Guest essay by Lance Wallace
For several months, the New York Times has been running a permanent feature on climate change. They direct their readers to this feature with the promise that it will answer their questions.
Will it really? Let’s see. My responses are in italic below each item.
Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change
NOV. 28, 2015
The issue can be overwhelming. The science is complicated. Predictions about the fate of the planet carry endless caveats and asterisks.
We get it.
So we’ve put together a list of quick answers to often-asked questions about climate change. This should give you a running start on understanding the problem.
1. How much is the planet heating up?
1.7 degrees is actually a significant amount.
As of October 2015, the Earth had warmed by about 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, when records begin at a global scale. That figure includes the surface of the ocean. The warming is greater over land, and greater still in the Arctic and parts of Antarctica.
Richard Muller’s Berkeley group (BEST) has pushed the starting point back to 1800. What that shows is a similar rise in temperature (land only) of about 0.5 degrees C (0.9 degrees F) from 1800-1880. Isn’t that interesting? Long before the rise of CO2, we have the earth emerging from the depths of the Little Ice Age, temperatures rising for more than 200 years now. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:1850/to:1880/trend/plot/best/from:1800/to:1850/trend
The number may sound low, but as an average over the surface of an entire planet, it is actually high, which explains why much of the world’s land ice is starting to melt and the oceans are rising at an accelerating pace. The heat accumulating in the Earth because of human emissions is roughly equal to the heat that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding across the planet every day.
The temperature has been higher in the past. During the Holocene Optimum, for example (Shakun et al, 2013). From 10,000 to 6,000 years before present, the temperatures were perhaps 0.7 degrees C above the low reached at the end of the Little Ice Age. See Fig. 1 in http://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198/tab-pdf
Marcott, S.A., Shakun, J.D., Clark, P.U., Mix, A.C. A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years Science 08 Mar 2013: Vol. 339, Issue 6124, pp. 1198-1201 DOI: 10.1126/science.1228026.
The authors conclude: Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history.
(Note: It is unfortunate that Marcott, whose Ph.D. thesis led to the above article in Science, was persuaded to publish a later article in which the high-resolution temperature measurements of the last few decades were appended to his low-resolution (100 year average) estimates in an attempt to show that present temperatures were “unprecedented”. Of course, if it were possible to increase his resolution, there could well have been periods in which short-term (decadal) averages reached quite high levels.)
[oceans rising at an accelerated pace] Arguable. Church and White (2006) find an acceleration of 0.013 + 0.006 mm per year per year. If the acceleration is constant until 2100, the rise would be 31 cm (one foot). But the tide gauges, the glacial isostatic adjustments, the land subsidence or rise due to continental drift are so uncertain that it seems extremely difficult to use our limited short-term measurements to reliably extract an acceleration signal.
[400,000 atomic bombs] Fear-mongering.
Scientists believe most and probably all of the warming since 1950 was caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. If emissions continue unchecked, they say the global warming could ultimately exceed 8 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet and undermine its capacity to support a large human population.
Some scientists, most dependent on Federal funds for their research. What would happen to them if their research showed something different?
Human emissions are about 5% of the total carbon flux. If they were the cause of increasing temperatures after 1950, what caused the increase between 1910 and 1940, which was nearly identical to that between 1975 and 1998? What caused the pause between 1998 and 2015? What caused the increased temperatures around 1000-1300, when the Vikings were growing grapes in Greenland? CO2 emissions cannot account for these variations. Please ask your climate scientists for the explanation for these earlier temperature changes. If they cannot supply the reason, why could not the present-day reason be related to these earlier increases?
2. How much trouble are we in?
For future generations, big trouble.
The risks are much greater over the long run than over the next few decades, but the emissions that create those risks are happening now. Over the coming 25 or 30 years, scientists say, the climate is likely to resemble that of today, although gradually getting warmer. Rainfall will be heavier in many parts of the world, but the periods between rains will most likely grow hotter and therefore drier. The number of hurricanes and typhoons may actually fall, but the ones that do occur will draw energy from a hotter ocean surface, and therefore may be more intense, on average, than those of the past. Coastal flooding will grow more frequent and damaging.
Maybe. But if the destructive potential is due to the collision of hot and cold air masses, as some have shown, then the colder air masses will be warmer and the difference no longer so great. By the way, we have now gone 4000 days (a new record) with no hurricanes of level 3 or higher making landfall in the US.
Longer term, if emissions continue to rise unchecked, the risks are profound. Scientists fear climate effects so severe that they might destabilize governments, produce waves of refugees, precipitate the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals in Earth’s history, and melt the polar ice caps, causing the seas to rise high enough to flood most of the world’s coastal cities.
This all depends on the unvalidated predictions of global climate models. For the last 20 years, these models have run hot by a factor of at least two compared to satellite and weather balloon measurements. The models have an average sensitivity of 3.2 degrees C per doubling of CO2. But most recent estimates are in the neighborhood of 1.6 degrees C per doubling. (Otto et al, 2013, Lewis 2014, Lewis and Curry 2016). The models have inadequate resolution to deal with actual important climate-affecting processes, such as thunderstorms and cloud formation. They have to be smeared over their smallest possible cell of one square degree (3600 square miles) so evolution from any initial conditions rapidly approach chaos within a few years of model time. See Lorenz about 1963 for the first demonstration of chaos in weather prediction.
All of this could take hundreds or even thousands of years to play out, conceivably providing a cushion of time for civilization to adjust, but experts cannot rule out abrupt changes, such as a collapse of agriculture, that would throw society into chaos much sooner. Bolder efforts to limit emissions would reduce these risks, or at least slow the effects, but it is already too late to eliminate the risks entirely.
[collapse in agriculture]. Increased CO2 has been associated with increases in food production, perhaps accounting for 15-25% of the observed increase. 50% of the earth’s surface has greened due to CO2 rise compared to 4% that has browned. This alone makes the social cost of carbon negative, (i.e., a benefit to plant growth, as all greenhouse operators know).
The “too late” comment depends on the Bern model of CO2 residence time in the atmosphere. The Bern model includes a portion of the emissions that are assumed just to persist in the atmosphere for basically forever. But the nuclear tests in the atmosphere provided a natural experiment, raising the level of C14 while they were occurring and then with their abrupt end, providing a direct measurement of the residence time in the atmosphere, which is in the neighborhood of 10-15 years.
3. Is there anything I can do?
Fly less, drive less, waste less.
You can reduce your own carbon footprint in lots of simple ways, and most of them will save you money. You can plug leaks in your home insulation to save power, install a smart thermostat, switch to more efficient light bulbs, turn off the lights in any room where you are not using them, drive fewer miles by consolidating trips or taking public transit, waste less food, and eat less meat.
Perhaps the biggest single thing individuals can do on their own is to take fewer airplane trips; just one or two fewer plane rides per year can save as much in emissions as all the other actions combined. If you want to be at the cutting edge, you can look at buying an electric or hybrid car, putting solar panels on your roof, or both.
If you want to offset your emissions, you can buy certificates, with the money going to projects that protect forests, capture greenhouse gases and so forth. Some airlines sell these to offset emissions from their flights, and after some scandals in the early days, they started to scrutinize the projects closely, so the offsets can now be bought in good conscience. You can also buy offset certificates in a private marketplace, from companies such as TerraPass in San Francisco that follow strict rules set up by the state of California; some people even give these as holiday gifts. Yet another way: In states that allow you to choose your own electricity supplier, you can often elect to buy green electricity; you pay slightly more, with the money going into a fund that helps finance projects like wind farms.
In the end, though, experts do not believe the needed transformation in the energy system can happen without strong state and national policies. So speaking up and exercising your rights as a citizen matters as much as anything else you can do.
“Fly less, drive less, waste less”. Please pass this message on to the 20,000 people who attend conferences to save the Earth in Rio, Bali, Cancun, and Paris. Electric cars and solar panels cannot compete on their own, so rich people get subsidies and poor people pay higher prices for electricity.
4. What’s the optimistic scenario?
Several things have to break our way.
In the best case that scientists can imagine, several things happen: Earth turns out to be less sensitive to greenhouse gases than currently believed; plants and animals manage to adapt to the changes that have already become inevitable; human society develops much greater political will to bring emissions under control; and major technological breakthroughs occur that help society both to limit emissions and to adjust to climate change.
