Climate Change Mega Thread

[rustled]

Having grown cynical over the abuse of the term "settled science" and hearing everything on CBC's Quirks and Quarks automatically framed with because "climate change", I was delighted by the refreshing discussion on today's program. What is life? How do we define it? What does it mean to be alive? A couple of quotes:

You know, scientists have learned a lot about life, but it's still really, really hard to answer that basic question. In fact, I would argue it's actually kind of impossible.

So are viruses alive? You can get scientists into a really spirited debate over that one. I've had lots of fun pitting scientists against each other because that is not settled.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/apr-17- ... -1.5987704
Music to my ears! How wonderful to hear a scientist simply discussing the science without Bob Macdonald politicizing it, without either of them bowing to an agenda, without the incessant fear mongering, without the silly pretense that "consensus" can somehow mean a scientific theory is settled and all discussion should cease.

Perhaps science IS coming back to life. Resurrected from the CAGW coffin. "It's aliiiiive..."

[d0nb]

Just keeping tabs on how those awesome "science is settled" climate-change forecasts are working out.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

• By 2007 violent storms smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable. Cities like The Hague are abandoned. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento river area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.

• Between 2010 and 2020 Europe is hardest hit by climatic change with an average annual temperature drop of 6F. Climate in Britain becomes colder and drier as weather patterns begin to resemble Siberia. https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... heobserver

It makes one wonder what other ‘information’ contained in such ‘secret’ reports are influencing decision-makers around the world. It might help to explain why twits like Trudeau, Merkel, Johnson and Biden push ‘green’ agendas that are so obviously divorced from reality and common sense.

[Glacier]

Tracking Joe Biden's promise... https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/tr ... -president

[JLives]

Looks like two random charts posted with no context by not a climate scientist to me.

As the theory goes, rising CO2 causes rise in temperature. Science does not tell us how much warming we get from CO2. These charts are not random.

The two charts are standard James Hansen graphs. The Bottom graph (used by the IPCC) displays what Hansen thought would be mankind's CO2 emissions in a few scenarios. In 1988, no one knew how the world would choose to use fossil fuels so Hansen gave some fossil fuel use scenarios, A, B, C, D. The chart above is the predicted temperature from those scenarios. Are you saying James Hansen was not a climate scientist? Really ironic isn't it since he was wrong.

The predictions were made back in 1988 and scared the world. The graphs above are annotated by those who want to make the point that the father of CO2 warming was wrong in 1988.

In 2018, we had MORE CO2 emitted (11.5Gt) than James Hansen's "business as usual scenario A", but the resulting temperature overlaid with UAH is closer to "scenario C" or 1/3rd his expected temperature.

This chart made by Nick Stokes shows UAH out to 2016 although we know all temperatures after the 2016 large El Nino are much lower.

hansenuah.png

Scenario "A" is obviously wrong, and it is what started the global warming scare.

You're wasting your efforts. Two non climate scientists debating climate science is ludicrous. I don't do it. I leave it to the experts who do know what they are talking about and understand the full scope of what the factors are.

[rustled]

Food for thought:

The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science
Much of climate research is focused on implausible scenarios of the future, but implementing a course correction will be difficult

A 2015 literature review found almost 900 peer-reviewed studies published on breast cancer using a cell line derived from a breast cancer patient in Texas in 1976. But in 2007 it was confirmed that the cell line that had long been the focus of this research was actually not a breast cancer line, but was instead a skin cancer line. Whoops.

Even worse, from 2008 to 2014 — after the mistaken cell line was conclusively identified — the review identified 247 peer-reviewed articles putatively on breast cancer that were published using the misidentified skin cancer cell line. A cursory search of Google Scholar indicates that studies continue to be published in 2020 mistakenly using the skin cell line in breast cancer research.

The lesson from this experience is that science has momentum, and that momentum can be hard to change, even when obvious and significant flaws are identified. This is particularly the case when the flaws exist in databases that underlie research across an entire discipline.

In 2020, climate research finds itself in a similar situation to that of breast cancer research in 2007. Evidence indicates the scenarios of the future to 2100 that are at the focus of much of climate research have already diverged from the real world and thus offer a poor basis for projecting policy-relevant variables like economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions. A course-correction is needed.

