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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.
Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Global warming is real and human-caused. It is leading to large-scale climate change. Under the guise of climate "skepticism", the public is bombarded with misinformation that casts doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming "skepticism".
Our mission is simple: debunk climate misinformation by presenting peer-reviewed science and explaining the techniques of science denial, discourses of climate delay, and climate solutions denial.
The critical context that’s typically left out is that the 1930s were the decade of the Dust Bowl — the grim result of relentless overplowing of the Great Plains followed by natural oceanic cycles that favored a multiyear drought, which coincided with the Great Depression. It’s a U.S. disaster almost a century old, one that draws little attention today and whose living memory is fading fast.
The University of Nebraska’s excellent summary of the Dust Bowl points to some of the sociological factors that led to the catastrophe:
“Boosters” of the region, hoping to promote settlement, put forth glowing but inaccurate accounts of the Great Plains’ agricultural potential. In addition to this inaccurate information, most settlers had little money and few other assets, and their farming experience was based on conditions in the more humid eastern United States, so the crops and cultivation practices they chose often were not suitable for the Great Plains. But the earliest settlements occurred during a wet cycle, and the first crops flourished, so settlers were encouraged to continue practices that would later have to be abandoned.
Three multi-year periods of drought unfolded between 1928 and 1942, with virtually no break in between. Much of the topsoil across the central United States simply blew away during those nasty years. The bare landscape allowed for maximal warming from the summer sun, which in turn helped reinforce the deep atmospheric heat that prevailed. Day-to-day weather patterns sometimes pushed the dust and heat all the way to the East Coast.
Hundreds of thousands of destitute farmers made their way from the Great Plains to California in hopes of finding work, a migration immortalized in the acclaimed book and movie “The Grapes of Wrath.” [From Bob Henson: My own mother grew up in western Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, and I vividly remember her telling me how she sometimes walked to school with a wet handkerchief over her face, simply to be able to breathe without inhaling lungfuls of dust.]
Figure 1. An unidentified car on a road in the Texas Panhandle in March 1936 with heavy clouds of dust in the sky — a typical phenomenon of the Dust Bowl. (Image credit: Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Texas grid, run by ERCOT, has had a rough few years. In 2021, winter storm Uri blacked out much of the state for several days. About a week ago, Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to millions of Houstonians, and a week later, hundreds of thousands of Houstonians still hadn’t had their power restored.
It might seem that these two events are completely different — one was a winter storm that caused a blackout by knocking out the natural gas supply, while the other one is a hurricane that knocked out the power distribution system.
Global society may have finally slammed on the brakes for climate-warming pollution released by human fossil fuel combustion.
According to the Carbon Monitor Project, the total global climate pollution released between February and May 2024 declined slightly from the amount released during the same period in 2023. Many experts believe that the clean energy transition has reached the point where emissions will stabilize and then begin to decline. The critical milestone of peak climate pollution might be happening right now.
And it’s happening none too soon. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in early June that “carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever — accelerating on a steep rise to levels far above any experienced in human existence.”
“Over the past year we’ve experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires, and storms,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad. “Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever. We must recognize that these are clear signals of the damage carbon dioxide pollution is doing to the climate system, and take rapid action to cut fossil fuel use as quickly as we can.”
How can CO2 levels in the atmosphere be increasing so rapidly if society is reaching peak emissions? It’s because the peak comes after two centuries in which more and more fossil fuels were burned every year to power economic growth. The relatively rare exceptions tended to come in years of economic decline, such as global recessions or pandemics. The global economy has grown in most years, and the consumption of fossil fuels for energy and their associated climate pollution has also increased as a result.
“Fossil fuel pollution just keeps building up, much like trash in a landfill,” Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps CO2 program, said in the NOAA June 6 report.
Emissions have peaked at an unsustainably high level and now must fall steeply and quickly to reach net zero by the second half of the century. The clean energy transition has been a huge help; in most of the years over the past decade that weren’t affected by the COVID pandemic, including 2022 and 2023, global emissions only rose by about 1% even as the economy continued to grow. Yet global climate pollution stubbornly kept rising to record levels.
Posted on 21 July 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 32 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 14, 2024 thru Sat, July 20, 2024.
Story of the week
As reflected by preponderance of coverage, our Story of the Week is Project 2025. Until now traveling mostly unobserved below the surface of public attention, this public policy submarine launched by the Heritage Foundation and loaded with missiles targeted at civil society as we express it via competent and impartial governance (or sincere attempts at such) now emerges as a hot topic of concern, spanning many domains of public administration.
What's Project 2025? If you didn't follow the link above, here's shorthand supplied by the instigators:
Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.
This ambition is accompanied by a detailed plan of action assembled by people well qualified for this task. Project members include over two dozen former Trump administration figures, all now well familiar with federal government and— per the policy formulation they've created— bringing their experience to bear with laser focus on inviting avenues of attack on our civil infrastructure.
Project 2025 certainly gives nods to various voguish culture war issues, but a scan of the entire plan reveals a bit of a pattern. "Deconstructing the administrative state" roughly translates into crippling the US government's capacity to impose accountability for external costs— by all necessary means.
As a practical matter, avoiding responsibility for burdens unilaterally imposed on other people follows a fairly simple logic. We cannot assign ownership of those harms people (us) don't know of. Hence ignorance is strength when seeking to hide uninvited costs visited on others at industrial scale. In our context of Project 2025— which at a glance appears to be operating chiefly to the benefit of interests uncaring of others-- blinding and deafening the eyes and ears of government is thus a fast and efficient route to serenely peaceful and maximally effective pursuit of profit.