The two human-influenced variables are not entirely independent, of course: Technological breakthroughs that make clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels would also make it easier to develop the political will for rapid action.
Scientists say the odds of all these things breaking our way are not very high, unfortunately. The Earth could just as easily turn out to be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than less. Global warming seems to be causing chaos in parts of the natural world already, and that seems likely to get worse, not better. So in the view of the experts, simply banking on a rosy scenario without any real plan would be dangerous. They believe the only way to limit the risks is to limit emissions.
“less sensitive to greenhouse gases” Already shown in multiple new estimates of climate sensitivity mentioned above leading to halving the predictions of global warming.
“Global warming … causing chaos… already” Hard statistics on tornadoes, hurricanes, drought, floods, etc. do not support this statement. You point out another important factor below (item 13), where you state that “The Internet has made us all more aware of weather disasters in distant places. On social media, people have a tendency to attribute virtually any disaster to climate change, but in many cases there is no scientific support for doing so.”
5. Will reducing meat in my diet help the climate?
Yes, beef especially.
Agriculture of all types produces greenhouse gases that warm the planet, but meat production is especially harmful – and beef is the most environmentally damaging form of meat. Some methods of cattle production demand a lot of land, contributing to destruction of forests; the trees are typically burned, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Other methods require huge amounts of water and fertilizer to grow food for the cows.
The cows themselves produce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that causes short-term warming. Meat consumption is rising worldwide as the population grows, and as economic development makes people richer and better able to afford meat.
This is worrisome: Studies have found that if the whole world were to start eating beef at the rate Americans eat it, produced by the methods typically used in the United States, that alone might erase any chance of staying below an internationally agreed-upon limit on global warming. Pork production creates somewhat lower emissions than beef production, and chicken is lower still. So reducing your meat consumption, or switching from beef and pork to chicken in your diet, are both moves in the right direction. Of course, as with any kind of behavioral change meant to benefit the climate, this will only make a difference if lots of other people do it, too, reducing the overall demand for meat products.
Good luck with this suggestion. It might make you feel better—a noble cause. But so unlikely to happen!
6. What’s the worst-case scenario?
There are many.
That is actually hard to say, which is one reason scientists are urging that emissions be cut; they want to limit the possibility of any worst-case scenario coming to pass. Perhaps the greatest fear is a collapse of food production, accompanied by escalating prices and mass starvation. Even with runaway emissions growth, it is unclear how likely this would be, as farmers are able to adjust their crops and farming techniques, to a degree, to adapt to climatic changes. Another possibility would be a disintegration of the polar ice sheets, leading to fast-rising seas that would force people to abandon many of the world’s great cities and would lead to the loss of trillions of dollars worth of property and other assets. Scientists also worry about other wild-card scenarios like the predictable cycles of Asian monsoons’ becoming less reliable. Billions of people depend on monsoons to provide water for crops, so any disruptions could be catastrophic.
If this is the greatest fear, then we are certainly saved! Because the 15-25% effect on increased food production already observed can only increase as the great wheat-growing areas in Canada and Russia will come into play.
[Disintegration of polar ice sheets]This disintegration would take millennia.
7. Will a tech breakthrough help us?
Even Bill Gates says don’t count on it, unless we commit the cash.
As more companies, governments and researchers devote themselves to the problem, the chances of big technological advances are improving. But even many experts who are optimistic about technological solutions warn that current efforts are not enough. For instance, spending on basic energy research is only a quarter to a third of the level that several in-depth reports have recommended. And public spending on agricultural research has stagnated even though climate change poses growing risks to the food supply. People like Bill Gates have argued that crossing our fingers and hoping for technological miracles is not a strategy — we have to spend the money that would make these things more likely to happen.
[growing risks to the food supply] Why do you keep saying this without mentioning the already-observed beneficial changes?
8. How much will the seas rise?
The real question is not how high, but how fast.
The ocean is rising at a rate of about a foot per century. That causes severe effects on coastlines, forcing governments and property owners to spend tens of billions of dollars fighting erosion. But if that rate continued, it would probably be manageable, experts say.
The risk is that the rate will accelerate markedly. If emissions continue unchecked, then the temperature at the Earth’s surface could soon resemble a past epoch called the Pliocene, when a great deal of ice melted and the ocean rose by something like 80 feet compared to today. A recent study found that burning all the fossil fuels in the ground would fully melt the polar ice sheets, raising the sea level by more than 160 feet over an unknown period.
With all of that said, the crucial issue is probably not how much the oceans are going to rise, but how fast. And on that point, scientists are pretty much flying blind. Their best information comes from studying Earth’s history, and it suggests that the rate can on occasion hit a foot per decade, which can probably be thought of as the worst-case scenario. A rate even half that would force rapid retreat from the coasts and, some experts think, throw human society into crisis. Even if the rise is much slower, many of the world’s great cities will flood eventually. Studies suggest that big cuts in emissions could slow the rise, buying crucial time for society to adapt to an altered coastline.
[soon resemble the Pliocene]. How soon? Multiple centuries?
9. Are the predictions reliable?
They’re not perfect, but they’re grounded in solid science.
The idea that Earth is sensitive to greenhouse gases is confirmed by many lines of scientific evidence. For instance, the basic physics suggesting that an increase of carbon dioxide traps more heat was discovered in the 19th century, and has been verified in thousands of laboratory experiments.
Climate science does contain uncertainties, of course. The biggest is the degree to which global warming sets off feedback loops, such as a melting of sea ice that will darken the surface and cause more heat to be absorbed, melting more ice, and so forth. It is not clear exactly how much the feedbacks will intensify the warming; some of them could even partially offset it. This uncertainty means that computer forecasts can give only a range of future climate possibilities, not absolute predictions.
But even if those computer forecasts did not exist, a huge amount of evidence suggests that scientists have the basic story right. The most important evidence comes from the study of past climate conditions, a field known as paleoclimate research. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has fluctuated naturally in the past, and every time it rises, the Earth warms up, ice melts, and the ocean rises. A hundred miles inland from today’s East Coast, seashells can be dug from ancient beaches that are three million years old, a blink of an eye in geologic time. These past conditions are not a perfect guide to the future, either, because humans are pumping carbon dioxide into the air far faster than nature has ever done.
There is also important evidence suggesting the basic story is wrong. All greenhouse gases work by affecting the lapse rate in the tropics. They thus create a “hot spot” in the tropical troposphere. This is admitted even by Gavin Schmidt. The theorized “hot spot” is shown in the early IPCC publications. Yet it has never been seen. Some millions of radiosondes, weather balloons, and satellite measurements (since 1979) have been unable to locate the “hot spot.” As my Caltech physics professor used to say “Doesn’t matter who made the theory, doesn’t matter how many people believe it, if the observations are not there, it is wrong.” (R.P. Feynman).
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has fluctuated naturally in the past, and every time it rises, the Earth warms up, ice melts, and the ocean rises.]
This is the most completely false and misleading statement in the whole sidebar. Yes, temperature and CO2 move together, as shown by the Greenland and Antarctica ice cores. But not quite together—for the last four interglacials (last 400,000 years) the temperature rises or falls first—CO2 follows about 600 (+ 400) years later (Fischer et al., 1999). So CO2 cannot be a cause of the observed temperature rise. Temperature could be a cause of the CO2 rise, for example, if as the oceans heat up they emit more CO2 to the atmosphere (Henry’s Law). Some estimates of the ocean overturning time to complete mixing are in the neighborhood of 1000 years, so this is a plausible cause of the CO2 increase. But there may also be something else (e.g., solar insolation) causing the temperature and then the CO2 to increase.
Perhaps you are not aware that Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth used this very argument to show CO2 causes temperature rise. A British court found that this was one of the 9 errors of fact that appear in the movie. The court ruled that any theater showing the movie would need to inform the audience of these 9 errors. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/3310137/Al-Gores-nine-Inconvenient-Untruths.html
Fischer, H., Wahlen, M., Smith, J., Mastroianni, D., and
Deck, B.: Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around
the last three glacial terminations, Science, 283, 1712–1714,
doi:10.1126/science.283.5408.1712, 1999.
10. Why do people question climate change?
Hint: ideology.
