Arguments
2014 SkS Weekly Digest #48
Posted on 30 November 2014 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights
Mercury Rising: 2014 Likely to Surpass 2010 as Warmest Year on Record by Rob Painting garnered the most comments of the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Dana's The latest global warming bill and the Republican conundrum attracted the second highest number.
El Niño Watch
"With the Thanksgiving holiday fast approaching; my thoughts are quickly shifting from trying to make sense of the current ENSO picture to heaping mounds of stuffing and turkey. With that in mind and with full realization that this is one of the busiest travel days of the year, I tried to keep today’s ENSO blog post simple, involving a question I was asked repeatedly during my recent trip to California:
"What’s the deal with El Niño and California rainfall? An El Niño means lots of rain, right?"
Fun with Statistics: El Niño and California Rainfall by Tom Di Liberto, NOAA/Climate.gov, Nov 26, 2014
Toon of the Week
h/t to I Heart Climate Scientists
Quote of the Week
"The 2-degree target is a great idea," Granger Morgan, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, told NBC News. "But we have been so slow in doing anything much about controlling emissions that the accumulative effects are building up on us and … I just do not see the political will to limit emissions to the degree that will be needed to stay below 2 degrees."
Nevertheless, he added, the world urgently needs to get serious about tackling climate change "because otherwise it is going to be much worse."
We're Kidding Ourselves on 2-Degree Global Warming Limit: Experts by John Roach, NBC News, Nov 26, 2014
SkS in the News
Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, Cook et al, 2013, Environmental Research Letters is cited in:
- Choosing who to believe when it comes to climate change, an op-ed by Ron Reid published in the Orillia (Ontario) Packet, and
- Republican Senator: GOP Needs To Develop Real Position On Climate Policy by Emily Atkin, Climate Progress.
SkS Spotlights
Coming Soon on SkS
- 97 Hours - the Turkish edition (BaerbelW)
- Volcanoes may be responsible for most of the global surface warming slowdown (Dana)
- Drought and Deforestation in Brazil (Alexandre Lacerda)
- 2014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #49A (John Hartz)
- To slow global warming, focus needs to be on carbon pollution (John Abraham)
- North Pacific warming (Rob Painting)
- 2014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #49B (John Hartz)
- 2014 SkS Weekly Digest #49 (John Hartz)
Poster of the Week
SkS Week in Review
- 2014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #48B by John Hartz
- The Chinese scientific revolution aims to tackle climate change by John Abraham
- Mercury Rising: 2014 Likely to Surpass 2010 as Warmest Year on Record by Rob Painting
- 2014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #48A by John Hartz
- The latest global warming bill and the Republican conundrum by Dana
- Will New Climate Treaty Be a Thriller, or Shaggy Dog Story? by Stephen Leahy
- 2014 SkS Weekly Digest #47 by John Hartz
The cartoon is actually an insult to the flat earth society, which does accept AGW. flat earth society accepts global warming
RealClimate is covering a recent article on El Nino:
A clearer picture how climate change affects El Niño?
jimlj@1,
I've read a bit about Flat Earth Society and their arguments supporting "the alternative thinking" in hope of finding some novel idea they could be proud of. Sadly I found nothing but logical mistakes and non-sequitur reasoning in general.
So I disagree, the comparison of climarte science deniers logic to FES logic is quite accurate with respect of number and gravity of their logical falacies.
But interestingly, many climate science models are well compatible with FES model. The layered 1D greenhouse gas absorption model is a chief example. Even the most orthodox flat earther can easily accept it while we know that many climate ecience deniers reject it. In fact, given the precision of input data (e.g. the volume of glacial melt), we simply calcutate the SLR by dividing said volume by the area of the oceans, just like flat earthers. Because the sperical shape of the Earth (or even the water spilling into some low lying parts of continents) does not matter for the resulting numbers.
So for the practical purposes we can say, that climate deniers are even bigger science deniers than flat earthers.
It looks like the polar vortex has basically split in two. I believe that is rather...uncommon. Are there any news stories about it?
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=-15.56,74.65,282
wili, wow. That's a great graphic. If you search on 'Omega block' you should find a few stories from a couple weeks ago about the phenomenon responsible. Example.