Month: December 2015

Deniers love to talk about the satellite temperature data, without having the slightest idea how it is derived.

Rabbit Run:

The news has been full of Lamar Smith, Chair and Poohba of the House Science Committee fulminating about NOAA and his attempts to gangplank Tom Karl.  In a recent op-ed in the Washington Times (fishrap whose time and sugar daddy has come and gone) Smith writes

NOAA often fails to consider all available data in its determinations and climate change reports to the public. A recent study by NOAA, published in the journal Science, made “adjustments” to historical temperature records and NOAA trumpeted the findings as refuting the nearly two-decade pause in global warming. The study’s authors claimed these adjustments were supposedly based on new data and new methodology. But the study failed to include satellite data.

Atmospheric satellite data, considered by many to be the most objective, has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. This fact is well documented, but has been embarrassing for an administration determined to push through costly environmental regulations.

Now this is very popular on the SKS list of denial as the El Nino driven SURGE is pushing global temperatures through the roof.  Certain folk, including Congressman Smith, invoke the UAH MSU global temperature record as their gold standard.  Yet anybunny looking into the matter knows of the serial screwups and the teeth pulling needed to get any information about the majic Spencer and Christy use to transform microwave intensity to temperatures and how it is hard to figure out what and where is actually being measured.

All is not clear in Alabama.

Continue reading “Admiral David Titley on Satellite Temperature”

New York Times:

Industrial emissions of greenhouse gases rose only slightly in 2014 and appear to be on track to decline in 2015, according to new data that raise the possibility that a period of rapid global emissions growth may be coming to an end.

The decline of 0.6 percent projected for this year, should it come to pass, would be highly unusual at a time when the global economy is growing. The projection contrasts sharply with emissions growth that averaged 2.4 percent a year over the last decade, and sometimes topped 3 percent.

The new figures were released at the climate conference here by the Global Carbon Project, a collaboration that studies emissions, and published simultaneously in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Past emissions declines have usually been linked to economic distress, such as the global financial panic of 2009 and the Russian economic meltdown of the late 1990s.

The new figures suggest that there is a chance that global emissions have already peaked and may be starting a long-term decline, experts said Monday, which would be an important inflection point for the international effort to limit the risks of global warming.

Washington Post:

The single biggest factor appears to be a marked reduction in China’s use of coal to make electricity. But other countries, from North America to Europe, also emitted less carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning as governments and consumers shifted to cleaner fuels and more fuel-efficient vehicles, according to a report published Monday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.

The authors cautioned that this year’s “pause” is not likely to last, as developing economies in India and elsewhere around the world are projected to increase emissions from coal and oil in the coming decades. But those higher emissions are beginning to be offset elsewhere as more people turn to the sun and wind to provide electricity, the analysis said, suggesting that a “peak” in the world’s output of greenhouse gases could be achieved in the foreseeable future.

A favorite hobby horse of climate deniers is the phony “humanitarian” argument – “Exxon cares so much about the poor starving people of Africa, we won’t rest till they all have the GE Kitchen of Tomorrow”.
The argument kind of falls down – if making way for  greater exploitation of fossil fuels by giant corporations was the key to progress, Nigeria and Libya would be shining beacons of democracy and prosperity.
Maybe that’s why Africa seems to be diverting from the idea.

Guardian:

An Africa-wide mega-scale initiative backed by all African heads of state should see the continent greatly increase its renewable energy over the next 15 years.

The African Renewable Energy Initiative (Arei) plans to develop at least 10 GW of new renewable energy generation capacity by 2020, and at least 300 GW by 2030, potentially making the continent the cleanest in the world.

Continue reading “Are Greenhouse Gases Peaking?”

The most sickening story of the millennium.

I’ve reported before that, in a major sea change in public attitudes, a large majority of Americans now believe that dealing with climate change is a moral issue that must be addressed. Above, Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders shows that he’s reading the polls, as well as the science,  and gets it.

The moral framing places climate change on a plane well above the dry charts and graphs that turn a lot of people off, and on to a gut-grabbing issue of right and wrong.  Scientists and others concerned with climate action have begun acting on a better understanding of this framing, and getting better responses from their audience.

Associated Press:

Physicist John Schellnhuber, founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said he has been coming to these international talks for 11 years and essentially seen negotiators throw up their hands and say “sorry guys we tried our best.” And no one protested. But this time, with the power of Pope Francis’ encyclical earlier this year calling global warming a moral issue and an even more energized interfaith community, Schellnhuber feels the world’s faithful are watching and will hold world leaders accountable.

