Thread: Any doubts about Climate Change?

Four new human-made ozone depleting gases found in the atmosphere
Date:
March 9, 2014
Source:
University of East Anglia
Summary:
New research reveals that four new human-made gases have been discovered in the atmosphere. 74,000 tons of these new CFCs and HCFCs are all contributing to the destruction of the ozone layer. Emission increases of this scale have not been seen for any other CFCs since controls were introduced during the 1990s.

Four new human-made ozone depleting gases found in the atmosphere -- ScienceDaily

We all agree that depleting the ozone layer is a bad thing, right?

Originally Posted by War Elephant

You previously agreed that the temperatures have been stable for 17 years. Is that not as severe as previously forecasted, even considering the swamp gasses bouncing off the Eagle Nebula and pushing the heat to the ocean floor?

We were told that temperatures would rise, oceans would rise, snow would end, etc. etc. That hasn't happened, and global warming has 'paused' for 17 years, as stated. How is that not as severe as previously thought? Why is that not good news? Why can't you just say, "Well, guys, it's not as bad as we thought, thank God. But that was quite a scare, and we learned some positive things from this."

Do you have ANY vague, distant inkling of an idea of how short a time 17 years is???

Ish.

Originally Posted by FlyFree

Do you have ANY vague, distant inkling of an idea of how short a time 17 years is???

Ish.

It's quite a while in relation to how long man made global warming has been happening, isn't it? When is the scientifically accepted date for when man made global warming began?

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Pentagon to teach us about climate change:

They have been doing this for 40+ years though, I thought. Why is this news?

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Pentagon to teach us about climate change:

They have been doing this for 40+ years though, I thought. Why is this news?

^ Guess you thought wrong...

REUTERS, 23/03 12:19 CET
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) – Global warming will disrupt food supplies, slow world economic growth and may already be causing irreversible damage to nature, according to a U.N. report due this week that will put pressure on governments to act.

A 29-page draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will also outline many ways to adapt to rising temperatures, more heat waves, floods and rising seas.

“The scientific reasoning for reducing emissions and adapting to climate change is becoming far more compelling,” Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, told Reuters in Beijing.

Scientists and more than 100 governments will meet in Japan from March 25-29 to edit and approve the report. It will guide policies in the run-up to a U.N. summit in Paris in 2015 meant to decide a deal to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The 29-page draft projects risks such as food and water shortages and extinctions of animals and plants. Crop yields would range from unchanged to a fall of up to 2 percent a decade, compared to a world without warming, it says.

And some natural systems may face risks of “abrupt or drastic changes” that could mean irreversible shifts, such as a runaway melt of Greenland or a drying of the Amazon rainforest.

It said there were “early warning signs that both coral reef and Arctic systems are already experiencing irreversible regime shifts”. Corals are at risk in warmer seas and the Arctic region is thawing fast.

Climate change will hit growth. Warming of 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels could mean “global aggregate economic losses between 0.2 and 2.0 percent of income”, it says.

Almost 200 governments have agreed to limit warming to less than 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, mainly by curbing emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Temperatures have already risen by about 0.8 Celsius (1.4F).

RISING RISKS

“A wide range of impacts from climate change are already happening,” said Chris Field of Stanford University and a co-chair of the IPCC report. “Risks are much greater with more warming than less warming.”

“And it doesn’t require 100 percent certainty before you have creative options for moving forwards … there are compelling adaptation options,” he told Reuters by telephone.

The report points to options such as improved planning for disasters such as hurricanes or flooding, efforts to breed drought- or flood-resistant crops, measures to save water and energy or wider use of insurance.

Field said the IPCC will have to take account of thousands of comments since the draft was leaked to a climate sceptic’s website late last year.

And the findings will be under scrutiny, especially after the previous IPCC assessment in 2007 wrongly projected that Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, affecting water supplies for millions of people from China to India.

This time, a sub-chapter projects Himalayan ice will range from a 2 percent gain to a 29 percent loss by 2035. “It is virtually certain that these projections are more reliable than an earlier erroneous assessment,” it says.

The study is the second part of a mammoth three-part report.

The first, in September, raised the probability that human activities, rather than natural variations, are the main cause of warming since 1950 to at least 95 percent from 90 in 2007.

But many people in big emitting nations are unconvinced.

Only 40 percent of Americans and 39 percent of Chinese view climate change as a major threat, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 39 nations in 2013.

