This month’s open thread for climate science discussions.
Reader Interactions
165 Responses to "Unforced variations: July 2019"
Dansays
Footnote to 48 and the axing of the red team:
John Christy and Judith Curry were to be among them. Both have been quite debunked over the years within the peer reviewed scientific community. The idea that they should be part of a climate science assessment was pretty ludicrous. And what, no Pat Michaels? ;-)
nigeljsays
Nemesis @36, I’m saying this because there are some big misunderstandings going on that fill up a lot of space. I’m not blaming anyone for this. Killian isn’t promoting some capitalist funded tree planting programme. He is promoting a completely new non capitalist sharing economic system, that plants trees because it helps the earth.
Make of this what you will, but it would appear to be close to your world view.I think civilisation will chart more of a middle course, but only time will tell, and we definitely need more goals than just the profit motive.
Al Bundysays
Killian: You’ve no right to try to drag others into your maladaptive life choices.
AB: Actually, it appears that Nemesis has made rather adaptive life choices. He’s vegan, he’s super-fit, he hasn’t reproduced, and he doesn’t worry himself to death but gets some popcorn and enjoys the show. He’s a friggin’ role model, dude.
Please compare and contrast your life choices. Hopefully you’re doing almost as well as he is doing for the planet. For example, did you take a car, train, boat, or a plane to get where you are? Your diet as low impact as his? Do you live, like Nemesis appears to, by “What would Greta do?”
(hopefully this is a softball question…)
————
Alan0202: “overshoot! global famine! billions must die!” hysteria
AB: You left off the second half of the sentiment: “so that my meat and my stuff aren’t affected; and after I’m dead, who cares? I’ll have died with the most toys and winning is the only thing that matters.”
So yes, billions MUST die
Mr. Know It Allsays
It’s all hooey according to scientists in Japan and Finland:
” Yet, when we use bio-mimicry to engineer ecosystems, even those made to look and act like naturally occurring systems, we create them to enhance and speed up natural processes.”
Sure, enhancement and speeding up natural processes aka geoengineering/terraforming is a wonderful thing, a godlike thing, like Svante Arrhenius “Worlds in the making”, like speeding up co2 and climate, just like the wonderful bible says:
” Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.“
Yes, you enlightened my soul now, no, I don’t want to be suicidal, I don’t want to walk that lonesome road of a death cult, I believe in biotechnology, terraforming and human (monkey?) godlike enhancement of Nature, we are in the drivers seat of planet earth now, we got the vision, we got the power to enhance Nature like never before during 4.3 billion years of earth’s history as we clearly see all around us. I say, I pray:
Plant these trees by the billions, enhance and speed up the cooking pot of Nature!
Sela.
@mike, #38
” Can/should we move the plant tree discussion to FR?”
There is no FR for the month of Juli so far.
Nemesissays
@alan2102, #28
” PS: this just in: https://www.businessinsider.co.za/this-south-african-made-drone-can-help-re-plant-100-million-trees-a-year-from-2023-2019-6
This South African invention allows drones to plant hundreds of trees in minutes
Jul 02, 2019
“- A new device, built in South Africa, allows drones to fire seeds into the ground.
– Two seeds per second are fired at velocities of between 150 to 300 metres per second.
– Its inventors hope that drones can be used to plant a million trees a year.
snip
The module…can attach to the bottom of popular drone models. Louw and Walker estimate that a team of two, flying 2 drones, can plant up to 40,000 seeds into into the ground in a day.” ”
Wow, incredible, I love these clever business insiderz. Btw, have you seen this already?
Do you know how much water a single tree needs to grow up and stay alive? Ah, these business insiderz already know exactly where all that water will come from:
” A pirate-fighting sailor wants to lasso and tow a 125-million-ton iceberg from Antarctica to solve South Africa’s water crisis”
Excellent, outright visionary. I’d really like to get some of the shit they are smoking.
@nigelj, #53
” Nemesis @36, I’m saying this because there are some big misunderstandings going on that fill up a lot of space. I’m not blaming anyone for this. Killian isn’t promoting some capitalist funded tree planting programme. He is promoting a completely new non capitalist sharing economic system, that plants trees because it helps the earth.
Make of this what you will, but it would appear to be close to your world view.I think civilisation will chart more of a middle course, but only time will tell, and we definitely need more goals than just the profit motive.”
Ok, non capitalist sharing economy, I’d love to see that happen… But where is it? I don’t see it and I won’t see it in my lifetime I bet. Let’s ask the Wall Street, the Deutsche Bank, Exxon, Trump, the military-industrial complex et al, let’s ask the powers that be, the rich and super rich what they think about a non capitalist sharing economy :))
Yes, we need more goals than just the profit motive and we will envisage these goals as soon as the capitalist system collapsed, when we will find ourselves as monkeys fighting over food and water out there in the cooking pot of Nature just like any other animals.
mike @51,
If you really want to embroil me in your continuing skyrocketry, do note that the “unprecedented Arctic mega-fires” are reportedly emitting “as much CO2 in just one month as Sweden’s total annual emissions.” So that would add 0.014ppm to atmospheric CO2 levels over six months which I would assume would be the extent of the fire-season in the Arctic.
While every little contribution to such emissions is unhelpful, we do need to address the big contributions and they tend to be down to fossil fuel use. Thus from Scripps Inst we get the quote “Many proposals have been made to mitigate global warming, but without a rapid decrease of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels they are pretty much futile,” Tans (Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division) said.
On this we likely agree.
Where we disagree is the bolt-on skyrocketry which evokes some new natural source for our increasing CO2. When this mindless hypothesising began to infect these UV threads back in early 2018, we saw annual rates of atmospheric CO2 increase dropping to low values (at MLO down to 1.8ppm/yr with a reasonable amount of smoothing) which wasn’t very helpful for the skyrocket thesis although this low level was simply blamed on the mild La Niña.
Today we see the atmospheric CO2 increase far higher but the idea that there is today an El-Niño-impact is refuted, this despite that Scripps Inst reference quoting Ralph Keeling saying “The rate of CO2 increase is still very high,” said Ralph Keeling. “We’re likely seeing the effect of mild El Niño conditions on top of record fossil fuel use.”
If you are properly interested in today’s underlying increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, monthly MLO data is probably not greatly useful as it picks up its own wobbles. This graphic (usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’) shows the wobbles of both MLO and the global CO2 increase and acceleration. I don’t see signs of CO2 skyrocketing in this data. Frankly, I don’t see signs of skyrocketing anywhere.
And I should add that I have no idea what “MSM interest” is meant to mean.
I’ve mostly sat out the backs and forths about CO2 rise, though I confess that I do in fact find the rise quite worrisome.
However, I must comment on MAR’s graph. It’s quite remarkable to observe the phasing between rate and acceleration in that plot. Of course, zero crossings on the acceleration plot are by definition constrained to be at positive and negative peaks in the growth plot, but I’m not sure at all that I really understand all the implications of that phase relationship. But its existence is very clear.
(Question: the legend has acceleration labeled “LH scale.” Surely that should read “RH scale”? That’s the one that has ppm/yr/yr!)
What I do think I understand is that there’s an anomaly in the highly “sine-ish” pattern. While both frequency and amplitude have shifted over the several ENSO cycles shown–and with variability increasing in the acceleration plot–the biggest thing to me is that we’re nearly missing the last ‘down’ segment. After the acceleration peak in 2018, you’d expect a sizable decrease in acceleration, but there’s only a very modest one, which doesn’t even cross into negative values. And the growth plot doesn’t even get to a negative slope, merely exhibiting a lower positive slope for a bit.
I wouldn’t say that that’s “skyrocketry,” but it’s also sure not what I want to see on this plot.
Nor, for that matter, is the fact that there’s a clear positive trend superimposed on the sine ‘wiggles’ of the growth plot. It makes me wonder how far back that goes?
Dan, currently #52, and others express amazement at “no Pat Michaels” on the planned and recently unplanned Red Team.
That is as nothing next to my amazement at no Fred Singer.
mikesays
Hey MAR – I think you are correct and I largely agree with you and Tans that the 10 GtC is the lion’s share of the CO2 accumulation problem because our actual carbon budget for stability is 2 GtC. Methane clathrates, catastrophic changes in the natural CO2 carbon cycle, widespread and rapid permafrost thaw – these things are the monster in the closet or under the bed, the things that go bump in the night. These things are quite scary and it’s a problem that we can’t simply shine a light somewhere and determine that we should not be scared by these possibilities. These problems/monsters are actually in the closet and under the bed. We would do well to keep them in those spots and our best shot at that requires that we cut emissions by about 80% as quickly as possible because once these monsters wake up, we could be in big trouble. Do you agree?
MSM is mainstream media. Cheers, buddy,
Mike
mikesays
Simultaneous production of fresh water and electricity via multistage solar photovoltaic membrane distillation
This belongs on the FR thread for July, but it doesn’t exist yet, so…
Kind of encouraging news.
Mike
alan2102says
#49 Nemesis 11 Jul 2019
N: “Mother Earth can easily feed 10–12 billion people”
I’m pleased to learn that you are not a Malthusian, even though you are a doomer. That’s unusual. It is rare to meet one who is not the other. I’m a non-Malthusian doomer myself, albeit not as pessimistic as you.
N: “but she can’t feed the greed of the few. It all depends on the economic system, just let capitalism walk on and you will see billions die very soon.”
I fear that you are correct, and I salute you for properly situating the blame. This probable dieoff will be caused by human choices and human systems, not by inexorable “overshoot” or “overpopulation” or “nature taking its course” in a way that cannot be stopped. It CAN be stopped. It is within our power. Carrying capacity has been increased dramatically, and still more-dramatic increases are yet to come just with technologies already on the shelf, let alone those now percolating in the brains of the humans currently “overpopulating” the earth. We’ll probably blow up the planet, or burn it up, before we can implement all that good stuff, but who knows? Failure is likely but the situation is still plastic, the outcome uncertain. Hence I am a doomer, just not as pessimistic as you.
N: “Your first study about the “positive” effects of climate change on rice production is highly speculative”
Any study doing projections decades out, or for later in this century, is by nature speculative (perhaps “highly”, perhaps not). So what? What’s the alternative?
We should and will continue to make speculative projections about this and other things such as, say, sea level rise by the end of this century — estimates of which, I’m sure you have noticed, vary wildly (rendering at least some of them “HIGHLY speculative”, right?). It is OK. We will do our best. We will make mistakes. We will get better.
N: “data in the real world has a different message: ‘Climate projections show that droughts will become more common in much of the U.S., especially the southwest.”
So, the climate projections that you cite represent “data in the real world” and are highly reliable, but the agriculture-related ones that I cite represent data in a fantasy world (?) and are “highly speculative” and probably wrong (?). This suggests that the climate scientists are right on target, but scientists in other fields like agriculture — who take climate science VERY seriously when doing their analyses, since climate is so crucially relevant — are bumbling idiots.
