Guest, “Why do they think ‘the climate story’ only has two sides?” by David Middleton
Both-sidesing the climate story
JANUARY 13, 2023
By KYLE POPEThe recent storms in California have been tragic, killing at least nineteen people and soaking nearly the entire state, including cities, such as Palm Springs, that are more used to drought. But is climate change driving it?
It is maddening that, this far into the climate crisis, news outlets continue to dither as to whether a single weather event is related to the now-undeniable, violent changes in Earth’s weather. Did the warming of the planet produce the water that pulled a five-year-old boy from his mother’s arms as he was on his way to school in San Luis Obispo County on Monday? It no doubt had a role. Is the cause and effect immediately and directly provable, on a chart or in a document? Of course not.
[…]
Journalists no longer need to both-sides the climate question. Many outlets don’t; this week, for example, Scientific American clearly conveyed that the California weather is the new normal. That would seem to be the story worth telling.
Scientists are doing their part to end the mystery; attribution science, which helps link local weather events to broader shifts, is gaining in sophistication and understanding. Help is also coming from local TV weathercasters who have emerged as unexpected heroes in efforts to more effectively tell the climate story. TV meteorologists are often the most trusted media figures in their markets, and the closest thing to a scientist many viewers see. The fact that they spend all day staring at the weather gives them unusual credibility in calling out changes on the ground.
[…]
Columbia Journalism Review
OK… The Columbia Journalism Review calls for an end to “both-sidesing the climate story” because this was obviously due to climate change:
It is maddening that, this far into the climate crisis, news outlets continue to dither as to whether a single weather event is related to the now-undeniable, violent changes in Earth’s weather. Did the warming of the planet produce the water that pulled a five-year-old boy from his mother’s arms as he was on his way to school in San Luis Obispo County on Monday? It no doubt had a role.
Columbia Journalism Review
Maybe the Columbia Journalism Review should have consulted the Columbia Climate School. They published this the day before CJR’s pathetic appeal to emotion…
CLIMATE, NATURAL DISASTERS
Flooding in California: What Went Wrong, and What Comes Next
BY SARAH FECHT | JANUARY 12, 2023
Battered by storm after storm, California is facing intense flooding, with at least 19 lives lost so far and nearly 100,000 people evacuated from their homes. And there’s no sign that the storms will be letting up soon.
Below, experts from across the Columbia Climate School help to explain this devastating weather and what it means in the broader conversation of climate change and disaster response.
Unusual, but not unheard of
“The floods are due to recurrent waves of atmospheric rivers that typically lead to very high rainfall. These are not unusual for California,” said Upmanu Lall, an engineering professor and director of the Columbia Water Center. Atmospheric rivers are air currents that carry large amounts of water vapor through the sky.
Modeling by the U.S. Geological Survey predicted a devastating scenario like we’re seeing now, Lall said. The projections were based on the storms that caused disastrous floods in California in 1861-62.
“There is sedimentary evidence from a UC Santa Barbara study that such a phenomenon recurs in California about every 250 years,” Lall added.
[…]
Climate change’s role
What role did climate change play in this seemingly endless parade of storms marching across California?
“Extreme precipitation is getting more frequent with warmer climate in many regions globally,” said Kornhuber. “A recent study suggests that climate change is increasing the frequency and magnitude of such storm sequences that impact California.”
However, he said, with atmospheric rivers in general, “it’s a bit difficult to say to what degree climate change is altering their frequency,” in part because it’s not clear how atmospheric circulation will change as the climate continues to warm.
[…]
Columbia Climate School
The fairly well-balanced Columbia Climate School article cites many factors:
- The “recurrent waves of atmospheric rivers” that caused this flood “are not unusual for California”
- “Sedimentary evidence from a UC Santa Barbara study that such a phenomenon recurs in California about every 250 years”
- “El Niño and La Niña effects”
- Failure to heed warnings like these: Starting in December 2022, “US government agencies started issuing forecasts that indicated the imminent possibility of something like this happening in the immediate term”
- “Communication breakdown”
- The drought made flooding more likely
- Regarding climate change…
“Extreme precipitation is getting more frequent with warmer climate in many regions globally,” said Kornhuber. “A recent study suggests that climate change is increasing the frequency and magnitude of such storm sequences that impact California.”