“They know they will be measured against the encyclical,” Schellnhuber, a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said Saturday at a Catholic Church event. Ever the scientist, Schellnhuber said on Saturday he hadn’t seen any evidence yet during the first week of negotiations that this will happen, but he has faith it will.

In the first five days of climate negotiations, interfaith activists came, fasted, talked to media, buttonholed leaders and prayed. On Saturday night in a downtown Paris chapel, hundreds of people, many of them prostrated on the ground, sang and prayed for the climate negotiators and mostly for the world.

 

Faith “is much deeper” than science, said Caroline Bader of the Geneva-based Lutheran World Federation.

Continue reading “Climate: Claiming the Moral Imperative”

Bloomberg:

Exxon Mobil Corp., a favorite target of global warming activists, said Wednesday that it’s hopeful for a deal out of the climate-change talks in Paris and still thinks the best solution is a tax on carbon pollution.

As the United Nations negotiations moved into a third day, the world’s biggest oil explorer said in an blog post that it supports “meaningful action to address the risks of climate change” as long as it preserved access to the reliable and affordable energy.

“The long-term objective of climate-change policy should be to reduce the risks of serious harm to humanity and ecosystems at minimum societal cost, while recognizing shared humanitarian necessities,” Exxon Mobil General Counsel Ken Cohen wrote in the post.

In the run-up to the Paris talks that began Nov. 30, Exxon has been under heavy assault by environmentalists and politicians who say it misled the public by promoting uncertainties about climate science. New York State’s attorney general has subpoenaed company records about its research going back decades, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, in a Rolling Stone interview published Tuesday, said Exxon’s actions would amount to “a betrayal” of humanity if it’s found to have suppressed knowledge about climate risks.

From Jeff Goodell’s interview with John Kerry in Rolling Stone:

Given your characterization of climate change as a national-security threat, when you look at what the Koch brothers and Exxon Mobil are doing – as you know, Exxon Mobil is being investigated by the New York state attorney general for lying to investors about what it knew about climate change—
Absolutely. It’s tobacco – it’s R.J. Reynolds all over again. Continue reading “Big Oil: Tax Me Before I Kill Again”

Latest chapter in the continuing saga of the House “Science” Committee (chaired by the science denier Lamar “lysenko” Smith of Texas) move to intimidate and surveil climate scientists in the country’s most respected research institutions.  Chairman Smith, not content to merely review stinking science and data, wants to read scientist’s personal email to look for potentially useable out-of-context quotations for the Fox News crowd to bat around. This has, of course been done before, in the run up to a significant climate conference.

In the face of embarrassing publicity, and mounting criticisms of the war on science,  the Chairman  has, at least temporarily, relented.  Unable to pry anything loose ahead of the now-ongoing Paris Climate conference, somebody apparently decided to cut their losses.

New York Times:

Mr. Smith, who has called himself a “semi-skeptic” on climate change and has criticized President Obama’s climate policies, accused NOAA of changing climate data “to get the politically correct results they want.” In October, he subpoenaed the group’s internal communications regarding the study methodology.

Then, in November, he claimed that information from whistle-blowers within the agency suggested the study had been rushed to publication over internal objections, and that “the timing of its release raises concerns that it was expedited to fit the administration’s aggressive climate agenda.”

This week, after eight scientific groups argued that demanding NOAA researchers’ emails could discourage other government scientists from studying anything politically controversial, Mr. Smith told NOAA he would first seek the communications of the agency’s nonscientific staff. He did not, however, rule out the possibility of requesting scientists’ emails in the future.

Continue reading “#lamarlysenko – Inquisitors Blink First”

Very soon, I’ll be posting a new video about the woefully underreported but -now-catching-on #ExxonKnew story.  Let’s just say it does not cast a flattering light on Exxon Mobil, and climate deniers in general – and portends a coming day of reckoning.

To catch up on the state of denial among climate deniers, I spoke in recent weeks to Marc Morano, high profile uber-denier,  frequent Fox News guest, and curator of the climatedepot website. You can see the first, very interesting part of that interview above. Judge for yourself the general state of mind in denierville by his remarks.

Washington Post:

To understand how dangerously extreme the Republican Party has become on climate change, compare its stance to that of ExxonMobil.

