This article on Grist (h/t to James Taylor, The Heartland Institute) tries to point out how “terrible” the last decade was due to “climate change”. They write:
As this hottest-on-record, godforsaken decade draws to a close, it’s clear that global warming is no longer a problem for future generations but one that’s already displacing communities, costing billions, and driving mass extinctions. And it’s worth asking: Where did the past 10 years get us?
The seven charts below begin to hint at an answer to that question. Some of the changes they document, like the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the number of billion dollar disasters that occur each year, illustrate how little we did to reduce emissions and how unprepared the world is to deal with the warming we’ve already locked in.
https://grist.org/climate/we-broke-down-the-last-decade-of-climate-change-in-7-charts/
We can also provide 7 charts that illustrate the last decade of climate change, and they tell a different story.
What they say: 1. Atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by about 25 parts per million.
There’s no disputing that ambient CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere, however, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. NASA, for example has this to say about the effects of that increased CO2 in study about CO2 and greening derived from satellite data.
From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25 2016
“We were able to tie the greening largely to the fertilizing effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration by tasking several computer models to mimic plant growth observed in the satellite data,” says co-author Prof. Ranga Myneni of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University.
“The greening over the past 33 years reported in this study is equivalent to adding a green continent about two-times the size of mainland USA (18 million km2)…”
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/bu-cfg042216.php
Source: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3004.html
It seems the Earth’s biosphere is responding to increased CO2 in a positive way, that’s also undeniable.
What they say: 2. Climate change got expensive.
They cite this graph (produced by the Grist magazine):
And they say:
One of the best-established consequences of global warming is that it makes natural disasters, like fires and floods, more frequent and severe. In the 2010s, the costs of this consequence came into sharp focus as billion-dollar disasters struck the United States again and again.
But, that’s not true when you look at normalized weather disaster costs:
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. makes note of this in Why Climate Advocates Need To Stop Hyping Extreme Weather
It appears that 2019, is on track to continue the record of good news. Robert Muir-Wood of RMS, a leading catastrophe modeling firm, wrote a month ago “Almost three months ago we passed a remarkable record in catastrophe loss. And yet no one seems to want to celebrate it. No banner headlines in the newspapers. . . The first half of 2019 generated the lowest catastrophe insurance loss for more than a decade.” Muir-Wood labelled 2019 “the year of the kitten.” With two months left, cross your fingers.
What they say: 3. More people accept the basic premises that it’s getting hot and that it’s our fault.
Well, you might think that if you believe the highly adjusted temperature data published by NASA GISS and [University of East Anglia’s Climate Research unit] on climate (ground zero for the embarrassing and revealing Climategate affair in 2009).
But when you look at unadjusted data, such as is produced by the state-of- the-art United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN) operated by NOAA, you get a wholly different idea about temperature over the last decade:
Source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/national-temperature-index/time-series?datasets%5B%5D=uscrn¶meter=anom-tavg&time_scale=12mo&begyear=2005&endyear=2019&month=12
That’s right, in the contiguous US, the temperature for 2019 was actually lower than for the start of the decade at 2010. The two peaks in 2012 and 2016 were from naturally caused El Nino events in the Pacific ocean. Granted, the USA isn’t the world, but the USA routinely gets blamed for all of the climate woes of the world, so the comparison seems a fair one. But really, where’s the climate crisis?
What they say: 4. But there’s a widening partisan divide when it comes to worrying about the environment.
Well that’s true, Conservatives generally think things through and look at fact based evidence compared to the liberal side, which seems to “feel” issues far more than they critically examine them.
But when people of all stripes worldwide are polled about it, such as the United Nations does, it comes in dead last as a concern:
It seems people worldwide would rather have education, food, honest government, better roads, and reliable energy than they would some climate action.
What they say: 5. Coal continued its death spiral.
Citing a Grist produced graph of data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) that they say depicts a “death spiral” for coal use, they say coal is on the way out.
While that data is true, what they aren’t showing you is the rest of the story from the EIA:
What is really going on here is that natural gas is replacing coal because it is more efficient, less expensive to maintain, and has a smaller footprint. It’s really a market driven business decision rather than a nod to environmental concerns.