However, he said, with atmospheric rivers in general, “it’s a bit difficult to say to what degree climate change is altering their frequency,” in part because it’s not clear how atmospheric circulation will change as the climate continues to warm.
Columbia Climate School
While it’s possible that climate change played some role in this flooding event, Du et al., 2018 found that the the average frequency of these sorts of floods is 236 years, ranging from 144 to 372 years.
Modeling by the U.S. Geological Survey predicted a devastating scenario like we’re seeing now, Lall said. The projections were based on the storms that caused disastrous floods in California in 1861-62.
Columbia Climate School
- 2023-1861 = 162 years
This flood did not deviate from the historical frequency of the past 9,000 years.
It seems to me that “both-sidesing the climate story” doesn’t have enough sides.
Here’s a plot of annual precipitation in California since 1895:
The most anomalous features are the heavy precipitation in 1984 and the 2011-2014 mega-mega-drought, which wasn’t caused by climate change.
It is tragic when lives are lost due to flooding and other weather-related disasters. It would be even more tragic if the death toll from flooding in these United States was increasing. However, it is not increasing; it is decreasing.
The declining death toll is even more obvious on a per capita basis.
What about the rest of the world?
The real other side of “the climate story”
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that Earth is warming, that man-made causes are to blame…
Columbia Journalism Review
The folks are Columbia Journalism Review think that the media should only cover one side of “the climate story.” That side asserts the “man-made causes” of climate change are greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel consumption and that this has lead to a climate crisis that must be solved quickly and at any cost. This illogical premise would lead to the conclusion that the only way to prevent children of the future from being swept from their mothers’ arms by flood waters, would be to get rid of fossil fuels.
This entirely ignores the massive benefits that modern civilization has derived from fossil fuels.
Energy Consumption: Bjorn Lomborg, LinkedIn
From 1800 to 1900, per capita energy consumption, primarily from biomass, remained relatively flat; as did the average life expectancy. From 1900 to 1978, per capita energy consumption roughly tripled with the rapid growth in fossil fuel production (coal, oil & gas). This was accompanied by a doubling of average life expectancy. While I can’t say that fossil fuels caused the increase in life expectancy, I can unequivocally state that everything that enabled the increase in life expectancy wouldn’t have existed or happened without fossil fuels, particularly petroleum.
The logical side of “the climate story” is that greenhouse gas emissions have probably contributed to warming over the past 50 years.
Right: Science News March 1, 1975
The warming has clearly been beneficial.
The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.
[…]
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.
[…]
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
Newsweek, April 28, 1975 Full text.
—PETER GWYNNE with bureau reports
If not for the warming over the past 50 years, it would still be just about this cold:
The logical side of “the climate story” would:
- recognize the massive benefits they have derived from fossil fuels
- continue to reap the benefits of fossil fuels
- promote economically viable efforts to reduce all emissions
- place the policy focus on adapting to changes in weather patterns
- recognize that weather-related disasters cannot be prevented, but they can be prepared for
The Columbia Journalism Review side of “the climate story” would:
- hype every weather-related disaster as proof of the mythical climate crisis
- ignore and/or censor the logical side
- remain blissfully (or bitterly) ignorant of the realities of energy economics
- continue to reap the benefits of fossil fuels, because they don’t have the slightest fracking clue about How the World Really Works
References
Du, Xiaojing, Ingrid Hendy, Arndt Schimmelmann. A 9000-year flood history for Southern California: A revised stratigraphy of varved sediments in Santa Barbara Basin. Marine Geology. Volume 397. 2018. Pages 29-42. ISSN 0025-3227 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.margeo.2017.11.014.
Terando, A., Reidmiller, D., Hostetler, S.W., Littell, J.S., Beard, T.D., Jr., Weiskopf, S.R., Belnap, J., and Plumlee, G.S., 2020, Using information from global climate models to inform policymaking—The role of the U.S. Geological Survey: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2020–1058, 25 p.,
https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20201058.