How is all of this relevant to human-caused climate change and climate mitigation obstruction? Beyond one project author having form as a climate science vandal, the plan is quite specific. In particular, Project 2025 calls out NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), naming it "a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry" and explicitly calling for the agency's dismantlement. This seems to be the main objection to NOAA on the plan's part, and is exemplary of how the authors are using their informed perspective to lean toward complete decapitation (or in some cases "only" bureacratic lobotomy) rather than tinkering around the edges of offending branches of government. More generally to the overall point of Project 2025, there can hardly be a better example of astronomically expensive external costs than human-caused climate change.
"Freedom" is a word much bandied about in the US., and Project 2025 uses the term liberally— in more than one sense. Freedom of thought and religion are certainly founding principles of the country. It's however highly doubtful that the authors of the Bill of Rights intended that we each should be free to end our sanitary sewer at our neighbor's property line. Yet human nature is such that some people will do exactly that— if they can sneak it by and nobody notices, or has no recourse to object.
Why do we agree to governance, and support the infrastructure of government as it pertains to law and regulation? In no small part it's because we know very well thanks to history (and our current climate predicament) that a small percentage of people with whom we all share space won't behave in a socially acceptable manner unless they're forced. If Project 2025 is an indicator, the Heritage Foundation doesn't seem to have good grasp of this underlying and pervasive feature of human behavior— and commensurate requirement for effective and robust civil governance. That seems unlikely, so it may be more parsimonious to assume that the Heritage Foundation simply doesn't believe in cooperative behavior as the foundation of true social prosperity.
With the Project 2025 submarine now exposed to view various contributing authors and participating organizations are jumping ship, but the document stands as the bared soul of poorly socialized people and what they'll do with access to levers of power. This circus of the self-interested has told us in plain language what they'd like to see, and whether or not they desert the Heritage Foundation we should appreciate their candor, listen to it, think about what it implies. None of them are actually learning from the general revulsion they're hearing and will all continue their program of "it's all about me," regardless of whether or not we continue paying attention.
Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:
To better account for spatial non-uniform trends in warming, a new GITD [global instrumental temperature dataset] was created that used maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to combine the land surface air temperature (LSAT) anomalies of non-infilled HadCRUT5 with the sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies of HadSST4. This GITD better accounts for non-uniform trends in warming in two ways. Firstly, the underlying warming trends in the model are allowed to vary spatially and by the time of year. Secondly, climatological differences between open-sea and sea ice regions are used to better account for changes in sea ice concentrations (SICs). These improvements increase the estimate of GMST change from the late 19th century (1850–1900) to 2023 by 0.006°C and 0.079°C, respectively. Although, for the latter improvement, tests suggest that there may be an overcorrection by a factor of two and estimates of SICs for the late 19th century are a significant source of unquantified uncertainty. In addition, this new GITD has other improvements compared to the HadCRUT5 Analysis dataset, including correcting for a small underestimation of LSAT warming between 1961 and 1990, taking advantage of temporal correlations of observations, taking advantage of correlations between land and open-sea observations, and better treatment of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Overall, the median estimate of GMST change from the late 19th century to 2023 is 1.548°C, with a 95% confidence interval of [1.449°C, 1.635°C].
Roofing highways with solar panels offers a new opportunity for PV development, but its potential of global deployment and associated socio-economic impacts have not been investigated. Here, we combine solar PV output modeling with the global highway distribution and levelized cost of electricity to estimate the potential and economic feasibility of deploying highway PV systems worldwide. We also quantify its co-benefits of reducing CO2 equivalent emissions and traffic losses (road traffic deaths and socio-economic burdens). Our analysis reveals a potential for generating 17.58 PWh yr−1 of electricity, of which nearly 56% can be realized at a cost below US$100 MWh−1. Achieving the full highway PV potential could offset 28.78% (28.21%–29.1%) of the global total carbon emissions in 2018, prevent approximately 0.15 million road traffic deaths, and reduce US$0.43 ± 0.16 trillion socio-economic burdens per year. Highway PV projects could bring a net return of about US$14.42 ± 4.04 trillion over a 25-year lifetime.
Understanding the behaviors of tropical cyclone (TC) intensity under the CO2 removal scenario is important for future climate adaptation and policy making. Based on the idealized CO2 ramp-up (from 284.7 to 1,138.8 ppm) and symmetric ramp-down experiments, our results suggest an asymmetric and irreversible response of TC potential intensity to CO2 reduction. Potential intensity shows an additional enhancement at the same CO2 level during the CO2 ramp-down relative to the ramp-up periods (though with regional differences), and does not completely return to the initial value even when CO2 recovers on multi-decadal to centennial timescale. The enhanced potential intensity is dominated by the increased thermodynamic disequilibrium, which is mainly attributed to the weakened surface winds arising from the El Niño-like warming pattern and inter-hemispheric ocean temperature contrast.
In this work, we collected 333,635 tweets in English about anthropogenic climate change. We used Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning methods to embed the semantic meaning of the tweets into vectors, cluster the tweets, and analyze the results. We clustered the tweets into four clusters that correspond to four narratives in the discussion. Analyzing the behavioral dynamics of each cluster revealed that the clusters focus on the discussion of whether climate change is caused by humans or not, scientific arguments, policy, and conspiracy. The research results can serve as input for media policy and awareness-raising measures on climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, and facilitating future communications related to climate change.
