Why I think Climate Change Denial is little more than pseudoscience. - Part 1

[boutons_deux]

13 Giant Companies Just Made Big Climate Pledges




Thirteen giant companies joined the Obama administration’s Act on Climate initiative Monday, announcing at least $140 billion in new low-carbon investment and more than 1,600 megawatts (MW) of new renewable energy, the White House said.

The pledge from Coca-Cola, Walmart, Apple, Google, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and other big-name companies comes in advance of the United Nations climate talks in Paris at the end of the year, and is meant to demonstrate industry support for strong carbon reduction goals.

“We recognize that delaying action on climate change will be costly in economic and human terms, while accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy will produce multiple benefits with regard to sustainable economic growth, public health, resilience to natural disasters, and the health of the global environment,” states the pledge, set to be announced at the White House with Secretary of State John Kerry.

Monday’s announcement is the first of two planned industry pledges, the White House said in a statement. A second round of companies is expected to make pledges in the fall.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/201...te+Progress%29

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Left Unchecked, Climate Change in Texas Will Cost Businesses Billions

Without action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the ravages of climate change could cost Texas tens of billions in the coming decades, according to a new report by the Risky Business Project, an initiative co-founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The report, released today, focuses on the economic risks of climate change for 11 southeastern states and Texas, estimating losses from climate-related extreme weather events, increases in heat-related deaths, rising energy costs and other troubling effects.

“Texas is particularly vulnerable to these impacts because it’s a state where the economy is based on a lot of physical infrastructure,” said Kate Gordon, the author of the report. “Texas has a lot of really valuable energy and manufacturing infrastructure — and that is the kind of infrastructure that is very, very vulnerable to climate change because it can flood, it’s more expensive to cool [during extreme heat],” and it’s expensive to replace if damaged or lost, she said.

http://www.texasobserver.org/climate...sses-billions/

[Wild Cobra]

Oceans slowed global temperature rise, until nowOceans slowed global temperature rise, until now

Heat trapped below the surface will begin moving up kicking off a warming cycle

A new study of ocean temperature measurements shows that in recent years, extra heat from greenhouse gases has been trapped in the subsurface waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans, thus accounting for the slowdown in the global surface temperature increase observed during the past decade, researchers say.

A specific layer of the Indian and Pacific oceans between 300 and 1,000 feet below the surface has been ac ulating more heat than previously recognized, according to climate researchers from UCLA and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They also found the movement of warm water has affected surface temperatures. The results were published July 9 in the journal Science.

During the 20th century, as greenhouse gas concentrations increased and trapped more heat on Earth, global surface temperatures also increased. However, starting in the early 2000s though greenhouse gases continued to trap extra heat, the global average surface temperature stopped climbing for about a decade and even cooled a bit.
In the study, researchers analyzed direct ocean temperature measurements, including observations from a global network of about 3,500 ocean temperature probes known as the Argo array. These measurements show temperatures below the surface have been increasing.

The Pacific Ocean is the primary source of the subsurface warm water found in the study, though some of that water now has been pushed to the Indian Ocean. Since 2003, unusually strong trade winds and other climatic features have been piling up warm water in the upper 1,000 feet of the western Pacific, pinning it against Asia and Australia.
"The western Pacific got so warm that some of the warm water is leaking into the Indian Ocean through the Indonesian archipelago," said Veronica Nieves, lead author of the study and a UCLA researcher with the UCLA Joint Ins ute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, a scientific collaboration between UCLA and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The movement of the warm Pacific water westward pulled heat away from the surface waters of the central and eastern Pacific, which resulted in unusually cool surface temperatures during the last decade. Because the air temperature over the ocean is closely related to the ocean temperature, this provides a plausible explanation for the global cooling trend in surface temperature, Nieves said.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...cienceDaily%29

Yes..

They keep rationalizing excuses.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Yes..

They keep rationalizing excuses.

I remember when you tried to attribute the warming to the deep oceanc currents as opposed to CO2. My response was to point out how they already accounted for them. You have no credibility sophist.

[Wild Cobra]

I remember when you tried to attribute the warming to the deep oceanc currents as opposed to CO2. My response was to point out how they already accounted for them. You have no credibility sophist.

Liar.

Are you intentionally misinterpreting what I said, or do you really not understand the English language?