SNIP

The challenges for climate research are significant. Consider that in contrast to the 900 articles that misused a skin cancer line as a breast cancer line, our literature review found almost 17,000 peer-reviewed articles that use the now-outdated highest emissions scenario. That particular scenario is also by far the most commonly cited in recent climate assessments of the IPCC and the U.S. National Climate Assessment. And every day new studies are published using outdated scenarios.

The elevated role of scenarios across climate research means that there is a huge momentum behind their continued use. A research reset would be a massive endeavor and would require essentially writing off the policy, economic or other real-world relevance of thousands of studies, and perhaps even their scientific utility. Though to be fair, there are reasons to use exploratory scenarios in modeling or theoretical studies, but such uses shouldn’t be confused with practical relevance — just as studies of skin cancer lines should not be confused with breast cancer lines.

Make no mistake. The momentum of outdated science is powerful. Recognizing that a considerable amount of climate science to be outdated is, in the words of the late Steve Rayer, “uncomfortable knowledge” — that knowledge which challenges widely-held preconceptions. According to Rayner, in such a context we should expect to see reactions to uncomfortable knowledge that include:

• denial (that scenarios are off track),
  .
• dismissal (the scenarios are off track, but it doesn’t matter),
  .
• diversion (the scenarios are off track, but saying so advances the agenda of those opposed to action) and,
  .
• displacement (the scenarios are off track but there are perhaps compensating errors elsewhere within scenario assumptions).

Such responses reinforce the momentum of outdated science and make it more difficult to implement a much needed course correction.

Responding to climate change is critically important. So too is upholding the integrity of the science which helps to inform those responses. Identification of a growing divergence between scenarios and the real-world should be seen as an opportunity — to improve both science and policy related to climate — but also to develop new ways for science to be more nimble in getting back on track when research is found to be outdated.

(That last bit of bold is mine.)

[JLives]

Don't forget to post your opinion blog link. ^^^

And here's yet another fact check for the deniers and scientifically illiterate.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/fac ... 336153002/

[BC Landlord]

And here's yet another fact check for the deniers and scientifically illiterate.

Where they quote Biden and AOC in the first paragraph, this is where I stop reading.

[rustled]

Oops, I see forgot to include the link to the piece I quoted from earlier:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/th ... f-outdated

Here's one of the pieces referenced:

Worst-case emissions projections are already off track
Under the worst-case scenarios laid out in the United Nations’ climate change projections, global temperatures could increase as much as 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (more than 4 degrees Celsius) by 2100, leading to as much as 3 feet (0.98 meters) in global sea level rise and an array of disastrous consequences for people and planet. But new research from CU Boulder finds that these high-emissions scenarios, used as baseline projections in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) global assessments, have not accurately reflected the slowing rate of growth in the global economy and we are unlikely to catch up to them anytime soon.

The new study, published late last week in Environmental Research Letters, is the most rigorous evaluation of how projected climate scenarios established by the IPCC have evolved since they were established in 2005.

“If we’re making policy based on anticipating future possibilities, then we should be using the most realistic scenarios possible,” said Matthew Burgess, lead author on the study and a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU Boulder. “We'll have better policies as a result.”

SNIP

Climate scenarios exist to tell us something about how the world’s evolving. But what happens if those scenarios don't reflect the world that we're in?

Roger Pielke Jr., co-author on the paper and professor of environmental studies, likens it to appropriately dressing for the weather outside. While it’s a useful exercise to know what you would wear in 80-degree weather, if it’s actually much more likely to be 60 degrees outside, you should actually plan for that.

“It’s reasonable to use extreme scenarios to explore what a future might look like under those conditions, because the future is uncertain. And climate modelers have really good reasons why they might want to use extreme scenarios in their work,” said Pielke Jr. “But policy-relevant research has a different set of expectations.”

The researchers recommend that these policy-relevant scenarios should be frequently recalibrated to reflect economic crashes, technological discoveries, or other real-time changes in society and Earth’s climate. Anticipating the future is difficult and updates are to be expected, according to Pielke Jr.

Their study does not mean that people can let their guard down when it comes to addressing climate change, they stress. No matter the scenario, the only way to get to net zero emissions as a society is to dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions from our energy sources.

