Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, since you seem to be saying my posts don’t belie my experience.

All due respect, but your ideas are not so uniquely profound or revelatory as you seem to assume they would be to me.

Obtaining my graduate degree necessitated that I become somewhat versed in the roots and modes of human behavior - I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, since you seem to be saying my posts don’t belie my experience.

Maybe you can find a more willing poster here to illuminate with your obviously evolved and comprehensive expertise. You can begin your lesson with that particularly valuable pearl of wisdom that “deception and manipulation fall within the spectrum of human abilities”.

Oh, you know what I meant, you light-hearted kidder you.

El Ninos have become more intense in the industrial age, which stands to worsen storms, drought, and coral bleaching in El Nino years. A new study has found compelling evidence in the Pacific Ocean that the stronger El Ninos are part of a climate pattern that is new and strange.

It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Ninos, La Ninas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change.

"What we're seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age," said Kim Cobb, the study's principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "There were three extremely strong El Nino-La Nina events in the 50-year period, but it wasn't just these events. The entire pattern stuck out."

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The report revealed, among other things, more health risks due to heat stress, an increase in the mean surface temperature of the North Sea and greater fluctuations in agricultural yields.

The report found there was increase in the number of days that are 30 degrees or above, rising from three to 10 between 1951 and 2018. It also said there were up to 7,500 deaths in some years due the heatwaves.

In the past 10 years, groundwater levels have receded, leading to problems with drinking water supplies in some communities, according to the findings. Increasing drought and increasingly frequent low water levels in rivers has impaired ecosystems, lead to restricted shipping and endangered the supply of cooling water to power plants and industry.

In the past 50 years, according to the report, heat and drought caused €700 million ($771 million) in agricultural losses. Growing seasons had expanded from 222 days in 1951-1981 to 232 days in 1988-2017. Animal and plant species from warmer regions of the world also spread into the country, including sardines and anchovies in the North Sea and the Asian tiger mosquito on land, increasing the change of disease.

Damage to infrastructure from extreme weather events affected the economy, with insurance losses of about €3.1 billion incurred on houses, motor vehicles, household goods, commerce, industry and agriculture in 2018.

Since its enactment into law in 1980, approximately 40,000 uncontrolled waste sites have been identified in the United States. Approximately 1,300 of these sites constitute the current national Superfund priority list of sites for remediation.

approximately 40,000 uncontrolled waste sites have been identified in the United States. Approximately 1,300 of these sites constitute the current national Superfund priority list of sites for remediation. Results from analyses are described that characterize the priority hazardous substances released from Superfund sites and the extent of hazard posed to residential communities. Findings from the United States' experience in responding to uncontrolled waste sites are relevant to other countries as they address similar environmental and public health concerns.

With world leaders gathering in Madrid next week for their annual bargaining session over how to avert a climate catastrophe, the latest assessment issued by the United Nations said Tuesday that greenhouse gas emissions are still rising dangerously.

“The summary findings are bleak,” said the annual assessment, which is produced by the United Nations Environment Program and is formally known as the Emissions Gap Report. Countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions despite repeated warnings from scientists, with China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, further increasing their emissions last year.

The result, the authors added, is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.”

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Your faulty claim of unreliable biased data

is falling on deaf ears. The public rejects trump's and the fossil fuel profiteers propaganda against the clear fact of AGW.

We can date the beginning of consensus-building on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) to Manabe and Wetherald (1967). Their pioneering computer modeling showed that doubling atmospheric CO2 would raise global temperature by about 2°C, lower than the present best estimate but not by much. Their finding convinced the late Wallace Broecker that what he named “global warming” was “a thing to worry about” (Broecker, 1975; Weart, 2009).

As computer modeling steadily improved and global temperatures began their erratic but inexorable climb in the 1970s, a consensus grew first among climate scientists and then more broadly that AGW was true and indeed worrisome. Governments became concerned about the damaging potential of AGW, as reflected in the objective of the first United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in Rio in June 1992: “To achieve . . . stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (United Nations, 1992, p. 4).

Because the use of fossil fuels has become so embedded in the world economy, it was clear that “stabilizing” greenhouse gases might require large-scale government intervention and regulation, anathema to some, including some scientists. This recognition gave rise to the repeated claim of global warming denialists: “There’s no consensus.”