N: “In other parts of the world, drought and water shortages are expected to affect the production of rice, which is a staple food for more than half of the people on Earth. During severe drought years, rainfed rice yields have decreased 17 to 40 percent.”
Surprise surprise! Stand idly by while native rice is starved of the one thing it needs in massive amounts — systematically FAILING to intervene in any way to compensate — and… yields are cut dramatically!
OK, end of sarcasm. Yes, of course climate problems are going to have negative effects. You seem to have missed the point. The point is that it is a complex situation, “not unopposed” was my phrase. The “opposition” comes in multiple forms, some passive/atmospheric (effects of CO2, moisture and warmth, for example), and some active/noospheric (products of human intelligence and communication). Humans are clever, which is why corn production for example has quintupled over a few decades. Humans come up with novel ways to adapt to conditions. They come up with rice strains that require less water. They come up with soil amendments that render rice less susceptible to drought stress. They come up with novel ways to irrigate so that “rainfed rice” is no longer so dependent on rain. And so on. Before you know it, rice yields that would have “decreased 17-40%” become stable, or perhaps lose a few percent, or perhaps GAIN a few percent.
N: “Your second study is also highly speculative as its projected “positive” effects of climate change on food production depends on quote: ‘substantial shifts in the global and local patterns of production.’ That would require the global economic system to change radically”
Why would it require that? I mean, I would hope you were right, but I don’t see how you are, necessarily. Just like humans, capitalism is highly adept at surviving under changing circumstances, and may just wriggle through the upcoming bottleneck. I give it credit for that, even though not my preferred outcome.
Rather than being destroyed by the climate crisis, capitalism might choreograph its survival by way of manipulating individual and institutional responses to it; see Cory Morningstar’s, and other’s, writings here: http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org (The neo-Malthusians will do their part, shifting the blame away from capitalism and portraying our fate as sealed and inevitable… because overpopulation and overshoot, doncha know.)
Anyway, you miss the point of that second citation, which was to introduce you to the broad context of the (agriculture and climate) discussion, as given in the introduction section which I bade you to read. I still recommend it. It is not complete, but it is a nice start. It begins with this sentence: “Environmental change will influence future agricultural productivity”, and then describes in a few paragraphs what is known about this subject, to the extent that anything can be known about it. Please read it.
And now, the doomer gish-gallop:
N: “take the global massive insect (especially pollinators) decline”
A very worrisome development, no question.
N: “soil erosion (and soil degradation)”
Not difficult to correct. Mostly a matter of us ceasing to behave like a bunch of morons. (That’s putting a big subject into a small nutshell.)
N: “biodiversity loss”
Difficult to correct, but then we’re just getting started. It was not even a concept widely known and accepted, outside of the ecological sphere, up until a couple decades ago. Further, as we progress in understanding and action (assuming that we do so), there could be happy surprises such as that restoration of biodiversity causes recrudescence of those lost insect populations.
N: “ever more meat and dairy consumption”
There’s various angles to this. Artificial meats are coming on strong (see: impossible burger for example) and are not far away from being price-competitive with the real thing; 3-5 years maybe. Then of course there can be public health-related initiatives to encourage reduced meat consumption, as they are doing in China. Meat is one thing, dairy very different. Dairy is not so much of a problem.
N: “your “positive” effects on global food production sounds almost like that all too well known “co2 is good for plants” meme, it sounds exactly like what has been claimed for more than a century”
Yes, claimed for more than a century *correctly*, if we can insert “an essential nutrient for” in place of “good for”. (“Good for” is contingent; “essential nutrient” is not.) This is well-established fact, not arguable. Whether or not a bunch of climate denialist nincompoops have glommed-on to the point is irrelevant to whether or not it is scientific truth. It is.
N: “beginning with Svante Arrhenius, quote: ‘We may find a kind of consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil. By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present…'”
Very nice quote, thanks. A “kind of consolation”, yes. And the earth has indeed “brought forth more abundant crops”; this is evident in NASA satellite data and by other means. On the other hand, “equable and better climates” is, well… off the beam, to say the least. Let’s give Arrhenius 1.2 cheers (out of 3).
N: “Good mixed with evil resp positive and negatve effects (as you claim)?”
How did this become MY claim? It is the “claim” of scientists who spend their lives studying and modeling these things — just like it is the “claim” of scientists who spend their lives studying climate that we are in deep climate trouble. I listen, and give thoughtful credence, to the words of scientists. Their words may not be the last words, but they are easily the FIRST words, to which we should all pay careful attention.
N: “Oh well, very cool, so let’s put even more co2 into the system”
mike @66,
Do I agree? I think the 80% reduction is a little old-hat these days. I would advocate planning for a 100% reduction as quickly as possible, then try to do it quicker.
And I would also suggest that the I-Spy book of Climate Monsters has a few more pages than suggested by your list @66.
Kevin McKinney @63,
Thank you for the LH/RH correction. Mind it would be LH if you held the graph upside-down, but then it would read HꞀ and I’m not sure what to make of that. So I’ve changed it to RH.
Over the period 2010-18, the wiggles in the rate of CO2 increase do show an increasing amplitude and an upward trend. The 2010-18 period is that of the daily global CO2 data from NOAA. Using monthly global data which goes back to 1982, the period 1997-2009 show roughly a decreasing amplitude and a bit of a downward trend. So I wouldn’t read too much into the last decade’s data.
As for where it’s going next; I think we will need a lot more polish for the crystal ball to know that. There is today a significant difference between the MLO & globally wobbles. There was something not unsimilar after the 1998 El Niño with the MLO increases running significantly below the global for a period and then significantly above for a period before snapping back into sync for a wobble or two. But is that something we should expect after the 2016 El Niño?
nigeljsays
Regarding the finnish research that claims climate change is mostly because of fewer low level clouds to reflect heat, caused by a decrease in cosmic rays. The trouble is over the warming period 1980 – 2018 cosmic rays have been increasing slightly as below, so its a bit hard to see how they are the cause of decreasing low cloud cover! I’m just a layperson, so how can this finnish study get past peer review?
So we both are doomers, you’re an optimistic doomer, while I’m a pessimistic doomer as you say. Wth is an “optimistic” doomer? Sure, there are two sides of every coin, I’m an optimistic doomer in that sense as well, as I see Death, even extinction as an intergral part of life and evolution. There is no ultimate failure, evolution is much more like a game than like a business, evolution can only happen when there is failure, death and destruction. I’m an optimistic doomer in that sense. You bet on science and technology to get us out of the shit, BUT, and here comes the ever and always crucial point:
Whatever genious technical solution you might have (and there are gazillion beautiful things one could do), it is worth nothing in a corrupt political system. Capitalism is most vulnerable to corruption, it follows it’s own goals that got nothing to do with “saving the planet” and flowery goals like that, it’s all about cold, cold MONEY -> power. There are lots and lots of solutions for centuries, but they just can’t overcome the corrupt political/economic system. The real problem is not a technical problem, but corruption is the real problem. All technological discussions are futile in a corrupt system. Science and technology can never fix a corrupt system, that’s Nemesis.
We have an ethical, a deeply spiritual problem here, not a technical one. That’s exactly the reason why I don’t bet on ANY technofix at all.
MAR @60 while I dislike exaggeration and hysterics over climate issues including CO2, the following is rather concerning. It may at least partly explain the high recent CO2 numbers.
“Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release”
Alan2102 @68, I agree the effects of climate change on agriculture are complicated, with both plusses and minuses, but the minuses look like they win out:
Even if there is some small advantage overall in a warmer climate, its in no way a justification for burning fossil fuels and you point out the world could feed 10 billion people if it has to. Genetic engineered food looks like its now proven to be safe and has plenty of potential.
Personally I think we would be well advised to get population down to well under 7 billion. An awful lot of problems get reduced that way without having to agonise over the exact structure of the socio economic system.
William B Jacksonsays
KIA posted an item garnered from Zero Hedge, I found it interesting to note that media bias fact check has this to say about that site “Overall, we rate Zero Hedge an extreme right biased conspiracy website”! So there it is….
nigelj @70,
The arXiv archive used to publish Kauppinen & Malmi (2019) does not subject papers to peer review. The “moderation” they do carry out is presumably very cursory given the volume of material being submitted to the archive which these days is running at over 136,000 papers a year.
New evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as
galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth’s climate by increasing cloud
cover, causing an “umbrella effect.”
When galactic cosmic rays increased during the Earth’s last
geomagnetic reversal transition 780,000 years ago, the umbrella
effect of low-cloud cover led to high atmospheric pressure in
Siberia, causing the East Asian winter monsoon to become stronger.
This is evidence that galactic cosmic rays influence changes in the
Earth’s climate. The findings were made by a research team led by
Professor Masayuki Hyodo (Research Center for Inland Seas, Kobe
University) and published on June 28 in the online edition of
Scientific Reports.
The Svensmark Effect is a hypothesis that galactic cosmic rays induce
low cloud formation and influence the Earth’s climate. Tests based on
recent meteorological observation data only show minute changes in
the amounts of galactic cosmic rays and cloud cover, making it hard
to prove this theory. However, during the last geomagnetic reversal
transition, when the amount of galactic cosmic rays increased
dramatically, there was also a large increase in cloud cover, so it
should be possible to detect the impact of cosmic rays on climate at
a higher sensitivity.
I’m thinking that Real Climate would be benefitted by a prominent and permanent link on the side to videos and perhaps real-time streaming. A large % of people are persuaded by visualizations, rather than just the usual static black on white verbiage.
O.says
What’s roughly the amount of scientific papers that has been published per year over the last decades?
How much of them seem to be (or are) contradictional?
In videos or articles the climate-problem-deniers often refer to contradictionary statements of different researchers/papers.
For example statements on the one hand were more snow, vs. less snow on the other hand. And for other effects the same thing of contradictional statements.
I would assume that there is misinterpretation of the papers, but it could also be the case, that in the research there really were such contradictional statements. (Climate Winter vs. Climate Heating up?)
Are there meta-studies that clarify this situation?
Or articles here or elsewhere that look at that topic in detail?
By a blog article I found a climate research-article thatstatet the influence of the sun, and that former climate changes have been quite fast, and that IPCC-research uses tree-data, which is not giving data for the winters, while stalagmites would give better data.
The same researcher, many years later, said: it’s clear that man-made CO2 is heating up the atmosphere.
So, I’m irritated about this… looks contradictional to me.
Same reaearcher, and two claims, which seem not fit togehter.
(I sent mail to the researcher today and wait for answer.)
The “it was the sun”-article was reason enough for the blogger who linked to that article, to state, that the climate-problem is just fake.
This also would fit into the contradictional statements issue mentioned above – but by just one researcher.
