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Comments 9801 to 9850:

  1. Climate denier scientists think these 5 arguments will persuade EU and UN leaders

    Looking like the same old army of "scientists" touting the same old shyte...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZzwRwFDXw0

  2. Climate denier scientists think these 5 arguments will persuade EU and UN leaders

    No informed person would consider your comments on cost of adaptation as “science.”  Your source of info is a 2015 article in The Guardian (journalists), who in turn rely on bankers who do not reveal their methods.

    Nordhaus, who just won the Nobel Prize for his work on the economics of climate change, advocates a target of 3C of warming. 

  3. Climate denier scientists think these 5 arguments will persuade EU and UN leaders

    BillyJoe, there is the link and more info about end of fossil fuels

  4. Climate denier scientists think these 5 arguments will persuade EU and UN leaders

    The OP suggests this silly denialist letter to the EU "represents the best case that climate deniers can make against the existence of a climate crisis." I feel that needs some qualification as it is a small set of denialists who came up with the silly five point 'oh-no-it's-not' rebuttal.

    At the end of January we hear of a large number of academics writing to the Belgian "federal and regional governments." I cannot see the actual letter sent but it did result in swivel-eyed denialists from the Netherlands responding with a point-by-point counter-argument which was quickly translated for the English-speaking deniosphere.

    (The authorship of the denial is given as the Climate Intelligence Foundation which is described as "a new Foundation that is funded by worried wealthy citizens. The Foundation focuses on independent public information. She does that by telling the entire climate story." somewhat similar to the nonsense spouted by the UK's GWPF who make out they are an educational charity (& thus trouser taxpayers money to fund their lies). The odd thing with this authorship for an OP posted 1st Feb 2019 is the Climate Intelligence Foundation (soon gaining the name CLINTEL) was not started until the end of March 2019, according to one of its co-founders. who says in this video that it will be set up "tomorrow" with the launch seemingly a couple of days later.)

    The point-by-point counter-argument of early Feb runs to seven points. The first five of these present identical argument to the silly denialist letter, although the letter has hardened the message a bit. The first five Feb points were -  (1) Climate has always changed with warming from 1850, (2) Calling recent warming 100% anthropogenic is unscientific, (3) There is no discernable trends in floods & droughts & plagues of frogs, (4) Models are hypersensitive to CO2 so any warming CO2 causes will be mild and nature can cool as well as warm. (5) The cost to Belgium & Holland of AGW mitigation is massive for "negligible and immeasurable" gain.

    (These five from February are pretty-much the same as the five in the silly denialist letter of August. The February version adds (6) AGW mitigation is not more cost-effective than doing nothing, (7) They mix up a clean environment, which all agree with, with AGW mitigation.)

    So the grand denialist message is no more than a knee-jerk response to a letter from Belgian academics supporting stronger action on AGW. That it has folk like Richard Lindzen signing-up to it when he disagrees with parts of it is presumably more a mark of solidarity than a mark of wholehearted agreement.

  5. Climate denier scientists think these 5 arguments will persuade EU and UN leaders

    You would think the authors of this letter might feel foolish regurgitating these stale , long debunked myths. But then, I suppose it's difficult to understand what they're paid not to. 

  6. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing

    Human 2932847 @27,

    We have been going round & round on this for some time now.
    The idea of a "debunk" being delivered by Seager et al (2002) suggests there is no disagreement today, yet that is surely not correct. The results of Seager et al (2002) are at variance with other more recent work, for instance Lui et al (2017).

    Consider the quantative results of Seager et al (2002). These were that the removal of the AMOC shows (his Fig 12) would drop "at most 2 degC ... south of 60ºN and about 3–6 degC ... between 60ºN and 70ºN." The major AMOC warming is seemingly pushed north to impact only Scandanavia. And if that is compared with the graphic from the Lui et al research up-thread @14, the UK is presented as 2ºC cooler and Scandanavia 3ºC cooler.
    This however is not Lui et al concuring with Seager et al. Far from it.

    The difference is that the values in the graphic @14 are in a 2xCO2 world on top of being without the AMOC. The northern hemisphere should therefore have warmed perhaps 3ºC and exhibit even more warming at the poles due to Arctic Amplification. Further, the temperature difference between the eastern coasts of the Pacific & the Atlantic are not "maintained" as in Seager eta al Table 1, but vastly increased.

