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- Richard Alley's Escalator
- Climate Change Consequences - Often Unexpected
- New research from last week 19/2012
- CRUTEM4: A detailed look
- 2012 SkS Weekly Digest #19
- Analysis of Speed of Greenland Glaciers Gives New Insight for Rising Sea Level
- Arctic Winter Analysis
- Two Centuries of Climate Science: part three - Manabe to the present day, 1966-2012
- Tom Harris' Carleton University Climate Misinformation Class
- Turbines in Texas mix up nighttime heat
- 101 responses to Ian Plimer's climate questions
- Lindzen's Clouded Vision, Part 2: Risk
- New research from last week 18/2012
- Lindzen's Clouded Vision, Part 1: Science
- 2012 SkS Weekly Digest #18
- West Antarctic Ice Shelves Tearing Apart at the Seams
- Report Warns of Rapid Decline in U.S. Earth Observation Capabilities
- rbutr Puts Climate Information In Front of Those Who Need It Most
- HadSST3: A detailed look
- Why Are We Sure We're Right? #2
- Lessons from Past Predictions: Hansen 1981
- Two Centuries of Climate Science: part two - Hulburt to Keeling, 1931- 1965
- New research from last week 17/2012
- John Nielsen-Gammon Comments on Continued Global Warming
- 2012 SkS Weekly Digest #17
- Richard Alley on Today's CO2 Levels
- Richard Alley - We Can Afford Clean Energy
- Alberta’s bitumen sands: “negligible” climate effects, or the “biggest carbon bomb on the planet”?
- Lessons from Past Predictions: Vinnikov on Arctic Sea Ice
- ABC documentary demonstrates the how and why of climate denial
Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn't what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that refutes global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?
Richard Alley's Escalator
Posted on 17 May 2012 by dana1981
In the latest video over at Climate Crocks, Richard Alley debunks the myth that global warming stopped in [insert year] with some excellent anecdotes.
Alley's presentation is very similar to our own very popular Escalator:
Climate Change Consequences - Often Unexpected
Posted on 16 May 2012 by dana1981
An increasingly common fallback position once climate change "skeptics" accept that the planet is warming and humans are the dominant cause is the myth that climate change won't be bad. In fact, this particular myth comes in at #3 on our list of most used climate myths. It's an ideal fallback position because it allows those who reject the body of scientific evidence to believe that if they are wrong on the science, it's okay, because the consequences won't be dire anyway.
One of my colleagues, Molly Henderson recently completed a Masters Degree program class on scientific research which focused on climate change, which she aced (way to go, Molly!). For her final research paper, she examined the consequences of climate change on the prevalence of water-borne diseases in the US Great Lakes region.
This is obviously a very focused topic on a specific region and predicted consequence of climate change, but I think it also provides a perfect example as to why this notion that the effects of climate change will somehow be benign or good is fundamentally flawed. As a general rule, climate change is not a good thing, because all species are adapted to the current climate in the region in which they reside. There is a certain amount of climate change to which species can adapt and survive, but adaptation can be a difficult and ugly process.
As Molly's paper makes clear, while humans are a very adaptable species, at the same time we've built a lot of infrastructure whose specifications are based on the current climate. We have large agricultural farms which depend on a relatively constant climate in order to successfully grow crops, for example. As Molly's paper shows, there are some other climate change consequences on our infrastructure which we might not even normally think about.
New research from last week 19/2012
Posted on 15 May 2012 by Ari Jokimäki
Wouldn't it be nice to see something like following headlines in popular news media:
"Growth change of oak and beech are related to climate time series and N deposition trends!"
"Atmospheric lifetime of methane only 9.1 ± 0.9 years!"
"WAIS Divide was colder than the last 1000-year average from 1300 to 1800 C.E.!"
"Concentrations of rBC in the ice cores displayed significant variability at annual to decadal time scales!"
I bet papers with these in their frontpage would be sold out in minutes.
CRUTEM4: A detailed look
Posted on 15 May 2012 by Kevin C
CRUTEM is a version of the surface temperature record based on weather station data spanning the last one and a half centuries. It is produced by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and provides the land component of the widely quoted HadCRUT global temperature record. Version 3 of this dataset (CRUTEM3) was the current version from 2006-2012, however in the past few months a new version, CRUTEM4, has been released.
Why produce a new version? Studies from the ECMWF and GISS identified a significant bias in the CRUTEM3 record: The dataset has been under-reporting recent temperatures, owing to poor sampling of high Northern latitudes which have displayed the fastest warming over the last decade. The coverage issue has been examined in previous articles on HadCRUT3 and GISTEMP.
