Opinion by Kip Hansen – 6 May 2021
The Covering Climate Now propaganda effort was “co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC in 2019, CCNow’s 460-plus partners include some of the biggest names in news” with the stated purpose of “to produce more informed and urgent climate stories, to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom”. Their basic document, the CCNow Climate Emergency Statement, claims, in part, “…to preserve a livable planet, humanity must take action immediately. Failure to slash the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, storms, wildfires, and ice melt of 2020 routine and could “render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable…”. To accomplish their goals, CCNow provides its partners with republishable stories from other partners (.pdf), editorial guidance, story writing ideas, a list of talking points labelled Climate Science 101 provided by Katharine Hayhoe.
Important Notice: Call 911 immediately if you are choking or experiencing chest pains as a result of reading that last sentence – in Europe, dial 112 – in the UK, dial 112 or 999 – in Australia, 000 or 112.
CCNow also supplies NPR’s Climate Guide of mis- and dis-information on climate and their own “fact sheet “ [ sic ] “Who says it’s a climate emergency?” in addition to their list of ten “Best Practices” for climate propagandists.
If this is your first time hearing about CCNow, please read my previous essays posted here at WUWT, most recently The Climate Propaganda Cabal and Turning Opinion into Science Fact. There are some earlier essays as well – here and here.
Last week, on April 27 2021, CCNow web site posted a list of Nine Pieces We Loved. One of those featured was:
How Warming Oceans Are Accelerating the Climate Crisis — Humans have locked in at least 20 feet of sea level rise—can we still fix it?” by Harold R. Wanless
On the upside, the article in The Nation is clearly and prominently marked:
Adapted from an article for the Florida Climate Reporting Network’s project “The Invading Sea,” this article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
My quick check of web search results show this article, one week old now, being re-posted or linked 16 times, before I stopped counting.
This article represents the “Big Lie” aspect of professional propaganda. Big Lies sell better, persuade people better than little nit-picky lies.
Here’s the bottom line Big Lie from this CCNow propaganda piece:
The climate emergency is bigger than many experts, elected officials, and activists realize. Humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions have overheated Earth’s atmosphere, unleashing punishing heat waves, hurricanes, and other extreme weather—that much is widely understood. The larger problem is that the overheated atmosphere has in turn overheated the oceans, assuring a catastrophic amount of future sea level rise.
As oceans heat up, the water rises—in part because warm water expands, but also because the warmer waters have initiated a major melt of polar ice sheets. As a result, average sea levels around the world are now all but certain to rise by at least 20 to 30 feet. That’s enough to put large parts of many coastal cities, home to hundreds of millions of people, under water.
Let me point out, unnecessarily for many readers, that not a single phrase or sentence in the first paragraph is true. The second paragraph fares little better. But only because “warm water does rise” — just not in the odd way Wanless says. [Technically, warming the water in the ocean causes expansion of the ocean’s water — the fact the ‘warmer water rises’ is not involved in this – it is the expansion that can lead to rising sea levels.] Nothing else in the second paragraph is true.
I am loathe to exaggerate, as this is what I am accusing CCNow and Wanless of doing, so let’s take a close look:
“The climate emergency is bigger than many experts, elected officials, and activists realize.” There is no real physical climate emergency – there is only a shared opinion that there is a climate emergency. At best, the sentence is an unsupported opinion (being presented here as fact). It would be hard for the real climate situation to be bigger (worse) than some of the more bizarre activists and politicians (“we have nine years left” – John Kerry).
“Humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions have overheated Earth’s atmosphere, unleashing punishing heat waves, hurricanes, and other extreme weather—that much is widely understood.” There is no scientific consensus that the Earth’s atmosphere has been “overheated”. Increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are believed to have cause a small amount of warming – but only that since the mid-1900s. Many think that that small warming and the CO2 that may have caused it are beneficial, including some of the smartest people in America. The real data on global heat waves, hurricanes, and extreme weather do not support the claim that the small warming experienced has “unleash[ed] punishing heat waves, hurricanes, and other extreme weather” – that is the climate activist’s preferred meme, not fact. More on the facts are available from the specialized pages on this web site and here. [ Readers: Please supply links in comments to reliable graphs showing that the CCNow/Wanless claims are false. ] Since this point is broadly contested by experts in wildfires, heat waves, hurricanes and extreme weather, it cannot be said to be “widely understood”.
