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    #51
    The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

    antoine polus wrote:
    As far as the climate predictions of warming at the poles, the ice shelf in the Antarctic has been growing significantly, contrary to what the climate models predicted.
    So you are a climate change skeptic as well?!

    No, the current lack of warming in the Antarctic is exactly in line with predictions from years ago.

    Scientists have, for a long time, predicted that the warming in the coming centuries will be the greatest in the polar regions. They also predicted that the warming would start first in the Arctic, but that warming in the Antarctic regions would be delayed until later in this century... and then it will take off there to. It's all built in to the global climate already, thanks to all our previous emissions, and it's all going to happen.

    But in the post-truth reality we live in, none of this information matters.
    I'll probably get crucified for this here, but I guess I'm a lukewarmist, along the lines of a Judith Curry... I've migrated from the small blue ball on the left end to the big green ball after spending a fair amount of time looking at the issue from different angles. I've been in the field of green building for the last ten years, almost all my peers and clients are squarely in the "Alarmed" end.



    Lang Spoon wrote: Sweet jeebus, man, not everything is a conspiracy. El Niño is up there with sunspots for not explaining this at all (outside the pure bank failing evil sophistry of Matt Ridley et al).
    As far as El Niños go, the last one looked pretty intense, Judith Curry attributes to it the record temperatures from 2015-16:

    Comment


      #52
      The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

      Well, of course the record temperatures during a single El Nino event are down to the El Nino. You should be more worried about the near-record temperatures over the whole of the previous two decades, which your disingenuous graph attempts to conceal

      Comment


        #53
        The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

        Yeah, using air temperature between 1995 and 2020 to understand global warming is like trying to understand the tactical machinations of a 90 minute football match by listening to one minute of radio commentary.

        Air has a very poor heat capacity when compared to water. That's why global air temperature, while showing a clear long term trend, fluctuates due to short term changes in temperature caused by volcanic eruptions, coal pollution in the 1950s, El Nino etc. Climate skeptics love stuff like that. However, 70% of our planet is covered by deep reservoirs of water (oceans). These oceans have a huge heat capacity and essentially act like a sponge to soak up heat energy from the atmosphere. And oceans, due to their huge heat capacity and vast depth, react slowly (but surely) to temperature change and are generally not sensitive to short term changes in temperature.

        If you want to know about global warming, you need to look at the oceans. So, what is the global ocean temperature? We don't know. We don't have thermometers at every depth in every part of the ocean, constantly recording temperature. However, as everyone knows, water expands when it heats. So if the entire global ocean were to continuously heat up a little bit, you'd expect the water to expand a little bit. And how would we see that? Well, water in the ocean is like water in a giant bathtub. It has nowhere to expand but upwards. So we would see water expansion in the ocean recorded as sea level rise, which has been measured by humans for quite some time now. And, because water has high thermal capacity and is insensitive to short term changes, we'd expect to see a constant, unrelenting, upward trend in sea level as soon as global warming kicks off.



        Global oceans react slowly but surely to changes in temperature for two reasons: (1) the high heat capacity of water and (2) oceans are being heated from the top and are very deep... they need to mix, like stirring soup while cooking, and this mixing is a hundreds year long process. But it will happen, it is inevitable. The heat will eventually get to deeper water and cause that to expand as well.

        Trying to stop sea level rise is very much like turning around an oil tanker. So, I can't repeat this enough, even if the entire world goes completely carbon neutral tomorrow, we are still guaranteed, at the very least, one meter of sea level rise by the end of this century, and, at the very least, two meters by 2300. It's already baked into the system, there's nothing we can do. Think of what that means for Bangladesh, South Florida, the Netherlands, New Orleans, etc. These places are essentially already fucked. Now consider that we are not, in fact, going carbon neutral tomorrow...

        Comment


          #54
          The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

          San Bernardhinault wrote: Well, of course the record temperatures during a single El Nino event are down to the El Nino. You should be more worried about the near-record temperatures over the whole of the previous two decades, which your disingenuous graph attempts to conceal
          The current temperature levels aren't worrisome, it's the future projections of temperature rises above current levels that are.