CRUTEM4 (Jones et al, 2012) takes the existing CRUTEM3 dataset and adds a significant number of new records. 344 stations were added in the Russian federation, 223 in other former USSR states, 125 in the Arctic and 7 in Greenland. A number of other records were updated. 312 records which were adjusted by CRU in the 1980s for inhomogeneity were either replaced with other records or had their adjustments reassessed. The total number of temperature series in the dataset is now ~5500, although only about 3000 can be updated on a monthly basis.
2012 SkS Weekly Digest #19
Posted on 14 May 2012 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights
The first article out of the chute, Dana's Lindzen's Clouded Vision, Part 1: Science created the biggest buzz of comments for the week. MarkR's Turbines in Texas mix up nighttime heat stirred-up the second highest number of comments. Coming in third was Dana's Tom Harris' Carleton University Climate Misinformation Class. Tom Harris himself actually dropped a couple of comments on the thread.
Toon of the Week
Analysis of Speed of Greenland Glaciers Gives New Insight for Rising Sea Level
Posted on 14 May 2012 by John Hartz
This is a reprint of a news release posted by the National Science Foundation on May 4, 2012.
Researchers determine that although glaciers continue to increase in velocity, the rate at which they can dump ice into the ocean is limited.
This is a re-post from the Arctic Sea Ice blog. Right, with that out of the way we can now look at various aspects of the 2011/2012 freezing season, and compare them to previous years, to be precise the previous freezing season of 2010/2011, and the freezing seasons leading up to and following that other record year: 2006/2007 and 2007/2008. Simply put: I'll be comparing 2007, 2008, 2011 and 2012 before their respective start of the melting season. I'll try not to use too many words, but I'll be using a lot of images. A bigger version of these images can be found by clicking on them in the original blog post. I'll start with the AARI ice age maps. These images are for the end of April, and they look upside down, because it's from the perspective of the Russians who produced them: This year, at the end of April, the Arctic seems to hold less of the brown 'old ice' than last year and 2007 (older version), and a tad more than 2008, that had relatively little multi-year ice (MYI) after the 2007 melting season/massacre. Another source that was already mentioned in the A first clue blog post, were these images based on data compiled by NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso from NASA's Nimbus-7 satellite and the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio). The images show the amount of MYI at its maximum, I presume: The fact that carbon dioxide is a 'greenhouse gas' - a gas that prevents a certain amount of heat radiation escaping back to space and thus maintains a generally warm climate on Earth, goes back to an idea that was first conceived, though not specifically with respect to CO2, nearly 200 years ago. The three-part tale of how this important physical property, its role in the geological past and understanding how it may affect our future, covers about two centuries of enquiry, discovery, innovation and problem-solving. This post is Part Three of this series, which also includes Part One and Part Two. graphic: jg A few months ago, the Canadian Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (CASS) issued a report regarding a slew of climate misinformation being taught at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada by Tom Harris. Somehow Harris, who is an engineer and communications specialist with zero climate research experience, and is the Executive Director of the Heartland Institute-funded International Climate Science Coalition, was put in the position to teach a class on climate and Earth science at Carleton University. More recently, Harris has taken to denouncing what he terms "climatism," which appears to be a disparaging synonym for "climate science." How an anti-climate science engineer was made lecturer of a climate science class at Carleton University is something of a mystery, and a poor decision by the university. The CASS report followed the growing trend of climate misinformation debunkings using the Skeptical Science database. In this post we will examine just a few of the myths identified by CASS as regrettably being used by Harris to misinform Carleton University students. Satellite measurements of temperatures near wind farms in Texas from 2003-2011 have suggested that wind turbines have mixed up the nighttime atmosphere, bringing warmer air down to the ground (Zhou et al, 2012). When looking at the physics it turns out that this suggests the chance of a (very, very small) global cooling effect. The satellites measure that downwind from wind farms the surface is warming more than other places nearby, but only at night. In the windier Texan summer the night warming has been 0.73°C per decade, but the calmer winter months have only gone up at 0.46°C per decade. The authors blame wind farms because the warming happened where turbines were built, as shown in Figure 1 below. The patterns also match expectations from physics: the effect is stronger when it's windier, downwind from turbines and at night. Figure 1 - map of changes in temperature across Texas in degrees Celsius. Crosses represent places where there are wind turbines, and the prevailing wind is from the south. The area average temperature has been subtracted from each