Global Climate Change Science News

[piscator]

James Delingpole was an English Lit major who now states he does not read peer-reviewed papers.

In a BBC Horizon documentary, "Science under Attack", Delingpole responded to Paul Nurse's discussion of the scientific consensus on global warming by saying that the idea of a consensus is unscientific. In response to Nurse's question as to whether he had read any peer-reviewed papers, he maintained that as a journalist "it is not my job" to read peer reviewed papers, but be "an interpreter of interpretations".

He's exactly correct. The job of a journalist is to present information in a way that persuades readers to read it. His ethical duty is to correctly quote and accurately represent the statements and evidence from his sources, but (depending on the particular forum) he's also allowed to insert his own opinions and write in compelling and provocative ways to try to make a particular point, just as the Warmist propagandists do.

But those qualities that you so admire make for poor science, so anyone who takes Delingpole's opportunistic scribblings as anything other than a source of Delingpole's money should be mocked. This would include the stupid fuckers who think he has anything more substantive to opine on the practice of descriptive geometry or neurosurgery than, say, a French notary public or a Philippine Saab mechanic.

So when Delingpole says, "A new scientific paper has driven yet another nail into the coffin of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory.", it's OK to fart if you're not in a nice restaurant and no one can trace it to you.

[Seth]

James Delingpole was an English Lit major who now states he does not read peer-reviewed papers.

In a BBC Horizon documentary, "Science under Attack", Delingpole responded to Paul Nurse's discussion of the scientific consensus on global warming by saying that the idea of a consensus is unscientific. In response to Nurse's question as to whether he had read any peer-reviewed papers, he maintained that as a journalist "it is not my job" to read peer reviewed papers, but be "an interpreter of interpretations".

He's exactly correct. The job of a journalist is to present information in a way that persuades readers to read it. His ethical duty is to correctly quote and accurately represent the statements and evidence from his sources, but (depending on the particular forum) he's also allowed to insert his own opinions and write in compelling and provocative ways to try to make a particular point, just as the Warmist propagandists do.

But those qualities that you so admire make for poor science,

He's not doing the science, he's writing about the science.

so anyone who takes Delingpole's opportunistic scribblings as anything other than a source of Delingpole's money should be mocked. This would include the stupid fuckers who think he has anything more substantive to opine on the practice of descriptive geometry or neurosurgery than, say, a French notary public or a Philippine Saab mechanic.

That can be said of any journalist. We are not experts in every field we write about, we're writers. We take the expertise of others and present it in readable form.

So when Delingpole says, "A new scientific paper has driven yet another nail into the coffin of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory.", it's OK to fart if you're not in a nice restaurant and no one can trace it to you.

You can disagree with him, but he's entitled to his opinion.

The problem is that you're attacking him with a circumstantial ad hominem fallacy rather than even addressing the substance of the article, which happens to be science.

[piscator]

That's what you asked for, so I simply stated the truth and said you were a Mac user, and Delingpole was a hack.


I didn't even read the Delingpole, BTW. Anyone who leads an article of "Opinion Journalism" like Delingpole is a fucking hack at minimum, and probably likes it up the ass. What about you, Seth? Do you like it up the ass too?

[Seth]

Despite deforestation, the world is getting greener - scientists
ReutersBy By Alisa Tang | Reuters – 8 hours ago


A woman walks past trees reflected on a lake in front of a construction site of a residential compound on a hazy day in Wuhan, Hubei province March 6, 2015. REUTERS/Stringer

Reuters - A woman walks past trees reflected on a lake in front of a construction site of a residential compound on a hazy day in Wuhan, Hubei province March 6, 2015. REUTERS/Stringer

BANGKOK - The world's vegetation has expanded, adding nearly 4 billion tonnes of carbon to plants above ground in the decade since 2003, thanks to tree-planting in China, forest regrowth in former Soviet states and more lush savannas due to higher rainfall.

Scientists analysed 20 years of satellite data and found the increase in carbon, despite ongoing large-scale tropical deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, according to research published on Monday in Nature Climate Change.

Carbon flows between the world's oceans, air and land. It is present in the atmosphere primarily as carbon dioxide (CO2) - the main climate-changing gas - and stored as carbon in trees.

Through photosynthesis, trees convert carbon dioxide into the food they need to grow, locking the carbon in their wood.