    And do note that both these works Seager et al (2002) & Lui et al (2017) pre-date Lozier et al (2019) 'A sea change in our view of overturning in the subpolar North Atlantic'. (There is coverage of the paper by CarbonBrief.) If the AMOC shutdown were shifted eastward as the measurements set out by Lozier et al (2019) suggest, it would surely make a bit of a difference to the resulting change in European winter temperature. But this is all an area of active research so definitive results should not be expected right away.

    Finally, do note when proclaiming that an AMOC shutdown would "not be as catastrophic as once thought, but still problematic"  - its impacts extend beyond a cooler Europe. The 1 metre SLR along the eastern US coast would be a bit more than "problematic" as would the drying of the Sahel.

     

  7. Climate denier scientists think these 5 arguments will persuade EU and UN leaders

    Billy Joe @1, yeah fair comment and I know that. I was just paraphrasing the general situation, and I threw in a relevant link I came across recently. Didn't have time to really do much more.

  8. Climate denier scientists think these 5 arguments will persuade EU and UN leaders

    My link @1 doesn't work, it goes back to this page so its a problem with this website. The full link is:

    https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/peak-coal-will-the-us-run-out-of-coal-in-200-years-or-20-years#gs.38xwbx

    It's quite a good article. Probably not what the American Administration wants to hear.

  9. Climate denier scientists think these 5 arguments will persuade EU and UN leaders

    nigelj @ #1

    You link doesn't work.

    But the quoted headline says something different to what you said. I'm pretty sure that what they are saying is that the recovery of fossil fuels will become un-economical long before the world runs out of fossil fuels. In fact, the world will never run out of fossil fuel because some of it is not actually recoverable.

  10. Philippe Chantreau at 08:50 AM on 12 September 2019
    2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    No harm done :-)

  11. Climate denier scientists think these 5 arguments will persuade EU and UN leaders

    The same old people making the same old mistakes, probably deliberately. The world will run out of fossil fuels soon enough anyway, leaving no choice but to find other sources of energy. "The U.S. is rapidly approaching the end of economically recoverable coal".

    Moderator Response:

    [BW] Updated the link

  12. 2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    Mal Adapted, thanks for that chart and it coincides with my own views. I've seen several attempts to rank media bias, and they all look pretty similar, so whatever methods they use one might almost say there is a 'consensus'.

  13. 2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    Philippe with one 'l', sorry 8^(.

  14. 2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    Thank you, Phillippe.

    Here's a somewhat different chart of the same phenomenon. IMHO, a degree of subjectivity in such a project is ineradicable, although it may still be reducible.

  15. Philippe Chantreau at 02:19 AM on 12 September 2019
    2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    At first glance, the chart corresponds very exactly to my experience with the organizations that figure in it, so I'm tempted to say it is a sincere and effective effort. However, I agree with Mal Adapted that more needs to be done to verify and corroborate, and I'd like to know more about the methods.

  16. 2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    On the highly salient topic of media credibility: I recently became aware of patent attorney Vanessa Otero's media bias chart. Some of you may also be intrigued. The current version 4.0 is the product of a well-documented team effort. I'm still skeptical (i.e. not yet convinced, but willing to be) of the chart's intersubjective verifiability, so I'll study the documentation some more. 

  17. 2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    prove we are smart @4

    Fair comments. The thing to do is understand how the mainstream media are biased and when they are unreliable, and use that as a filter when you read it.

    Most mainstream media is owned by corporate leaning interests and investment funds, with the sort of bias that brings.  Mass media also exaggerates some problems to get attention, but probably not so much the climate issue. The media wont want to annoy their advertisers many of whom have vested interests in fossil fuels. So the mainstream media does have some fake news, but not of the sort Donald Trump alleges. 

    Of course alternative sources of information all have their own biases, mostly. But you know that. So have the critical thinking skills switched on!

    Non partisan, non aligned  think tanks can be useful.

  18. One Planet Only Forever at 08:07 AM on 11 September 2019
    2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    "Manufacturing Consent" is actually a 1988 book.

    And a movie with the same name was made 1992.

  19. One Planet Only Forever at 08:04 AM on 11 September 2019
    2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    prove we are smart@4,

    A good explanation of a significant part of the problem of the 'stories that get told and incorrectly become popularly believed' is provided by Edward S. Herman's Propaganda Model presented in the 1987 book "Manufacturing Consent" (written with input from Noam Chomsky), and reviewed and updated in the 2019 book "Propaganda in the Information Age" by Alan MacLeod. 