Attribution science = circular argument
“Attribution science” = Guessing
It’s all CO2 alarmists have: Guesses.
Confirmation bias on steroids!
Attribution Science:
Bad weather = Climate Change caused by humans.
Good weather = weather.
The easiest field in all of “science”. No actual education required.
It’s the latest way of…
rolling the bones.
Both sides?
“Why do they think ‘the climate story’ only has two sides?” My reading of it is (in the UK at least) there is the right side [of history etc] and denialism; a willful refusal to accept the awful crimes of humanity against a defenceless planet. Platforming an alternative view to the official narrative has been given the name of False Balance.
“The BBC has accepted it gets coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/07/bbc-we-get-climate-change-coverage-wrong-too-often
This was the point of Harrabin’s infamous NGO get together in 2006 to ‘settle the science’.
A case for intense climate anxiety therapy…
“It is maddening that, this far into the climate crisis, news outlets continue to dither as to whether a single weather event is related to the now-undeniable, violent changes in Earth’s weather. “
I suppose when you’re as unhinged as that it probably does seem real.
Today’s big scare? SLR and the Antarctic – again
““I have never seen such an extreme, ice-free situation here before,” said Prof Karsten Gohl, from the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/antarctic-sea-ice-hits-record-low-climate-crisis
How do you deprogram most of the Western youth?
The funny thing is that the day before the Columbia Journalism Review published their nonsense, the Columbia Climate School published their fairly well-balanced article… Are the folks at CJR blissfully or bitterly ignorant? 🤔
“Are the folks at CJR blissfully or bitterly ignorant? “
Are there differing factions?
“Columbia Journalism Review
Covering Climate Now
Three years ago, we started Covering Climate Now in hopes of closing the gap that existed between the enormity of the climate crisis and the efforts of journalism to cover it. We are, finally, starting to see progress. “
https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/
They’re just more of the same, it seems to me.
The folks at CJR are willfully and stubbornly ignorant.
It is apparently extremely difficult to become “willfully and stubbornly ignorant” without years and years of college! I’d call it a college ‘education,’ but that no longer seems to apply!
“Are the folks at CJR blissfully or bitterly ignorant?”
Yes
The Rashomon Effect suggests that that there are as many sides to a story as there are participants or players with a vested interest.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-rashomon-effect/
In the case of polarized positions, there are at least two sides to the story. If one is prevented from hearing both side, then they are only getting a half-truth.
Or only outright lies.
“now-undeniable, violent changes”
“I have never seen such an extreme”
People skilled in word use rule everything?
In France we often hear “unprecedented, since year 19xx“
The folks at Columbia Journalism Review think that the media should only cover one side of “the climate story.”
They fail to understand that journalism REQUIRES informing people of all ideas/opinions/perspectives out there in the real world on any issue. It’s not about supporting or dismissing any side. Not even mentioning some perpsectives removes it from the honorable profession of journalism. It doesn’t have to give every perspective equal coverage but it must indicate that such differences exist.
While we understand journalism once meant collecting news and writing about it in an impartial and objective way to inform the public, they understand it to mean information, often inaccurate information, which has a political imperative and is published or broadcast in order to influence people.
“once meant collecting news and writing about it in an impartial and objective way”
Did that ideal moment exist?
Did that ideal moment exist?
Not really, although many people think it did. Historically, most newspapers were biased, but they never made any effort to hide that bias (Savannah Republican, Chatfield Democrat). Some time late 20th C. (Not sure when, 70s-ish I think) they started acting like they were objective. Maybe it had something to do with the rise of TV news, which also put on the same mask?
Admittedly, they at least tried to appear less biased during that time, but I don’t think they ever really were. It’s just that without hearing any contradictory information, nobody knew. The rise of talk radio, and then the internet, changed that.
“They fail to understand that journalism REQUIRES informing people of all ideas/opinions/perspectives out there in the real world on any issue.”
These are not journalists, they are CO2 propagandists. That’s why they only tell one side of the story.
