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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Recent Comments

Comments 18451 to 18500:

Tom Dayton at 02:32 AM on 19 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

Mike Evershed: So as you get more and more doctors' opinions that you immediately need heart surgery, you become less and less convinced that you really need it?

Has goes your hobby of jumping off buildings, inspired by the consensus on gravity?

Johnboy at 02:08 AM on 19 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

I think many folks can't get their arms around the significance of a 2°C temperature change or how really fast this is happening relative to "natural" change. Maybe we need to excise the use of the word "since" in weather reports. You know, "warmest 18th of July since..." or "driest, since", "longest drought since".

As far as the rapidity of change, I like to ask my denialist friends to think about growing up living "across the street" from the glacier terminus at the end of the last ice age. Their great grandfather would be telling them that the glacier was there when he was born and his great grandparents said the same. It was permanent source of ice for us forever. For the temperature to have dropped 1°C would have taken 400 generations (10k years). Who would have noticed? Being born at the beginning warming, you would tell your great grandchildren the same thing, only now it would be a "mere" 40 generations to see a 1°C rise. Maybe relatives from 8,000BC left could have drawn a picture of it on the cave wall across from where the glacier was.

Mike Evershed at 02:06 AM on 19 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

I think this article misses an important reason for doubting the consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Some of us are sceptical of consensus views, especially when they are so strongly bound up with politics and expressed in abusive terms. (Has anyone on this site ever questioned whether it is respectful to call someone a "denier". It smacks of the sort of things "believers" say about outsiders.) So I, for one, will continue to look at the facts and question some of the consensus assumptions. The world has undoubtedly warmed in recent years, and it is a reasonable hypothesis that man made CO2 has made a significant contribution, but it is hardly beyond doubt - in fact the stronger the consensus the harder we should question the hypothesis, and the more open we should be to challenges to it.

Moderator Response:

[PS] This is sloganeering -assertions without any backing evidence. What is your evidence that the consensus of worldwide climate scientists is "politically motivated". Why should we challenge the consensus on say gravity or atomic theory again? If you want back your assertions for doubt about climate, provide evidence.

Our comments policy prefers respectful language but denier is a reasonable term when applied to someone who flat out denies evidence.

One Planet Only Forever at 01:53 AM on 19 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

thoughts@13,

Jim Eager has done a fine job of correcting some of your expressed "thoughts"/preferred beliefs.

As a structural engineer I can add that my work (and the work of all other engineers - appliers of science) includes using analysis models to 'predict' the performance of a structure under a variety of conditions.

Those 'models' are developed based on the best developed understanding to date. And the behaviour of every part of the real structure is understood to not be exactly modeled, just very well represented in general so that the general behaviour is well enough understood to result in successful designs based on analysis models (btw, these are not toy models like model trains or model cars and they are not 'fashion models that may only be popular for a moment').

So from my perspective people who repeat a claim that analysis models are not relevant, or complain that 'models' do not 'exactly' represent things or 'exactly' predict what will happen, only proves that they 'do not really understand the matter that they are commenting on'.

The propensity for some minds to not properly understand issues, making-up thoughts about what is to be believed, is tragic when it becomes popular. Especially tragic is when those made-up minds lacking understanding get away with winning popular support by complaining that a concensus understanding among people who would better understand an issue is not relevant, is a conspiracy.

Why people fail to better understand matters like climate science is a serious problem. I still contend that many people who resist better understanding climate science also resist admitting the unacceptability of personally benefiting from unsustainable activity that cause harm to, or creates challenges for, others including/especially future generations of humanity. Many people resist understanding/admitting that their developed perceptions/beliefs are unjustified/poorly excused.

Jim Eager at 00:21 AM on 19 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

@13: "Deniers accept that GHGs may exacerbate the effects of the Milankovitch cycles, etc.”

If you actually knew anything about the Milankovitch cycles you would know that they currently favour a slow global cooling, not warming.
And what are these “et cetera” that you mention? Be specific.

@13: "What is needed is a clear explanation as to how mankind's addition of maybe 4% of the natural gas CO2 to the atmosphere can affect global climate."

Your personal ignorance or incredulity of such an explanation is not the same as the absence of that explanation. Furthermore, your estimate of the percentage of atmospheric CO2 that is anthropogenic is off by an order of magnitude. It is 30% (400 - 280 = 120 ppm out of the current 400).

"Many "deniers" have seen Al Gore's chart showing that CO2 follows global temperatures, both rising and falling, and cannot therefore be a cause of temperature”

A basic logic fail repeated ad nausium. We know for a fact that adding CO2 causes warming. We also know that CO2 lags temperature in the ice core record because orbital changes were the intitial forcing, not CO2, so of course it follows temperature. That in no way negates that fact that rising CO2 then produced still more warming. Furthermore, this point flatly contradicts your first one listed above. So which is it, CO2 and other greenhouse gases do cause warming, or they can’t? Get your story straight.