  20. Skeptical Science New Research for Week #36, 2019

    We cannot quantify the effects of climate change and all possible feedback loops and tipping points to unstable chaotic systems. The correct analogy (as the author points out) is not a discount rate that quantifies the damage, but an insurance policy, like fire insurance. You don't invest in insurance to discount the damage, you do it to mitigate and hedge the risk. That's why with airplanes and nuclear plants, you go for 100% safety — you don't discount the likely damages. Think Boeing 737.

  21. SkS Analogy 20 - The Tides of Earth

    SkS’s ditty on Milankovitch cycles is better than most at explaining the mechanics involved given the difficult subject, yet I did notice a possible rough spot there: the Earth’s orbital plane, or ecliptic (Fig. 5 on that page). Shouldn’t this remain nearly fixed in space over as short a time as 41000 years, so that changes in its orientation can be ignored when discussing changes in the obliquity of Earth’s axis? The Earth possesses much more angular momentum about the sun in its orbit than it does about its axis in rotating daily, and any out-of-plane component of Jupiter’s torques on Earth (measured with sun at pivot point) should be quite small because Jupiter’s always close to the ecliptic and pulling on us from a direction nearly in-plane.

    My suspicion is reinforced by Figs. 4 and 5 in Souami & Souchay below, who show that the inclination and North node of the solar system’s invariable plane, with respect to the International Celestial Reference Frame (based on the stars), vary by a mere ~0.01 arcsecond over 6000 years, a time lapse comparable to that of the nodding obliquity cycle, yet an amplitude quite tiny compared to 2½˚, the arc through which the axial obliquity swings. Therefore, it shouldn’t matter in Fig. 5 of SkS’s Milankovitch page, and if so, then SkS can omit the diagram altogether. (The other orbital oscillations discussed on the page, advance of apsides and change of eccentricity, remain the same as before since they’re confined to the ecliptic itself.)

    As I lack a degree in this stuff, you may wish to run it by someone in the field who contributes to your site.

    Souami & Souchay (2012), “The solar system’s invariable plane,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 543
    DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201219011

  22. They changed the name from 'global warming' to 'climate change'

    Yaeger @36,

    If it is the Google Books Ngram Viewer graphs (as per the 3rd grahic in the OP), the link here (also linked within #34) takes you there. Enter the variables you desire and voilà.

    If it is the Google Scholar data (as per the 4th graphic in the OP), it isn't clear to me how exactly that graphic was created but if you search Google Scholar for a particular term and a particular period, it does return how many 'results' it found, although I wouldn't be sure how accurate or reliable that 'returns' value is. (I see GWPF blogs listed which are not scientific documents and are dated as 1912 instead of 2012.) Yet it does support 'Global Warming' being a less used phrase than 'Climate Change' in scientific articles although the "the term 'climate change' was in use before the term 'global warming'" assertion in the OP isn't as strongly evident as that graph suggests.

  23. prove we are smart at 20:02 PM on 10 September 2019
    2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    One Planet Only Forever , @3

    It seems to me there are many  issues that are being falsely misrepresented. At least two are the looming debt crises in America ( and worldwide ? ) , and the much more worrisome climate change. We all can be a role model for thoughtful discussion.  " Ordinary people"  believing their biased media reports, need to become aware of other sources of information , i'm sometimes worried, under some phoney excuse our govts may even control the internet news..afterall , our thoughts on issues are controlled by what we have read/seen. When the powerful control most media, education is the best defence to stop it /getting worse..Maybe its really our flawed and lazy human faults ?, because with just a little effort, you can find most viewpoints on many subjects.

  24. Skeptical Science New Research for Week #35, 2019

    Wili: yeah, I get it. :-)

  25. They changed the name from 'global warming' to 'climate change'

    Hi,

    How did you obtain the graphic comparing climate change and global warming in Google Scholar? I could not replicate it and it has no source so I can't really use it in arguments I have been having on this specific point.

    Thanks.

  26. Key facts about the new EPA plan to reverse the Obama-era methane leaks rule

    Thanks for the article, Dana. I would like to add that scientists have never put much stake into the EPA emissions inventory. EPA's methodology uses input data from the 80s and early 90s, which are hardly representative any more. I think the EDF tried to get the EPA to update this, but that went nowhere in the new admin since 2017.