What they say: 6. Solar skyrocketed, but fossil fuels still dominate.
Once again they cite a graph they produced from EIA data, and once again, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Gosh, it looks like the entire USA is being powered by solar energy! Hurray for environmentalism! Inconveniently, the reality is far different:
While renewables, including solar, have made gains, they still lag behind fossil fuels such as natural gas, crude oil, and coal in energy production in the USA. Without baseload (grid) generation by coal and natural gas, solar wouldn’t even work, since almost all solar installations are grid-tied – meaning that if the grid doesn’t have electricity, solar power can’t feed to it.
What they say: 7. While coal flatlined, the price of renewables dropped precipitously.
I wonder what the price of renewables would be if they weren’t propped up by your tax dollars? According to EIA data, fossil fuels are still far less expensive:
And there there’s this analysis.
The EIA estimates the two largest federal tax credit programs benefiting wind and solar paid out a combined $2.8 billion in 2016. These funds came through a tax credit worth 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour of power produced, as well as a deduction equal to 30 percent of a facility’s installation costs.
These two tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2021, though a permanent 10 percent investment tax credit for solar and geothermal installations would remain.
https://www.insidesources.com/us-still-subsidizing-renewable-energy-to-the-tune-of-nearly-7-billion/
That doesn’t include state tax credits, which are also substantial.
While some people at Grist believe there is more to worry about from climate change issues this past decade, the undeniable fact is We’ve Just Had The Best Decade In Human History.
How inconvenient for the eco-worriers at Grist.
Anthony Watts is former television meteorologist and Senior Fellow for Environment and Climate for The Heartland Institute. He operates the most viewed website on climate in the world, WattsUpWithThat.com
Its about time someone listed some of the pros vs cons to warming…I swear I must have missed that debate.
Anthony: Good for you for using the phrase, “What they say.” This is a good format to prepare the way for a series of short zingers in which the second phrase is, “And this is what they leave out.” (WHATTLO)
Of course the retards who author articles like this ignore nature has tipping points, the latent heat of arctic sea ice, sea level rise, global dimming & who is going to maintain the 450 atomic water boilers the naked ape species are operating when conditions reach the point no one can insure properties. The author engages in sophistry, when 80 percent of the insects are gone & the shells of plankton are thinning.
LOL! Touch a nerve there sonny?
There’s no sophistry, just information, backed by sources, that YOU don’t like to hear. Thus, you have to levy insults.
There’s no tipping point, and no worst case scenario anymore. Climate science itself made a self-correction and threw it out a few days ago.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/01/30/climate-change-worst-case-scenario-misleading-experts-say/2854910001/
As for the “80 percent of insects are gone” wild claim you make: PROVE IT, and no we aren’t talkijng about some opinion piece or a pronouncement from Greta Thunberg. Show real science. Otherwise you are just mouthing off.
The shells of plankton are thinning? Eh, not so much.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/01/31/the-solution-to-dissolution/
You have an attitude which discounts facts, replaces facts with opinions are all equally valid. You, David Icke, Tony Heller, parrot climate change denier rhetoric, mostly flag waving nonsense, because no one can dispute the Keeling measurements & the physical properties of CO2, & the ice core data. People like you are the reason way there is a market for peer-review literature. People like you abuse freedom of speech, using it as a license for unregulated yammering of nonsense. You group of deniers include a guy anyone can search about, a guy with a rap-sheet of goofiness, Lord Monckton. Presenting facts is not effective here with you. You are concerned with nerves, with impressions, not facts.
“…no one can dispute the Keeling measurements & the physical properties of CO2, & the ice core data.” I certainly don’t. I just don’t think climate change is the crisis that low-information headline regurgitators like yourself believe it is.
See here’s the thing, and there’s really no way of getting around this: I don’t give a shit what you think.
Feel free to be as upset as you wish.
“People like you abuse freedom of speech, using it as a license for unregulated yammering of nonsense.”
Seriously? Do you crazed collectivists have a capacity to even understand the dichotomy of your own ramblings? Freedom isn’t something to be used as ‘license.” By its very nature it means to be absent a need for license or regulation. you are spinning is suck a tight circle you are collapsing in on yourself Russ.