"What the 'deniers' see is computer models, not proven science.”

That’s becuase you don’t bother to look past the computer models. Don’t blame scientists for your failure to look at the established science that the models are derived from. You might try employing some actual *thought* before repeating such misinformed talking points.

thoughts at 23:30 PM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

I do not think that either fear or self-interest is motivating "denial of the evidence." Disrespect for others does not make a case for AGW. Many "deniers" are not afraid to accept that the global climate is changing, and that it will affect us. "Deniers" accept that we are adding pollutants like SO2 and CO to the air, and that we prefer clean air. Deniers accept that GHGs may exacerbate the effects of the Milankovitch cycles, etc. But insisting that everyone agrees (97%!) does not make a case. What is needed is a clear explanation as to how mankind's addition of maybe 4% of the natural gas CO2 to the atmosphere can affect global climate. Many "deniers" have seen Al Gore's chart showing that CO2 follows global temperatures, both rising and falling, and cannot therefore be a cause of temperature, whether it is the 96% natural or the 3% man-made. What the 'deniers' see is computer models, not proven science. What the "deniers" do not see is clear evidence that mankind can affect the global climate. Calling them "fearful" does provide the needed evidence.

Nick Palmer at 22:38 PM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

I don't think fear is a consicous motivation for denial of evidence - or at least fear of the results of climate change. From tackling many denialists, I suspect that if fear is a factor, then it is fear of change that provides the fertile ground for the deceit to grow in. Fear of having to change one's life, one's aspirations, one's hopes and dreams. Fear of wasting all that time and money invested in some parts of education, job qualifications, business experience etc which are only useful in the current status quo and would be redundant in a climate friendly economy.

Tom Curtis at 22:03 PM on 18 July 2017

Those 80 graphs that got used for climate myths

Digby Scorgie @11, I do not currently have access to Steig et al due to its being paywalled (and budgetary constraints). On the assumption that its content largely matches the second half of Steig's PhD thesis, then paragraph four of the section of the OP, "Creating a straw man" is not a full response to anticorncobb@66. Specifically, the "other graphs [which] where reconstructions [that] also showed warming globally" in the PhD thesis were reconstructions using pseudo-proxies rather than actual proxies, and therefore evidence of the adequacy of a statistical technique rather than evidence of global warming.

The reason the pseudo-proxy reconstructions showed, while the genuine reconstructions did not show warming appears to come down to two factors. First, ice core proxies are effected not just by temperature. The PhD thesis shows that pseudo-proxies reflecting all factors (Figure 2.6) do not reproduce the global temperature record as well as those reflecting temperature differences only (Fig 2.12). With real proxies, it is not possible to isolate the temperature influence from other influences is a similar way, leading to a significant amount of noise. Second, while pseudo-proxies can be generated anywhere that feels convenient, genuine proxies must actually be obtained by drilling in available ice. In this case that means that the pseudo-proxies came from 105 locations scattered across the Arctic, Antarctica, Himalayas, Andes and the Rockies. In contrast, the actual proxies are restricted to just 40, from 7 locations within Greenland, 5 locations from the rest of the Arctic, 23 locations from Antarctica, and just one from the Himalayas and no others from outside of polar regions (Fig 2.1). The highly biased distribution of proxies means the proxy network poorly captures global temperature trends - a feature reinforced by the dominance of Antarctic sources, with the majority of Antarctic experiencing little warming over the 20th century (with the exception being the West Antarctic Pensinsula).

The problem of noise generated by other influences can be combated by having a large number of proxies, prefferably of different types, such that the noise tends to cancel out. The limited number of proxies, and geographic bias of proxy locations can be combatted by using a wide variety of proxies from different parts of the world. At least one proxy based reconstruction of 20th century temperatures have bas been done using a greater number of proxies of different types, and it does in fact show global warming over the 20th century. But, as it turns out, the limited number of ice core only proxies used by Steiger et al does not.

Digby Scorgie at 20:17 PM on 18 July 2017

Those 80 graphs that got used for climate myths

anticorncob6 @9

The answer you want is in the fourth paragraph after the heading "Creating a straw man".

One Planet Only Forever at 13:40 PM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

I believe one of the most powerful and prevalent fears in the minds of climate science deniers (miss-understanders, delayers fighting against correcting incorrectly developed human activity), is the fear of having to admit that their developed perceptions of personal wealth, prosperity and opportunity are not justifiable, are not actually deserved.

nigelj at 11:36 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

JW Rebel @6,

I agree totally, but everything you mention comes back to fear of something. For example it is exaggerated fear of government, fear of rules applying to business, fear of loss of power or privilege, paranoid fear of loss of individual rights. All this can obviously become excessive and deluded.