          Over a short period of time, year to year variations are mostly driven by Pacific Ocean oscillatory events (El Niño/La Niña), this graph above was meant to illustrate that, and the fact that the last El Niño cycle was bigger than average.

          The main thing that stands out from the past two decades is that temperatures have plateaued, this is known as the Global Warming Pause or the Hiatus. This is a period which accounts for nearly one third of all human CO2 emissions in history, with an acceleration in industrialization in Asia and elsewhere, so the fact that global temperatures haven't accelerated accordingly, or at the very least kept rising as they have in previous decades (1970s through the late 1990s) is perplexing.

          Antoine attributes that 19yr long current hiatus to oceanic thermal inertia, but the fact that sea levels been rising very steadily since 1880 indicates that this rise is mostly due to natural factors. There are a couple of graphs that show an acceleration in sea temperatures, but the problem with those data sets graphs is that they show two fused data sets, with the change in data set (from land to satellite measurements), as well as "adjustments" accounting for most of the increase/acceleration (Mann's hockey stick problem)...

          Individual station measurements taken over the last century do not show recent accelerations, see the dozens of historic data sets from across the Pacific starting on p.10 of this appendix:

          http://research.fit.edu/sealevelriselibrary/documents/doc_mgr/403/Pacific_Introduction_to_SLR_-_Mitchell_et_al.pdf

          Comment


            #55
            The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

            i basically give up, but feel nonetheless compelled to point out that the pacific sea level records you refer to record "relative sea level", i.e. they need to be corrected for vertical land movement. volcanic islands in the pacific are known to experience vertical motion. the people who spent literally their entire careers constructing the global sea level record took these things into account. i trust their calculations.

            the fact that sea levels been rising very steadily since 1880 indicates that this rise is mostly due to natural factors.
            people peeing in the ocean?

            the Great Lump of Space Rock of 1880?

            Comment


              #56
              The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

              Good grief.

              There's no hiatus. Really. The only appearance of hiatus comes when you only look at air temperatures and when you start your sequence with the massive El Nino event of 1998.

              There never was a hiatus.

              But even if there were a hiatus, a 20 year "pause" bookended by the two warmest years in history, with 18 of the other warmest years in not only history but also within the reconstructed temperature archive, reconstructed through ice cores and so on, panic would still be an entirely reasonable response. But if you were to ignore temperatures and look at ice volume or the reduction in ice thickness in the Arctic, you would see all of the entirely predicted outcomes of anthropogenic global warming.

              You're desperately clutching at straws, desperately cherry picking data to suit your entirely feeble position.

              As for complaining about "adjustments", seriously, get a grip. That is what grown up scientists do, to make sure that their various datasets are actually measuring the same thing. To suggest anything else if to put yourself out fully in the nutjob fringes of the likes of James Delingpole and "Lord" Monckton.

              Comment


                #57
                The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                Fucking hell the fringes of Establishment Science aren't all full of Galileos or Brunos.

                There's a reason most of these fuckers are either ignored or get feted by Delingpole types /industry apologists.

                Peer Review, bitches.

                Comment


                  #58
                  The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                  On top of the other stuff, this:
                  The current temperature levels aren't worrisome, it's the future projections of temperature rises above current levels that are.
                  ...is nonsense. You may not have noticed, but at current temperature levels, the Great Barrier Reef is getting bleached out of existence. And that's just one of many data points.

                  Comment


                    #59
                    The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                    When I think about all of this stuff, which is almost every day lately, I get unutterably depressed.

                    So in an attempt to share some good news, or at least some slightly less unambiguously terrible news, here's an article about some good work being done around the world. Who knows, by sharing it maybe it'll help someone come across it who can help make a difference as well (whether that someone is on OTF or someone who lands here accidentally).

                    Of course, how long even this good work (in the US and the UK under Trump and Brexit, for example) holds up is anyone's guess. And it's only baby steps when we need Usain Bolt sprints. But reminding myself periodically of some of this stuff might stop me going completely insane.

                    Comment


                      #60
                      The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                      All trains in the Netherlands are now run on wind power, a year earlier than planned.