You and your Socialist, “Give over all power to the central authority, in order to save the planet” Brigade. expose the very evil intent of your movement unconsciously when you suggest that people speaking freely are using freedom as a license to break the rules you wish to impose upon the masses e.g. “you can’t say that! Who do you think you are!! There will be consequences to your using freedom to speak out against us!!! There is nothing more frightening than you Borg Drones.
You have no idea what I think because you are operating a delusional & sick mind. There has never been any choice for the collective, if any recognizable organization existed. There is absolutely nothing humans can do which will alter the extinction, now well under way. It’s a matter of scale. The ocean has absorbed most of the heat & CO2. You ignore the fact the ocean has a cycle time of a decade and then some. You ignore the fact politics has never been enabled to deal with problems of population. There is nothing I would do to stop fossil fuel consumption at this point. The aerosol masking effect is too great now to risk. All I intend to do is wait and see.
President Jimmy Carter was aware of the impending doom, it prompted a review of the science, perhaps the inconvenient truth was too horrific to be believed, perhaps the policy was already in place & he would like to have had another.
The Charney Report 1979
– page viii
“The conclusions of this brief but
intense investigation may be comforting
to scientists but disturbing to
policymakers. If carbon dioxide
continues to increase, the study group
finds no reason to doubt that climate
changes will result and no reason to
believe that these changes will be
negligible. The conclusions of prior
studies have been generally reaffirmed.
However, the study group points out that the ocean,
the great and ponderous flywheel of the global climate system,
may be expected to slow the course of
observable climate change. A wait-and-
see policy may mean waiting until it is
too late.”
The Charney Report 1979
Page 6
“Considering the uncertainties, it would
appear that a doubling of atmospheric
carbon dioxide will occur by 2030 if the
use of fossil fuels continues to grow at
a ratio of about 4 percent per year, as
was the case until a few years ago.
Page 8
Ignoring feedbacks ….”For such
a case, doubled CO2 produces a
The Charney Report 1979
Page 1
(We) ….”have assumed a rate of CO2
increase that would lead to a doubling of
airborne concentrations by some time in
the first half of the twenty-first
century.”
“People like you abuse freedom of speech, using it as a license for unregulated yammering of nonsense.”
The same could be said about you. That’s what you are doing here. No facts, just yammering. Anthony, magnanimously, allows you to yammer.
You can have your say here, but you should use facts rather than just yammering your displeasure at the state of things. No facts invites ridicule. Whining invites ridicule.
You always lie to yourself and others. You care nothing for facts or how they are gathered. You are unfit to talk with authority. Your group of sophists include, so called, Lord Monckton. This man has a rap-sheet of goofiness which is worth reviewing for a few laughs. You have no respect for peer-review literature so you replace it with conspiracy theories such as the academics are motivated to increase the threat, ignoring the fact we all depend on fossil fuel for our lives. Some of us making a very good living, far better than those academics, by far. You say you want facts, then read Guy McPherson’s 32,000 word essay. It is full of links to peer-review papers, not the rhetoric you spew.
(SNIPPED the Video)
(You need to back off and get on topic, your attacks are getting personal) SUNMOD
“Of course the retards who author articles like this ignore nature has tipping points”
Could you point some of those weather tipping points out? That is what you are talking about isn’t it, the Earth’s weather?
I’m curious as to what I have been missing with Nature’s tipping points. You suggest these are easily visible and the only way to deny them is by ignoring their existence Please give examples.
You can’t recognize the melting point of ice, or the habitable temperature range of humans, or the point where the reservoir no longer delivers potable water, or the point where snow become an avalanche, or the point where the dam breaks, or the point where the aircraft can’t develope take-off lift or the point where sea level rise means properties can’t be insured, or when wild fires are so numerous the military is called in to help?
Are you out of your mind? Or do you suffer brain damage? I am looking out of window and there is 16 °C in February! It never been so warm and there are storms out of nothing and almost like orkans – you would never think of umbrella in February, there should be snow every winter and there is nothing.
Dude, get out of this virtual reality and get to real world please!