Individual rights are obviously important, but self evidently do not give people the right to damage the environment or harm the community or expect government to ignore environmental matters.. That sort of world can’t work and we don’t have to put up with it. People promoting it are ultimately toxic.

Bob Loblaw at 11:01 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

The aspect of fear applies to the followers more than the leaders. Some people have a real knack for scaring the $#!^ out of people, and then reassuring them that they will be saved if only they follow the One True Path.

A long but very interesting read on the psychology of much of this is Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians. (Free download at the web page I have linked.)

A shorter, less-scholastic blog post is The Long Con. Also very interesting.

Funkypants at 10:11 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

Ironically, when people like Al Gore, Michael Mann or Bill Nye expound the impending dangers of AGW they get howled down as Alarmists & Fear Mongers.

JWRebel at 09:57 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

Mixing in Trump, Russiagate, and electoral fraud in a "false facts" narrative does help the case. Not all false claims are related, and many false narratives have been propagated on many fronts historically, and often refuse to die, like zombies, no matter how fastidiously they have been debunked. Russiagate has no publicly verifiable facts, and there is a decades old literature on electoral fraud in the USA. Contrary to accepted opinion, US elections do not set a standard of democratic integrity for the rest of the world; on the contrary, basic controls are so poor or even absent that monitoring organisations state that it is not even possible to monitor US elections, putting them behind monitored elections in Kazakhstan or Syria. Americans do not seem capable of enacting electoral reforms.

JWRebel at 09:45 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

I agree that fear is an underlying ground for much denialism — many scientists were also reluctant to accept the magnitude of the problem as it became clearer and clearer the past 50 years.

But there are other important aspects. One is international context. Vociferous denialism seems a peculiarly Ango-Saxon disease. Why would that be?

The concentration of news into the hands of the likes of Rupert Murdoch, always printing ammunition for "scepticism".
Corporate disinformation and ideological think tanks.
The strong anti-governmet anti-left narrative that has taken hold since Reagan was president. Don't forget that Reagan won by scuttling Carter's energy policy, telling Americans they were great, and everything would go back to how it was in the fifties — without all these perplexing modern problems.

These factors play much less of a role in most other countries of the world.

A further factor is group loyalties. Many people's views on many subjects are informed by loyalty to their tribe and how the tribe has decided to view the matter. Loyalty is a big part of conservative and religious denialism, but it is precisely this loyalty that can be used to change the narrative [loyalty also means not running down the family farm before handing it to your children].

As for people like James Delingpole, there have always been a small number of irredeemable miscreants who find their claim to fame in serving evil.

scaddenp at 08:25 AM on 18 July 2017

Those 80 graphs that got used for climate myths

I cant access the full paper but since the subject about methodology for reconstructing the temperature records from water isotope proxies, I am guessing the original graph showed one methodology compared to "actual" data (the BEST global record from of weather stations worldwide). I would suspect from conclusions, that this was showing the that methodology has limited skill in global reconstructions of temperature.

The denier arguments obviously believes that an inferred temperature scale based on water isotopes from a very limited no. of ice cores with poor spatial resolution is a better record for temperatures than actual thermometers from 1000s of weather stations.

Doug_C at 08:15 AM on 18 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

It is amazing how these changes are playing out across the globe, I'm still trying to get my head around how heat is both trapped within the atmosphere, how that is mostly downloaded into the oceans and how that is affecting circulation patterns and things like ocean-atmosphere coupled systems like El Nino/La Nina which influences climate around the globe.

My niece married an Auzzie and they both live in Texas so I get first hand accounts of what it was like living on that continent and how chaotic weather can become in some areas like Texas. They have been through both tornadoes and hurricanes. There does seem to be a much higher frequency of the super-cell systems that spawn tornadoes in the US south and midwest.

My sense is that climate science and scientists have slowly been chipping away at the artificially created roadblocks erected by the fossil fuel sector in its interests alone to deny the science of climate change and delay mitigation for as long as possible. The level of genuine doubt for most people is disappearing and when it goes I think the changes will come quite suddenly compaired to how long it had taken to get effective action.

Here in BC there was a lot of denial and the main economic initiative of the last government which was just defeated in election was a massive fracking program in the BC NE with LNG plants and terminals all along our coast. I think that will change.

I've also spent a lot of time learning about the alternative technology to replace fossil fuels and with abundant power from things like thorium power molten salt reactors, there's no question in my mind at all that we could build within decades completely viable, dynamic, innovative and most importantly sustainble economies and societies. We don't even have to do away with internal combustion powered transportation as we can make diesel, octane and other fuels directly from air with electricity and the addition of carbon and other readily available materials. Technology like thermal depolymerization allows us to turn any long chain carbon molecules to short chain organic material very similar to light crude in a matter of hours. Add in all the other alternatives like solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, etc... and there is simply no reason at all to keep investing billions of dollars on a fossil fuel powered future that by all indications ends in catastrophe.