    A classic paper from 2003 in PNAS carefully summarized:

    "This result [of high methane emisisons] suggests that total U.S. natural gas emissions may have been underestimated."

    In addition to the two papers you cited, there are several others making this point; e.g. this paper using ethane and propane data, or this paper estimating national methane emissions (2.3x EPA estimates), or this paper demonstrating global ethane on the rise downwind of North America.

    So for Administrator Wheeler to say that methane emissions are dropping, citing the EPA database as evidence, is boldly ignorant in the face of the science, the thing that is supposed to inform decision making at EPA.

  27. Philippe Chantreau at 03:48 AM on 10 September 2019
    Sea level rise is exaggerated

    Very nice Daniel, thanks for doing that research legwork.

  28. Philippe Chantreau at 03:46 AM on 10 September 2019
    Skeptical Science takes the Pro-Truth-Pledge

    IdPnSD, 

    I am not quite convinced by your argument. Some of it is confusing: "Somebody killed somebody – is always a fact, because somebody observed it." Does that allude to the act being witnessed by another party than the 2 participants? If yes, it is false, the act does not require a witness to be real, and the participants are witnesses themselves. Furthermore, it implies that events that do not have witnesses are not real, which is nonsense. 

    You may not always see a demonstration of every truth. It took the immense power of the LHC to "see" the Higgs Boson, there may never be any experimental setup able to show superstrings. 

    Who cares what Ayn Rand said?

    The internet does not have all the truths because no source is entirely exhaustive and even if it was, that could be the case only for a fleeting moment in time.

    That being said, there is indeed a lot of information to be had on the internet, some of it useless, much of it valuable. The problem is a severe lack of critical thinking in the general population and an emotional attachement to ideology that effectively disables judgment. Seeking truth carefully implies that one must be ready to accept being wrong, or seeing their prefered ideology whoefully inadequate. It also requires to accept that certainty is nowhere to be had, only varying levels of probability, and constant revision as knowledge is refined.

  29. Sea level rise is exaggerated

    As MA sagely notes, Chen 2014 is dated and newer studies with later data show an acceleration in SLR and with the mass component also increasing.

    Per Yi et al 2017 - Acceleration in the Global Mean Sea Level Rise: 2005–2015:

    "Global mean sea level rise has been accelerating for more than 100 years, and the acceleration in the last two decades seems to further increase"

    And

    "Our results show that the acceleration during the last decade (0.27 ± 0.17 mm/yr2 ) is about 3 times faster than its value during 1993–2014. The acceleration comes from three factors, that is, 0.04 ± 0.01 mm/yr2 (~15%) by land ice melting, 0.12 ± 0.06 mm/yr2 (~44%) by thermal expansion of the seawater, and 0.11 ± 0.02 mm/yr2 (~41%) by declining land water storage."

    And

    "we demonstrate that current advances in satellite gravimetry, and marine in situ measurements enable us to detect the acceleration in global sea level rise from 2005 to 2015, 11 years in total"

     

    Other studies:

    Cazenave et al 2018 - Global Sea Level Budget 1993–Present

    "Ocean thermal expansion, glaciers, Greenland and Antarctica contribute by 42%, 21%, 15% and 8% to the global mean sea level over the 1993-present. We also study the sea level budget over 2005-present, using GRACE-based ocean mass estimates instead of sum of individual mass components. Results show closure of the sea level budget within 0.3 mm/yr. Substantial uncertainty remains for the land water storage component, as shown in examining individual mass contributions to sea level."

    Cazenave et al 2018 - Contemporary sea level changes from satellite altimetry: What have we learned? What are the new challenges?

    "Most recent studies (e.g., Dieng et al., 2017a, Ablain and Jugier, 2017b, Chen et al., 2017a, Chen et al., 2017b, Nerem et al., 2018b, WCRP, 2018) show that the GMSL is accelerating, and that this acceleration mostly arises from accelerated Greenland and Antarctica ice mass loss."