“We're still affecting the climate and the challenge of reducing emissions is as hard as ever,” said Pielke Jr. “Just because it's not the worst-case scenario doesn't mean that the problem goes away.”
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/11/ ... eady-track

[Jlabute]

And here's yet another fact-check for the deniers and scientifically illiterate.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/fac ... 336153002/

Here is yet another erroneous and childish fact-checker. There is so much wrong with the Mr. fact-check-reporter article it's hard to know where to start. When you see such stuff it is easy to understand why fact-checkers are continually sued and how far afield their understanding is.

Climate skeptics don’t believe climate change is man-made

This is not true and it doesn't mean anything the way it is worded. Worse yet, the article keeps using this phrase. Thousands of climate scientists have a realistic view on climate change. "...climate change is man-made?" What a stupid statement. Is it either man-made or not man-made? It is a range of infinite possibilities. Some say mankind is partly responsible, or a lot. Human influence sits somewhere between 0% and 100% rather than being true or false. The majority of climate scientists are not CAGW believers although a few have come from NASA like James Hansen. With no change in CO2 the earth has swung between ice-ages and no ice-caps.

despite overwhelming scientific evidence to support the conclusion.

There is no such evidence. Even 99% of all climate models are wrong so it is apparent climate is not understood. The 'evidence' is what is observed which is very little warming that started even before the industrial revolution.

Some don’t acknowledge global warming is happening at all.

Not sure how this is possible. After-all we have temperature charts. The question is how much is due to additional CO2 or other gasses.

Wait a minute... didn't we save the ozone by banning CFCs? lol

chlorofluorocarbons also are contributing to the greenhouse effect.

Biden promises 50% reduction in US greenhouse emissions by 2030.

Good luck to Biden. Him and his team are too stupid to know they will fail.

Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade, this is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of a climate crisis

There are activist scientists who are closer to XR than being a real scientist. Very few scientists believe in a catastrophic outcome especially in the next 10 years. Even the IPCC doesn't believe it so already nothing in this article is credible. Not sure where this garbage comes from. As always, no proof.

Partly true. Michael Mann's work is controversial among ALL scientists which is skeptical scientists and bad scientists alike. Even Michael Mann's own team members shy away from it. It was endorsed by a panel of 12 people. Few scientists today believe it is credible. Michael Mann keeps his publicly funded work confidential. Considering the existence of all man-kind is at stake, you'd think he'd share his work. Nope.

The [hockey stick] graph has been controversial among climate skeptics but was endorsed in 2006 by the National Academy of Sciences.

So laughable. Natural forces can change climate? Really? Like they have for billions years through ice ages and periods hotter than today?? Warming has not accelerated and certainly has risen any different than previous millennia with low CO2 levels. What is more laughable IS the hockey stick with a flat planetary temperature for thousands of years. That is unrealistic and untrue.

While natural forces can contribute to global temperature changes, scientific data show warming has accelerated since the mid-20th century.

Not true. Majority of all warming is just the northern hemisphere.

As the planet has warmed

Weather patterns always change. Especially with solar minima we tend to get polar anomalies. The author is way to vague as usual.

weather patterns have changed

Some glaciers are melting. Some glaciers are growing. Greenland glacier is melting due to volcanic activity. Sea level is rising at the same rate it has for thousands of years. Hurricanes, droughts, fires are not getting worse and this is proven.

melting glaciers and ice sheets have raised sea levels and heat waves have become longer and more intense.

LOL. How much of it though? 1%, 2%, 10%, 100%?

In short, humans are causing climate change.

Immediately after a single NASA employee James Hansen said we are all doomed and his predictions shown to be wrong.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the United Nations in 1988

If you don't believe any of this, check the sources NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA, and NASA, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt and other associated climate-gate perps.

Again, far-left Facebook with no climate knowledge, paying the far-left USA TODAY with no climate knowledge for expected results. Wow.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook

http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warm ... r-manmade/

[d0nb]

What the ‘fact checker’ for the fact-light USA Today has to say on this subject is fatuous enough but at a minimum, Rick Rouan should be aware that anyone who hopes to be taken seriously should avoid using a term as absurd as “climate deniers.”