This article investigates the impact of climate policies on electoral support for governing parties in Sweden through mixed methods combining a sentiment analysis of news articles and regression discontinuities of voter support over time. The regression discontinuity models indicate that the effects of climate policies on government support are not robust and are spurious across different model specifications. To ensure that we can detect effects, we used a set of political events that could have affected government support, such as elections and the Covid-pandemic as robustness checks. Contrary to expectations from literature and analyzed news reporting, we cannot determine robust effects of introducing climate policies on governmental support in Sweden. This suggests that governments do not need to anticipate losing substantial support when implementing climate policies – at least in favorable conditions.
As global temperatures continue to rise, climate change should become increasingly important in the planning of mass gatherings and should be viewed as an existential threat to all mass sporting, artistic, and religious events. As such, planners and organisers of these events need to start to bring together research, ideas, and technology that can reduce future risks of severe heat-related illnesses and deaths.
To date, governments’ decisions (such as continuing with vast subsidies for fossil fuels) clearly show that powerful vested interests have been much more influential than the amassed scientific knowledge and advice. We argue that in the face of this inaction, scientists can have the maximum amount of influence by lending their support to social movements pressing for action, joining as active participants and considering civil disobedience. Scientists seeking to halt continued environmental destruction also need to work through our institutions. Too many scientific organizations, from national academies of science to learned societies and universities, have not taken practical action on climate; for example, many still partner with fossil fuel and other compromised interests. We therefore also outline a vision for how scientists can reform our scientific institutions to become powerful agents for change.
The authors discuss the entrenched nature of the oil and gas industry's opposition to the alternatives to fossil fuels, revealing a decades-long playbook employed to hinder progress toward the transition. It builds on previous analysis of historical fossil fuel industry lobbying that highlighted the use of climate science denial tactics. It demonstrates that a range of other narratives and arguments are still being deployed by the sector to this day, despite contradicting the Science-Aligned Climate Policy analysis of the IPCC. The authors highlight the potentially seismic effects that are associated with this influencing campaign, which has enabled an expanded and sustained market for fossil fuel products at the expense of zero-carbon alternatives. The sale and use of these products have resulted in cumulative GHG emissions that now threaten to put global temperature rises on track for catastrophic climate impacts.
Some observers have argued that clean energy is to blame for rising electric rates, but the data does not support this conjecture. The author walks through recent trends in electricity rates and unpacks the myriad factors that have contributed to rate increases in recent years, leading to several key takeaways including evidence that does not suggest that clean energy is driving electricity cost increases; wildfire costs and risks have significantly increased electricity rates in California; natural gas price volatility has been a major driver of higher electricity costs in some states; utilities have made substantial investments in aging, uneconomic coal plants, raising costs to customers; transmission and distribution costs are rising nearly twice as fast as inflation, driven by a focus on grid hardening, resilience, and advanced technology; and regulated utility profit margins and bias toward capital investments underly rising electricity rates.
136 articles in 67 journals by 757 contributing authors
June 2024 was Earth’s warmest June since global record-keeping began in 1850 and was the planet’s 13th consecutive warmest month on record, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI, reported July 12. As opposed to being focused in one region or another, the record heat was unusually widespread, with 14.5% of the world’s surface experiencing record heat – beating the previous June record set in 2023 by 7.4%.
Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for June 2024, the world’s warmest June since record-keeping began in 1850. Record warm temperatures covered 14.5% of the world’s surface. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)
NASA placed June at 1.44 degrees Celsius (2.59 °F) above the 1880-1899 period, its best estimate for when preindustrial temperatures last occurred. This beat the previous June record (from 2023) by an impressive 0.13 degrees Celsius (0.23 °F).
The European Copernicus Climate Change Service also rated June 2024 as the warmest June on record and said that the global average temperature for the past 12 months (July 2023-June 2024) was the highest on record for any 12-month period, 1.64 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 preindustrial average.
Land areas had their warmest June on record in 2024, according to NOAA, and for the 15th consecutive month, global ocean temperatures were the warmest on record. The recent record heat in the oceans has brought on a global coral bleaching event, the fourth one in recorded history (1998, 2010, 2014-17, and now 2024).
It was the warmest June on record for Africa, Asia, and South America, second-warmest for Europe, fourth-warmest for North America, and 25th-warmest for Oceania. The Main Development Region for hurricanes in the Atlantic had its warmest June on record, 0.08 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous record-warm June of 2023.
Dr. Ella Gilbert is a climate scientist and presenter with a PhD in Antarctic climate change, working at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Her background is in atmospheric sciences and she's especially interested in the physical mechanisms of climate change, clouds, and almost anything polar. She is passionate about communicating climate science to non-specialist audiences and using film and TV to do it. After all, climate change affects everyone, so everyone should be able to understand it. To help with that, she publishes videos about climate science, Antarctica, weather and anything climate related on her Youtube channel called Dr Gilbz.
Here is a sample of her videos to "showcase" her work, each with a description based on what Ella provided on Youtube for it.
Climate extremes are reshaping Antarctica - published Aug 21, 2023
Antarctica is experiencing more and more extreme events, driven in large part by climate change. These extremes are changing the polar environment, with consequences for us all. Lots of this video is based on new work by Siegert et al. (2023).
Air conditioning was initially a symbol of comfort and wealth, enjoyed by the wealthy in theaters and upscale homes. Over time, as technology advanced and costs decreased, air conditioning became more accessible to the general public.
With global warming, though, air conditioning has moved from being a luxury to being necessary for survival in many places. If you live in Phoenix or Houston and your air conditioner fails, staying in your house may be impossible and you may need to evacuate.
