Global Climate Change Science News

[pErvinalia]

Thanks for finding this Hermit. I was sure he said it. Makes you wonder how much of his arguments are full of made up bullshit.

[Animavore]

See? Not all of the Rockerfellas are bad.

A Rockefeller explains: Why I lost faith in Exxon Mobil, and donated my shares

My great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Sr., created the Standard Oil Company and I inherited shares in the companies it spun off, including Exxon Mobil. But this year I donated those shares to the nonprofit Rockefeller Family Fund's Environmental program, which sold them and is using the $400,000 proceeds to fight global warming.

I lost faith in Exxon Mobil's future value. A prime reason is that Exxon's valuation is based largely on the immense untapped reserves of oil and gas it owns. And yet if future generations are to inherit a livable world, most of those reserves must stay in the ground.

Cynics may say that foreknowledge of the dire consequences won't stop humanity from using this fossil fuel. I would answer that Exxon Mobil may not have any choice in the matter. The company bases its growth and stability projections on increasing its sale of fossil fuels to developing countries. And yet those are the places that will be hurt first and worst by climate change — indeed, many are already suffering the effects. As those nations confront ecological harm and consequent economic damage — in some cases even possible economic collapse — will they really provide Exxon Mobil with the growth it forecasts?

In shareholder resolutions and meetings with company representatives over the last 15 years, I and other members of my family have argued that it is shortsighted for Exxon to insist on remaining “an oil and gas company” — rather than evolving into an energy company prepared to transition to a post-carbon economy. I thought the company was being foolish. But we now know it was worse: it was being deceitful, in a way that is almost unimaginably heartless to future generations.

cont... http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la ... ign=buffer


Now if only the rest of the denialist, useful idiots who've been buying into the Exxon's lies would open their fucking eyes.

[Animavore]

Car maker Ford has ended its relationship with the climate-denial lobbyist group ALEC, the Guardian reports, joining tech companies like Google, Facebook, eBay, and Yelp, as well as the energy companies like Shell and BP in distancing themselves from the Koch-funded network.

A company spokesman told the watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy “we will not be participating in ALEC in 2016,” citing its “annual budget review.” CMD uncovered Ford’s financial ties to ALEC in November.

“Ford appeared to be very happy to quietly fund ALEC when its membership was secret, but now that the relationship has become public it has become a liability,” Nick Surgey, CMD’s director of research, told the Guardian.

The issue is that Ford wants consumers to believe that it prioritizes environmental sustainability, while ALEC aggressively pursues a legislative agenda that would limit environmental regulations on big businesses.

http://gawker.com/ford-cuts-ties-with-r ... 1759797786

Guess siding with liars for fossil is turning out to be bad business.

[Animavore]

Could you have any less credibility? The desperation is leaking out of every orifice at this stage.

Climate models, and the predictions they make, are based on physics. We know how much more energy is trapped on Earth when we increase the greenhouse effect, and we have a good idea how much this trapped heat will warm the planet. We’ve understood these physical scientific concepts for over 150 years.

When climate contrarians make their own predictions, they tend to throw physics out the window. For example, as documented in my book and a paper I recently published with Rasmus Benestad and colleagues, contrarians have made climate predictions based on things like the orbital cycles of Jupiter and Saturn, ocean cycles and sunspots, and “natural fluctuations,” but they often completely disregard the basic, long-understood physics of the increasing greenhouse effect.

And so we have the latest such unphysical climate prediction, made in a report by Loughborough University statistics professor Terence Mills, on behalf of the anti-climate policy advocacy group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The report essentially fits a statistical model to past global and local surface temperature changes, and then uses that statistical model to forecast future temperature changes. It’s an approach that’s been used to predict financial market changes, for example.

The obvious flaw in this application is that the Earth’s climate is a physical system, and the statistical model includes no physics whatsoever. You simply cannot accurately predict how a physical system will change if you ignore physics, like the increasing greenhouse effect. As DeSmogUK put it, the GWPF report predicts no global warming by ignoring the main cause of global warming.

cont. http://www.skepticalscience.com/GWPF-th ... fawns.html


And from the comments.

The technical basis of this GWPF Technical Paper No1 actually rests on a method that is well known here at SkS. The result rests wholly on the method employed to identify the break-points in the HadCRUT4 & RSS TLT data series. This method is not without its critics so GWPF Technical Paper No1 presents the reasons for employing this method in Note 9. And these reasons are that the 'author' (posh word for kid with crayon) Terence C. Mills of Loughborough University (likely attached to the university's kindergarden) feels he can argue that (firstly) alternative methods are less well developed that his chosen approach and (secondly) break-points can be identified over the full length of the data series when using his chosen method.

This chosen method thus allows him a level of flexibility unavailable with any of the alternatives.

