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A look back at ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ 20 years later

Evan at 09:32 AM on 28 May, 2026

MA Roder@34, yes I agree with you that my accelerations are low by about a factor of 2. Let me get back in the game and see if I can find the inconsistency. The problem I have with your analysis is that I cannot get an intuitive feel for what you are doing. My method is to fit a well-behaved function to a statistically meaningful span of data and then analyze the derivatives. That seems like the logical, consistent approach.

Somewhere there is an inconsistency in my method and I will try to find it.

A look back at ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ 20 years later

MA Rodger at 20:58 PM on 25 May, 2026

Evan @26/28,
I was tempted to roll-back this discussion to that analysis I presented @23 rather than directly address your comment @26. (One reason for such a roll-back is an aversion to using quadratic regressions, something which I am also not very well set up for using.)
But perhaps I should address your comment @26 and say why it is giving you apparent indications of continuing acceleration thro' the recent decade-or-so of MLO CO2 data.

Your first graphic shows two overlapping quadratic regressions for MLO CO2, namely for periods 2000-2015 & 2010-2025. So the overlap period is 2010-15.
You say "15 years should be sufficient to average out the effect of wobbles such as El Ninos" but I would be inclined to the opposite view. However, with autocorrelation a issue, such a wobblological assessment is well beyond my pay grade.

You project the 2000-15 regression line to out 2025 and it sits below the 2010-25 regression line. The implication of these curvatures of the quadratic regressions does point to accelration and your use of this 'overlap' is potentially showing greater acceleration 2010-25 than 2000-15. Wisely you do not go that far but do see these regressions as demonstrating continuing acceleration thro' 2010-25 and thus conclude there is no 'plateau', a situation you describe as leaving "no room for interpretation."
Part of my aversion to quadratic regression is that I have in the past found there is always far more 'room for interpretation' than you would ever expect.

What you are missing in this analysis of the period 2000-25 is the intermediate period sitting between your early & late ones, namely the quadratic regression for the period 2005-20. Such regression shows the acceleration providing the strong curvature thro' the period 2000-25 is happening within this central part of the post-2000 data. I've graphed out these quadratic regressions (2000-26) with a bit more clarity by plotting the data as its deviation from the linear rise between 2000 & today (see HERE Posted 25th May 2026)
Futher, I don't see this analysis providing evidence of continued acceleration and the absence of a 'plateau'. Logically it wouldn't. That same graphic shows the linear rise 2015-2026 and totting up the residuals; the linear rediduals are as big as the quadratic residuals.

Concerning testing for accelertion, I wouldn't venture beyond OLS (which proves too sensitive in this present ciscumstances) or rolling averages (which do better) or nigelj's "put a ruler on the graph."

A look back at ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ 20 years later

Evan at 09:37 AM on 17 May, 2026

Nigel@15. This is one time when I strongly disagree with your position.

If you fall over a cliff and are plummeting to your death, you can argue that opening an umbrella will slow your descent more than if you didn't open it, but you will still likely fall to your death.

Not only is the Keeling curve not flattening out, it is accelerating upwards.

Accelerating!

The best we can say is that maybe we have slowed the rate of acceleration a bit. But as long as the Keeling curve is accelerating upwards, I don't see any room for optimism. I only see room for communicating that we need to do much much more.

It concerns me greatly that many climate scietists remain optimistic in the face of an upward accelerating Keeling curve. For the not-so-well-informed general public, the logic may be.

1. Climate scientists say they have a plan for reaching net-0.

2. Climate scientists say we are making great progress.

3. So CO2 levels must be stabilizing.

4. I feel better now knowing that we just have to stay the course.

Your average person will have no idea what the Keeling curve is doing. The end result of all this discussion about net-0 and hype about how well we're doing reducing emissions, hides the fact that we are having no effect on the Keeling curve. It may simply put the general public to sleep.

I really wonder how many people realize what an absolutely massive increase of 2.5 ppm/year CO2 really is? CO2 is nowhere near stabilized!

A look back at ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ 20 years later

nigelj at 08:00 AM on 17 May, 2026

Evan @13, thanks for your comments. I feel there is some grounds for some limited optimism that we have made real progress with the climate issue. You correctly analyse the keeling curve that theres no sign of the keeling curve flattening off. Its depressing to be sure. However I think its hard to see a change, because we haven't done enough yet to make an impact that would appear above the noise in the system.

And I would contend its highly likely that the building of renewables has reduced the rate of growth of the keeling curve. Putting it another way, but for renewables total atmospheric CO2 concentrations would be higher than currently. Obviously we cant be certain of this, but basic evidence and logic points that way.

So as I previously suggested, I think we have some grounds for limited optimism, and should spread a message that we are making some progress but its not nearly enough.

I agree that some commentators over hype the progress we have made. That is definitely neither accurate or helpful. But if we scare people too much so that the problem looks huge and insurmountable, this will discourage climate action.

-------------------------------------------

Prove we are smart @14

"Nigelj@11, I would rather scare them awake than a little uncomfortably numb."

That has generally been my preference. But if you scare people too much, especially if you exaggerate the dangers, or spread a message we are doomed, then you discourage people form taking any climate action.

If I felt we really were doomed, I would say so, and obviously theres no point promoting action to mitigate the problem. We would be stuck purely with adaptation. But I do have some limited optimism we have made a difference, and can make more of a difference. Therefore I think the message should be we have made some progress but not enough, and if we dont make more progress the outcomes will be very serious, etc,etc.

Human-caused climate change is unmistakably distinct from Earth’s natural climate variability

Eric (skeptic) at 01:38 AM on 20 April, 2026

Eclectic, AI is not the savior to achieve net zero in the next few decades. What AI will do is greatly accelerate already accelerating technological progress. Right now what I've seen and done is mostly in SW. AI can be guided to create extremely complex SW which no human needs to review in detail. Luckily I am in the end stages of my SW career so I don't need to figure out what to do when AI does everything and more. I've read plenty of debates online about AI taking over SW development or not and some people get it. But many do not. They believe AI does "grunt work". But at its more productive, AI runs the show and humans actually do a lot of the grunt work.

New SW can help with lots of energy related efforts like smart grid, resource optimization, turbine optimization, smart ag, etc. Plus resilience. But for net zero HW is also needed. AI plays a role in that too with materials science innovation like modeling and simulation for materials discovery, e.g. at IBM research.ibm.com/topics/materials-discovery The work is early but will become more widespread and accelerated. But as the AI itself tells me:

AI cannot do physics or engineering independently because it lacks intuition, creativity, and the ability to make conceptual leaps required for true scientific discovery and design.

But the AI points out:

In essence, while AI can accelerate the perspiration phase [99% according to Edison] by processing data and running simulations at scale, the inspiration—the spark of human insight, curiosity, and purpose—remains uniquely ours.

I think the AI meant to say "yours" in that quote. While I brought up the fact that AI could go awry, that's also a possible cheap excuse to "not do anything" so I really should not have brought it up. Capitalism is critically debated in this forum for flaws like unpriced externatlities. AI should have the same treatment. In fact as an accelerator, AI goes hand-in-hand with capitalism. And it uses lots of energy. But keeping it safe is mostly a separate issue.

Human-caused climate change is unmistakably distinct from Earth’s natural climate variability

nigelj at 07:28 AM on 19 April, 2026

Regarding rkcannons comments and the moderators accurate response. I have long suspected a large propotion of the climate science denialists might be getting certain things wrong at least partly due to an innate or deeply seated difficulty they have with multi factorial situations, where an outcome is a result of a combination of multiple factors operating simultaneously. I have now tracked down some science that backs this up and added this at the end.

Some examples of this page. rkcannon essentially claims that the anthropogenic warming theory is wrong because warming was strong early last century despite CO2 emissions. But the reasons for strong warming early last century were a complicated combination of CO2 and multiple other natural cycles and natural factors acting simultaneously, and the limited atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at that time. There are studies on this easly found by an internet search.

rkcannon mentions China is still warming despite its use of coal burning that generates cooling aerosols. But this is due to a complicated combination of factors, many discussed by the moderator.

The denialists have had all this explained to them many times yet persist with their denialism. I suspect some people (particularly a large proportion of the climate denialists) find holding multi factorial issues in their heads difficult, despite often being well educated people. It might be a basic psychological difference between people. Like how some people are good at multi tasking and some aren't. This might partly explain their stubborn denialism. Im not sure if this would apply to rkcannon but it looks like it applies to some people.

I asked an AI about this and the response is as follows and includes specific references to key researchers:

Short answer:
Yes — there is published science showing that some people, even highly intelligent ones, have difficulty understanding situations where multiple interacting factors produce an outcome. This difficulty is not simply about “intelligence” but about specific cognitive skills, cognitive styles, and limits in working memory and reasoning.

1. Intelligence ≠ Systems Thinking
General intelligence (often measured as g) predicts problem‑solving in many areas, but systems thinking — the ability to understand interactions, feedback loops, and multi‑cause outcomes — is a separate cognitive skill.

Research in cognitive psychology and decision science shows that people can be strong in abstract reasoning yet weak in:

Integrative complexity (ability to hold multiple perspectives at once)

Causal reasoning (understanding how multiple causes interact)

Systems reasoning (thinking in terms of networks, not linear chains)

These are partly independent of IQ.

2. Working Memory Limits
Complex situations require holding several variables in mind simultaneously. Studies in cognitive load theory show that people vary widely in working memory capacity, which strongly affects their ability to reason about multi‑factor problems.

Even very intelligent people can have:

Lower working memory span

Difficulty tracking interacting variables

A tendency to oversimplify to reduce cognitive load

This leads to “single‑cause thinking” even when the person is otherwise bright.

3. Cognitive Biases That Block Multi‑Factor Understanding
Humans naturally prefer simple explanations. Several well‑documented biases contribute:

Simplicity bias — preference for one clear cause

Attribution error — overemphasis on personal causes vs. situational ones

Confirmation bias — selecting the cause that fits one’s existing beliefs

Narrative bias — preferring tidy stories over messy realities

These biases operate regardless of intelligence.

4. Need for Cognitive Closure
Some people have a stronger psychological need for quick, definite answers. Research on need for closure shows that individuals high in this trait struggle with:

Ambiguity

Multi‑factor explanations

Probabilistic reasoning

They prefer a single, decisive cause even when the situation is inherently complex.

5. Published Research Areas Supporting This
There is substantial scientific literature across several fields:

Cognitive psychology — working memory, causal reasoning, integrative complexity

Decision science — multi‑attribute decision‑making, heuristics and biases

Systems thinking research — especially in education, engineering, and management

Neuroscience — showing that multi‑factor reasoning activates networks associated with cognitive control and abstraction

Key researchers include:

Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky (cognitive biases)

Philip Tetlock (integrative complexity)

John Sterman (systems thinking)

Keith Stanovich (rationality vs. intelligence distinction)

6. Bottom Line
Some people — even very intelligent ones — genuinely struggle with multi‑factor, complex situations because:

Systems thinking is a distinct skill

Working memory varies between individuals

Cognitive biases push toward simple explanations

Some people have a psychological preference for certainty

This difficulty is not a sign of low intelligence, but a reflection of how differently human minds handle complexity.

-------------------

Normally I do not post AI responses but I think it makes sense on this issue and I dont have time to write an essay in my own words, and it includes a list of researchers people can look up.

Human-caused climate change is unmistakably distinct from Earth’s natural climate variability

rkcannon at 17:14 PM on 18 April, 2026

Rebuttal: Systems Analysis vs. Circular Reasoning

Subject: Response to Moderator Comments regarding Bhatta (2024) and Marks-Peterson (2026)

While the ad hominem labels—"amateur" and "naive"—provide a look into the moderator’s temperament, they do not address the physical and statistical discrepancies presented. As a Professional Engineer (PE), I prefer to evaluate the Transfer Functions of a system rather than the consensus of the "grown-ups."

1. On Circular Reasoning and System Gain
The moderator admits that the Nature paper (Marks-Peterson et al., 2026) requires "important contributions" from albedo and ocean circulation to explain a 2.5°C cooling while CO2 remained stable.

The Logic: To claim CO2 is the "key" control knob, only to demote it to a "passenger" whenever the data shows the planet cooling without its help, is circular reasoning.

The Math: Since the early 1900s, human CO2 emissions have increased by over 1,700%. If a seventeen-fold increase in the supposed "driver" results in a warming rate statistically similar to 1910, a rational systems analysis concludes the system is insensitive to that input.

2. The Failure of "Aerosol Masking"
The argument that mid-century cooling was "masked" by aerosols fails the spatial and modern test.

The Discrepancy: If industrial aerosols were a primary "cooling shield," China—with the world’s highest coal-related aerosol loading—should have been a global cool spot. Instead, China has warmed faster than the global average.

The Conclusion: You cannot invoke a "masking shield" to explain the 1940s cooling while ignoring its failure to stop warming in modern Asia. This is curve-fitting, not physics.

3. The Measured Driver: Albedo and the CERES Data
The moderator’s focus on 21-year surface trends ignores the most robust data set we have: the CERES satellite record.

The Data: Since 2000, CERES has measured a 0.8% drop in Earth’s albedo. This change in reflectivity has added roughly 2.7 W/m2 to the Earth's energy budget—effectively 100% of the warming forcing that the IPCC attributes to CO2 over the last 250 years.

4. The Missing "Fingerprint" and UHI Bias
If CO2 were the driver, the laws of physics dictate a "Tropical Hot Spot" in the upper troposphere. Decades of radiosonde and satellite data show this fingerprint is missing. The warming we do see is surface-based and highly correlated with Urban Heat Island (UHI) contamination. When you "homogenize" data by forcing rural stations to match urban trends, you aren't measuring global climate; you're measuring the encroachment of asphalt on thermometers.

Conclusion
Rational skepticism demands that models reconcile with empirical history. If the planet cooled 2.5°C with no change in CO2 in the Pliocene, and cooled for 40 years during a CO2 surge in the 20th century, the "Control Knob" theory is functionally dead. It is fascinating to watch the "Immune System" of this forum react; the Killer T-cells are working overtime to neutralize empirical data that looks like a "foreign invader" to the dogma. Nature doesn't care about your PhD or your moderation policy if your math is wrong.

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #14

One Planet Only Forever at 08:54 AM on 8 April, 2026

Recent SkS posted items raise important awareness and understanding related to the historic challenge of dealing with the damage done by people who choose to fail to responsibly learn to self-regulate their actions. Thank you to Doug and Marc for curating and sharing the Weekly New Research, and to Baerbel, John, and Doug (again) for curating and sharing the Weekly News Roundups.

A related item in this week’s Climate Policy and Politics list is, Vermont Hits Back at Trump’s Effort to Block ‘Climate Superfund’ Law. It is about responsible leaders struggling to use the powers they have, State powers in Vermont, to penalize and limit the climate change harm done by the global team of undeserving economic winners.

Responsible leadership struggles to effectively discourage and disappoint people who want to benefit from being: less accepting of diversity, more harmful, and less helpful. Humanity, especially its leaders, has a history of struggling regionally and globally to collectively correct and recover from results of harmful pursuits of benefit and get the beneficiaries of the harm done to make equitable and adequate reparations. It is more challenging when members of a regional or global club of harmful unhelpful people Win positions of power that enable them to make-up inequitable rules and harmfully enforce rules to avoid being penalized and to threaten, penalize and punish everyone they believe is a potential threat to their undeserved perceptions of superiority.

People passionately pursuing being perceived to be “The Winners” are most likely “The Problem”.

Restricting a person’s freedom to continue to benefit from understandably unsustainable harmful actions - does not harm them.

Penalizing a person for benefiting from understandably harmful actions and making their penalty help those who have been harmed - does not harm them.

An earlier related item is the study The political economy of leaving fossil fuels underground: The case of producing countries, listed in Open Access Notables in Skeptical Science New Research for Week #13 2026.

The study discusses the challenging temptation to pursue ‘Private Profits and Rents’ while creating ‘Public Problems’ by extracting and exporting non-renewable resources, especially challenging for developing nations.
The developed economic system is fatally flawed in many ways. One of the major flaws is that it values the removal and use of non-renewable resources, and ignores the harm done (it also encourages more harm to be done because it is easier and more profitable to be more harmful). Non-renewable resources have no value when they are left in the ground.

And the challenge is made worse by unjust made-up rules like the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty (Wikipedia link) (ECT). The EU formally withdrew from the ECT in June 2024. But the ECT rules were include ‘protection’ of Fossil Fuel investment rewards for 20 years after withdrawal (to 2044).

Another recent related item is Quantifying climate loss and damage consistent with a social cost of carbon, the first item listed in Open Access Notables in Skeptical Science New Research for Week #14 2026, (which was the basis of news item, Past CO2 emissions may drive far bigger future economic losses, in 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #13). The study explains that calculating the penalty owed today for fossil fuel harms of emissions-to-date should begin as early as 1980 and extend far into the future.

The following quote is regarding the earliest date it would be reasonable to say leaders would struggle to deny understanding the harmfulness of fossil fuel use:

To estimate when to begin counting emissions, we set our baseline ‘year of knowledge’ as 1990, or a year after the establishment of the IPCC. This is perhaps conservative: using text-based analysis of United Nations documents, other analyses set the date a decade earlier, and internal company documents reveal that some major emitters were aware of climate risks beginning around 1980.

Any pursuer of profit from fossil fuel use since 1990, and potentially since 1980, would struggle to credibly claim that they were unaware of the harm done by fossil fuel use. This reinforces the understanding that the Energy Charter Treaty was an unjust rule made-up by undeserving wealthy people.

Both studies also relate to Don Gillmore’s 2025 book, On Oil that I recently commented about (here @ comment 25 on the SkS post, After a major blow to U.S. climate regulations, what comes next?). In addition to presenting the general understanding that Alberta and other regional populations are easily tempted to pursue benefit from harmful fossil fuel use, and things really took off in about 1980, the chapter titled The Battle Begins opens with the following reinforcement of 1980 as a legitimate start date for evaluating penalties to apply to beneficiaries of harmful fossil fuel use:

In 1980, Ronald Reagan became president of the United States and appointed James Watt, a determined anti-environmentalist, as secretary of the Department of the Interior. Watt described environmentalists as “a leftwing cult dedicated to bringing down the type of government I believe in,” and refused to meet with them. Watt was a devout Christian who believed the End Times were near. “I do not know,” he said to Congress in 1981, “how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” In the meantime there wasn’t much point in preserving the environment. Reagan concurred, telling television evangelist Jim Bakker, “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.”

Anne Gorsuch, a lawyer who was scornful of climate science (and whose son Neil sits on the Supreme Court), was given the role of Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and cut the EPA budget by 22 percent and staff by almost 30 percent. Enforcement declined by 79 percent during her first year. She hired people from the industries the EPA was supposed to be regulating, tried to weaken pollution standards, and facilitated the use of restricted-use pesticides. She resigned in 1983 amid scandal, ... Her most lasting legacy may have been to solidify political battle lines around oil and the environment: If you were a Republican, you were pro-development and, if not anti-environment, at least anti-environmentalist. It began as a corporate issue, then became a political issue and to some extent a generational issue, and finally, like so much these days, it became a tribal issue.