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                        #61
                        The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                        On a knife-edge.

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                          #62
                          The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                          This headline is a bit deceptive, isn't it? The seeds were never threatened, the flood here being a chunk of ice that made its way to the vault's entrance.

                          The article only implied that in a doomsday scenario where humans would be wiped out from the area, the seed inventory would not be completely insured from a flood (even though in what was described as a warm winter cycle, its inventory was actually never threatened).

                          There was a rash of recent articles in late Fall about the arctic melting, with this winter season having had a late start due to the lingering effects of the last El Niño. But since then, it's been a long and cold winter season. In my half of the Arctic/N. Atlantic, we've been having the thickest ice formations in living memory.

                          https://polarbearscience.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/newfoundland-labrador-sea-ice-19-april-2017-nasa-worldview.jpg?w=750Newfoundland coast one month ago

                          You have to be careful not to extrapolate too much from isolated observations (a one day temp data point), like the poster from Dublin who was panicking because it was 14C before the start of winter. Or the graphs of Arctic ice packs taken in the middle of El Niño further up in this thread, as those are basically manifestations of confirmation bias.

                          Outlets like the Guardian don't balance out their alarmist reporting from spotty events with updates placing those data points or events in a proper longer range perspective.

                          Comment


                            #63
                            The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                            And while it's been fuckin freezing in Canadia, the Scottish Highlands have been undergoing drought and nae snow this winter and spring on a similar latitude. Increasingly unpredictable weather patterns with an overall inexorable catastrophic trend of warming, where's the hidden science leading us away from the bleak (and fuck, I wish there was a sunny way out)? Who benefits from made up man made climate change? Give us The Smoking Man, Linus

                            Comment


                              #64
                              The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                              Lang Spoon wrote: Who benefits from made up man made climate change?
                              This is the bit that always gets me, in general, about climate change naysaying. What's the point in denying it, or dissembling about it? Even if it somehow were all smoke and mirrors, where's the downside in trying to use less energy, or pump fewer petrochemicals into the atmosphere, or recycle, or...?

                              Other than to protect 'big oil' profits, and the like, of course.

                              ...Oh. Yeah.

                              Comment


                                #65
                                The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                linus wrote: Outlets like the Guardian don't balance out their alarmist reporting from spotty events with updates placing those data points or events in a proper longer range perspective.
                                Their reporting is not perfect. The headline is wrong for starters. Permafrost does not melt, it thaws. Just like how one leaves out frozen meat to thaw, not to melt.

                                But here's your long range perspective:



                                Red line is actual September sea ice extent.

                                Other lines are computer model predictions. Which have all underestimated the rate of melting.

                                Comment


                                  #66
                                  The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                  The September ice cover data set is most likely to vary wildly due to the effects of El Nino. It does not reflect the real extent of ice and snow over the winter season. If you wanted to ask somebody if a winter was cold or mild, you wouldn't ask how cold September was...

                                  There aren't any major adverse effects from slightly warmer conditions in late summer, in fact longer growing seasons in northern latitudes are a positive development. Last year we had record high crops in many key cereals like wheat, in what was supposed to be a disastrously hot year.

                                  The September ice snapshot doesn't really tell the story of seasonal ice. This year winter started late but ended up being cold and long.
                                  Here is the actual mid-winter picture of ice and snow cover over the northern hemisphere, as you can see it tells a dramatically different picture:



                                  I guess the UK was spared this season due to the Gulf Stream, but as you can see from the picture Lang Spoon, it is a clear outlier. The ice cover over eastern Canada is the thickest observed since 1810 (the furthest back records go).

                                  And here is the latest snapshot of the extent of ice cover, compared to the average (orange line):



                                  As you can see, it's very much within the norm, a bit less ice than normal in the Bering Sea, and a lot more off of Newfoundland. It really doesn't jibe with the graphic antoine posted above, which looks like a deliberate attempt to project an alarmist picture.

                                  Comment


                                    #67
                                    The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                    The 'pause' is a zombie myth, no point paying attention to anyone suggesting it is anything but imaginative data manipulation....

