Global Warming General Thread

[Doug]

Baaad News: Global Warming Shrinks Sheep

Call it the case of the shrinking sheep. On the remote Scottish island of Hirta, sheep have been getting smaller, shrinking an average of 5% over the last 24 years. Don't blame evolution, though. Researchers say climate change is the real culprit.
The Hirta sheep belong to a breed known as Soay, after the remote Scottish island where they arose. One of the most primitive forms of domestic sheep, Soays first came to Hirta in 1932. Because Hirta is a remote island, its sheep have remained genetically isolated, and no other sheep have been brought in for breeding. That's made Hirta's Soays ideal subjects for scientific study.

In 2007, scientists first reported that the sheep were smaller than they had been in the past. This prompted biologist Arpat Ozgul of Imperial College London and colleagues to analyze body weight data going back 24 years. The researchers confirmed that the Soays had indeed been getting smaller. And, as they report online today in Science, the reason appears to be climate change.

In the past, Hirta's sheep gorged on grass during their first summer, the team notes, piling on the weight in order to make it through the island's typically harsh winters. But over the past quarter-century, Hirta has had unusually short and mild winters. As a result, Ozgul and colleagues propose, grass has become available for more months of the year, meaning the Soay sheep do not have to bulk up as much. In addition, Hirta's harsh winters used to kill small ewes born to young mothers. But now these small ewes survive--and because of their low birth weight, they never get as big as normal sheep. That drives down the average size of the entire population, the team reports. Further mathematical modeling allowed the researchers to propose that natural selection has played little--if any--role in the shrinkage of the Hirta sheep.

See here.

[kwlyon]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg&feature=sub

[Dardedar]

Scientific American
November 30, 2009

Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense

Evidence for human interference with Earth's climate continues to accumulate

By John Rennie

Article Here

[Doug]

DOUG writes:
Just saw this on ABC News:

Climate scientist Michael Mann says he has received hundreds of them -- threatening e-mails and phone calls calling him a criminal, a communist or worse.

"6 feet under, with the roots, is were you should be," one e-mail reads. "How know 1 one has been the livin p*ss out of you yet, i was hopin i would see the news that you commited suicide, Do it."

"I've been called just about everything in the book," Mann, who runs of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, told ABC News. "It's an attempt to chill the discourse, and I think that's what's most disconcerting."

Mann is not the only one. The FBI says it's seeing an uptick in threatening communications to climate scientists. Recently, a white supremacist website posted Mann's picture alongside several of his colleagues with the word "Jew" next to each image.

One climate scientist, who did not wish to be identified, told ABC News he's had a dead animal left on his doorstep, and now sometimes travels with bodyguards.

See here.

[Dardedar]

The latest issue of Skeptic magazine has an excellent issue responding to the deniers.

Here's an excerpt I found very interesting:

"At the 2008 Future in Review Conference, Harvard professor James McCarth, former co-chair of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), was asked how many of the world's top 1000 climate experts would disagree with the basic scientific consensus that the increase in green house gas concentrations over the last 50 years to levels not seen in 650,000 years is primarily anthropogenic and is the cause of an increase in global temperatures. He replied, "Five."

...Despite publicly bruited offers of jobs, publicity and lavish rewards from fossil fuel companies and neoconservative media, very few qualified experts in climate have stepped forward to object to the overall consensus on AGW, and those who have done so couch their doubts very specifically, so as to be almost useless to the Climate Denier community."
--Skeptic Magazine, vol. 15, No. 4, page 14 (latest issue)

And very good news, you don't have to buy the issue, I found the article online:

Distinguishing Climate Deniers From Skeptics

By David Brin, Ph.D.

[Dardedar]

Good article:

Is Climate Change Worth Tackling?

And:

France to Shut Half Its Coal-Fed Power Plants, Curb Energy Use
By Tara Patel

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- France will shut about half its coal- fired power stations by 2015 under a plan to lower energy consumption, cut carbon emissions and more than double the share of energy from renewable resources by 2020...

European nations are promoting cleaner-burning power plants and alternative energy sources to cut greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming. The U.K. said in April no new coal plants could be built without adopting carbon-capture technology. Germany’s RWE AG, the biggest emitter in Europe, said May 27 it won’t build new coal stations as they’re “no longer economically feasible,” while Vattenfall AB, the Nordic region’s largest utility, plans to convert its Danish coal plants to use biomass.