The formation of the ECT in 1994, 14 years after 1980, should be understood to be a misleading attempt to unjustifiably obtain benefit and protect against the loss of undeserved perceptions of superiority. And since 1980 it has continually become clearer that investments in new fossil fuel pursuits should be considered to be bets in the marketplace that deserve whatever ‘penalties or losses of opportunity for benefit’ happen. The people who benefited from the delay of transition away from fossil fuel use since 1980, particularly business leaders and investors, could and should be penalized rather than be protected and rewarded. ‘Legal creations’ like the ECT should not be able to be used to evade penalty for past ‘bad bets made on benefiting from fossil fuel use’.

There is a long diverse history of harmful pursers of personal benefit seriously damaging and delaying the development of sustainable improvements for the future of humanity. The, now officially discredited, Doctrine of Discovery developed as Papal Bulls in the 1400s (Link to Canadian Museum for Human Rights) and was formally brought into American Law by US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in 1823 (Link to Wikipedia). It was misleading marketing to excuse undeniably harmful colonialism, racism, and slavery. The incorrect beliefs about the ‘fundamental superiority of a sub-set of humanity’ persist in the supposedly most advanced societies today, and contaminate the thoughts and actions in many developing societies, allowing neocolonialism (link to Wikipedia) to flourish.

People passionately pursuing being perceived to be “The Winners” are most likely “The Problem”.

I have also been re-reading Thomas Piketty’s 2021 book, A Brief History of Equality (first english translation 2022). The following are selected related quotes:

From Chapter 9, Exiting Neocolonialism, which includes a sub-section with the heading, The Pretenses of International Aid and Climate Policies.

The battle for equality is not over. It must be continued by pushing to its logical conclusion the movement toward the welfare state, progressive taxation, real equality, and the struggle against all kinds of discrimination. The battle also, and especially, involves a structural transformation of the global economic system [including reparations (penalties) for harms done by past emissions, and no compensation for people claiming to be harmed by restrictions of their harmfulness and penalties for being harmful] .
…
Our current economic organization, which is founded on the uncontrolled circulation of capital lacking either a social or environmental objective, often resembles a form of neocolonialism that benefits the wealthiest persons. This model of development is politically and ecologically untenable. Moving beyond it requires the transformation of the national welfare state into a federal [multi-national] welfare state open to the global South, along with a profound revision of the rules and treaties that currently govern globalization.
...
We must also emphasize the extreme hypocrisy that surrounds the very notion of international aid. First, public aid for development is much more limited than is often imagined: in all, it represents less than 0.2 percent of the global GDP (and scarcely 0.03 percent of the global GDP for emergency humanitarian aid). In comparison, the cost of climatic damage inflicted on poor countries by past and current emissions from rich countries amounts by itself to several points of the global GDP. The second problem, which is not a detail [not a minor technicality], is that in most of the countries supposedly “aided” in Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere, the amount of outflow in the form of multinationals’ profits and capital flights [evading taxation] is in reality several times greater than the incoming flows from public assistance, …

Chapter 10 sub-section with the heading, Climate Change and the Battle Between Ideologies.

All the transformations [sustainable improvements reducing harmful inequality] discussed in this book, whether the development of the welfare state, progressive taxation, participatory socialism, electoral and educational equality, or the exit from neocolonialism, will occur only if they are accompanied by strong mobilizations and power relationships. There is nothing surprising about that: in the past, it has always been struggles and collective movements that have made it possible to replace old [harmful unsustainable] structures with new institutions.
…
Environmental catastrophes are, of course, among the factors that may help accelerate the pace of change. In theory, we could hope that the mere prospect of these catastrophes, whose future occurrence scientific research has increasingly confirmed, might suffice to provoke adequate mobilization. Unfortunately, it is possible that only tangible concrete damage greater than we have already seen will manage to break down conservative attitudes and radically challenge the current economic system.
…
In the darkest scenario, the signals will come too late to avoid conflicts between nations over resources, and it will take decades to realize possible, as yet hypothetical reconstructions [sustainable developments like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pursuits to mitigate and correct high levels of inequality] [we are potentially already experiencing that Darkest Scenario].
…
We can also foresee hostile reactions towards countries and social groups whose ways of life have contributed most to the disaster, starting with the richest classes in the United States, but also in Europe and the rest of the world.
…
the global North, despite a limited population (about 15% of world population for the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, and Japan), has produced nearly 80% of the carbon emissions that have accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
…
However, we have to qualify the idea that a green Enlightenment will be likely to save the planet. In reality, people have suspected for a long time – indeed almost since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution – that this accelerated burning of fossil fuels might have harmful effects. If reactions have been slow and remain so limited even today, that is also and especially because the economic interests at stake are considerable, between countries as well as within them. For the countries most affected (in particular in the global South), the attenuation of the effects of a warming climate and financing for measures to adapt to it will require a transformation of the distribution of wealth and the economic system as a whole, and this in turn will involve the development of new political and social coalitions on a global scale. The idea that there might be only winners is a dangerous and anesthetizing illusion that must be abandoned immediately.

It all closes back to the SkS items that this comment started with.

People passionately pursuing being perceived to be “The Winners” are most likely “The Problem”.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

John Hartz at 14:00 PM on 20 March, 2026

@Pollution Monster #471:

You state: "The problem with nuclear is not a technological problem, but a regulatorary problem."

Do you regard the proper disposition of the nuclear waste to be a regulatory problem? If so, should this particular problem be resolved prior to the "go-ahead" for the construction of a new nuclear power plant?

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

PollutionMonster at 15:19 PM on 17 March, 2026

My last link in 469 was an editorial. I have done some more research. I think nuclear versus renewable has taken too much of the front stage. We should focus on decaboninzation.

"Overall, the findings support the role of nuclear energy in achieving global decarbonization targets, provided that safety, equity, and environmental responsibility are upheld."

nuclear energy decarboninzation.

This is a peer reviewed article from 2025 that explicity says nuclear can helpo us meet emissions targets, Abott 2012 is a bit dated and the author admits that nuclear can arguably be used to address climate change.

Each energy source has its own strengths and weakness. For example, wind is low during heatwaves. Wind turbines are also dangerous to fix and workers have died from falling. Hydroelectric dams can break causing many deaths, take for example the Banqiao Dam failure. Nuclear killed zero people in contrast in 2025.

As for the cost of nuclear there is red tape driving up consturction cost and time. Like renenwables most of the cost for nuclear is in the construction.

Red tape nuclear power construction cost and time

The problem with nuclear is not a technological problem, but a regulatorary problem. We shouldn't be arguing we should be trying to phase out fossil fuels which kill many via air pollution.

Why Science Communication Fails: How to Break Down Misleading Arguments and Inoculate Against Misinformation

Just Dean at 20:01 PM on 16 March, 2026

The issue is straightforward. You're treating CO₂ as a dependent variable from various sources and sinks, rather than as the forcing function that drives temperature. The radiative physics doesn't care how CO₂ got into the atmosphere. A molecule from volcanoes or the ocean and a molecule from a coal plant have identical greenhouse properties.

The ice age data illustrate this precisely. During glacial cycles, orbital forcing, ice-albedo feedback, and ocean circulation drove CO₂ and temperature through completely different cycles than today — yet those data points land on exactly the same CO₂-temperature relationship as the deep-time Cenozoic record. Different mechanisms, same curve. That's not a coincidence. That's the physics.

In this news release about the Science article, Tierney states this directly:
"Carbon dioxide is the dominant control on global temperatures across geological time. When CO₂ is low, the temperature is cold; when CO₂ is high, the temperature is warm.”
“We found that carbon dioxide and temperature are not only really closely related but related in the same way across 485 million years."

The slope of the modern instrumental record is much shallower than the Judd curve — not because the physics is different, but because the ocean's enormous thermal inertia means it absorbs heat slowly over decades to centuries. Nature moved CO₂ over millennia. We've done the equivalent in 175 years. The lag between the green trajectory and the equilibrium curve in the diagram is that difference in rates made visible.

Why Science Communication Fails: How to Break Down Misleading Arguments and Inoculate Against Misinformation

Just Dean at 19:47 PM on 10 March, 2026

John's discussion of cherrypicking — one of the five FLICC techniques — resonated with me in a specific way. One of the most effective forms of cherrypicking in climate communication isn't the deliberate kind; it's the inadvertent kind. When we present the modern instrumental record of CO₂ and temperature in isolation — as most data visualizations do — we're unintentionally handing skeptics an opening. The data is hanging out in parameter space with no reference point, vulnerable to the response: "the climate has always been changing."

As an engineer and former experimental physicist, my instinct when evaluating any measurement is to overlay independent diagnostics. If they converge, you have something real. Applied to climate, that means placing three completely independent datasets on the same CO₂–temperature axes: the deep-time equilibrium relationship from Cenozoic reconstructions spanning 66 million years (Judd et al., Science 2024), glacial–interglacial variability from Antarctic ice cores covering the past 800,000 years, and the modern instrumental record since 1850. These datasets were developed by different scientific communities, using different methods, to answer different questions. When plotted together, they don't just approximately agree. They land on top of each other.

What this ensemble makes structurally harder is cherrypicking. To dismiss the composite, a skeptic must simultaneously discredit three independent lines of evidence — geological proxies, ice cores, and direct measurement — each developed without reference to the others. More importantly, the composite provides a direct visual answer to the "climate has always been changing" myth. Yes — and here are 66 million years of it on one plot. What it shows is that nowhere in that entire record does Earth evidence the specific combination of CO₂ concentration and global temperature that exists today. It is not the individual values that are unprecedented. It is the combination.

At the end of the episode, Nate asked John what individuals can do. His answer — that we each bring something different to the table — struck me as both honest and important. I'm not a climate scientist. But the instinct to overlay independent diagnostics, standard practice in experimental physics, turned out to be useful here.

For anyone interested, the most recent post developing these arguments is here: [link]

Trump just torched the basis for federal climate regulations. Here’s what it means.

nigelj at 11:47 AM on 27 February, 2026

Bob @31

Yes systems that rely purely on prescriptive rules are too restrictive and discourage innovation. That's one reason NZ moved away from local council prescriptive rules, and adopted The NZ building code. The NZBC is an objectives and performance criteria model, and allows for design form first principles for just about everything, with the design and calcs needing council approval, or sometimes it can be done by an independent engineer or other expert.

As I stated we can still use the NZ standards which are essentially prescriptive rules. They are generally applicable to small buildings only. People mostly design houses using the NZ Standards. Very few people design a house or part of a house from first principles because its too expensive and time consuming getting approvals. The exception is when you need some steel structure within a house, as this is outside the scope of The NZ Standards. But you would be brave to do it for the plumbing system. So innovation tends to be driven with large buildings where design from fist principles is more common.

And one of the ironies is even when one uses design from first principles, Council are very tough scrutinising this to protect their own backsides I suppose. There's no magic building regulations system, but NZs approach combines prescriptive rules and performance criteria, and is certainly ok, and probably as good as it gets, and yours sounds similar.

Yes Oceangate seemed like the designer was very arrogant and contemptuous of the rules and need for approvals. Reminds me of myself at a young age but most people grow up.

And yes I've also noticed Trump is destroying process and wants total power for himself. I think we are better off having checks and balances. The political decision making process in America and to a lesser extent in NZ, does seem to have been in a sort of grid lock in recent years but IMHO that's not so much due to a bad process, and checks and balances, as a very divided country not sure which way to go. Its like society is at some sort of tipping point. But I don't think we should be solving that problem by electing power mad tyrants and mad men.

New Zealands current right wing government is cutting regulations. Some of this looks ideologically driven. Some of its allegedly on wasteful regulations. Except the government hasn't found any significant examples. The government has also fired thousands of public servants. The excuses are waste, but they have never provided hard evidence. And another reason has been to cut government deficits, but government debt is really quite low as a % gdp, so it just looks ideologically driven.

Of course I fully acknowledge its possible to over regulate and have over staffed bureaucracies, but the government hasn't really provided great proof of either. If you want to see genuine over regulation parts of Europe might be examples. But really I'm not a fan of the very small government self regulation ideology, because it just doesn't work. History has repeatedly shown that. And theres plenty of evidence that regulations drive innovation.

I suppose its ultimately a balancing act between under and over regulation, but if we listen to experts and base decisions on evidence we can get that balance right. Its so sad watching Trumps America turn its back on experts, and on a need for regulations. That is never going to end well.

After a major blow to U.S. climate regulations, what comes next?

Eric (skeptic) at 18:59 PM on 24 February, 2026

The conclusion is basically backwards. The best case is for states to experiment with solutions and have Congress write laws to set numeric standards for CO2 just like they did for CO. The worse case is to go to the Supreme Court and watch them rule 6-3 against the same thing they ruled 5-4 for in 2007. It's pretty simple: decisions based on policy, or even worse, science, do not create strong legal precedent. Please read the Roberts 2007 dissent that I will again link here: Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007)

If the USSC decides a similar case, a 6-3 decision will hinge on Roberts 2007 logic both in deference to the legal issues and to Roberts himself. The three liberal justices will maintain the Stevens argument and argue it's even more crucial today. The other six may secretly harbor Scalia's merchandizing of doubt, but won't put that in writing.

How will Congress pass those laws? Good question, a simple majority in the House is inevitable thanks to my state of Virginia gerrymandering and anti-Trump sentiment. 60 votes can be purchased in the Senate by sending enough money to farmers regardless of party control.

Trump just torched the basis for federal climate regulations. Here’s what it means.

nigelj at 11:27 AM on 24 February, 2026

Bob, I do acknowledge it would be difficult apportioning which pollutant decisions require legislative approval and which could be completely left to the EPA to do its thing. So you get the last say with your previous comment. I'm out of energy for any more anyway.

Trumps deep distrust of science might be psychological projection. Hes so incredibly dishonest himself he assumes everyone else is.

The effects of his presidency on American science look quite crippling. Last months Economist Journal has a good article on the issue. I dont have a link because I buy the paper version for the coffee table.

It's not bad

jlsoaz at 08:10 AM on 13 February, 2026

Hi Bob and Eclectic,

Thanks for your constructive responses from half a year ago.

Also, I just stumbled across this "cross-sectional study" from February 2024.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10862342/
BMJ Med
. 2024 Feb 10;3(1):e000627. doi: 10.1136/bmjmed-2023-000627
Published research on the human health implications of climate change between 2012 and 2021: cross sectional study
Victoria L Bartlett 1, Harry Doernberg 1, Maryam Mooghali 2, Ravi Gupta 3, Joshua D Wallach 4, Kate Nyhan 4,5, Kai Chen 4, Joseph S Ross 2,6,7,✉
PMCID: PMC10862342 PMID: 38352020

--------

Some useful looking quotes:

"What is already known on this topic.

"Climate change is one of the most pressing public health threats of the 21st century, contributing to more than 250 000 deaths each year."

and

"...Eligibility criteria

"Inclusion criteria were peer reviewed, original research articles that investigated the health effects of climate change and were published in English from 2012 to 2021. After identification, a 10% random sample was selected to manually perform a detailed characterisation of research topics and publication information.
Results

"10 325 original research articles were published between 2012 and 2021, and the number of articles increased by 23% annually...."

------

My additional comments to this study and to your comments:

Bob, thanks for the points about the logical fallacies, that helps put this in perspective.

Both, I didn't realize it was a volunteer effort exactly.... though that makes some sense now.

As to the 250,000 deaths per year number they cite, I am not sure where they are getting that (I have only stumbled across the summary today and haven't read the study itself, and doubt I will understand much of it if I do).

Still, the optimistic main thing that I get from this study is that there have been many peer-reviewed studies by now, and taken together, there is growing strength in the claims that have been made as to how many deaths scientists are telling us climate change is "contributing to". I'd have to get to it later to see what exact wording is used in the report.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

One Planet Only Forever at 05:06 AM on 10 February, 2026

Regarding PollutionMonster’s comment @454, and the comments since then, I add the following comment with related recent news items related to the context of my earlier comments @450, @428, @413:

The Trump administration exempts new nuclear reactors from environmental review, NPR, Geoff Brumfiel, Feb 2, 2026.

The Trump administration has secretly rewritten nuclear safety rules, NPR, Geoff Brumfiel, Jan 28, 2026.

Trump's rush to build nuclear reactors across the U.S. raises safety worries, NPR, Geoff Brumfiel, Dec 17, 2025.

It appears that some people who made significant bad bets (investments) trying to develop small modular nuclear reactors have gotten the USA leadership-of-the-moment to weaken developed requirements requirements for evaluation and understanding of the risks and harms of new nuclear reactors.

The people who placed those losing bets appear to understand that the new nuclear systems being developed would be more expensive than the renewable alternatives if they had to be as safe and publicly well understood as the developed requirements for nuclear power plants would require.

One tragic argument in favour of small modular nuclear power plants is that the magnitude of the harm is limited because the plants are smaller than the large scale plants. The (il)logic appears to be that the damage done by a small nuclear plant would be less than the damage done by a large nuclear plant … therefore smaller plants can be riskier and be more harmful per unit of power generated than a large one.

The reality will be that the risks and harm of these new small modular nuclear reactors will become known after there are many of them in use. And, after the attempts to limit public awareness of the risk and harm, it will likely be argued that correcting what has been developed will be 'too harmful'. After all, it is unlikely that the powerful people pushing for benefits from the harmful unsustainable activity will suffer significant harm.

I will repeat the closing part of my comment @450 (with its pointing back to my comment @428):

Also, in the future, any energy system that is unsustainable will be unable to be continued. Unsustainable activities either use up non-renewable resources or produce accumulating harm. Nuclear power systems consume non-renewable resources and produce accumulating harm.

Therefore, no future energy system will include nuclear power generation. And since it is also a very costly way of generating electricity it should be unpopular.

However, humans have a tragic history of regionally developing popular support for harmful costly misunderstandings, as I implied in my comment @428.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

PollutionMonster at 20:21 PM on 9 February, 2026

I read the links provided and I am still not 100% sure who is correct. The author of the blog posted a new post again promoting nuclear as part of the solution along side renewables.

Nuclear and renewables?

I see this as a puzzle I am trying to figure out. Basically the author still makes many references to nuclear while also promoting many renenwables including solar. Seeing nuclear, geothermal, and hydroelectric as a stepping stone before we go to fully renewable.

So who is right? Do we eliminate nuclear entirely or do we use nuclear as a stepping stone until we can go fully nuclear?

Thanks for your time and energy in advance.

Joseph E. Postma and the Greenhouse Effect Part 2

Eclectic at 23:11 PM on 21 January, 2026

JPostma :-

An interesting disquisition [including the other thread] by you ~ and one which, I must confess, I have not seen published in any of the reputable scientific journals. Could it be that you have failed to recognize flaws in your work?

For example, you say: "However, the lapse rate differential is only as that calculated from adiabatic thermodynamics. This is actually enough to refute the climate greenhouse postulate."

~ But what you have stated is a logical non-sequitur. [Discuss.]

Joseph E. Postma and the Greenhouse Effect Part 2

JPostma at 13:06 PM on 21 January, 2026

The greenhouse effect should produce a differential effect on temperature since there is a differential effect on radiation scattering and absorption. However, the lapse rate differential is only as that calculated from adiabatic thermodynamics. This is actually enough to refute the climate greenhouse postulate.