No one would confuse the oil and gas giant with the Sierra Club. But if you visit Exxon’s website , you will find that the company believes climate change is real, that governments should take action to combat it and that the most sensible action would be a revenue-neutral tax on carbon — in other words, a tax on oil, gas and coal, with the proceeds returned to taxpayers for them to spend as they choose.

With no government action, Exxon experts told us during a visit to The Post last week, average temperatures are likely to rise by a catastrophic (my word, not theirs) 5 degrees Celsius, with rises of 6, 7 or even more quite possible.

“A properly designed carbon tax can be predictable, transparent, and comparatively simple to understand and implement,” Exxon says in a position paper titled “Engaging on climate change.”

None of this is radical. Officials negotiating a climate agreement right now in Paris would take it as self-evident. Republican leaders in the 1980s and 1990s would have raised no objection.

But to today’s Republicans, ExxonMobil’s moderate, self-evident views are akin to heresy. Donald Trump, the leading GOP presidential candidate, says, “I don’t believe in climate change.” Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) says, “Climate change is not science, it’s religion.” Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) at the moment seems to acknowledge that climate change might be real but opposes any action to deal with it.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

Future historians — if there are any future historians — will almost surely say that the most important thing happening in the world during December 2015 was the climate talks in Paris. True, nothing agreed to in Paris will be enough, by itself, to solve the problem of global warming. But the talks could mark a turning point, the beginning of the kind of international action needed to avert catastrophe.

Continue reading “Exxon Panicking Now. Oh, Just Wait.”

A study that is completely not surprising to paleo climate experts I have spoken to, underlines again the localized nature of the so-called “Medieval warming period”, an article of faith among the denierati.

Telegraph Voice:

The new study found the effects of the Medieval Warm Period did not extend to Greenland and other parts of the globe so climate was less important in their demise.

‘The concept is Eurocentric – that’s where the best-known observations were made.

“Conceiving the end of Norse Greenland as a case of maladaptation by an inflexible society in the face of climate change allows neither justice to their innovation nor appropriate lessons to be drawn from that completed experiment”, notes a recent study advancing such a multicausal understanding of the Viking departure.

A new study questions the popular notion that 10th-century Norse people were able to colonize Greenland because of a period of unusually warm weather.

Led by Erik the Red, Vikings first landed in south western Greenland after sailing from recently settled Iceland in around 985 AD. However, these colonies disappeared between about 1360 and 1460, leaving only ruins. The native Inuit remained, but Europeans did not re-inhabit Greenland until the 1700s. Thus, popular authors and some scientists have fixed on the idea that nice weather drew the settlers to Greenland, and bad weather froze and starved them.

Climate change is blamed for many things in history, but it seems that it can now be ruled out as an explanation for why the Vikings had abandoned their settlements in Greenland by the mid-15th Century after 400 years of valiant occupation.

Historians argued alongside climate change hostilities with the Inuit, a decline in ivory trade, soil erosion caused by cattle or a migration back to Europe to farms depopulated by the Black Plague played a role too.

Studying Beryllium 10 isotopes in boulders left in Greenland by 1,000 years of glacial movement, the researchers found the rocks were deposited by advancing glaciers between 975 and 1275 when the Norse had arrived and settled there.

“If the Vikings travelled to Greenland when it was cool, it is a stretch to say deteriorating climate drove them out”, Young pointed out.

Continue reading “Dead Again. Medieval Warming, Not So Much.”

NASA Earth Observatory:

Zachariæ Isstrøm has become the latest Greenland glacier to undergo rapid changes in a warming world. Research published November 2015 in Science found that Zachariæ Isstrøm broke loose from a stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat.

The consequences will be felt for decades to come. The reason? Zachariæ Isstrøm is big. It drains ice from a 91,780 square kilometer (35,440 square mile) area of northeast Greenland. That’s about 5 percent of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The glacier holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 46 centimeters (18 inches) if it were to melt completely. It is already shedding billions of tons of ice into the far North Atlantic each year.

“North Greenland glaciers are changing rapidly,” said lead author Jeremie Mouginot of the University of California, Irvine (UCI). “The shape and dynamics of Zachariæ Isstrøm have changed dramatically over the last few years. The glacier is now breaking up and calving high volumes of icebergs into the ocean, which will result in rising sea levels for decades to come.”

 

UPDATE: Below, Full interview: Continue reading “CBS: Obama on Climate Legacy”