                                    Comment


                                      #68
                                      The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                      Various Artist wrote:
                                      Originally posted by Lang Spoon
                                      Who benefits from made up man made climate change?
                                      This is the bit that always gets me, in general, about climate change naysaying. What's the point in denying it, or dissembling about it? Even if it somehow were all smoke and mirrors, where's the downside in trying to use less energy, or pump fewer petrochemicals into the atmosphere, or recycle, or...?

                                      Other than to protect 'big oil' profits, and the like, of course.

                                      ...Oh. Yeah.
                                      Short answer: Wall Street, the City, the CBOT/CCX, to the tune of up to $10 trillion/yr carbon trade markets within a decade or two.

                                      Big oil is fully on board with this, BP, Exxon and co have funded AGW, at levels well beyond PR . The industry is positioning itself to profit from carbon trade and the placing of artificial brakes and tariffs on oil consumption. As it stands, we were heading towards a global oil and energy glut for the next few decades, peak oil/gas has not materialized, with a corresponding slump in the oil sector.

                                      The motive is even stronger for the financial industry, that's why politicians like Hollande, Trudeau or Clinton have been pushing hard in that direction. Do you really think they are doing this out of their concern for the environment...

                                      The people who brought you Enron have also drawn up the carbon trade scheme. The only fossil fuel loser will be the coal industry, which doesn't have anywhere near the clout of Wall Street or big oil.

                                      You hated Maggie's Poll Tax plans, now you are getting carbon taxes, a more regressive version of that, it will hit the poor much harder (especially those in rural areas), and the developing world harder yet. It will also push the price of food and transport, once again affecting the poorer segments disproportionally.



                                      There will also be negative repercussions on employment in manufacturing and the energy sector that will further erode these industries and their labor pool.

                                      The economic result of these policies is a net wealth transfer from the poor and the developing world to the financial sector. Most of you don't share my climate change skepticism, but there should be no doubt about the cost in forcibly reducing carbon emissions. That part of the equation is clear, while the benefits in terms of impact on climate really aren't as clear at this point IMHO, two decades into the Hiatus.

                                      Comment


                                        #69
                                        The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                        Oh sweet Jesus.

                                        Comment


                                          #70
                                          The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                          Moonlight shadow wrote: The 'pause' is a zombie myth, no point paying attention to anyone suggesting it is anything but imaginative data manipulation....
                                          This line might have worked 5 or 10 years ago, but today, even someone with no basic training in statistics can see that the main data sets have shown a definite flattening over the past two decades, especially with the latest El Nino spike from 2016 having subsided.

                                          RSS satellite data set:



                                          Most scientists have actually moved on from denying the Pause to providing explanations for the lack of warming since 1998.

                                          The alarmist case is becoming more difficult to defend given that nearly one third of all human CO2 emissions have occurred over that period. In other words, human activity has added nearly 50% more CO2 into the atmosphere since 1998 than what was cumulatively produced in centuries prior, yet global temperatures have not risen correspondingly.

                                          Comment


                                            #71
                                            The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                            I'm grinding my teeth again...

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                                              #72
                                              The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                              I see your dilemma here Spoon, burning the heretic would only add to the problem here.

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                                                #73
                                                The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                                There is no anthropogenic global warming.. there was no Russian manipulation of the US election, Assad has never used chemical weapons, that was the US backed rebels...

                                                But the WTC7 tower was a controlled demolition for reals.

                                                It must be fun in Bizarro world. I'm guessing you think Brexit is a liberating thing that will bring socialism to Britain as well and not Blood Meridian style shits and giggles.

                                                Under the pavement lies the beach. Or a cracked utilities pipe.

                                                Comment


                                                  #74
                                                  The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                                  Lang Spoon wrote: There is no anthropogenic global warming.. there was no Russian manipulation of the US election, Assad has never used chemical weapons, that was the US backed rebels...

                                                  But the WTC7 tower was a controlled demolition for reals.