Even if we go beyond what is plausible and grant that a differential influence does not produce a differential effect, then, if the height of emission changes such that it induces higher near-surface temperature, then this means that the temperature of the emitting region has also moved up the gradient, and now we have a violation of conservation of energy because a larger emitting shell is emitting at the same temperature as before. In fact, the height of emission can change without affecting the temperature. The absolute temperature profile of the atmosphere remains the same, the average height of emission simply moves up. But in any case, the primary logic already refutes the greenhouse effect: the lapse rate is caused by adiabtic thermodynamics, and there is no sign of the greenhouse effect.

[snip]

Joseph E. Postma and the Greenhouse Effect

JPostma at 11:55 AM on 21 January, 2026

Mutual exclusivity disproves the greenhouse effect

[snip]

A little application of logic goes a long way in science.

Zeke's 2026 and 2027 global temperature forecasts

nigelj at 06:04 AM on 25 December, 2025

MAR, good comment. I would say 90% pretentious twaddle, 10% grain of truth. Regarding the 10% grain of truth. Our current trajectory is looking bad. In terms of population numbers and economic growth and industrial culture clearly has us heading towards a resource crisis where we could potentially run short of energy and various important minerals. More specifically these things could start to become ominously expensive to extract. This all seems well known and relatively uncontroversial.

Surely the most likely outcome is that there will be some shortages of energy and materials and we will be forced to prioritise things and ration things and do a lot of recycling. There may be a drop in standard of living. Its impossible to say how much, because there are so many unknown variables like population trends and discoveries of new mineral deposits and technological substitution. I could be a very small drop in standard of living or quite drastic.

The economic system will change in some way and economic growth will be forced to or stop slow by shortages of resources. Humanity will not just lie down helplessly and give up. It will mitigate and adapt in some way. Capitalism may morph into something different but then again it might not. Capitalism does not strictly speaking need endless gdp growth.

The alternative is to be proactive to avoid shortages emerging in the first place. But this would require our generation to make drastic and urgent voluntary cuts in our use of energy and materials to make what is left last a very long time, without rising in price too much. Or we could make drastic cuts in the size of our population.

Well good luck persuading humanity to all volunteer to live like poor people or kill of about 5 billion people. I'm sure that will be adopted with enthusiasm. And any drastic cuts in consumption could cause massive levels of unemployment so we are caught between a rock and a hard place. And such a plan is very risky because we cant even quantify the problem beyond saying we will likely run short of some things eventually sometime.

People also talk about abandoning capitalism and having another go at something socialist. Im very suspicious of any sort of planned utopian solutions to the resource problem, having seen how disastrous communism was. I dont oppose all socialist ideas. For example there is a strong place for some government provision of services but I think the concept of private property is so entrenched that its unlikely to change. I certainly dont believe it should change.

Or another alternative is we do both adaptation and proactive change: For example we are adopting renewable energy, which does have the virtue its not reliant on non renewable resources like burning coal. This leaves such resources for other uses like petrochemicals.

Its a very complex issue. Clearly we need to change our ways, and this will either be forced on us by deteriorating circumstances or we will be a bit more proactive about it.

Zeke's 2026 and 2027 global temperature forecasts

MA Rodger at 18:42 PM on 24 December, 2025

prove we are smart@1,
Your request for "proof" is a bit off the subject of climate..

This Steven J. Newbury describes himself as an "Amateur Anthropogenic Entropy Theorist and Free Software developer." His (latest?) web presence dates back a month and sports 41 posts allegedly of non-trivial substance. These are not good signs.
He cannot write for nuts: another bad sign.

The particular post you link-to manages to tell us he:-

argued that to avoid the “Resource Entropy Singularity”—the point where the energetic cost of maintaining our society exceeds the energy available to it—we must transition from an economy based on Exchange-Value (financialisation, infinite growth) to one based on Use-Value (utility, biophysical reality).

Readers, quite naturally, have asked the follow-up question: “How do we get there?”

He then deigns to provide his "uncomfortable truth" that "we cannot 'manage' our way to survival" and that the "best case" would be that we initiate a human catastrophe to stop us "strip-min(ing) the biosphere down to the bedrock."

The employment of thermodynamical principles within non-thermodynamical circumstances is not a robust use of the physics. Such use is pure analogy and prone to the usual panoply of pitfalls for analogies. Talking 'energy use' simply dresses such analogy in pseudo-science.

His argument is really simply that the current trajectory of mankind is pointing to some really bad outcomes. You could use such projections to point to, say, pre-industrial mankind drowning in horse shit. Or perhaps to consider that the increasing ability of humanity to wage destructive war and the use of such war over ideological differences would reach the point where we can and thus eventually will inevitably destroy ourselves.

Or you could argue that humanity is today gaining access to new technologies that are exceedingly dangerous which our societies are entirely ill-equipped to harness in any way safely. Or you could argue that the nation states around the world will be unable to mitigate the emerging climate crisis and then be unable to cope with that climatic crisis and instead resort to military force precipitating an even worse crisis. And if not the emerging climate crisis, how about the emerging ecological crisis? Or one of the multitude of resource crises (of which 'energy' is but one)? And maybe a future malthusian crisis could yet reappear despite the passing of 'peak-baby'.

I'm sure Steven J. Newbury could happily invoke such threats into his "Grand Agency" bad and "Ground Agency" good. But really? Is this idea that we can chill out and be good if only we could precipitate the revolution which allows a utopian society to appear and flourish on the bones of today's world. Is there in some manner a metaphorical island we can inhabit and grow, fat like the Kākāpō, a species which only had laughing owls to fear as long as they stayed nocturnal? And in that analogised setting, was suddenly nature actually no longer red in tooth and claw?

You've probably guessed by now, I'm of the opinion that this little essay of
Steven J. Newbury is pretentious twaddle.

Emergence vs Detection & Attribution

wilddouglascounty at 10:49 AM on 17 December, 2025

@10 Bob, we completely agree until the very last sentence. The exact analogy that I'm driving at is that we're NOT saying "He was on steroids." The analogy, if carried to its simplified analog to "steroids" is "fossil fuels" or "carbon emissions" or "greenhouse gases" and the like, not "climate change." There is a real psychological underpinning behind the need to simplify a complex topic: just make sure you simplify it in a way that points out what needs to change if you want the changing climate to stabilize!

As you have pointed out, the complexity of the climate includes all of the other factors as a system, including solar irradiation, volcanic activity, long term orbital dynamics, and on and on, which we know goes "whoosh" over the average person's head, which the fossil fuel companies have taken advantage of, by the way. But the systemic changes we're seeing in the climate is from the change in carbon emissions that are overwhelming the system's ability to absorb it, causing a change in the composition of the atmosphere and ocean that supports increasingly frequent severe weather events. So we need to really hone in on that single fact: rising greenhouse gas percentages in the atmosphere and oceans is changing the climate, not "climate change." It is easier for everyone to understand the source of the changes occurring in a very complicated system in the same way as "he was on steroids" cuts to the chase. And #11, Nigelj, I'm completely fine with the term "anthropogenic climate change" and for everyone, I don't honestly expect us to just immediately stop using "climate change" as an important phrase in our vocabulary and discussions about the topic. What I do sincerely hope is that this phrase be modified to include the human driven nature of the changes in the climate, so in addition to "anthropogenic climate change" I'm hoping folks will always use such phrases as "human activity induced climate change," "fossil fuel driven climate change," "greenhouse gas induced climate change," "carbon emission driven climate change," etc. if you need to use the phrase at all. These phrases include true causality, while "climate change" by itself does not pinpoint the causal problem as finely as it needs to be made if we have any chance of changing our future.

Emergence vs Detection & Attribution

Bob Loblaw at 04:52 AM on 17 December, 2025

Wild:

The most common (and probably the most familiar) example of a descriptive approach to climate is the Koppen Climate Classification system. It uses seasonal observations of temperature and precipitation to classify a regions using qualitative terms. This system aligns with our common concepts of tropical, arid, temperate, polar, continental, coastal climates, etc.

Attribution studies need some sort of model that allows an estimate of the likelihood of events (e.g. severe weather) under two different regimes (with greenhouse gases, and without). The Koppen system is a model - but largely a descriptive model. It uses numerical results, but those are descriptive statistical models.

Attribution requires a much more quantitative model - a physical model. The model simulates climate under one set of controlling conditions, and then it is run under a different set (greenhouse gases, in this case). It can be a bit hard to see the physics behind that, though, as physical model outputs are often interpreted using a descriptive model. The statistics with and without greenhouse gases help determine the probability of an event of a particular intensity, with or without climate change. But keep in mind that those descriptive statistics of the physical model output are just as complex as doing descriptive statistics of actual weather observations.

In the case of the "juiced athlete", the attribution to performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) is difficult, for very similar reasons. You can't claim "this home run was caused by PEDs" for the same reason you can't claim "this severe weather event was caused by climate change". Arguing that a particular drug is a PED needs to be based on detailed physiological studies, as you suggest.

...but that level of detail isn't going to get a message across to the general public very well - it will go "whoosh" over their heads. "He was on steroids" is the short form. Just as "the climate has changed" is the short form for all the things that have happened due to our release of greenhouse gases and other human activities that have altered the climate.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

PollutionMonster at 18:47 PM on 14 December, 2025

I have been reading this blog and it seems decent quality. I think that nuclear energy can used side by side renewable energy sources like wind and solar. That until we get the massive grid storage needed for all renewables that we can replace brown coal with nuclear at least in the short run.

I am not pro nor anti-nuclear, I just want to understand the topic better.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

angusmac at 13:35 PM on 3 December, 2025

BL@173, 177 and 178

Before responding to your challenge, I note that the points you raise would not normally be part of the guidelines that a publication would provide for an independent reviewer. Instead, they appear to be points derived by someone who has studied the paper at university and wishes to arrive at preconceived conclusions regarding my ability to carry out an independent review.

I now reply as follows.

Why did he do the work?

He developed a one-dimensional climate model based on a steady-state energy balance approach to analyse temperature and ice distribution by latitude.

The study was motivated by the need to understand how variations in solar radiation and atmospheric properties influence global surface temperature and ice coverage, with particular focus on the roles of solar input, surface albedo, and meridional heat transport.

His work represents an early application of energy balance modelling to demonstrate how changes in climate variables can drive significant shifts in Earth’s temperature and ice extent

What aspects of climate science does he attempt to address?
The paper addresses some aspects of climate science, including:

The planetary energy budget, focusing on the balance between absorbed solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation by latitude.

The role of ice–albedo feedback and the existence of multiple stable climate states, demonstrating how changes in high-latitude ice extent can lead to either warmer climates or near-complete ice coverage.

What part of his paper represents "original work"?
He appears to have made several original contributions, including:

Developing a zonally averaged, one-dimensional energy balance model structured by latitude, which calculates mean annual sea-level surface temperature for each latitude band. The model incorporates key parameters such as solar radiation, surface albedo, infrared emission, and meridional heat transport.

Conducting systematic numerical experiments by varying parameters such as the solar constant, albedo, and transport coefficients. This enabled the exploration of climate sensitivity and the identification of distinct equilibrium states, including both warmer climates and scenarios approaching global glaciation.

What part of his paper provides useful guidance to future work in climate science?
Part 2 “The Model” and Part 3 “Applications” provide particularly useful guidance for future climate science research for two main reasons:

Conceptual: These sections demonstrate that even highly simplified energy-balance models can produce multiple stable climate states. This insight has motivated more detailed investigations into climate feedback mechanisms, such as ice–albedo feedback, and their role in glacial–interglacial transitions.

Methodological: The modelling framework introduced is straightforward and transparent and has been adopted in subsequent research. It enabled systematic evaluation of climate sensitivity, heat capacity, and meridional heat transport.

Interestingly, Sellers (1973) is classified as neutral, and Sellers (1974) is classified as warming by both PCF-08 and me.

Why the chemtrail conspiracy theory lingers and grows – and why Tucker Carlson is talking about it

nigelj at 05:15 AM on 3 December, 2025

Regarding chemtrail conspiracy theories. Its been suggested some people have a conspiratorial leaning personality. I asked Google Gemini the following question: "Some people strongly believe in conspiracy theories. It's been suggested some people have a conspiratorial personality. What does the science say? Quote a couple of studies if possible." Geminis response was interesting and convincing:

Science suggests that while no single "conspiratorial personality" type exists in simple terms, a cluster of specific personality traits and psychological motives makes some individuals more susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories. These traits often relate to suspicion, a need for uniqueness, and a lack of analytical thinking.

Key Personality Traits and Predictors

Research has identified several personality characteristics and psychological factors linked to a propensity for conspiratorial thinking:

Antagonism and Paranoia: A sense of antagonism toward others, high levels of suspiciousness, and paranoia are strong predictors. People with these traits tend to view the world as a dangerous and threatening place.

Schizotypy and Odd Beliefs: Traits associated with schizotypal personality (a predisposition toward certain psychological disorders), such as eccentricity, magical thinking, and unusual beliefs, are linked to higher belief in conspiracies.

Narcissism and Fragile Self-Esteem: A high degree of narcissism (an inflated sense of self and entitlement) and low, unstable self-esteem can predict belief in conspiracy theories. Such beliefs may help people defend a fragile sense of self-worth by making them feel unique or superior for possessing "secret" knowledge.

Lack of Analytical Thinking: Individuals who rely more on intuition ("gut feelings") rather than analytical, critical thinking are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. Lower levels of education and scientific knowledge are also correlated with this tendency.

Need for Uniqueness and Control: People are more drawn to conspiracy theories when they feel a lack of control over their environment or a desire to feel special and unique.

Conversely, the general "Big Five" personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) have a much weaker, less consistent relationship with conspiratorial thinking in meta-analyses.
Noteworthy Studies

Two key areas of research illustrate these findings:

The Role of Personality Dimensions and Motivations (Bowes et al., 2020/2023): A meta-analytic review published in Psychological Bulletin (2023) by Shauna Bowes and colleagues synthesized findings from numerous studies to provide a clearer portrait of the "conspiratorial mind". The researchers found that while general Big Five traits had weak associations, more specific pathological personality traits, such as high grandiosity, low agreeableness/humility, and antagonism, were strong predictors. They concluded that conspiratorial thinking is complex and linked to various motives (epistemic, existential, and social), suggesting no single, simple "conspiratorial personality" type but rather a convergence of specific vulnerabilities.

Conspiracy Mentality as a General Predisposition (Bruder et al., 2013): A study in Frontiers in Psychology (2019) is part of a body of work that found a general measure called "Conspiracy Mentality" (a general predisposition to interpret events as the result of conspiracies) to be the best predictor of belief in specific conspiracy theories. This "mentality" captures a general mind-set of distrust and a tendency to see intentional, malevolent forces at work, and it was a more reliable predictor than broader personality traits like the Big Five. The study highlighted that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are more likely to believe in others, even mutually contradictory ones.

CO2 increase is natural, not human-caused

sychodefender at 22:35 PM on 2 December, 2025

Only 5% of global annual co2 emissions are man made. Thus 5% of the yearly rise in atmospheric co2 (2.4 ppm) is from human activities.
(2.4 ppm X 5% = 0.12 ppm pa)
Scientists argue about the existence and quantity of various positive feedbacks from the tiny amount of warming that 0.12 ppm produces, but generally they estimate that feedbacks add 300% to forcing.
(0.12 ppm X 300% = 0.36 ppm pa)
So the maximum reduction that we can achieve with net zero is 0.36 ppm pa and this is extremely unlikely to happen this century.
Some other process is occurring to make up the remaining 2.04 ppm pa that is being added to the atmosphere, does this suggest that feedback from the small temperature rise is much more powerful than previously thought?
Or is our belief that this coincidental co2 rise is the driver of significant warming erroneous?
Methane is calculated to be responsible for 30% of warming, 60% of global methane emissions are anthropological, hence theoretically by completely eliminating our methane emissions we could prevent 18% of its influence on temperature increase.
This would necessitate dramatic changes which in all honesty are massively unlikely, perhaps a 10% reduction might be possible this century.
It seems that the ability of these anthropological gases (and their associated feedbacks) to have any significant warming effect is very small indeed.
If we are certain that the measurements revealing an untypical rapid temperature rise are accurate we must search elsewhere for an explanation and hopefully a method of control that is potent, plausible and genuinely achievable on a global basis and timescale.

Why the chemtrail conspiracy theory lingers and grows – and why Tucker Carlson is talking about it

pattimer at 21:32 PM on 2 December, 2025

This is a good article.

However it was predictable that this ludicrous and other ludicrous conspiracies would grow now. I personally predicted this and watched them grow in line with the predictions, not just online but with talking and meeting people. As good as the article is, however, it doesn't cover why these deep state conspiracies are growing now at this point on time.

CL Matheson knows that conspiracies do exist. It would be equally ludicrous to claim otherwise.

While world conspiracies among scientists would be virtually impossible it would be unreasonable to believe that governments do not conspire particularly with their friends and allies.

People will generally accept that people in the countries that are considered to be politically in opposition to their own country have been conditioned through a false narrative. However analogous to the cosmological principle this works both ways.

However when more and more people have come to realise this last point those without adequate scientific understanding will make the irrational leap to think that scientists around the world are also conspiring.

The growing awareness of the history of the Apartheid, illegal Settlers, ethnic cleansing and now the Genocide that we see today in Palestine has made people aware that people in countries that consider themselves democratic have been given a false narrative for their entire lives.

[snip]

This awakening is undoubtedly for the best but it carries this short problem of growing mistrust in conspiracies such as chemtrails.

The cause of this growth in conspiracies can be blamed on the false narrative that has come from politicians and the media that has encouraged or at best turnned a blind eye to the Apartheid in Palestine and it's consequences for more than over a hundred

years.

[snip]

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

Eclectic at 03:57 AM on 28 November, 2025

RegalNose @26 [and to add to Bob Loblaw's comment] :

What are you missing?

Many things, it seems (including biological evolution).

And you are missing the meaning of "crisis" ~ a delightful word which covers a broad spectrum of possibilities, and is often played with by politicians & scammers.

The scammers want you to feel panic, so that you take immediate (but unwise) action of some sort. And some politicians use that approach too ~ for their own benefit.

Other politicians go the opposite way, and say there is no immediate crisis . . . and tell you to relax and take no action at all. Even if your common sense tells you it would be a good idea to start tackling a problem which has obviously been developing.

Analogy : You have been checking your car engine oil level daily, and you keep finding that you need to top up the oil by a quart every week. Is this a crisis ~ obviously not an immediate crisis . . . and yet a wise man would quickly consult a car mechanic and decide what action to take to tackle the engine problem. Not put things off until the middle of next year.

RegalNose : What is your idea of "crisis" ?