    SLR Components, p. 1645, Figure 3:

    SLR Components

    Other salient studies:

    1. Dieng et al 2017 - New estimate of the current rate of sea level rise from a sea level budget approach
    2. Ablain and Jugier 2017
    3. Chen et al 2017a - The increasing rate of global mean sea-level rise during 1993–2014
    4. Chen et al 2017b - Groundwater Storage Changes: Present Status from GRACE Observations

    On 2018 sea level rise acceleration:

    "Global sea level rise is not cruising along at a steady 3 mm per year, it's accelerating a little every year, like a driver merging onto a highway, according to a powerful new assessment led by CIRES Fellow Steve Nerem. He and his colleagues harnessed 25 years of satellite data to calculate that the rate is increasing by about 0.08 mm/year every year—which could mean an annual rate of sea level rise of 10 mm/year, or even more, by 2100.

    "This acceleration, driven mainly by accelerated melting in Greenland and Antarctica, has the potential to double the total sea level rise by 2100 as compared to projections that assume a constant rate—to more than 60 cm instead of about 30." said Nerem, who is also a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. "And this is almost certainly a conservative estimate," he added. "Our extrapolation assumes that sea level continues to change in the future as it has over the last 25 years. Given the large changes we are seeing in the ice sheets today, that's not likely."

    Also per Nerem et al 2018:

    "the observed acceleration will more than double the amount of sea-level rise by 2100 compared with the current rate of sea-level rise continuing unchanged. This projection of future sea-level rise is based only on the satellite-observed changes over the last 25 y, assuming that sea level changes similarly in the future. If sea level begins changing more rapidly, for example due to rapid changes in ice sheet dynamics, then this simple extrapolation will likely represent a conservative lower bound on future sea-level change."

    Nerem 2018

  30. Sea level rise is exaggerated

    Ossyrial @305,

    You appear to have spotted some of the reasons Chen et al (20140 'Global sea level trend during 1993–2012' have given for their 'deceleration 2004-12' result.  They do also see a significant level of uncertainty in their result although this is not so well handled when presenting their result.

    In a broader context, Visser et al (2015) reviews various methods being used to derive acceleration/deceleration in SLR, methods which do yield contradictory results.

    And the lead author X Chen has published since with Chen et al (2017) 'The increasing rate of global mean sea-level riseduring 1993–2014' which provides a result that supersedes the contradictory result of Chen et al (2014) in that it corrects satellite data and better accounts for other variable factors.

  31. Sea level rise is exaggerated

    Hey, I recently came across a paper from 2014, "Global sea level trend during 1993–2012", by Chen (2014). (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818113002397)

    It finds that since 2004, the sea level rise has been decelerating. I have a couple of questions about it since I am not very knowledgeable in this field.

    I think this is the main conclusion of the paper: "GMSL started decelerated rising since 2004 with rising rate 1.8 ± 0.9 mm/yr in 2012."

    However, it does make say the following things in the discussion:

    "Comparison between the GMSL, the global mean steric sea level, and the global mean ocean mass indicates that the decreasing of the rising trend is mainly due to the stalled ocean heat content which started in the early 2000s, when the PDO switched from the warm polarity to cold polarity."

    "Although the stalled upper ocean heat content during the last decade has reduced the rising trend of the GMSL, the global sea level kept rising because of the contribution of the accelerated melting of land ice in the warming climate. This means that if the land ice keeps melting at the same or faster pace due to anthropogenic warming, the world ocean will experience a significant accelerated total sea level rise when the steric sea level transitions to a stage similar to the period during 1993–2003."

     

    In short, I am not sure what to think of this study. Is the increase in global sea level decelerating? Or is this part of a trend (perhaps the PDO? I don't understand that fully either), and irrelevant if one would look at long-term?

    Thanks

  32. Skeptical Science takes the Pro-Truth-Pledge

    “… has been established in order to reclaim the fuzzy concept of "truth," which different people may interpret differently.” It is very unfortunate that our society does not have a definition of truth. Most people like to think that the following is the correct definition – You have your own truth and I have my own truth. But this cannot be correct. If this were correct then Galileo would still be in jail today. Truth must be unique, universal, and eternal.

    The following definition of truth can be found embedded in many books of all religions, like in Bible and Vedas. (1) The laws of nature are the only truths. (2) The objects of nature and their characteristics create these laws. (3) The nature always demonstrates its all truths.

    Item (3) is the most important part of the definition. If you search carefully, like Galileo did, you will always be able to see a demonstration of every truth, given by nature. Thus a fact can be defined as something that can be observed in nature. Somebody killed somebody – is always a fact, because somebody observed it. Ayn Rand said, “Truth is not for all men, it is only for those who seek it.” The internet has all the truths, but you must seek it carefully.