When the turn comes - and I'm confident it will, even if I have down moments like right now when climate change is in the face of thousands of us here - it will be because of people like the ones who have created and populated this site with facts presented in a professional and endlessly patient manner that I do think is in fact wearing down the denial movement.

Moderator Response:

[DB] "how that is mostly downloaded into the oceans"

Your answer is here (in short, the energy goes directly into the oceans from the sun, but its exit path back to space is slowed by rising levels of CO2).

scaddenp at 08:10 AM on 18 July 2017

Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions

Sadly, CAIT doesnt seem to supply anymore. Try here for what it looked like.

nigelj at 07:24 AM on 18 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

Doug_C @22, interesting points.

Australia appears to be at particularly high risk from climate change, particularly forest fires. As you probably know they have a hot, dry, drought prone climate that can also be quite windy. They have many houses among forests of gum trees which appear particularly susceptible to fire, however they are also big coal producers, and this lobby is powerful. Their response to climate change has been mixed at best, although they have made some decent progress with wind power. It all seems to depend on who is in government.

I live in New Zealand, and we are affected quite differently, but almost as badly. We are an island nation in the path of a system of frequent low and high pressure systems, and tend to have a rather wet, mild, cooler, windy climate, actually rather more like British Columbia. Climate change has made droughts slightly worse, but the most obvious impacts are more rainfall, all in exactly the wrong places. It's predicted we will get more stormy weather possibly quite severe cyclones from the north, serious sea level rise, more droughts and forest fires. However given our wet, slightly cooler climate forest fires are not quite the major concern Australia has.

But it shows how the same warming climate can effect different geographies, and still in negative ways.

I try to read something on the climate issue. I find it a very interesting issue, because it reflects a whole range of personal interests of mine including earth sciences, politics, economics, human psychology.

I haven't done any advanced physics, however I did several papers in physical geography at university, and they covered an introduction to the theory of weather and climate. I also did some basic maths, and chemistry and psychology.

I think websites like this are good because they promote the science in a authoritative logical way and without catastrophising. They also deal with denialist myths very well. I actaully think the majority do understand broadly whats happening, confirmed by polls in my country showing over 70% acceptance of the science (although it fluctuates weirdly), but its important to get that number higher.

The real sticking point is poor leadership to politicians, who look to be captive to various industry lobby groups, and wealthy donors sceptical of climate science. It would be great to get this money out of politics, and at the very least voters need to put pressure on politicians.

nigelj at 06:36 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

I agree fear sums the issue up quite well. I would take it further and say "fear of change". However this doesn't get us too far, because simply saying be less afraid isn't going to do much.

Take a step back. I look at climate denialists and I see evidence of vested interests, addiction to big v8 cars, jobs in the fossil fuel industry, dislike of big government, religious factors, and conservatism. I think it makes them deny the science, or issues around renewable energy, even although the denial is clearly illogical and contradictory etc.

All these are fear of something, whether loss of jobs, petrol prices going up, government rules, beliefs being challenged, change in general. These are real and should be acknowledged, even although they are generally missplaced fears. For example renewable energy is actually creating jobs, electric cars are cheap to run, all governments have laws, etc.

I think if we own this, it becomes easier to see a way forwards in terms of convincing people and addressing specific fears. We won't convince everyone, for example look at tobacco, vaccines, or evolution which are also issues revolving around various fears, addictions, etc, but it should be possible to convince the overwhelming majority, and that is what is important.

silence at 06:10 AM on 18 July 2017

Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions

The graph in the "Further reading" section appears to be broken.

ubrew12 at 05:37 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

If this is fear, then good news on non-fossil energy is the antidote. It may do more to emphasize the enormous strides being made in renewable power lately, than to prove conclusively to someone immune to proof that the 'hiatus' never happened.

Big fossils likes to preach its captive audience that if they go with alternatives, the 'big government gulags' will not be far behind. Stories that tell the truth may matter here: that alternatives are largely being fought by utilities which, as government-granted monopolies, are the very epitome of 'big government'. It should sway some minds to realize that Joe Libertarian, in fighting renewable power, is fighting on the same side as a state-sponsored monopoly that thinks it 'owns' the right to sell him electricity, to the exclusion of all other sources in an open market.

bjchip at 05:18 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

I disagree that it is "fear" - at least to the degree that is presented.

If you consider at the same time that these people are almost entirely in the "extremely conservative" subset of humans, AND you add the knowledge that extreme views are often accompanied by supreme confidence in in ones own opinion - we can conclude that the contradictory evidence is being rejected out of hand because it would mean that the person at the extreme is in fact wrong and has to accept that they were wrong.

For most people this isn't a big deal. For someone on the extremes who relies on his/her own opinion and knowledge more, and on other people's opinions less, finding out they made a mistake is a near death experience.