Climate Adam - Climate Scientist responds to Bill Gates

walschuler at 05:11 AM on 13 November, 2025

As usual Climate Adam is clear and passionate. I have not read Gates' piece, and I will, but there is an action he is carrying out that relates to his argument, that is not commented on here, so I assume it is not mentioned by Gates. That action is that he has a permit for construction of a mini-nuclear powerplant in Wyoming that is based on uranium fuel and liquid sodium as primary coolant. Mini in this context means base load 345 Mwe, and with a short term (5 hour) peaking power at 500Mwe. Most recent power company nukes run base load at around 1,000Mwe. The Gates company collaborated with Hitachi, which is well established. But this design carries two burdens. First, the attempts to make liquid sodium reactors have failed. France has made the biggest efforts, in the form of the Phenix and Super-Phenix reactors. See wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix). The French designs had the goal of making them fast breeder reactors, that would generate more fissionable material while in operation than they would use up, using various purified natural sources, such as U238 (which is not a reactor or bomb isotope) or wastes from other reactors..Both reactors had serious problems. Among them is the fact that liquid sodium burns spontaneously if it comes in contact with air, so any leaks are potentially diasterous. Then there is the problem that like conventional reactors such reactors will end up with partly used fuel that will have high and low radiation level other elements as wastes that have to be separated and disposed of. One is Pu239, a great reactor fuel and atomic bomb material. So diversion of that is a threat, an easy threat if incoporated in a dirty bomb dispersed with conventional explosives, or an atomic threat if a critical mass can be purified and imploded. Disposal of it and other wastes demands separation from the environment for 10 half-lives, to reach a human-safe level of contact. For Pu239 that means reliable isolation for 249,000 years! Underground isolation in deep tunnels in geologically quiet and dry sites is needed for this and is the current working approach.. Finland is pioneering one, Sweden and France are gearing up. The USA had one designated at Yucca Mountain, adjacent to the underground test site of Yucca Flats, 65 miles north of Las Vegas. George W. Bush approved that, Nevada residents objected, and Barack Obama reversed it. It may have water leakage issues, but no further action has been taken there or or towards another site. So existing wastes (filled fuel rods) are containerized after cooling in swimming pools and are stored in various locations above ground. Other wastes, such as radioactivated structural materials and equipment, are separated and distributed to various "secure" locations. Potentially there is a second method of disposal, that uses a tuned subatomic particle accelerator or specially designed nuclear plant to convert wastes to either very short lived or stable isotopes. There is some work going on in Europe on this, but none in the US. It would be a way of making disposal of the hazards safe more quickly and it desrves serious funding, in order to dispose of slready generated and (possible) future wastes. To carry on generating nuclear power and wastes, even thogh the energy generated is mostly carbon-free, Gates' stated excuse for going nuclear, is irresponsible without safe operations and disposal guaranteed.

Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change

nigelj at 10:24 AM on 12 November, 2025

So we are left with Lindzens and Happers persistent errors or crazy opinions despite their qualifications. According to google gemini both are very suspicious of government regulations and over reach. I just think this is probably making them downplay the science. Impossible to prove of course. But I dont think its a coincidence that they have similar ideological leanings.

Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change

Eclectic at 08:39 AM on 12 November, 2025

You are right, gentlemen.

FLICC is a great concept, particularly when discussing clear-cut matters. Monckton is an excellent example of a clear-cut Fake Expert. The cases of Lindzen & Happer . . . get us deeper into murky semantics. Both are highly intelligent, but doing a crap job of thinking.

All this, motives aside ~ for we can speculate about their obvious & less obvious psychological "high crimes and misdemeanors" but most people are (properly) not much interested in that topic. After all, it is the outcome that matters, in practical politics.

In my mind, Lindzen started as an expert, and then progressively degraded his claim to that title, by his persistent and pig-headed errors (which he doubles-down on). And as you say, there is no point in publicly saying that he has no [current] claim to be regarded as a true expert ~ because the Denialists would aim to counter by getting out a tape measure and saying [re old academic qualifications] "His is bigger than yours" .

Best to simply show that Lindzen is wrong here and wrong there and wrong almost everywhere. And to bypass the "expertise", in his case.

Please, just the facts, madam.

Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change

nigelj at 04:20 AM on 12 November, 2025

Eclectic, youre right Lindzen makes a lot of mistakes, but I dont see how that makes him a fake expert. Because the only logical definition of a fake expert is someone without relevant qualifications.The incessant false claims do however make him a very unreliable, poor quality expert. I dont see how we can stretch that to mean fake.

I'm probably being a bit pedantic and I get your point about semantics, but if we say Lindzen is a fake expert its so easy for the denialists to just list his impressive qualifications and the public will see that.

Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change

nigelj at 05:06 AM on 11 November, 2025

Very informative and accurate commentary, except I have one nit pick:

Commentary says: "Rogan’s fake experts. Rogan’s podcast tends to invite fringe, unqualified climate contrarians who dispute the expert consensus. Happer is a retired physicist with a scant publication record in the field of climate science. Lindzen has an extensive list of climate publications, but his contrarian claims have been consistently proven wrong. In other words, they have not withstood scientific scrutiny or the test of time."

This is wrong about Lindzen and conflates a whole lot of things. Lindzen cannot be classified as a fake expert. Lindzen is certainly a well qualified in climate science. His CV and publishing record shows this. The fact he has been proven wrong on various issues doesn't make him non qualified. Experts are sometimes proven wrong. The fact hes a contrarian doesn't make him a non expert or non qualified. Hes not a fringe scientist. IMHO Lindzen is a very bad choice to use as an example of a fake expert. However several of his reasonings fit the examples of cherry picking and logical fallacies etc,etc.

Happer is arguably a fake expert but not an ideal expample because at least he has a physics degree. Someone like Christopher Moncton would be much better example of a fake expert, because he is interviewed as if he's an expert, but he has no climate science related qualifications at all. He has a BArts degree in classical studies and a journalism diploma.

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

nigelj at 04:12 AM on 9 November, 2025

Clarification: If you asked an AI tool to investigate all possible motives for Richard Lindzens denialism including psychological motives, and listed them the AI would probably trawl the internet looking for commentary that mentions such things, or evidence that might suggest such things, and have a go at making sense of it.

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

nigelj at 04:01 AM on 9 November, 2025

Eclectic @ 17, said: "I suspect that the AI tools are only capable of going looking for evidence of partisan political affiliation, rather than for the "subconscious" evidence that a person is guided by the deeper (and often unworthy) motives that rule so much of the non-partisan aspect of politics. Power / money / psychological resentments."

I'm not so sure. If you asked an AI tool to investigate all possible motives for denialism including psychological motives, and listed them the AI would probably trawl the internet looking for commentary that mentions such things, or evidence that might suggest such things, and have a go at making sense of it.

What I've found is the performance of AI depends on asking very clear and precise questions and providing some explanatory background and even listing your own suspicions. And defining your terms carefully. This leads to more useful answers than just putting in a 5 word search, "Lindzen, motives for climate denialism." You have to help the AI.

The problem is the AI then tends to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. Accuracy can suffer. But at the very least you get a good list of relevant articles with links.

The AI has limits of course. I've found accuracy is variable but its good enough to be useful for simple issues, and the AI is so fast and that makes it useful. But I digress and I may have misinterpreted what you are getting at.

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

Eclectic at 07:52 AM on 8 November, 2025

Quite correct, Nigelj @16. I suspect that the AI tools are only capable of going looking for evidence of partisan political affiliation, rather than for the "subconscious" evidence that a person is guided by the deeper (and often unworthy) motives that rule so much of the non-partisan aspect of politics. Power / money / psychological resentments.

Sad that Lindzen & the handful of eminent "denialist" scientists have abandoned logical scientific thought. To quote my favorite politician : "Sad. Sad like has never seen before."

[Except that we have seen it before.]

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

nigelj at 05:04 AM on 8 November, 2025

I asked some of the usual AI tools what are Richard Lindzens political beliefs. The responses were lengthy and listed references but here are some key quotes fyi:

Google Gemini: Richard Lindzen was a lifelong Democrat who switched to the Republican Party due to his views on climate change and government policy responses. He describes his political beliefs as generally conservative or libertarian, especially regarding what he sees as government overreach in the name of climate action.

Microsoft Copilot: While Lindzen doesn’t publicly identify with a specific political party, his affiliations and rhetoric suggest a strong ideological alignment with libertarian and conservative critiques of environmental regulation.

So he may be minimising the climate problem as a way to avoid government involvement in solutions. He may not even realise hes doing this.

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

nigelj at 04:23 AM on 7 November, 2025

KR said: " I wonder, at this point, whether the reward for such denial is financial (I don't think either has published much recently), ideological (against government control/pro libertarian), or just consistency with past assertions?"

The denialism may be a mixture of all three motinations. Humans often have multiple motivations for a particular action or view. This is a basic finding of psychology.

We humans are reductionist we prefer a simple singular explanation. Occams Razor being the formalisation of this broadly saying that the simplest explanation for an event that can explain all the facts is usually correct. But with human behaviour the simplest explanation that works is sometimes a not so simple.

And I think you can add more motivations for climate science denialism. Religious beliefs and extreme attention seeking. And unusual stubborness. Some people have a big narcissistic ego so it becomes difficult and downright painful to admit they are wrong or made a mistake so people hold onto absurd beliefs their whole lives. Of course we are all egotistical but most of us are capable of admitting we made a mistake. People at the extreme end of the ego spectrum have a huge problem walking back from their views. They are unusually stubborn.

And some people are super smart and over confident so they believe they just cannot be wrong. But everyone is fallible

Of course its hard to know precisely what motivates Lindzen but the evidence suggests it may be some sort of combination of money and religion and I reckon over confidence and attention seeking.

When reading denialists comments and getting in discussions with them a large number do seem to have very strong libertarian leaning anti government regulation ideologies, so denying the science is an obvious strategy to prevent governments control. Nick Palmer is right.

I dont like accusing people of lying. Its hard to know if they are lying because lying means deliberately spreading falsehoods that they know are falsehoods. Sometimes they are just mistaken. Genuine lying does happen of course and can sometimes be proven, but in scientific issues its tricky to prove because scientifc findings have error bars and theories are not the same as facts. So someone like Lindzen may really believe his numbers are the truth. I think hes more in the delusional category. Hes certainly spreading "miss"information.

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

Eclectic at 22:29 PM on 6 November, 2025

Plincoln @4 :

Lindzen may be the exception, indeed. IIRC, roughly 19 years ago [aged 65?] he gave an interview where seemingly his fundamental denialism was on the religious basis that Yahweh would prevent the Earth's climate deviating from the Eden-like state. Doubtless Lindzen's viewpoint would also be reinforced by the usual political and/or motivated reasonings of the true Denialist.

Yes, Lindzen had received some small payments/stipends from the usual industry suspects. Interestingly, the psychologists say that small payments of cash or other benefits, can have a remarkably strong effect on the mindset of recipients.

Happer and the other elderly Denialists ~ in which I include the youthful [mid-70's] Koonin ~ seem to have the more typical mishmash of ego/Emeritus-Syndrome/wingnut/etcetera distortions of logic as well as a deficiency in Charity.

But I guess we should update the traditional virtue of Charity, to be re-named as Empathy.

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

Nick Palmer at 21:26 PM on 6 November, 2025

KR#2

"ideological (against government control/pro libertarian), or just consistency with past assertions"

I don't think such pathological scepticism is motivated by money, at least, not directly. I find most nowadays is strongly ideologically based and caused by what Katharine Hayhoe calls being "solutions averse". This is that they don't like the solutions offered up, such as distributed wind and solar and 'Big Goverment'/Internationalist type restrictions, so intensely that they choose denialism as a strategy to head off restrictions on 'freedom' etc.

I've had some success arguing with the most extreme by pointing out how virtually unanimous the science is about the effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and then asking them why, instead of embracing denialist propaganda as a political strategy, they didn't come up with alternative 'free market' type solutions. Most actually shut up...

Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer

KR at 09:56 AM on 6 November, 2025

Same old nonsense from the same few denialists. I wonder, at this point, whether the reward for such denial is financial (I don't think either has published much recently), ideological (against government control/pro libertarian), or just consistency with past assertions?

It's certainly not based on facts. At all.

It's the sun

kootzie at 04:32 AM on 4 November, 2025

I am semi-active on Research Gate and elsewhere and doing my bit to [snip]

swat and bitch-slap denialists as they emit their oral-methane emissions to contaminate the discussions and spread anti-science drivel

I notice that the likes of
D*n P*rn
H. D*s L*oot
J*k Br*n
and others regularly engage in denialist mis-information
I notice that none of them appear to be significant enough to
merit (or dis-merit) inclusion in your rogues gallery

Their latest drivel stream purports that not only does increased atmospheric CO2 concentration not contribute ANY increase in global average temperatures, that CO2 does not have any effect on GAT at all.

They claim that WV aka Water Vapour, is a far more potent GHG
(which is arguably a defensible proposition) but that WV is the ONLY
GHG which has ANY effect on temperature, and ipso-facto ergo QED
anthropogenic Global Warming does not exist - its all on the natch.

They regularly mis-interpret mis-comprehend mis-represent physics.
They fundamentally deny that CO2, a non-condensible GHG with a long lifespan drives global temps and insist that WV, a condensible GHG with a short lifespan is not merely a feedback / feedforward mechanism but the fundamental / ONLY driver.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/analyze-and-critique-vol-20-20-wis.z78fQn.WeNzqnj5Kkg#0
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/analyze-and-critique-the-error-7ZbX2nqyRgGc19k2y45u_Q#0
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/analyze-and-critique-paraphras-Lrr7UYOjQAitC93qUR10EA#1

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_environmental_protection_and_biodiversity_be_improved_by_using_current_ecological_technologies#view=6908dd880ea281189c0a137f/312/313/312

Ice age predicted in the 70s

angusmac at 11:41 AM on 30 October, 2025

This SkS rebuttal appears to be incorrect because the enclosed database of the climate science literature of the 1965-1979 period shows that there was an overwhelming scientific consensus for climate cooling (see Figure 1).

The consensus was 65% for the whole period but greatly outnumbered the warming papers by 3.4-to-1 during the 1968-1975 period, when there were 57 cooling papers (77%) compared with 17 warming (26%).

The supposed SkS rebuttal has placed too much reliance on Petersen et al, 2008 (PCF-08) However, it appears that the PCF-08 authors have committed the transgression of which they accuse others; namely, “selectively misreading the texts” of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979. The PCF-08 authors appear to have done this by neglecting the large number of peer-reviewed papers that were pro-cooling.

I find it very surprising that PCF-08 only uncovered 7 cooling papers and did not uncover the 86 cooling papers in major scientific journals, such as, Journal of American Meteorological Society, Nature, Science, Quaternary Research and similar scientific papers that they reviewed. For example, PCF-08 only found 1 paper in Quaternary Research, namely the warming paper by Mitchell (1976), however, my review found 19 additional papers in that journal, comprising 15 cooling, 3 neutral and 1 warming (refer to enclosed database.

I can only suggest that the authors of PCF-08 concentrated on finding warming papers instead of conducting the impartial “rigorous literature review” that they profess.

If the current climate science debate were more neutral, the PCF-08 paper would either be withdrawn or subjected to a detailed corrigendum to correct its obvious inaccuracies.

Database of Cooling Neutral and Warming Papers 1965-1979.pdf

New Book - Climate Obstruction: A global Assessment

nigelj at 05:14 AM on 23 October, 2025

The commentary says:

The key method for cultivating these disbeliefs is by FLICCing off scientific integrity—using the five techniques of science denial:

Fake experts
Logical fallacies
Impossible expectations
Cherry picking
Conspiracy theories

All good, but does it need a category of "pseudoscience", where flawed but superficially convincing scientific reasoning is used to attempt to debunk the greenhouse effect, or climate models, etc,etc.

Climate change is accelerating, scientists find in ‘grim’ report

One Planet Only Forever at 02:19 AM on 18 September, 2025

Evan,

My understanding is that the global warming, climate changes, and sea level rise due to increasing ghg levels is due to the 4%. How much future harm is done is indeed totally dependent on what global humanity collectively does in the future.

What global humanity has done to date, including the failure to dramatically reduce activities that undeniably increase ghg levels, especially the most fortunate failing to lead the transition to less harmful ways of living (and the related failure of the most fortunate to help those who are tragically unfortunate have better less harmful life experiences), made things worse now than it had to be.

If humans stop causing impacts that continue to increase ghg levels then the global warming, climate change and sea level rise impacts will stop getting worse.

So, “Future emissions [do] control future warming,” when those emissions are understood to be the human caused excess emissions increasing ghg levels (the 4%). And that understanding is reinforced by the complete quote “Future emissions control future warming, … And if the world were to rapidly act on carbon dioxide and methane emissions, we could halve the rate of warming.”
And that understanding can be extended to state that: If global humanity were to rapidly act on carbon dioxide and methane emissions and rapidly act to develop and implement effective sustainable reduction of levels of ghgs then the maximum level of future harm due to future human impacts will be less than would otherwise be created.

A reminder about an often ignored aspect of reality regarding effective methods to limit the total future harm of human climate change impacts. A significant action that can immediately be implemented, needing no technological development or growth of production and use of a technology, is the ending of energy use that, while potentially enjoyable or popular or profitable, is not required to live a decent healthy helpful (unharmful) life.

Technological developments that require less energy consumption should be the priority. Less energy use would reduce the harm done during the transition from harmful unsustainable energy systems to harmless sustainable energy systems.

Climate Sensitivity

Leitwolf at 11:20 AM on 10 September, 2025

I would like to go back to an older post here on the tropospheric hot spot. I know the discussion, especially like Santer et al 2005. I do not really care if the hot spot is there or not. The interesting fact is that it should be there, and what jumps into my eyes when I see this graph..

trop. hot spot

Roughly speaking the graph suggests a 1.5K increase in Ts in the tropics, and about a 3K increase ot Tz, if you assume the average emission altitude to be in 450-400mb range in the tropics. I know, some emissions will occur from below, some from above, but the higher the more warming, so it should largely cancel out anyway.

This graph indirectly implies a very low climate sensitivity. If you assume Tz ~261K in the tropics and a Planck Feedback of 3.6W/m2 there, you can do some math. For Tz +3K, going from 261 to 264, we can calculate..

(264^4-261^4)*5.67e-8 = 12.3W/m2 delta OLR

Planck Feedback would only amount to 1.5 * 3.6 = 5.4W

So you would get a negative lapse rate feedback of 12.3 -5.4 = 6.9W/m2

Or normalized per K of warming of 6.9/1.5 = 4.6W/m2.

This figure is insanely large, way larger than all positive feedbacks combined. Eventhough I only used ballpark estimates, the fundamental problem is simply the huge increase in Tz. Of course one could say it is mainly a thing of the tropics, but the "hot spot" expands well beyond 30° latitude, and the tropics between 30° S and N account for 1/2 of the planet. Even if you just halve it, you are still left with 4.6/2 = 2.3W/m2 of negative lapse rate feedback.

Although the "hot spot" does not seem to materialize, the fact that it should in theory, and the logical consequences to it, is kind of a non-negligible detail when considering climate sensitivity.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 01:54 AM on 23 August, 2025

The most recent report by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (Nista) in England has concluded:

"Plans to dispose of the UK’s high-level nuclear waste in an underground repository – a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) – have been described as “unachievable” by a Treasury unit."

While nuclear supporters claim that it is simple to build underground storage facilities for high level nuclear waste it is proving difficult in practice. The USA currently has no proposed facilities. The current practice world wide is to store the waste in temporary casks on the grounds of existing reactors. Sometimes the waste is moved to another site.