Air-conditioning now plays a central role in protecting public health in homes, workplaces, and public spaces. But, of course, not everyone can afford it. This is one of the biggest equity issues in the climate debate, with some saying, “we’ll rely on air conditioning” to address climate change. This essentially abandons the poorest in our society, as well as the animal world, to a hellishly hot world they did not create.
Given the enormous importance of air conditioning, I thought it would be useful to put together a few posts about it. This is part one: some background on the physics of air conditioning.
Heat engines
In thermodynamics, a heat engine is a device that converts thermal energy into mechanical work by exploiting the temperature difference between a hot and a cold reservoir.
A coal-fired power plant is an example of a heat engine: It takes heat from a coal-burning furnace, the hot reservoir, converts some of it to work, e.g., driving a generator to produce electricity, and rejects the remainder of the heat into the cold reservoir, which is the environment.
Note that you cannot convert heat to work with 100% efficiency. This is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics (see appendix). The second law in fact allows us to derive exactly how much of the energy extracted from the hot reservoir can be converted into work:
efficiency=1−Tc/Th
where Th is the temperature of the hot reservoir, e.g., the furnace, and Tc is the temperature of the cold reservoir, usually the environment. Plugging in typical values of 80F and 600F for a coal-fired power plant1, you get an efficiency of around 50%.
This is the best you can do and, in the real world, you can’t achieve this: Very efficient coal-fired power plants tend to be around 40% efficient. This means that, for every 100 Joules of energy from burning coal, you get 40 Joules of electricity. The other 60 Joules are waste heat ejected into the environment. This necessary production of waste heat is a main reason that thermal power plants are usually sited next to rivers or lakes, which are used as heat sinks.
Posted on 14 July 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 7, 2024 thru Sat, July 13, 2024.
Story of the week
It's still early summer in the Northern Hemisphere. The season comes as our first year of 1.5°C warming of Earth's land surface is recorded and ocean temperature remains at historical highs, leaving our atmosphere loaded with heat and moisture crammed in by our changing our climate. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that summer 2024 is off to a roaring start, setting numerous new records of various unattractive kinds. Thus our Story of the Week is how only a little warming leads to notably worse and more frequent extreme weather— exemplified by some 1/3rd of this week's collection of news items being centered on "just" 1.5°C of warming, and extreme weather and impacts of this so-called best case warming scenario (highlighted in red).
Summer 2024's climate-fueled weather problems are leading to burgeoning cases of heat exhaustion and heat stroke, with hospitals sometimes struggling to manage influxes of patients urgently in need of care to avoid organ shutdown and death. Skeptical Science's beat is principally about combating climate change denial, a mission that is driven as much by care and consideration for others as it is annoyance with liars and the lies they tell. Meanwhile, excessive heat can and does kill workers. Hence we can't help but note that as climate change is added to the bonfire stupidity of "culture war," politicians claiming to act on behalf of workers are in fact making it legally impossible for local governments to protect those workers from excess heat exposure, despite near complete absence of binding guidance from upper echelons of jurisdiction. We believe this is helpful background information for making fully joined-up decisions in an important election year. After all, in general it's best to choose leaders who reliably can see and employ crisp facts rather than spout useless ideology when administering our affairs.
Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:
Before July 7
Oxford University climate survey shows majority want action, Oxford Mail News, Lucy Williams. The University of Oxford has helped create the biggest ever survey on climate change and the results show 80 per cent of people want more government action on the environment.
Crucial gaps in climate risk assessment methods, Science Daily, Staff. Significant flaws in current climate risk assessment techniques could lead to a severe underestimation of climate-related financial losses.
To Save the Amazon, What if We Listened to Those Living Within It?, Justice & Health, Inside Climate News, Katie Surma,. "Aiming to prevent “climate and ecological collapse,” rainforest inhabitants release a detailed plan to save their home, honing in on ending fossil fuel subsidies and securing Indigenous land rights."
Exposing Bjorn Lomborg's Climate Lies, ClimateClub on Youtube, Andreas Hernandez Denyer. A 17 minute long video explaining why most of what Björn Lomborg says about climate change is flawed.
Posted on 13 July 2024 by John Mason, BaerbelW, Ken Rice
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by John Mason in collaboration with members from the Gigafact team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.
Were scientists caught falsifying data in the hacked emails incident dubbed 'climategate'?
Nine separate investigations found that climate scientists involved in the “climategate” controversy did not falsify data.
In 2009, the Climatic Research Unit’s servers were hacked. One scientist was reported as saying that he “completed Mike’s nature trick” to “hide the decline” in an email. The “trick” in question simply refers to combining instrumental temperature data and tree ring data.
“Hide the decline” referred not to a temperature decline, but a decline in the reliability of some tree rings as a temperature proxy. This had become an issue in data starting from the year 1960. Also known as the "divergence problem," it had been discussed in the scientific literature since the mid 1990s — 15 years before "climategate."
Steve Mosher, who fueled the conspiracy theory, has since issued a public apology, acknowledging that the scientists’ work was accurate.
Cold winds blowing over polynyas (areas of ice-free water) on the Antarctic continental shelf create sea ice, forming very cold and somewhat salty, hence very dense, waters. These dense shelf waters descend the continental slope to the abyss, mixing with adjacent waters to form Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW). AABW spreads northward from there, filling much of the global abyssal ocean as it mixes with warmer, lighter waters above. AABW has been warming on pressure surfaces, freshening and cooling on density surfaces, and reducing in volume (contracting). These changes are likely a result of melting Antarctic ice sheets, which freshen the shelf waters, making them less dense, hence less able to sink to the bottom. We compare profiles of ocean temperature and salinity in the eastern Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean collected in 2023 and 2024 by robotic freely drifting profilers to data collected from ships from the early 1990s to the late 2010s. We find all of the above listed changes, but also acceleration of the warming, with the rate from 2017/18 to 2023/24 being nearly triple the rate from 1992/95 to 2023/24. The contraction rate has nearly quadrupled. This acceleration has been predicted by high-resolution climate model simulations.