So while there is a "fear factor" involved (as is likely )

www.sciencedaily.com

We cannot discount the likelihood that it is fear of being wrong, in someone who cannot afford to have their worldview shaken in such manner.

Note that this sort of avoidance occurs in extreme liberals as well. Just not in the area of climate. Consider instead the arguments around nature vs nurture and the evidence for a genetic basis for intelligence.

It gets iffy out there on the edges. :-)

ianw01 at 05:11 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

Fear is an interesting way to frame it, but to me it is not quite broad enough to catch those who are driven by pure short term economic self-interest or those with a natural predisposition to contradict experts just for the sake of it.

wili at 04:42 AM on 18 July 2017

Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump

I generally agree here...and with pretty much everything our wonderful JA has ever said or published '-). But the problem with dismissing political ideology or religion as a major factor here is the high correlation of those who deny GW with those who identify as politically conservative and religiously fundamentalist. Are those ideologies just more likely to have very fearful people in them? That's what you would seem to have to claim, as far as I can see. I'm not sure how one would independently test such a hypothesis, but it might be interesting to try.

And if John's hypothesis is true, what does that mean about Climate Communication? You can't really talk honestly for very long about the certain or even likely consequences of CC with out bringing up stuff that is going to make rational people somewhat or very afraid. Right?

Connected to the whole issue of the role of fear and CC communications:

Eric Holthaus writes, in part:

"My advice for climate journalists going forward:

1. Don't hold back. Readers can take it. (As long as it's rigorously grounded in the science, of course.)
2. The weird shit that climate change could cause—the tail risks, the megastorms, the blinking out of entire ecosystems—is compelling.
3. Climate journalists should find those stories—things scientists wouldn't bother with b/c they're unlikely—& report the hell out of them.
4. AND THEN (this is the most important part) you plant the seed of possibility at the end & invite the reader to become part of the story.

Because that's the reality: We are all part of this story. This is our story, we are shaping it every day."

tinyletter.com/sciencebyericholthaus/letters/today-in-weather-climate-final-thoughts-that-nymag-story-edition-monday-july-17th

Doug_C at 02:32 AM on 18 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

nigelj

I know Australia has been hit hard by wildfires in recent years with mass evacuations and loss of life as well as property. We haven't seen the loss of life yet, just hundreds of homes burned and many more to come.

Some of the fires have been caused by people, but the majority have been lightening strikes on very dry forests. An eyewitness account from someone driving south through the Cariboo District where most of these fires are said it a surreal experience as he saw lightening strike after strike that was followed by an immediate fire.

I'm just frustrated, I'm also semi-retired and have spent the last decade informing myself of the true dimensions of this subject learning as much as I could in a bunch of different subject including some quantum mechanics, atmospheric circulation, lots of biology, ocean currents and more. There's no question I find what is going on deeply distrubing, reading up on the Permian and other climate change related extinction events is sobering, now we're starting to connect them to what we doing on both scale and timeline is frightening.

I'm all for making changes in a way that doesn't turn society and the economy on its head creating its own form of disaster, the thing that really concerns me as a Canadian is that we're not even making any real attempt. Our PM went to the Paris climate conference - which James Hansen has called a fraud because it doesn't create the conditions to make all fossil fuels uneconomical - and because we were part of a political agreement to deal with issue acts as if the problem is solved. While having exactly the same emissions as the last federal government here which openly denied climate change, refused to be part of any international agreement, censored science and even went as far as to burn scientific libraries with data that went back over a century and were priceless in scientific terms.

Meanwhile much of this province burns and we're already being told here this is the new normal. Which is only going to get worse, James Hansen has stated explicitly that if the billions of barrels of tar sands crude is sent to market and burned then climate change will be unmanagable. But that is still the central policy of the Canadian government, the Alberta government and until the last election here this spring the BC government was in full compliance with allowing pipelines and tanker trains to carry over 1,000,000 barrels of bitumen through BC a day.

I don't know what the answer is, I've been coming to this site for years and truly believing that if people were presenting the science in such a clear and effective manner not just here but many other places then it must take effect soon.

But that isn't happening and now I'm watching much of what I've grown up calling home being burned up, climate change is very real here at this moment, it's not something abstract that will happen in a couple of decades.

BC is also highly dependent on the water provided by major rivers that originate with glacial melt in the Rookies. Not only will massive wildfires become a frequent summer event, in coming years we have water scarcity to look forward to as those too disappear.