It looks like (some) scientists offer a lot of possibilities to erode their (and their colleagues) work.
Some research may even be junk, and be cherry picked by lobbyists and ideologists.
Some misunderstandings may come from journalists misinterpreting things.
And maybe the attempt from reasearchers to use “easy language” is rather a drawback, than an advantage?!
O.says
… of course I meant the number of papers per year,regarding climate science.
Nemesissays
Just a reminder:
If you don’t change yourself, you change nothing at all.
Mr. Know It Allsays
75 – William B Jackson
Zerohedge did not do the science in the article I posted in #55 above – they just reported on it. Same science was written about in post 77 above by Hank Roberts. His link if you prefer: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190703121407.htm
Only difference is Zerohedge included more “inconvenient” quotes from the scientist reports. I did not read the “actual” science reports so can’t say who reported most accurately. Feel free to do a little research on that.
Great comments on Zerohedge if you click Viewing Options and sort by “best”. I liked this one:
“That carbon credits exist & can be sold proves this is about $$$$$……as always.”
“But what if much of what we have been told to believe is not actually true? What if scientists do not overwhelmingly agree that humans have dominated (with ~110% attribution) weather and climate changes since about 1950, which is what we have been told by the UN IPCC? What if scientists do not overwhelmingly agree that natural factors exert effectively no influence on weather and climate changes anymore — now that humans have taken over?
These are compelling questions. Because in 2016 alone, 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers published in scholarly journals seriously question just how settled the “consensus” science really is that says anthropogenic or CO2 forcing now dominates weather and climate changes, and non-anthropogenic (natural) factors no longer exert much, if any, role.”
While the size of two lists of papers could well be questioned by AGW scientists/denialists, as presented the size of the two lists (13,800 & 501) yields a ratio of 100 to 3.6. This pretty-much adds further support to the 97% consensus result found by Cook et al (2013), a result which denialists find so impossible to accept.
..
As for an individual author seemingly contradicting themselves, this may not be as obvious as at first sight and would need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.
b fagansays
MA Rodger @44 – thanks for the links. It wasn’t until after I’d posted my question that I noticed GISS was already using the paired data sets NOAA has now updated to.
Note that the comparison page does show that 1998 is now warmer than 2009 in the official NOAAGlobalTemp-v5 accounting. But yes, swapping positions of the 9th and 10th warmest doesn’t change the fact that all the top ten are in the most recent 20 years of a 138-year-old dataset.
That Kauppinen/Malmi thing looked to me like a sour-grapes document because one of the authors wasn’t agreed with when he was a reviewer for an IPCC report. That they use the IPCC summary document chart without even referencing the relevant report chapters and underlying source papers looks like they aren’t trying too hard for academic rigor. That they claim CO2 emissions aren’t due to our fossil fuel habit ignores accounting, production records, chemistry, changes in isotopic ratios and all sorts of other reality. Their cloud cover doesn’t do away with the trapped energy from the increased greenhouse gases, either. And it sounds a bit like Lindzen’s iris theory – a miracle meaning we don’t have to limit emissions, that only makes sense if you ignore the fact that prior greenhouse elevations blew past temperatures these theories say we don’t have to worry about.
Just an opinion and I haven’t submitted it for peer review.
Al Bundysays
WBJ: “Overall, we rate Zero Hedge an extreme right biased conspiracy website”!
AB: Which makes it only slightly too liberal for KillingInaction. Hey, he’s being way open-minded…
Killiansays
Re #68 alan2102 said #49 Nemesis 11 Jul 2019
N: “Mother Earth can easily feed 10–12 billion people”
I’m pleased to learn that you are not a Malthusian
Why is it so hard to understand the simple point underlying Malthus’ work? To say someone is Malthusian or non-Malthusian is nonsensical. It is a literally meaningless way to speak of limits because it takes math and science and turns it into belief. It’s even more egregious given he was absolutely correct: The planet has limits, population has limits. This is a certain as the sun being a star. Was his timing off? Certainly. How could he anticipate the effects of the oil binge? To hold the future against someone is lazy thinking.
Worse, 12M is a limit. It fits perfectly into Malthus’ work. His concept was completely correct. To say someone is non-Malthusian because their limit is higher than Malthus’ from so long ago, and pre-The Great Soil Devastation aka Green Revolution, begs the question, do you understand logic?
N: “but she can’t feed the greed of the few. It all depends on the economic system, just let capitalism walk on and you will see billions die very soon.”
I fear that you are correct, and I salute you for properly situating the blame. This probable dieoff will be caused by human choices and human systems, not by inexorable “overshoot” or “overpopulation”
I agree with you both, but I have to address the illogical here. Overshoot and overpopulation are both human choices. They are inseparable from all the other choices we have made that got us here. It is a prima facie argument that more people means more consumption regardless of the number of people or the level of consumption. Whatever the minimum possible per capita consumption is, add another person, consumption rises.
Certainly we can choose to reduce per capita consumption, but only above whatever minimum is. More people is a problem. Too high consumption is a problem. Both are choices of humanity, not conditions external to us. Are you claiming the orangutans are responisble, for goodness’ sakes? Of course not.
Carrying capacity has been increased dramatically, and still more-dramatic increases are yet to come just with technologies already on the shelf
No. Carrying capacity of the planet has never been lower during the time of Homo ~~. Three million years of hominids that became us and we have reduced the ecosystem to an unmitigated disaster wherein even if all negative activities were stopped today, we would see the ecosystem continue to decline for hundreds of years or longer unless we actively intervene to reverse conditions. Even still, some, like SLR, will go on for centuries almost certainly.
All of this is due to technology and complexity.
Humans are clever, which is why corn production for example has quintupled over a few decades.
Destroying the source of nutrition, soils, globally is clever? How?
Humans come up with novel ways to adapt to conditions. They come up with rice strains that require less water. They come up with soil amendments that render rice less susceptible to drought stress. They come up with novel ways to irrigate so that “rainfed rice” is no longer so dependent on rain. And so on. Before you know it, rice yields that would have “decreased 17-40%” become stable, or perhaps lose a few percent, or perhaps GAIN a few percent.
Is this a wise bet? No. Nobody would take that chance if it were bullets in a gun set against their head, or even if the chance of dying in a car crash. Every indication now is yields are, and will continue to be, falling. You seem to blithely dismiss rates of change, lack of globally consistent systems, etc. Betting that the non-existent will save you is, frankly, beyond delusional, it’s nuts. This is not a case where the problem and the solution are theoretical. The problem is established and well-understood. The solutions exist on the simple end of the spectrum. To risk the planet’s biologics on non-existent options when full system solutions already exist that are virtually zero risk is just not sane. It’s playing Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun vs an unloaded gun.
N: “Your second study is also highly speculative as its projected “positive” effects of climate change on food production depends on quote: ‘substantial shifts in the global and local patterns of production.’ That would require the global economic system to change radically”
Why would it require that? I mean, I would hope you were right, but I don’t see how you are, necessarily. Just like humans, capitalism is highly adept at surviving under changing circumstances
Capitalism has never changed other than qho gets to be an owner. You don’t understand the word, it seems. Capitalism means one and only one thing: That private ownership is the basis of the means of production.
You are conflating Capitalism and economics/markets.
Rather than being destroyed by the climate crisis, capitalism might choreograph its survival by way of manipulating individual and institutional responses to it
Because magic? What, pray tell, is going to bring about this Utopia where the rich share their wealth?
The neo-Malthusians will do their part, shifting the blame away from capitalism and portraying our fate as sealed and inevitable… because overpopulation and overshoot, doncha know
That you think these things are seprarable is mind-blowing. How are they? You want Capitalism which means you want profit which means you want growth. Under what conditions do you have Capitalism and markets and equality, and especially have either without increasing consumption over time?
N: “take the global massive insect (especially pollinators) decline”
A very worrisome development, no question.
N: “soil erosion (and soil degradation)”
Not difficult to correct. Mostly a matter of us ceasing to behave like a bunch of morons. (That’s putting a big subject into a small nutshell.)
You want Capitalism and markets but also renewed soils? Good luck with that… As likely as the sun becoming a moon tomorrow. The principles underlying these things are not compatible. Capitalism and markets do not value resources. To the extent there is discussion of things like Donut/Steady-State economies, there is some awareness, but the *fact* that any form of ownership leads to the pursuit of profit/greater return than invested means you have exactly two essential choices: Growth, or inequality. If the resource base it held steady, wealth will accumulate to those who already have it, impoverishing others as the pie is moved from one to the other. If growth is allowed, bye-bye environment.
N: “biodiversity loss”
Difficult to correct… there could be happy surprises such as that restoration of biodiversity causes recrudescence of those lost insect populations.
More magical/wishful/extremely risky thinking.
Artificial meats are coming on strong
This is about as sustainable as a sane conversation about sustainability on this site.
N: “your “positive” effects on global food production…
Yes, claimed for more than a century *correctly*, if we can insert “an essential nutrient for” in place of “good for”. (“Good for” is contingent; “essential nutrient” is not.) This is well-established fact, not arguable.
What is? Increasing heat and CO2 is good for food supply? Is that the claim? If so, wrong.
If you mean something else, I have no idea what you think it is.
And the earth has indeed “brought forth more abundant crops”; this is evident in NASA satellite data and by other means.
Those are not crops. C’mon…
Killiansays
Re #73 nigelj said MAR @60 while I dislike exaggeration and hysterics over climate issues including CO2, the following is rather concerning. It may at least partly explain the high recent CO2 numbers.
“Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release”
GISTEMP has posted the global anomaly for June at +0.93ºC, a little up on May’s +0.86ºC anomaly.
It is the warmest June in the GISTEMP record, well ahead of 2016 (+0.82ºC), 2015 (+0.81ºC), 2018 (+0.78ºC), 1998 (+0.76ºC) and in 6th place 2017 (+0.72ºC).
June 2019 sits at =21st warmest month in the GISTEMP all-month record.
With half the year behind us, 2019 is the 3rd warmest start-to-the-year on record and would require a bit of a drop over the remainder of the year to miss out on claiming 2nd place for the full calendar year. Mind, the IRI ENSO Forecast for July is showing a lower liklihood that mild El Niño conditions will persist for the remainder of the year, although there is a bit of a lag between El Niño conditions and their impact on global temperature.
Up-thread @5 linked to a ECMWF Climate Change Service post suggesting a dramatic record June global anomaly +0.11ºC above the previous record for June. This has been exactly fulfilled with this GISTEMP anomaly but probably won’t be for NOAA or HadCRUT which would require bigger jumps from the May anomaly to achieve even a clear record. Thus GISTEMP shows a +0.07ºC anomaly increase May-June, yet such a May-June increase in NOAA would only give an =1st place for June and in HadCRUT would only give a 3rd placed June. (It was HadCRUT4 that ECMWP cited in their post. The data plotted by them was their ERA5 reanalysis data stitched onto HadCRUT data for earlier pre-1979 years. ERA5 does hold variations not seen in actual surface measurement records.)