Clear-Air Turbulence (CAT) is associated with wind shear in the vicinity of jet streams in upper atmospheric levels. This turbulence occurs in cloudless regions and causes most weather-related aircraft accidents. Recent studies have shown that in response to climate change, CAT could significantly increase over certain regions as a consequence of strengthening of jet streams. In this study we use several atmospheric reanalyses and coupled model experiments database to evaluate CAT recent and future changes in the Northern Hemisphere. Several CAT diagnostics are computed to assess the sensitivity of the results to different turbulence representations. A significant positive trend in CAT frequency is found in the reanalyses in different Northern Hemisphere regions over the period 1980–2021. The signal-to-noise analysis shows that over North Africa, East Asia and Middle East the increase of CAT occurrence in the last decades is likely attributed to the response to anthropogenic forcing. In contrast, over the North Atlantic and North Pacific the response to external forcing is not detectable due to a weak signal to noise ratio related to large internal variability.
Using the approximate partial radiative perturbation (APRP) method, future shortwave aerosol effective radiative forcing changes are isolated from other shortwave changes in an 18-member ensemble of ScenarioMIP projections from phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). APRP-derived near-term (2020–2050) aerosol forcing trends are correlated with published model emulation values but are 30%–50% weaker. Differences are likely explained by location shifts of aerosol-impacting emissions and their resultant influences on susceptible clouds. Despite weaker changes, implementation of aggressive aerosol cleanup policies will have a major impact on global warming rates over 2020–2050. APRP-derived aerosol radiative forcings are used together with a forcing and impulse response model to estimate global temperature trends. Strong mitigation of GHGs, as in SSP1-2.6, likely prevents warming exceeding 2C since preindustrial but the strong aerosol cleanup in this scenario increases the probability of exceeding 2C by 2050 from near zero without aerosol changes to 6% with cleanup. When the same aerosol forcing is applied to a more likely GHG forcing scenario (i.e., SSP2-4.5), aggressive aerosol cleanup more than doubles the probability of reaching 2C by 2050 from 30% to 80%.
Climate Data Democracy is critical to open up a new era where climate data does not remain a commodity whose access is restricted to the learned or moneyed few. With the climate crisis unfolding around us, the need for informed action has never been as urgent, or apparent, as it is now. Data should not act as a barrier to action, as it does today. We argue for academia to take an enabling role, acting as a node to connect governments, business, civil society and other critical stakeholders.
At least 230 new climate cases were filed in 2023. Many of these are seeking to hold governments and companies accountable for climate action. However, the number of cases expanded less rapidly last year than previously, which may suggest a consolidation and concentration of strategic litigation efforts in areas anticipated to have a high impact. Climate cases have continued to spread to new countries, with cases filed for the first time in Panama and Portugal in 2023. 2023 was an important year for international climate change litigation, with major international courts and tribunals being asked to rule and advise on climate change. Just 5% of climate cases have been brought before international courts, but many of these cases have significant potential to influence domestic proceedings.
The authors present the fossil fuel holdings of over 7,500 pension funds, insurance companies, asset managers, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds, and asset management arms of commercial banks. In May 2024, these institutional investors held $4.3 trillion in bonds and shares of fossil fuel companies. For the second year in a row, Vanguard holds the sad record as the world’s biggest fossil fuel investor. The US asset management company holds and manages assets of coal, oil, and gas companies worth $413 billion. Due to its sheer volume and because it does not have any fossil fuel policy, Vanguard is the number one in fossil fuel investments worldwide. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset management company, holds rank number 2. Its' fossil fuels assets add up to $400 billion. Fossil fuel investors number 3 and 4 are State Street, which holds $171 billion, closely followed by Capital Group, which holds $165 billion. Collectively these four US asset managers hold and manage assets in fossil fuel companies worth $1.1 trillion.
145 articles in 63 journals by 846 contributing authors
The world’s coral reefs are like underwater cities, bustling with all kinds of fish and sea animals. Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean, but they support an estimated 25% of all marine species, including many important fish species. The economic value of the services that these complex ecosystems provide is estimated at over US$3.4 billion yearly just in the U.S.
Today, rising ocean temperatures threaten many reefs’ survival. When ocean waters become too warm for too long, corals expel the colorful symbiotic algae, called zooxanthellae, that live in their tissues – a process called coral bleaching. These algae provide the corals with food, so bleached corals are vulnerable to starvation and disease and may die if the water does not cool quickly enough.
The current bleaching event in the wider Caribbean region is longer and more severe than any previous bleaching episode recorded since the first global one in 1998. I study large-scale climate and ocean dynamics and am analyzing how biological connections between coral reefs – sometimes extending over great distances – may help reefs recover from heat stress.
The current mass coral bleaching event is the fourth such episode since 1998.
Some people thought Juliana Dockery and her husband Sean were being impractical when they bought an electric vehicle in 2022. Why? Like one in five Americans, they live in a rural area — Grass Valley,California — where charging stations are few and far between. And with a bustling household including three kids, it would be their family’s only car.
