Arguments
2013 SkS Weekly Digest #49
Posted on 8 December 2013 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights
Climate Change: Years of Living Dangerously by Rob Painting is about the new television series on climate change being made by for the U.S. Showtime cable televison network. The series, produced by Hollywood heavyweights James Cameron and Jerry Weintrub, examines the impacts of climate change on people around the world. This posting, including video, garnered the most commebnts of the articles posted on SkS during the past week.
Toon of the Week
h/t to I Heart Climate Scientists
Quote of the Week
The paper 'Assessing "Dangerous Climate Change": Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature' (pdf) is being published today in the leading open-access journal PLOS ONE. A 2-page paper summary + 4-page opinion (Hansen & Kharecha) re policy implications is available here (pdf) or from my web site.
The paper was written to provide the scientific basis for legal actions against federal and state governments, in the United States and other nations, for not doing their job of protecting the rights of young people. The legal actions being filed by Our Children's Trust ask the courts to require the government to provide a plan for how they will reduce fossil fuel emissions consistent with stabilizing climate.
We dispute the common assumption that the world necessarily is going to develop all fossil fuels that can be found, thus making large global warming inevitable. Humanity does not need to be a bunch of lemmings headed over a cliff. Indeed, appropriate policies that phase out fossil fuel emissions over decades would be economically and environmentally beneficial. The editors of PLOS ONE, noting our statement "...there is still an opportunity for humanity to exercise free will", are establishing a "Responding to Climate Change" Collection in the journal PLOS ONE. They invite paper submissions in all areas of research and a broad range of disciplines aimed at returning Earth to a state of energy balance.
Assessing "Dangerous Climate Change", from James Hansen, Dec 3, 2013
SkS Week in Review
- Swedish translation of The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism by Baerbel W
- 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #49B by John Hartz
- Media failure on Iraq War repeated in climate change coverage by Stephan Lewandowsky
- Climate Change: Years of Living Dangerously by Rob Painting
- Experts say the IPCC underestimated future sea level rise by John Abraham
- 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #49A by John Hartz
- Cowtan and Way (2013) is now open access by Kevin C
- How do meteorologists fit into the 97% global warming consensus? by Dana
Coming Soon on SkS
- New Video: Making the Plio Scene – What the Past tells us about Sea Level (Peter Sinclair)
- 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50A (John Hartz)
- Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows (Dana)
- Behind the Lines: Herschel's Discovery of IR (jg)
- Why is Antarctic Sea Ice Growing? (Guy Williams)
- 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50B (John Hartz)
- South Scores 11th-Hour Win on Climate Loss and Damage (Stephen Leahy)
- Provisional Statement on Status of Climate in 2013 (John Hartz)
- 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50C (John Hartz)
In the Works
- Climate Risk Index 2014: Haiti, Philippines and Pakistan most affected (John Hartz)
- Comments on the Purpose of Privacy (Rob Honeycutt)
- Rebuttal to the myth 'CO2 is saturated' (Glenn Tamblyn & jg)
SkS in the News
In his Discover blog post, The Climate Bomb Redux, Tom Yulsman critically reviews SkS's Hiroshima atom bomb widget.
Boston Globe columnist distorts survey and study to deny climate consensus, on Climate Science Watch. contains links to both the TCP and the SkS profile of Richard Lindzen.
Eli Rabbet introduces and imports the Hiroshima atom bomb widget in his Rabbet Run blog post, The Pearl Clutcher's Aghast.
SkS Spotlights
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media provides original reporting, commentary, and analysis on climate change — one of the most important and challenging issues of our time.
Edited by veteran environmental journalist and journalism educator Bud Ward, our online publication engages a dynamic global community of journalists, scientists, educators, and communicators. We strive to improve understanding of, and nurture better communication on, climate change … for the benefit of the public in arriving at sound individual and public policy actions.
We invite comments from those who educate on causes, consequences, challenges, and approaches on climate change. Share your ideas, experiences, successes, and challenges. Constructively engage with our community to foster better understanding of the climate challenges facing society.
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media is an initiative of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, directed by Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
I like the cartoon (I was glad to see it run in our local paper).There were also voices over the last few decades that could have been shown in those boxes expressing greater and greater alarm at inaction in the face of ever-more-clear threats, who also now have to say that it is too late to avoid unimaginably bad and now inevitable consequences of our past inaction. But of course further inaction (which is what seems to be in the cards at this point) will further doom us to even worse consequences.
I see that it looks as though Dana's upcoming piece "Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows" will likely be along something like those lines.
This news may inspire the knucle-head denialists, because their own conservative hero-president attitude:
Reagan eco-warrior
It's funny how the author's trying to explain with his/er text averything controversial, i.e. latest "GW slowed down...".
Certainly, the Montreal Protocol contributed to e.g. the birth of the meme that James Hansen "over-estimated rate of warming" back in 1988. But the latest hiatus in surface temp increase has little to do with Montreal...