Journalism isn’t a profession, honorable or otherwise. It’s a craft, like laying bricks. It’s only in recent times that “schools of journalism” have come to exist. For many years journalists began their newspaper careers at the lowest level and advanced through the approval of their bosses, the editors. They were apprentices who became journeymen. Academia has stuck its nose into the field, as they have everywhere, becoming a gatekeeper by issuing diplomas in exchange for money. The multiplication of media has made stars of journalists. A goal of many fetching young ladies is the spot of the weather info babe on the local tv station, a position that didn’t exist not long ago.
It’s long been known that to be a journalist you need a low rat-like cunning and a certain facility with words.
I thought that was the requirement for being a lawyer or a politician who was formerly a lawyer.
along with an alcohol-proof liver and smoke-resistant lungs.
H. L. Mencken born September 12, 1880
It’s all about schooloism, the undocumented disease of people addicted to school (brilliantly illustrated by most abhorrent character of The Simpsons: Lisa Simpson).
In school, you don’t get different POV about many subjects believed to be factual and objective. You win by repeating the teachers’ views. School is basically a democratically sanctioned dictatorship.
School, with more and more time spent in front of zero responsibility teachers (*), is according to me the fundamental basis of most modern Western problems.
School is where you learn that it’s better to be wrong with the group than correct alone.
(*) Unlike, say, someone teaching skydiving.
“Extreme precipitation is getting more frequent with warmer climate in many regions globally,” said Kornhuber. “A recent study suggests that climate change is increasing the frequency and magnitude of such storm sequences that impact California.”
The linked recent study uses only “modeled data” and RCP8.5. Total fantasy.
“Extreme precipitation is getting more frequent with warmer climate “
Except when a warmer climate is causing more drought
Bob B.
Far from fantasy, they are totally correct. Warmer temperatures result in stormier weather, including droughts, heat waves, famines, and, observably, extreme flooding..
See: “Net-Zero Catastrophe Beginning?
https://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2022.16.1.1035
If that is true, then how did the dinosaurs rule the earth for 150 million years? How did many of them grow to such enormous sizes (much larger than any land mammal has ever been) with such climate catastrophes in abundance? What did those 100 ton sauropods eat if storms, droughts and famine destroyed most plants?
Well, if you take a look at the fossil record, you will see that dinosaurs were quite successful, despite the fact that the earth was much, much warmer than it is today. They even colonized Antarctica and lived there year round (where there is very little diversity of life there today). And after the asteroid hit and the earth recovered from its impact (and dinosaurs, all except birds, died out), the global temperature was still far higher than it is today. It was then that the primate ancestors of us humans were evolving. Why didn’t the horrible storms, droughts and famine destroy them then? Ice ages and interglacials only began much later in time, creating the world we know today.
Bottom line is that life on earth has not only existed but actually thrived under much warmer global temps, all without the above mentioned catastrophe list.
The problem is, time is also a place. Antarctica wasn’t where it is now when dinosaurs roamed over the land.
“Abstract:
Historically, warm eras such as the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Medieval Warm Period were all eras where there was very little volcanic activity, with the result that their atmospheres were normally free of dimming volcanic SO2 aerosol emissions, This allowed world-wide temperatures to rise 2 to 4 degrees above current temperatures, causing droughts, famines, and the demise of earlier cultures around the world.
Current Net-Zero activities banning the burning of fossil fuels and their SO2 aerosol emissions will have the unintended consequence of causing temperatures to rise to those of the earlier eras.
”
Sure, logic and data both allow it. The downvotes might be from tripping POV flags.
“The logical side of “the climate story” is that greenhouse gas emissions have probably contributed to warming over the past 50 years”
No they haven’t. Urban heat island yes, CO2, no. The problem is your view is one-sided like the warmists, with no acknowledgement of the natural Henry’s Law effect on Mauna Loa CO2:
From the article: “It is maddening that, this far into the climate crisis, news outlets continue to dither as to whether a single weather event is related to the now-undeniable, violent changes in Earth’s weather. . .
From the article: “Scientists are doing their part to end the mystery; attribution science, which helps link local weather events to broader shifts, is gaining in sophistication and understanding.”
Why do you need Attribution “science” if it is undeniable that CO2 is causing violent changes in Earth’s weather?