Just 17% of rural Americans live less than a mile from a public EV charger, while 60% of urbanites do. So it was understandable to wonder: Could they keep their car charged without drama? Would they still be able to manage longer-distance drives, like chaperoning out-of-town school field trips for their kids?
Two years later, Juliana Dockery answers with confidence: yes and yes. Like most EV drivers, Dockery charges her car mostly at home and uses apps to plan her longer trips around charging station availability. So even though she’s excited that more charging infrastructure is on the way, she says the family has already been able to get everywhere they need to go.
In addition to reducing their carbon footprint, she said the family has benefited financially by ditching their old gas-powered Honda Fit and transitioning to the Volkswagen ID4.
The Dockerys are not alone in recognizing the advantages of moving to an EV. A new report by Coltura, a nonprofit working to speed up the shift from gasoline and diesel to cleaner alternatives, sheds light on how EV adoption can benefit rural communities in particular.
Federal Chevron deference is dead. On June 28, 2024, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court overturned the 40-year-old legal tenet that when a federal statute is silent or ambiguous about a particular regulatory issue, courts should defer to the implementing agency’s reasonable interpretation of the law.
The reversal came in a ruling on two fishery regulation cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce.
This decision means that federal courts will have the final say on what an ambiguous federal statute means. What’s not clear is whether most courts will still listen to expert federal agencies in determining which interpretations make the most sense.
While courts and judges will vary, as a scholar in environmental law, I expect that the demise of Chevron deference will make it easier for federal judges to focus on the exact meaning of Congress’ individual words, rather than on Congress’ goals or the real-life workability of federal laws.
Posted on 7 July 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 31 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, June 30, 2024 thru Sat, July 6, 2024.
Story of the week
Our Story of the Week is brought to us by Dr. Ella Gilbert, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey. As Gilbert mentions in her bio, she's passionate about "making climate science accessible to non-scientists." Dr. Gilbert backs that ambition with action, presenting as "Dr. Gilbz" on YouTube. In her newest production, Gilbert walks us through three very recent scientific publications that amplify worry over the fate of Antarctic ice sheets and hence the fate of coastal cities all over the globe:
As Dr. Gilbert explains, these papers suggest a high degree of risk unaccounted for in models of future behavior of ice in West Antarctica. These findings join other recent work raising biq questions about what our climate accident is unleashing from Earth's most southerly continent. It's fair to say that these investigations collectively trend toward grim possibilities.
What happens in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica. Leaving aside fear of the unknown, the practical implications of underestimated Antarctic ice loss are unanticipated sea level rise, and hence suboptimal planning for adaptation of coastal cities to challenges presented by the rising sea. We may fail to see cases for complete retreat in time for some degree of planned exit as opposed to a panicked rout. Failng to take into account what Antactica is going to deliver to our shorelines will be very costly.
Dr. Gilbert points out that even while we don't have complete information on the magnitude of Antarctic upheaval we're created, we do still know perfeclty well how to reduce whatever mayhem is in store: as quickly as possible we need to modernize our energy systems and dump the outmoded fossil fuels creating problems in the Antarctice and everwhere else on the planet. The biggest answer remains the same and plainly visible, leaving an even larger question hanging in the air: will we listen to and act on the best advice we have?
Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:
Before June 30
More extreme heat demands coordinated action, WMO Press Release, Staff. "With extreme heat posing a growing threat to human health, the environment and key economic sectors, hundreds of millions of people in the northern hemisphere are bracing for what is typically the hottest month of the year, July."
The University of Chicago’s new climate initiative, Climate Change, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,, Jessica McKenzie . "Brave research program or potentially dangerous foray into solar geoengineering?"https://thebulletin.org/2024/06/the-university-of-chicago-new-climate-initiative/
Oxygen depletion constitutes a major threat to lake ecosystems and the services they provide. Most of the world’s lakes are located >45° N, where accelerated climate warming and elevated carbon loads might severely increase the risk of hypoxia, but this has not been systematically examined. Here analysis of 2.6 million water quality observations from 8,288 lakes shows that between 1960 and 2022, most northern lakes experienced rapid deoxygenation strongly linked to climate-driven prolongation of summer stratification. Oxygen levels deteriorated most in small lakes (<10 ha) owing to their greater volumetric oxygen demand and surface warming rates, while the largest lakes gained oxygen under minimal stratification changes and improved aeration at spring overturns.
New experiments presented here each simulated 300 years and included intermediate branch points. In each experiment that branched after emitting more than 1000 PgC, the global climate continues to warm. For the experiment that branched after 2000 PgC, or after 3.5 °C of warming from a preindustrial climate, there is 0.37 ± 0.08 °C of extra warming after 50 years of zero emissions, which increases to 0.83 ± 0.08 °C after 200 years. All branches show ongoing Southern Ocean warming. The circulation of the Southern Ocean is modified early in the warming climate, which contributes to changes in the distribution of both physical and biogeochemical subsurface ocean tracers, such as ongoing warming at intermediate depths and a reduction in deep oxygen south of 60° S.
Inoculation theory research offers a promising psychological ‘vaccination’ against misinformation. But are people willing to take it? Expanding on the inoculation metaphor, we introduce the concept of ‘inoculation hesitancy’ as a framework for exploring reluctance to engage with misinformation interventions. Study 1 investigated whether individuals feel a need for misinformation inoculations. In a comparative self-evaluation, participants assessed their own experiences with misinformation and expectations of inoculation and compared them to those of the average person. Results exposed a better-than-average effect. While participants were concerned over the problem of misinformation, they estimated that they were less likely to be exposed to it and more skilful at detecting it than the average person. Their self-described likelihood of engaging with inoculation was moderate, and they believed other people would benefit more from being inoculated. In Study 2, participants evaluated their inclination to watch inoculation videos from sources varying in trustworthiness and political affiliation. Results suggest that participants are significantly less willing to accept inoculations from low-trust sources and less likely to accept inoculations from partisan sources that are antithetical to their own political beliefs. Overall, this research identifies motivational obstacles in reaching herd immunity with inoculation theory, guiding future development of inoculation interventions.