                                                  It must be fun in Bizarro world. I'm guessing you think Brexit is a liberating thing that will bring socialism to Britain as well and not Blood Meridian style shits and giggles.
                                                  Brexit on this board boils down to a cultural identity issue, so there is no point in debating it. I was a bit shocked at how visceral that issue has become, talking with some British friends of mine IRL. You're either an enlightened, tolerant Remainer, or you're an EDL xenophobe Brexiter, there simply is no space in between. So I get it, let's not talk about this here.

                                                  But I'll ask if you might at least be able to entertain the idea that perhaps Greece might have been better off outside of the EU?!? And that perhaps one can agree with this notion without having the least bit of sympathy for Golden Dawn?

                                                  As to the other issues:

                                                  1- I doubt at this point the theory of CO2-driven catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. 5 arguments against this being:

                                                  -Heating between 1910 and 1940 is similar in magnitude to the recent period of warming (1975-1998). Global cooling observed between 1945-1970s.

                                                  -Pause for 19 years and counting while carbon emissions have steadily accelerated

                                                  -Climate models have consistently overestimated the feedback effect by a factor of 5-10x. An indisputable fact.

                                                  -No significant increase in the rate of oceans rising.

                                                  -The science has been heavily politicized. Just referring to some of the examples from this thread, the chart using September to portray an ice cover crisis in a year where winter has been quite pronounced across the northern hemisphere.

                                                  Or the XKCD chart a few pages ago, which offered a grossly manipulative narrative, reducing the weather to a 20,000 year long Michael Mann hockey stick. Contrast that graphic interpretation with this reconstruction conducted by peer reviewed scientists:


                                                  Average near-surface temperatures of the northern hemisphere during the past 11,000 years compiled by David Archibald after Dansgaard et al. (1969) & Schönwiese (1995)

                                                  2-Russian manipulations of US elections:

                                                  Russia is practically a non-factor in the US political scene. Its political influence over the US is dwarfed by that of Israel, or China for that matter, whose economic leverage is immensely greater. And the influence of Mexico, the UK, Canada or the GCC all exceed that of Russia as well.

                                                  Russia has virtually no economic or political leverage over the US, and little in terms of soft power beyond RT or Sputnik, who are very marginal players at best. Russia has become for the left what the Muslim Peril has been to the right since 9/11, a Straussian bogeyman du jour, a kind of weird reincarnation of cold war era Red Peril that was suddenly resurrected during this last election cycle.

                                                  3- Assad did not drop chemical weapons on Idlib last month.

                                                  I was fairly convinced that his regime did the 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta, but become more skeptical about this after doing some research, Seymour Hersh has laid a good case against it. For this latest incident though, it's quite clear that Assad had absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by using poison gas to bomb the rebel outpost near Idlib. No motive there (not even a tactical/military one) and every disincentive for him and his Russian backers to go chemical.

                                                  I'm not particularly fond of Assad, and I consider myself very well-informed on Syria. I'm probably the only person on this board who has heard of Al-Ghouta or Idlib before 2011, let alone been there.

                                                  4- WTC7

                                                  There is no way this 47 story steel structured building cold have come down at freefall speed other than through a controlled demolition, because freefall speed would only occur if and only if all internal structural resistance was instantly eliminated along the path of collapse.

                                                  I don't really want to dwell on this issue though because it is one that has become so deeply loaded that people simply cannot process basic scientific arguments on their own merit, either for lack of a basic scientific training and/or because of the intense cognitive dissidence that such a thought and its implications engender. Ultimately, it's the domain of Asch Experiment and cognitive science, not structural engineering, physics or thermodynamics.

                                                  I've come to realize that I was incredibly naive to believe that most people (especially those with a limited scientific training) could examine the scientific forensics on a purely rational plane.

                                                  None of my positions above are without some merit or beyond that rational plane, or attained without a fair amount of research and knowledge of the elements involved.

                                                  Comment


                                                    #75
                                                    The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

                                                    Greece might have been better off outside the EU or theEuro? The first is clearly not true. A nation emerging from dictatorship, geographically cut off from the rest of the democratic Europe? Greece got a massive amount from being in the EU. You'll still struggle to find any but the most fringe of Greeks who will say any different.

                                                    As to whether joining the Euro was a good idea. Probably not. But the EU? Codswallop.

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