The truth is there are no violent “changes” in Earth’s weather, and CO2 alarmists created attribution science to make guesswork look like facts.
Extreme weather is happening less frequently today than in the past. That’s what the numbers say. Attribution “science” ignores these numbers because the numbers refute their claims that CO2 is making Earth’s weather more extreme.
What is necessary now is the establishment of correct attribution science, ie solar attributions.
The very bottom line is CO2 warmists make these false CO2 attributions because to their unknowing, unsuspecting naked eye, the actual CO2 changes happen so closely in time with extreme events they look like the cause of the events, when in reality CO2 changes lag the warming conditions that drive the extreme events, due to Henry’s Law, by 5+ months.
This can only happen when looking at one side of things – staying ignorantly blind of the other.
“correct attribution science”
Attribution science is a bad joke. No, it’s a useful propaganda tool that carries a certain auctoritas.
“The most prevalent event-attribution technique involves calculating the “fraction of attributable risk” (FAR) for a specific weather event. This statistical approach has been long used by epidemiologists for public health studies (for example, “What is the risk of cancer that is attributable to cigarette smoking?”). In combination with well-established climate models, FAR allows scientists to assess the probability of an event happening in two different scenarios: a world without our history of greenhouse gas emissions related to human activities, and our world as it is now.”
https://www.sciline.org/climate/attribution/how-attribution-science-works/
Epidemiologists got covid (just as they did with BSE/CJD) spectacularly wrong, whatever the weather…
“The model is designed to simulate households, schools, offices, people and their movements. But due to bugs, the code gives different results given identical inputs. “They routinely act as if this is unimportant,” lamented Denim in his critique. Even the code that was being evaluated by interested developers doesn’t actually paint the full picture. The code that was released by the Imperial College on GitHub is allegedly a heavily modified version, and this too fails to give accurate results. In other words, this code has a replicability issue.
This model spits out wildly different outcomes if you go play around with the formatting options.
This revised codebase is written in C++ and is split into multiple files, but the original program was a 15,000 line single file that was written over a decade, which the ex-Google engineer considers it to be an extremely poor practice.”
https://analyticsindiamag.com/the-most-devastating-software-mistake-of-all-time-why-is-the-imperial-model-under-criticism/
All modelling tends to fall back on some form of averaging because they don’t agree.
Solar attributions follow solar events, not “fraction of attributable risk” methods.
Climate modelers today don’t know what natural solar forcing is or how it works, since they misattribute solar changes as the lowest level of forcing after CO2, their highest forcing agent. They are upside-down and they don’t know it.
In the final analysis, nobody has a handle on how it works. There are interstellar influences, and a good many unknown unknowns.
The Vostok Ice Core studies (Petit, et al 1995) could not show that fine a resolution as the data graph above, but it did show that CO2 lagged temperatures by decades. Apparently, whether on an annual scale or a decadal scale, CO2 lags temperature.
Attribution science sounds a lot like creation science.
“Extreme weather is happening less frequently today than in the past.”
The quoted words are true in the way their writer was defining them, at the moment he wrote them.
At some point “in the past” …
Our side (especially the luke warmers) cede far too much territory to the warmists. All of their dire predictions fail miserably. They don’t care how many whales, eagles and other wildlife they slaughter with their fantasy projects. They were caught fabricating data and other criminal activity in the climategate emails. They’re now trying to trash the agricultural sectors, dairy farming, meat, fertilizers and every other thread in the fabric of society. They are demons.
And we give them time of day, well not me.
Ceding all of the territory that has any scientific basis at all, yields a very minor long-term problem, that can be economically managed over the long-term.
The failed predictions, perpetual “crying wolf!” and failed energy policies, will eventually lead voters defund the climatariat.
Ultimately, this will be decided at the ballot box… provided some semblance of election integrity can be retained and/or restored.
I admire your optimism… but doubt things are actually that civilized anymore.
The truth is powerful. It is so powerful that it can survive any attack thrown against it. That is why people with the truth want to debate. They know their idea is right, so they know it can withstand attacks against it.
