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2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #40
Posted on 2 October 2016 by John Hartz
Story of the Week... SkS Highlights... Toon of the Week... Quotes of the Week... Graphic of the Week... SkS in the News... SkS Spotlights... Video of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... Climate Feedback Reviews... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...
Story of the Week...
To much fanfare, global leaders have agreed to tackle the climate crisis by ratifying the Paris climate agreement, but a group of esteemed scientists is warning that current pledges to reduce emissions are far from sufficient and, in fact, put the world on track to reaching the dangerous 2°C climate threshold by 2050.
"The pledges are not going to get even close," said Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and lead author of a new report out Thursday. "If you governments of the world are really serious, you're going to have to do way, way more."
Aptly titled The Truth About Climate Change, the report, put forth by the Argentina-based Universal Ecological Fund (Fundación Ecológica Universal FEU-US), comes amid a rash of new research, all suggesting that key global warming thresholds will be reached much more rapidly than previously thought.
Forget Paris, Scientists Say 'Radical Change' Only Way to Stay Below 2 Degrees by Lauren MaCauley, Common Dreams, Sep 30, 2016
SkS Highlights...
Using the metric of comments garnered, the two most popular articles posted on SkS during the past week are:
- IPCC special report to scrutinise ‘feasibility’ of 1.5C climate goal by Roz Pidcock (Carbon Brief)
- Global weirding with Katharine Hayhoe: Episode 1 by KTTZ Texas Tech Public Media
Toon of the Week...
Quotes of the Week...
New research suggesting that the planet might already be committed to vastly greater warming than previously thought is being dismissed as deeply flawed by prominent climate scientists.
A study published today in one of the world's top science journals, Nature, offers the most complete reconstruction to date of global sea-surface temperatures for the past two million years—a valuable addition to the climate record, scientists say.
But the conclusions the study's author drew from that research—that even preventing any further increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could still leave the Earth doomed to a catastrophic temperature rise of up to 7 degrees Celsius (about 13 degrees Fahrenheit)—isn't supported by the data, several top scientists said.
"This is simply wrong," said Gavin Schmidt, chief of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Jeffrey Severinghaus, a paleoclimatologist at Scripps Institution for Oceanography in San Diego, was equally vehement, arguing that the study's result isn't logical: "It's based on a fundamental mistake," he said. "The problematic conclusion doesn't flow from the main meat of the paper."
Global Warming Is Real—But 13 Degrees? Not So Fast by Graig Welch, National Geographic, Sep 26, 2016
Graphic of the Week...
Scripps Institute of Oceanography Mauna Loa Observatory / Climate Central
SkS in the News...
Professors weigh in on the climate change debate by Alexandra Karlesses posted on The Review (University of Delaware) includes:
Ninety to 100 percent of publishing climate scientists have opposing views to Legates, according to John Cook, a supporter of climate change and the author of “Skeptic Science,” a blog that maintains that human-caused climate change is occurring.
In his article, Scientific Consensus: Why Should We Accept It? posted on Futurism, Robert Sanders writes:
A recently published paper by John Cook along with seven other authors of climate change studies found that 97% of publishing climate science endorse the consensus position of anthropogenic climate change. Further, the paper found that the studies conducted by more expert scientists reaffirmed the consensus more.
SkS Spotlights...
From WXshft's About page...
Your forecast, with climate context. Your weather, explained. Your world, made a little clearer.
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We're here to simply make your day brighter (unless it's raining, of course).
Video of the Week...
Coming Soon on SkS
- The future belongs to clean energy (Anders Runevad)
- Mapped: How Germany generates its electricity (Simon Evans & Rosamund Pearce)
- DOE charts show why we should be optimistic about stopping global warming (Dana)
- Video: Laurence Tubiana on the 1.5C questions scientists need to answer (Leo Hickman)
- Scientists: How the new focus on 1.5C is reshaping climate research (Roz Pidcock)
- 2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #41 (John Hartz)
- 2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Waming Digest #41 (John Hartz)
Poster of the Week...
Climate Feedback Reviews...
Climate Feedback's team of experts analyze the article, “Climate Exaggeration is Backfiring” by Robert Bradley Jr. (Forbes, Sep 23, 2016) and concludes:
Nine scientists analyzed the article and estimated its overall scientific credibility to be ‘very low’.
Click here to access the detailed review.
SkS Week in Review...
- 2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #40 by John Hartz
- Sensitivity training by Andy Skuce
- Global weirding with Katharine Hayhoe: Episode 1 by KTTZ Texas Tech Public Media
- New MIT app: check if your car meets climate targets by Dana Nuccitelli (Climate Consensus - the 97%, Guardian)
- IPCC special report to scrutinise ‘feasibility’ of 1.5C climate goal by Roz Pidcock (Carbon Brief)
- The Madhouse Effect of climate denial by John Abraham (Climate Consensus - the 97%, Guardian)
- 2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #39 by John Hartz
97 Hours of Consensus...
Disapointed in the cartoon this week showing inappropriate levity on a deadly serious subject
The people who force women to wear these disgusting garments are deliberately trying to upset westerners and stir up trouble.
The burkini is not a new swimwear fashion; it’s the transmission of a political project, against society, founded notably upon the subjection of women.
Some people try to portray those who wear them as victims, as though we were calling liberty into question. But there is no liberty to subjugate women. There needs to be far stronger penalties imposed on those who insist on using our family beaches to further their political hatreds.
Leslie Graham: The cartoon drives home how difficult it has been for the negative consequences of manmade climate change to compete with other events for attention by the media and society.
Nice quote from Ken. Just replace "little old ladies" with "vulnerable countries" that do not contribute to AGW but bear most of its consequences, and you've got a true picture. Or, in temporal space, replace "little old ladies" with "future generations".
AGW is firstly a social problem, and then environmental problem. The fact that w're dealing with its denial, confirms we have a social problem here. If it was environmental problem only, it'd be far easier to fix.
Re #1: Some Moslem women wear the various forms of dress because it makes them feel more comfortable. Period.
My daugher married into an immigrant semi-Moslem family. Her mother-in-law (Phi Beta Kappa, Bryn Mawr) wears a hijab to prayer, otherwise dresses like most American women (albeit more tastefully). One of her daughters is more conservative. My daughter and son-in-law are fully secular. A fine family.
My wife, who is Hispanic by upbringing and modest by nature, had trouble appearing in public in a traditional one-piece swimsuit. Her friends at church told her they'd die to have a figure like hers to show off in a swimsuit.
My daugher went to college in France for a couple of years. She and some Americans went to a beach topless. Today she laughs about it; she had a very difficult time being blasé about it at first, but then she got used to it; to the French girls in her group, the American girls were funny.
Leslie Graham: Cool it.