HK at 23:07 PM on 17 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #28

This may be off-topic, but it may also be related to global warming.
Last night I saw the brightest and most extensive noctilucent clouds I have seen so far this summer. Here in south-eastern Norway the sun is only about 8-9° below the horizon at midnight right now, so these very thin ice crystal clouds in the upper mesosphere (75-85 km altitude) remain illuminated by the sun throughout the night. It appears that these clouds, which were unknown to the science before 1885, have become more common during the 20^th century (I have seen them several times in recent years), so they may be linked to global warming.
One possible link is that the increased greenhouse effect cools the stratosphere and mesosphere, making one of the necessary conditions (temperatures below -120°C) more common than before. Another possible link is increased amount of water vapour formed by the oxidation of methane, since methane can easily reach that altitude because it doesn’t condense anywhere in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The Wikipedia article has several nice pictures of noctilucent clouds, but the ones I saw last night were most similar to these from Estonia in July 2009:

Night clouds

BTW, this last night was also the first after summer solstice that I was able to barely see Polaris and several of the stars in the Big Dipper ("Karlsvogna" in Norwegian).

carn at 19:16 PM on 17 July 2017

It's too hard

@Eclectic 68

I have nothing in principle against subsidies; but too early and too much subsidy to have a technology on the market, that is too far away from cost efficiency, is a mistake.

For such technologies one only needs subsidies too such extent, that development continues.

Regarding hydro potential, i maybe have not specified enough, what i mean with chenging "ecological protection laws"; for example, i would want to have that thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Canyon_Dam

in operation within 15 years. Forget about "The lower dam would have flooded a number of natural features, including Redwall Cavern and Vasey's Paradise." Human lives are at stake due to global warming, so nobody should care about that stuff.

Just look at all conservation areas; there is some potential for a hydro increase.

"the OECD and World Nuclear Association expect that they would achieve a "too little, too late" result by 2050 (in reducing world CO2 emissions)"

"Private company investors are running for cover, when it comes to the suggestion of financing nuclear power plants."

Based on current rules and handling, yes. Therefore they would have to change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Development

"Installed nuclear capacity initially rose relatively quickly, rising from less than 1 gigawatt (GW) in 1960 to 100 GW in the late 1970s, and 300 GW in the late 1980s. Since the late 1980s worldwide capacity has risen much more slowly, reaching 366 GW in 2005."

Get the speed of the 60s and you have 150 GW per decade. Nuclear power was throttled late 70s onwards with superflous burden; of course with that superflous burden still mostly in place, OECD is correct to estimate, that nuclear cannot do much. Therfore, one needs to change things so that build up can again be done with the speed of the 60s.

"And similarly with large-scale solar plants. And solar power is cheap enough now for private individuals to install their own roof panels — again without subsidy."

From the calculations i know, no, not yet. Especially comparing generating electricity for one's own household to buying electricity with taxes, regulations and power grid costs, is an error. Solar is not more cost efficient than coal or nuclear. Its more cost efficient than taxes; not a useful criteria for technical efficiency.

"One guy I know says (only half-jokingly) that the entire costs of the USN Fifth Fleet over past decades should have been added to the per-gallon price of gasoline."

Fine, but do not forget to also calculate the cost increases caused by superflous envirmental regulations and activities. It is just completely crazy to pay billions and billions to backward regimes for oil and another billions and billions for military equipment to keep them in check, but leave a single drop of oil at home unused cause some birds or fish might die.

Effectively, US politics in part sacrificed human lives - mostly in the middle east - so ecos could be pleased at home and some animals saved. Despicable.

nigelj at 16:53 PM on 17 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

Doug_C @20, numbers of forest fires certainly have increased in recent decades, in America and Canada as below:

www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-is-increasing-forest-fires-around-the-world/a-19465490

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161012141702.htm

So your suspicions are not just anecdotal or locally based. Somehow I doubt numbers of arsons have inceased, and anyway there are also changes in area and intensity. Looks mostly like global warming.

I'm not sure if this has happened in NZ, but we have seen increased levels of rainfall, in recent decades, according to our climate minotoring agency NIWA, and this has been mostly on the west coast, which is already very wet. It's not happening where it would be useful to agriculture or hydo power.

You ask why people can't see all this or are complacent? It's probably hard for people to get their heads around the full scale, or even keep up with it. I'm semi retired, so have a bit of time to read.

Maybe people also feel overwhelmed. I feel torn in two directions, one direction that we should actually be a bit alarmist about it, the other that too much alarmism, catastrophising, and despondency won't help.

Doug_C at 16:21 PM on 17 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

Here's what a realy hot summer can look like where I live.

BC Wildfires Map

The town of 11,000 where I grew up has been evacuated and there are major fires all around it. That is just one small area of central BC which is covered in fires.

I stopped thinking that climate change was an academic issues years ago, watching this happen is like being in a disaster movie as a participant not a spectator. Talking on the phone with my elderly mother, she suddenly began weeping for all that is being lost.

It's insane that we're all basically sitting back and watching this happen... and keep in mind this is the opening stages in a process that will become increasingly catastrophic taking out entire ecosystems. Coral reefs are already well on their way to being mostly gone, likely by mid century.