Most of the attacks on climate science are coming from libertarians and other political conservatives who do not like the policies that have been proposed to fight global warming. Instead of negotiating over those policies and trying to make them more subject to free-market principles, they have taken the approach of blocking them by trying to undermine the science.
This ideological position has been propped up by money from fossil-fuel interests, which have paid to create organizations, fund conferences and the like. The scientific arguments made by these groups usually involve cherry-picking data, such as focusing on short-term blips in the temperature record or in sea ice, while ignoring the long-term trends.
The most extreme version of climate denialism is to claim that scientists are engaged in a worldwide hoax to fool the public so that the government can gain greater control over people’s lives. As the arguments have become more strained, many oil and coal companies have begun to distance themselves publicly from climate denialism, but some are still helping to finance the campaigns of politicians who espouse such views.
But in fact conservative politicians and economists are “trying to make [climate change policies] more subject to free-market principles.” The government provides thousands of dollars to rich homeowners to put solar panels on their homes, or to buy electric cars. The government then forces electric utilities to buy solar or wind power as a priority over fossil fuel power and at a higher price. This is of course the opposite of a free-market approach. President Obama has been quoted as saying this will cause electricity rates to “skyrocket” (direct quote). Does he not realize that this is a war on the poor, who spend a much higher percentage of their incomes on electricity? Well, he does realize it, but the noble cause means that some must pay the price. If solar and wind were not subsidized by the government, which makes very bad choices (Solyndra) when it meddles, then they would depend on technological change to bring their prices down to compete with fossil fuels. Once the technology is there, they might then naturally complement the fossil fuels. The present force-feeding before they are ready causes pain. In Germany, over 300,000 homes have been thrown into energy poverty by the Energiewende.
The “ideological position” is that taken by the IPCC, which has convinced various countries, which have spent far more, in the hundreds of billions of dollars, to prop up the war on demon CO2. Consider that there are about 40 separate global climate models, each of which requires millions of dollars to run on supercomputers. Why 40? 39 of them must be wrong.
The main cherry-picking was famously carried out by Michael Mann, who erased the Medieval Warming Period as well as the Little Ice Age from history, at least for a few years until his work was debunked (The Hockey Stick Illusion, by Andrew Montford). The IPCC ran his graph about six times in one of their earlier reports just to make the point that present conditions are unprecedented. After the debunking, his graph has completely disappeared from subsequent reports.
Virtually the entire attention of the IPCC is to the short period from 1950 on. If they went back any further, they would see inconvenient truths, such as the sharp increase in temperature from 1910-1940, which even Phil Jones is on record as saying was undistinguishable from the 1975-1998 increase, the latter of which is supposed to be from CO2.
11. Is crazy weather tied to climate change?
In some cases, yes.
Scientists have published strong evidence that the warming climate is making heat waves more frequent and intense. It is also causing heavier rainstorms, and coastal flooding is getting worse as the oceans rise because of human emissions. Global warming has intensified droughts in regions like the Middle East, and it may have strengthened the drought in California.
In many other cases, though, the linkage to global warming for particular trends is uncertain or disputed. That is partly from a lack of good historical weather data, but it is also scientifically unclear how certain types of events may be influenced by the changing climate.
Another factor: While the climate is changing, people’s perceptions may be changing faster. The Internet has made us all more aware of weather disasters in distant places. On social media, people have a tendency to attribute virtually any disaster to climate change, but in many cases there is no scientific support for doing so.
Tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods are not increasing. See Pielke, Jr., an advisor to insurance companies, for the data.
12. Will anyone benefit from global warming?
In certain ways, yes.
Countries with huge, frozen hinterlands, including Canada and Russia, could see some economic benefits as global warming makes agriculture, mining and the like more possible in those places. It is perhaps no accident that the Russians have always been reluctant to make ambitious climate commitments, and President Vladimir V. Putin has publicly questioned the science of climate change.
However, both of those countries could suffer enormous damage to their natural resources; escalating fires in Russia are already killing millions of acres of forests per year. These countries may think differently, once they are swamped by millions of refugees from less fortunate lands.
Present-day refugees are fleeing violence and poverty, mainly. This statement is more fear-mongering, sounding almost as if the NYT is hoping this will happen.
13. Is there any reason for hope?
If you share this with 50 friends, maybe
Is this a newspaper or an activist Green NGO?
Scientists have been warning since the 1980s that strong policies were needed to limit emissions. Those warnings were ignored, and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have since built up to potentially dangerous levels. So the hour is late.
But after 20 years of largely fruitless diplomacy, the governments of the world are finally starting to take the problem seriously. A deal reached in Paris in December commits nearly every country to some kind of action.
Purely voluntary, no enforcement, China gets a free pass until 2030, Indian premier says no way will he do anything that would slow down his country’s emergence from energy poverty. Meanwhile the developed countries are supposed to cut back on their already small contribution to total emissions and hurt their economies and their people with taxes and higher energy costs. What a great deal!
Religious leaders like Pope Francis are speaking out. Low-emission technologies, such as electric cars, are improving. Leading corporations are making bold promises to switch to renewable power and stop forest destruction. Around the world, many states and cities are pledging to go far beyond the goals set by their national governments.
What is still largely missing in all this are the voices of ordinary citizens.
You just heard the voices of ordinary citizens in the recent election. These ordinary citizens care about jobs and electrical bills, not future uncertain catastrophes. The longer the NYT does not listen to ordinary citizens, the farther from relevance you recede.
Because politicians have a hard time thinking beyond the next election, they tend to tackle hard problems only when the public rises up and demands it.
Except when they get a chance to tax the air you breathe, you will find many who are willing, throughout the EU, Canada, Australia, etc.
14. How does agriculture affect climate change?
It’s a big contributor, but there are signs of progress.
The environmental pressures from global agriculture are indeed enormous.
The demand for food is rising, in large part because of population growth and rising incomes that give millions of once-low income people the means to eat richer diets. Global demand for beef and for animal feed, for instance, has led farmers to cut down huge chunks of the Amazon rain forest.
Efforts are being made to tackle the problems. The biggest success has arguably been in Brazil, which adopted tough oversight and managed to cut deforestation in the Amazon by 80 percent in a decade. But the gains there are fragile, and severe problems continue in other parts of the world, such as aggressive forest clearing in Indonesia.
Scores of companies and organizations, including major manufacturers of consumer products, signed a declaration in New York in 2014 pledging to cut deforestation in half by 2020, and to cut it out completely by 2030. The companies that signed the pact are now struggling to figure out how to deliver on that promise.
Many forest experts at the Paris climate talks in late 2015 considered the pledge as ambitious, but possible. And they said it was crucial that consumers keep up the pressure on companies from whom they buy products, from soap to ice cream.
But as we speak, climate policy in the UK is causing a main energy provider (Drax) to stop using local peat and coal and use instead wood pellets gained from cutting thousands of trees in the Carolinas. These are then transported across the ocean on diesel-powered ships. How’s that for a sensible solution?
15. Will the seas rise evenly across the planet?
Think lumpy.
Many people imagine the ocean to be like a bathtub, where the water level is consistent all the way around. In fact, the sea is rather lumpy – strong winds and other factors can cause water to pile up in some spots, and to be lower in others.
Also, the huge ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica exert a gravitational pull on the sea, drawing water toward them. As they melt, sea levels in their vicinity will fall as the water gets redistributed to distant areas.
How the rising ocean affects particular parts of the world will therefore depend on which ice sheet melts fastest, how winds and currents shift, and other related factors. On top of all that, some coastal areas are sinking as the sea rises, so they get a double whammy.
This argues for infrastructure work at the threatened areas. But a King Canute command to the oceans to stop rising will not get the job done.
16. Is it really all about carbon?
Here’s a quick explainer.
The greenhouse gases being released by human activity are often called “carbon emissions,” just for shorthand. That is because the two most important of the gases, carbon dioxide and methane, contain carbon. Many other gases also trap heat near the Earth’s surface, and many human activities cause the release of such gases to the atmosphere. Not all of these actually contain carbon, but they have all come to be referred to by the same shorthand.
By far the biggest factor causing global warming is the burning of fossil fuels for electricity and transportation. That process takes carbon that has been underground for millions of years and moves it into the atmosphere, as carbon dioxide, where it will influence the climate for many centuries into the future. Methane is even more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, but it breaks down more quickly in the air. Methane comes from swamps, from the decay of food in landfills, from cattle and dairy farming, and from leaks from natural gas wells and pipelines.