Nemesissays
@O., #79
” So, I’m irritated about this… looks contradictional to me.”
Yes, yes, climate science is not easy to grasp at times, it’s not easy to look through all the made up smoke and mirrors of the fossil fool industry, I recommend to go here for a start:
Don’t hurry, take your time, spend some adequate time to study the history of climate science, especially the history of denial of the oil industry, very enlightening:
The study is based on 222,060 papers (articles and reviews only) published between 1980 and 2014. The total number of papers shows a strong increase with a doubling every 5–6 years.
How much of them seem to be (or are) contradictional?
In videos or articles the climate-problem-deniers often refer to contradictionary statements of different researchers/papers.
Perhaps not quite the answer you are looking for, but…
400 Scientific Papers Published In 2017 Support A Skeptical Position On Climate Alarm
ozajhsays
MAR @64 (+ earlier references),
“is indeed doing t(h)e rounds”
That was the LEAD story on an Sky News commentary segment here in Australia over the weekend.
(Sky News is from the same corporate stable as Fox News in the US. The weakest {by far} of the three major free-to-air networks added it to their set of stations last year. They show a lot of Sports results summaries over weekends, so they might get some crossover to their “news” from that.)
mikesays
Hottest June in the record books and we are not in a strong warm part of ENSO cycle and July shaping up to be hottest July on record according to WAPO. Thanks to S Rahmstorf for tweeting the news.
CO2? How are we doing?
June CO2
June 2019: 413.92 ppm
June 2018: 410.79 ppm
over 3ppm increase in yoy. Could be worse. MAR and others say this is almost exclusively driven by our emissions, that positive feedbacks are not contributing in a significant way at this time. I hope that’s an accurate representation of MAR’s position.
I think there are signs that many positive feedbacks are starting to wake up. Thawing permafrost, increased forest fire activities, rising emissions from warmed wetlands, etc. Are they contributing measurably to the higher rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere? I think yes, but I could be wrong. We might be in big trouble by the time that we are certain the positive feedbacks have turned on in a significant way. Precautionary principle? I think only a very foolish person would declare no concern about that matter.
The current question evolves around rates of change and paleo comparisons, maximum rates of climate change are systematically underestimated in the geological record https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9890
b fagansays
Fred Magyar @90. I hit your watts link then the 2016 list of “skeptical” papers. was interested in Part 2 mention of I. “Mid-Holocene Sea Levels Meters Higher”
“Holocene Sea Levels Meters Higher When CO2 Levels Much Lower” (Tricks’ description)
then: “Haghani et al., 2016 Caspian Sea (CS) water level has fluctuated repeatedly with an amplitude of larger than 25m during the Holocene without any link with the eustatic sea level.”
The TricksZone counts on readers being ignorant of the fact that the Caspian Sea is landlocked and completely unconnected to global (eustatic) sea levels. So they reference work that has nothing to do with global sea levels, but encourage unskeptical readers to think otherwise.
The first two references in ManyTricks Part 2 are like that, too (Donchyts et al., 2016 and a BBC press release/article). I don’t have access to the Nature paper, but the BBC press release accurately describes the paper as documenting changes in global area covered or not covered by water – not shifts in sea level.
The BBC piece notes specifically that the biggest growth of dry land area was the drying Aral Sea (landlocked, too) and the biggest increase in surface water is lakes growing in Tibet — from melting ice in the mountains. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37187100
The Idso family enterprise had started this “list we misinterpret for you” approach some time ago. At least the NoTricksZone warns people by the very name of the site that they’re going to lie to you – like salesman who say “believe me”.
It’s not worth trying to debunk all the misdirection or the bad papers they also list (deliverables?), and the people who follow those sites lack the skepticism to carefully read what’s put in front of them. So papers that support the reality of climate change? Not a problem! Just post a quote or two, reinterpret it, then let the readers convince themselves.
b fagan @95,
Given the gross stupidity and/or insincerity of denialist commentators, why should we be surprised that the NoTricksZone listing of papers that “seriously question just how settled the “consensus” science really is” is full of fake entries.
Having linked to the 2016 NoTricksZone serving of such papers up-thread @83, I did have a quick look at some of the papers presented as showing a lack of concensus.
Rather than start at the top, I looked at the bottom four in the third list (4 papers that papers that say “We don’t know” according to NoTricksZone) and not one of them should be in a listing of denialist literature. ☻ The bottom one is from the Hadley Centre so an unlikely candidate. Quoted as saying stuff “cannot be directly assessed from observations,” it thus examines ‘indirect’ methods. ☻ The next up concerns mechanisms of stratospheric cooling and does not in any way question the consensus. ☻ And the next up ditto, but is looking at the attribution of North Sea weather processes. ☻ And fourth up is quoted saying the influence of solar flux variability on the climate system remains an open scientific question” but again this is about stratospheric cooling and not a contradiction of AGW.
While there are papers published from obvious denialists who include a rant about the IPCC being wrong because AGW isn’t actually a problem, there is perhaps a big grey area with papers that don’t have a rant. Imagine I carried out an analysis that found that half the warming since 1970 was due to a big fat natural climate wobble. Presumably publishing such a finding would be contrary to the consensus. But what if the finding was a wobble providing a quarter or a tenth of the warming? A paper setting out that things aren’t quite as bad as we expected doesn’t contradict the consensus. So how big an effect would be considered consensus-breaking?
Of course, the denialists don’t go in for nuanced argument. Denialist analyses usually concern massive effects which are thus sure to bring the AGW consensus tumbling down.
But this need for dramatic findings is another flaw in the NoTricksZone list. How many of these denialistical papers contradict each other. It almost certainly has denialist papers saying it is the sun or the planets or the clouds or the Earth’s magnetic field or the length of day or under-sea volcanism or the AMO or PDO or AMOC or some other unspecified natural wobbly effect or Uncle Tom Cobbly and all.
But it isn’t ‘and all’!!
So which is it? And when you decide which it is, how many of these denialist papers can remain in the list? I would suggest it becomes lean pickings.
mikesays
clarify a bit at 92: MAR and others say this is almost exclusively driven by our emissions AND WARM ENSO CONDITIONS, that positive feedbacks are not contributing in a significant way at this time. I hope that’s an accurate representation of MAR’s position.
Killiansays
This new paper on clathrates seems to be *the* authorative work wrt describing formation, extent, behavior.
As far as I can tell from a quick perusal, it is not a paper focusing on outcomes or predictions, but still has some alarming info.
Glaciologist Mauri Pelto has followed several glaciers in the Cascade Range in Washington State for 35 years. He’s learned a lot about the future. Illustration by Jill Pelto
A Visit with the Glacier Squad
For 35 years, a scientist and his team have been taking the pulse of 10 coastal glaciers. The diagnosis is in.
O.says
@Nemesis, #89: thanks for the links.
I got answer from the researcher with the solar driven climate paragraph.
The answer was not very detailed, but I got some links to official climate research blogs and that it was.
So I assume that, what I thought was a contradiction, possibly was misinterpretation, and maybe it must be seen in the wider context. But this again is just an interpretation from a laymans view.
I asked on further explanation, citing the text, but got no answer so far.
I think, it would make sense to the research field, that the researchers could invest a littlebid more of their time explaining some possible misunderstandings, especially when it’s obvious, that the questions are coming from interested people, far from being denialists.
But I just can ask or hope for it. If they are not interested giving more time to the answers, it’s their choice.
It would be completely ok for me to hear, that in the wider context it is not a contradiction, but that would need explanation.
And it also would be ok that a researcher itself would have changed their mind under the impression of other researchers new findings.
But not explaining the seemingly contradiction and just sending some links could raise the suspicion, that former critical researchers switched to the mainstream field, because they could profit from this more (the denialists “they talk mainstream because the next money for more research will be possible then”).
Thats a very common suspicion, and it would make sense to me, that researchers would explain a bit more, if to the laymens world it looks like they changed their mind out of nothing.
O.says
@Fred Magyar, #90: thanks for the links.
222,060 papers ooops. And then the notrickszone-link with 400 papers… hmhhh.
The notricks-links I found in some denialist articles (from people who claim to be social scientists, but their page is rather polemically/ideological than science driven; they use scientific arguments, if they serve them well, and chose polemics, if science arguments would contradict their goals). With these papers linked, they claimed the big climate fake.
The problem is, that climate layman (at least those without some background in physics) are easily trapped by such articles.
I’m also no climate researcher, but have some background knowledge of natural sciences/physics, so I could at least in principle find out the wrong assumptions. But it’s very time consuming. I already found wrong claims and sent links to people I know. But the propaganda seems to work stronger than arguments.
At some point it does not make sense to further invest time into providing arguments to people, if these people just don’t listen.
Maybe that people don’t listen, is rather a psychological problem, not one of missing information.
Footnote to 48 and the axing of the red team:
John Christy and Judith Curry were to be among them. Both have been quite debunked over the years within the peer reviewed scientific community. The idea that they should be part of a climate science assessment was pretty ludicrous. And what, no Pat Michaels? ;-)
Nemesis @36, I’m saying this because there are some big misunderstandings going on that fill up a lot of space. I’m not blaming anyone for this. Killian isn’t promoting some capitalist funded tree planting programme. He is promoting a completely new non capitalist sharing economic system, that plants trees because it helps the earth.
Make of this what you will, but it would appear to be close to your world view.I think civilisation will chart more of a middle course, but only time will tell, and we definitely need more goals than just the profit motive.
Killian: You’ve no right to try to drag others into your maladaptive life choices.
AB: Actually, it appears that Nemesis has made rather adaptive life choices. He’s vegan, he’s super-fit, he hasn’t reproduced, and he doesn’t worry himself to death but gets some popcorn and enjoys the show. He’s a friggin’ role model, dude.
Please compare and contrast your life choices. Hopefully you’re doing almost as well as he is doing for the planet. For example, did you take a car, train, boat, or a plane to get where you are? Your diet as low impact as his? Do you live, like Nemesis appears to, by “What would Greta do?”
(hopefully this is a softball question…)
————
Alan0202: “overshoot! global famine! billions must die!” hysteria
AB: You left off the second half of the sentiment: “so that my meat and my stuff aren’t affected; and after I’m dead, who cares? I’ll have died with the most toys and winning is the only thing that matters.”
So yes, billions MUST die
It’s all hooey according to scientists in Japan and Finland:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-11/scientists-finland-japan-man-made-climate-change-doesnt-exist-practice
:)
52:
Pat michaels ? By far the most interesting Red Team wannabe is long time Heartland Institute Science Director Jay Lehr PhD.