  33. One Planet Only Forever at 01:07 AM on 9 September 2019
    2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    The following articles show the type of response to improved awareness and understanding that the likes of Boris and Trump encourage with their misleading appeals for support of Their powerfully passionately desired harmful beliefs and actions.

    "Threats, abuse move from online to real world, McKenna now requires security, CBC News"

    "Why is billionaire George Soros a bogeyman for the hard right?, BBC News"

  34. One Planet Only Forever at 00:32 AM on 9 September 2019
    2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    Improving awareness and understanding of climate science has exposed the requirement for corrections of activities that have developed power, popularity and profitability.

    And the other Sustainable Development Goals threaten developed power, popularity and profitability.

    The pursuit of increased awareness and understanding of requirements for sustainability, and sustainable improvement, of humanity started before the 1972 Stockholm Conference. That meeting of global leadership (power) formally established a consensus understanding among global leadership that many corrections of what had developed are required. And it established an awareness and understanding that revised ways of governing what was developing would be required to block harmful actions before they became popular or profitable, and encourage helpful actions.

    Since then it has been clear that a portion of powerful people have been fighting to maintain their undeserved status by any means they can get away with. They have had success with appeals for people to be 'freer to believe whatever They want' to justify pursuing harmful and unsustainable actions that 'They perceive they personally benefit from'.

    Their leaders appear to claim that 'If Their Type of People (their portion of the population) were freer to believe and do as they please, they would behave less harmfully, more helpfully, more beneficially to others'. Their leaders appear to claim that efforts to force them to increase their awareness and understanding of how harmful their actions are to Others,(including the future of humanity), and related efforts to limit how much harm They can do, makes them be harmful rather than helpful.

    I will agree that efforts to improve awareness and understanding can make them react more harmfully. However, it is unlikely that attempting to please them will get them to agree to the corrections required for Them to behave less harmfully. And it appears even less likely that They will agree to the larger corrections required for them to become helpful to Others, especially to the future of humanity.

  35. SkS Analogy 20 - The Tides of Earth

    swampfoxh@7, pull on a branch and it bends a certain amount. Now pull on it 40 times as hard. Will it bend 40 times the distance, or will it simply break?

    Fast cars can acclerate from 0 to 60 in about 2 seconds. Some people might feel a little sick under those high acceleration. Acclerate 40 times that fast an you may die.

    Natural systems have limits of how much they can absorb before they no longer react, but simply break. I know you know this, so just making a point about the dangers of extrapolating by a factor of 40.

  36. There are genuine climate alarmists, but they're not in the same league as deniers

    sailrick @43/44,

    Those quotes get a bit strong. The source of the quotes is this blog by McPherson which may help put them in context, but what is also required is the science lying behind these strong assertions.

    The link to the OP provided by Postkey @46 is part of this, but the underlying paper is Rosenfeld et al (2019) 'Aerosol-driven droplet concentrations dominate coverage and water of oceanic low level clouds'. Also cited in your quote @43 is Levy et al (2013) 'The Collection 6 MODIS aerosol products over land and ocean'.

    The basis for the strong message presented @43/44 is that coal-use emits both CO2 and SO2. The CO2 is raising climate forcing at a rate of ~0.02Wm^-2/yr. SO2 acts as a seed for aerosols and thus more shiny clouds which cool the planet. SO2 is very short-lived but provides a negative forcing which is not well defined (IPCC AR5 put it at -0.9Wm^-2(+0.8,-1.0) although note the recent work cited by Postkey @45 derives from Haustein et al (2019) 'A Limited Role for Unforced Internal Variability in Twentieth-Century Warming' (described in the CarbonBrief article & the RealClimate article). Haustein reconstruct the global temperature record using known forcings and conclude that the SO2 effect would be roughly -0.4Wm^/2.

    So simplistically, we have what is seen by some as a dilemma facing humanity. If we cut coal-use we will be faced by a net increase in climate forcing boosting AGW. But if we maintain coal-use to prevent such a boost, the CO2 would provide the exact same boost over coming decades (perhaps as few as 20 years) and the dilemma would still be in place.

    Yet it isn't quite as difficult as that. The coal-use will not cease overnight and there is a reduction in CO2 forcing (and also more quickly CH4 forcing which totals so-far 0.5Wm^-2 and of which a significant proportion is down to coal) once we stop CO2 emissions (or the reduction in a past contribution of a particular source once it is shut down).