While fossil-fuel emissions are the major issue, another major creator of emissions is the destruction of forests, particularly in the tropics. Billions of tons of carbon are stored in trees, and when forests are cleared, much of the vegetation is burned, sending that carbon into the air as carbon dioxide.
When you hear about carbon taxes, carbon trading and so on, these are just shorthand descriptions of methods designed to limit greenhouse emissions or to make them more expensive so that people will be encouraged to conserve fuel.
Let’s not forget that politicians and governments are always on the lookout for new revenue streams. What better to tax than the air we breathe?
Fake News!
What is the fake news, this site or the fake “scientists” refuted here?
[it could also be your comment -mod]
NYT is very fake news. Their mere news has been liberal trash for a long time.
CAGW promoters have long had contradictions with the historical records (e.g. “hottest” vs ice covered parts of Europe and Greenland that were exposed hundreds of years ago; changing the records more than Soviets) and their “science”, the simple earmarks of fraud and collusion.
When ANY person in the news says something, and the reporting public media person says they said something else, THAT is fake news.
The only thing in THAT category that is NOT fake news, is the EXACT words, used by the person in the hews.
For example, If I say I am going to go dancing in the streets in the nude, in seven different countries, which I name, so you know which ones to go to, to report on my antics; it is FAKE news for Anderson Cooper to report that I said I was going to go dancing in the streets in the nude in seven ” mostly Islamic countries. ”
I said no such thing; so that is a lie.
It isn’t rocket science. Report what your subject person said or did; not something else that they did NOT say or do.
G
Fake news is the ever changing outputs of surface temperature data. Just try to explain the consistent changes over the last 40 years.
Geologists are scientists, so are astrophysicists, computer scientists, neuro scientists, engineers, aeronautical engineers, chemists and this list goes. All these clever people get grants and are funded by universities when doing research yet none of the people below question their research and accuse them of making stuff up to get grants. Funny that when it comes to the 3000 scientists who put together the IPCC report most of the people below say these scientists dont know what they doing or they are doing it for the YUGE amount of grant money. Really? That is the argument of a simpleton.
Steve –
I used to be as naive as you clearly are! There is indeed outright distortion and deceit in many branches of science, and probably for the reasons that you cite, although there are others as well. And although it probably isn’t general, there are plenty of examples where such things have been brought out into the open.
In climate science, surely you will be familiar with the extraordinary shenanigans in palaeoclimatology at UEA and Penn State, so meticulously documented and clinically dissected by Steve McKintyre and Ross McKitrick? And even with all that evidence produced by M and M, many of us, believing in the good faith of the scientific establishment, would probably not have been convinced that it was actually happening, were it not for the revelations of the ClimateGate emails..
But you don’t really need to invoke a conscious conspiracy in order to produce these distortions, when you have large cadres of scientists who believe themselves to be saving the planet, and whose very job existence depends upon the maintenance of the theme that has been cultivated thus far. These people are only human! And nor would I suggest that the majority of contributors to IPCC are at all dishonest (they include, or have included, many sceptics in their number, of course). But you will find the actual science of the working groups of IPCC reports is one hell of a lot less frightening than the summaries (what are called the ‘Summaries for Policymakers’) which are politically determined rather than scientifically determined, but which are of course what the mass media is invited to alight upon, and governments are expected to act upon, and which have ingrained themselves in the public consciousness.
I couldn’t really believe I was being railroaded, either. But now I do.
Money corrupts. That isn’t the argument of a simplton, just simple observation.
Actually I’ve gotten academics fired for willful, bad science despite political cover, in industry. It was not easy. This CAGW business is stupefyingly worse for the level of politicization.
Who are “the people below” who are doing this bad stuff ??
G
Man made Global warming is very simple physics. I went to the NASA website its very informative. Of course hubble is bad science as they got government money to put it up there. And the apollo missions and all that other made up stuff.
Calling all 3,000 persons who put together the IPCC report “Scientists” is a bit of a stretch.
A lot of them are simply some form of statistician.
Statistics; like any other branch of mathematics is pure fiction; all made up; it is not science at all, but it is a sometimes very useful art form.
Statistics is in a class by itself.
It always gives the exact correct answer for any real data set.
A real data set is a finite set of finite real known numbers. no other constraints are placed on those numbers, and the rules of statistical algorithms presuppose NO specific relationship of any kind between ANY subset of numbers in that data set.
They can be numbers taken sequentially from the pages of a daily newspaper; with no apparent connection between any two of such numbers. Or they can be numbers calculated from a specific closed form equation.
Makes no difference; you always get a valid result.
And that result always means exactly nothing, except what YOU have elected to call it, and has no importance besides what you define it to have.
Nothing real in the universe pays ANY attention to your statistical machinations; they are simply numerical origami obtained by applying a rigid rule to a qualified data set .
Science on the other hand involves observation and experimentation of, or on real things in the real universe.
Nothing (as in not one single entity of any kind) in ANY branch of mathematics, actually exists ANYWHERE or at any time, in the real universe.
They are all pure fiction conjured up by us in our heads.
And anybody, can make up their own system of mathematics to suit whatever interest or purpose they choose. We do it all the time.
Just a few weeks ago, I defined a system of statistics of COMPLEX numbers (of the form (r) + j (I) )
And gave the algorithm for calculating the average of a data set of complex numbers.
Please feel free to use it if you wish.
G
Ooooooh!
Oh, man!
You went to THE NASA WEBSITE!
Why the hell didn’t you just say so to begin with, so we could have all completely ignored you, Steve?
It may surprise you to know the level of science education and practical experience of the average WAWT commenter.
Know this…your “simple physics” was discovered and then refuted over a hundred years ago, and by everyone who work on the topic since…right up until it was dusted off and trotted out by Big Jim Hansen, and glommed onto by green hordes and liberal elitists for scads of separate and specific reasons…none of which have a single solitary thing to do with physics or any actual science.
Try reading some stuff by people who are not paid to say a certain thing, and who will not be fired, blackballed, and blacklisted, if they speak the truth.
mods, correction to the above…WUWT, not WAWT.
Sorries.
Steve: re your faith in the IPCC: check out the $3 ebook by Donna Laframbois, The Delinquent Teenager . . . (a 10% sample is free), at https://www.amazon.com/Delinquent-Teenager-Mistaken-Worlds-Climate-ebook/dp/B005UEVB8Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1489886400&sr=1-1&keywords=the+delinquent+teenager
Horizontal follow-on, “Into the Dustbin” is also a revelation.
steve d March 18, 2017 at 4:29 pm
“Man made Global warming is very simple physics. I went to the NASA website its very informative.”
It’s not simple at all. It’s probably the most unsettled “science” of the current era. The website you looked at is that of GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) – a little offshoot of NASA that was hijacked by notorious climate alarmist and scaremonger James Hansen in 1981. Did you see anything about “space studies” on the site?
“Of course hubble is bad science as they got government money to put it up there. And the apollo missions and all that other made up stuff.”
Here’s what the REAL scientific talent behind Hubble, Apollo etc. have to say about the efforts of that little sheltered workshop known as GISS:
“We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.”
Read more at http://www.livescience.com/19643-nasa-astronauts-letter-global-warming.html
Have fun!
The summary for policy makers is written by at most a few dozen rabid ideologues and shameless rent-seekers. It doesn’t matter what real scientists say in the supporting documents.
So you all seem to have dismissed NASA, big call! What about the website of the Royal Society or do all know more than them as well. Now that you have proved man made global warming is a hoax i cant wait to see all your names on the short list for the Nobel science prize, by the way, leave your tin foil hats at home they will clash with your tuxedo.
steve d March 18, 2017 at 7:17 pm
“So you all seem to have dismissed NASA, big call! ”
Didn’t you bother to look at the list of NASA scientists who have dismissed GISS as nothing more than “unbridled advocacy”? Here it is again https://www.businessinsider.com.au/nasa-scientists-dispute-climate-change-2012-4 in case you missed it first time round,
“What about the website of the Royal Society or do all know more than them as well. ”
43 of its elected fellows sent a letter protesting that some of the society’s statements, including ones in a pamphlet called “Climate Change Controversies” and comments from Robert May, then president of the society, were oversimplified.