“The larger problem is that the overheated atmosphere has in turn overheated the oceans, assuring a catastrophic amount of future sea level rise.” The oceans have not overheated – that is simply not true in any sense – it is difficult to even scientifically support that the oceans have warmed in any substantial, climatically important way. Measuring ocean water temperature is an ongoing project and we have a very short time series of even moderately reliable data. It is madness to claim that the tiny amount (if any) of ocean water warming has “assur[ed] a catastrophic amount of future sea level rise.”
I will leave parsing the rest of second paragraph to readers. But let’s take a further look at the idea that sea levels are assured to rise “20 to 30 feet”.
Wanless states: “But if seas rise 20 feet or more over the next 100 to 200 years—which is our current trajectory—the outlook is grim. In that scenario, there could be two feet of sea level rise by 2040, three feet by 2050, and much more to come.”
That link in there leads to “NOAA Technical Report NOS CO-OPS 083 — GLOBAL AND REGIONAL SEA LEVEL RISE SCENARIOS FOR THE UNITED STATES” [ .pdf ] which you will not be surprised says no such thing. The NOAA document does not say that the most extreme (RCP8.5) scenario is our current trajectory at all. And it does not, under any of the scenarios, predict 2 feet of sea level rise by 2040 or three feet by 2050, not even under RCP8.5 (a scenario which is now widely considered highly improbable to impossible).
Even under impossible RCP8.5 conditions, NOAA predicts only 16 inches (2040) and 25 inches (2050) [yellow highlight] – but in the real world, we saw only the 0.03m (30 mm) predicted for 2010 to 2020 for the very lowest scenario [blue highlight] . Wanless apparently gets his claimed our current trajectory to 20-30 feet from the lower right corner, highlighted in red, RCP8.5 at 2200.
Adding insult to injury, Wanless goes on to claim in his article that “Today, oceans are rising six mm a year (over two inches a decade), and this pace will continue to dramatically accelerate.” The only thing correct in this sentence is that 60mm is over two inches. Wanless’s link to a CSIRO page is broken but current sea level rise, according to NOAA:
Not 6 mm/yr, but 3.3 mm/yr, and level for the last two or three years. [ source: https://climate.nasa.gov/ to see this graph select Sea Level from right hand bottom section of the graphic at the top of the page.]
You may ask, “How can any article with so many obvious, egregious errors – wild exaggerations, inaccuracies and falsehoods — get published in The Nation?” That might be the wrong question. Better to ask, “How did it get published by the AGU in EOS in its science news section?”
The answer is: The Nation, AGU and EOS are all partners of CCNow.
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Author’s Comment:
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) and its associated online magazine, EOS, have abandoned even the pretext of science and opted to join forces with the acknowledged propaganda effort, Covering Climate Now, with its anything-goes push to convince the world that there is a Climate Emergency so they will willingly give up fossil fuels. This example today shows that that effort extends to publishing wild exaggeration and egregious lies to forward The Message – propaganda’s Big Lie in play.
I honestly don’t know how it has come to this and am simultaneously saddened and outraged.
This has now gone far, far beyond the go-along-to-get-along mutual back-patting of climate alarmists at AGU meetings of the 1990’s. Where are the real scientists who are members of the AGU? How can they remain silent when EOS publishes such articles without even a disclaimer. Shame.
Note: as always, I have fixed a couple of obvious typos on my first read-through after publication.
Address your comments to “Kip . . . “ so I will be sure to see them if you are speaking to me.
Thanks for reading.
# # # # #
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Project Veritas released video last month of a CNN technical director chatting about how they produced the disinformation that helped remove Donald Trump from office. Then he said “Climate Change is next!”
The man-made climate change scare has never been about science. It has always been bout the ‘scare’, or the usefulness’ of controlling the population through fear. The plandemic, climate change, racial tensions (BLM), the border crisis, UFO’s/alien invasion (possibly coming soon) and so on, are not different things. They were all manufactured, orchestrated and coordinated to keep the masses ‘progressively’ marching towards their own enslavement.
When you step back from the emotion, and look at all of these fear campaigns dispassionately, the one thing that really stands out is how completely ridiculous they all are!
There’s liars, damn liars, and CCNow.
In 1981 I went to work in Malaysia, the location had been flooded badly at King Tides which seemed to occur every 10 years. I sailed at the local boat club and helped them install sheet piling to protect the front of the club. There have been no more floods there, the sheet piling is exactly as I saw it left and the front of the club untouched. There has patently been no sea level rise there in 40 years
Wondering what has changed here:
It’s based on John L. Daly
Martin ==> Thanks for the first hand report — what city in Malaysia?
Is it beyond the bounds that the ocean is rising because of (all) the silt we are pouring into it, off eroding farmland not least.