The French plants slated for closure will be replaced by gas-fired stations, according to ministry documents published today. The government won’t allow any new coal-fed generators to be built unless they are fitted with carbon capture and storage capability...

Bloomberg

[Doug]

'Climategate' Investigation VINDICATES Scientists, Finds Research Reliable

LONDON — An independent report into the leak of hundreds of e-mails from one of the world's leading climate research centers on Wednesday largely vindicated the scientists involved, saying they acted honestly and that their research was reliable.

But the panel of inquiry, led by former U.K. civil servant Muir Russell, did chide scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit for failing to share their data with critics.

"We find that their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt," Russell said. "But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness."

Russell's inquiry is the third major investigation into the theft and dissemination of more than 1,000 e-mails taken from a back-up server at the university.

They caused a sensation when they were published online in November: They captured researchers speaking in scathing terms about their critics, discussing ways to stonewall skeptics of man-made climate change, and talking about how to freeze opponents out of peer-reviewed journals.

The ensuing scandal energized skeptics and destabilized the U.N. climate change conference at Copenhagen. The research center's chief, Phil Jones, stepped down while Russell, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, was brought in to investigate.

Russell's carefully worded report said there was no evidence Jones had destroyed evidence that he knew critics were seeking under the Freedom of Information Act. But it did say he had pushed colleagues to delete e-mails that he thought might provide ammunition to skeptics.

It also criticized the university for being "unhelpful" in dealing with Freedom of Information Act requests – an issue Britain's data-protection watchdog has already flagged.

See here.

[Dardedar]

And so it continues...

NASA: First half of 2010 breaks the thermometer — despite “recent minimum of solar irradiance”
July 10, 2010

[Dardedar]

*Monckton

One of the most idiotic Global Warming deniers still making the rounds is this incredibly nutty and incredibly dishonest Monckton fellow.



Some how I got sucked into reading over 370 comments in the thread for this article on realclimate.org Monckton Makes it Up. Then I went to a site defending him and read several hundred more. Oy. On the site defending him some commentators kept asking for an actual example of Monckton getting something wrong. This is like asking for a boo boo in the Bible, or if Kent Hovind has ever gotten his science wrong. It's just mind boggling. So I did a little checking around and came up with this quick list. I may use this some time so I'll just put it here for now.

***
John Nielsen-Gammon (Texas State Climatologist) has checked [Monckton's] claims and concluded:

"Let's recap: (1) The graph lies by representing an envelope from a single scenario as "the" IPCC prediction. (2) The graph lies by asserting that an observed CO2 trend outside that envelope would require a downward adjustment in the IPCC's central temperature projection. (3) The graph lies by depicting the spread of IPCC projections for even this single scenario as zero, when the actual spread is 60 ppm. (4) The graph lies by creating an imaginary envelope of projections for this single scenario that does not correspond to the actual envelope of projections, thereby generating a supposed IPCC prediction of CO2 that increases much more rapidly than does even the IPCC projection for the most extreme emissions scenario. The only part of this graph that is correct is the observed CO2 concentration; the envelope labeled "IPCC" is completely and utterly bogus."

LINK

***
Over 100 Monckton errors detailed here:

http://altenergyaction.org/Monckton.html

About a dozen here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/05 ... nt-1619298

Dozens more here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/global_ ... /monckton/

Caught lying here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-d ... 92233.html

Dozens more here:

http://www.durangobill.com/GwdLiars/Gwd ... ckton.html

More info on Monckton’s lies, please see:

1) “Monckton lies again (and again, and again, and again, and again . . .)!”
http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2009/10 ... f-fiction/

2) “Christopher Monckton: Lies, damn lies or staggering incompetence”
http://www.desmogblog.com/christopher-m ... competence

3) “Monckton caught making things up. Yet again”
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/05 ... things.php

4) “Class Dissection: Lord Christopher Monckton lies exposed.”
http://www.climateshifts.org/?p=5338

5) “Debunking the myths behind the pontificating potty peer”
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/societ ... -nikc.html

6) “Lord Monckton’s Rap Sheet”
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/lord-mon ... rap-sheet/

7) “Monckton is a Fraud”
“On the evidence, it is clear that Monckton is a shameless humbug, a proven liar and a hypocrite, who intentionally misrepresents the facts of climate science in order to mislead his audience.”
http://hot-topic.co.nz/monckton-is-a-fraud/

***

DAR
The astonishing thing is to see people going on and on about what a great scientist and spokesperson this fellow is for their GW denier cause. This is young earth creationism (if not flat earth creationism) level of delusion. The republicans have brought this guy in to speak before congress twice.

D.

[Dardedar]

Quote:

Naming Climate Change Disasters After the Deniers

"The most recent report from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says, "Global warming is undeniable," and it's happening fast. NOAA's study, an in-depth analysis of ten key climate indicators, all point to marked and accelerating warming. This disturbing consistency should scare policy makers -- if they were listening. As Derek Arndt, head of NOAA's Climate Monitoring Branch clearly put it, "This is like going to the doctor and getting your respiratory test and circulatory test and your neurosystem test...It's testing all the parts, and they're all in agreement that the same thing's going on."

That "thing" is accelerating climate change.

Those few extreme policy makers and pundits who continue to deny the realities of climate change often point to "uncertainty" in the observations, models, and climate system itself that make perfect predictions impossible. Of course, climate scientists also talk about uncertainty all of the time -- it is a characteristic of the science, not an excuse for politicians to avoid taking action. What the deniers don't cop to, in a great example of selective one-sided argumentation, is that uncertainty cuts both ways. As Stephen Schneider, one of the world's greatest climate scientists and communicator regularly pointed out, while there is always a possibility that climate changes will fall on the less severe end of the scale, there is a comparable probability that climate changes will be far worse than we expect, with far more serious consequences to the planet.

And this lopsidedness works in another important way. If we act to slow climate change, and the impacts turn out to be less severe than we predict, all we've done is reduce our emissions of pollutants, cut our economic dependence on fossil fuels from countries that fund extremism and terror, and boosted our economy with new green technologies and jobs. But if we do nothing, and climate changes turn out to be more severe than we fear, we've made things far worse than they needed to be.

And that's what's happening.

There is growing evidence from the real world that climate changes are accelerating faster than we originally feared and that impacts -- already appearing -- will be more widespread and severe than expected. This makes the arguments against taking actions against climate change not just wrong, but dangerous. We cannot expect climate deniers to change their tune: they've made up their minds, despite all new evidence. As Epictetus said, "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."

The rest

***

[Doug]

'Sceptical environmentalist' and critic of climate scientists to declare global warming a chief concern facing world

The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.

See here.

[Dardedar]

[/b]"Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.
See here.

DAR
Well. This will be a most welcome eating of the crow by Mr. Lomborg. But I still don't trust the guy. He's a fast talking slippery fellow and I approach his "$100 billion annually" (for the whole planet) extremely skeptically. His last metamorphosis was to say GW is real but it doesn't make sense to do anything about since we will be so rich in the future we can deal with it then.

So I'll wait to see the footnotes. He is a master of spin and making something look like one thing, while he is really trying to sell another thing. He's the kind of economist rightwinger who would try to say we can pay for this with a tax cut for the rich. That's probably not his angle here, but in my following him for years, he's usually got an angle. In this case, it will undoubtedly be partly a new way to get attention and sell books (not a bad thing necessarily). But I do welcome the conversion. It will cause some squirming in the denial-sphere which always gives me pleasure.

D.

[Dardedar]

As one fellow said:

***
Maybe this chart makes it more clear (GISS anomaly * 100) + 225 vs. CO2



Could be a fluke though.

[Betsy]

Here's an interesting idea, albeit a little paranoid/crazy but is it worth looking at - re: at something called the Bilderberg conference this past summer:

"Which is what makes one particular item on the group’s discussion agenda so tremendously significant. See if you can spot the one I mean:

The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 – 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, Global Cooling, Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations.

Yep, that’s right. Global Cooling.

Which means one of two things.

Either it was a printing error.

Or the global elite is perfectly well aware that global cooling represents a far more serious and imminent threat to the world than global warming, but is so far unwilling to admit it except behind closed doors.

Let me explain briefly why this is a bombshell waiting to explode...."

The rest here: Global Cooling and the NEw World Order

[Dardedar]

Here's an interesting idea, albeit a little paranoid/crazy but is it worth looking at -

DAR
From the article in question:

In the Eighties and Nineties, the global elite had a nice run of hot weather to support their (scientifically dubious) claims. But now they don’t. Winters are getting colder. Fuel bills are rising (in the name of combating climate change, natch). The wheels are starting to come off the AGW bandwagon. Ordinary people, resisting two decades of concerted brainwashing, are starting to notice.

DAR
This person is truly an idiot. This is why we don't get our science from rightwing political rags (the UK Telegraph is worse than WSJ which is awful, dishonest and has nothing whatsoever to do with science). As things aren't going well in the denier community they are getting even more desperate and more blatantly dishonest.

Rather than point out again that this last decade is the hottest recorded in modern history (and we hotter than ever and this year currently has 75% odds of hitting a new record, they actually have a stock market where people bet on this as they follow the science) I'll just find someone from the comment thread at your link who is not insane and has already done the work:

CO2 rise and why it's human caused.

There's the FAQ "Why does atmospheric co2 rise" which covers the key pieces of evidence.
http://www.radix.net/~bobg/faqs/scq.CO2rise.html

There's Ferdinand Engelbeen's work:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klima ... ments.html

There's a post by Willis Eschenbach at WUWT
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/07/s ... -to-blame/

I deliberately pick the last two links because the authors are skeptical of manmade global warming. They nevertheless are convinced that the recent co2 rise is human caused. Because the evidence for that is so overwhelming.

And I checked with NOAA:

NOAA reports 2010 hottest year on record so far

Summer 2010 the second warmest on record; hottest August in RSS satellite record*
September 15, 2010

etc.

[Dardedar]

Passed along from Art Hobson. Thank goodness we have (mostly) adults currently running the country now.

***
Here is the most informative brief discussion of the climate problem I've seen. It's by John Holdren, President Obama's science advisor. He is past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an excellent scientist, and a master of science-related social issues. I'm proud to say that he's a physicist and that he's been a friendly professional acquaintance of mine for decades.

As Al Gore and others have done, Holdren gives a power point presentation. You can watch it with Holdren's voice narration (45 min), or you can download the slides and quickly flip through the fairly self-explanatory slides. Feel free to contact me with any questions, although I don't promise to be able to answer them. There's a lot of good science, and good political science, here.

http://www.kavlifoundation.org/2010-kav ... te-address



See also:

Climate disruption caused by global warming driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

[Dardedar]

From Scientific American:

Climate Denial on the Decline*

"Numerous polls show a decline in the percentage of Americans who believe humans affect climate, but our survey suggests the nation is not among the worst deniers. (Those are France, Japan and Australia.) Attitudes, however, may be shifting the other way. Among those respondents who have changed their opinions in the past year, three times more said they are more certain than less certain that humans are changing the climate."



http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... trust-poll

*Note the major qualifier for this poll. It's not random but rather an online poll of those reading the websites of Scientific American and Nature. While 21,000 responded this does not represent a scientific poll of the public (i.e. 19% had Ph.D's).

[Dardedar]

Comment on Huff Po:

"Wayne Davidson, a scientist currently on site in the Arctic
reported this today: “Lack of sea ice over much of the
Eastern North American Arctic is very dramatic…. Hudson Bay
nearly devoid of ice at this time of the year, is truly
freakish, and proves the main theories on Climate science
astonishingly correct. A glimpse of the near future
unfolds.”

What are the paid pom pom clowns for the
fossil fuel industry going to do when the warming accelerates
to the point where even the dimmest bulbs realize that global
warming is an incontrovertible fact? Since the denialists are
so adept at prevarication, one expects that they will simply
try to blend in with everyone else and deny that they ever said
what they said."

Link

[Dardedar]

CO2 emissions by country:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_c ... -emissions

Per capita:

http://www.nationmaster.com/red/graph/e ... per-capita

The Australian Broadcasti­ng Corporatio­n is running a series by author Clive Hamilton on the bullying, lies and funding behind right-wing climate denial:

Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial

Who is orchestrat­ing the cyber-bull­ying?

Think tanks, oil money and black ops

Manufactur­ing a science scandal

Who’s defending science?.

[Dardedar]

Expert credibility in climate change

William R. L. Anderegg a , 1 , James W. Prall b , Jacob Harold c , and Stephen H. Schneider a , d , 1

Contributed by Stephen H. Schneider, April 9, 2010 (sent for review December 22, 2009)

Abstract

Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC. A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions. Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/ ... 7.abstract