A third instalment, due in Berlin in mid-March, will show solutions to climate change such as more renewable energy.
NewsWires : euronews : the latest international news as video on demand

How could a myth do all that?

Originally Posted by chitown

How could a myth do all that?

It couldn't.

Contrarians bully journal into retracting a climate psychology paper

After threats of frivolous libel and defamation lawsuits, a journal will retract an academically sound paper.

Given that fewer than 3 percent of peer-reviewed climate science papers conclude that the human influence on global warming is minimal, climate contrarians have obviously been unable to make a convincing scientific case. Thus in order to advance their agenda of delaying climate solutions and maintaining the status quo in the face of a 97 percent expert consensus suggesting that this is a high-risk path, contrarians have engaged in a variety of unconventional tactics.

* Funding a campaign to deny the expert climate consensus.
* Harassing climate scientists and universities with frivolous Freedom of Information Act requests.
* Engaging in personal, defamatory public attacks on climate scientists.
* Flooding climate scientists with abusive emails.
* Illegally hacking university servers and stealing their emails.
* Illegally hacking climate science websites
* Harassing journals to retract inconvenient research.

That final tactic has evolved, from merely sending the journal publishers a petition signed by a bunch of contrarians, to sending journals letters threatening libel and defamation lawsuits. Although to date all editors involved have resisted such unwarranted intimidation, an online journal is on the verge of retracting a paper due to worries about lawsuits.

The story begins with the publication of a paper titled NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science. The paper was authored by Lewandwosky, Oberauer, and Gignac, and published in the journal Psychological Science in 2012. Using survey data from visitors to climate blogs, the paper found that conspiracy theorists are more likely to be skeptical of scientists' conclusions about vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and climate change.
This result was replicated in a follow-up study using a representative U.S. sample that obtained the same result linking conspiratorial thinking to climate denial.
Suffice it to say climate contrarians didn't like the conclusions of this paper. Ironically, many contrarian bloggers and blog commenters came up with a variety of conspiracy theories about the Lewandowsky paper. As Lewandowsky and John Cook later wrote,

"These range from "global climate activist operation" to "ringleader for conspiratorial activities by the green climate bloggers," to Stephan Lewandowsky receiving millions of dollars to run The Conversation."

The contrarians had inadvertently provided fertile material for further research, which John Cook began to harvest, collecting all of the blog conspiracy theories about their conspiracy theory paper into a spreadsheet. That catalog became the basis for a follow-up paper.
Recursive Fury

Lewandowsky, known for his creative publication titles, came up with another doozy for the follow-up paper: Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation. The paper, authored by Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, and Marriott, was published in the journal Frontiers on 18 March 2013. That study concluded,

"...many of the [conspiratorial] hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking. For example, whereas hypotheses were initially narrowly focused on LOG12 [the NASA paper], some ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors of LOG12, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. The overall pattern of the blogosphere's response to LOG12 illustrates the possible role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science, although alternative scholarly interpretations may be advanced in the future."

Stepping back for a moment to take stock of the situation, it's really not surprising that climate contrarians as a group would tend to exhibit conspiratorial thinking. After all, 97 percent of climate experts and climate research contradicts their beliefs. When you're a non-expert who doesn't want to believe the conclusions of 97 percent of experts, how do you justify that position, psychologically? Writing those experts off as being part of a conspiracy is probably the easiest avenue to take.

Contrarians bully journal into retracting a climate psychology paper | Dana Nuccitelli | Environment | theguardian.com

RDFRS: According To A Nasa Funded Study, We're Pretty Much Screwed

Global Warming? We have more pressing concerns.

I'm all for cleaning up the world, using clean energy etc. Here's one thing I do not understand though.

Take this map, for example.


Taken from ABC in Australia on a website discussing the Eromanga Sea. The seas that flood, at low levels, the vast majority of Australia are proven due to the discovery of fossilized sea creatures. Indeed, all over the world, these types of fossils are found significantly higher than present sea levels.

The natural state of Australia, 114m years ago, apparently was a swamp, which then turned into a huge sea about 110m years ago. You also have fossil trees found in Antartica which proves beyond a doubt that at some point in history, there was no ice there at all - the trees would not have grown if there had been.

Couldn't it be a chance that we are just accelerating, ever so slightly, a natural phenomena? After all, there can be no denying at all that in the past sea levels have been massively higher than they are now, that average earth temperatures have jumped up by over 10 degrees celius.