The lie, however, is weak. It needs a strong fortress of censorship and propaganda to protect it. The only reason not to debate is because your idea cannot survive the weakest of attacks. Cognitive dissonance takes over. Anybody who tried to silence, block, or avoid a civil debate does not have the truth. Of course the scammers behind the CAGW don’t want a “both sides” debate, because their side would quickly crumble and the power and money would dry up!
The warmists do not have the truth on their side .The warmists now refuse to debate as their case is so weak.
Global Warming has turned into a religious belief .The high priests might believe what they tell us but the long game is communism .
I am sure that the treat of global warming is being used to change world wide opinion of electorates all over the world .
What are they promising us ?
” Elect us and we will protect you from the climate.
Surrender all your rights and you will live happily ever after .”
No government or even the UN can control the climate or for that matter stop cyclones and droughts .
Rising levels of C02 will have minimal effect on climate but it has become the great evil bogey man to blame for every typhoon ,cyclone or hurricane .
These tropical storms have been happening since before man first came out of their caves as they are a very necessary feature for transporting excess heat from the tropics to the poles.
I don’t know if this is well-balanced or just talking about apples and oranges in the same breath.
“The fairly well-balanced Columbia Climate School article cites many factors:
I don’t know how they could have been more balanced.
The deception of the media makes me angry because it will end up enriching a few and hurting hundreds of millions of the poorest.
Five years ago National Geographic predicted that Cape Town (with winter rain like California) was running out of water and this would be the beginning of recurring droughts. Well, as this summer ends and the Cape approaches their rain season the dams are 57.4% full and over the past five winters have had a surprising amount of rainfall – i.e. for the alarmists.
These same alarmists have been predicting that much of Southern Africa is going to get hotter and drier. Well the Eastern half of the country, where most rain falls has had plenty of rain, again, and the largest dams are overflowing. The governments between 1920 and 1970 had foresight and built the biggest dams and piped water from surplus areas to the drier areas. The present government has done an insignificant amount of work over the past nearly 30 years despite population increase. Now most of the excess water simply flows into the sea. Government corruption, mismanagement, fraud and theft is the real problem not the weather conditions alternating between floods and droughts.
What should have been a blossoming first world situation in Southern Africa is very much a third world situation. California is going down the same path. It is long overdue that citizens replace their political leaders, get rid of their hordes of worthless advisors and employ sensible engineers.
Two days later this report:
Heavy rains have caused many rivers and dams to overflow. Water levels in the Vaal and Orange River system have risen rapidly requiring more of the Vaal Dam’s sluice gates (16 already) to be opened.
>> The fairly well-balanced Columbia Climate School article
omits that
“The IPCC’s attribution methodology is fundamentally flawed”https://judithcurry.com/2021/08/18/the-ipccs-attribution-methodology-is-fundamentally-flawed/
There are no two sides for your example as both of your cited articles are wrong!
And unkike their expressed opinions this is a mathematical fact, good luck arguing against it!
but not to worry – if we just remove a tiny, miniscule, barely measurable amount of CO2 from the atmosphere we will have perfect weather forever – right
In other words: “What is correct weather?”
“What is correct weather?”
I’ve been asking that for years. Never got an answer.
Another great post, David!
I particularly like the super-imposition of life expectancy on per capita energy consumption! I’m going to start calling for those that wish to return our society to pre-Industrial Revolution levels of food and energy production having to adhere to the appropriate life expectancy! This should quickly get rid of all the politicians and professors that are driving the mass delusion of CAGW, and scaring little children half to death. It would mean that St. Greta only has about ten more years, and that AOC has already reached her ‘sell-by’ date! Yahoooo!!
“the now-undeniable, violent changes in Earth’s weather.”
As changes in Earth’s weather were much more violent in 1862 when California Governor had to travel to his inauguration in a boat, authors undeniably did not do any homework.
Is “Attribution Science” anything more than “We will keep looking for evidence until our explanation is proven correct”?
Isn’t that “research bias”?
The approximate 250-year period between major flooding events is the same period as the de Vries cycles of Grand Solar Minimums. There’s been a fair amount of discussion about a new GSM developing if the maximum amplitude of solar cycle 25 is similarly low as it was for cycle 24.