The method utilises a very powerful piece of equipment call a Mk1 Eyeball. Yes, you have it right. The kid with the crayon is cherry-picking his breakpoints visually. Note 9 does make plain that other break-points can still be considered but the kid with the crayon is happy to ignore any of that and go with his prediction for temperatures out to 2020. And I note there is some press coverage showing that the kid with the crayon has got his hands on a longer ruler than the one used in GWPF Technical Paper No1. He is reported predicting global tempertatures out to 2100(And they are talking years not hours!!) based solely on the data 2002-2014. The kid may well know that short sets of noisy data (less than 18 years or so) give statistically unsound results but he probably hasn't learnt to count up to eighteen yet.

[Animavore]

Exxon, after getting fucking busted big time last year lying about climate change, have changed their tune from denialism to apathy.

Exxon Mobil has devised a bizarre new argument to wriggle away from its shareholders’ demands: Humanity can’t fix the problem we created, so we shouldn’t even try. Yep — as it turns out, Exxon Mobil’s shareholders care a lot more about climate change than the company itself does.

The planet’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company challenged a resolution about climate change regulations from its own shareholders on Friday, arguing that it’s a practical improbability that the emissions-restricting goals set forth by the recent climate accord in Paris will actually be achieved. Therefore, Exxon Mobil says, it shouldn’t have to address the impact that the regulations would have on its business.

“It’s a little bit like a toddler putting their fingers in their ears and saying, ‘If I can’t hear you then what you’re saying isn’t true,'” Shanna Cleveland, manager of the Carbon Asset Risk Initiative, told InsideClimate.

The resolution, originally brought by the New York State Comptroller and four other Exxon Mobil shareholders earlier this week, had asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to force the company to address how its business would be impacted by climate mitigation efforts. Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, whose office manages a state pension fund that has a large stake in the oil and gas giant, told Reuters that investors “need to know how Exxon Mobil’s bottom line will be impacted by the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and what the company plans to do about it.”

For decades, other investors have been filing resolutions asking Exxon Mobil to take action on climate change, with most of them falling on deaf ears. Among their demands: Transparency about its anti-climate action lobbyists, a board member devoted to climate issues, and even a request for it to take “moral responsibility” for its contribution to climate change.

With Exxon Mobil blatantly ignoring climate science on one hand and giving up on emissions regulations on the other, the company seems to have flipped from willful ignorance to purposeful complacency. We’re not sure which one is worse, but either way: Exxon Mobil is clearly a nightmare for the planet.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/exxon-m ... ign=buffer

[mistermack]

In other news, the climate is just about identical to what it was, when the scare started.

The winter was warm going in, and it's cold going out. Overall no fucking different to what it was forty years ago.

The north polar ice is a tiny bit less, on average. The south is about the same.

Hey ho, global warming will never warm this country up. You could die waiting, and we all probably will.

[Animavore]

I love the sound of desperate, extreme denialism in the morning. You don't even have your last, supposed, gambit any more.

Ted Cruz's favorite temperature data just got a lot hotter
A new paper makes Ted Cruz’s favorite chart obsolete, as atmospheric temperatures set a new record

In a new paper, Carl Mears and Frank Wentz at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) have revised their data set estimating the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere. At his recent congressional hearing, Ted Cruz presented the RSS data to incorrectly claim that there’s been no global warming in over 18 years.

As I noted at the time, RSS had the only data that could remotely support Senator Cruz’s argument. Surface and ocean temperatures have warmed, ice has melted, sea levels have risen, species have been forced to migrate, spring has begun earlier, and so on.

Even other estimates of the atmospheric temperature, of the same satellite data by scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH), and by weather balloons, indicate that the atmosphere is warming. Ted Cruz cherry picked RSS because it was the lone outlier that seemed to support his preferred argument against the need to take action to mitigate the risks posed by human-caused global warming.

That’s no longer the case. In their new paper, Mears and Wentz detail the revised RSS method to account for drift in the time of day at which satellites measure the same location on Earth (known as “diurnal drift”, discussed by Mears at the 0:47 mark in the above video). They applied a method suggested by Stephen Po-Chedley and colleagues at the University of Washington in an important paper covered by John Abraham last year. As a result, the new version of RSS (v4.0) shows about 60% more warming than the previous version (v3.3) since the record began in 1979.

RSS mid-troposphere temperature, v3.3 and v4.0.
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RSS mid-troposphere temperature, v3.3 and v4.0. Illustration: Mears & Wentz (2016), Journal of Climate.
This new adjustment also helps to reconcile the divergence between atmospheric temperature estimates from satellites and weather balloons. Over most of the temperature record, the estimates using the two different types of instruments have been similar, and the satellite data are calibrated with the weather ballon data. However, over the past decade, the weather balloons had shown significantly more atmospheric warming than the satellite estimates. RSS v4.0 goes a long way toward bringing these measurements into closer agreement.