Apparently FInland has a repoisitory near completion and Sweden has just started building a repository expected to begin taking waste in about 2040.

Getting climate risk wrong

nigelj at 06:43 AM on 22 August, 2025

Ted Nordhaus talks about climate issues. Its important to understand his background and involvement in certain organisations. He has a BA degree in history, and was a founding member of the Breakthrough Institute. Wikipedia has a good page on the Breakthrough Institute. Some key excerpts:

The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center located in Berkeley, California. Founded in 2007 by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus,[5] The institute is aligned with ecomodernist philosophy.[6][7] The Institute advocates for an embrace of modernization and technological development (including nuclear power and carbon capture) in order to address environmental challenges. Proposing urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination as processes with a potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species.[8][9][10][11]

Since its inception, environmental scientists and academics have criticized Breakthrough's environmental positions.[12][13][14][15][16] Popular press reception of Breakthrough's environmental ideas and policy has been mixed.[17][18][19][20][21][22][15][23][24][25]

Programs and philosophy:

Breakthrough Institute maintains programs in energy, conservation, and food.[33] Their website states that the energy research is “focused on making clean energy cheap through technology innovation to deal with both global warming and energy poverty.” The conservation work “seeks to offer pragmatic new frameworks and tools for navigating" the challenges of the Anthropocene, offering up nuclear energy, synthetic fertilizers, and genetically modified foods as solutions.

Criticism:

Scholars such as Professor of American and Environmental Studies Julie Sze and environmental humanist Michael Ziser criticize Breakthrough's philosophy as one that believes "community-based environmental justice poses a threat to the smooth operation of a highly capitalized, global-scale Environmentalism."[12] Further, Environmental and Art Historian TJ Demos has argued that Breakthrough's ideas present "nothing more than a bad utopian fantasy" that function to support the oil and gas industry and work as "an apology for nuclear energy."[13]

Journalist Paul D. Thacker alleged that the Breakthrough Institute is an example of a think tank which lacks intellectual rigour, promoting contrarianist reasoning and cherry picking evidence.[15]

The institute has also been criticized for promoting industrial agriculture and processed foodstuffs while also accepting donations from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, whose board members have financial ties to processed food companies that rely heavily on industrial agriculture. After an IRS complaint about potential improper use of 501(c)(3) status, the Institute no longer lists the Nathan Cummings Foundation as a donor. However, as Thacker has noted, the institute's funding remains largely opaque.[15]

Climate scientist Michael E. Mann also questions the motives of the Breakthrough Institute. According to Mann, the self-declared mission of the BTI is to look for a breakthrough to solve the climate problem. However Mann states that basically the BTI "appears to be opposed to anything - be it a price on carbon or incentives for renewable energy - that would have a meaningful impact." He notes that the BTI "remains curiously preoccupied with opposing advocates for meaningful climate action and is coincidentally linked to natural gas interests" and criticises the BTI for advocating "continued exploitation of fossil fuels." Mann also questions that the BTI on the one hand seems to be "very pessimistic" about renewable energy, while on the other hand "they are extreme techno-optimists" regarding geoengineering.[16]

Have renewables decreased electricity prices: European edition

Cesar Madrid at 01:35 AM on 22 August, 2025

Hi Andrew. Nice post! Just a sugestión. Would not be better to include transmission and supply costs in order to get a more precise comparison. It is true that a more renewable system needs more network infraestructure in order to get all the electricity suplied to final consumption points. It is logical to eliminate tales but O jave my doubts when eliminating network costs. Regards!

It's not bad

Bob Loblaw at 10:37 AM on 31 July, 2025

Jlsoaz @ 428:

As Eclectic notes in his response, SkS is a volunteer effort.

In addition, the idea that there can be a specific attribution of a single death, a single health outcome, a single item of property damage that can be attributed to climate or weather is pretty much impossible, as you state.

Epidemiological methods are appropriate, but as you state, these are statistical methods, applying to defined populations - not single events.

Those denying the science (be it climate change, tobacco use, whatever) essentially commit two fallacies in this area:

The fallacy of division, where properties of the whole are incorrectly assumed to apply to the individual parts. ( If climate change or tobacco smoke causes deaths at the population level, we should be able to identify it in individuals.)

The fallacy of composition, where it is incorrectly assumed that properties of part of the system can be applied to the system as a whole. (Since you can't attribute an individual death to climate change or tobacco, you can't determine that these increase death rates at the population level.)

I doubt that denialists will be bothered by attribution studies - they'll just block them out by applying their Morton's demon.

It's not bad

jlsoaz at 00:43 AM on 30 July, 2025

Eclectic at post number 427:
In my opinion,
it could be useful to do some thinking around the wording of the myth that needs busting here. Is it "Myth: Nobody has died from global warming."? Or perhaps it is something like:

Myth: Under strict defensible peer-reviewed scientific methods, deaths, health impacts and property damage cannot be attributed to global warming.
Reality: Under strict defensible peer-reviewed scientific methods, deaths, health impacts and property damage are difficult to attribute to any one cause such as global warming, but probability estimates can be made, and over time it becomes more clear whether a given cause is having certain impacts, even when there are many other possible factors. We have seen this with smoking and other killers where it was difficult for scientists to attribute deaths at first, but after much research and careful following of established epidemiological methods, attribution was possible.

As to whether it would be useful for skepticalscience.com to put forth the resources to get this one my busted, I'm assuming that all myths busted require some effort, including possible consultation with relevant scientific experts or at least careful study of their publications, and I do not recall a single instance of skeptical science indicating that they would refrain from busting a myth because a member thought it would not be that helpful.

As a side-note, I disagree with your strong opinion. I can't think of anything that (in my own fallible opinion) is more likely to upset denialists more than attribution of (and discussion and debate of attribution of) deaths to Anthropogenic Climate Change. Ideally, we will eventually see counters (similar to the atomic bombs of heat counter on skepticalscience.com) which will show range estimates for how many deaths are attributable to ACC.

One big, beautiful, climate-killing bill

One Planet Only Forever at 02:05 AM on 8 June, 2025

Building further on my comment @6,

The collection of harmful actions in the Big Beautiful Bill, and the fact that many supporters of the Bill and the Party that made-it-up claim to have been unaware of some of the harmful elements, indicates that a new way to evaluate and position political groups would be helpful.

The existing evaluations like, Right-Left, Liberal-Conservative, Capitalist-Socialist, Democratic-Authoritarian are useful ways to differentiate political groups. But I think a new scale would be Most Helpful. It would be a scale between the extremes of:

Every action is governed by the pursuit of learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others. Evidence-based pursuit of increased awareness and understanding of harm being done and the need to stop the harm and make amends for the harm done To Others. Totally Woke (on the left)

Every action is a pursuit of short-term, unsustainable, increased potential benefit for some people to the detriment of Others, even to the detriment of people who hope they will benefit from it. This side fighhts against the increased awareness and pursuit of evidence and understanding that would contradict their desired pursuit of short-term unsustainable benefit for a sub-set of global humanity. They call themselves Us. All Others are Them (the enemy or the irrelevant). Totalitarian Anti-Woke (on the Right).

The Big Beautiful Bill contains more actions on the Right of that scale than the ‘anti-future of humanity actions’ that will undeniably increase the magnitude of global warming and climate change harm done (and other related pollution and environmental damage harms).

The Big Beautiful Bill is far from ‘Centrist (the middle of the scale)’. It is very close to the extreme of ‘anti-woke, anti-science, harmful to the future of humanity’.

Tragically, many people, especially young men (see Harmful masculinities among younger men in three countries: Psychometric study of the Man Box Scale - linked here), can be misled to hope to benefit from those unkind kinds of leadership action.

The following quote of the opening paragragh of the above linked article indicates how young men could still support leadership that causes increased climate change harm for other reasons even if they have a good understanding of the harm they will suffer due to human caused global warming and climate chnage.

There is strong evidence that young men who subscribe to inequitable gender norms (e.g., believe women are solely responsible for household chores and child-rearing) (Pulerwitz and Barker, 2008) and endorse dominant and hostile forms of masculinities (e.g., believe women are sexual conquests) (Pulerwitz and Barker, 2008) have higher rates of perpetrating psychological, physical, and sexual violence against women (Pulerwitz and Barker, 2008; Jewkes et al., 2011; Malamuth et al., 1995; Parrott and Zeichner, 2003; Good et al., 1995; Schwartz et al., 2005; Copenhaver et al., 2000; Eisler et al., 2000; Jakupcak et al., 2002; Barker et al., 2011). Violence against women is a global health epidemic in which one in three women are impacted during their lifetime, leading to adverse health outcomes, such as depression, sexually transmitted infections, and exacerbation of chronic health conditions (World Health Organization, 2013). Research also shows emerging evidence of an association between “harmful masculinities” and perpetrating verbal and physical abuse, cyber bullying, and aggression towards gay, lesbian, and transgender people or those who do not conform to hetero-normative gender norms (Leemis et al., 2018; Steinfeldt et al., 2012; Leone and Parrott, 2015; Parrot, 2009; Vincent et al., 2011; Kelley and Gruenewald, 2015; Reidy et al., 2009; Espelage et al., 2018). Furthermore, studies have explored the impact of “harmful masculinities” on the health of the individual who endorses them, including poor care-seeking behaviors, and mental and sexual health outcomes (Pulerwitz and Barker, 2008; Barker et al., 2011; Barker, 2000; Rivers and Aggleton, 1999; Addis, 2008; Barker and Ricardo, 2005; American Psychological Association, Boys and Men Guidelines Group, 2018; Jakupcak et al., 2017; Courtenay, 2000; Oliffe, 2009; Cho and Kogan, 2017). A recent study estimated that eliminating these hegemonic masculine norms could save the United States (U.S.) economy $15.7 billion (Heilman et al., 2019).

Renewables allow us to pay less, not twice

Jeff Cope at 14:16 PM on 7 June, 2025

The prisoner's dilemma

Pointing out that it makes sense to build slowly and wait for prices to fall calls to mind the prisoner's dilemma thought exercise. Everybody acting selfishly (in a very limited, short-term way), thinking (incorrectly) that this is a zero-sum contest (essentially the core conservative belief (GeorgeLakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant and other works)) and delaying implementing solutions such as efficiency, renewable energy, organic permaculture, EVs, heat pumps, etc. until the price is lower, makes it all turn out very badly for everyone, as we see playing out in the real world, as actors try to compete by NOT solving the greatest existential crisis in history. Because that delay is the strategy for most countries, even more corporations, and many people, climate catastrophe will destroy quadrillions of dollars worth of civilization and nature (by which I mean mostly ecosystem services, alone worth more than the entire human economy, since it's quite insane to try to put a price on extinction or ecological degradation).

Taking this to its logical conclusion, everybody would do nothing, ever, and civilization and most life on Earth would be doomed. We see that that is almost the case in reality, except some people and countries are

1) being deceitful, with lies like "net zero 2050", essentially an excuse for people in power now to do nothing, but to pretend they are or will, so others implement solutions now and bring the price down; or

2) acting more enlightened and altruistic. So we see that it's not even in anyone's short term interest to delay, as they are saving money on cheaper energy, or as China seems to be doing, reducing its burden of expensive energy and externalities to compete better and take over the world.

Sabin 33 #28 - How reliable is wind energy?

tder2012 at 11:03 AM on 17 May, 2025

I don't care how grids get decarbonized, just get it done NOW. France did it 40 years ago by accident, only because they wanted energy security and independence, no fossil fuels to extract in France. Australia wants to do it with wind, solar, batteries, synchronous condensors, etc. I say go for it, get 'er done! Here are a few sites you can watch AUS grid generation mix, import, export between states, prices, etc (you can find sites like this for many other countries, states, etc but I like electricitymaps best as I am very concerned about CO2 and ghg emissions and I find its the best for showing that data. Also, it is a "one stop shop"). https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem & https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed & https://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/RenewEconomy/

Clean energy hits many roadblocks, often people ideologically opposed to them, we see this with solar, wind and also with nuclear. The No Nukes in the USA in the 70's were successful at blocking the build of nuclear power plants, but look at this article from US Energy Information Administration and see how much coal was built after 1980, fortunately they haven't build much since 2013. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50658

We are only really talking about electricity here, which is 20-25 % of global energy production. Oil is barely a blip in global electricity production (mostly diesel generators in small remote communities and islands). New England in USA uses oil occasionally, they seem to encounter natural gas supply issues more than typical, this is an article on the New England Independent System Operator (NEISO) website. "Nuclear, oil, and coal generators are critical on the coldest winter days when natural gas supply is constrained (as shown below). Coal- and oil-fired resources also make valuable contributions on the hottest days of summer when demand is very high or major resources are unavailable".

Anyway, the point I want to make is that oil is barely a blip in global electricity generation, yet it is the number one source of energy generation in the world, as you can see on this Our World in Data website https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution?time=1970..latest Much decarbonization all over the world needs to be done in very short order.

Sabin 33 #28 - How reliable is wind energy?

tder2012 at 21:11 PM on 15 May, 2025

Have you read this report presented at the 2025 Georgia Tech Protective Relaying Conference "Assessing Inverter-Based Resources Modeling Gaps in Commonly Used Short-Circuit Programs". Cristian Paduraru P.E. (Experienced Transmission Relay Settings Engineer) provide this comment on LinkedIn "Just a heads up on what's coming if RE contribution will continue to increase: no ECHO logic will work as there will not be any strong source.

Also, the output will significantly be affected by load which is impossible to be properly captured in current short circuit programs.

Also, the simulaton in CAPE/Aspen may be irrelevant in absence of proper implementing the exact control algorithm in IBRs, generic models are a disaster, here's a paper just presented at Georgia Tech on this" here is the link to the paper https://www.ap-concepts.com/2025_PRC/modules/request.php?module=oc_proceedings&action=summary.php&id=73&a=Accept Do you have any comments on this?

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

tder2012 at 04:12 AM on 13 May, 2025

Indeed, this post is mistitled, obviously no energy source is THE answer. I believe nuclear energy can be part of the solution. Please take less than 10 minutes to check out these six slides and provide comment. Also, consider obtaining a copy of "The LNT Report" when it is published in August, 2025, see cover and back of the book here. "For decades, the notion that any amount of nuclear radiation is hazardous to human health has been perpetuated by flawed science, ideological agendas, and misinformation. The LNT Report reveals the shocking truth behind this myth, exposing the bad faith, muddled thinking, and prejudice that have fueled unnecessary fears about nuclear power", if we overcome this fear and instead support nuclear power, maybe we could build fast breeder reactors, high temperature gas reactors, etc.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

tder2012 at 09:06 AM on 12 May, 2025

Jacobson is responsible for The Solutions Project. In 2023, Bangladesh used 2940 kwh per person per year. Germany used 38,052 kwh. Germans have a decent lifestyle, the people of Bangladesh are, unfortunately, the poorest in the world (population 171 million). https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy

The Solutions Project shows Bangladesh will use 59% less energy in 2050 than today!! On the main page for The Solutions Project it shows "We Love People & Planet", BS!!!. How do you think the citizens of Bangladesh would feel about this? I highly doubt civil engineer Jacobson is able to defy and/or reinvent the scientific laws of physics and thermodynamics!! https://thesolutionsproject.org/what-we-do/inspiring-action/why-clean-energy/#/map/countries/location/BGD

You can look thru The Solutions Project web site and see this is how Jacobson handles all poor countries, I just used Bangladesh as an example. Disgusting, shameful!

And to think there are people who actually respect Jacobson's work. The word "science" is in this site's name, but this, to me, looks like a classic appeal to authority logical fallacy.

Have a look at these six charts and provide any comments.

Sabin 33 #13 - Is solar energy unreliable?

Eclectic at 14:20 PM on 9 May, 2025

Tder2012 @34 and prior :-

Le sarcasme, moi?

Though maybe you mean a friendly chaff (without wheat).

# But perhaps looking at the Big Picture instead, you could abandon hope of the "nuclear solution" ~ 'cos it just ain't gonna happen in the foreseeable future of the coming decades. Sad, but there it is. Fission power for electricity has been hit with the Triple Whammy of hyper-costs, hyper-delays, and NIMBY-ism as well.

Solar has a better-than-sporting chance, with minor technological improvements in panels and sodium storage batteries. Together = reliability = the subject of this thread.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #18 2025

One Planet Only Forever at 07:24 AM on 5 May, 2025

This week I read a few news items that were related to the problem presented in this week’s introduction regarding Silencing Science Tracker. Only one of them, White House dismisses authors of major climate report, from NPR, by Rebecca Hersher, Apr 29, 2025, was directly related to climate science (I submitted it to SkS and it is shared in 2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #18). The others are not about climate science, nor are they regarding ‘Research Reporting’. But I think they supplement the point about the escalation of efforts in the US by the Trump Republicans to silence science.

Scientists reel as turmoil roils National Science Foundation – NPR includes the following:

Eliminating so much of this agency's budget would be "a crisis, just a catastrophe for U.S. science," says Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the largest scientific societies in the world.

He's optimistic that Congress wouldn't go along with it, but the budgetary process would likely take months.

Meanwhile, the uncertainty would leave scientists fretting over how to support their labs and the students and early-career researchers who work there.

"That's created this paralysis that I think is hurting us already," says Parikh, who says that when he talks to scientists, he's starting to hear them express an interest in having an "exit plan from these jobs."

Medical journals hit with threatening letters from Justice Department – NPR includes the following quote:

"It's pretty unprecedented," says J.T. Morris, a lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group. He says the First Amendment protects medical journals.

"Who knows? We've seen this administration take all sorts of action that doesn't have a legal basis and it hasn't stopped them," Morris says. And so there's always a concern that the federal government and its officials like Ed Martin will step outside and abuse their authority and try to use the legal process and abuse the court system into compelling scientific journals and medical professionals and anybody else they disagree with into silence."

Trump says he's ending federal funding for NPR and PBS. They say he can't – NPR includes the following:

President Trump issued an executive order late Thursday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board of directors to "cease federal funding for NPR and PBS," the nation's primary public broadcasters, claiming ideological bias.

"Neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens," the order says. "The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding."

It is not clear that the president has the authority to make such orders to CPB under the law.

PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger called it a "blatantly unlawful Executive Order, issued in the middle of the night."

A common theme is the Trump Republican claims of bias (against them). It is becoming increasingly certain that ‘learning’ is biased against the interests of the Trump Republican misleading marketing machinery.

The Trump Republicans are attempting to restrict ‘research and reporting funding’, especially if it contradicts ‘their interests’. That will not produce lasting improvements. Increased awareness and improved understanding is not achieved by ‘restricting the pursuit of learning’. Lasting improvements are actually achieved by people being ‘more woke’.

Some people undeniably try to keep other people from learning. People who are less aware and misunderstand things are the basis for the popularity of unjustified beliefs supporting and excusing undeserved perceptions of superiority. Less awareness and more misunderstanding is ‘never a good thing for any group’, regardless of how beneficial it can be for people who are perceived to be the ‘winners – leaders’.