Oh, and I am not a denialist, but I just don't know the answers to these questions because most publications / articles don't address these. Most of them are fairly pointless as their predictions are usually far less than real history shows us will happen.

^ agreed.

During the Jurassic to the Cretaceous Australia and Antarctica were still joined, the rift valley that is now the Southern Ocean only started approximately 95 million years ago becoming fully open around 55 Ma. During those dinosaur eras Australia and Antarctica were on the Equator and were hot tropical lands. There was also a deep geosyncline valley open from near present day Adelaide into the interior that allowed a shallow sea passage into the inland waters. That geosyncline has since been uplifted into the present day Flinders Ranges and the remains of it are Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens and Spencer Gulf in the South.

This a summary of a CC report on bbc today.


Climate impacts 'overwhelming' - UN




The impacts of global warming are likely to be "severe, pervasive and irreversible", a major report by the UN has warned.

Scientists and officials meeting in Japan say the document is the most comprehensive assessment to date of the impacts of climate change on the world.

Some impacts of climate change include a higher risk of flooding and changes to crop yields and water availability.

Humans may be able to adapt to some of these changes, but only within limits.


An example of an adaptation strategy would be the construction of sea walls and levees to protect against flooding. Another might be introducing more efficient irrigation for farmers in areas where water is scarce.

Natural systems are currently bearing the brunt of climatic changes, but a growing impact on humans is feared.

Members of the UN's climate panel say it provides overwhelming evidence of the scale of these effects.

Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change” - Rajendra Pachauri Chairman, IPCC

Our health, homes, food and safety are all likely to be threatened by rising temperatures, the summary says.

The report was agreed after almost a week of intense discussions here in Yokohama, which included concerns among some authors about the tone of the evolving document.

This is the second of a series from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) due out this year that outlines the causes, effects and solutions to global warming.


Analysis

Roger Harrabin Environment analyst

The prognosis on the climate isn't good - but the doctor's changing his bedside manner with the people in charge of the planet's health.

The report's chair, Dr Chris Field, is worried that an apocalyptic tone will frighten politicians so much that they'll abandon the Earth to its fate.

There is nothing inevitable about the worst impacts on people and nature, Dr Field says. We can cut emissions to reduce the risks of catastrophe and adapt to some changes that will inevitably occur.

We have to re-frame climate change as an exciting challenge for the most creative minds.

Cutting local air pollution from, say coal, can also reduce carbon emissions that cause warming; creating decent homes for poor people in countries like Bangladesh can improve lives whilst removing them from the path of flood surges.

Some will criticise Dr Field for being too upbeat. But many politicians have gone deaf to the old-style warnings. Maybe it's worth a new approach.


This latest Summary for Policymakers document highlights the fact that the amount of scientific evidence on the impacts of warming has almost doubled since the last report in 2007.

Be it the melting of glaciers or warming of permafrost, the summary highlights the fact that on all continents and across the oceans, changes in the climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems in recent decades.

In the words of the report, "increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts".

"Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,'' IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri told journalists at a news conference in Yokohama.

Dr Saleemul Huq, a convening lead author on one of the chapters, commented: "Before this we thought we knew this was happening, but now we have overwhelming evidence that it is happening and it is real."

Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, said that, previously, people could have damaged the Earth's climate out of "ignorance".

"Now, ignorance is no longer a good excuse," he said.

Mr Jarraud said the report was based on more than 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies. He said this document was "the most solid evidence you can get in any scientific discipline".

US Secretary of State John Kerry commented: "Unless we act dramatically and quickly, science tells us our climate and our way of life are literally in jeopardy. Denial of the science is malpractice."





He added: "No single country causes climate change, and no one country can stop it. But we need to match the urgency of our response with the scale of the science."

Ed Davey, the UK Energy and Climate Secretary said: "The science has clearly spoken. Left unchecked, climate change will impact on many aspects of our society, with far reaching consequences to human health, global food security and economic development.

"The recent flooding in the UK is a testament to the devastation that climate change could bring to our daily lives."

The report details significant short-term impacts on natural systems in the next 20 to 30 years. It details five reasons for concern that would likely increase as a result of the warming the world is already committed to.



A perspective on the UK David Shukman Science editor, BBC News

British winters are likely to become milder and wetter like the last one but cold spells still need to be planned for, says the UK Met Office.

Summers are likely to be hotter and drier, but washouts are still on the cards, it adds.

