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2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #47
Posted on 20 November 2016 by John Hartz
Story of the Week... SkS Highlights... Toon of the Week... La Niña Update... Quote of the Week... Graphic of the Week... SkS Spotlights... Video of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...
Story of the Week...
Fears that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will pull out of the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming pushed almost 200 nations at climate talks in Morocco on Thursday to declare action an "urgent duty".
Trump has called man-made global warming a hoax and has said he will withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which seeks to wean the global economy off fossil fuels this century with a shift to renewable energies such as wind and solar power.
In a statement, the ministers at the meeting said momentum for cutting greenhouse gases was "irreversible" and reaffirmed their commitment to "full implementation" of the Paris accord.
"We call for the highest political commitment to combat climate change, as a matter of urgent priority," they said in the Marrakesh Action Proclamation.
"Our climate is warming at an alarming and unprecedented rate and we have an urgent duty to respond," it said. Delegates applauded and joined hands above their heads in a standing ovation after the proclamation was read out.
"We call for the highest political commitment to combat climate change, as a matter of urgent priority" by Alister Doyle and Nina Chestney, Reuters, Nov 17, 2016
For more reporting on what transpired at Cop 22 in Marrakesh, see:
- Poor nations pledge deep emissions cuts at Marrakech summit by Arthur Neslen, Guardian, Nov 18, 2016
- "We call for the highest political commitment to combat climate change, as a matter of urgent priority" by Alister Doyle and Nina Chestney, Reuters, Nov 17, 2016
- COP22 headlines: what did Marrakech climate summit deliver? by Megan Darby, Karl Mathiesen, Ed King & Lou Del Bello, Climate Home, Nov 18, 2016
- COP22: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Marrakech by Sophie Yeo, Carbon Brief, Nov 19, 2016
To access the official COP 22 website of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), click here.
Toon of the Week...
La Niña Update...
According to the latest forecasts, 2016/17 should be stamped in history as an official La Niña season. And although its relative weakness has somewhat downplayed its existence, La Niña is already halfway through its run.
La Niña is the cool phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which is very closely monitored by commodity markets as ENSO is one of the most reliable long-term indicators of weather patterns on the global scale.
In its monthly ENSO discussion last week, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center issued a "La Niña Advisory," its first official recognition of the phenomenon’s presence. The agency left the probability for weak La Niña to persist through the Northern Hemispheric winter months unchanged at 55 percent.
La Niña cycle halfway complete - what's next? by Karen Braun, Reuters, Nov 16, 2016
Quote of the Week...
Now we know that many other industries have learned from Big Tobacco’s playbook. Physicians hired by the National Football League have questioned the evidence that concussions can cause brain disease, and soda sellers have financed research to deny that sugar causes obesity. And climate deniers have conducted a kind of scavenger hunt for oddities that appear to challenge the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists.
Climate Change in Trump’s Age of Ignorance, Opinion by Robert Proctor, Sunday Review, New York Times, Oct 19, 2016
Graphic of the Week...
America’s TV meteorologists: Symptoms of climate change are rampant, undeniable, Opinion by Paul Douglas, Capital Weather Gang, Washington Post, Nov 18, 2016
SkS Spotlights...
The PRISM Climate Group gathers climate observations from a wide range of monitoring networks, applies sophisticated quality control measures, and develops spatial climate datasets to reveal short- and long-term climate patterns. The resulting datasets incorporate a variety of modeling techniques and are available at multiple spatial/temporal resolutions, covering the period from 1895 to the present. Whenever possible, we offer these datasets to the public, either free of charge or for a fee (depending on dataset size/complexity and funding available for the activity).
- Methods used by the PRISM model
- Descriptions of the PRISM datasets
- How we developed the PRISM model
- Publications about PRISM
- Calendar of PRISM dataset updates
- What's new at PRISM
Video of the Week...
The COP stands for the “Conference of the Parties.” It is the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), opened for signature in 1992 during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and later entered into force in 1994.
The ZME Science team was at the event for two weeks and shared loads of news and impressions about the discussions and activities that took place at the summit.
For full articles and more information visit: www.zmescience.com
Coming Soon on SkS...
- Groups working with Republicans on climate are discouraged, but see a glimmer of hope (Dana)
- Mitigation in Australia (Riduna)
- Rating Canada's Climate Policy (Jim Byrne)
- Guest Post (John Abraham)
- Global weirding Episode 5 (Katharine Hayhoe)
- 2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #48 (John Hartz)
- 2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Waming Digest #48 (John Hartz)
Poster of the Week...
SkS Week in Review...
- 2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #47 by John Hartz
- Two Scientists' Upbeat Views on Marrakech by greenman3610 & Bud Ward (Yale Climate Connections)
- Trump begins filling environmental posts with clowns by John Abraham (Climate Consensus -the 97%, Guardian)
- What President Trump means for the future of energy and climate by Mark Barteau (Conversation US)
- US election: Climate scientists react to Donald Trump’s victory by Carbon Brief Staff (Carbon Brief)
- On Trump and climate, America is split in two by these demographics by Dana Nuccitelli (Climate Consensus -the 97%, Guardian)
- 2016 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #46 by John Hartz
97 Hours of Consensus...
Quote derived with permission from author from:
"So here's the thing. It sounds like a simple question. Is CO2 produced by man's activities causing the planet to warm up? But to answer that question, to make a clear attribution to carbon dioxide, you have to know something about all of these other agents of change. But the fact is we do know a lot about all of those things. You know, thousands of scientists have been working on understanding all of these man-made causes and the natural causes. And we've got it worked out, and we can say, "Yes, CO2 is causing the planet to warm up now."
If there is global warming then CO2 is not the cause.
Go and look elsewhere.
[JH] This comment is pure, unadulterated sloganeering which is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy.
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Every 2500 molecules in the air has only one CO2 molecule.
And you think it will make a change. Hoax.
[JH] Sloganeering snipped.
[PS] This discussion belongs on "CO2 is just a trace gas" myth. I wonder if Plato would enter a room with only 1 in 2500 molecules being HCN?
plato525 @1 and @2 shows all the commitment to clear reasoning we have come to expect from AGW deniers /sarc.
With regard to his post @2, taking a different angle - Iron represents 670 ppmv of the human body. By plato525's implicity reasoning, changes in its proportion in the human body can make no difference. Much of that iron, however, is found in various globulins, of which the best known is haemoglobin. Without iron, there is no haemoglobin, and hence no transport of oxygen from the lungs to the muscles. Without iron in the body, that is, we would suffocate in seconds.
Of course, with too much iron (50 ppm by mass) in your dietary intake will result in severe iron poisoning. If sustained, it will you will suffer acute pain as you vomit blood more or less continuously untill you eventually die of kidney failure.
This is just one more example among thousands in which plato525's "reasoning" simply fails. In fact, the counterexamples to his claim are so numerous, and so well known that his claim is not entitled to the claim of reasoning. It is, most likely, empty rhetoric; and quite possibly a belief siezed on desperately to avoid thinking clearing on the topic.
Tom Curtis @3,
You may not recall plato525's previous visit to SkS a three months back in which the "video experiment with the black color solution that was added to water in a glass container to show the amount of CO2" was sought. It appears plato525 found the demonstration unconvincing.
And as plato525 is not what you'd call chatty, establishing why he remains unconvinced, or indeed the reasons for his apparent doubt on there being rising global temperatures @1 or his branding AGW as "hoax" @2; all this may remain unresolved.