Consider as examples two statements 20 years apart from Richard Lindzen of MIT. In 1992, he published an article titled, “Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus” (Lindzen, 1992). It appeared in Regulation, a non–peer-reviewed periodical from the Cato Institute, a libertarian “think-tank.” The article began, “Many aspects of the catastrophic scenario have already been largely discounted by the scientific community [and] fears of massive sea level increases have been steadily reduced by orders of magnitude” (p. 87). In 2012, Lindzen and 15 coauthors published a letter to the Wall Street Journal titled, “No Need to Panic about Global Warming” (Lindzen, 2012). It opened with this paragraph:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

The signatories included not only Lindzen but also a former astronaut and senator, the co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the President of the World Federation of Scientists, and a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. This impressive list seemed to show not only that there was no consensus on AGW, but that distinguished scientists thought it might well be false. However, Lindzen was the only one of the 16 who had done climate research.

Scholars responded to the controversy by surveying the opinion of scientists. The results of eight such studies conducted between 2009 and 2015 showed a consensus on AGW ranging from 83.5% to 97% (Cook et al., 2016). But given the ingrained caution of scientists and their reluctance to affirm findings outside their own field, opinion surveys are likely to underestimate the consensus. Moreover, as shown by the controversy over continental drift, even a near-unanimous consensus among scientists can turn out to be wrong. If we look back at the early decades of continental drift, however, we find that there was little peer-reviewed evidence for or against the theory. As a result, early articles on continental drift contained much more opinion than evidence. Thus, we could say that although scientists turned out to be wrong about continental drift, the peer-reviewed literature was not wrong, only thin and inconclusive. This affirms that the most reliable way to gauge a consensus among scientists is to turn to the peer-reviewed literature and the evidence therein. This method also has the advantage of directly showing how likely a theory is to be true.

In an article titled “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Naomi Oreskes was the first to use the literature in this way (Oreskes, 2004). As a scholar of the history of science, she recognized that in spite of the widespread agreement on AGW from scientific associations, national academies, and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), their reports “might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions” from individual scientists. Oreskes tested that hypothesis by reading the abstracts of the 928 articles published between 1993 and 2003 that answered to the keyword phrase, “global climate change.” She found, “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position” (Oreskes, 2004, p. 1686).

Cook et al. (2013) reviewed 11,944 peer-reviewed articles from 1991 to 2011, using the search terms “global climate change” and “global warming.” They required that to be counted as part of the consensus, an article had to “endorse” AGW by “explicitly stat[ing] that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming” (p. 3). This led them to reject 7,930 articles, after which they calculated a consensus of 97.1%. Had they used rejections of AGW, as Oreskes did, Cook et al. (2013) would have reported a consensus of 99.8%, compared to her 100% (see Cook et al., 2016). Powell (2016) reported that, using rejection as the criterion, literature surveys to date showed an average consensus of 99.94%.

In this study, I used the Web of Science core database to search for peer-reviewed articles on “climate change” or “global warming” published from January 1, 2019, through early August (see Research Data, available online as Supplemental Material). I found 11,602 articles, more than 10 times the number in Oreskes’s database. To read even the abstracts would be a daunting and time-consuming task subject to fatigue and error. Instead, I read the titles, and when it appeared that an article might question AGW, I read the abstract and in some cases the article itself. I found only a handful of articles whose titles left open the possibility that its authors might reject AGW, and on closer inspection none did. One example is, “Has Global Warming Already Arrived?” by Varotsos and Efstathiou (2019). They reported that the temperature of the troposphere as measured indirectly from satellites did not match that predicted by AGW theory. They noted that “the climate system is complicated and complex with the existing uncertainties in the climate predictions” (p. 36) and did not use the discrepancy as a basis to reject AGW.

Oreskes’s largely unheeded warning from 15 years ago tolls sadly true today: “There is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen” (Oreskes, 2004, p. 1686).

Denialists have long run out of excuses for inaction and humanity has almost run out of time.

In an article titled “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Naomi Oreskes was the first to use the literature in this way (Oreskes, 2004). As a scholar of the history of science, she recognized that in spite of the widespread agreement on AGW from scientific associations, national academies, and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), their reports “might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions” from individual scientists. Oreskes tested that hypothesis by reading the abstracts of the 928 articles published between 1993 and 2003 that answered to the keyword phrase, “global climate change.” She found, “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position” (Oreskes, 2004, p. 1686).