, Scientific American clearly conveyed that the California weather is the new normal. That would seem to be the story worth telling.
Scientific American isn’t. They gave up all connection with science years ago, by locking themselves into the hyper-progressive viewpoint: human activity is THE cause global warming: and refusing to allow the questioning of it which the scientific method requires.
Meanwhile, we had a storm in Santa Cruz in 1955 which outdid the recent one in January. It was the OLD normal, which has been going on for centuries in CA – droughts (up to 40 years long by tree rings), and now and then the Pineapple Express.
We’re getting the same sort of nonsense here in NZ after cyclone Gabrielle swept through and left behind all sorts of carnage.
Some broadcasters are asking if this is the ‘new normal’, seemingly implying that cyclones like that one will strike all the time. Others tell us there is ‘no denying’ that the climate has changed, and the cyclone just adds to the pile of evidence that it has.
Our Green party co-leader, James Shaw, suggests that the cyclone is the result of our inaction around addressing the climate crisis. I suppose he thinks that if we had culled our dairy herd like he’d asked for this wouldn’t have happened.
Interestingly, ‘climate change’ also caused (according to politicians at least) a really nice summer a couple of years back where it didn’t rain at all for a few months. Nice weather also adds to the evidence of ‘climate change’ in the very same regions.
Logic and data do not matter to these people – I don’t know how you’d convince them that ‘climate change’ didn’t cause these weather events.
Our government produced some predictions a few years back about how they think the climate will change over the next century – for Auckland they think rainfall might increase or decrease (they’re not sure which) by a few percent. I guess that makes our government climate deniers.
“This entirely ignores the massive benefits that modern civilization has derived from fossil fuels.”
This also entirely ignores the fact that there’s no evidence whatever that our CO₂ emissions have done anything to the climate.
Except whatever climatic consequences follow from greening up the entire planet.
In further fact, there’s no evidence whatever that CO₂ itself does anything to global air temperature.
Scientific American has as much to do with science these days as postmodern physics.
Like inventing “dark matter” to bandage a theory.
History means nothing when today is “Special”. It’s circular reasoning: CO2 increases these atmospheric rivers, the proof of CO2 climate change is these atmosphere rivers.
The Columbia Journalism Review is responsible, along with the Guardian newspaper in the UK, for the climate journalism cabal, Covering Climate Now, which is an all-in climate crisis propaganda effort which has recruited hundreds of news outlets around the world to participate in its huge propaganda campaign 0n behalf of climate crisis and Net Zero.
Here’s Covering Climate Now’s list of “Partners”.
https://coveringclimatenow.org/partners/partner-list/
Quite a range.
From Al Jazeera to The Weather Channel to ChildPress International
David,
Fixed.
Why is it so hard for people to understand that the world would be a better place for all living things if CO2 doubled?
It is always interesting to ask climate fanatics to explain how CO2 going from 1/2500 of total atmospheric gas molecules to 2/2500 can change the earth’s climate. The standard answer is that the extra CO2 traps more heat! The obvious next question is how do you trap heat? This is where the conversation usually falls apart as trapping heat in a free convective atmosphere makes no sense.
The graphic showing the earth’s temperature history and the natural forcing is a joke. The temperature data is “adjusted”. The temperature history shown has little relation to actual observed temperatures. 1921 was an extremely hot year around the world. This is well documented. Any graph that shows 1921 cooler than the 70s is just fraud. There really isn’t any other way to put it.
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New Zealand was struck by tropical Cyclone Gabrielle this week.
High winds with severe flooding and land slides .
It has severely impacted the fruit bowl of Hawkes Bay with thousands of acres under water .
Now that the water is receding the orchards and gardens are covered forestry trash and silt.
Thousands of homes affected with major damage to roads and railways .
Unfortunately for New Zealand these cyclones build up usually in the Coral sea and track south east making landfall in Northland then track down the east coast.
The last cyclone of this intensity was Bola which struck the same areas in 1988 causing major damage.
The damage is well into billions of dollars with the economic cost estimated as much as he Christchurch earthquakes.