Tine and again, you misrepresent things that I say.

I showed how the ocean "could be" the reason we see solar delay, and never said it was.

My God, you are a worthless stupid idiot.

Funny ow, how you have alarmists turning to the oceans saying they are the reason for cooling the warming trend and causing the hiatus.

I will laugh in my old age at how stupid the progeny of warmers will see their forefathers.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Liar.

Are you intentionally misinterpreting what I said, or do you really not understand the English language?

Tine and again, you misrepresent things that I say.

I showed how the ocean "could be" the reason we see solar delay, and never said it was.

My God, you are a worthless stupid idiot.

Funny ow, how you have alarmists turning to the oceans saying they are the reason for cooling the warming trend and causing the hiatus.

I will laugh in my old age at how stupid the progeny of warmers will see their forefathers.

I can only laugh when you think prefacing your harebrained ideas "if" or "could be" makes them any less harebrained or yours.

You thought it could be deep water currents when presented with evidence of warming. Now that scientists are saying they have empirical proof of the mechanism in the reverse you call foul? this shouldn't be hard but then again it always this way with you.

[boutons_deux]

Education increases belief in climate change — everywhere except in the U.S.

In China, people are more likely to understand the risks of climate change if they live in the city instead of the countryside. Almost everyone in Japan knows about climate change. In Egypt, Bangladesh, Nigeria and India, over 65 percent of people do. In Burundi, Benin, and Liberia, almost nobody has heard of it.

All of this is according to a study published this week in Nature: Climate Change. In the study, a group of researchers took a close look at data collected in 2007 and 2008 by the Gallup World Poll.
Research on public perceptions of climate change is a new field, and until this point has been dominated by studies in Australia, the United States and Europe. One standout finding is that, on this topic at least, there’s strong evidence to back American exceptionalism.

Specifically: In the U.S. — unlike everywhere else — being better educated doesn’t guarantee that you are more likely to believe that climate change is a real thing that is actually happening. Instead, education seems to polarize in the United States: More education is correlated with greater concern about climate change among liberals and Democrats, and less concern from conservatives and Republicans. It seems that being better educated just means you have more ammo for defending the belief that your existing partisan identification bequeaths to you.

So while in most of the world, education is the strongest predictor of a belief that climate change is real, in the U.S., it’s something called “civic engagement” — which Gallup defines as having donated money, volunteered time, or helped a stranger in the last week. People with high levels of civic engagement are almost always aware of climate change, while those with the lowest levels have no clue it’s even happening.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/educ..._campaign=feed

[DarrinS]

Specifically: In the U.S. — unlike everywhere else — being better educated doesn’t guarantee that you are more likely to believe that CATASTROPHIC climate change is a real thing that is actually happening.

fify

[boutons_deux]

fify

It will be catastrophically EXPENSIVE to save low-coastal cities, so rising sea levels from AGW will be CATASTROPHIC.

http://www.rtcc.org/2014/09/01/green...cedented-rate/

And you duped AGW BigCarbon shills will be proven stupid, ignorant.

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http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/

[boutons_deux]

Global glacier melt reaches record levels


LONDON—The world’s glaciers are melting fast—probably faster than at any time in recorded history, according to new research.

Measurements show several hundred glaciers are losing between half and one metre of thickness every year—at least twice the average loss for the 20th century—and remote monitoring shows this rate of melting is far more widespread.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), based at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, has compiled worldwide data on glacier changes for more than 120 years.


Long-term retreat

The study also shows that the long-term retreat of glacier tongues is a global phenomenon. Intermittent re-advance periods at regional and decadal scales are normally restricted to a smaller sample of glaciers and have not come close to achieving the Little Ice Age maximum positions reached between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Glacier tongues in Norway, for example, have retreated by some kilometres from their maximum extents in the 19th century. The intermittent re-advances of the 1990s were restricted to glaciers in coastal areas, and to a few hundred metres.

The study shows that the intense ice loss of the last two decades has resulted in what it calls “a strong imbalance of glaciers in many regions of the world”. And Dr Zemp warns: “These glaciers will suffer further ice loss, even if climate remains stable.”

He told Climate News Network: “Due to the strong ice loss over the past few decades, many glaciers are too big under current climatic conditions. They simply have not had enough time to react to the climatic changes of the past.