Mid troposphere temperature estimates and linear trends (2006–2015) from RSS v3.3, RSS v4.0, UAH v6.0, and weather balloons (RATPAC).
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Mid troposphere temperature estimates and linear trends (2006–2015) from RSS v3.3, RSS v4.0, UAH v6.0, and weather balloons (RATPAC). Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli
As Joe Romm noted at Climate Progress, Roy Spencer and John Christy at UAH speculated over 4 years ago that the RSS diurnal drift correction method was introducing a cool bias into their record.

my UAH cohort and boss John Christy, who does the detailed matching between satellites, is pretty convinced that the RSS data is undergoing spurious cooling because RSS is still using the old NOAA-15 satellite which has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality.

This new paper and latest RSS adjustment once again highlight the challenges scientists face in converting measurements of atmospheric microwave emissions by satellites in orbit into a synthetic temperature estimate. It’s a complicated process that requires a complex model with large uncertainties involved, and as Carl Mears has noted, it’s certainly unwise to rely exclusively on these estimates of one small component of the Earth’s climate to evaluate global warming.

Nevertheless, Spencer has just reported that February 2016 was the hottest month on record in the UAH data set; the same is true of RSS, and weather balloons are also registering record hot atmospheric temperatures, as the above chart shows.

It’s now clear that Senator Cruz has been hoisted by his own petard. He and his hearing witnesses claimed that the satellite data from RSS represent our best measurement of global warming. While that’s not true, this latest correction to the RSS record shows that global warming continues, in the atmosphere as with every other component of the Earth’s climate, at record hot levels. Instead of congressional hearings denying the existence of global warming, we need hearings to debate the best way to solve the problem.

You're done here. The time for entertaining denialism is gone. It's for the rest of us who understand the problem to control the damage. Thankfully the divestment movement is in full swing. While the governments are doing nothing, banks, businesses and insurance companies are protecting their interests by switching from fossils. Meanwhile denialists are relegated to the annals of bad science along with flat-earthers and creationists. Hehe. And the idiots who believed the tobacco industry when they pulled the exact same shit.

[pErvinalia]

It was cold yesterday. Therefore global warming is a conspiracy.

[Animavore]

It was cold yesterday. Therefore global warming is a conspiracy.

Yes. A very elaborate conspiracy spanning multiple scientific disciplines and propagandised by literally every single scientific academy, involving billions of dollars spent on meticulous research programs from the ocean floor to outer space with thousands of migrating and going extinct animal and plant co-conspirators.

Sounds legit.

[Hermit]

In my view the fight by a few plucky billionaires in the fossil fuel industry against tens of thousands conspiratorial scientists is pointless because

[Animavore]

In my view the fight by a few plucky billionaires in the fossil fuel industry against tens of thousands conspiratorial scientists is pointless because

The fight of a few plucky billionaires? Haven't you been keeping up with the news? A trillion or so dollars are being divested from fossils to renewable sources this year and that figure is set to double next year. All across the globe tar sand production and franking is being stopped by people and indigenous tribes rightfully protecting their land and themselves. The oil industry is going down the shitter. As people are starting to see the effects of global warming, increased disaster and extreme weather they're starting to wake up to reality. Even in highly Republican areas such as Florida pressure is being put onto the government to do something.

As we see the fallout of lying, corrupt shits, ExxonMobil, getting sued by investors and investigated by the FBI we should see more of a swing from the public away from carbon. The message is becoming clear. If you're lying for carbon you're immoral. If you believe the lies you're a dangerous, but useful idiot. If you support fossil over carbon you or your business are unethical and need to be sidelined.

[Animavore]

Oops. Misread Hermit's post to read the opposite of what it said.

[Hermit]

So the battle isn't going well for the few plucky billionaires just now. This will change when the Middle Eastern oil cartel reduces productivity again or if the oil simply runs out. Then the rape of the environment will resume with increased ferocity. Shale oil, oil sands, drilling and pipelines in the Arctic and Antarctic. blowing a giant hole in the Great Barrier Reef to provide a shortcut for the transport of coal, fracking under people's homes and gardens, we'll get the lot again, only more so than in the past. It'll be explained to us that it's necessary due to immutable economic laws. "But rest assured," we'll be told, "there will be no leaks, spills or any other damage to the environment. Past damage was a one-off. All 100,000 instances of it. Trust us."

[Hermit]

Oops. Misread Hermit's post to read the opposite of what it said.

Yeah, sorry. I keep forgetting that the written word is in need of visible sarcasm tags at times, because intonation tends to be less obvious in textual communication.

[pErvinalia]

It's good to see a new young fella on the site take up the global warming fight. Without macdoc around, most of the rest of us couldn't be bothered.