2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #16

One Planet Only Forever at 05:45 AM on 24 April, 2025

RedRoseAndy,

Your proposal would help achieve the required corrections of developed unsustainable fishing activity. It would be a little more work and would reduce the profitability of the currently developed fishing. But, as you correctly implied, the easier and more profitable fishing methods that have developed have no real future (and benefiting from burning non-renewable fossil fuels also has no future, even if it wasn’t causing harmful climate change impacts).

The assisted fertilization of eggs from ‘caught fish’ would be part of the actions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically SDG 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.

You should investigate the potential for your suggestion to be part of the SDG 14 related UN Event - Ocean Action Panel 10 : Enhancing the conservation and sustainable use of oceans and their resources by implementing international law as reflected in the UNCLOS

However, I would like to know more about ‘how’ (considering all of the aspects in a holistic evaluation) an increased amount of fish will produce a reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere (more going on than carbon in fish poop falling into the depths). It seems intuitive that, like trees, more fish would result in reduced CO2 levels. If increasing the amount of fish in the seas will sustainably reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then any actions that sustainably increase fish populations would help.

Regardless of the question about increased fish stocks reducing CO2, it would be helpful to increase fish stocks.

Hopefully all reasonable helpful actions will be pursued by leaders, in business and politics, to limit the harm done by human activities. Unfortunately, the focus will likely be on the easier, more profitable, and more easily popular actions rather than pursuing actually possible actions (not ‘hoped to be developed’ technological solutions) that are more helpful but are harder, more expensive, or less likely to be popular.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Bob Loblaw at 10:57 AM on 7 April, 2025

Reed Coray @ 208, 213:

You continue to avoid the real question. It may be that you don't understand the question - but I agree with Dikran that you probably simply don't want to answer his question.

At least you have abandoned your attempt to claim that "trap heat" is not a term that would appear in "a generic dictionary".

Let's play word games again, and look at another definition of "trap" - this time as a noun. It comes from one of the links I gave earlier.

a dangerous or unpleasant situation which you have got into and from which it is difficult or impossible to escape:

The undercover agents went to the rendezvous knowing that it might be a trap.

fall into a trap She's too smart to fall into the trap of working without pay.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can learn a foreign language without doing any work.

His foot was caught in the jaws of the trap.

We set a trap and they walked right into it.

They put rabbit traps all over the wood.

We set traps to try to control the mice.

Your attempts to divert attention away into more word games is obviously because of the "unpleasant situation which you have got into and from which it is difficult or impossible to escape". It is also a trap of your own making - posting poorly-thought-out arguments in a public forum, where others are free to point out your errors.

[Note that all three of the dictionaries that I referenced in comments 205 and 206 provide similar definitions.]

I agree with Dikran @ 210, when he says that your sort of behaviour is common from "contrarians". Avoid the questions. Avoid dealing with the arguments presented. Avoid admitting to the glaring errors of logic and inconsistency that are pointed out to you.

Word of advice: when you find yourself in a deep hole, stop digging.

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

One Planet Only Forever at 03:46 AM on 6 April, 2025

nigelj,

A reduced global total population would definitely improve the ability of all humans on this amazing planet to sustainably enjoy better lives, now and into the distant future.

However, some people are opposed to, or unaware of, the fundamental benefit of fewer concurrently living people, regionally as well as globally. Fewer people would allow more sustainable negative impacts per person to meet the following common sense rule: (average impacts per person) X (number of people) < Sustainable total impacts

This recent BBC – In Depth article “The influencers who want the world to have more babies - and say the White House is on their side” is about beliefs that ignore or conflict with that common sense understanding. Those beliefs can currently be considered to be ‘of limited influence’. However, the current White House, and other institutions governed by the current version of the US Republican Party, is now significantly influenced by misunderstandings that were considered to be extreme fringe beliefs 10 years ago.

And a scary reality presented in the article is the following quotes of statements made by the ‘pronatalism promoter’:

"The easiest way to [spread the word about pronatalism] was to turn ourselves into a meme... If we take a reasonable approach to things and say things are nuanced, nobody engages. And then we go and say something outrageous and offensive and everyone's into it."
...
"We are a coalition of people who are incredibly different in our philosophies, our theological beliefs, our family structures," says Malcolm. "But the one thing we agree on is that our core enemy is the urban monoculture; the leftist unifying culture."

The following parts of the article are also a concern:

[JD]Vance has often spoken about the need to fix a "broken culture" that is tearing the US family apart, by undermining men.

In a recent interview, he said: "We actually think God made male and female for a purpose and we want you guys to thrive as young men and young women and we're going to help with our public policy to make it possible to do that."

This idea has been echoed in pronatalist circles.

"Vance is a vocal pronatalist," says Rachel Cohen, policy correspondent at Vox. "Trump himself campaigned on implementing a new "baby boom" and last week he declared himself the 'fertilisation president'."
...
Their [pronatalism promoters] connection to power is thanks to the so-called tech right, a reactionary movement against liberalism led by some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley. Those in the tech right include Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel – who sponsored Vance's Senate race and has invested in fertility technology – and venture capitalists David Sacks and Marc Andreessen.

My semi-conspiracy theory, supported to some degree by the evidence, about the current version of the US Republican Party is that the fossil fuel interests who aggressively and abusively pursue their interests could only ‘sustain’ protection of their harmful interests by winning control over governing institutions. Increased awareness and improved understanding of climate science forced them to try to appeal to other harmful misunderstandings in their desperate attempts to ‘sustain’ their understandably harmful interests. And the groups they appealed to have developed more harmful influence, while ‘sustaining’ the harmful fossil fuel interests.

People who want more people born, especially those who want more of their type than Other types, seem to be the type that the harmful fossil fuelers, and the other harmful interests they have gathered support from, would try to appeal to in order to ‘collectively sustain’ their harmful interests.

Note: I admit to also wanting ‘more of a certain type of people’. I want more people who pursue learning to be less harmful and more helpful to others. That may be ‘divisive’. But it is arguably ‘a good divisiveness’.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Dikran Marsupial at 16:45 PM on 2 April, 2025

Reed Coray "In my opinion, most people who responded to my comments are missing the point I am trying to make. ... My point is that the claim: “The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth’s surface by trapping heat within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system” is a denial of science."

Several people, including myself have directly addressed that point.

"(1) Does science preclude the existence of “trapped heat?” Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer."

No, as I pointed out, blankets can be reasonably said to "trap" heat; thermos flasks can reasonably said to trap heat.

"(2) Does the fact that “trapped heat” can’t exist, prohibit “trapping heat?” Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer."

No, because the premise that '“trapped heat” can’t exist, prohibit' is false, see the answer to (1).

(3) If “trapping heat” can’t exist, does the use of “trapping heat” in an argument mean the argument contains a logical fallacy? Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer.

Again, "no" because the premise is false, see (1).

(4) Does the claim “The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth’s surface by ‘trapping heat’ within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system” use the phrase “trapping heat?” Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No”answer.

Yes, but this is an unhelpful rhetorical question rather a truth seeking one. I am answering it mostly to point out the rhetoric. It isn't unreasonable as a very basic analogy. The enhanced greenhouse effect does cause more energy to be returned to the surface rather than being radiated out to space, so it could be viewed as being (temorarily) "trapped".

(5) Does the claim “The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth’s surface by ‘trapping heat’ within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system” contain a logical fallacy? Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer.

No - see answer to the previous question. It is a reasonable analogy - the actual physical mechansism is a bit more complex than that, but it is a O.K. as a starting point for the layperson.

(6) Does the fact that the claim “The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth’s surface by ‘trapping heat’ within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system” contains a logical fallacy imply a denial of science? Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer.

No, see answers to previous questions. (a) it is based on an incorrect premise (that heat cannot be trapped) and (b) it is a reasonable, but extremely basic, analogy that is a reasonable starting point for the layperson.

There I have given direct answers to your questions. The ball is now in your court to respond to them constructively (I would start with explaining how a thermos flask cannot be viewed as trapping heat - of course I had already made that point in an earlier comment).

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Eclectic at 14:03 PM on 2 April, 2025

Reed Coray @ 194 / 195 :

You have a major problem with your semantics.

And you also have a logic problem ~ partly complicated by your original semantics problem.

Possibly you have been confused by some of the faulty logic exhibited at the WUWT website. WUWT Comments Sections show the pesence of a handful of logical scientific thinkers, interspersed with a whole chaff-bagful of crackpots and angry nutters.

But the final responsibility rests on you to think clearly and logically. Please look at the Big Picture and avoid nit-picking one or two pixels of the overall picture.

Hint: get away from the loose wordy terms of 19th-Century "thermodynamics" ~ and concentrate your attention on the real physics of atoms and photons. (In other words, look at the real universe and not at the dictionary.)

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Reed Coray at 11:07 AM on 2 April, 2025

Bob, I haven't gone away. I apologize for the delay. I've just struggled with the process of bringing up a window into which I can enter a comment. It's only chance I have brought up some windows. I think I've figured out how to do that, so I'll get to the questions as soon as I can.

Let's see if this comment gets inposted.

In my opinion, most people who responded to my comments are missing the point I am trying to make. My point is NOT that the greenhouse effect isn’t real. [I believe the greenhouse effect is real in the sense that gases in the Earth’s atmosphere (called greenhouse gases) will absorb the energy in the infrared radiation (IR) emitted from the Earth’s surface and radiate a portion of that absorbed energy back to the Earth’s surface.] My point is that the claim: “The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth’s surface by trapping heat within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system” is a denial of science.
[Note: Any misunderstanding regarding the point I’m trying to make is my fault. I did, after all, post my original comment under the thread “falsifying the greenhouse effect.” I accept responsibility and apologize for any misunderstanding my choice of thread has caused.]
Bob Loblaw wrote (01:05 AM on 31 March, 2025) “Reed Coray's argument is a pig in a poke. He's making a mountain out of a molehill. He's making a federal case out of a trivial issue. He's sweating the small stuff. He's blowing things out of proportion. It's a tempest in a teapot. It's much ado about nothing. He's giving us a song and dance. He's laying it on thick. [Aren't dictionaries fun?]”
[In the spirit of Bob’s question “Aren’t dictionaries fun?” I mention that Bob left out the phrase “his arguments are mouse nuts.” Because of this oversight, I recommend someone buy Bob a new dictionary.]
If atmospheric greenhouse gases can trap heat, then not only is it likely that all of Bob’s characterizations of my argument are appropriate, it’s worse than that--my arguments are flat wrong and can be dismissed out of hand.
If, however as I believe is the case, science says that heat can’t be trapped,
(1) Then the process of “trapping heat” doesn’t and can’t exist.
(2) If the process of “trapping heat” can’t exist, then claiming that something can or will occur as a result of “trapping heat” is a logical fallacy.
(3) Since the claim says that the Earth’s surface is warmed “by trapping heat in the Earrth/Earth-atmosphere system,” the claim contains a logical fallacy.
If the above three-step logic is valid, then any global warming argument that uses the words “trapping heat” to represent a real-world phenomenon is an argument that contains a logical fallacy. No matter how closely the real-world phenomenon agrees with the meaning of “trapping heat,” the use of the phrase “trapping heat” is a logical fallacy The magnitude of the logical fallacy may play a minor role in determining the amount of temperature change the real-world process that is called “trapping heat” can cause, but no matter how small a logical fallacy is, it is still a logical fallacy.
The SkS blog (a) implies that when discussing AGW, “denying science” is bad, and (b) claims that one technique used to “deny science” is to employ arguments that contain one or more logical fallacies. Thus, anyone who employs a logical fallacy is denying science.
If the AGW community encourages people to point out skeptic arguments that deny science, shouldn’t the skeptic community encourage people to point out AGW arguments that deny science--no matter how insignificant that denial is (e.g., pig in a poke, making a mountain out of a molehill, making a federal case out of a trivial issue, sweating the small stuff, blowing things out of proportion, tempest in a teapot, much ado about nothing, giving a song and dance, and worrying about mouse nut)?. The phrase I think that applies to the above is: “What’s sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander.” Bob, would you check to see if see if that phrase is in your dictionary?
To end this comment, I pose six questions to all who are interested in this topic.
(1) Does science preclude the existence of “trapped heat?” Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer.
(2) Does the fact that “trapped heat” can’t exist, prohibit “trapping heat?” Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer.
(3) If “trapping heat” can’t exist, does the use of “trapping heat” in an argument mean the argument contains a logical fallacy? Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer.
(4) Does the claim “The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth’s surface by ‘trapping heat’ within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system” use the phrase “trapping heat?” Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer.
(5) Does the claim “The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth’s surface by ‘trapping heat’ within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system” contain a logical fallacy? Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer.
(6) Does the fact that the claim “The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth’s surface by ‘trapping heat’ within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system” contains a logical fallacy imply a denial of science? Yes or No. If “No,” I’m interested in knowing the rationale behind your “No” answer.
If you reach this point in this comment with all “Yes” answers, then we are in agreement—the claim “The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth’s surface by trapping heat within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system” is a denial of science.
If you reach this point with one or more “No” answers, then we have identified the issue (or issues) that are worthy of further discussion.
Thank you for your time.

Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim

One Planet Only Forever at 08:12 AM on 2 April, 2025

nigelj,

I agree that we substantially agree. One question I have is what would be the ways to transition from what has developed – nearly 9 billion with a very inequitable distribution of harmfulness and wealth plus total impacts that are well beyond being sustainable - to 2 billion living as you see being a sustainable future?

I will also clarify my perspective. (As an engineer with an MBA this is like the way I deal with an engineering/business challenge):

What is the desired objective? All of humanity equitably (not equally) living Sustainably (into the very far future).

What is the starting point? Really important to understand that the current developed reality is very unsustainable, grossly inequitable, and in many ways getting worse (global warming and climate change impacts are getting worse until ghg levels, not just CO2, stop increasing)

What are the ways to help achieve the urgently required transition from the current developed very harmful unsustainable reality to humanity collectively equitably living sustainably for the millions of years this amazing planet could be lived on? (A related understanding: Humanity should not spread beyond this planet until this is figured out).

Specifically regarding a Sustainable Global Population:

Any ‘total global population’ up to 9.5 billion can be sustainable. It is simply a matter of keeping the sum of everybody’s impacts below the sustainable limits (the planetary boundaries and regional impact limits).

There can be a diversity of ways to live within that total equitable sustainable population.

People who are more fortunate should be required to set the examples of ways to live less harmfully and more helpfully (live more sustainably) for Others to aspire to develop towards. Everyone less fortunate should be able to develop to the more fortunate ways of living without compromising the sustainable total impact.

Regarding the corrections required related to global warming and climate change impacts:

It is unacceptable for there to be significant differences of the amount of harm that people benefit from.

Peer pressure will be required to ensure that all of the most fortunate compete to be ‘least harmful and most helpful to Others’ (having the evidence rationally prove things – Do not just accept proclamations that a person’s actions are less harmful and more helpful – No more Carbon Offset scams).

Without effective evidence-based peer pressure it is unlikely that sustainable living will develop as rapidly as is required to responsibly limit the harm done by currently developed unsustainable activities like fossil fuel use.

That perspective allows, and should encourage, improvements through scientific investigation and development of technological improvements ‘governed by learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others’.

CO2 limits will harm the economy

Bob Loblaw at 00:28 AM on 20 March, 2025

charles125 @ 126:

The moderator has pointed out your lack of sources for data, and some inconsistencies in your brief comment. I'll point out a few more.

Your economic argument appears to make the "one cause and only one cause" error. CO2 emission are not affected only by carbon taxes - many factors come into it. For your argument (that carbon taxes had no effect on emissions) to make sense, because changes happened without them, you need to pretend that nothing else matters. To make a successful argument, you would have to show that actual emissions remained the same as they would have if there had been no carbon tax (all other factors remaining in effect). That requires a level of economic analysis that you have not provided (or given a reference to).

You also have logical inconsistencies in your short argument. At the end, you say "...they knew the economic impact carbon taxes would have." Which is it: no impact (no emission changes), or impact? You can't have it both ways.

...and you are misrepresenting the reason BC cut taxes when they introduced their carbon tax. They did so in order to make the carbon tax revenue-neutral. Their policy was to keep collecting the same total $ in taxes, but switch the means of collecting some of those dollars from income etc. to fossil fuel use. That provides an incentive to move away from fossil fuels - you only pay the carbon tax if you use fossil fuels, but everyone sees the other tax reductions (whether they use fossil fuels or not). The people that move away from fossil fuels see more money in their pockets, while the profligate fossil fuel user ends up with less in their pocket. This is exactly the sort of market-driven process that economists think is an efficient method of incentivizing innovation and individual choice in reducing fossil fuel use.

The Canadian carbon pricing scheme was also designed to be revenue-neutral. A fee was charged on fossil fuels, but taxpayers received quarterly rebates. In January, my household received $210. The rebates were set at a level so that total rebate $ were close to total carbon fee $ - but again, the family with below-average fossil fuel use still got the same rebate as everyone else, so they had more $ in their pockets. It was the high-fossil-fuel users that paid more in carbon fees than they got back. A disincentive to use fossil fuels - the invisible hand of the market at work.

Unfortunately, certain political elements beat the drum of "carbon taxes bad!". Those politicians never emphasized "we're going to axe your carbon rebates!" (many people were unaware that they even existed), and people drank the koolaid so now the political trend is to eliminate those carbon fees.

And you also show a lack of knowledge of the history of carbon pricing in Ontario. Ontario used to have a cap-and-trade system in place. Not strictly a "carbon tax", but still a cost on fossil fuel use. A change in government eliminated that program. Ontario's reductions in CO2 emissions under the previous government were also partly the result of a policy to eliminate coal-powered electricity production. More than one policy. More than one factor involved in reducing CO2 emissions.

Climate's changed before

Eclectic at 13:07 PM on 18 March, 2025

Brainscientist @902 :

You can find a vast amount of information and analysis at this SkepticalScience website, if you like reading for self-education.

For instance, the world temperatures (per proxy) show no evidence of the 'pair of "nuclear Winters" [sic]' that you mention occurring 'in the last 250 years' [unquote]. Perhaps you got that from a very unreliable source.

# Now, there have been some slight "dips" in world temperatures during the last 600 years ~ apparently caused by a combination of clusters of volcanic eruptions plus some Grand Solar Minima . . . but even these "dips" have been (globally) less than 0.5 degreesC. And even at the height of the USA/USSR Cold War panics, no-one much was afraid at the thought of a post-apocalyptic Nuclear Winter chilling effect of less than 0.5 degreesC.

And if you don't like reading but prefer viewing , then you can get a bigly amount of education by viewing the YouTuber "potholer54" who has a climate series of short videos (total 71 videos currently) that are both easy-going and mildly humorously presented. You will enjoy them, I'm sure ~ as they educate by debunking many of the absurd unscientific memes which the science-deniers so often recycle.

You will also be amused by the videos' Comments sections, where some protesters (against climate science) bring up some bigly moronic assertions. One of the most recent of these, in past months, has been commenter "OldScientist" who often copies-and-pastes his own comments. He is quite clueless about science and logic. But he is entertaining ~ if you enjoy Schadenfreude.

January sets an unexpected temperature record

Evan at 05:58 AM on 5 February, 2025

PericoDelosPalotes, not sure what your point is.