“Now that you have proved man made global warming is a hoax i cant wait to see all your names on the short list for the Nobel science prize”
They don’t give Nobel prizes for debunking shonky pseudoscientific claims. I’m guessing you’re about 15, yes?
(Age or IQ or both)
Steve,
I take back my comment regarding your age.
My new guess is 14 instead of 15.
Listen child, and listen well:
People lie, and people who lie do so repeatedly, and sometimes convincingly.
People have all sorts of reasons to make up the lies they tell, a fact you will come to understand as you grow up. You will be well served to know this ahead of time, so you can be on the lookout for it.
Sometimes the people lying to you will be people in positions of trust and authority, and use misinformation and propaganda to try and bend peoples opinions and ideas to conform with what the liars want people to think, rather than what is the actual truth.
Some lies are mixed with truth, which makes it confusing to sort out which is which.
Some lies are told by people who think the lies are true, learn that as well…and learn that sometimes, people can seem to believe their own lies! Believe it or don’t…some people are such good liars they fool themselves. You will see…you live and you learn.
But perhaps the most egregious thing these liars have done is to feed these lies, wholesale, to young children…school kids. This is calculated…they know that young minds are impressionable, and they wish to make large numbers of people, everyone really, believe the BS, and the fake news, and the propaganda, and the false facts that they are spouting.
They use the teachers, in schools and universities, to indoctrinate all of you young and impressionable minds into the fake world they want you to accept as reality. This may seem unbelievable at first, that those who are entrusted to teach and to educate…to instill knowledge and facts, are instead preaching an ideology, a sort of religion, to their students.
Instead of teaching you how to think, they tell you what to think.
This is perhaps the best clue one might have at first, that something is amiss.
In point of fact, it is actually an accepted truism of logic that the sort of reasoning you have used here is logically fallacious reasoning, and there is a name for it…it is called argumentum ab auctoritate, or, appeal to authority.
To use such reasoning proves exactly nothing.
I will say it again…believing or declaring something to be true because of who said it is a reason with no basis in logic or in science or in fact. I will post a link at the bottom where you can read up on such fallacious reasoning, but I will also point out here something very specific…there is good reason to never ever believe anything just because someone else said it was so. No matter who they are.
Anyone who asks you to believe something because of who they are should be suspected of lying to you…ask for the facts, and never accept “It is true because i said so”.
Ever.
The entire history of science, and many other fields of inquiry, has advanced over time not by gradual accumulation of knowledge but what is called a paradigm shift, in which most or all what was generally believed to be true is found to be false, and discarded…thrown away.
To be replaced with another idea that is in better accord with some what is known.
Examples are both the arcane and the familiar, but in each case, right up until the paradigm shift, there were large groups of so-called “expert” who all believed something which was found out to be completely untrue.
And these experts are the ones who were telling everyone else what was and what was not true, so everyone, or most people, believed it to be true as well.
Modern progress in understanding the world only came about when the idea that some things were obviously true, or true because lots of people believed it, was itself abandoned, and was replaced by what is called the scientific method, in which only what is testable, repeatable, and verifiable. At the heart of this method is experimentation. If experimentation cannot verify what is asserted by hypothesis, the hypothesis must be abandoned or discarded. It matter not one bit who believes what, or who says what…it matters only what can be shown true by repeatable experimentation.
“The Oxford Dictionaries Online define the scientific method as “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses”.”
Examples of widely believed ideas thrown out by paradigm shifts?
The Heliocentric model of the Solar System.
Spontaneous generation of life.
The phlogiston theory of fire.
Diseases are caused by miasma.
Light waves travel across space in a substance called the aether.
Newtonian model of gravity and physics in general.
Classical mechanics at the microscopic level (replaced by quantum mechanics).
Continents cannot moved across the surface of the Earth.
The age of the Earth.
The source of the Sun’s heat.
Peptic ulcers caused by stress and spicy foods.
In every one of these cases, there were legions of established experts who were very authoritative, and very sure they were correct…and ultimately very wrong.
Some of these were quite recent…we are not talking ancient history here.
There is no one who is correct because of who they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Dear menicholas, I suppose you are the only one not lying. How convienient.
menicholas, you left out my favorite false paradigm, “the incredible edible egg”! For decades they told us that if you eat more than two eggs a week IT WILL KILL YOU. i’m always amazed at the gullibility of those who except everything at its face value. (those of us who forget history are doomed to repeat it over and over again) Pay no attention to “steve d’ troll”. He and his flat earther buddies will soon be assigned to the dustbin of history along with all those others who have promoted false paradigms. (if he stuck around long enough — and he won’t, he’d be an embarrassment; he’s no match for the intellects here at “watts at with that”… ☺)
You overlook the fact that whether you’re in geology or astrophysics, if you can link your grant application to climate change you have a better chance of success. That is why scientific inquiry has become so distorted in one direction.
Furthermore, if anyone on your science team says, “I don’t actually believe all that climate propaganda!” then that jeopardises your funding. So, that cannot be allowed to happen.
Not just hypothetical either, I’ve seen it in action at our local uni.
steve d – March 18, 2017 at 9:40 pm
Now steve d, …… which one (1) of these two (2) Religious books have you been “brainwashed” into believing is not lying to you, ……… the Christian Bible or the Islamic Koran?
Given the literal fact that there is far more adamant religious believers and worshippers of the Islamic Koran …… than there are adamant religious believers and worshippers of the Christian Bible, ….. is that also literal proof that the content/context of the Koran is true and factual and “not lying” to any of its believers …… whereas the same can’t be said for the Christian Bible?
Testify, steve d, …….. testify, …… which one is the truth and which one is a lie.
Steve, you said:
“Geologists are scientists, so are astrophysicists, computer scientists, neuro scientists, engineers, aeronautical engineers, chemists and this list goes. All these clever people get grants and are funded by universities when doing research yet none of the people below question their research and accuse them of making stuff up to get grants.”
This is false. We have not discussed these other branches of scientific inquiry on this thread, but we surely have on others.
In fact, it is a downright shame how many research papers, in many fields of inquiry including medical science and related fields, have to be withdrawn, retracted, revised or corrected, because of everything from data manipulation to outright fraud. Entire fields of research have been found to be based on fake science, and in some instances, thought leaders in the field were found to have fabricated everything, or nearly so, that they ever published!
The field of stem cell research comes to mind…I leave it to you to do the homework.
Even in the recent past, articles have been presented here that look at the sad state of affairs regarding research integrity and reliability.
Here are a few links to head you in the proper direction.
You must be new here…skepticism is the hallmark of a good scientist, and a critical mind is required to do good science.
And one more thing…scientists, or would-be scientists, are no more immune to human weakness and failings than any other person.
And yet many people seem to think just being a scientists imbues a person with goodness and removes the possibility of having untoward motives and methods.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/04/big-jump-observed-in-scientific-research-fraud/
http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/27/up-to-50-of-govt-funded-scientific-research-is-totally-flawed-says-new-report/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528826-000-is-medical-science-built-on-shaky-foundations/
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/12520/can-up-to-70-of-scientific-studies-not-be-reproduced
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
Moderators, it seems by using the f word my recent comment needs moderation approval before being posted.
Just a heads up.
Mucho gracias
Do you think that by using the f-word, it actually improves your comment? That it wouldn’t be subject to moderation? Well no, it’s not that, it’s the fact that you have 4 links in it, and that looks like spam to the automated spam filter. So, it gets held for moderation.
TO: Steve D.
A large majority of scientific studies can not be replicated.
There was an article on that subject here recently.
The research of all scientists is in question today, not just scientists on government payrolls hired only if they believe CO2 is the climate controller.
There is no scientific proof that CO2 is the climate controller, and only one decade in 4.5 billion years where manmade CO2 and average temperature rose significantly at the same time (early 1990s to early 2000s).
There is no evidence that the climate in 2017 is unusual (or even unpleasant).
There is no evidence that the very roughly estimated change in the average temperature since 1850, of about 1 degree C., was unusual.
I’m afraid the climate science simpleton is you.
That is not an insult, just my observation — very few people are experts in more than one subject — science is obviously not a general subject you are an expert in.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a series of studies were published showing abortion was numerically, statistically related to subsequent breast cancer (“ABC” hypothesis). Everyone saw this info, and expressed concern over this tentative connection.