    As for the strong message, a quick peek at the blog by McPherson shows some serious misrepresentation of cited material, serious enough to suggest the blog is entirely without merit. So I would be surprised if there is any actual support for the bold claim that there will be 2-3 degrees C warming over the period 2019-30.

  37. There are genuine climate alarmists, but they're not in the same league as deniers

    An alternative scenario?

    'However, new research published in Science by Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Daniel Rosenfeld shows that the degree to which aerosols cool the earth has been grossly underestimated, necessitating a recalculation of climate change models to more accurately predict the pace of global warming.
    And, they discovered that aerosols' cooling effect is nearly twice higher than previously thought.
    However, if this is true then how come the earth is getting warmer, not cooler? For all of the global attention on climate warming, aerosol pollution rates from vehicles, agriculture and power plants is still very high. For Rosenfeld, this discrepancy might point to an ever deeper and more troubling reality. "If the aerosols indeed cause a greater cooling effect than previously estimated, then the warming effect of the greenhouse gases has also been larger than we thought, enabling greenhouse gas emissions to overcome the cooling effect of aerosols and points to a greater amount of global warming than we previously thought," he shared.'

    www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.htm?fbclid=IwAR3zOtLzDBlG_3gGDdxHw91lE1ESN7en-zviFRHo7FfVI2gonFdYvr22fAQ

  38. There are genuine climate alarmists, but they're not in the same league as deniers

    ” . . . Actually, we show that aerosol-induced cooling is currently only ~0.4°C (see 3rd figure in the CarbonBrief article). Higher aerosol sensitivity would be incompatible with the observed mid-century hiatus. Plus, current warming would be overestimated if transient sensitivity was higher than we report. The neat thing is that the temporal evolution of (warming) anthropogenic greenhouse gases and (cooling) aerosols is not a mirror image. Hence they can both be constrained fairly robustly now.”www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/06/unforced-variations-vs-forced-responses/#comments

  39. There are genuine climate alarmists, but they're not in the same league as deniers

    Here is the rest of what McPherson said in his comment

    "This Catch-22 of abrupt climate change, termed the McPherson Paradox by Bill R. Eddy, takes us down the wrong path regardless of the direction of industrial activity, assuming we are interested in maintaining habitat for vertebrates and mammals on Earth. A decline in the aerosol masking effect means loss of habitat for human animals, with human extinction soon to follow. Yet the liars at Deep Green Resistance, Extinction Rebellion, and other organizations are still promoting the dismantling of industrial civilization while claiming to be committed to the continuation of life on Earth."

  40. There are genuine climate alarmists, but they're not in the same league as deniers

     I was recently reading comments at a Facebook post, where McPherson's was cited.  His claim is that by reducing fossill fuels emissions, the resulting  decrease of sulfur aerosols will cause worse warming.
     McPherson himself posted a comment. Here is an excerpt

    "Civilization is a heat engine, but slowing or stopping civilization heats Earth even faster than the ongoing warming resulting from this set of living arrangements. The impact of the aerosol masking effect has been greatly underestimated, as pointed out in an 8 February 2019 article in Science. As indicated by the lead author of this paper on 25 January 2019: “Global efforts to improve air quality by developing cleaner fuels and burning less coal could end up harming our planet by reducing the number of aerosols in the atmosphere, and by doing so, diminishing aerosols’ cooling ability to offset global warming.” The cooling effect is “nearly twice what scientists previously thought.” That this February 2019 paper cites the conclusion by Levy et al. (2013) indicating as little as 35% reduction in industrial activity drives a 1 C global-average rise in temperature suggests that as little as a 20% reduction in industrial activity is sufficient to warm the planet 1 C within a few days or weeks."

    Could someone comment on his claim about aerosols?

  41. SkS Analogy 20 - The Tides of Earth

    Evan...agreed. It was a sloppy estimate not really intended to say much except to point to the possibility that the Sixth is going to take "awhile" to become a global catastrophe regarding species extinction. And to William...yes, Bill Ruddiman is a "neighbor" of mine here in Virginia. I know his work well and consider it of great value in the literature. I thought that some dialog on predicting the GGE trends might be interesting in the Big Picture of the Big Five.

  42. One Planet Only Forever at 13:50 PM on 8 September 2019
    2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

    It is obviously too easy to promote popular support for harmful and incorrect beliefs and actions in supposedly more advanced nations.