The most annoying thing that the News media does is publish cartoons of our Parliament Building ( the beehive ) six or seven stories with the only the top story above the waves .
The news media are all blaming our use of fossil fuels but without fuel thousands of people would have starved as food has had to be airlifted in to most of the east coast .
I was told back in November that the Tongan volcanic eruption threw millions of tonnes of sea water into the atmosphere and that it could cause intense tropical cyclones in our summer.
Maybe ,it is only a coincidence.
Vaclav Smil’s “How the World Really Works” is must-reading for anybody who wants to understand where we are and how we got here as a society and our technological achievements. Buy copies for your family and friends; it may just reduce the number of ignorant, off-base comments you keep hearing.
Are you sure? Author Smil supports carbon credit trading.
“Smil noted in 2018 that coal, oil, and natural gas still supply 90% of the world’s primary energy. Despite decades of growth in newer renewable energy technologies, the worldwide proportion of energy supplied by fossil fuels had increased since 2000.[4] He emphasizes that “the greatest long-term challenge in the industrial sector will be to displace fossil carbon used in the production of primary iron, cement, ammonia and plastics” which account for 15% of the total fossil fuel consumption globally.[7] Smil favours reducing demand for fossil fuels through energy conservation, and calls for having the price of energy reflect its real costs including greenhouse gas emissions.[8]“
Do you recall what is said about horses and water?
Same as:
So here we are… where is Amber Heard now? (France Televisions is defending her in the show called “la fabrique du mensonge” = the lie factory)
Didn’t work so well, did it?
Journalists behaving badly. Pope needs to be held accountable. He flat out says that he and the people he listens to have won, there is no point to allowing losers a say, end of story. The Columbia Journalism Review and Pope need to be called out. Someone from our side needs to approach them and tell them they are wrong and we can prove they are wrong. We want a retraction on page one or a public debate. Talk to them through their competitors if need be. These pompous hounds need to be stopped.
If the Columbia J School knows more about Climate science than the Columbia Climate School, does the Columbia Climate School know more about journalism than the J school? Who should we believe, journalists or declared scientists? Is this entire situation conceivable in a rational world?
The Columbia Climate School’s article was certainly the better example of journalism!
if human lives were measured in the thousands of years, then we wouldn’t be having this disagreement over climate change because we would be experts in judging the natural climate cycles that the human hating climate change activists are so fond of manipulating for their own nefarious purposes.
mere speculation
I started my professional career at Norton AFB in San Bernardino, CA in 1980. In the mid- to late-1980s, we had some monsoon-like weather in what was otherwise a desert. I recall returning from a business trip on a flight landing at Ontario Airport (CA). The pilot had managed to get us on the ground and to the gate just before a torrential downpour began. This was at the old Ontario Airport, which didn’t have jetways. They would roll stairs up to the plane, and passengers would have to walk across the tarmac to the gate. My boss and I took one look out of the open door, and said to each other “I guess we run for it.” But the instant I stepped outside, my clothes were saturated to the skin. And there was no running across the tarmac, because the water was already 3 inches deep. we just accepted our fate, and walked.
During the same storm, one of our secretaries was driving home when the intersection she was in was suddenly flooded up above the level of the hood of her car. The engine died, of course, but the car was a stick-shift. She had the presence of mind to put it in gear, and turn the ignition key to use the starter motor to get her out of the flood zone. She likely wouldn’t have survived the raging river that street became.
The one significant change in Inland Empire weather during that decade was the advent of the thunderstorm. Old timers in my department at TRW had lived in the area for decades, and could remember hearing only one thunderclap in that whole time. But for a few years, thunder became much more frequent. Then it stopped.
Go figure.
In the mid- to late-1980s, we had some monsoon-like weather in what was otherwise a desert.
I remember that. I was in High School at the time (Arlington if you know it). The school shut down and we were confined to class for some time due to the danger of falling tiles – they had the U-shaped mission style tiles on near-vertical fascias at the edges of the roof. That was fun when the power went out and we only had a small window in the door for light. Fortunately for me, I was in chemistry lab at the time!
You probably remember some of the 120F heat waves around then too.
Yeah, SoCal has had its share of crazy weather.