This was bad for business. A social approach, rather than a scientific approach, was taken. In short, presently, it is taboo to state the evidence-based possibility that abortion is a risk factor for breast cancer. You cannot even include it, for good measure, as yet another covariate if investigating any study of influences upon breast cancer. You will not get funded, and you will not get published. At least not in the nations of the developed world that also happen to be all ga-ga over manmade global warming: the wealthy Anglosphere.
Here is brief, essential history:
In 2002, NCI held an invited expert panel review of data, and were able to arrive at the desired answer: abortion is not a cause of breast cancer (“Summary Report: Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer Workshop”). Astonishingly, Susan Komen felt confident enough to immediately chime in their support, as were other organizations. Surprise, surprise.
The overall approach, and the specific articles, of NCI 2003 ABC have been criticized by Joel Brind, in 2005, in a good analysis: “Induced abortion as an independent risk factor for breast cancer: a critical review of recent studies based on prospective data.” More of the story here: http://abort73.com/abortion/abortion_risks
In short, it is perfectly scientifically proper to continue to keep the abortion-breast cancer issue in play. Yet, it is taboo. In the Anglosphere. The 2003 NCI Report is the “97% consensus” and “MBH1998” of the ABC world.
It is not taboo in other parts of the world. I occasionally scan for emerging studies on this topic. In Eastern Europe and most all of Asia (near East, subcontinent, etc.), this taboo does not exist – or the taboo has much less power. Possibly because their histories with abortion are different from ours, here in the Anglosphere.
Studies keep coming out showing this ABC connection. I have well over a dozen saved away in a file.
Sure, the case-control studies, with the greatest effect, are likely biased by the inherent bias involved in case-control studies where predictors (such as abortion) are heavily influenced by social factors. Risk factors vary wildly – varying by matching strategy.
But the longitudinal epidemiological cohort studies seem to either have little/no effect, or repeat the oft-noted 50% greater risk. So, there is some signal worth investigating.
One aspect is this: if you consider women who did not have a full-term delivery in years soon after the abortion, the risk is more obvious than those who did have a baby. This fits the biological-plausibility aspect: abortion interrupts breast cells as estrogen promotes them to develop to milk-producing state, and they do not naturally return to non-milk-producing state, and so remain at elevated sensitivity to estrogen.
But never mind all of that. It is more important to toe the line, and observe the taboo.
Actually 1.7 deg. F over the entire globe is peanuts.
The total range that could exist simultaneously is more like 270 deg. F.
They should quit lying to us.
G
or a wire tapping ……
Fake news! — I submitted my comments on Justin Gills articles in NYT relating to Climate Change and agriculture. As my comments are critical on the articles, they find no place. At the same time on Dot Earth of Revkin in NYT, most of my comments were included — sometimes he presented Justin Gill articles under Dot Earth.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
I find it fascinating how they have to go back almost 70 years prior to the rise in CO2 concentrations in order to find enough warming to worry about.
A suggestion. You need to bold “My Answer” by each of your responses to make them clear.
I assume they were your responses to the NYT puff piece.
I suggest quotation marks . . when quoting the words of others . . since they could use italics too . .
I do this “””””….. you said this …..”””””
That’s how you can differentiate what I did say, from what I didn’t say but someone else did.
G
You don’t say?
I believe he prefaced them with the notation that his answers were italicized.
How did we allow science to become so horribly distorted for ideological reasons?
Apathy and laziness.
And federal funding
Yes, OPM, the opiate of bad science.
Voting for the wrong people leftists, Socialists, and easy-money politicians who knew where the big money is.
Applying logical constraints to the Left is like pushing a string. Also, people in general are too trusting and when a bunch of flimflam artists show up with enticing arguments, it’s hard to recognize them for what they are.
Science is not so much distorted. NYT and very much of so called MSM is.
Only certain type of people become journalists. Only some of them are employed in MSM. They become more alike when they study and work together. Group think,and illusion of betterness. In the end, just leftism combined with Dunning Kruger.
Here you need to forget that leftism.
hugs, Only certain type of people become journalists.’ you forgot a few words: “Only certain type of people become ARE ALLOWED TO BECOME journalists “
your tax dollars at work.
own it.
The distortion introduced by so-called ‘reporters’ is the greatest issue here. You can’t fake the science (for the truth will always ‘out’) but you can fool most of the people most of the time by using reprehensible abuse of the status of ‘reporter’ and become, instead, a traitor to your profession.
I await the day that reporters grow a (new) set of gonads and do what they profess they do – reveal the truth, expose the lies.
“How did we allow science to become so horribly distorted for ideological reasons?”
Indoctrination, to put it simply, it seems to me, which turned science into a virtual authority figure. Even in that question you speak of “science” as if a discreet it, which can be horribly distorted, when it’s really a method that can still be utilized just fine . . Essentially a call to put things to the test, in reality-land (the time/space continuum in science speak ; ) rather than treat some authority figure’s figuring as the last word . .
In this particular realm they call “climate science”, the authority figure aspect is often revealed it seems to me, in phrases like “Most of the attacks on climate science are coming from ..”, rather than speaking of some people disagreeing with or questioning the assertions of a few supposed experts. Each and every time we have “allowed” statements about what “science tells us” and the like, without objection to the anthropomorphic incantations, we allowed this false god to grow more powerful, it seems to me.
all true and there’s more to it.
mimicry and systematic destruction of ‘heroic figures’ are elements you neglected to mention.
take away ‘thinkers’ and the role models that remain for children to emulate are personifications of wut?
The great and powerful Oz, of course ; )
Drivel.
Anthony
Can you put these informative but long articles in a PDF link at the bottom? With long sci papers I get the PDF, tap “open in iBooks” and then can read off-line when travelling (I have no 4g and downloaded is more reliable anyway).
Even more importantly, I’d like to have this to refer to quickly if in an argument with alarmists or just to reread in two years’ time. I can bookmark it but accessing a downloaded PDF is so much easier- 4g/slow wifi issues again. And my global warming bookmarks outnumber what I’d download as PDF by 50:1. Many are short pieces from other sites not worth putting in PDF format.
Scute,
In Chrome (as an example) find the three dots on upper right corner, click them, choose print, when print menu comes up, click “change printer” which will give you another menu from which you can choose…. “save as pdf”
ta da!
David, Thanks for the great tip!
Alternative – you can right click on the page and save it as a web page. You can still read it then when off line, just double click the file and your default browser will open it despite not being connected to the internet.
Or (Windows) Ctrl+P. Select – Microsoft Print to PDF- from ‘Name’ drop-down menu.
Scute: If you’re using any other browser, just copy the part you want (run your cursor over it), and paste it into a blank Word document. Save it as a pdf.
Scute, here is a pure Mac centric solution for iPad iBooks. Just tested.
Open WUWT post using Safari on an iMac. This trick doesn’t work starting from iPad alone.
Click print in the Safari tool bar (if you dont want comments, choose the appropriate page range for the post only).
Click PDF when print opens
Click email pdf when options opens
Email as an attachment to yourself. This assumes you have a Mac acessible email account somewhere.
Open that email using iPad
Open attached PDF
Open PDF in iBooks and it is there permanently until you remove it.
Good point about “if you don’t want comments”. Tried to email to myself, with comments, 37.7MB pdf.
Skype on home network is the way to go.
Tools-Options-Advanced-Connection. Uncheck “use port 880 and 443 for additional incoming connections”. Save.
Old image.
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b331/kevster1346/home.jpg
All good answers from a practical point of view.
But it ignores the root cause.
The root cause is that WUWT is not rich. It has not the funds to afford professional IT support.
So workarounds are necessary.
What is needed in the long term is for WUWT to be on a high-powered format. One where we get a preview system.
But, alas, we are still awaiting the Big Oil Money.
You did not get your check yet either, M. Courtney?
I thought it was because i moved.
Well I don’t have an iBook, or any of the 101 ibook lookalikes, so I need Anthony to put it in plain English so I can read it/
That was around long before ibook.
G
One approach is to save threads like this to “Pocket” (with only a single click, plus an entry or two in the tag field). Then, to retrieve a thread, go to the tab that contains the Pocket data and search on a tag or (with the premium version) on a title. Each item has a readable thumbnail.