How is it more people don't get that at some point this wave will wash right over them. In Florida it was an unspoken rule created by the governor that public employees not mention climate change because of the implications of a rising sea level for a state much of which is barely above sea level now.

Warmer summers is just the tip of this "iceberg"...

anticorncob6 at 15:05 PM on 17 July 2017

Those 80 graphs that got used for climate myths

Can someone explain why the blue line in the first graph (with reconstruction) does not show warming?

nigelj at 14:12 PM on 17 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

I would just add the lakes issue, and other permafrost issues, sinkholes, etc all do definitely look like troubling developments.

nigelj at 14:06 PM on 17 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

Wili @17, yes fair enough. To add to your research link, here's an interesting very recent article and photo on holes and mounds in the sub arctic releasing methane etc.

www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4335386/7-000-underground-methane-gas-bubbles-Russia.html

However I was really wondering the following if anyone knows. We have these very recent lake issues, sinkholes and methane bubbles in the subarctic releasing methane, and is this more than the slow / limited release the research done over the last ten years was predicting?

wili at 13:20 PM on 17 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

nigel wrote: "not massive or catastrophic"

well...pretty massive, at least in terms of actual carbon, equivalent to more than all the carbon in all of life on earth. But we don't know how much of that will emerge as methane. And yes, most recent studies conclude it won't come out suddenly (which word Wells-Wallace never actually used).

But here's a somewhat troubling development: High methane emissions from thermokarst lakes in subarctic peatlands

nigelj at 12:42 PM on 17 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

My understanding is the research says arctic and siberian methane is a problem, but not massive or catastrophic. However this research appears to be based on theory and projections.

However over the last couple of years various holes have appeared in siberia and northern regions, belching methane, as the permafrost melts and things collapse. Question: Does this mean the research is too conservative?

Doug_C at 12:20 PM on 17 July 2017

Toward Improved Discussions of Methane & Climate

Daniel Bailey

Thanks for responding.

I wasn't really thinking in terms of a massive pulse of Arctic methane from destalization in the next few years or decades. I was thinking in terms of the next century or longer and how records from past rapid warming events as a result of quickly increasing atmospheric CO2 levels indicate there were pulses of methane that kicked warming from CO2 into a much more powerful forcing.

In recent geological time the conditions have favoured the creation of more methane hydrates as the planet has in general been cooler with ice ages and the gradual drawdown of CO2 levels. This would seem to pose an even greater possibility of methane release on shorter time scales than earlier events when the base "stable" state was from a much warmer planet with little or no permanent ice cover.

I also seriously question trying to project anything this complex and poorly understood decades into the future. As we saw with something that should have been relatively simple to project in the Larsen B iceshelf breakdown, dynamic forces quickly turned a massive sheet of very thick ice into a highly unstable formation that broke apart.

One paper from Hansen et. al. from a number of years ago - sorry I can't find it now - seemed to indicate that as a Earth warmed, deep water submergence transitioned from the polar regions to much lower latitudes, smething of that nature would completely reorder how heat is distributed and could possibly introduce much warmer water into the deep ocean.

It's the scale of this we should always consider and the potential for feedback and impacts that are going to be next to impossible to fully predict or model because we simply don't have the information.

And I realize that being in an environment where much of what I've called home for over 50 years is on fire and some of my family are now short term climate change refugees makes this a much more immediate issue for me.

The methane is there, the conditions are chaotic to say the least and the deep geological record says beware.

At a time when this country - Canada - is still fully committed to burning billions of tons of the least sustainable fossil fuel for decades.

As I said, thanks for the response and I'll dig deeper into this, but I am viewing climate change and our certainty of how it is going to unfold with less and less confidence all the time. At a time when the impacts are becoming the most serious most of society will be in emergency mode just as this entire province is at the moment meaning even monitoring changes effectively could be compromised.

Forget any hope of mitigation at that point.

wili at 09:02 AM on 17 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

DB, in your links you write: "...the bad news is that the already difficult task of keeping warming under 2°C becomes much harder once we face up to the consequences of Arctic permafrost feedbacks."

I think we can all agree on that, and I will point out, contrary to what some might have concluded if they only read reviews of it and not the article itself, that Wells-Wallace, whatever else his faults may be, never uses the words 'bomb' or 'sudden' with regards to permafrost or methane.

Daniel Bailey at 08:42 AM on 17 July 2017

2017 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #28

@Doug_C:

I have responded to you on this post. Please read the post in full, and the comments underneath it, before then proceeding to my updated material on it. If you have any questions, please place them there, and not here. Thanks!