Weather is not climate. Next February it might be -10°C
You first.
Fossil fuels get roughly 10 times the amount of subsidies.
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs
Oil companies get taxbreaks. That means they do not have to pay as much to the government in taxes.
Windmills and Industrial Solar are paid cash out of the U.S. Treasury in the form of subsidies.
There is a difference between not paying as much into the U.S. Treasury and getting paid out of the U.S. Treasury. Oil companies don’t get cash out of the U.S. Treasury, whereas Windmills and Solar do get cash.
Oil companies would still be in business if their taxbreaks were taken away. Windmills and Solar would not be economically viable without government, taxpayer payments.
“”There is a difference between not paying as much into the U.S. Treasury and getting paid out of the U.S. Treasury. Oil companies don’t get cash out of the U.S. Treasury, whereas Windmills and Solar do get cash.”
Trans: My kind of corporate welfare, orders of magnitude higher than yours, good. Your kind, bad.
Get rid of both. Make the hydrocarbon supply chain pay ALL of it’s currently rolling external costs (including AGW costs, as a carbon tax rebated monthly, totally, equally to all of us), and make then catch up on 13-14 figures USD of a century’s worth of shucked asset retirement obligations, world wide, in 15 years. THEN, stop the relatively tiny green start up helps.
With the new ranking of ACTUAL energy costs, we would be as Milton Friedman said “Free to Choose”….
“It seems people worldwide would rather have education, food, honest government, better roads, and reliable energy than they would some climate action.”
However, this survey taken last month in the US shows otherwise ….
“Nearly six in ten (58%) Americans are now either “Alarmed” or “Concerned” about global warming. From 2014 to 2019, the proportion of “Alarmed” nearly tripled.”
“Over the past five years, the U.S. population as a whole has shifted dramatically towards membership in the Alarmed segment. In 2014, the Alarmed and Dismissive were similar in size. As of November 2019, however, the Alarmed now outnumber the Dismissive by more than 3 to 1 (31% vs. 10%), representing a major shift in these two “issue publics” most engaged with the issue of climate change.”
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/for-the-first-time-the-alarmed-are-now-the-largest-of-global-warmings-six-americas/
“Nearly six in ten (58%) Americans are now either “Alarmed” or “Concerned” about global warming.”
The problem I see with polls like this is how do the respondents actually define “alarmed” and “concerned”?
Are they alarmed and concerned enough to turn society upside down to fix the CO2 “problem”?
Or are they just alarmed and concerned because of all the scaremongering they have heard and don’t understand the problem enough themselves and just want some answers, not a societal upheaval?
Polls are not something that can be depended on to form public policy. The polls are easily manipulated in numerous ways, and just citing a poll doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good poll, or that it means what the pollsters claim it means.
Most polls I know about overweigh Democrats by various margins. So more Democrats vote in a particular poll than Republcans which naturally skews the results. I don’t know about the details of this poll but I suspect it is pretty similar to all the others.
You can get useful data out of a poll but they have to be long-term polls asking the same question, worded exactly the same, and then over time, you can see changes in the poll that tell you something, even if the poll is skewed towards the Democrats.
I will just say take every poll with a large grain of salt.
hi anthony
great article. thank you. but there are no “fossil fuels”, never were, and never will be. the correct
term is HYDROCARBONS. hydrocarbon fuels did not come from rotting plants and animals.
THAT’S PREPOSTEROUS!!!
the unimaginable oceans of hydrocarbon fuels- coal, gas, oil- beneath our soils were formed
when the earth was formed. please stop saying “fossil fuels” i remember being taught that nonsense
in the sixth grade, and could see thru it.
Thanks to a much warmer winter in Moscow, St Petersburg & the Baltic states+Finland, there is practically no snow at all this winter.
My (communal) heating bills are at least 30% lower this winter than any time I can remember in the last decade..and there are far less accidents & road deaths from slippery roads.
In fact it’s still possible to drive on summer tyres in most parts of the Baltic states, Finland and Sweden. (forbidden Nov-March).
Poland has no snow cover, & Germany/France has not had the kind of deadly cold snap that kills homeless people living in the streets.