Heatwaves are the deadliest weather hazard and people and societies across the world continue to suffer from heat-related impacts. Future climate projections show a troubling increase in cross-sectoral impacts including health and economic risk presented by heatwaves. Many weather hazards such as floods and droughts already have a type of Early Warning System (EWS) or Global Alert System, but a global heat early warning system currently does not exist. An accurate heat EWS can save lives and can promote heat adaptation across society. Here, we (1) explore the history of Early Warning Systems as framed using the Disaster Risk Reduction paradigms and (2) identify potential barriers to an integrated Global Heat Early Warning system. Finally, we discuss what we have learned from history and the identified current barriers and outline a vision of a Global Heat Early Warning system around four key themes, incorporating systems for low-, middle-, and high-income countries and requiring cross-sectoral, cross-government, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Exposure to high and low ambient temperatures increases the risk of neonatal mortality, but the contribution of climate change to temperature-related neonatal deaths is unknown. We use Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data (n = 40,073) from 29 low- and middle-income countries to estimate the temperature-related burden of neonatal deaths between 2001 and 2019 that is attributable to climate change. We find that across all countries, 4.3% of neonatal deaths were associated with non-optimal temperatures. Climate change was responsible for 32% (range: 19-79%) of heat-related neonatal deaths, while reducing the respective cold-related burden by 30% (range: 10-63%). Climate change has impacted temperature-related neonatal deaths in all study countries, with most pronounced climate-induced losses from increased heat and gains from decreased cold observed in countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Future increases in global mean temperatures are expected to exacerbate the heat-related burden, which calls for ambitious mitigation and adaptation measures to safeguard the health of newborns.
The protection of heritage from a changing climate has been of increasing interest over the last few decades, which creates a need for a systematic approach to the impacts of climate on tangible and intangible heritage. We present heritage climatology as an applied, interdisciplinary field of science that examines aspects of climate that affect heritage and provides data, statistics, well-tuned climate parameters and projections that can aid interpreting past changes and future management of heritage. It must consider the impact of extreme events, cyclic processes and the gradual accumulation of damage. Climate threats to heritage need to be represented at the appropriate temporal and spatial scales, and transferred using dose–response functions such that they can be interpreted in terms of management decisions yet be resistant to errors from both the representation of the climate threat and its translation into policy.
The planet’s continued streak of record heat has spurred calls for action by scientists and global leaders. Meanwhile, in the United States, energy development policy is being hotly debated on the national and local levels this election year. How do Americans feel about U.S. energy policy options, and what steps are they willing to take in their own lives to reduce carbon emissions? A new Pew Research Center survey takes a look. There’s been a decline in the breadth of support for wind and solar power. The shares who favor expanding solar and wind power farms are down 12 percentage points and 11 points, respectively, since 2020, driven by sharp drops in support among Republicans. Interest in buying an electric vehicle (EV) is lower than a year ago. Today, 29% of Americans say they would consider an EV for their next purchase, down from 38% in 2023. Still, a majority of Americans (63%) support the goal of the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050. When asked which is the greater priority, far more Americans continue to say the country should focus on developing renewable energy rather than fossil fuel sources (65% vs. 34%).
The authors analyzed data from pro-climate voters, or registered voters in the U.S. who say both that global warming is a “very important” issue to their vote for president and that they prefer to vote for candidates who support action on global warming. In the survey, respondents first rated the importance of global warming and 27 other issues in terms of influencing their 2024 presidential vote. Later in the survey, they answered a different question about whether they preferred a candidate who supports or opposes action on global warming. Just over one-third (37%) of registered voters in the U.S. are pro-climate voters. Notably, an additional 25% of registered voters also prefer a candidate who supports climate action even though they do not say that global warming is a very important voting issue to them. Most other respondents indicated that climate change will not factor into their voting choices, but importantly, virtually no registered voters said that global warming was a very important issue and that they prefer a candidate who opposes action.
164 articles in 67 journals by 1014 contributing authors
When Category 5 Hurricane Otis roared through Acapulco, Mexico, in October 2023, the city was left in ruins. Winds stripped facades from beachfront buildings and storm surge flooded lobbies. The storm killed at least 50 people and damaged 80% of hotels in the once-glittering resort town. Six months later, a Bloomberg reporter described “a grim scene,” with many buildings left abandoned and “swimming pools full of muck.”
And residents were still working to bring tourists back.
“If there’s no tourism, nothing happens,” Juan Carlos Díaz, a 59-year-old laborer, told an AP reporter. “It’s like a little chain, it generates (money) for everyone.”
As the climate warms and the weather grows more extreme, similar events could unfold in places worldwide, with the potential to devastate — or at least drag — the economy. Economists agree that climate change will cause severe damages and costs, but teasing out exactly how and how much it’s likely to affect the world’s economic engines is a matter of fierce debate in the academic literature. For example, will an extreme weather event impose one-time costs from which governments can quickly rebound, or will it create a persistent drag on the economy? About three-quarters of climate economists think the latter scenario is likely.