The assessment of future weather extremes finds the role of human influence is "detectable" in summer heatwaves and in intense rainfall.

However, the Met Office says a lot more work must be done to confirm the links.


If the study is correct, it means everything from gumboots to snowploughs and sunscreen to anoraks will still be needed.

• Read more from David

These include threats to unique systems such as Arctic sea ice and coral reefs, where risks are said to increase to "very high" with a 2C rise in temperatures.

The summary document outlines impacts on the seas and on freshwater systems as well. The oceans will become more acidic, threatening coral and the many species that they harbour.

On land, animals, plants and other species will begin to move towards higher ground or towards the poles as the mercury rises.

Humans, though, are also increasingly affected as the century goes on.

Food security is highlighted as an area of significant concern. Crop yields for maize, rice and wheat are all hit in the period up to 2050, with around a tenth of projections showing losses over 25%.

After 2050, the risk of more severe yield impacts increases, as boom-and-bust cycles affect many regions. All the while, the demand for food from a population estimated to be around nine billion will rise.

Many fish species, a critical food source for many, will also move because of warmer waters.


What is the IPCC?

In its own words, the IPCC is there "to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts".

The offspring of two UN bodies, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, it has issued four heavyweight assessment reports to date on the state of the climate.

These are commissioned by the governments of 195 countries, essentially the entire world. These reports are critical in informing the climate policies adopted by these governments.

The IPCC itself is a small organisation, run from Geneva with a full time staff of 12. All the scientists who are involved with it do so on a voluntary basis.


In some parts of the tropics and in Antarctica, potential catches could decline by more than 50%.

"This is a sobering assessment," said Prof Neil Adger from the University of Exeter, another IPCC author.

"Going into the future, the risks only increase, and these are about people, the impacts on crops, on the availability of water and particularly, the extreme events on people's lives and livelihoods."

People will be affected by flooding and heat related mortality. The report warns of new risks including the threat to those who work outside, such as farmers and construction workers. There are concerns raised over migration linked to climate change, as well as conflict and national security.

Report co-author Maggie Opondo of the University of Nairobi said that in places such as Africa, climate change and extreme events mean "people are going to become more vulnerable to sinking deeper into poverty".

While the poorer countries are likely to suffer more in the short term, the rich won't escape.

"The rich are going to have to think about climate change. We're seeing that in the UK, with the floods we had a few months ago, and the storms we had in the US and the drought in California," said Dr Huq.




IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri said the findings in the report were "profound"

"These are multibillion dollar events that the rich are going to have to pay for, and there's a limit to what they can pay."

But it is not all bad news, as the co-chair of the working group that drew up the report points out.

"I think the really big breakthrough in this report is the new idea of thinking about managing climate change as a problem in managing risks," said Dr Chris Field.



"Climate change is really important but we have a lot of the tools for dealing effectively with it - we just need to be smart about it."

There is far greater emphasis to adapting to the impacts of climate in this new summary. The problem, as ever, is who foots the bill?

"It is not up to IPCC to define that," said Dr Jose Marengo, a Brazilian government official who attended the talks.

"It provides the scientific basis to say this is the bill, somebody has to pay, and with the scientific grounds it is relatively easier now to go to the climate negotiations in the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and start making deals about who will pay for adaptation


BBC News - Climate impacts 'overwhelming' - UN

Originally Posted by Gilbert

What about the 18m long whale which was found 75m above sea level in Sweden, and is thought to be 10,000 years old.

Probably a combination of tectonic uplift and crustal rebound from glacial ice loss. Not to familiar with European geology so can't say with any surety.

Political Climate
Mar 31, 2014
IPCC exaggerates risks: NIPCC Opposing view

In its usual over the top fantasy world special report by the committee chaired by special BS artist Chris Fields (not surprisingly a Heinz (Mrs Kerry) award winner), the IPCC projects dire consequences for agriculture and the environment. They claim the risks from extreme weather events, including heat waves and flooding are also high at 1C.

Now considering that Kentucky is 2.1C warmer than neighbor Illinois, that has to be the most ridiculous statement ever made by an agenda driven pseudoscientist. How could they sleep at night knowing what they say is totally bogus. Oh I forgot the billions of dollars in grants at stake. Also no changes in droughts, floods, and declines in heat waves, tornadoes and hurricanes have occurred. But never mind the real world. We live in a virtual computer world.