Is it still true that (I think) Bangladesh is actually expanding in area by 20 square kilometres annually due to silt settling out of the big rivers there and expanding their deltas.
How would that affect Global Sea Level. How much stuff comes down the Yellow River, so-called exactly because of all the silt it constantly carries.
Also dust rising from almost everywhere, quarries, farms, cities, roads, forest fires etc etc – dust which I assert to be the cause of the observed Global Greening.
On average, 70% of that dust must surely fall into the ocean
Back onto soil erosion but this time the biological erosion (read= oxidation) of the soil organic matter.
For every molecule of CO2 that rises up and drifts away, so does a molecule of water.
Except that the water will condense and has nowhere else to go but into The Ocean.
Is it possible that Earth is actually cooling?
How can it possibly not be even by the words of the Warmists?
How is it that the GHGE only seems to radiate heat downwards? Why doesn’t an amount equal to the extra downwelling radiation get radiated upwards and out?
Just as El Nino is a cooling event, where/when heat energy stored (trapped?) in a deep pool in the Western Pacific is scattered out over the whole ocean and lost to the atmosphere.
Once Heat Energy gets into the atmosphere, it can only go to ‘a colder place’ which certainly might stay on Planet Earth at or near the poles, but otherwise is lost to space.
It has been asserted that 300++ Watts of downwelling radiation has been measured many thousands of times.
Maybe.
Maybe using ‘Pyregeometers’?
Can anyone really understand what those things actually do?
All I see them doing is measuring their own temperature (= that of wherever they are placed) and then using a bastardisation of Stefan’s Law (no adjustment for emissivity) and ‘compensation circuitry, they somehow create a figure for downwelling power.
Basically, they compare the temps of a black object (their sensor) with a white object (both looking at the sky) and use the temp difference to create a power figure.
The sensor is carefully shielded from convection and conduction while the white object, the instrument’s own case, is fully exposed to everything.
Why doesn’t NASA’s OCO2 Sputnik use one/more of those things?
They seem so perfectly circular, wtf is Stefan’s Law doing inside a power-meter cum thermometer?
To my mind , Pyregeometers are just as big a train-wreck as Al Gore’s CO2 experiment, is it still in the Climate Fail File here?
Similar in no small way to all the sweet little Youtube experimenters with their perspex cabinets, ice statues and theatrical spotlights.
Well intentioned certainly, but utterly clueless otherwise
Lots to ponder
I see that Covering Climate Now‘s Executive Director is Mark Hertsgaard.
Hertsgaard is the son of Rolf Hertsgaard, who was a local television station’s anchorman in the 1960s and ’70s. Rolf who was widely regarded as a bit of a nutcase. Son Mark removed to the Left Coast, is poorly educated, has zero scientific training and has become even more of a crackpot than his father.
Nobody will ever accuse either one of them as being the sharpest knives in the drawer.
John ==> He knew a lot about the Beatles though . . .A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles.
The post is a catalog of fake-information generation/sources.
The post didn’t mention you as source….
The devil is the father of lies. Make no mistake, the war is spiritual. You think science isn’t part of that war? Ok, sure, whatever.
Kip: What none of the consensus science team or mainstream media propagandists dare to say is that Asia and Africa (over 5 billion people) are forging ahead with economic development largely based on electrification using coal. Hundreds coal fired plants are being built and planned in China, India, elsewhere in Asia and throughout Africa.
Bangladesh has had a GDP growth of 15% (World Bank has excellent data and many countries will be a surprise – Pakistan ~10%, Africa south of the Sahara a respectable 3%). They have told Al Gore and Kerry they won’t compromise their ec dev plans. CO2 will continue to rise this century.
Think also increased cement, steel, autos and everything that goes with the new prosperity and creates more CO2 emissions. Maybe we will warm up, maybe not significantly, but one thing is for sure, the West spending 90 trillion will be a huge waste under the certainty of ever rising CO2.
Gary ==> But . . . . . John Kerry says China and the US are co-operating to limit CO2 emissions!
> …not even under RCP8.5 (a scenario which is now widely considered highly improbable to impossible).
Even -if- reported temperatures magically got back in line with the RCP8.5 scenario it is too late. RCP8.5 has been so wrong for so long it is clear that the models incorporated are wrong.
Humans have locked in at least 20 feet of sea level rise—can we still fix it?
Paleoclimate studies show that sea level was 4 to 6 meters higher 125,000 years ago during the peak warm era of the prior interglacial period. Let’s see…6 meters converted to feet is…times 3.28…equals 19.7 feet! Oh, the coincidence of claiming another 20 feet of sea level rise.