On the 25th he’ll be at the Trump International Hotel to receive , wait for it:
The Dauntless Purveyor of Climate Truth Award
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2019/07/join-heartland-lonely-hearts-club-atthe.html
Be aware that this is going to make the rounds:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-11/scientists-finland-japan-man-made-climate-change-doesnt-exist-practice
@Killian, #40
” Yet, when we use bio-mimicry to engineer ecosystems, even those made to look and act like naturally occurring systems, we create them to enhance and speed up natural processes.”
Sure, enhancement and speeding up natural processes aka geoengineering/terraforming is a wonderful thing, a godlike thing, like Svante Arrhenius “Worlds in the making”, like speeding up co2 and climate, just like the wonderful bible says:
” Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.“
Yes, you enlightened my soul now, no, I don’t want to be suicidal, I don’t want to walk that lonesome road of a death cult, I believe in biotechnology, terraforming and human (monkey?) godlike enhancement of Nature, we are in the drivers seat of planet earth now, we got the vision, we got the power to enhance Nature like never before during 4.3 billion years of earth’s history as we clearly see all around us. I say, I pray:
Plant these trees by the billions, enhance and speed up the cooking pot of Nature!
Sela.
@mike, #38
” Can/should we move the plant tree discussion to FR?”
There is no FR for the month of Juli so far.
@alan2102, #28
” PS: this just in:
https://www.businessinsider.co.za/this-south-african-made-drone-can-help-re-plant-100-million-trees-a-year-from-2023-2019-6
This South African invention allows drones to plant hundreds of trees in minutes
Jul 02, 2019
“- A new device, built in South Africa, allows drones to fire seeds into the ground.
– Two seeds per second are fired at velocities of between 150 to 300 metres per second.
– Its inventors hope that drones can be used to plant a million trees a year.
snip
The module…can attach to the bottom of popular drone models. Louw and Walker estimate that a team of two, flying 2 drones, can plant up to 40,000 seeds into into the ground in a day.” ”
Wow, incredible, I love these clever business insiderz. Btw, have you seen this already?
” South Africa : Cities without water”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DyH3R3nA8w
Do you know how much water a single tree needs to grow up and stay alive? Ah, these business insiderz already know exactly where all that water will come from:
” A pirate-fighting sailor wants to lasso and tow a 125-million-ton iceberg from Antarctica to solve South Africa’s water crisis”
https://www.businessinsider.de/south-africa-water-crisis-antarctica-iceberg-towing-2019-6?r=US&IR=T
Excellent, outright visionary. I’d really like to get some of the shit they are smoking.
@nigelj, #53
” Nemesis @36, I’m saying this because there are some big misunderstandings going on that fill up a lot of space. I’m not blaming anyone for this. Killian isn’t promoting some capitalist funded tree planting programme. He is promoting a completely new non capitalist sharing economic system, that plants trees because it helps the earth.
Make of this what you will, but it would appear to be close to your world view.I think civilisation will chart more of a middle course, but only time will tell, and we definitely need more goals than just the profit motive.”
Ok, non capitalist sharing economy, I’d love to see that happen… But where is it? I don’t see it and I won’t see it in my lifetime I bet. Let’s ask the Wall Street, the Deutsche Bank, Exxon, Trump, the military-industrial complex et al, let’s ask the powers that be, the rich and super rich what they think about a non capitalist sharing economy :))
Yes, we need more goals than just the profit motive and we will envisage these goals as soon as the capitalist system collapsed, when we will find ourselves as monkeys fighting over food and water out there in the cooking pot of Nature just like any other animals.
mike @51,
If you really want to embroil me in your continuing skyrocketry, do note that the “unprecedented Arctic mega-fires” are reportedly emitting “as much CO2 in just one month as Sweden’s total annual emissions.” So that would add 0.014ppm to atmospheric CO2 levels over six months which I would assume would be the extent of the fire-season in the Arctic.
While every little contribution to such emissions is unhelpful, we do need to address the big contributions and they tend to be down to fossil fuel use. Thus from Scripps Inst we get the quote “Many proposals have been made to mitigate global warming, but without a rapid decrease of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels they are pretty much futile,” Tans (Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division) said.
On this we likely agree.
Where we disagree is the bolt-on skyrocketry which evokes some new natural source for our increasing CO2. When this mindless hypothesising began to infect these UV threads back in early 2018, we saw annual rates of atmospheric CO2 increase dropping to low values (at MLO down to 1.8ppm/yr with a reasonable amount of smoothing) which wasn’t very helpful for the skyrocket thesis although this low level was simply blamed on the mild La Niña.
Today we see the atmospheric CO2 increase far higher but the idea that there is today an El-Niño-impact is refuted, this despite that Scripps Inst reference quoting Ralph Keeling saying “The rate of CO2 increase is still very high,” said Ralph Keeling. “We’re likely seeing the effect of mild El Niño conditions on top of record fossil fuel use.”
If you are properly interested in today’s underlying increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, monthly MLO data is probably not greatly useful as it picks up its own wobbles. This graphic (usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’) shows the wobbles of both MLO and the global CO2 increase and acceleration. I don’t see signs of CO2 skyrocketing in this data. Frankly, I don’t see signs of skyrocketing anywhere.
And I should add that I have no idea what “MSM interest” is meant to mean.
#52, Dan–
“And what, no Pat Michaels? ;-)”
Yeah, surely he’s earned a shot at the varsity? Maybe he hasn’t played all that smart, but he’s sure played hard!
@Al Bundy, #54
Hehe, we know who we are, so let’s share some popcorn with all the monkeys out there, enjoy one of my all time favorites:
” Townes Van Zandt- Dead Flowers – The Big Lebowski”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNlUhW0azKI
Hoka he!
#60, MAR–
I’ve mostly sat out the backs and forths about CO2 rise, though I confess that I do in fact find the rise quite worrisome.
However, I must comment on MAR’s graph. It’s quite remarkable to observe the phasing between rate and acceleration in that plot. Of course, zero crossings on the acceleration plot are by definition constrained to be at positive and negative peaks in the growth plot, but I’m not sure at all that I really understand all the implications of that phase relationship. But its existence is very clear.
(Question: the legend has acceleration labeled “LH scale.” Surely that should read “RH scale”? That’s the one that has ppm/yr/yr!)
What I do think I understand is that there’s an anomaly in the highly “sine-ish” pattern. While both frequency and amplitude have shifted over the several ENSO cycles shown–and with variability increasing in the acceleration plot–the biggest thing to me is that we’re nearly missing the last ‘down’ segment. After the acceleration peak in 2018, you’d expect a sizable decrease in acceleration, but there’s only a very modest one, which doesn’t even cross into negative values. And the growth plot doesn’t even get to a negative slope, merely exhibiting a lower positive slope for a bit.
I wouldn’t say that that’s “skyrocketry,” but it’s also sure not what I want to see on this plot.
Nor, for that matter, is the fact that there’s a clear positive trend superimposed on the sine ‘wiggles’ of the growth plot. It makes me wonder how far back that goes?
pessimist @57,
That particular dollop of denialist nonsense (prompted by a regurgitation of the same old nonsense by the same old denialists – Kauppinen & Malmi (2019) ‘No Experimental Evidence for the Significnt Anthropogenic Climate Change’ See up-thread @16, @21, @24 & @25.) is indeed doing te rounds. I note the ironically-named Mr Know It All @55 also links to the same OP.
The OP you link-to adds to the Kauppinen & Malmi nonsense a reference to Ueno et al (2019) ‘Intensified East Asian winter monsoon during the last geomagnetic reversal transition’ as though this paleoclimate study of MIS-19 (800,000 years ago) somehow ‘collaborates’ the Kauppinen & Malmi nonsense. Certainly, one of the co-authors of Ueno et al (Hyodo) is happy to wave the denialist message, although his understanding of MIS-19 appears to have been greatly improved since Hyodo et al (2017) ‘Millennial-scale northern Hemisphere Atlantic-Pacific climate teleconnections in the earliest Middle Pleistocene’ when significant doubt was rightly being expressed over the causes of MIS-19 climatic features.
Dan, currently #52, and others express amazement at “no Pat Michaels” on the planned and recently unplanned Red Team.
That is as nothing next to my amazement at no Fred Singer.
Hey MAR – I think you are correct and I largely agree with you and Tans that the 10 GtC is the lion’s share of the CO2 accumulation problem because our actual carbon budget for stability is 2 GtC. Methane clathrates, catastrophic changes in the natural CO2 carbon cycle, widespread and rapid permafrost thaw – these things are the monster in the closet or under the bed, the things that go bump in the night. These things are quite scary and it’s a problem that we can’t simply shine a light somewhere and determine that we should not be scared by these possibilities. These problems/monsters are actually in the closet and under the bed. We would do well to keep them in those spots and our best shot at that requires that we cut emissions by about 80% as quickly as possible because once these monsters wake up, we could be in big trouble. Do you agree?
MSM is mainstream media. Cheers, buddy,
Mike
Simultaneous production of fresh water and electricity via multistage solar photovoltaic membrane distillation
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10817-6
This belongs on the FR thread for July, but it doesn’t exist yet, so…
Kind of encouraging news.
Mike
#49 Nemesis 11 Jul 2019
N: “Mother Earth can easily feed 10–12 billion people”
I’m pleased to learn that you are not a Malthusian, even though you are a doomer. That’s unusual. It is rare to meet one who is not the other. I’m a non-Malthusian doomer myself, albeit not as pessimistic as you.
N: “but she can’t feed the greed of the few. It all depends on the economic system, just let capitalism walk on and you will see billions die very soon.”
I fear that you are correct, and I salute you for properly situating the blame. This probable dieoff will be caused by human choices and human systems, not by inexorable “overshoot” or “overpopulation” or “nature taking its course” in a way that cannot be stopped. It CAN be stopped. It is within our power. Carrying capacity has been increased dramatically, and still more-dramatic increases are yet to come just with technologies already on the shelf, let alone those now percolating in the brains of the humans currently “overpopulating” the earth. We’ll probably blow up the planet, or burn it up, before we can implement all that good stuff, but who knows? Failure is likely but the situation is still plastic, the outcome uncertain. Hence I am a doomer, just not as pessimistic as you.
N: “Your first study about the “positive” effects of climate change on rice production is highly speculative”
Any study doing projections decades out, or for later in this century, is by nature speculative (perhaps “highly”, perhaps not). So what? What’s the alternative?
We should and will continue to make speculative projections about this and other things such as, say, sea level rise by the end of this century — estimates of which, I’m sure you have noticed, vary wildly (rendering at least some of them “HIGHLY speculative”, right?). It is OK. We will do our best. We will make mistakes. We will get better.
N: “data in the real world has a different message: ‘Climate projections show that droughts will become more common in much of the U.S., especially the southwest.”
