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2016 SkS Weekly Digest #8
Posted on 21 February 2016 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights... El Niño's Status... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... He Said What?... SkS in the News... SkS Spotlights... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...
SkS Highlights
Republicans' favorite climate chart has some serious problems by Dana Nuccitelli (Climate Consensus - the 97%) attracted the highest number of comments of the the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Tracking the 2°C Limit - January 2016 by Rob Honeycutt garnered the second highest number of comments. This climate scientist has tried really hard to get a date by Howard Lee generated the third highest.
El Niño's Status
Current climate event is still strong but it is too early to say whether it will be most powerful on record, says World Meteorological Organisation.
El Niño has passed peak strength but impacts will continue, UN warns by Adam Vaughan and John Vidal, The Guardian, Feb 18, 2016
Toon of the Week
Quote of the Week
President Obama’s special envoy for climate change has warned Republican presidential hopefuls including Donald Trump and Ted Cruz that any attempt to scrap the Paris climate agreement would lead to a “diplomatic black eye” for the US.
Speaking to journalists in Brussels, Todd Stern also said that a recent supreme court decision to block Barack Obama’s clean power plan would not affect US climate pledges, or plans to formally sign up to the Paris agreement later this year.
Republican candidates such as Trump or Cruz who query climate science on the presidential stump would in practice be “very loathe” to set off the storm that would follow any ditching of the Paris accord, Stern argued.
“Paris as an agreement has such broad acceptance and support around the world from countries of every stripe and region and Paris itself was seen as such a landmark - hard-fought, hard-won - deal that for the US to turn around and say ‘we are withdrawing from Paris’ would inevitably give the country a diplomatic black eye,” he said.
“When President Bush took the US out of Kyoto – which in retrospect was in fact a quite flawed document - he took lots and lots of diplomatic flak and that, I think, would pale in comparison to what would happen if a president took us out of Paris, which is seen as a strong viable structure that all countries have now bought into.”
Donald Trump warned against scrapping Paris climate deal by Arthur Neslen, The Guardian, Feb 16, 2016
He Said What?
Back when he was a mere Reality TV star, Donald Trump published a less-than-140-character dissertation on climate change. “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” That tweet from Election Day, 2012, drew 40,000 retweets or likes.
Donald & Ted’s Excellent Climate Adventure by Peter Dykstra, The Daily Climate, Feb 20. 2016
SkS in the News
The US News & World Report article, Climate Change's Unseen Consensus by Sander van der Linden, Edward Maibach, Anthony Leiserowitz opens with:
In the history of science, there have been few instances in which almost all experts in a particular field were in complete agreement. Climate change is one of those instances. Nearly two decades of research has converged on the following fact: Over 97 percent of climate scientists have independently concluded that human-caused global warming is happening.
In his Bad Astronomy blog post, Climate Quickies: Scientists (Briefly) Discuss Climate Change Phil Plait states that SkS is his "go-to for most basic debunking."
SkS Spotlights
The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) is an independent scientific analysis produced by four research organisations tracking climate action and global efforts towards the globally agreed aim of holding warming below 2°C, since 2009.
The CAT Consortium
Coming Soon on SkS
- Fossil fuel funded think tank report poses as climate science (John Abraham)
- Uncertainty Handbook Translations (Baerbel)
- Global warming is happening 50 times faster than when Earth comes out of an ice age (Dana)
- US seafood species highly vulnerable to climate change, study says (Robert McSweeney)
- How Exxon Overstates the Uncertainty in Climate Science (John H. Cushman Jr.)
- 2016 SkS Weekly News Roundup #9 (John Hartz)
- 2016 SkS Weekly Digest #9 (John Hartz)
Poster of the Week
SkS Week in Review
- 2016 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8 by John Hartz
- Republicans' favorite climate chart has some serious problems by Dana Nuccitelli (Climate Consensus - the 97%)
- Explainer: how surface and satellite temperature records compare by Roz Pidcock (Carbon Brief)
- Tracking the 2°C Limit - January 2016 by Rob Honeycutt
- Checking Ted Cruz's climate science denial howlers by Graham Readfearn (Planet Oz, The Guardian)
- This climate scientist has tried really hard to get a date by Howard Lee
- 2016 SkS Weekly Digest #7 by John Hartz
97 Hours of Consensus: Donald Wuebbles
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