Daniel Bailey at 08:39 AM on 17 July 2017

Toward Improved Discussions of Methane & Climate

User Doug_C asks:

"Do you know something we don't because trillions of tons of methane in unstable frozen deposits in a rapidly warming world seems like the definition of catastrophic to me"

Please read the OP of this post and the comments above this one in full. Here's some updated material:

Gao et al 2013 - Permafrost degradation and methane: low risk of biogeochemical climate-warming feedback

"Climate change and permafrost thaw have been suggested to increase high latitude methane emissions that could potentially represent a strong feedback to the climate system. Using an integrated earth-system model framework, we examine the degradation of near-surface permafrost, temporal dynamics of inundation (lakes and wetlands) induced by hydro-climatic change, subsequent methane emission, and potential climate feedback.
We find that increases in atmospheric CH4 and its radiative forcing, which result from the thawed, inundated emission sources, are small, particularly when weighed against human emissions. The additional warming, across the range of climate policy and uncertainties in the climate-system response, would be no greater than 0.1° C by 2100.
Further, for this temperature feedback to be doubled (to approximately 0.2° C) by 2100, at least a 25-fold increase in the methane emission that results from the estimated permafrost degradation would be required.
Overall, this biogeochemical global climate-warming feedback is relatively small whether or not humans choose to constrain global emissions."

And, as the Gao et al paper I linked to notes, CH4 from permafrost will drive an expected temperature increase by 2100 of about 0.1 C. Schaefer et al 2014 now calculates a total temperature rise contribution from ALL permafrost carbon stocks (CO2 AND CH4) by 2100 of about 0.29 ± 0.21 (0.08-0.5 C).

Per Berndt et al 2014 - Temporal Constraints on Hydrate-Controlled Methane Seepage off Svalbard

"Strong emissions of methane have recently been observed from shallow sediments in Arctic seas...such emissions have been present for at least 3000 years, the result of normal seasonal fluctuations of bottom waters"

Per Schuur et al 2015, an abrupt permafrost climate feedback is unlikely, according to the experts, but the bad news is that the already difficult task of keeping warming under 2°C becomes much harder once we face up to the consequences of Arctic permafrost feedbacks.

SkS Post on Schuur

This just in, per Myhre et al 2016: METHANE NOT ESCAPING INTO THE ATMOSPHERE FROM ARCTIC OCEAN

"Methane gas released from the Arctic seabed during the summer months leads to an increased methane concentration in the ocean. But surprisingly, very little of the climate gas rising up through the sea reaches the atmosphere.

As of today, three independent models employing the marine and atmospheric measurements show that the methane emissions from the sea bed in the area did not significantly affect the atmosphere."

Shocker.

And there ensued much gnashing of teeth and hissing in frustration from AMEG, Arctic-News (dot) blogspot, the Scribbler-of-fiction, Paul Beckwith and Guy McPherson.

Per Sweeney et al 2016:

"Data show no sign of methane boost from thawing permafrost"

And

"Decades of atmospheric measurements from a site in northern Alaska show that rapidly rising temperatures there have not significantly increased methane emissions from the neighboring permafrost-covered landscape"

Also on that paper
And even more on it

Per James et al 2016 - Effects of climate change on methane emissions from seafloor sediments in the Arctic Ocean_A review

"We find that, at present, fluxes of dissolved methane are significantly moderated by anaerobic and aerobic oxidation of methane"

And

"Our review reveals that increased observations around especially the anaerobic and aerobic oxidation of methane, bubble transport, and the effects of ice cover, are required to fully understand the linkages and feedback pathways between climate warming and release of methane from marine sediments"

And

"a recent study (Dmitrenko et al. 2011) suggests that degradation of subsea permafrost is primarily related to warming initiated by permafrost submergence about 8000 yr ago, rather than recent Arctic warming"
[here's the relevant info from Dmitrenko et al 2011, below]
Dmitrenko et al 2011 - Recent changes in shelf hydrography in the Siberian Arctic: Potential for subsea permafrost instability
"the observed increase in temperature does not lead to a destabilization of methane-bearing subsea permafrost or to an increase in methane emission. The CH4 supersaturation, recently reported from the eastern Siberian shelf, is believed to be the result of the degradation of subsea permafrost that is due to the long-lasting warming initiated by permafrost submergence about 8000 years ago rather than from those triggered by recent Arctic climate changes"
And
"A significant degradation of subsea permafrost is expected to be detectable at the beginning of the next millennium. Until that time, the simulated permafrost table shows a deepening down to ∼70 m below the seafloor that is considered to be important for the stability of the subsea permafrost and the permafrost-related gas hydrate stability zone"

Per Ruppel and Kessler 2017:

"The breakdown of methane hydrates due to warming climate is unlikely to lead to massive amounts of methane being released to the atmosphere"

And

"not only are the annual emissions of methane to the ocean from degrading gas hydrates far smaller than greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere from human activities, but most of the methane released by gas hydrates never reaches the atmosphere"

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