So, the climate projections that you cite represent “data in the real world” and are highly reliable, but the agriculture-related ones that I cite represent data in a fantasy world (?) and are “highly speculative” and probably wrong (?). This suggests that the climate scientists are right on target, but scientists in other fields like agriculture — who take climate science VERY seriously when doing their analyses, since climate is so crucially relevant — are bumbling idiots.
N: “In other parts of the world, drought and water shortages are expected to affect the production of rice, which is a staple food for more than half of the people on Earth. During severe drought years, rainfed rice yields have decreased 17 to 40 percent.”
Surprise surprise! Stand idly by while native rice is starved of the one thing it needs in massive amounts — systematically FAILING to intervene in any way to compensate — and… yields are cut dramatically!
OK, end of sarcasm. Yes, of course climate problems are going to have negative effects. You seem to have missed the point. The point is that it is a complex situation, “not unopposed” was my phrase. The “opposition” comes in multiple forms, some passive/atmospheric (effects of CO2, moisture and warmth, for example), and some active/noospheric (products of human intelligence and communication). Humans are clever, which is why corn production for example has quintupled over a few decades. Humans come up with novel ways to adapt to conditions. They come up with rice strains that require less water. They come up with soil amendments that render rice less susceptible to drought stress. They come up with novel ways to irrigate so that “rainfed rice” is no longer so dependent on rain. And so on. Before you know it, rice yields that would have “decreased 17-40%” become stable, or perhaps lose a few percent, or perhaps GAIN a few percent.
N: “Your second study is also highly speculative as its projected “positive” effects of climate change on food production depends on quote: ‘substantial shifts in the global and local patterns of production.’ That would require the global economic system to change radically”
Why would it require that? I mean, I would hope you were right, but I don’t see how you are, necessarily. Just like humans, capitalism is highly adept at surviving under changing circumstances, and may just wriggle through the upcoming bottleneck. I give it credit for that, even though not my preferred outcome.
Rather than being destroyed by the climate crisis, capitalism might choreograph its survival by way of manipulating individual and institutional responses to it; see Cory Morningstar’s, and other’s, writings here: http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org (The neo-Malthusians will do their part, shifting the blame away from capitalism and portraying our fate as sealed and inevitable… because overpopulation and overshoot, doncha know.)
Anyway, you miss the point of that second citation, which was to introduce you to the broad context of the (agriculture and climate) discussion, as given in the introduction section which I bade you to read. I still recommend it. It is not complete, but it is a nice start. It begins with this sentence: “Environmental change will influence future agricultural productivity”, and then describes in a few paragraphs what is known about this subject, to the extent that anything can be known about it. Please read it.
And now, the doomer gish-gallop:
N: “take the global massive insect (especially pollinators) decline”
A very worrisome development, no question.
N: “soil erosion (and soil degradation)”
Not difficult to correct. Mostly a matter of us ceasing to behave like a bunch of morons. (That’s putting a big subject into a small nutshell.)
N: “biodiversity loss”
Difficult to correct, but then we’re just getting started. It was not even a concept widely known and accepted, outside of the ecological sphere, up until a couple decades ago. Further, as we progress in understanding and action (assuming that we do so), there could be happy surprises such as that restoration of biodiversity causes recrudescence of those lost insect populations.
N: “ever more meat and dairy consumption”
There’s various angles to this. Artificial meats are coming on strong (see: impossible burger for example) and are not far away from being price-competitive with the real thing; 3-5 years maybe. Then of course there can be public health-related initiatives to encourage reduced meat consumption, as they are doing in China. Meat is one thing, dairy very different. Dairy is not so much of a problem.
N: “your “positive” effects on global food production sounds almost like that all too well known “co2 is good for plants” meme, it sounds exactly like what has been claimed for more than a century”
Yes, claimed for more than a century *correctly*, if we can insert “an essential nutrient for” in place of “good for”. (“Good for” is contingent; “essential nutrient” is not.) This is well-established fact, not arguable. Whether or not a bunch of climate denialist nincompoops have glommed-on to the point is irrelevant to whether or not it is scientific truth. It is.
N: “beginning with Svante Arrhenius, quote: ‘We may find a kind of consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil. By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present…'”
Very nice quote, thanks. A “kind of consolation”, yes. And the earth has indeed “brought forth more abundant crops”; this is evident in NASA satellite data and by other means. On the other hand, “equable and better climates” is, well… off the beam, to say the least. Let’s give Arrhenius 1.2 cheers (out of 3).
N: “Good mixed with evil resp positive and negatve effects (as you claim)?”
How did this become MY claim? It is the “claim” of scientists who spend their lives studying and modeling these things — just like it is the “claim” of scientists who spend their lives studying climate that we are in deep climate trouble. I listen, and give thoughtful credence, to the words of scientists. Their words may not be the last words, but they are easily the FIRST words, to which we should all pay careful attention.
N: “Oh well, very cool, so let’s put even more co2 into the system”
Don’t be silly. No one is suggesting that.
mike @66,
Do I agree? I think the 80% reduction is a little old-hat these days. I would advocate planning for a 100% reduction as quickly as possible, then try to do it quicker.
And I would also suggest that the I-Spy book of Climate Monsters has a few more pages than suggested by your list @66.
Kevin McKinney @63,
Thank you for the LH/RH correction. Mind it would be LH if you held the graph upside-down, but then it would read HꞀ and I’m not sure what to make of that. So I’ve changed it to RH.
Over the period 2010-18, the wiggles in the rate of CO2 increase do show an increasing amplitude and an upward trend. The 2010-18 period is that of the daily global CO2 data from NOAA. Using monthly global data which goes back to 1982, the period 1997-2009 show roughly a decreasing amplitude and a bit of a downward trend. So I wouldn’t read too much into the last decade’s data.
As for where it’s going next; I think we will need a lot more polish for the crystal ball to know that. There is today a significant difference between the MLO & globally wobbles. There was something not unsimilar after the 1998 El Niño with the MLO increases running significantly below the global for a period and then significantly above for a period before snapping back into sync for a wobble or two. But is that something we should expect after the 2016 El Niño?
Regarding the finnish research that claims climate change is mostly because of fewer low level clouds to reflect heat, caused by a decrease in cosmic rays. The trouble is over the warming period 1980 – 2018 cosmic rays have been increasing slightly as below, so its a bit hard to see how they are the cause of decreasing low cloud cover! I’m just a layperson, so how can this finnish study get past peer review?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/galactic-cosmic-rays
@alan, #2102
So we both are doomers, you’re an optimistic doomer, while I’m a pessimistic doomer as you say. Wth is an “optimistic” doomer? Sure, there are two sides of every coin, I’m an optimistic doomer in that sense as well, as I see Death, even extinction as an intergral part of life and evolution. There is no ultimate failure, evolution is much more like a game than like a business, evolution can only happen when there is failure, death and destruction. I’m an optimistic doomer in that sense. You bet on science and technology to get us out of the shit, BUT, and here comes the ever and always crucial point:
Whatever genious technical solution you might have (and there are gazillion beautiful things one could do), it is worth nothing in a corrupt political system. Capitalism is most vulnerable to corruption, it follows it’s own goals that got nothing to do with “saving the planet” and flowery goals like that, it’s all about cold, cold MONEY -> power. There are lots and lots of solutions for centuries, but they just can’t overcome the corrupt political/economic system. The real problem is not a technical problem, but corruption is the real problem. All technological discussions are futile in a corrupt system. Science and technology can never fix a corrupt system, that’s Nemesis.
We have an ethical, a deeply spiritual problem here, not a technical one. That’s exactly the reason why I don’t bet on ANY technofix at all.
The good folks at Climate Feedback have a good take-down of the Kauppinen & Malmi “paper”
https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/non-peer-reviewed-manuscript-falsely-claims-natural-cloud-changes-can-explain-global-warming/
MAR @60 while I dislike exaggeration and hysterics over climate issues including CO2, the following is rather concerning. It may at least partly explain the high recent CO2 numbers.
“Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01313-4
Alan2102 @68, I agree the effects of climate change on agriculture are complicated, with both plusses and minuses, but the minuses look like they win out:
https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climate-impacts-agriculture-and-food-supply_.html
Even if there is some small advantage overall in a warmer climate, its in no way a justification for burning fossil fuels and you point out the world could feed 10 billion people if it has to. Genetic engineered food looks like its now proven to be safe and has plenty of potential.
Personally I think we would be well advised to get population down to well under 7 billion. An awful lot of problems get reduced that way without having to agonise over the exact structure of the socio economic system.
KIA posted an item garnered from Zero Hedge, I found it interesting to note that media bias fact check has this to say about that site “Overall, we rate Zero Hedge an extreme right biased conspiracy website”! So there it is….
nigelj @70,
The arXiv archive used to publish Kauppinen & Malmi (2019) does not subject papers to peer review. The “moderation” they do carry out is presumably very cursory given the volume of material being submitted to the archive which these days is running at over 136,000 papers a year.
Winter Monsoons Became Stronger During Geomagnetic Reversal
| from the failure-to-maintain-the-deflector-shields dept.
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/07/11/239256 |
+—————————————-+
New evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as
galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth’s climate by increasing cloud
cover, causing an “umbrella effect.”
When galactic cosmic rays increased during the Earth’s last
geomagnetic reversal transition 780,000 years ago, the umbrella
effect of low-cloud cover led to high atmospheric pressure in
Siberia, causing the East Asian winter monsoon to become stronger.
This is evidence that galactic cosmic rays influence changes in the
Earth’s climate. The findings were made by a research team led by
Professor Masayuki Hyodo (Research Center for Inland Seas, Kobe
University) and published on June 28 in the online edition of
Scientific Reports.
The Svensmark Effect is a hypothesis that galactic cosmic rays induce
low cloud formation and influence the Earth’s climate. Tests based on
recent meteorological observation data only show minute changes in
the amounts of galactic cosmic rays and cloud cover, making it hard
to prove this theory. However, during the last geomagnetic reversal
transition, when the amount of galactic cosmic rays increased
dramatically, there was also a large increase in cloud cover, so it
should be possible to detect the impact of cosmic rays on climate at
a higher sensitivity.
[0]https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190703121407.htm
————————————————————————
[1]Original Submission
Discuss this story at:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=19/07/11/239256
Links:
0. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190703121407.htm
1. https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=34987
Re: Climate Slate, #26.
I’m thinking that Real Climate would be benefitted by a prominent and permanent link on the side to videos and perhaps real-time streaming. A large % of people are persuaded by visualizations, rather than just the usual static black on white verbiage.
What’s roughly the amount of scientific papers that has been published per year over the last decades?
How much of them seem to be (or are) contradictional?
In videos or articles the climate-problem-deniers often refer to contradictionary statements of different researchers/papers.
For example statements on the one hand were more snow, vs. less snow on the other hand. And for other effects the same thing of contradictional statements.