point, so a blue area doesn't necessarily mean it cooled, just that it warmed less quickly than the turbine areas. The Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency have put together a handy and recommended resource: Accurate Answers to Professor Plimer's 101 Climate Change Science Questions (direct link to 1.4Mb PDF). This is in response to Plimer's book How To Get Expelled From School, a compilation of climate misinformation targeted at school children. One section of the book features 101 questions that he suggests children ask their teachers. The DCCEE summarise it well: "Many of the questions and answers in Professor Plimer’s book are misleading and are based on inaccurate or selective interpretation of the science. The answers and comments provided in this document are intended to provide clear and accurate answers to Professor Plimer’s questions. The answers are based on up-to-date peer reviewed science, and have been reviewed by a number of Australian climate scientists." In Part 1 of this post, we examined the fundamental flaws in the last hope for climate contrarians - that the planet won't warm very much in response to rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, because climate sensitivity is low, because clouds will act as a negative feedback and dampen future warming. While it would be convenient if this picture (best embodied by Richard Lindzen) were accurate, the evidence is stacked heavily against it. Nevertheless, as Part 1 concluded, there is a slim chance that Lindzen and company are correct, that climate sensitivity is low and global warming is not a major concern. There is also a high probability that they are wrong, that future global warming will be substantial, and that the consequences will be bad if we don't do something about it. How we choose to address these scenarios is a question of risk management, which happens to be a big part of my day job. Unfortunately, as with his scientific positions, Lindzen's risk management arguments are ill-conceived. In the Gillis New York Times article, Lindzen summarizes his approach to this climate risk management question: Last week scientists moved the borders of unknown little further in following subjects (among others): astronomical climate forcing, NAO-snow cover relation, global temperature analysis, daily mean temperature, hurricane activity, ocean acidification, mass extinction, AMO, insect ice toleration, lake ice, sea ice, climate system annual cycle, growing season, 18th century meteorology, bark beetle outbreaks, summer monsoon, and iceberg distribution. When it comes to global climate change, there are two critical and intertwined, but distinct issues: science, and policy. We generally focus on the science, because that is what dictates the appropriate policy response, or at least what our climate policy needs to accomplish. Justin Gillis had an excellent article published in The New York Times this past week, which addresses both science and policy. The science aspect of the article bears some resemblance to one of our posts from a year ago, Climate Sensitivity: The Skeptic Endgame. The fundamental premise of both articles involves the fact that, because of the sound basic science supporting the human-caused global warming theory, there only remains one fallback position for the remaining relatively credible climate contrarians. That fallback position involves climate sensitivity being lower than the body of scientific evidence indicates. Gillis' article focuses mainly on Richard Lindzen, who is one of the relatively more credible climate contrarians (although he has a long history of taking contrarian positions on nearly every climate-related issue, and being almost universally wrong on those issues). Lindzen embodies the low climate sensitivity fallback position perfectly, but as we will see here, the basis of Lindzen's argument, which itself is the basis of all remaining relatively credible climate contrarianism, is entirely false and undermined by three inescapable flaws. In the second installment of the Why Are We Sure We're Right? series, SkS authors Rob Honeycutt, Dana Nuccitelli, and Andy S. explain why they embrace what mainstream scientists are telling us about climate change. Needless to say, this post generated the highest number of comments during the week. Coming in second and third respectively were Dana's John Nielsen-Gammon Comments on Continued Global Warming and John Mason's Two Centuries of Climate Science: part two - Hulburt to Keeling, 1931- 1965. Source: Royalty Free Cartoons This is a reprint of a news release posted by the Jackson School of Geosciences of the Universtiy of Texas at Austin on March 26, 2012. A new study examining nearly 40 years of satellite imagery has revealed that the floating ice shelves of a critical portion of West Antarctica are steadily losing their grip on adjacent bay walls, potentially amplifying an already accelerating loss of ice to the sea. Location of Amundsen Sea Embayment The most extensive record yet of the evolution of the floating ice shelves in the eastern Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica shows that their margins, where they grip onto rocky bay walls or slower ice masses, are fracturing and retreating inland. As that grip continues to loosen, these already-thinning ice shelves will be even less able to hold back grounded ice upstream, according to glaciologists at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics (UTIG). This is a reprint of a news release posted by the US National Research