“So they will have to retreat further until they are in balance with climatic conditions again. In the European Alps, many glaciers would lose about 50% of their present surface area without further climate change.”

http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/global-glacier-melt-reaches-record-levels/

[Wild Cobra]

Global glacier melt reaches record levels


LONDON—The world’s glaciers are melting fast—probably faster than at any time in recorded history, according to new research.

Measurements show several hundred glaciers are losing between half and one metre of thickness every year—at least twice the average loss for the 20th century—and remote monitoring shows this rate of melting is far more widespread.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), based at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, has compiled worldwide data on glacier changes for more than 120 years.


Long-term retreat

The study also shows that the long-term retreat of glacier tongues is a global phenomenon. Intermittent re-advance periods at regional and decadal scales are normally restricted to a smaller sample of glaciers and have not come close to achieving the Little Ice Age maximum positions reached between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Glacier tongues in Norway, for example, have retreated by some kilometres from their maximum extents in the 19th century. The intermittent re-advances of the 1990s were restricted to glaciers in coastal areas, and to a few hundred metres.

The study shows that the intense ice loss of the last two decades has resulted in what it calls “a strong imbalance of glaciers in many regions of the world”. And Dr Zemp warns: “These glaciers will suffer further ice loss, even if climate remains stable.”

He told Climate News Network: “Due to the strong ice loss over the past few decades, many glaciers are too big under current climatic conditions. They simply have not had enough time to react to the climatic changes of the past.

“So they will have to retreat further until they are in balance with climatic conditions again. In the European Alps, many glaciers would lose about 50% of their present surface area without further climate change.”

http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/global-glacier-melt-reaches-record-levels/

Yawn...

[boutons_deux]

S leaving conservative ALEC over climate change views


http://fuelfix.com/blog/2015/08/07/s...ws/#34195101=0

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Corrected sunspot history suggests climate change not due to natural solar trends

The Maunder Minimum, between 1645 and 1715, when sunspots were scarce and the winters harsh, strongly suggests a link between solar activity and climate change. Until now there was a general consensus that solar activity has been trending upwards over the past 300 years (since the end of the Maunder Minimum), peaking in the late 20th century -- called the Modern Grand Maximum by some [1].

This trend has led some to conclude that the Sun has played a significant role in modern climate change. However, a discrepancy between two parallel series of sunspot number counts has been a contentious issue among scientists for some time.

The two methods of counting the sunspot number -- the Wolf Sunspot Number and the Group Sunspot Number [2] -- indicated significantly different levels of solar activity before about 1885 and also around 1945. With these discrepancies now eliminated, there is no longer any substantial difference between the two historical records.

The new correction of the sunspot number, called the Sunspot Number Version 2.0, led by Frédéric Clette (Director of the World Data Centre [WDC]-SILSO), Ed Cliver (National Solar Observatory) and Leif Svalgaard (Stanford University, California, USA), nullifies the claim that there has been a Modern Grand Maximum.

The results, presented at the IAU XXIX General Assembly in Honolulu, Hawai`i, today, make it difficult to explain the observed changes in the climate that started in the 18th century and extended through the industrial revolution to the 20th century as being significantly influenced by natural solar trends.

The sunspot number is the only direct record of the evolution of the solar cycle over multiple centuries and is the longest scientific experiment still ongoing.

The apparent upward trend of solar activity between the 18th century and the late 20th century has now been identified as a major calibration error in the Group Sunspot Number. Now that this error has been corrected, solar activity appears to have remained relatively stable since the 1700s [3].

The newly corrected sunspot numbers now provide a genous record of solar activity dating back some 400 years.

Existing climate evolution models will need to be reevaluated given this entirely new picture of the long-term evolution of solar activity.

This work will stimulate new studies both in solar physics (solar cycle modelling and predictions) and climatology, and can be used to unlock tens of millennia of solar records encoded in cosmogenic nuclides found in ice cores and tree rings. This could reveal more clearly the role the Sun plays in climate change over much longer timescales.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-csh080715.php

[Cry Havoc]

Yawn...

Don't let your ignorance get in the way of not listening to facts that you don't like to hear.

[Wild Cobra]

Don't let your ignorance get in the way of not listening to facts that you don't like to hear.