I would assume that there is misinterpretation of the papers, but it could also be the case, that in the research there really were such contradictional statements. (Climate Winter vs. Climate Heating up?)
Are there meta-studies that clarify this situation?
Or articles here or elsewhere that look at that topic in detail?
By a blog article I found a climate research-article thatstatet the influence of the sun, and that former climate changes have been quite fast, and that IPCC-research uses tree-data, which is not giving data for the winters, while stalagmites would give better data.
The same researcher, many years later, said: it’s clear that man-made CO2 is heating up the atmosphere.
So, I’m irritated about this… looks contradictional to me.
Same reaearcher, and two claims, which seem not fit togehter.
(I sent mail to the researcher today and wait for answer.)
The “it was the sun”-article was reason enough for the blogger who linked to that article, to state, that the climate-problem is just fake.
This also would fit into the contradictional statements issue mentioned above – but by just one researcher.
It looks like (some) scientists offer a lot of possibilities to erode their (and their colleagues) work.
Some research may even be junk, and be cherry picked by lobbyists and ideologists.
Some misunderstandings may come from journalists misinterpreting things.
And maybe the attempt from reasearchers to use “easy language” is rather a drawback, than an advantage?!
… of course I meant the number of papers per year,regarding climate science.
Just a reminder:
If you don’t change yourself, you change nothing at all.
75 – William B Jackson
Zerohedge did not do the science in the article I posted in #55 above – they just reported on it. Same science was written about in post 77 above by Hank Roberts. His link if you prefer:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190703121407.htm
Only difference is Zerohedge included more “inconvenient” quotes from the scientist reports. I did not read the “actual” science reports so can’t say who reported most accurately. Feel free to do a little research on that.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-11/scientists-finland-japan-man-made-climate-change-doesnt-exist-practice
Great comments on Zerohedge if you click Viewing Options and sort by “best”. I liked this one:
“That carbon credits exist & can be sold proves this is about $$$$$……as always.”
O. “79/80,
The number of papers published on climate change was analysed by CarbonBrief back in 2015 showing this graphic of pubication numbers by year with perhaps 13,800 papers published in 2015.
A year later, this denialist analysis found 501 papers in 2016 that they said contradicted AGW science.
While the size of two lists of papers could well be questioned by AGW scientists/denialists, as presented the size of the two lists (13,800 & 501) yields a ratio of 100 to 3.6. This pretty-much adds further support to the 97% consensus result found by Cook et al (2013), a result which denialists find so impossible to accept.
..
As for an individual author seemingly contradicting themselves, this may not be as obvious as at first sight and would need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.
MA Rodger @44 – thanks for the links. It wasn’t until after I’d posted my question that I noticed GISS was already using the paired data sets NOAA has now updated to.
Note that the comparison page does show that 1998 is now warmer than 2009 in the official NOAAGlobalTemp-v5 accounting. But yes, swapping positions of the 9th and 10th warmest doesn’t change the fact that all the top ten are in the most recent 20 years of a 138-year-old dataset.
That Kauppinen/Malmi thing looked to me like a sour-grapes document because one of the authors wasn’t agreed with when he was a reviewer for an IPCC report. That they use the IPCC summary document chart without even referencing the relevant report chapters and underlying source papers looks like they aren’t trying too hard for academic rigor. That they claim CO2 emissions aren’t due to our fossil fuel habit ignores accounting, production records, chemistry, changes in isotopic ratios and all sorts of other reality. Their cloud cover doesn’t do away with the trapped energy from the increased greenhouse gases, either. And it sounds a bit like Lindzen’s iris theory – a miracle meaning we don’t have to limit emissions, that only makes sense if you ignore the fact that prior greenhouse elevations blew past temperatures these theories say we don’t have to worry about.
Just an opinion and I haven’t submitted it for peer review.
WBJ: “Overall, we rate Zero Hedge an extreme right biased conspiracy website”!
AB: Which makes it only slightly too liberal for KillingInaction. Hey, he’s being way open-minded…
Re #68 alan2102 said #49 Nemesis 11 Jul 2019
N: “Mother Earth can easily feed 10–12 billion people”
I’m pleased to learn that you are not a Malthusian
Why is it so hard to understand the simple point underlying Malthus’ work? To say someone is Malthusian or non-Malthusian is nonsensical. It is a literally meaningless way to speak of limits because it takes math and science and turns it into belief. It’s even more egregious given he was absolutely correct: The planet has limits, population has limits. This is a certain as the sun being a star. Was his timing off? Certainly. How could he anticipate the effects of the oil binge? To hold the future against someone is lazy thinking.
Worse, 12M is a limit. It fits perfectly into Malthus’ work. His concept was completely correct. To say someone is non-Malthusian because their limit is higher than Malthus’ from so long ago, and pre-The Great Soil Devastation aka Green Revolution, begs the question, do you understand logic?
N: “but she can’t feed the greed of the few. It all depends on the economic system, just let capitalism walk on and you will see billions die very soon.”
I fear that you are correct, and I salute you for properly situating the blame. This probable dieoff will be caused by human choices and human systems, not by inexorable “overshoot” or “overpopulation”
I agree with you both, but I have to address the illogical here. Overshoot and overpopulation are both human choices. They are inseparable from all the other choices we have made that got us here. It is a prima facie argument that more people means more consumption regardless of the number of people or the level of consumption. Whatever the minimum possible per capita consumption is, add another person, consumption rises.
Certainly we can choose to reduce per capita consumption, but only above whatever minimum is. More people is a problem. Too high consumption is a problem. Both are choices of humanity, not conditions external to us. Are you claiming the orangutans are responisble, for goodness’ sakes? Of course not.
Carrying capacity has been increased dramatically, and still more-dramatic increases are yet to come just with technologies already on the shelf
No. Carrying capacity of the planet has never been lower during the time of Homo ~~. Three million years of hominids that became us and we have reduced the ecosystem to an unmitigated disaster wherein even if all negative activities were stopped today, we would see the ecosystem continue to decline for hundreds of years or longer unless we actively intervene to reverse conditions. Even still, some, like SLR, will go on for centuries almost certainly.
All of this is due to technology and complexity.
Humans are clever, which is why corn production for example has quintupled over a few decades.
Destroying the source of nutrition, soils, globally is clever? How?
Humans come up with novel ways to adapt to conditions. They come up with rice strains that require less water. They come up with soil amendments that render rice less susceptible to drought stress. They come up with novel ways to irrigate so that “rainfed rice” is no longer so dependent on rain. And so on. Before you know it, rice yields that would have “decreased 17-40%” become stable, or perhaps lose a few percent, or perhaps GAIN a few percent.
Is this a wise bet? No. Nobody would take that chance if it were bullets in a gun set against their head, or even if the chance of dying in a car crash. Every indication now is yields are, and will continue to be, falling. You seem to blithely dismiss rates of change, lack of globally consistent systems, etc. Betting that the non-existent will save you is, frankly, beyond delusional, it’s nuts. This is not a case where the problem and the solution are theoretical. The problem is established and well-understood. The solutions exist on the simple end of the spectrum. To risk the planet’s biologics on non-existent options when full system solutions already exist that are virtually zero risk is just not sane. It’s playing Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun vs an unloaded gun.
N: “Your second study is also highly speculative as its projected “positive” effects of climate change on food production depends on quote: ‘substantial shifts in the global and local patterns of production.’ That would require the global economic system to change radically”
Why would it require that? I mean, I would hope you were right, but I don’t see how you are, necessarily. Just like humans, capitalism is highly adept at surviving under changing circumstances
Capitalism has never changed other than qho gets to be an owner. You don’t understand the word, it seems. Capitalism means one and only one thing: That private ownership is the basis of the means of production.
You are conflating Capitalism and economics/markets.
Rather than being destroyed by the climate crisis, capitalism might choreograph its survival by way of manipulating individual and institutional responses to it
Because magic? What, pray tell, is going to bring about this Utopia where the rich share their wealth?
The neo-Malthusians will do their part, shifting the blame away from capitalism and portraying our fate as sealed and inevitable… because overpopulation and overshoot, doncha know
That you think these things are seprarable is mind-blowing. How are they? You want Capitalism which means you want profit which means you want growth. Under what conditions do you have Capitalism and markets and equality, and especially have either without increasing consumption over time?
N: “take the global massive insect (especially pollinators) decline”
A very worrisome development, no question.
N: “soil erosion (and soil degradation)”
Not difficult to correct. Mostly a matter of us ceasing to behave like a bunch of morons. (That’s putting a big subject into a small nutshell.)
You want Capitalism and markets but also renewed soils? Good luck with that… As likely as the sun becoming a moon tomorrow. The principles underlying these things are not compatible. Capitalism and markets do not value resources. To the extent there is discussion of things like Donut/Steady-State economies, there is some awareness, but the *fact* that any form of ownership leads to the pursuit of profit/greater return than invested means you have exactly two essential choices: Growth, or inequality. If the resource base it held steady, wealth will accumulate to those who already have it, impoverishing others as the pie is moved from one to the other. If growth is allowed, bye-bye environment.
N: “biodiversity loss”
Difficult to correct… there could be happy surprises such as that restoration of biodiversity causes recrudescence of those lost insect populations.
More magical/wishful/extremely risky thinking.
Artificial meats are coming on strong
This is about as sustainable as a sane conversation about sustainability on this site.
N: “your “positive” effects on global food production…
Yes, claimed for more than a century *correctly*, if we can insert “an essential nutrient for” in place of “good for”. (“Good for” is contingent; “essential nutrient” is not.) This is well-established fact, not arguable.
What is? Increasing heat and CO2 is good for food supply? Is that the claim? If so, wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emFGiIJvce8
If you mean something else, I have no idea what you think it is.
And the earth has indeed “brought forth more abundant crops”; this is evident in NASA satellite data and by other means.
Those are not crops. C’mon…
Re #73 nigelj said MAR @60 while I dislike exaggeration and hysterics over climate issues including CO2, the following is rather concerning. It may at least partly explain the high recent CO2 numbers.
“Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01313-4
AKA, Killian right again. It’s a long list at this point.
GISTEMP has posted the global anomaly for June at +0.93ºC, a little up on May’s +0.86ºC anomaly.
It is the warmest June in the GISTEMP record, well ahead of 2016 (+0.82ºC), 2015 (+0.81ºC), 2018 (+0.78ºC), 1998 (+0.76ºC) and in 6th place 2017 (+0.72ºC).
June 2019 sits at =21st warmest month in the GISTEMP all-month record.
With half the year behind us, 2019 is the 3rd warmest start-to-the-year on record and would require a bit of a drop over the remainder of the year to miss out on claiming 2nd place for the full calendar year. Mind, the IRI ENSO Forecast for July is showing a lower liklihood that mild El Niño conditions will persist for the remainder of the year, although there is a bit of a lag between El Niño conditions and their impact on global temperature.