This is the world their computer models, failing miserably project for a 3F increase.

image
Enlarged

The NIPCC report on environmental consequences shows the very opposite has occcurred with the gentle warming 1979 to 1998 and the stable temperatures (starting a precipitous decline) since. CO2 is a plant fertilizer. They pump it into greenhouses. The increase in CO2 with improved hybrid seeds has resulted in a 3 to 5 fold increase in yields for rice, corn, wheat and beans worldwide, allowing u to fed more people. Until the recent turn to colder, the growing areas have expanded not been displaced with more production from Canada and Russia.

Here is the NIPCC finding based on real world data and studies not tinker toy models. “Global-Warming / Climate Change POLICY, not the weather, is a threat to National Security in the UK and Europe; Miliband’s (a UK alarmist like Fields) claims are as deluded as the charge of the light brigade” - Piers Corbyn

Biological Impacts Summary

* Atmospheric carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a non-toxic, non-irritating, and natural component of the atmosphere. Long-term CO2 enrichment studies confirm the findings of
shorter-term experiments, demonstrating numerous growth-enhancing, water-conserving, and stress alleviating effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 on plants growing in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

* The ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth. All across the planet, the historical increase in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration has stimulated vegetative productivity. This observed stimulation, or greening of the Earth, has occurred in spite of many real and imagined assaults on Earth’s vegetation, including fires, disease, pest outbreaks, deforestation, and climatic change.

* There is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Farmers and others who depend on rural livelihoods for income are
benefitting from rising agricultural productivity throughout the world, including in parts of Asia and Africa where the need for increased food supplies is most critical. Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels play a key role in the realization of such benefits.

: Terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Empirical data pertaining to numerous
animal species, including amphibians, birds, butterflies, other insects, reptiles, and mammals, indicate global warming and its myriad ecological effects tend to foster the expansion and
proliferation of animal habitats, ranges, and populations, or otherwise have no observable impacts one way or the other. Multiple lines of evidence indicate animal species are adapting,
and in some cases evolving, to cope with climate change of the modern era.

* Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels do not pose a significant threat to aquatic life. Many aquatic species have shown considerable tolerance to temperatures and
CO2 values predicted for the next few centuries, and many have demonstrated a likelihood of positive responses in empirical studies. Any projected adverse impacts of rising temperatures or declining seawater and freshwater pH levels ("acidification") will be largely mitigated through phenotypic adaptation or evolution during the many decades to centuries it is expected to take for pH levels to fall.

* A modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperature-related events. More lives are saved by global warming via the amelioration of
cold-related deaths than those lost under excessive heat. Global warming will have a negligible influence on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases, a phenomenon observed in virtually all parts of the world.

Source: Idso, C.D., Idso, S.B., Carter, R.M., and Singer, S.F. (Eds.) 2014. Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts. Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute.

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate

Something interesting from the Guardian. It seems even some of the larger climate denier publications might be coming around.

One is home to some of the UK's best known commentators casting doubt on climate change science, while the other claims "climate change is on ice" and "huge uncertainties surround the science of climate change".

But both the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have now told MPs they believe climate change is happening and humans play a role in it.

And nice interview from PBS on the IPCC report that came out yesterday.

A UN report warns that the effects of climate change -- flood, drought and food shortages -- have already caused harm, and will worsen quickly if we don’t take immediate action. Judy Woodruff takes a closer look at the global implications with two people who worked on the report: Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University and Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

(We are here: 402 ppm) This isn't a good place to be

Carbon Dioxide Levels Climb Into Uncharted Territory for Humans

The amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has exceeded 402 parts per million (ppm) during the past two days of observations, which is higher than at any time in at least the past 800,000 years, according to readings from monitoring equipment on a mountaintop in Hawaii. Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is the most important long-lived greenhouse gas responsible for manmade global warming, and it is building up in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

Once emitted, a single molecule of carbon dioxide can remain aloft for hundreds of years, which means that the effects of today's industrial activities will be felt for the next several centuries, if not thousands of years. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, such as methane, warm the planet by absorbing and redirecting outgoing solar radiation that would otherwise escape back into space.

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Once emitted, a single molecule of carbon dioxide can remain aloft for hundreds of years, which means that the effects of today's industrial activities will be felt for the next several centuri

It was not felt today in Britain and in the early evening I still had to zip up my big coat I've been wearing since October.
Can we please try 500 parts per million ?
please .