You can find a pdf of 10 years of WUWT here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/17/wuwt-milestone-10-years/
Here are some article you will never see quoted in the NYT:
Climate “Science” on Trial; Germany Builds Wind Farms While NATO Burns
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/climate-science-on-trial-germany-builds-wind-farms-while-nato-burns/
Climate “Science” on Trial; Temperature Records Don’t Support NASA GISS
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/03/12/climate-science-on-trial-temperature-records-dont-support-nasa-giss/
Climate “Science” on Trial; How Does Ice Melt In Sub-Zero Temperatures?
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/climate-science-on-trial-how-does-ice-melt-in-sub-zero-temperatures/
Climate “Science” on Trial; The Criminal Case Against the Alarmists
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/climate-science-on-trial-the-criminal-case-against-the-alarmists/
Climate “Science” on Trial; Confirmed Mythbusters Busted Practicing Science Sophistry
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/02/04/climate-science-on-trial-confirmed-mythbusters-busted-practicing-science-sophistry/
Really Fake News!
We should now do an article entitled, Long Answers To Shortsighted Thinking About Climate Change
If this is typical of NYT journalism then it must be a low quality rag.
No. Just following the NWO agenda being pushed by their DNC masters.
The New York Times appears to have confused “talking points” with “answers.”
No, they just believe the two to be equivalent. Redefining language is a hallmark of the Left.
Newspeak!
I note that they don’t invite a thinker to contribute to the article. And BTW, skeptic means thinker.
“……..If you want to offset your emissions, you can buy certificates, with the money going to projects that protect forests,…….”
Um, yea. Do you mean buying certificates to protect forests from that evil CO2 Gillis? And I’m supposed to believe that agriculture yield is going to collapse someday from higher CO2 emissions and warmer temperatures? Never mind that ag yields have been going up and that greenhouse operators and plant biologists know why. And on and on.
This whole screed from Gillis is so full of holes, its a bad joke. Even as a non-scientists myself, I can look at the Antarctic ice core sample (which is (or was recently) posted on Tom Nelson’s Twitter page) and the Greenland ice core sample and see that Gillis and his ilk appear to have the relationship between temperature and CO2 bass ackwards. Scientists, as I understand it, do not really know what the human contribution to the warming is, if any. And that collapses his whole House of Cards.
I guess this is what happens when you put your blind unquestioning faith in people who have chosen to abandon sound science years ago, only Gillis is too ignorant to know that he’s done that.
Surprised the NYT didn’t direct readers to whichever emissions certificate fraudsters they are invested in.
It’s amazing what a person will believe (or profess to believe) when his/her paycheck depends on it, and there’s more than a little motivated reasoning going on with the doomists.
CD, good comment, thanks.
I thought GW was supposed to not affect the tropics, warming at mid to high latitudes and night temps only…
I’ve yet to see what’s wrong with that.
“Share this with 50 friends?” The NYT is no longer a newspaper or even a green NGO, they’re a sci-fi chain letter making the rounds in Chappaqua.
Best reply by Lance:
“Is this a newspaper or an activist Green NGO?”
Purely rhetorical ( & I didn’t even need to point that out! )
Journalists don’t make any difference between journalism and advocacy. They think right means their own talking points. It’s so myopic it is hard to understand how you manage to do it. You gotta love your opinions to think you can’t err when you’re talking ‘ex cathedra’.
It is different here. We have the right to be Dunning Krugered, a journalist just sucks when s/he does it.
The beef issue perks up my ears. It doesn’t seem like the AGWists fully acknowledge that every atom of carbon that comes out of a cow (as methane or CO2) first went into the cow (as food), and that carbon atom came from the air (via photosynthesis). There is an analogous flow balance with water. By focusing only on the output, the bloviators exaggerate their significance.
That’s a peeve of mine , too . I like pointing out that every bite of food we eat is made from CO2 , not that we exhale it . At http://cosy.com/Science/warm.htm , I put it most generally as
Also, the same balance with burning deforestation. I have yet to see a good study of the CO2 balance of dense forest (what we used to call jungle) compared to multi-cropped ag open land.
And then they tell us methane as a greenhouse is 86 times as powerful as CO2. And they’re getting away with it!
If vegetation isn’t eaten by cows, won’t it die and decay anyway? Doesn’t the decaying process release about the same emissions as digestion, just at a slower rate? But a wild fire works even faster than digestion. So I don’t see how beef would make all that much of a difference in overall emissions when all is said and done.
It is a mathematical thing…they have the idea that if no one ate meat, then land that is used for pastures could become wheat fields when we all switch to a bread and water diet.
And the corn that is used to fatten cattle would go to…um…I am not sure…the poor?
Corn bread for Sunday feast?
It’s because cattle magically produce CO2 in excess of what they eat.
“It is a mathematical thing”
No, it’s a religious thing. They want to stop everybody from eating beef. Any excuse will be trumpeted from the rooftops.
It may be a religious thing for certain people, but the most common arguments made by the likes of the UN is that it takes a lot more resources…land, time, water, and ultimately energy…to produce a certain number of calories of food in the form of beef than it does to make the same amount of calories of food if it is bread, or corn, or some other non-meat foodstuff. And that this is somehow “unsustainable” and hence a burden on the Earth.
They need the corn to use for biofuel.
Ocean level acceleration of 0.013 + 0.006 millimeters per year? Is it measured with something like this?
But presumably not in Bay of Fundy
Yeah, “sea level rise” of the width of one of my horse’s tail hairs per CENTURY really freaks me out! /sarc
More like this:
http://gilligan.wikia.com/wiki/Quick_Before_It_Sinks
You notice no one drowned in the video even thought the sea level rise dwarfs the raise the AGW people talk about.
Add in it happens twice a day.
No Jaakko you don’t need that little short stub on the left hand side or the left hand side of the C-clamp.
You just stick the rod down in th water, and screw it till it touches the bottom.
G
While this is a nice deconstruction of the NYT sermon, it is also longish and complicated. Simpler talking points are also needed. An example.
The NYT says future generations are in big trouble. But such predictions can only come from climate models, and those models have failed. They predict a tropical troposphere hotspot that does not exist. They failed to predict the pause. And teir ECS is twice what is observed since 1880.
Another simpler talking point would include the micrometer (shown three comments up) accompanying any 20 (or fewer) word fact about sea level rise.
Micrometers, not Polar Bears.
Yup. Another good sound bite.
Also the fact that only “evidence” support CAGW was fraudulent.
Deniers tend to be scientifically literate and not able to keep it simple.
My simple “climate” talking points to people in my home state of Michigan.
(1) I’ve lived in the same house since 1987, and have only noticed slight warming.
Even then the winter of 2013 – 2014 had record snowfall for the Detroit metropolitan area, and my water meter in the garage froze and cracked in February 2014, for the first time since 1987.
(2) My property was under a mile of ice 20,000 years ago.
What started the ice melting back then?
Was it coal power plants and SUV’s?
I don’t think so !
The New York Times has reflected the publishers politics for a very long time, and this screed is but one of his catechisms reflecting his orthodoxy. If one wants Green Democrat Gun Control Feminist mainstream opinion, go to the Times. For the fringe, go to the Huffington Post or the Daily Kos.
Here is the NYT will definitely not be mentioning:
Climate “Science” on Trial; Climate McCartyism
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/climate-science-on-trial-climate-mccartyism/
WUWT, you should commission someone to expand upon this article and go point by point, and each time the NYTs publishes something, publish a response. The bias in the NYT is appalling.
At the current level of CO2 there is one cubic foot of CO2 spread across each 2500 cubic feet of air. Everyone should be dubious about this presence being any type of effective “heat blanket” let alone a climate changer. If the past record of temperature change since 1880 is any indication then there will be only 40 years of warming this century and probably for less than one degree F. Then there are the inadequately addressed pauses in warming that are as lengthy as the periods of warming.
Agree with you. I still don’t understand why scientist can’t built un experiment that would measure the temperature increase in troposphere for each, say 10 ppm co2 increase, takink into account feeback if any, humidity, etc. Then we would know if such a tiny portion of co2 has any effect at cuurent concentration. If Trump has any positive effect on science, he should put some money in it, instead of all fake climate science we endured.
Got a link to any science behind that claim? Nope, so just making things up then.
Just making stuff up, huh?
Pretty much like every single word ever uttered by a warmista then.