Council on May 2, 2012. A new National Research Council report says that budget shortfalls, cost-estimate growth, launch failures, and changes in mission design and scope have leftU.S.earth observation systems in a more precarious position than they were five years ago. The report cautions that the nation's earth observing system is beginning a rapid decline in capability, as long-running missions end and key new missions are delayed, lost, or cancelled. This photo from NASA's Suomi NPP satellite shows the Eastern Hemisphere of Earth in "Blue Marble" view. The photo, released Feb. 2, 2012, is a companion to a NASA image showing the Western Hemisphere in the same stunning detail. This photo was taken on Jan. 23. CREDIT: NASA/NOAA Guest post by Shane Greenup. It is an unfortunate fact that most people will tend to only see information which confirms their current beliefs. Thanks to choosing friends with similar beliefs, choosing news programs which report things in a way which we find agreeable, and now thanks to the filter bubble concept, even Google and Facebook are selectively giving us more of what we have previously indicated we liked and clicked on. This is a real problem for those of us who are interested in genuinely finding the truth in this sea of opinions. How do we inform ourselves completely when everywhere we look (whether by design or by accident) we only see more self-confirming bias? Perhaps more importantly, how do we reach everyone else who is trapped in their own bubble of self-confirmation, and don’t even realise it? In an attempt to help with this problem we have recently launched an application which provides a surprisingly simple way out of this self-confirmation bubble for anyone who cares to look. It is called rbutr, and it simply allows people to connect one webpage which makes a claim, to another webpage which rebuts that claim. In doing so, any future visitors to the original claim webpage are then able to see that that page has been rebutted, and can easily click through to read the rebuttal. The Hadley centre of the UK Meteorological office has for a number of years maintained a dataset of sea surface temperatures (SSTs), HadSST2, which has formed a basis for estimating global surface temperatures. The HadSST2 dataset was used in the widely quoted HadCRUT3 temperature record, as well as providing the in-situ sea surface temperature component of HadISST since 2007. HadISST is used along with Reynold's OISST in NASA's GISTEMP record. The source data are versions of the International Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS), which includes historical records from many sources. The SST data are a little more complex than the weather station data with which most of use are familiar: Whereas temperature measurements at weather stations have been performed according to a standard protocol for over a century, measurement methods for SST data have changed significantly over the same period. Early measurements were taken using a canvas bucket trailed in the water, or later a better insulated wooden or rubber bucket. Later measurements were taken from engine room intakes, hull sensors, or buoys. The different methods have different biases, and thus significant corrections are required to produce a stable temperature series. The HadSST2 record included a 'bucket correction' for data collected before 1942, to correct for a known cool bias in the data. This year, the Hadley centre released a new version of this dataset, HadSST3, based on additional data and more importantly, some additional corrections. These are described in Kennedy et al, 2012. This is a second installment in this series exploring why we are sure we're right on climate change issues. In part 1 we heard from Skeptical Science authors Dikran Marsupial, Glenn Tamblyn and Ari Jokimäki. This time I'm going to take my own stab at the question, and post the thoughts of Dana Nuccitelli and Andy S. Rob Honeycutt...
Arctic Winter Analysis
Posted on 12 May 2012 by Neven
I'm starting this blog post off with a conclusion that was reached a while back already: sea ice on the Atlantic and Russian side of the Arctic
looks vulnerable, sea ice on the Pacific and North American side
should be thicker.Ice age
Two Centuries of Climate Science: part three - Manabe to the present day, 1966-2012
Posted on 11 May 2012 by John Mason
Tom Harris' Carleton University Climate Misinformation Class
Posted on 10 May 2012 by dana1981
Turbines in Texas mix up nighttime heat
Posted on 10 May 2012 by MarkR
101 responses to Ian Plimer's climate questions
Posted on 9 May 2012 by John Cook
Lindzen's Clouded Vision, Part 2: Risk
Posted on 9 May 2012 by dana1981
Irrational Optimism
New research from last week 18/2012
Posted on 8 May 2012 by Ari Jokimäki
Lindzen's Clouded Vision, Part 1: Science
Posted on 8 May 2012 by dana1981
2012 SkS Weekly Digest #18
Posted on 7 May 2012 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights
Toon of the Week
Another climate change solution
West Antarctic Ice Shelves Tearing Apart at the Seams
Posted on 7 May 2012 by John Hartz
Report Warns of Rapid Decline in U.S. Earth Observation Capabilities
Posted on 6 May 2012 by John Hartz
rbutr Puts Climate Information In Front of Those Who Need It Most
Posted on 6 May 2012 by Shane Greenup
HadSST3: A detailed look
Posted on 5 May 2012 by Kevin C
Why Are We Sure We're Right? #2
Posted on 4 May 2012 by Rob Honeycutt
THE ESCALATOR
(free to republish)
The Scientific Guide to
Global Warming Skepticism
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