The thing is, at the current rate (2 to 3 mm per year), it will take another…math again…2 to 3 thousand years for sea levels to rise another 6 meters (20 feet). Yawn. Back to real stuff.
And lets face it, on a 2 to 3 thousand year time scale, more likely than not we will be headed down into the next Glacial Maximum
“Make the lie big, make it simple, repeat it frequently and people will come to believe it”-Joseph Goebbels. Propaganda requires the lie to be constantly in the loop, otherwise people start to question the narrative.
Then they change the name/ goalposts. Note-moving the goal posts is a classic sign you are dealing with a liar.
The BBC have got to be part of this monstrosity, if not in league with its creators..
Headline: “Cutting methane gas ‘crucial for climate fight‘”
In reference to bovine cows the BBC asks…..so should we change our eating habits?
Quite oblivious to the fact that cows burp for the exact same reason we fart.
i.e. When we eat, when we are forced to eat: Nutrient Free Dreck
See:
Betteridge’s law of headlines – Wikipedia
Peta ==> Some programs of the BBC are partners of CCNow.
I am pretty sure these people believe what they are saying, in which case they are not lying, just wrong. I think there are even published studies that say these things. We disagree with them but name calling is not helpful.
Also, if all CCNow does is circulate its member’s articles then I doubt they are all that important in the climate change debate. Articles on both sides circulate widely in many ways.
David ==> I too think that most of the individuals involved in the CCNow movement are True Believers, and not just liars. There are not, as you well know, published studies that say that humanity has “locked in 20 to 30 feet” of sea level rise, “As a result, average sea levels around the world are now all but certain to rise by at least 20 to 30 feet.” or any of the other gross exaggerations and obvious falsehoods in the particular piece highlighted here in this essay.
That the author himself may believe does not excuse AGU members for failing to speak up when such climate propaganda is published in their organizations magazine as a “news article”. It does not excuse these men and women of science remaining silent.
CCNow of its partners and their shared stories claims that its penetration, on a daily basis, is to 2 billion people. If they are correct, that about 1/2 of the adult population of the world.
Their published claim:
” 460+ News and media partners
2,000,000,000 Reach of our partners
57 Countries represented “
“I am loathe to exaggerate”
Should be “loath” (reluctant).
Roger ==> Thank you, love a detailed reader. Sometimes my fingers get the best of me….
Imagine the sense of entitlement for such believers in CAGW to use fossil fuels every day, while trying to take the same fuels away from the little people.
Partners in Australia are just two known wacko greenie outfits.
Martin ==> But check your local papers fro the origins of their stories — How many from AFP? How many from Reuters? How many re-written from materials at NPR or BBC?
CCNow claims a daily reach to 2 BILLION readers.
Kip,
“I will leave parsing the rest of second paragraph to readers. ”
Okay, I’ll start:
“As oceans heat up, the water rises—in part because warm water expands, but also because the warmer waters have initiated a major melt of polar ice sheets.”
I’ve just had a qualified professional (plumber) demonstrate expansion of water under lab conditions (my water heater). Expansion of fresh water in a closed container over 60 degrees f (33 and a third centimes or 0.05 EU), in a pressure-equalized, cylindrical container is about 1 part in 25. Median temperature of the water over the course of the experiment was near 80 degrees F (26.6 dungarees, something),
According to some imperfect memory of engineering steam tables that I was tested on, once, years ago, for a given constant pressure, the rate of thermal expansion of liquid water is small near freezing and suddenly big at more than boiling.
But weirdly, in water, ice is less dense than water at freezing, and actually expands as it freezes. So when ice melts in a container of water, the water surface stays at the same level in the container. My daughter, a professional (kindergarten teacher) effectively demonstrates this to (sometimes, educationally challenged for their ages) 5-7 year-olds nearly every couple months.
Really strangely, fresh water at just above freezing, can’t melt ice. The water at the interface with solid ice actually cools until it is nearly freezing, just starting to expand a little bit, and stopping the process of heat transfer as it becomes slightly less dense. This was demonstrated to me, as a youngster, by an amateur (ice cream maker at a church social) but I’ve verified it many times since, so I’m pretty sure it is the case. In fact, we had to chemically change the composition of the water/ice mixture by adding salt, then adding more salt, until all the ice melted. We were forced to add the salt to the ice, because when added to the water. the water just next to the under surface of the ice became less salty!