People have medical issues and their doctors give them advice on what to do to improve their health. Some people follow the doctor's advice, many do not. Just because people don't follow their doctor's advice does not mean the problem does not exist.

It just means there are other factors that determine how we act than the existence of a single problem, even if it is a really serious problem. Human behavior is not always logical.

How could global warming accelerate if CO2 is 'logarithmic'?

akb at 06:45 AM on 3 February, 2025

We can learn a lot from geological history. Supplementing info from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record), we see that the earth today is relatively cool compared the past 500 million years even though recent ice ages were cooler. From plot of temperatures and CO2 levels over history determined by a variety of means, one sees that the temperaure rise is not linear with CO2 concentrations due Beer's law (it gradually flattens but does not turnover and drop). If we have reached peak fossil-fuel use and phase it out over the same time frame (about a century) we used to reach the peak, we will reach about 550 ppm CO2, which the geologic record says corresponds to about a 3 deg C temperature increase. For comparison, dinosaurs lived at about 1500 ppm CO2 and at temperatures 5-9 deg C higher. Creation of the Devonian black shales and Carboniferous coals dropped CO2 from 4000 ppm to something close to present, with a corresponding drop of about 10-12 deg C. One does not need a supercomputer to know approximately where we are headed.

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

sychodefender at 11:50 AM on 31 January, 2025

Hi MA Rodger, thanks for your reply.

Please can you just clarify one thing from your paragraph below, are you saying that the temperature rise attributable to anthropological co2 at 800ppm would be insufficient to trigger a significant H2O feedback, or am I misinterpreting?

"As you say, the climate forcing from mankind's CO2 emissions does cause feedbacks, these most evident in the water cycle, humidity, cloud cover, cloud height (this last the least understood). But there is no "self-sustaining loop" or even any significant CO2 emissions consequent from mankind's emissions as a feedback. There is thus no need for a natural mechanism to prevent run-away global warming"

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025

Bob Loblaw at 02:43 AM on 13 January, 2025

Oh, I missed this the first time through.

David-acct says in comment 32:

The implausibility of any state maintaining a reliable data base of deaths by party affiliation.

Yet his favoured eTable 1, with its "devastating" evidence that discredits Wallace et al (2023) contains data tables of the following:

Counts of Democratic voter deaths, by age.

Counts of Republican voter deaths, by age.

Somehow, "deaths by party affiliation" are completely unreliable when Wallace et al use them throughout their analysis, but majickly become completely reliable when David-acct wants to use eTable 1 to support his own conclusions.

It is these kinds of logical conflicts that permeate so much of the contrarian argument space. Again, there is a psychological term for this defence mechanism: compartmentalization. From the Wikipedia page:

Compartmentalization allows these conflicting ideas to co-exist by inhibiting direct or explicit acknowledgement and interaction between separate compartmentalized self-states.

Of course, Wallace et al have described how they analyzed the data the obtained to link mortality to party affiliation. I even quoted part of the paper in comment 30. Hint: they did not obtain that data directly from any "state database".

Once again, David-acct could get a better idea of what the authors did - if he'd read the paper. (Or, just fully read all the comments here.)

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025

Bob Loblaw at 02:06 AM on 13 January, 2025

To further expand on why David-acct's "arguments" in comment 32 are trivial:

Dismissing the Texas/Florida mistake as a "typo" is deflection. The mistake shows that you are sloppy and are not paying attention to detail.

You originally stated in comment 2:

"Per capita death rates for Democrats exceeded per capita death rates for republics [Republicans?] in all categories in both states except for the 85+ age group in Ohio and Texas."

When I pointed out your error (comment 9) about the Florida age 25-64 age class, I said "David-acct ... may want to try argue that the difference is not significant".

You have fulfilled that prediction, and now are trying to revise your argument, but that does not change the fact that your original statement was wrong.

Once again, the mistake shows that you are sloppy and are not paying attention to detail.

You continue to use a table (eTable 1) that shows total death rates, rather than excess death rates.

Value for total death rates are not in conflict with any conclusions regarding excess death rates.

The values in eTable 1 are not broken down by time, so it is impossible for those values to conflict with any analysis that does look at how death rates (excess or otherwise) change over time. (Hint: such analysis is included in the paper, in the portions you continue to fail to look at or discuss.)

You have yet to explain how any "well known weaknesses in computing excess death rates" apply to the specific methodology used in Wallace et al (2023).

You have not looked at how Wallace et al examined the sensitivity of their result to changes in assumptions for calculations of excess death rate.

Even if there are "weaknesses in computing excess death rates", it makes no sense whatsoever to then assume that total death rates are a better way of looking at the issue of Covid-related deaths.

Your argument about baseline periods ignores the information in the paper about various methods they used to examine the sensitivity of their results to changes in the baseline estimate methodology.

Once again, you are just making a broad, sweeping generalization - without looking at the specifics in the actual study/paper.

Your "implausibility" argument is simply an argument from incredulity. From the RationalWiki definition:

The argument from incredulity is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone decides that something did not happen or does not exist because they cannot personally understand the workings.

There is nothing in your criticisms that would demonstrate that there is any significant problem in the Wallace et al study.

That does not mean that there might be valid criticisms - it just means that you have failed to show any.

Another hint: the paper itself has a section titled "Limitations".

If you had bothered to actually read the paper, you might have been able to use that discussion as a starting point for your criticism.

You continue to grasp at straws. You continue to reject Wallace et al for no good reason. You continue to refuse to look at the paper in full.

There is a psychological term for someone that uses a defence mechanism involving a refusal to accept the truth of a phenomenon or prospect.

The conclusion from the Wallace et al paper says "Our study found evidence of higher excess mortality for Republican voters compared with Democratic voters in Florida and Ohio after, but not before, COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults in the US."

There is something in your world view that simply cannot accept that this conclusion might be right.

The authors of Wallace et al really have provided evidence, but you need to read the paper to see it.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025

David-acct at 10:00 AM on 9 January, 2025

Phillipe C @13 - thanks - your review of the real time data is consistent with my review of the real time data. There is reduction in output partially due to reduced demand, but no shut downs of France's nuclear reactors on weekends as mentioned by M Sweet. Additionally, a google search pulled no hits of any documentation or any other information that would support the assertion of weekend shut downs of France's nuclear reactors (other than for maintenance or the like) though there was a reference to a few shut downs in 2012.

Again Thanks for your assistance on the logical and concise interpretation of real time data.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025

One Planet Only Forever at 04:11 AM on 9 January, 2025

michael sweet @10,

In addition to making-up misleading claims based on misunderstandings of raw data, David-acct has a history of claiming that efforts to help others learn about harmful misleading claims is a form of ‘censorship’ (Bob Loblaw @3 points this out). They try to redefine ‘censorship’ to include efforts to increase awareness and improve understanding. They also try to claim that efforts to increase awareness and improve understanding are also ‘misleading’ (David-acct @2 ends their misleading attack on “...the Wallace et al study 2022...” by incorrectly claiming that “It simply is another example of misinformation.”).

If misleading claim makers like David-acct fail to succeed in claiming that exposing their misleading promotion of misunderstanding is ‘censorship’ or ‘misinformation’, then they are likely to shift to making-up claims that freedom of speech includes ‘the freedom from having the effectiveness of misleading made-up claims reduced by people learning from logical and evidence-based presentations of information and corrections'.

Tragically, several popular communication platforms are shying away from responsibly justifiably exposing and correcting misleading claims (NPR item “Meta says it will end fact checking as Silicon Valley prepares for Trump” by Huo Jingnan, Shannon Bond, Bobby Allyn)

The likes of Meta and X leadership appear to mistakenly believe that ‘communities driven by emotion-triggering (viral) popularity that can be significantly overwhelmed by harmfully misleading made-up claims’ will be effectively corrected, including having harm done by misleading claims being effectively undone and neutralized, by that same ‘community driven by emotion-triggering (viral) popularity that can be significantly overwhelmed by harmfully misleading made-up claims’. Logically, the evidence indicates that it is more likely that logical evidence-based (boring and long-winded) understandings will be popularly misunderstood to be misleading or deserve to be dismissed.

CO2 effect is saturated

MA Rodger at 20:28 PM on 4 January, 2025

Eclectic @870/871,
Thomas Shula is a retired broker who did physics back in his university days.
As for the video, your "Youtube video in 2024, on the Tom Nelson channel" seems to be to a different to the one HERE (it stretches to almost 2 hours) which is basically a presentationt of a 26-page thesis posted HERE July 2024 and entitled 'The “Missing Link” in the Greenhouse Effect'.
The work is only co-authored by Shula along with one Dr Markus Ott, a german chemist who previously authored a whole book on the subject entitled 'Dismantling The CO2-Hoax'.

I've only skimmed through this Shula/Ott stuff (so far) but note two rather odd-but-fundamental lapses of logic by these two gentlemen.

Their first lapse (which is very badly misrepresented by Shula in the video @0:3:23 when he boldly goes off script and states that emitting IR "is a property of condensed matter. Gases do not emit thermal radiation."): this first lapse is to agree that almost all IR absorbed by CO2 is 'thermalised' (because the average relaxation time required to emit IR is measured in tenths of a second while the disrupting impacts of fellow air molecules occur on average in microseconds) but then they entirely ignore the effect of these far-more-numerous molecular collisions causing the vast majority of CO2 population which is in the excited state and thus can (and so many of them that it does) emit the IR.
And the existence of such radiation is readily measured as the back-radiation at grond level. So it is a pretty silly error.

The second lapse is to fail to grasp that their magic "missing link" would still work to give us AGW.
Their "missing link" is to suggest that, with the absorbed IR at 15-microns entirely 'thermalised' in the thick air at low altitude and in their version not re-emitted as IR, the energy in this 15-micron waveband is transmitted up to an altitude by means of convection, up to thinner air where (acording to them) 'thermalisation' is weakened enough to allow emitted IR. And at such altitudes the IR is emitted out into space. In my quick skim-through I've not spotted any reason why their replacing the 15-micron IR flux up through the atmosphere with their "missing" convection flux would mpact the level of TOA emissions and how, with an increasing altitude for such emissions with increasing CO2, why the flux wouldn't result in AGW (as it does).

CO2 effect is saturated

Eclectic at 08:08 AM on 16 December, 2024

My apologies, Moderator, for my clumsy communication. The aim was to point out the colossal temporal difference in orders of magnitude between the molecular/photonic interplays versus the meteorological layers of the atmosphere . . . was a difference so vast that it left no room for prevarications by poster CallItAsItIs about "equilibrium" being present or not present.

Far more delightful was Philippe's [@865] metaphor about the "stationary" wheel rolling down the road. ( Just so long as Philippe avoids mentioning that smoky second of impact when the landing wheels touch down on the runway! )

Interview with John Cook about misinformation and artificial intelligence

nigelj at 12:12 PM on 8 December, 2024

David-acct says: "Eclectic since you requested an example, virtually every pro masking study had serious flaws and methodology errors"

You provide no evidence for your claim. Maybe think about what masks do. Masks reduce droplets getting through, and much of the virus is in the droplets (with covid some is airborne as well). This reduces the viral load on the lungs and is thus going to reduce the severity of the illness. Its not rocket science. Masks work. Loccations with high mask use were shown to have lower mortality rates. For example:

www.covidstates.org/blog/did-mask-mandates-reduce-covid-deaths

David-acct says : "eclectic - same issues with vax efficiency, virtually no reduction in infection rates and transmission rates, though did have some benefit in the reduction of severity and death for those who were at high risk.

Most vaccines have little or no effect on infection and transmission rates. The purpose is to reduce the severity of the illness. And your implied claim that vaccines only reduce severity of illness in high risk people is completely unsubstantiated and defies commonsense and simple logic. Medications generally reduce severity in people regardless of their age group or underlying general state of health. I see no reason why vaccines would be different. Remember plenty of unvaccinated healthy or young people died of covid or got very sick! The point is vaccines help everyone, but of course they are particularly helpful for older or at risk people.

I will explain why America had such a high covid mortality and illness rate Many millions of people (tending to be on the right of politics) didn't wear masks, or socially distance, or self isolate, or get vaccinated. So they died. What a surprise. In New Zealand we mostly did the opposite and had a much lower mortality rate.

I realise Americans have this freedom thing where they utterly refuse to suffer any restrictions even temporarily. Its crazy and its got like an obsession. But you can't see it.

CO2 effect is saturated

MA Rodger at 01:46 AM on 3 December, 2024

The argument that was being made by commenter CallItAsItIs (with which he apparently now feels confident enough to present within lectures!!) is to suggest that the likes of Kirchoff's Law can be ignored because the atmosphere is warming and thus Kirchoff's Law and its ilk which apply in a state of equilibrium do not apply under AGW. Of course, that situation should mean you adapt the physics such that they do apply, an adaption which commenter CallItAsItIs feels is not required as he can instead happily applies his own nonsense as an alternative.

The logical absence of an atmosphere in equilibrium under AGW has prompted me to set about calculating how large that out-of-equilibrium is under AGW and thus the significance of any deviation from equilibrium, this in a rough & wholly trivial manner. (I think I have managed to tame all the decimal points I've employed.)

A 15 micron photon has an energy of 1.3e-20J. Air at 1bar has a Cp of roughly 0.0012J/cm^3/K and is today warming at some 0.02 K/y or 6.3e-10 K/s, this with ECS=3ºC multiplying the warming by three. So this would suggest 2.5e-13W of forced warming, so requiring 20 million photons/second in the 15 micron band for a cc of air at sea level under today's AGW.
We can compare this roughly with the flux of such IR at average surface air temperatures, a flux of 400mW/m^2/cm^-1 in a band of width 170cm^-1 or 0.0068W/cm^2, roughly 500 quadrillion photons/second or 25 billion times the number of photons required for today's AGW.
The atmosphere is, of course, a little taller than this 1cc packet of air, with about 1.2 million times the mass of a sea level cc in the full cm^2 column, the full column requiring warming. About half the 500 quadrillion photons emitted at the surface are measured escaping from the TOA into space, the remaining 250 quadrilion maintaining the GH-effect. The AGW warming of the full column of atmosphere would require (pro rata with the sea level cc) 25 quadrillion photons, so about 10% additional to the GH-effect and 5% of the surface flux. That seems about right for a ballpark figure.
And while some may say that 10% is significant in terms of there being no equilibrium (and indeed AGW is significant), the statements of commenter CallItAsItIs are actually arguing inconsistently for/against the very existence of the 250 quadrillion photons/s/cm^2 required for a 33ºC GH-effect with an ECS=3ºC.

Recorded webinar about climate change misinformation and disinformation

nigelj at 11:46 AM on 29 November, 2024

Regarding climate science and mitigation missinformation. Chimpanzees throw mud or stones at things they dont like. Modern humans throw logical fallacies and lies and ad hominems instead. Thats about the only difference.

CO2 effect is saturated

Bob Loblaw at 23:28 PM on 26 November, 2024

CallItAsItIs @ 749:

Yes, we need to get some basics straight. You say:

In this problem, we are trying to assess warming of the atmosphere due to IR radiation eminating from the surface of the earth. This earth-emitting IR is estimated as a blackbody at about 288 deg. K, although we do consider it to be adjustable.

For energy conservation, we must take this to be the only source of energy causing addtional warming to the entire atmosphere.

...and at this point, you have the basics horribly, horribly wrong. Energy conservation applies to all forms of energy. There is no "energy conservation" that applies solely to IR radiation. Energy is conserved in a system that obtains all energy as solar radiation, and emits the same amount of energy solely as IR radiation. When you isolate one form or another, there is absolutely no requirement that solar energy be conserved, or IR energy be conserved.

From this basic misunderstanding on your part, you have created a cartoon physics that bears no resemblance to reality.

You then continue with:

The term thermal radiation is used to denote the distribution of EMR when thermal equilbrium is reached.

This, frankly, is "not even wrong". Try reading Wikipedia's page on thermal radiation. The opening paragraph starts with:

Thermal radiation is electromagnetic radiation emitted by the thermal motion of particles in matter. All matter with a temperature greater than absolute zero emits thermal radiation.

Since you can't even get the basics right, the rest of your argument is completely illogical.

As for Eclectic's reference to the Trenberth energy diagram, here it is. Note that the only "conservation of energy" rules that applies is to the entire diagram as a whole - not the individual components (IR, solar, etc.)

Trenberth energy diagram

CO2 effect is saturated

Eclectic at 17:36 PM on 25 November, 2024

Charlie_Brown @739 :-

Our two-way conversation is getting rather off-topic for this thread.

I am sure that we two are "on the same side" regarding AGW/science. But there is clearly a large semantic discrepancy with our individual understandings of the meaning of certain English words ~ and it would take far too long for us to negotiate a mutual agreement on the semantics.

Let it slide.

The point which I found interesting (and which I always find interesting in reading all the nonsenses, bad science, and Motivated Reasonings to be found on the WUWT website) . . . is that our new friend [viewed @722 ; @723 ; @726 ; @730 ; @740 ; and @741 ] and suchlike people ~ are coming to pseudo-science conclusions because of poor logic and poor understanding of the physical universe of particles & photons. They are hampered by their confusions of realities vs abstractions (e.g. the mental constructions achieved by the great scientists of the 18th, 19th, and later centuries. Constructions which have been dignified by the label "Laws" ) .

[ Off-hand, I do not know of a suitable thread on SkS , for the discussion of the philosophy of science as expressed through human psychology & semantics. ]

2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46

Cleanair27 at 02:58 AM on 19 November, 2024

I am willing to accept that there may be a positive efficiency difference between using a stochastic parrot and a human, or humans, to hunt for relevant articles that readers of this site will find informative or even useful. I'm not entirely convinced, and the link in this Story of the Week post is broken regarding AI vs. human writing and illustrating work. And it sounds a little too much like the John Henry fable updated.

There is also the ethical question that comes with using the products of large corporations whose investors who don't give a fig about the climate impact of the energy use from running LLMs. What they want is to continue to capture huge swaths of surplus value from the labor of others (as the Marxists would call it) and use their profits to extract excess rent (as economists would call it) in the form of public policy that favors their interests.

I don't know what the best solution is for the humans working very hard to maintain this site. For my own purposes, the chronological listing of reports and articles is more than satisfactory. It is easy to sift through to find what interests me, which tend to be the peer-reviewed research. So please accept my thanks for all that you do to inform us. I accept that it is best to leave up to you how to improve the product and ease your burdens.

Climate Risk

Bob Loblaw at 00:58 AM on 5 November, 2024

Paul @ 5, 7:

I wouldn't say that Curry has flipped - but I have to admit that I have not being paying a lot of attention to her and I have never had the impression that she has a coherent, logical, consistent position on much related to climate science. She would have to actually hold a position in order to be able to flip away from it. She has a history of broadcasting all sorts of whack-a-doodle stuff (calling it "interesting") - but in a way that she can deny she supported it (or opposed it) when the cards line up.

So, in that tweet, what the heck is she really claiming she has been saying for over a decade now? Only the contents of David Wallace-Wells' tweet, which says little? If you interpret his tweet as saying that there are other factors besides CO2 driving the current warming trend, and stopping CO2 emissions will have little effect, then maybe that fits her history of obfuscation and attacks on climate science as we know it. But is that what David Wallace-Wells really means?