Oh I am moaning, and I can hear everyone else complaining, the climate crisis is here, it’s the apocalypse!
Look at USA temperature trend for past 100 years. You include only 9 years, specifically selected to reinforce a point. That’s like taking measurement during day, and then during night, and saying that “trend is downward”
The article is about the LAST DECADE. Please learn to read.
For 40 years, from Kellogg (1977) to Schmidt (2017), it has been asserted that climate change is due to human activities entirely.
To quote Schmidt:
“All of the mean global climate change in the last century is because of our activities. All of it. Not 10 percent, not 15 percent, not 20 percent—all of it.”
This assertion means that climate did NOT change prior to about 1920; climate was only “fluctuated”.
Some fluctuations!
The graphs in Kellogg’s articles and Schmidt’s presentation explicitly showed this.
I witnessed Schmidt’s presentation. It is dutifully recorded in the article online (below).
Following 1920, then, total human control of climate justifies the term: “Anthropocene”.
And, yes, such a term and such statements are pure rubbish.
The audience, quite naturally, was awed by the august academics on the dais: experts in anthropogenic climate change, since as asserted, there is no other kind.
Schneider, in his “Mediarology” essay of 2011, explains to the uninitiated that science cannot be the basis of indoctrinating the public about climate since science is too uncertain, and absolute certainty MUST be conveyed always. According to Schneider, such perfidy is essential to convince and convict humanity, so science be damned.
Kellogg, W.W., World Meteorological Organization, Technical Note 156, 1977.”Effects of Human Activities on Global Climate”
Schmidt, Gavin, https://www.studlife.com/news/2017/09/21/wash-u-hosts-climate-change-panel-continues-push-toward-increased-sustainability-on-campus/
Schneider, S. 2011, https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Mediarology/Mediarology.html
– proof-read proof-read version –
“n.n February 8, 2020 at 7:12 am
Yes, transgender (i.e. homo, bi, neo) is trendy. So are female rent-a-wombs and male sperm depositors. As well as dodo dynasties.
The chambers are still Planned with unworthy human lives.
Some sequestered, others cannibalized for clinical profit. There has been great progress in the last century.”
____________________________________
Companies want your “unworthy human lives”. In fact, companies want 100% trained workers.
The best 50% are accepted in the company.
The remaining 50% trained then are defamed as deplorables. That’s live.
____________________________________
The percentages of / living / accepted / deplorable / unworthy / human lives will not change so soon. Kismet.
… letting the days go by ….
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-huawei&sxsrf=ALeKk00ThoX2SRkRnLu-OEOjPfEJrb94kA:1582292985549&q=Talking+Heads+Once+In+A+Lifetime+(Remastered)&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAFWQvU7DMBSFFQkkBlg6M1wxwYAaByWBkY1KSEiIiQU5sesYHDuxb5s6EhLPwuP0kZiaRG1Cx_Nzj66-s8ur87mYExfGKNaYRjOk6ktqAQWnzEEh0b1_K47Ye1hwYNQ7EAYyD509WA1FbruuUQzKrmEaDS865yA1UFByyVGWY22pTNOPGT0cC2tWmsFCoxl0plYcqKDdrfJW5m4bHH04yboVUbuXdfyZrpOqnVIb-9Rug4teEsY290hUPcWNrcJslElyV5Qf_9KShGSarqvEPxy28khbkm_yv2D2tmf1NLL6OQl-T2-P_QHFQsMjPB9QXL_ykroOB2c3O3kCJ5-DAQAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjX8tXa5OLnAhUL7aYKHWvdDWIQs9oBKAAwA3oECA0QCQ&biw=360&bih=574&dpr=3#wptab=s:H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLRT9c3LDYwLUkvKzF_xOjJLfDyxz1hKYdJa05eY7Ti4grOyC93zSvJLKkU0uFig7KUuASkUDRqMEjxcaGI8Oxi4sgvSy0qy0wtX8SqG5KYk52Zl67gkZqYUqzgn5ecquCZp-Co4JOZllqSmZuqoBGUmptYXJJalJqiCQCanjmElwAAAA
Thx for an informative “Breaking down the last decade of climate change in 7 charts”.
– regards !