    Improving awareness and understanding applied in pursuit of the Ethical Objectives of 'Do No Harm' and 'Help Others, particularly those who are less fortunate, less aware or lacking in understanding' is a major thing that humanity potentially has 'going for it'.

    However, improving awareness and understanding can be a threat when a group, such as these 400, improve their awareness and understanding of how they can abuse the flaws in the developed socioeconomic-political systems to interfere with, and potentially set-back, the development of a sustainable improvable future for humanity.

  43. Skeptical Science New Research for Week #35, 2019

    From top quoted article: "...rational cost–benefit analyses..."

    wtf??

  44. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing

    No I agree, there's some controversy there. I would call it disagreement, which has different social connotations, but you could use controversy too.


    So, would it be fair to say that we've moved on from the simplistic idea of the Gulf Stream alone keeping Europe warm - which I believed until reading Seager's debunk - and air currents have a larger role to play, whether as much as Seager says or not ?

    Because the picture I'm getting here is that a Gulf Stream slow down or stop would not be as catastrophic as once thought, but still problematic.

  45. SkS Analogy 20 - The Tides of Earth

    There is a very believable theory that the highly unusual stability of our present interglacial, up to recently, was due to our output of Greenhouse gasses from the use of the plow, forest clearing and Rice cultivation.  Previous interglacials have begun to slide back into a glacial period almost as soon as the interglacial begins.  See the book Plows Plagues and Petroleum by Ruddiman.

  46. CO2 is plant food

    Wowzee , you are being an alarmist about "dangerously low CO2 levels".

    Without the recent human intervention, it would still have taken millions of years for CO2 to have fallen to a level dangerous to the "C3 metabolism" types of plants (which are so important for our food production).

    And taken even longer to be dangerous to the "C4 metabolism" plants [maizes , grasses , etcetera] . . . assuming that they did not make further evolutionary adaptation to low CO2.   

    As for the very distant future (as atmospheric CO2 gets gradually absorbed into rock-carbonate form) . . . then sure, the humans of that time will know the lessons of the distant past [= 20th Century AD] and will know that all they need do is dig up and burn a few gigatons of coal/oil every 100,000 years or so.

    Makes sense for us to stop burning coal/oil . . . and leave it in the ground in case our ultra-distant descendants should ever need it as an easy way to raise CO2 and warm the climate !   That's the sensible and responsible thing for us to do at present.

  47. CO2 is plant food

    During the Carboniferous period the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was three times that of 1750, and double that of 2019. The Carboniferous period had lush forests, and a great deal of the coal, methane, and crude oil that was trapped in the Earth came from that period. Plants seem to thrive in high CO2 concentrations.

    It can be projected that had humans not come along and extracted and burned fossil fuels, CO2 levels would in the future go so low for this critical plant nutrient that plants would be unable to grow. In the long-term, I believe humans' greatest contribution to life on Earth is our re-introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere.

  48. Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas

    Wowzee , if you are talking about the "GreenHouse" Effect keeping the Earth's surface warmer than freezing point . . . then certainly the effective strength of H2O's GHEffect is larger than CO2's GHEffect.   This has been known for a very long time.  Yes, a very long time.

    It may be best if you stop thinking in terms of H2O being the "dominant" GHE gas.   It is not.   Or rather, in using dominant , you make a misleading & poor choice of words — if you are trying to mean that it is H2O which dominates or controls the situation.

    A horse is far stronger / heavier / more powerful than its human rider.   But it is the lightweight rider that dominates/controls what the horse does.

    So too, the CO2 controls the climate (along with control by changes in solar output & levels of reflective aerosols, of course).

  49. Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas

    Water vapor absorbs more solar energy than CO2 per molecule.  There are many more molecules of H2O in the atmosphere than CO2.  If the amount of absorbed solar energy exceeds the amount of thermal infrared energy that escapes into space, temperatures will rise.

    Burning one molecule of methane produces one molecule of CO2 and two molecules of H2O.  Similar chemical product ratios for burning gasoline, coal, and deisel. 

  50. Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas

    https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/EnergyBalance/page7.php

     Please see the graph from the NASA graph, both H2O and CO2 absorb in the infrared (12 - 14 micrometer) range.  The water vapor window is only slightly affected. Also keep in mind that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is only a fraction of H2O. 

    This is why water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas. 

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