We could try to find David Wallace-Wells' article at The Conversation. Not hard. It's here. Want more detail? The article at The Conversation links to the actual paper it is based on. It is here.

I have not read the paper in detail - it is moderately long and technical - but I can get the gist of it. It certainly does not support any argument that CO2 levels are less important than presented in the IPCC reports and positions. What the paper does seem to present is an argument (from model simulations) that the expected drop in CO2 levels after reaching net zero - due to fast parts of the carbon cycle continuing to remove CO2 - will be offset by other slow feedbacks in the climate system that will cause continued warming.

The paper uses the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator Earth system model (ACCESS-ESM-1.5), which appears to include a number of slow-response feedbacks related to ice, ocean circulation, etc. (The paper provides references that explain that model in more detail, but the details are not apparent from a quick read of the current paper.)

So, the gist of this new paper seems to be that slow feedbacks often not included in many models will make things worse than expected, once net zero is reached. They also indicate that the longer we wait to reach net zero, the worse things will be.

This may fit into Curry's Uncertainty Monster scenario ("See, I told you there were things the models didn't get right!), but it is an uncertainty that will bite us in the posterior regions - not Curry's favoured "everything uncertain will fall to our benefit".

I would not be surprised if Curry hasn't actually read the paper (or maybe even the Conversation article), and just saw what she wanted to see in the tweet - without actually understanding it.

Why widening highways doesn’t reduce traffic congestion

nigelj at 05:42 AM on 24 October, 2024

I live in New Zealand, and we have experienced the issue of induced travel, and in quite dramatic form. About 30 years New Zealand started experiencing increasingly severe traffic congestion due in part to accelerated rates of immigration, and in part to a policy that allowed the importation of cheap used Japanese vehicles. You can imagine the ressult of this!

About 15 years ago it reached crisis point and the Government engaged in a large road building programme, and on occasion widened existing roads primariy to reduce this traffic congestion and travel times. It worked for a few years, and then those traffic times start to creep back up, so induced travel is a very real thing.

The filling up of the new roads is not all due to immigration pressure or cheap cars because those trends have stabilised. Its induced travel. The roads mostly had a rather poor cost benefit ratio and this assumed congestion would stay low. So its like we are constantly running to try to catch up, and we are throwing a lot of money and resources at the problem for meagre returns.

In my view the problem goes back to urban design. Cheap fossil fuels have enabled massive technological advances and this created a model of centralised cities with their factories, and this separates people from the food supply and their workplaces, and makes it essential to have effective long distance transport links. And instead of compact walkable cities countries like America and New Zealand opted for spread out suburban living because the wealth creation allowed everyone to own a car and a suburban home. But this whole structure is utterly dependent on the car and a complex roading system.

New Zealand has experimented with pushing things back to the walkable city concept, (which I personally quite like) with encouraging highrise apartments and high density living, making improvements for pedestrian travel, and creating bicycle lanes on the roads, and car free zones, and reduced car parking in shopping areas and improvements to things like buses and train transport.

The problem is there has been enormous push back from all sorts of groups of people. People resent losing their sunlight and views when high density homes are built next door. Car owners are frustrated that dedicated bicycle lanes create less space on the roads for cars, and less car parks available. Retailers are angry that reduced car parks outside their shops is allegedly loosing them business. As a result the current conservative leaning government are downscaling cycle lanes and building more roads.

Some of these complaints seem valid - such as having a 4 story height apartment block cutting out your sunlight and privacy, but some complaints are less valid. Complaints that buiding bicycle lanes and reducing car parking badly affects buiness are less valid. Studies show it doesnt cause business to suffer, probably because its countered by easier access for people walking or cycling. Refer:

thespinoff.co.nz/science/17-05-2024/cycle-lanes-are-good-for-business-actually

However making public transport work better has proven very difficult.You need a lot of buses to get people exactly where they need to go in one trip and this becomes costly. People arent so keen on getting two or three buses to get to their destination, which is understandable and especially when buses are notoriously unreliable. But obviously there are at least some things you can do to improve and expand public transport.

Of course change on the scale we are looking at is rarely smooth or quick or easy, but we do face an enormous challenge, because trillions of dollars of infrastructure are designed around the car (essentially) so changing this wont happen overnight. However other living options to the walkable city are not so viable. We cant all live idyllic lives in little settlements in the country because we need at least some big cities that are closely integrated with industrial production, assuming we want a technology based future.

So the walkable big city concept seems like its the best option overall. I doubt even that can totally replace the car, for obvious reasons, but it could make us a lot less car dependent and that helps. Famous quote: "The perfect is the enemy of the good" (Voltaire)

You will not escape the climate crisis

prove we are smart at 07:59 AM on 9 October, 2024

Of course no life will escape the increasing effects from climate change and we know dealing with its consequences will vary from annoyance to survivability depending on many factors - especially your bank account.

Further checking out Mr Dressler's re-post and his informative articles, i could particulary relate to this comment ...
John Hardman
John’s Substack
Aug 4, 2023
Liked by Andrew Dessler

"I am reminded of the silly Monty Python skit where the knight confronts the king and is progressively dismembered while staying defiant. “It is but a flesh wound!” he bellows as his dismembered arm lies at his feet. Denial is not bound by sanity.

Change happens using the same path as the grief cycle: denial, bargaining, anger, surrender, and acceptance. Logically we should be feeling the pain of climate change wounds and the financial pinch of accruing costs, but we are looping in a cycle of denial, bargaining, and anger. The question becomes what level of pain will knock us (and the rest of the natural world) to our knees and accept responsibility for our fate?

Looping in the first three stages of change allows us to play the victim and shift the blame to others which is easy and addictive. But, inevitably a reckoning happens where the wound is felt deeply and personally. The pain sears through the fog of illusion bringing us out of the clouds and back into our humanity. I shudder to think what must happen to bring us down to earth but the power of denial is formidable and we now have a lot of distractions from our pain. Monty Python showed us the bounds of our absurdity. We may just exceed them."

The distractions are increasing and I have always believed when we are faced with a common "enemy", the whole tribe would unite-put our differences to one side and work together- people, how bad does it have to get before this happens? Are we just too de-sensitized to human suffering now?

Skeptical Science News: The Rebuttal Update Project

Cedders at 19:44 PM on 6 October, 2024

I would also welcome any expansion of the 'it's too hard' section of myths, as this has been such a boom area since about 2015. Generally industry and society has moved from denial that climate change is a human-caused threat, to delay and sometimes fatalism ('it's too late' could be a whole new top level of the taxonomy). While there are a small rump of people with 'dismissive' attitudes to climate science, a majority of people accept there is a major problem, but are helped to feel powerless to do anything (per Michael Mann's The New Climate War).

Addressing this trand could be seen as straying into technological and economic and policy questions, but objectivity is still possible (eg citing whichever economic opinions are expressed and a range of informed views where there are no scientific facts).

This would be very helpful to deal with in the same format as there are certainly a lot of myths circulating in political circles and media. Typically the misguided arguments concern technology and what can be permitted within remaining carbon budgets, but also sometimes groups of scientists and activists. For example in the context of a climate mitigation conversation, policy-makers can express a preference for hydrogen cars over EVs or even public transport. At that point someone lie Auke Hoekstra or Michael Liebreich can explain simple facts about energy losses in electrolysis and fuels cells or combustion engines. This makes it clear that the most efficient use of renewables will not be hydrogen cars or heating, so investmeet in some hydrogen infrastructure would be a misguided dead end, rather like 'low tar' cigarettes or diesel engines. This is also a consequence of understanding from about 2009 that carbon pollution has to be cut to ('net') zero.

Essentially to get a major policy through needs people to agree it is fair, effective and beneficial. Incumbent industries want to preserve their business model and deny access to new entrants by influencing regulation. So they need to suggest clean technology uptake is inherently unfair, or that it has inherent environmental costs. Informing people about not just why stopping fossil fuels is fundamental but that the transition can generally improve equity and have environmental co-benefits is the hard task ahead.

I hope this take wasn't too off-topic. My thanks to all the SkS authors and editors for their continuing work.

The doom spiral

MA Rodger at 00:07 AM on 23 September, 2024

Jan @4,

I don't think I can agree with your assertion that with AGW, "we are now flying blind."

Climate scientists are well aware of the potential for nasty surprises being stoked by humanity's greenhouse gas emissions. For some time now, the message has been that anything warmer than a +1.5ºC world is running the risk of bringing on some of those nasty surprises. (This safety limit was originally +2.0ºC prior to ~2010.) Mind, extinction of the human race will be far from the first nasty surprise to arrive. Of course, logically it would be the last but, that said, it would be a long long way down the road in terms of global tmperature rise.
The big risk we face not addressing AGW (which is where we are today) is messing the climate enough to bring the global economy crashing down around our ears, an economy the vast majority of humanity rely on to keep them fed and watered.

You do make some very brave assertions which I consider are difficult to support.
As an example, I would question some of your comment on the "methane feedback."
Present natural methane emissions have not been easily quantified but they are included in the climate modelling and their growth has been a part of the projected methane forcing. Certainly recent work suggests the modelled natural emissions are running behind the assessed natural emissions and projections are not capturing the full picture. But this is not to the extent that natural methane would become a significant feedback mechanism. (See for instance Kleine et al (2021) or Zhang et al (2023).) However, the increase in natural methane emissions is one of the potential nasty surpises.

One area of natural methane emissions where people often express great concern is the Arctic emissions, an understandable concern but one which is misplaced. Years ago I went down this road myself.

But it should be said that your brave assertions do require supporting evidence.

The doom spiral

Eclectic at 05:07 AM on 21 September, 2024

Jan @4 , your ideas are all very fine.

But rather than basing your thoughts on climate models and/or on speculations ~ you could look at the Earth's geological history. Such as what happened during the warmer period of the Eemian, around 120,000 years ago.

The doom spiral

Jan at 19:49 PM on 20 September, 2024

Sadly, climate scientist have no time to follow the path single discussions on feedbacks take. Therefore, they think models can in anyway predict what is comming. Unfortunately they can't! So many models errors of Earth system developments now amerging that one can only vomit.

Thererby, models miss way too many feedbacks which are now soming into motion.

The Amazon is now trapped in the vicious cycle, speeding up its collapse decades earlier then predicted. Antarctic heatwaves and see ice losses also happens decades earlier then predicted.

The methane feedback has started while models did not see a significant signal till 2100 to emerge. The methane modul of models is crap! But do not know if the new one is already deployed.

Be it as it may, the warmings of the Arctic methane bomb are now out and will increase the comming years as recent observational studies are quite worring. Not only Yedoma permafrost emits much more, but the real danger will be geological methane from methane hydrates and gas rich sediment layers, which is a wild card, which is ever more observed and documented - methane of thermogenic origion reaches the atmosphere where measurements have been made, while ground water melts its way downward through cracs driven by osmosis.

Marine heatwaves, a feedback of oceans warming too fast, are also not predicable by models as they are driven by small scale to global circulation patterns in the oceans and atmosphere. We have now the first MHW in the North Pacific reaching in its peak regions some 7-8°C above the 1981-2011 average (one cause: Asian flooding amplifying the subtropical North Pacfic high via hot upper air currents).

Not only that marine heatwaves expanded non-linear, they are also a game changer in terms of ocean heat uptake, circulation patterns, and extreme events. Models were not able to predict their spread which can only be described as nuts.

Next problem we face is that over the oceans first 300m ocean heat is now building up, in the mode water and intermediate water mass regions the heat buildup spreads to deeper layers with subsurface water masses warming, freshening, and expanding. Very bad sign indeed!

First study came now out that vertical mixing of the oceans could already be suppresed by increasing stratification. Further, we see worrying changes in mode water masses in the Northern Hemisphere. At the same time recent changes around Antarctica (e.g. warming and hemispheric temperature gradient declining -oops!) are also worrying as it has been the Southern Ocean that had been mostly responsible for the monotoic trend of incrasing heat uptake the last 20 years - intensfying winds around Antarctica the major reson (Ozone hole supported that development of increasing hemispheric temeprature gradient).

Just now the experts of ocean mxing and ocean heat uptake trying frantically to find out which processes controlls heat uptake of the oceans as we did never really loocked into it. But now the changes become so worrying that our simple assumption that the oceans would continue their monotoic trend in increasing heat uptake like nothing was amiss doesn't matter how fast we warm our planet had been way too simple.

If ocean heat uptake declines from 90% of the extra energy to 80%, the whole goes fast bam, as a too fast warming had been the problem in the first place.

And if oceans should start to take less than 90% of the extrem energy kept in the system, all the other feedbacks will be triggered.

This can go very fast! Doomer? Stupid framing of the system, as the above is in all points a real possibility as we do not know when and how fast feedbacks could start to synchronize.

And if this should happen the only chance humanity will have, will be to reduce GHG conrentrations in the atmsphere as fast as we can do it united as a species figthing for its own survival!

Sadly, many climate scientist have become statisticans and thereby they have lost contact with reality as the discussions deep in the mechanics of our climate systems point something very clear out:

We are now flying blind and even an extinction level event is a possibility whch can progress fast!

2024's unusually persistent warmth

Bob Loblaw at 05:21 AM on 20 September, 2024

pattimer:

To have chemistry or biology affect atmospheric temperatures, you need to argue that there is a mechanism by which those changes in chemistry and/or biology lead to a physical change in atmospheric heat storage.

For ocean chemistry, you would need to have chemical reactions that release enough energy to lead to increased ocean temperatures, which would then lead to increased atmospheric temperatures. This seems highly unlikely, but I'm open to suggestions.

For biological activity, the same applies. Photosynthesis is a possible suspect, as that consumes energy at the surface. The energy that goes into photosynthesis would otherwise go into the other energy transfers that occur at the surface: emission of IR radiation back to the atmosphere, transfer of heat (thermal energy) into the atmosphere, transfer of heat into the ocean or land, or the evaporation of water (which then goes into the atmosphere in the form of latent heat, and is released to thermal energy when the vapour condenses again). If there is less photosynthesis, then more energy would go into the other fluxes, but where?

...but photosynthesis is already part of the system (as is heat released as carbon is oxidized), and you'd have to argue a change in biological activity that is pretty large.

2024's unusually persistent warmth

Bob Loblaw at 05:07 AM on 18 September, 2024

pattimer:

My first reaction is to think "nothing chemical or biological". The energy sink that we see as global warming is entirely physical - thermal energy. Plant photosynthesis does store energy from the sun, but that is essentially offset by the release of energy as biological carbon decomposes.

Most of the energy imbalance (solar radiation absorbed, minus infrared radiation emitted out to space) goes into oceans. The heat capacity of air (the entire atmosphere) is a tiny fraction of the heat capacity of the oceans.

Our routine temperature observations only cover small proportions of the ocean/atmosphere systems. Our most detailed ones are air temperature near the surface - your everyday weather station data. When you see global air temperature fluctuating during El Nino cycles, we are seeing a shift between what stays in the atmosphere and what goes into oceans.

I think it will take time to figure out just what part of the oceans is storing less heat during this period of warmer atmospheric temperatures. And even more time to understand just exactly how the physics has played out.

...but my gut says "physics", not chemistry or biology.

2024's unusually persistent warmth

pattimer at 19:57 PM on 17 September, 2024

Could there be some change in the Oceans other than the El Nino cycle, perhaps chemically or biologically that is limiting the oceans previous ability to absorb as much of the global to absorb as much of the global warming
?

How mismanagement, not wind and solar energy, causes blackouts

One Planet Only Forever at 08:52 AM on 11 September, 2024

I agree with Michael Sweet’s comment @3. However, David-acct does raise important points:

electricity generation systems need to perform essential services adequately under extreme circumstances.

it is important to be more fully aware – less misunderstanding (David-acct raises this general concern while appearing to fail to be ‘more generally aware’ as noted by Michael Sweet)

Regarding the need for robust performance:

The existing electricity system in Texas obviously failed to be developed robust enough. This is a ‘marketplace failure’ that the leadership of Texas failed to act to correct (especially their action to keep the Texas grid isolated to avoid federal requirements that would have made it more robust).

There is indeed a concern that a renewable electricity system compromised by marketplace interests would also fail to be developed to be robust enough. The marketplace could also fail to make the renewable system as harmless and sustainable as it could be (less harmful and more sustainable ways tend to be more difficult and more expensive. Easier and cheaper generally wins marketplace competitions).

Additional matters that people should be more aware of or have a fuller and better understanding of:

There can be conflicting interests regarding water storage for hydro-electric generation. A desire for water for irrigation could lead to a reduction of water stored for electricity. And a desire to have capacity in the storage reservoir to act as a flood abatement measure would reduce the storage for electricity. The solution would be to build bigger storage features that have adequate capacity for electricity plus these other interests.

Reduced energy demand needs to be the objective. Technological development that reduces energy demand needs to be prioritized over developments that do not reduce energy demand. The marketplace has a history of failing to do that sort of thing.

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

Bob Loblaw at 05:05 AM on 3 September, 2024

Yes, another good video from Potholer54. I think I share his sarcastic sense of humour - and at some point as you look at this level of denial from a politician you have to make a choice between crying and laughing at it.

I am currently reading Authoritarian Nightmare - Trump and his Followers, by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer. (Yes, John Dean of Watergate fame). Much of the social psychology it discusses is from Bob Altemeyer's career studying what he termed authoritarian follower psychology. You can access much of Altemeyer's material (including an ebook The Authoritarians), at https://theauthoritarians.org/.

Dean and Altemeyer discuss two psychological aspects of the extreme devotion to the sort of politicians' messages exposed by Potholer: they refer to "social dominators", who treat every interaction as a situation where they need to dominate others (or other groups), and authoritarian followers, who are highly susceptible to being led down the garden path by authority figures. When someone comes along that tells them what they want to hear, they lose any ability to critically evaluate what they are being told. Being lied to isn't a problem as long as the message confirms what they deeply want to believe.

Large numbers of authoritarian follower voters and lying power-hungry demagogue politicians is not a good mix.

CO2 lags temperature

Blusox69 at 22:00 PM on 6 August, 2024

Thanks for the replies so far. I read the paper over a few times and it didn't sit right with me. Under section 4.1 he neglects to show data or even graphs for the CO2 to T as he states they "did not provide useful results". Straight away that rang alarm bells. I've never omitted data from my studies, even if the results were not useful as it lays the foundation for being accused of cherry picking data/results. I'm not a statistician, but I'm sure the same logic would be applied to their work too.

Why were the 1930s so hot in North America?

nigelj at 08:08 AM on 25 July, 2024

Read a study somewhere saying Americas unusually strong heatwaves during the 1930s (the heatwave index was off the chart) were a statistical outlier resulting primarily from both the pacific and atlantic oceans being in a strong natural warming phase at the same time, combined with local meteorological conditions favouring heatwave formation. This combination was a very uncommon coincidence, but it seems to me that a similar combination of factors in the future is inevitable sooner or later, and when you add in anthropogenic warming since the 1930s, a new heatwave record would be set and by a wide margin, and the impacts would be huge.

Heatwave intensity and frequency has also increased in America in recent decades. Refer:

www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-waves

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