The 4-billion-tonne increase is minuscule compared to the 60 billion tonnes of carbon released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning and cement production over the same period, said Yi Liu, the study's lead author and a scientist at the University of New South Wales.

"From this research, we can see these plants can help absorb some carbon dioxide, but there's still a lot of carbon dioxide staying in the atmosphere," Liu said by telephone from Sydney.

"If we want to stabilise the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - and avoid the consequent impacts - it still requires us to reduce fossil fuel emissions."

Liu, who specialises in observing the water cycle including rainfall and soil moisture, used a new technique of collecting satellite data on radio frequency radiation naturally emitted by the Earth to calculate the amount of vegetation in a given area.

Before, scientists measured vegetation through satellite images and other techniques, looking at canopy greenness and plant height, he said.

Liu had expected to find increased forests in China, which has had tree-planting projects for two to three decades, as well as on abandoned farmland in former Soviet countries.

But he was surprised to discover the large expansion in vegetation due to higher rainfall on tropical savannas and shrublands in Australia, Africa and South America.

These fragile gains may be easily lost, as weather patterns shift with climate change, he warned.

"Savannas and shrublands are vulnerable to rainfall – one year can be very wet, and more carbon will be fixed in plants, but the next year can be very dry, and then we will lose the carbon fixed in previous years," Liu explained.

Louis Verchot, a research director at the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research, said Liu's findings were "by and large what we would expect in the warmer and wetter world that results from climate change".

"As ice and permafrost melt, they are being replaced by vegetation, and the tree line is moving north as the Arctic warms," he said by email.

Vegetation growth is also expected to increase due to rising CO2 in the atmosphere, known as the "CO2 fertilisation effect".

Verchot said the value of Liu's study was that it put a number on the contribution of vegetation to moderating greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere.

"Hopefully this will lead to greater efforts to stop tropical forest loss and to promote sustainable use of ecosystems in ways that preserve enough of the carbon absorption function as we continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere through fossil fuel burning," Verchot added.

(Reporting by Alisa Tang, editing by Megan Rowling)
@YahooCanadaNews on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook

[Tero]

Well, it's got to go somewhere.

Where did carbon come from, Seth?

[Seth]

Well, it's got to go somewhere.

Where did carbon come from, Seth?

Er, same place it came from before, 65 million years ago. Earth is a closed-loop system. All the carbon that is, was. It just moves around a bit. Interestingly, when CO2 levels rise, plants take it up, sequester the carbon and release oxygen. That's what happened 65 million years ago, and before that. All that "fossil fuel" carbon was once floating around in the atmosphere as CO2, where it was taken up by plants and sequestered, where it was buried and became coal and oil. When we release it, it will be take up by plants and the process will repeat itself. And earth will abide. Life will go on, albeit perhaps without the ski industry and without Miami Beach, among other low-lying areas where people shouldn't be living. But they can move, so it's no big deal.

[mistermack]

Not so windy today. It looks like global warming has died down a bit.

No, wait.that's wrong. Global warming causes a lack of wind as well.

It's spitting rain though. That's global warming causing severe drizzle. Until global warming stops it, causing a day's drought.

Where will it all end?

[cronus]

Not so windy today. It looks like global warming has died down a bit.

No, wait.that's wrong. Global warming causes a lack of wind as well.

It's spitting rain though. That's global warming causing severe drizzle. Until global warming stops it, causing a day's drought.

Where will it all end?

The entire atmosphere flipping state and a new ice age obviously. Wait for the Amazon to burn down - you'll see the effect of global dimming....and then it'll snow and won't stop snowing for a long, long time.

[Seth]

DailyCaller

Scientists Say New Study Is A ‘Death Blow’ To Global Warming Hysteria
10:07 PM 03/31/2015



Photo of Michael Bastasch
Michael Bastasch



A new study out of Germany casts further doubt on the so-called global warming “consensus” by suggesting the atmosphere may be less sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide emissions than most scientists think.

A study by scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology found that man-made aerosols had a much smaller cooling effect on the atmosphere during the 20th Century than was previously thought. Why is this big news? It means increases in carbon dioxide emissions likely cause less warming than most climate models suggest.

What do aerosols have to do with anything? Well, aerosols are created from human activities like burning coal, driving cars or from fires. There are also natural aerosols like clouds and fog. Aerosols tend to reflect solar energy back into space, giving them a cooling effect that somewhat offsets warming from increased CO2 emissions.