But then, a funny, funny thing occured. The liquid in thermal contact with the mixture actually froze. Yah, I did spring it on you, but you’ll have to take my word for it, the liquid water/ice/chemical mixture was actually colder than the freezing temperature of the freshwater ice, and of the water-based mixture (cream and sugar–both hydrocarbons).
Later, I demonstrated that the frozen mixture was less dense than liquid fresh water, too (in root beer).
I realize that none of this is scientific, at all, but MELTING SEA ICE CAN”T RAISE SEA LEVEL.
I also really, truly, in my tortoise-loving heart believe that less than 32 degree F (upyers centipede) salt water in the ocean CAN’T MELT SEA ICE.
Now I will accept a scientific, or even sensible sounding explanation of why I am wrong, but I feel very, very sure that no semi-human who has ever worked with, for, or near Covering Climate Now can or will ever produce such a thing (except maybe after a bunch of them were banging away at keyboards, with their thumbs, for an infinite amount of time).
The CCNow Climate Emergency Statement makes the tale of Little Red Riding Hood look like documented Scientific History.
Life has NEVER been better for humanity – so obviously we must all retreat and suffer under Marxism.
Al ==> And you are quite right, in the first bit. Literally everything — by every metric imaginable — is better now than 100 years ago or any other time in history.
And that includes the weather and the climate, which have been improving since the late 1700s.
They claim to care about the future well being of mankind, while at the same time loathing mankind and wishing for a future with a population massively reduced. You would think they would be secretly delighted that all these bad things will happen.
Can someone please explain this to me?
The Arctic and the Antarctic are two land masses surrounded by ice, the Arctic being tiny and the Antarctic massive.
The Oceans warm and melt the sea ice. So no meaningful SLR as it’s Sea Ice, right up to the coast of the land masses.
The land masses are covered in Ice hundreds of metres thick, which is an environment probably no warmer than -20 degrees C (When Scott raced to beat Amundsen to the S. Pole it was estimated it was -40C, and it was Summer!) so the land bound ice isn’t going to be affected by even a 4C rise in atmospheric temperature.
How does the land bound ice then melt? The Oceans will meet the land masses and can’t possibly get further than the coastline as there is no meaningful SLR. Even if there were some its effect would surely be insignificant as the land itself rises raising the ice beyond the reach of the Oceans.
It’s all double Dutch to me.
HotScot ==> There is no land mass under the ARCTIC sea ice — it is all floating sea ice.
There are a few islands around the edges. See
Kip are you sure there is no land mass under the Arctic as according to the Environment Correspondent of the UK i newspaper the Arctic is a continent!
Quote “The Arctic may be getting greener as the climate warms – but it is not nearly enough to curb global warming on the continent,a study shows”
Written by Tom Bawden i newspaper 30th April 2021.
Words fail me.
Dave ==> Words fail me too. I supplied a map and offer the Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic
How can a person become a journalist in a northern European country and not know this simple geographical fact?
How can they become a journalist? Even back in the mid 70’s at Indiana University in Bloomington, when I walked by the Ernie Pyle school of Journalism I could smell pot!
Oh . . . there was a time long, long ago in a world far, far away from the one we have now where journalism had research as one of its key cornerstones.
The Dark Side won.
As a Dutchman living 6,76 meter under sea level, I laugh in the general direction of this prediction.
In case things do go awry I have an escape plan: Move to Sweden where the sea level is falling:
Skol !!
Kip,
I just sent the links to your climate propaganda trilogy to many of the climate “players” in Massachusetts, which I now refer to as the Climate Emergency Caliphate. I presume few will look at your essays- since here in MA, it’s considered heresy to even consider that the “emergency” isn’t proven fact. Of course MA is the state where the Puritans got their start and the home of the Salem witch trials…..
JZ ==> Those nasty Puritans chased my ancestors away — forced them to move to Rhode Island.
PROBLEM SOLVED ==> Thanks y’all! The content is available here, in a different piece.
Excerpt from the CCNow quote in the above article titled, appropriately, the Big Lie:
“. . . As oceans heat up, the water rises—in part because warm water expands, but also because the warmer waters have initiated a major melt of polar ice sheets.” (my bold emphasis added)
Gee . . . all along I thought that it was the Earth exiting naturally from the last glacial period, some 12,000 to 14,000 years ago—long before there were fossil fuel-powered, human industrial activities, electrical power generating plants, and cars and SUVs—that started the melting of the polar ice sheets and bringing on the welcomed warmth of the Holocene (the current interglacial) that enormously benefitted development of human civilization.
It seems that CCNow owes all of its followers an explanation of just what melted polar ice sheets prior to, say, 1700 AD . . . or did all the scientists and historians just get that part wrong?