I see uneducated/dumb people visit here all the time but you’re probably one of the most naive too.
400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding across the planet every day.
So when they told us that a nuclear war would destroy the earth even though the entire arsenals of all the nuclear armed countries in the world are a tiny fraction of that, they were lying?
Misinformed.
There is a big difference.
As you know.
One incredibly stupid analogy deserves another.
In a heated argument yesterday, a social justice warrior told me that everything wrong with the world was caused by straight white males. I asked if that meant that I (since I am one) was part of the problem, to which I received an emphatic “Yes!”. I then asked if that was the case, are all Muslims part of the terrorism problem? Red face, steam coming out of ears, torrent of insults with words like bigot and racist and moron…. So I won.
Moronic analogies deserve moronic responses.
To David M Hoffer:
First, let me say you’re one of the WUWT commenters I respect a lot. And I’ve been hanging around here, and commenting occasionally, for 8 years +.
But there’s a logical problem in what you say this time… and if you did win the argument, you won it unfairly.
(1) Everything wrong with the world is caused by straight white males, is not the same as:
(2) Every straight white male causes things that are wrong with the world.
And:
(3) All Muslims are part of the terrorism problem, is not the same as:
(4) All terrorists are Muslims.
You tried to answer (1) with (3). If you had been fair to your interlocutor, you would have answered with “that’s like saying (4).” But (4) is obviously false; as is (2) [Which was probably the contention you were trying to respond to].
Neil Lock,
Pish posh.
We are in a situation where one side is trying to deconstruct our industrial society, and to do so make up one giant lie after another…pure lies, no truth to them, and have repeated them so long with such a big megaphone many people have come to believe these lies are the truth.
The NYT articles highlight many of these lies, spoken as if established facts.
And here we find people on the other side, who represent the rational and the sane point of view, arguing over subtleties such as you bring up?
Maybe instead of answering the liberal blowhard as he did, David could have simply asked what group of people are most responsible for bringing about the modern world we live in today, in which life is ever longer, more well fed, more comfortable, and in general less brutish and unforgiving than it was for all of history except for the past 100-200 years or so…and improving fast?
Would those most responsible for this transformation include any cis-white males?
Maybe mostly cis-white males (sorry ladies)?
But that would be racist and sexist and all kinds of other hateful -isms and -ists, wouldn’t it?
Oh, and BTW, what has been the primary energy source powering most of this transformation?
That might be relevant to the current article and discussion.
Also BTW…you cis-gendered white ladies aint exactly off the hook either…who birthed all those planet wrecking straight white males anyway…hmmm?
Neil Lock;
(1) Everything wrong with the world is caused by straight white males, is not the same as:
(2) Every straight white male causes things that are wrong with the world.
I asked him to qualify it. He did, effectively accusing me and all straight white males of being guilty of his accusation merely by being who we are. So my analogy in fact holds. Had I not insisted that he qualify it you would be right. But he did.
I agree David – when the sjw replied “yes” to your question, he made the leap from (1) to (2), making (4) a legitimate analogy.
No fgs, the Hiroshima bomb as a unit of heat is so dork, so incredibly stinking green ngo propaganda sheet there is no need to take seriously anyone who uses that. By using it, NYT shows it is no different from Pravda, unless you remember Pravda was printed on some useful paper.
Pretty much like discussing ocean rise by using the number of tons of ice melting in Greenland, or the oceanic heat content in joules.
Big numbers tend to impress the uninformed.
Add in a sprinkle of nuclear fear for good measure…lather, rinse, repeat…ad nauseum.
Pravda is Russian for Truth. Whenever you see an official government paper being called truth, you know that’s the last thing it will print. Much like the NYT, in fact.
Speaking of Pravda, the Victorian government (Australia) ran with propaganda like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcMNZueIyNI and this
for (what seemed like) years. I guess one day they realized that
a) A CO2-filled balloon will sink, not float
b) What happened to all the balloons? Maybe they all ended up in the ocean and baby dolphins choked on them.
It might be less dishonest if they included how many Hiroshima bombs are sent by the sun daily. Makes their argument look silly, though, so I don’t anticipate it happening soon.
Sheri March 19, 2017 at 10:51 am
“It might be less dishonest if they included how many Hiroshima bombs are sent by the sun daily. Makes their argument look silly, though, so I don’t anticipate it happening soon.”
Just a back of beer coaster calculation says the Earth receives 2,762 Hiroshima bombs worth of solar insolation every second or 10,000,000 per hour or 240 million Little Boys every single day or 600 times their puny little human input estimate. Yes, they do look pretty silly.
When one vaporizes our major population centers and heaves the neutron activated debris into the atmosphere, the quality of life for the rural survivors, is expected to degrade. Go figure. GK
Maybe. And maybe not…
The NYT publishing this sort of crud is one reason why they are going down the tubes. Anyone with half a brain can see what they’ve done here. They asked “questions” which amount to straw men, and simply regurgitated the standard Climatist ideological crap. They are playing to their base – liberal drones who’ve guzzled the Kool Aid, with the sole purpose of renewing their Faith in the CAGW religion.
The same liberal drones guzzling the Times’ Kool-Aid also believe that biological sex is an oppressive social construct of the capitalist, patriarchal Right. So much for their “science.” Pretty obvious they were busy studying Alinksy, not biology. No wonder they’ll believe anything if it furthers their victim narrative.
The rebuttal to this is simple. There is no global average temperature. Their talking point is extremely deceptive in that not everywhere on the planet has warmed. Some places have cooled, some have warmed, some have remained relatively static. By dishonestly saying the entire surface has warmed based on a fictitious average, They show they are not about information, but propaganda.
Maybe someone who has fun playing with numbers could figure out how many “Hiroshima atomic bombs” the heat content of the Earth would equate to without what Man is supposed to have added?
Then describe just where life on Earth would be without all those “nasty nukes”?
Would Earth really be better off if everything was dead?
For a very long time, scientists and historians have been in unanimous or near-unanimous agreement that for human interests and for life in general, warmer is better.
The cold periods have been pretty much disastrous in many many ways…more wars, famines, inhibited trade…less prosperous times all around.
Cold kills everything. Life thrives in hot conditions, given a sufficient water supply. And a warmer world is generally a wetter world, at least it always has been.
Many more people die of cold than of heat.
One enduring mystery to me has been how readily people have been brainwashed into believing the opposite is true, without even a discussion, let alone a debate, on the subject.
And this (the nuclear bombs analogy) is one of the ways how this was accomplished.
Where do you want to live…here:
http://www.coolantarctica.com/gallery/scenic/mountains/Antarctica_sea_ice_Coronation_island2.jpg
http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/36/3681/N1OCF00Z/posters/geoff-renner-single-gentoo-penguin-on-ice-in-a-snowy-landscape-on-the-antarctic-peninsula-antarctica.jpg
http://girlsjustwannahaveguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/iqd0xzf.jpg
Or here:
http://www.arts-wallpapers.com/travel_wallpapers/Tropical%20Paradise%20Wallpapers/images/kaneohe_fish_pond_oahu_hawaii.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wwZ1Ovlnq24/T0UY4dRjDgI/AAAAAAAAFf0/cThUh-Lqxsc/s1600/beach34-scenery-wallpapers.jpg
http://www.hawaiimagazine.com/images/content/Hawaii_Oahu_Kauai_Hilo_Waipio_/RainboTor.jpg
I know which world looks better to me!
Menicholas: Actually, I’m going with the first pictures. I like cold and snow. I’m happy most would choose the second part of the pictures, though, because it leaves the frozen, barren wasteland wide open for me to enjoy!
1. How much is the planet heating up?
1.7 degrees is actually a significant amount.
As of October 2015, the Earth had warmed by about 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, when records begin at a global scale. That figure includes the surface of the ocean. The warming is greater over land, and greater still in the Arctic and parts of Antarctica.
Average temperature is up about a degree from what it was in 1850 and most of that warming is in the winter. Summers in the United States at least have been cooling for decades. The frequency of the most violent classes of tornadoes has decreased, and precipitation is up.
Add it all up and we are enjoying a mild climate compared to what it was 80 years ago. Pretty soon the claims that, “Climate Change will bring extreme weather” will have to scare us with “extreme mildness”
As of October 2015, the Earth temp ‘has been adjusted’ by about 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880