The Max Planck study suggests “that aerosol radiative forcing is less negative and more certain than is commonly believed.” In layman’s terms, aerosols are offsetting less global warming than was previously thought. And if aerosols aren’t causing as much cooling, it must mean carbon dioxide must be causing less warming than climate models predict.

“Going forward we should expect less warming from future greenhouse gas emissions than climate models are projecting,” write climate scientists Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger with the libertarian Cato Institute, adding that this study could be a “death blow” to global warming hysteria.

Independent climate researcher Nick Lewis put out a study last year with Georgia Tech’s Dr. Judith Curry that found that the climate’s response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels — a measurement called “climate sensitivity” was 1.64 degrees Celsius.

Lewis revised his findings based on the Max Planck aerosol study and found something astounding: climate sensitivity drops dramatically. Lewis also looked at climate sensitivity estimates given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — often regarded as the world’s top authority on global warming.

The IPCC’s latest assessment put climate sensitivity between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius. The IPCC says that despite “the large uncertainty range, there is a high confidence that aerosols have offset a substantial portion of [greenhouse gas] global mean forcing.”

Basically, the IPCC says aerosols deflect a lot of warming — the opposite of the Max Planck study’s finding.

But incorporating the results from the Max Planck study dramatically reduces the upper bound estimate of climate sensitivity from 4.5 degrees to 1.8 degrees Celsius.

To put this into perspective, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 currently stand at around 400 parts per million, if this were to double, according to the IPCC’s estimates temperatures could rise as high as 4.5 degrees Celsius.

But incorporate the Max Planck study results and warming would only be as high as 1.8 degrees Celsius — less than half what the IPCC originally predicted.

Michaels and Knappenberger say Lewis’s findings basically eliminate “the possibility of catastrophic climate change—that is, climate change that proceeds at a rate that exceeds our ability to keep up.”

“Such a result will also necessarily drive down estimates of social cost of carbon thereby undermining a key argument use by federal agencies to support increasingly burdensome regulations which seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” write Michaels and Knappenberger.

[piscator]

Boyle's Ideal Aerosol Laws. Yup. Airtight.

[Seth]

I told you so....

Daily Caller News Foundation
A woman shovels snow on Joy Street during a winter blizzard in Boston, Massachusetts February 15, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder A woman shovels snow on Joy Street during a winter blizzard in Boston, Massachusetts February 15, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Flashback 1971: Scientists Predict Burning Coal Will Cause The Next Ice Age
4:09 PM 04/03/2015


Michael Bastasch

The world is on the verge of another ice age. Well, at least that’s what scientists told us in the 1970s: burning fossil fuels like coal would cause the world to plunge into another ice age in the 21st Century.

“The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts,” the Washington Post reported on July 9, 1971, quoting Dr. S. I. Rasool of NASA and Columbia University.

According to Rasool, fine dust from fossil fuel use would block out so much sunlight that the Earth’s “average temperature could drop by six degrees.” Rasool added that “such a temperature increase could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!”

Basically, pollutants from burning coal and other fuels tend to reflect solar energy back into space. Scientists were worried that such man-made aerosols would block out so much sunlight that global temperatures would drop — just like how volcanoes can cause some atmospheric cooling.

Worry among the scientific community was apparently so strong that Gordon MacDonald, President Nixon’s science advisor, said that fossil fuel-driven cooling was “one of the serious problems” facing the world. MacDonald added that Rasool’s predictions were “consistent with estimates I and others have made.”

So what “solution” to global cooling did scientists come up with? Banning fossil fuel use. The Post reported that scientists wanted mankind to stop using coal, gas and oil and start using nuclear power — pollution controls just weren’t enough, according to the Post.

Scientists, of course, have changed their tune since the 1970s, saying that fossil fuels are causing global warming, not cooling. While aerosols from fossil fuels do have a slight cooling effect (the extent of which is being debated), scientists say carbon dioxide emissions are trapping heat and warming the world.

Oddly enough, the solutions scientists pushed to fight global cooling and warming are the same: ban fossil fuels and use low-carbon energy. The only difference from the 1970s is that, today, politicians are pushing green energy from solar and wind, not nuclear power.