Nothing to do with ignorance. Just tired of Bouton's same different day horse pucky. This latest on solar is bogus too. Sunspots are affected my the sun's magnetic cycle, which also affects TSI. However, sunspots are not responsible for TSI. This news release does nothing to show TSI was stable for 300 years like it says "suggests." In fact, there is a disclaimer attached to the paper:

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing ins utions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

[boutons_deux]

WC's blind ideology is the basis of his willful ignorance.

What's really warming the planet?

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/20...ing-the-world/

[Wild Cobra]

WC's blind ideology is the basis of his willful ignorance.

What's really warming the planet?


http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/20...ing-the-world/

You can go yourself.

Of all the forums I participate on, you are probably the worse pundit of all. You blindly post after after .

How do you live with yourself so full of anyway?

You are the ignorant one. You understand so little of what you post. You read it in some blog or news posting, and say "Hey, I like that" and post the most lib ed I ever see. Just because of your blind, arrogant, ignorant, egotistic confirmation bias.

[Wild Cobra]

What's really warming the planet?

The sun!

It is the source of all heat on our planet except for radioactive and tidal forces.

Greenhouse gasses modulate the solar heat.

So does clouds, ice, soot, surface composition, etc. etc. etc....

[boutons_deux]

1,800 years of global ocean cooling halted by global warming

Prior to the advent of human-caused global warming in the 19th century, the surface layer of Earth's oceans had undergone 1,800 years of a steady cooling trend, according to a new study. During the latter half of this cooling period, the trend was most likely driven by large and frequent volcanic eruptions.

The study also indicates that the coolest temperatures occurred during the Little Ice Age—a period that spanned the 16th through 18th centuries and was known for cooler average temperatures over land.
The concurrence of cooling events on both land and sea suggests that a global cooling phenomenon was erased by subsequent human-caused global warming.

"Today, the Earth is warming about 20 times faster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years," said Michael Evans, second author of the study and an associate professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Geology and Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC). "This study truly highlights the profound effects we are having on our climate today."

Compared to the atmosphere, the oceans can absorb much more heat and trap it for longer periods of time. Thus the ocean can buffer short-term changes in global temperature. But when events such as volcanic eruptions cluster together in a relatively short period of time, the temperature changes can become prolonged.

"Volcanic eruptions have a short-term cooling effect on the atmosphere, but our results showed that when volcanic eruptions occurred more frequently, there was long-term ocean cooling," said lead author Helen McGregor, an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. "With this research, we now have new insight into the century-scale global sea-surface temperature variations that came before man-made greenhouse gas forcing."

The scientists are the first to combine 57 previously published marine surface temperature reconstructions that cover all of the world's oceans, from near-polar to tropical regions. The team compiled the data within 200-year brackets to observe long-term trends, and then compared the findings to land-based reconstructions, which revealed similar cooling trends.

"No matter how we divided the data set, the cooling trend stands out as a robust signal," McGregor said.



http://phys.org/news/2015-08-years-g...ng-halted.html

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Climate Change Deniers Present Graphic Description Of What Earth Must Look Like For Them To Believe

WASHINGTON—Evoking cataclysmic scenes of extreme weather and widespread drought and famine, the nation’s climate change deniers held a press conference Wednesday to describe exactly what the Earth must look like before they will begin to believe in human-induced global warming.

The group of skeptics, who said that the consensus among 97 percent of the scientific community and the do ented environmental transformations already underway are simply not proof enough, laid out the precise sequence and magnitude of horrific events—including natural disasters, proliferation of infectious diseases, and resource wars—they would have to witness firsthand before they are swayed.

“For us to accept that the average surface temperature of the Earth has risen to critical levels due to mankind’s production of greenhouse gases, we’ll need to see some actual, visible evidence, including a global death toll of no less than 500 million people within a single calendar year,” said spokesperson William Davis, 46, of Jackson, NJ, who added that at least 70 percent of all islands on the planet would also have to become submerged under rising seas before he and his cohort would reconsider their beliefs. “To start, we’re going to have to see supercell tornadoes of category F4 or higher ripping through Oklahoma at least three times a day, leveling entire communities and causing hundreds of fatalities—and just to be perfectly clear, we’re talking year-round, not just during the spring tornado season.”