The claim that man-made climate change is a hoax is FALSE, based on our research.

Another nonsensical straw man bites the dust. Kudos to Facebook for funding such ground-breaking journalism.

It would be as silly to claim that human activities don’t change the climate as it is to assume that our simulations can (so far) accurately quantify that change.

Both government organizations and papers in scientific journals have concluded with a high degree of certainty that climate change is man-made.

Bully for them. The most we can state with certainty is that human activity is now a factor in our ever-changing climate. No one can state with scientific certainty that our current climate trend is caused primarily by CO2 or by any other product of human activity. Simply asking ‘what else could it be?’ is an admission of ignorance, not a persuasive argument. The fact is, we are far from understanding why the Earth’s climate fluctuates as dramatically as the geologic and ice-core records show that it does.

Rather than indulging in apocalyptic political histrionics, our ‘leaders’ need step back and see a larger picture that includes a realistic assessment of the environmental benefits of higher levels of atmospheric CO2 along with the massive self-inflicted economic and environmental damage they could incur by simply assuming that their CO2 reduction schemes will render net-positive results.

[rustled]

Mr. Bolt points out the dearth of science at the recent summit:

Mr Bolt said Biden's recent climate summit was a "disgraceful farce".

“I am just gobsmacked that Biden ... insulted the intelligence of 39 other world leaders — including our Prime Minister Scott Morrison — by making them listen to the ravings of a bizarre parade of alarmists, mystics, New Age tribal women and even a teenager".

Mr Bolt said with "no scientists around" at the summit, anyone "could claim any wild thing".

He said the "global warming scare" is now a "religion - with a touch of Marxism."

[d0nb]

Bolt is such an Australian. He says what he means and means what he says; nothing mealymouthed about him. It’s too bad that so many Canadians have lost the emotional maturity required to listen to strong opinions without being offended. No Sky News for us, please.

Biden’s summit was indeed a sorry spectacle, but like Joe's SOTU address, a majority of the talking heads of the corporate media and the smallish audience of other delusional Democrats who watched it probably thought that it was inspirational - almost divine. How sad.

[Jlabute]

The alarm has been sounded on possible fraud (non-reproduceable results and data tampering) in regards to fish studies and a slightly rising ocean acidification. We've all seen such fishy reports and such information has been uses by the IPCC. It is good we still have groups who try to replicate test. The JCU group stand by their results while accusations of “methodological or analytical weaknesses” might have led to irreproducible results. It goes without saying that oceans are heavily alkaline so they are not becoming 'more acidic', but slightly less alkaline.

"In 2009, Munday and Dixson began to publish evidence that ocean acidification—a knock-on effect of the rising carbon dioxide (CO2) level in Earth’s atmosphere—has a range of striking effects on fish behavior, such as making them bolder and steering them toward chemicals produced by their predators. As one journalist covering the research put it, “Ocean acidification can mess with a fish’s mind.” The findings, included in a 2014 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), could ultimately have “profound consequences for marine diversity” and fisheries, Munday and Dixson warned.

But their work has come under attack. In January 2020, a group of seven young scientists, led by fish physiologist Timothy Clark of Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, published a Nature paper reporting that in a massive, 3-year study, they didn’t see these dramatic effects of acidification on fish behavior at all."

...

"What few researchers know is that in August 2020, Clark and three others in the group took another, far bigger step: They asked three funders that together spent millions on Dixson’s and Munday’s work—the Australian Research Council (ARC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)—to investigate possible fraud in 22 papers."

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05 ... -sea-doubt

[rustled]

Interesting question:

“In my experience, whistleblowers, myself as well as others, are shamed for talking to the media before an investigation has concluded misconduct,” says Josefin Sundin of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, the last author on the Nature replication paper. “But why is that? If an investigation even takes place, it can drag on for a very long time. If you know that data have been fabricated, why is it considered the right thing to do to stay silent about it for months and even years?”

One wonders how much impact the "stay silent" expectation has impacted policy around climate science.

[nepal]

Even ‘alternative energy’, such as wind turbines, come with environmental degradation. Bird deaths/injuries are a mounting problem. Human population growth and it’s excessive demand of resources is the core of the environmental problem.