But even in the 1970s there was a debate over whether or not human activities were cooling or warming the globe. Scientists who argued the global was warming won out, culminating in the testimony of NASA scientist James Hansen who testified before Congress in 1986 that carbon dioxide would warm the planet 2 to 4 degrees by 2010.

[piscator]

The Keystone XL Pipeline Company Just Delayed Its Other Huge Tar Sands Pipeline

Pipeline company TransCanada is canceling its plans to build an oil export terminal in Quebec, a move that the company says will postpone the start of its proposed Energy East pipeline for more than a year.

TransCanada announced Thursday that, due to concerns about the safety of beluga whale populations in the St. Lawrence River, it won’t building marine and tank terminals in Cacouna, Quebec. Cacouna borders the St. Lawrence.

The company said in a statement that it is looking at other options for export sites in Quebec for the Energy East, a pipeline that would carry tar sands oil more than 2,850 miles from Hardisty, Alberta east to Saint John, New Brunswick. TransCanada had planned two export terminals for the project: one in Cacouna and one in Saint John. Because of the change in plans, TransCanada says the pipeline now has a projected start date of early 2020, rather than late 2018.
TransCanada previously halted work on the Cacouna terminal in December, after the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) recommended that the population of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River be labelled endangered. At the time, TransCanada said it was looking into what impacts Energy East would have on the belugas, and was reviewing “all viable options.” Now, the company says it’s been swayed to scrap plans for the terminal completely.
“This decision is the result of the recommended change in status of the Beluga whales to endangered and ongoing discussions we have had with communities and key stakeholders,” Russ Girling, TransCanada’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “We have listened and our decision reflects that.”

Since Energy East would carry the same tar sands oil that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline would carry and is being proposed by the same company, it has been seen as the main alternative to carry Canada’s tar sands oil to market if Keystone XL isn’t constructed. Like Keystone in the U.S., however, the proposed pipeline — which if approved would involve building new pipeline as well as converting hundreds of miles of natural gas pipeline into oil line — has run into significant opposition in Canada and in parts of the Northeast U.S. Last October, thousands of protesters marched through Cacouna in opposition to the pipeline and its Quebec terminal.

Some political leaders have also voiced their concerns about the project. Ontario Premiers Kathleen Wynne and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard said in November that, before they can sign off on the project, TransCanada must look into how Energy East will contribute to climate change. One report has found that the pipeline, which will have a higher capacity than Keystone XL, will contribute significantly: last year, Canada’s Pembina Institute found that Energy East could create more greenhouse gas emissions than Keystone XL, generating 30 million to 32 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year, compared with Keystone’s 22 million metric tons.

Even though the cancellation of the Cacouna terminal doesn’t spell the end for Energy East, it’s still a win for opponents. Some Canadians, including well-known environmentalist David Suzuki, have been fighting for months to halt TransCanada’s work in Cacouna and protect the belugas’ St. Lawrence habitat. The concern for the belugas isn’t surprising: The whales have had a difficult past in the St. Lawrence, struggling with whaling in the early and mid 1900’s and pollution that caused cancer, blood poisoning, and hepatitis. Last September, a researcher warned that the river’s whales were on a “catastrophic trajectory,” and that the Energy East terminal would do little to help the creatures.
Now, opponents are focused on killing the Energy East Pipeline altogether.

“Yes it’s a win, but ultimately the entire project needs to be scrapped,” Andrea Harden-Donahue, energy and climate campaigner at the Council of Canadians, told Reuters. “I think we’re going to see more municipalities taking a stand on this, more landowners. I think (aboriginal group) opposition along the route is strong and growing.”

[mistermack]

Scientists who argued the global was warming won out, culminating in the testimony of NASA scientist James Hansen who testified before Congress in 1986 that carbon dioxide would warm the planet 2 to 4 degrees by 2010.

That just about sums up climate ''science''.
And they're still at it now.

[Seth]

Scientists who argued the global was warming won out, culminating in the testimony of NASA scientist James Hansen who testified before Congress in 1986 that carbon dioxide would warm the planet 2 to 4 degrees by 2010.

That just about sums up climate ''science''.
And they're still at it now.

Yup, except it's worse now because the bureaucrats have figured out they can use the "crisis" to increase their power and control.

[mistermack]

Yup, except it's worse now because the bureaucrats have figured out they can use the "crisis" to increase their power and control.