…….. Jan-June Ave … Annual Ave ..Annual ranking
2016 .. +1.19ºC … … … +1.02ºC … … … 1st
2017 .. +1.03ºC … … … +0.92ºC … … … 2nd
2019 .. +0.99ºC
2015 .. +0.86ºC … … … +0.90ºC … … … 3rd
2018 .. +0.86ºC … … … +0.85ºC … … … 4th
2010 .. +0.82ºC … … … +0.73ºC … … … 6th
2007 .. +0.77ºC … … … +0.66ºC … … … 9th
2014 .. +0.75ºC … … … +0.75ºC … … … 5th
2002 .. +0.73ºC … … … +0.63ºC … … … 13th
1998 .. +0.68ºC … … … +0.61ºC … … … 15th
2005 .. +0.68ºC … … … +0.68ºC … … … 8th
Up-thread @5 linked to a ECMWF Climate Change Service post suggesting a dramatic record June global anomaly +0.11ºC above the previous record for June. This has been exactly fulfilled with this GISTEMP anomaly but probably won’t be for NOAA or HadCRUT which would require bigger jumps from the May anomaly to achieve even a clear record. Thus GISTEMP shows a +0.07ºC anomaly increase May-June, yet such a May-June increase in NOAA would only give an =1st place for June and in HadCRUT would only give a 3rd placed June. (It was HadCRUT4 that ECMWP cited in their post. The data plotted by them was their ERA5 reanalysis data stitched onto HadCRUT data for earlier pre-1979 years. ERA5 does hold variations not seen in actual surface measurement records.)
@O., #79
” So, I’m irritated about this… looks contradictional to me.”
Yes, yes, climate science is not easy to grasp at times, it’s not easy to look through all the made up smoke and mirrors of the fossil fool industry, I recommend to go here for a start:
https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php
( Especially: https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm and: https://skepticalscience.com/history-climate-science.html )
Don’t hurry, take your time, spend some adequate time to study the history of climate science, especially the history of denial of the oil industry, very enlightening:
https://www.smokeandfumes.org/
And finally you might find out what’s real (hint: Reality is a beast most of the time and so is capitalist, fossil fool driven Empire). Good luck.
O. @ 79 says:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4966958/
Climate Change Research in View of Bibliometrics
The study is based on 222,060 papers (articles and reviews only) published between 1980 and 2014. The total number of papers shows a strong increase with a doubling every 5–6 years.
Perhaps not quite the answer you are looking for, but…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/25/so-far-this-year-400-scientific-papers-debunk-climate-change-alarm/
400 Scientific Papers Published In 2017 Support A Skeptical Position On Climate Alarm
MAR @64 (+ earlier references),
“is indeed doing t(h)e rounds”
That was the LEAD story on an Sky News commentary segment here in Australia over the weekend.
(Sky News is from the same corporate stable as Fox News in the US. The weakest {by far} of the three major free-to-air networks added it to their set of stations last year. They show a lot of Sports results summaries over weekends, so they might get some crossover to their “news” from that.)
Hottest June in the record books and we are not in a strong warm part of ENSO cycle and July shaping up to be hottest July on record according to WAPO. Thanks to S Rahmstorf for tweeting the news.
CO2? How are we doing?
June CO2
June 2019: 413.92 ppm
June 2018: 410.79 ppm
over 3ppm increase in yoy. Could be worse. MAR and others say this is almost exclusively driven by our emissions, that positive feedbacks are not contributing in a significant way at this time. I hope that’s an accurate representation of MAR’s position.
I think there are signs that many positive feedbacks are starting to wake up. Thawing permafrost, increased forest fire activities, rising emissions from warmed wetlands, etc. Are they contributing measurably to the higher rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere? I think yes, but I could be wrong. We might be in big trouble by the time that we are certain the positive feedbacks have turned on in a significant way. Precautionary principle? I think only a very foolish person would declare no concern about that matter.
Cheers,
Mike
This is the 50th anniversary of The Mother Of All Carbon Footprints:
https://drive.google.com/drive/search?q=seitz%20conde%20nast
Extinction Events in Earth History and Today http://climatestate.com/2019/07/16/extinction-events-in-earth-history-and-today includes a video, if you prefer YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWIOVun1yko
Largely draws from this recent study https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-earth-053018-060136
The current question evolves around rates of change and paleo comparisons, maximum rates of climate change are systematically underestimated in the geological record https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9890
Fred Magyar @90. I hit your watts link then the 2016 list of “skeptical” papers. was interested in Part 2 mention of I. “Mid-Holocene Sea Levels Meters Higher”
I wanted to see about that remarkable sea level change. So I went to https://notrickszone.com/skeptic-papers-2016-2/ and found:
“Holocene Sea Levels Meters Higher When CO2 Levels Much Lower” (Tricks’ description)
then: “Haghani et al., 2016 Caspian Sea (CS) water level has fluctuated repeatedly with an amplitude of larger than 25m during the Holocene without any link with the eustatic sea level.”
The TricksZone counts on readers being ignorant of the fact that the Caspian Sea is landlocked and completely unconnected to global (eustatic) sea levels. So they reference work that has nothing to do with global sea levels, but encourage unskeptical readers to think otherwise.
The first two references in ManyTricks Part 2 are like that, too (Donchyts et al., 2016 and a BBC press release/article). I don’t have access to the Nature paper, but the BBC press release accurately describes the paper as documenting changes in global area covered or not covered by water – not shifts in sea level.
The BBC piece notes specifically that the biggest growth of dry land area was the drying Aral Sea (landlocked, too) and the biggest increase in surface water is lakes growing in Tibet — from melting ice in the mountains.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37187100
The Idso family enterprise had started this “list we misinterpret for you” approach some time ago. At least the NoTricksZone warns people by the very name of the site that they’re going to lie to you – like salesman who say “believe me”.
It’s not worth trying to debunk all the misdirection or the bad papers they also list (deliverables?), and the people who follow those sites lack the skepticism to carefully read what’s put in front of them. So papers that support the reality of climate change? Not a problem! Just post a quote or two, reinterpret it, then let the readers convince themselves.
b fagan @95,
Given the gross stupidity and/or insincerity of denialist commentators, why should we be surprised that the NoTricksZone listing of papers that “seriously question just how settled the “consensus” science really is” is full of fake entries.
Having linked to the 2016 NoTricksZone serving of such papers up-thread @83, I did have a quick look at some of the papers presented as showing a lack of concensus.
Rather than start at the top, I looked at the bottom four in the third list (4 papers that papers that say “We don’t know” according to NoTricksZone) and not one of them should be in a listing of denialist literature. ☻ The bottom one is from the Hadley Centre so an unlikely candidate. Quoted as saying stuff “cannot be directly assessed from observations,” it thus examines ‘indirect’ methods. ☻ The next up concerns mechanisms of stratospheric cooling and does not in any way question the consensus. ☻ And the next up ditto, but is looking at the attribution of North Sea weather processes. ☻ And fourth up is quoted saying the influence of solar flux variability on the climate system remains an open scientific question” but again this is about stratospheric cooling and not a contradiction of AGW.
While there are papers published from obvious denialists who include a rant about the IPCC being wrong because AGW isn’t actually a problem, there is perhaps a big grey area with papers that don’t have a rant. Imagine I carried out an analysis that found that half the warming since 1970 was due to a big fat natural climate wobble. Presumably publishing such a finding would be contrary to the consensus. But what if the finding was a wobble providing a quarter or a tenth of the warming? A paper setting out that things aren’t quite as bad as we expected doesn’t contradict the consensus. So how big an effect would be considered consensus-breaking?
Of course, the denialists don’t go in for nuanced argument. Denialist analyses usually concern massive effects which are thus sure to bring the AGW consensus tumbling down.
But this need for dramatic findings is another flaw in the NoTricksZone list. How many of these denialistical papers contradict each other. It almost certainly has denialist papers saying it is the sun or the planets or the clouds or the Earth’s magnetic field or the length of day or under-sea volcanism or the AMO or PDO or AMOC or some other unspecified natural wobbly effect or Uncle Tom Cobbly and all.
But it isn’t ‘and all’!!
So which is it? And when you decide which it is, how many of these denialist papers can remain in the list? I would suggest it becomes lean pickings.
clarify a bit at 92: MAR and others say this is almost exclusively driven by our emissions AND WARM ENSO CONDITIONS, that positive feedbacks are not contributing in a significant way at this time. I hope that’s an accurate representation of MAR’s position.
This new paper on clathrates seems to be *the* authorative work wrt describing formation, extent, behavior.
As far as I can tell from a quick perusal, it is not a paper focusing on outcomes or predictions, but still has some alarming info.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/9/6/251/htm
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/a-visit-with-the-glacier-squad/
@Nemesis, #89: thanks for the links.
I got answer from the researcher with the solar driven climate paragraph.
The answer was not very detailed, but I got some links to official climate research blogs and that it was.
So I assume that, what I thought was a contradiction, possibly was misinterpretation, and maybe it must be seen in the wider context. But this again is just an interpretation from a laymans view.
I asked on further explanation, citing the text, but got no answer so far.
I think, it would make sense to the research field, that the researchers could invest a littlebid more of their time explaining some possible misunderstandings, especially when it’s obvious, that the questions are coming from interested people, far from being denialists.
But I just can ask or hope for it. If they are not interested giving more time to the answers, it’s their choice.
It would be completely ok for me to hear, that in the wider context it is not a contradiction, but that would need explanation.
And it also would be ok that a researcher itself would have changed their mind under the impression of other researchers new findings.
But not explaining the seemingly contradiction and just sending some links could raise the suspicion, that former critical researchers switched to the mainstream field, because they could profit from this more (the denialists “they talk mainstream because the next money for more research will be possible then”).
Thats a very common suspicion, and it would make sense to me, that researchers would explain a bit more, if to the laymens world it looks like they changed their mind out of nothing.
@Fred Magyar, #90: thanks for the links.
222,060 papers ooops. And then the notrickszone-link with 400 papers… hmhhh.
The notricks-links I found in some denialist articles (from people who claim to be social scientists, but their page is rather polemically/ideological than science driven; they use scientific arguments, if they serve them well, and chose polemics, if science arguments would contradict their goals). With these papers linked, they claimed the big climate fake.
The problem is, that climate layman (at least those without some background in physics) are easily trapped by such articles.
I’m also no climate researcher, but have some background knowledge of natural sciences/physics, so I could at least in principle find out the wrong assumptions. But it’s very time consuming. I already found wrong claims and sent links to people I know. But the propaganda seems to work stronger than arguments.
At some point it does not make sense to further invest time into providing arguments to people, if these people just don’t listen.
Maybe that people don’t listen, is rather a psychological problem, not one of missing information.