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask to see a super hurricane destroying the Southeast U.S. and another one at the same time decimating the Pacific Northwest before I make up my mind about this.”

“The reality is that we’re still experiencing cold, snowy winters, and the entire global population is not currently embarking on cross-continental migrations in search of arable land,” Davis continued. “Until that changes, we cannot be expected to believe climate change is occurring.”

Davis went on to say that certain events, such as massive, uncontrollable wildfires across the U.S—not just restricted to the American West, but in areas including Florida and New England—would render climate change deniers open to reevaluating the decades’ worth of data that show the planet is warming at a catastrophic rate. Additionally, Davis said that for the community to begin believing a single word of any scientific journal article corroborating climate change, every one of Earth’s glaciers would have to retreat at a rate exceeding 20 miles per year, and each of the skeptics, individually, would have to go a decade without seeing naturally occurring ice anywhere.

Furthermore, climate change deniers maintained that if the total number of plant and animal species on the planet remained higher than 200 in aggregate, they would not be dissuaded from their belief that Earth is simply experiencing one of its natural warming cycles that would eventually resolve itself on its own.

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask to see a super hurricane destroying the Southeast U.S. and another one at the same time decimating the Pacific Northwest before I make up my mind about this,” said global warming skeptic Mic e Wilkinson of Medina, MN, adding that she would be willing to recognize the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change if repeated and unpredictable storm surge flooding rendered every major East Coast city, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., wholly uninhabitable. “The fact of the matter is that if I walk outside at any time of day at any point in the year and it’s below 90 degrees, then there simply isn’t enough proof that we need to be cutting carbon emissions.”

After clarifying that the desertification of major population centers, and the global refugee crisis that would result, would be necessary but not sufficient evidence of climate change, the skeptics reportedly unveiled a vivid artist’s rendering of the vast expanse of parched, lifeless earth and dead trees that each of them must see through the windows of their homes before reversing their opposition to public schools teaching children about global warming.

“We keep hearing all this mumbo-jumbo about the sixth mass extinction we’re in the midst of,” said Mitch McConnell, a U.S. senator from Kentucky, at the conclusion of the press conference. “Well, if that’s the case, then tell me this: Why aren’t the streets littered with human bodies right now, with the ragged bands of the still-living siphoning the moisture from the corpses of the dead?”

“We’re not unreasonable; we just need the evidence to be convincing before we make a decision,” McConnell added.

http://www.theonion.com/article/clim...cription-51129

[Wild Cobra]

Compared to the atmosphere, the oceans can absorb much more heat and trap it for longer periods of time. Thus the ocean can buffer short-term changes in global temperature.

Interesting article, and I have commented before on what happens when you mix proxy and direct reading.

Did you not comprehend?

I wonder just how good that XXX is. They didn't source the paper their info came from.

I like this graph:



Paper:

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v.../ngeo2510.html

Lots of "fudge factor" available:

[Wild Cobra]

This is good...

Here we demonstrate that speakers at the press conference for the publication of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group 1; ref. 1) attempted to make the do ented level of certainty of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) more meaningful to the public. Speakers attempted to communicate this through reference to short-term temperature increases. However, when journalists enquired about the similarly short ‘pause’2 in global temperature increase, the speakers dismissed the relevance of such timescales, thus becoming incoherent as to ‘what counts’ as scientific evidence for AGW. We call this the ‘IPCC’s certainty trap’. This incoherence led to confusion within the press conference and subsequent condemnation in the media3. The speakers were well intentioned in their attempts to communicate the public implications of the report, but these attempts threatened to erode their scientific credibility. In this instance, the certainty trap was the result of the speakers’ failure to acknowledge the tensions between scientific and public meanings. Avoiding the certainty trap in the future will require a nuanced accommodation of uncertainties and a recognition that rightful demands for scientific credibility need to be balanced with public and political dialogue about the things we value and the actions we take to protect those things4, 5, 6.

That's just the abstract. I only skimmed the paper so far.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journ...imate2672.html

[boutons_deux]

AGW is a FACT, GFY

[Wild Cobra]

AGW is a FACT, GFY

No Sherlock.

However, AGW isn't most of the warming. If it was, we wouldn't have a hiatus going on for 17 years now.