The debate is crucial because the costs of slowed economic growth compound over time. For a large economy like that of the United States or the world, just slightly stunting economic growth can add up to tens or even hundreds of trillions of dollars in lost wealth by the end of the century — making climate solutions look like an absolute bargain.
An April 2024 study in the journal Nature led by Potsdam Institute climate economist Maximilian Kotz estimated that climate damage costs by 2050 will be six times larger than the cost of reducing carbon pollution consistent with world’s targets under the Paris climate agreement over the same time frame.
And climate economists risk underestimating the potential price of inaction because they can only account for the costs of extreme weather events and impacts for which data are available.
“Climate damages are always going to be underestimated,” said Columbia climate economist Gernot Wagner in a phone interview. “Some things we just can’t quantify. For most of those uncertain climate damages, we have precisely and incorrectly estimated their cost at zero.”
It’s also critical to remember that economic metrics like gross domestic product, or GDP, don’t account for important factors like the stress, trauma, and lost cultural and natural resources that climate change also costs us. The true costs of climate damages go well beyond simply estimating how much GDP will be lost.
Posted on 2 July 2024 by John Mason, BaerbelW, Ken Rice
Regular readers might be surprised to not see another "At a glance" highlight for an updated rebuttal given that it's Tuesday when this blog post gets published and that we've done just that "regularly as clockwork" since February 2023. Please read on to find out why we are going on a little summer break now and how we plan to switch to a more relaxed publication routine for updated rebuttals following that.
November 2022 saw us set off on a bit of a journey. It wasn't just that there was a mountain of rebuttals debunking well-known denier talking-points, waiting to be updated. More ambitiously, we had also decided after some debate to restructure them, for the purpose of improved public accessibility. You will therefore immediately know that you landed upon an updated rebuttal if it begins with "At a glance".
Since late 2022 it's been pretty much flat out, with John Mason drafting one or two updated rebuttals a week and Bärbel Winkler, Ken Rice and others reviewing their content. We started our weekly highlighting of updated rebuttals on February 14th 2023 and up until now have continued that procedure without fail, passing 50 updated rebuttals at the end of January 2024. All told, almost 100 updated rebuttals have been drafted with 71 published and highlighted as of this post. It's been a lot of hard work, in other words. But it's the summer holidays soon and we think we deserve a break!
This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).
Across the world people are sweltering under the extreme heat of heat waves - whether under the heat dome in North America or the deadly heat that threatened Hajj pilgrims in Mecca. These weather disasters may not look as scary as devastating floods, wildfires and droughts, but they are silent killers - threatening the most vulnerable in our societies. And now research is shedding light on just how deadly heat waves can be, and how climate change is pouring fuel on the fire. So how does global warming have such a huge effect on heatwaves, and what climate action can we take to protect ourselves - now and in the future?
Thanks to scientist Dr Fredi Otto for her input on the script. Follow here here: X /frediotto
Posted on 30 June 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, June 23, 2024 thru Sat, June 29, 2024.
Story of the week
Our Story of the Week is extreme weather juiced by our climate fumble creating an extreme start to summer across the Northern Hemisphere:
As University of Massachusetts professors Mathew Barlow and and Jeffrey Basara explain in another article in this week's listing, we know this isn't normal summer weather. This won't come as a shock to most of us. "Plain as the nose on your face" is hard to avoid— or deny. Perhaps this is why we're seeing our own explainer against "it's not happening" fading into its sunset years (if our access statistics are any guide).
Now that we're properly roasting, are we done with denial of human-caused climate change? Not exactly, because of some basic facts:
The fundamental fix for our climate mess is energy modernization, shrugging off our old habit of burning hydrocarbons.
The faster we step into this future, the less that outmoded energy firms reliant on fossil fuels will be able to monetize the resources they control.
Hence it doesn't need a rocket scientist to see an obvious way for any energy firm stuck in the past to optimize its stale resources: delay energy progress by all means possible. If all once has to sell is inconvenient and awkward melting ice, modern refrigeration is very bad news and must be discouraged at all costs. It's no different with fossil fuels.
Previously (and still to some extent) encouragement to procrastinate was accomplished by fairly crude denial of fairly basic physics we've had in our grasp for a span including three centuries. Now— with the evidence of our changing of our climate being increasingly plain to see— we're seeing a novel and malign form of "energy transition" wherein the focus of effort by the fossil fuel industry on delaying the invitable march of technological progress shifts. No longer are we not changing the planet but rather the wretched mess we're making with our energy anachronism is a necessary and even hopeful feature of human progress, as detailed in yet another article from this week's collection. The gist of "innovation" by parties interested in freezing our energy clock is nicely covered in The New Climate Denial Is Based on These Six Terms, via Genevieve Guenther writing for The New Republic.
Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:
Arguments
Figure 1. An unidentified car on a road in the Texas Panhandle in March 1936 with heavy clouds of dust in the sky — a typical phenomenon of the Dust Bowl. (Image credit: 
Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for June 2024, the world’s warmest June since record-keeping began in 1850. Record warm temperatures covered 14.5% of the world’s surface. (Image credit: 
Skeptical Science is partnering with 
Nine separate investigations found that climate scientists involved in the “climategate” controversy did not falsify data.
(Photo credit: Automotive Rhythms / 
Gilbert mentions in her bio, she's passionate about "making climate science accessible to non-scientists." Dr. Gilbert backs that ambition with action, presenting as "Dr. Gilbz" on YouTube. In her newest production, Gilbert walks us through three very recent scientific publications that amplify worry over the fate of Antarctic ice sheets and hence the fate of coastal cities all over the globe:
