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It’s “depressing”, “hopeless” and “dismal”
The climate debate is more polarised than ever. David Roberts at Vox is very honest about the challenges believers face to solve the deep partisan political divide. But despite all the grants and funding to solve this problem, the experts miss the obvious. I explain below why polarization will solve itself. Indeed, all their best efforts to reduce polarization in the climate debate are creating the polarization. It takes a sustained effort and millions of dollars to keep a false belief alive.
Now Dunlap and McCright (along with Oklahoma State’s Jerrod Yarosh) have updated their study, giving us a fresh look at public opinion on climate change at the end of the Obama era.
The findings are dismal, if not very surprising: Polarization only accelerated after 2008, the gap between the parties is wider than ever, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scores politicians. It tracks the voting records of members of Congress. Way back in 1970 both sides of politics wanted to approve environmental legislation about equally.
Public opinion has a similar trend. Here are Gallup poll results since 1997. (The recent up-spike in Republican “belief” was recorded in March this year and is probably due to the record warmest US winter thanks to the El Nino. I expect that to revert to trend next year.)
…
 … Feel the pain as experts hunt in vain to solve the split
The experts and paid up researchers are scratching their heads trying to think of everything to fix this. But they miss the most obvious solution completely:
Hopes for reducing polarization are mostly forlorn
There are three sources of hope for reducing polarization in the short term. Dunlap et. al. shoot them all down.
The first is education — better informing the public about climate science. The much-derided “information deficit model” has proven a failure in practice. “Two decades of news coverage and educational campaigns since 1997 have produced only modest increases in Americans’ belief in the reality and human cause of climate change, with gains among Democrats often offset by declines among Republicans,” the authors write.
After three decades of propaganda, more propaganda pushes skeptics away. Badgering people with the 97% consensus only reminds them of how pathetically political and unscientific this debate is. Faking it up to a 99% consensus makes it worse. The consensus message only works on those prone to “follow the herd” and those people have all been reached already.
The second is better “framing,” pitching climate to conservatives in terms more likely to appeal to their values — climate as a national security threat, or an economic opportunity, or a threat to God’s covenant. However, dozens of studies have found small or negligible effects from these strategies. “The evidence so far gives little basis for optimism,” they conclude.
Lipstick on a pig. The problem is the pig, not the lipstick.
The third is personal experiences with extreme weather events, which, it is often hoped, will drive home the reality of climate change. But what evidence exists shows that such experiences have little-to-no effect on climate beliefs, especially among committed partisans. People interpret their experiences through their preexisting worldviews. “Again,” Dunlap et. al. write, “the evidence thus far does not provide much support for optimism.”
Extreme weather events have no scientific justification as “proof” of man-made climate change. Believers are stooping to falsely and unscientifically preying on people’s innate tendency to find patterns which are not real. This is about as low as any science communicator can get, but despite scraping this barrel, believers can still not win.
The blindingly simple answer — why polarization will resolve itself
The good news for Dunlap, McRight, Roberts, etc is that polarization is going to resolve — but the lines are trending to zero, not 100.
The bigger truth they all miss is that polarization will only end when politics matches reality. This science debate starts and ends with empirical evidence, not consensus’s or “framing” or the emotional ploy of random big storms. The empirical evidence shows the climate models are wrong, the hot spot “fingerprint” was never there, the predictions have failed. The model architecture is missing a whole class of feedbacks. The Sun is probably controlling the climate through its effect on clouds with dynamic magnetic fluxes, solar winds, or spectral changes.
Currently it’s taking a billion dollars of propaganda to keep the Democrat belief so high, so far from reality.
Reality will bite, and sooner or later the public will all realize that like the fear of Witches, the man-made climate crisis was overblown, exaggerated, based on poor data, badly managed and overrun with political self interest and confirmation bias.
When will the polarisation resolve? It depends on the US election:
“Whether, and how, individual Americans vote this November,” Dunlap et. al. write, “may well be the most consequential climate-related decision most of them will have ever taken.”
Trump would give voice to the part of the herd that is closer to reality (ie. observations by satellites, weather balloons, etc etc). As this side of the debate is finally aired, and funding is turned down for propaganda, the followers will gradually follow – and herd-thinkers will shift towards the new more dominant herd position. If Clinton wins, the propaganda will keep the tribal split alive for longer.
The researchers can always find faux scientificy reasons to support their own confirmation bias:
Skepticism toward climate change and hostility toward climate policy have been yoked to conservative identity. To reject them is to risk rejecting that identity and harming the social relationships that come with it. And most people have much stronger commitment to their core identity than they do to any individual political issue.
Just as skepticism has become yoked to conservative identity — hostility, namecalling and religious climate fervour have become yoked to Democrat identity.
What happens when scientists “stop reasoning like a scientist”?
Once an issue has been yoked to our core identities, we stop reasoning like scientists (gathering evidence, seeing where it leads) and start reasoning like lawyers (start with a conclusion, work backward to build a case). Yale psychologist Dan Kahan calls it“motivated reasoning”— “the unconscious tendency of individuals to process information in a manner that suits some end or goal extrinsic to the formation of accurate beliefs.” In this case, the “end or goal” is preserving commitments core to identity.
Dan Kahan, Dunlap and McCright are all their own case study in motivated reasoning. They simply cannot process the possibility that the groupthink is wrong. It mars all their research, stopping them from even considering the possibility that the “motivated” reasoning is a bigger badder problem on the side driven by irrational fear and herd behaviour and backed by gazillions of dollars.
As a former Green my motivated reasoning was to find evidence to support the theory of a man-made crisis, but the harder I looked the less I found. Some of us can overcome that confirmation bias. Why won’t psychologists research that?
9.6 out of 10 based on 105 ratings
A survey in Asia found that 69% of financial institutions there don’t bother with assessing climate change risks when considering financing projects. Either these bankers have missed the last 20 years of IPCC messaging (careless inattentive bankers), or they’ve seen it and they know it’s baloney (skeptical bankers). Hmmm. What’s more likely?
Looks like two thirds of Asian banks don’t believe the IPCC:
[The new survey] …undertaken by Asia Research and Engagement with support of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, … found that 31 per cent of the institutions factored climate change risks into their financing operations, with 61 per cent of banks referring to green products and 56 per cent providing some quantification of their exposure.
It said financial institution were factoring climate change risks into their policies and offered green finance products. But only over a quarter of banks referred to climate change factors as a reason to limit financing .…
The bottom line is always where the money goes.
So over two thirds of financial institutions couldn’t care less about those forecasts of beachside apartments sinking under the waves, or cities becoming unlivable, nor of coal mines supposedly going broke. Nor do they think the average investor is likely to run from these either.
How many rich bankers are there that read the UN First Assessment Report in 1990 and knocked back loans to coal, oil, and car magnates, and beach-side property moguls? The IPCC has made some people rich, but it wasn’t the investors who believed their climate predictions.
The article waxes lyrical about the wondrous trillion dollar investment opportunity. If someone discovered $7 trillion dollars of gold in Kazakhstan, who thinks they would have to survey bankers 20 years later to find out whether they were aware of the risks and opportunities…?
Read more at: Economic Times, India
h/t Willie
9.3 out of 10 based on 62 ratings
Last year there were warnings from crop modelers in Nature that heat kills wheat and yields were going to fall in the “near future”, if temperatures rose. In fact global warming was “already slowing wheat gains”. What followed was a record El Nino, and 2015 was the hottest ever year, with 2016 vying to beat it. But instead of wheat doom, this month the USDA forecasts a record yield of wheat with bumper crops globally. Wheat output has grown in Australia, the US, Russia, Ukraine, everywhere pretty much, except the EU where it has been too rainy. Where are the mea culpas? h/t to the GWPF
Jan 2015, published in Nature. “Global Wheat Yield May Drop as Temperatures Rise”
“… researchers are now letting farmers know that the world’s wheat yields are excepted decline in the near future, with the world standing to lose six percent of its wheat crop for every degree Celsius that the annual global temperature increases.
“The simulations with the multi-crop models showed that warming is already slowing yield gains, despite observed yield increases in the past, at a majority of wheat-growing locations across the globe,” researcher Senthold Asseng, at the University of Florida, explained in a statement.”
August 2016: USDA projects 743m ton wheat production from 2016/2017 year
USDA current August forecast is for 743 million tons, up from 734 million last year (estimated).
Looks like yet another global warming disaster:
 Global Wheat Production, Forecast, 2016/2017 year. USDA. Graph. Source: Food Security Portal with last blue bar added by me for recent USDA estimate.
9.3 out of 10 based on 70 ratings
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7.8 out of 10 based on 24 ratings
Today the Paris Agreement jumped from including 1.1% of global emissions to 39%. It’s part of the performance art, the Grand Act. Including those emissions means nothing as far as emissions go (China will keep putting out more), but it carries political leverage unless we expose the game.
Make no mistake: there is nothing at all legally binding about the Paris Agreement, but it can be politically binding — like a Chastity Vow. Right now, it’s about shame and social standing, not about megatons, but inasmuch as bluff and bluster can pull it off, the UN will eventually want the shapeshifting chastity vow to be treated as a legal force.
This soft vow has the advantage that is completely two faced — it can be all things to all people. To the green-passionate crowd it will be a historic, landmark agreement of the world working together. That’s “momentum”. To the free world, it may look like a failure, but that’s an advantage — it disarms the protests. Watch the Pea — (it’s really a bee). The sting is hidden. That’s ACT III.
After the Copenhagen disaster, the Global Worriers realized that they would have to sneak in a mechanism to keep the Climate Gravy Train running, despite the will of the voters, and crumbling economies, so here is how the plot goes to conjure obedience, and confuse dissenters:
ACT I was the two week PR cabaret in Paris where countries signed their Carbon Chastity Vows — vows that amounted to no actual outcome, other than coming back to ratify it all again later. The important part in Act I was to manage expectations so that the Paris agreement “looks” successful no matter what. It was easy for countries to sign. Each nation brought its own “To Do” list, and it was not legally binding anyway. Success, was a low bar, just the achievement of signatures, not any reduction of CO2 emissions, or God-forbid any actual change in the climate. What matters is that the junkets and subsidies continue.
ACT II is the “ratification” where people “sign into force” an agreement that has no legal force. (Except potentially through tricky subclauses that tie it to legally enforceable documents in each country. See ACT III).
ACT III is the pincer move with domestic legislation. In the US that’s through things like the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP). It can also work through things like the TPP — the Trans Pacific Partnership (where it stings Australia too). The sting is hidden in domestic legislation that creates “arbitration tribunals” and effectively commits nations to meet their international “carbon chastity vows”. (Read more about that below)
ACT IV– repeat ACT I. This play never ends.
The point is to avoid giving voters a choice
Politico quotes Inhofe: “This is another attempt by the president to go around Congress in order to achieve his unpopular and widely rejected climate agenda for his legacy. The Senate does not support the Paris Agreement which is why his administration prefers to not call it a treaty.” — Sen. Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Environment Public Works Committee.
“The agreement was crafted to help the U.S. avoid Senate ratification, as is constitutionally required for treaties. Instead the structure of the agreement, which lays out goals but contains few legally binding requirements, allows the U.S. to formally join the agreement by having the president sign documents and then submit them to the U.N.
Republican presidential nominee Trump has threatened to “cancel” the climate agreement if he is elected, but putting it into force could make such an action more complicated.
Myron Ebell explains that this document has no effect until Congress votes on it
No one should be able to sign a chastity vow on your behalf, right? Even the UN themselves quietly call this a treaty, which means Obama cannot just declare it to be so:
Negotiators at COP-21 went along with the charade that it’s not really a treaty for the United States. However, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat considers it a treaty. The relevant UNFCCC web page is headlined: “Paris Agreement—Status of Ratification.” The information note prepared by the UNFCCC Legal Affairs Programme on the Entry into Force of the Paris Agreement: Legal Requirements and Implications begins: “1. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties states that ‘a treaty enters into force in such manner and upon such date as it may provide or as the negotiating States may agree’.”
Moreover, every other country considers it a treaty and is going through its normal procedures for joining a treaty. Patrick Goodenough in CNS News reported recently that even in China, which is ruled by a Communist Party dictatorship, the government has referred the treaty to the Standing Committee of Parliament for its approval.
Article 20.4 of the TPP says: “The Parties [recognize] that multilateral environmental agreements to which they are party play an important role, globally and domestically, in protecting the environment and that their respective implementation of these agreements is critical to achieving the environmental objectives of these agreements. Accordingly, each Party affirms its commitment to implement the multilateral environmental agreements to which it is a party.“
— Howard Richman, Jesse Richman and Raymond Richman
The TPP can be a vehicle to enforce the Paris vow:
“Also, chapter 27 of the TPP creates “Arbitration Tribunals.” These tribunals, according to the Richmans, “can impose multi-billion dollar fines upon the U.S. government if the U.S. violates anything that is in the pact.”
“In other words, the tribunals can force whatever Obama negotiates in Paris upon the American people, and Congress will have very little say,” argues the Richmans.”
— Alex Swoyer
What’s the solution?
First, let the voters know that the Paris agreement is a bluff. It is not legally binding unless domestic legislation, or Congress or Parliament makes it so. As Marlo Lewis said the Paris Agreement Is a Real Tiger: recognise that the Paris Agreement is a treaty, and it must pass the US Senate. Marlo Lewis, explains why it is a treaty and not an executive agreement. Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation discusses it too.
Second: Even if it was a real agreement, it’s pointless. Tell the world that China and India will be producing more CO2 regardless. By 2030, Australia’s entire 25% cut in annual emissions will be undone by 2 whole days of Chinese output.
Third: As Marlo Lewis said in the Paris Agreement Is a Real Tiger: Free nations need to legislate something like the Byrd-Hagel Resolution which was passed in 1997 to counteract the Kyoto Treaty.
Fourth: Be ever vigilant about local legislation that mentions terms like “multilateral environmental agreements.”
It’s all bluff. We can still stop it, but we have to tell the world what this shapeshifting vow is.
For more information see:
9.4 out of 10 based on 57 ratings
Somewhere in the world, a whole town is missing their tea-leaf readers.
The Physics tells us (practical beats us over the head) that more CO2 will mean warmer nights. It is a 97% certified mantra that warm nights are a fingerprint of man-made global warming.*
Well don’t look now, but CO2 causes cold nights too (and get this… on the East Coast).
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the simultaneous occurrence of extremely cold winter days in the Eastern United States and extremely warm winter days in the West, according to a Stanford-led study published in Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres. Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are likely driving this trend, the researchers report.
Used to be that single seasons were “weather” and thirty year trends were “science”– now all they need is a single repeated season and half a country:
“Looking back at temperature data from the past 35 years, we’ve found that in fact 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 did have the biggest difference in winter temperature between the East and West.”
This is pretty freaky — can you imagine how smart these guys must be to spot this pattern? We are talking GCM-Rorschach. Coming soon — record differences from 6 – 9am in Spring mornings in States starting with P.
After that, alternating hot-cold weather split north-south, oh wait…
Note the standard press release formula
Part I: Start with two paragraphs of spooky ominous observations.
Part II: it’s onto the mechanism, sorry, the money-request: Mention how we need to understand this better, how this kind of weather costs billions, stretches resources… tick, platitudes, done… “Understanding the physical factors driving extreme weather could provide policymakers with more reliable information…
Part III: wave hands (don’t clap, it’s microagressive) just jazz them. Here’s The Big Evidence:
The Stanford study finds that the occurrence and severity of “warm West, cold East” winter events increased significantly between 1980 and 2015.
…because before 1980 there was a constant 4 billion trendless years.
Look out for the ridge trough pattern as the Moon traverses Jupiter:
This is partly because the winter temperature has warmed more in the West than in the East, increasing the odds that warm days in the West coincide with cold days in the East. Along with warming of the West, a “ridge-trough” pattern of high atmospheric pressure in the West and low atmospheric pressure in the East has also been producing greater numbers of winter days on which large areas of the West and East experience extreme temperatures at the same time.
“What we’ve found is that this particular atmospheric configuration connects the cold extremes in the East to the occurrence of warm extremes in the West,” said lead author Deepti Singh,…
And anomalous patterns jumped over the Moon. Weasel words coming:
Despite long-term warming across most of the globe, some regions can experience colder than normal temperatures associated with anomalous circulation patterns that drive cold air from the poles to the mid-latitudes. In fact, circulation patterns that facilitate such extremes are potentially a response to enhanced warming, the study’s authors point out.
Potentially this type of word-salad waffle can fool gullible editors and useful idiot fans.
“Although the occurrence of cold extremes is often used as evidence to dismiss the existence of human-caused global warming, our work shows that the warm West, cool East trend is actually consistent with the influence of human activities that have modified Earth’s climate in recent decades,” Singh said.
Thus does a mere potential become “actually consistent” with the exact opposite of what the models predicted.
PART IV: the get-me-out-of-jail climate soothsayer clause
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9.3 out of 10 based on 86 ratings
A bunch of scientists used tree rings to figure out the streamflow in Bear River, Utah, since the dark ages. This is what a perfect stable climate looks like.
Obviously we need immediate carbon trading to stop whatever is going to happen next:
 Figure 1. Reconstructed Bear River decadal-scale drought (brown) and wet (green) periods from cubic smoothing spline with frequency response of 25% at wavelength 10 years. Dashed lines indicate 1 SD from reconstruction mean. Adapted from DeRose et al. (2016). Thanks to the excellent CO2Science site for analyzing it in their collection.
In 1200 Years of Historic Streamflow we see that there was a dreadful drought in 1210 that lasted 70 years. The worst wet period lasted nearly 50 years and started in 1378. Spot the effect of CO2. Anyone?
Naturally there has already been a Bear River Climate Change Adaptation Workshop, with “thirty-nine representatives of 20 state and federal agencies, local governments, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations.”
The old 2010 Workshop report tells us we have to let go of the idea that the climate is stable — “stationarity is dead”. *
“ We are no longer working in a world where we can assume climate stability”
Climate stability and persistent ecosystems are no more. Several years ago it became apparent to the conservation community that we are no longer working in a world where we can assume climate stability and persistent ecosystems. Hydrologists now say, for example, that “stationarity is dead.” The assemblages of species we have known as persistent, relatively stable, natural communities will disassemble and reassemble in new and unpredictable ways. In fact, climate change is already causing subtle change, like changes in timing of migrations or leaf-out, and dramatic and sometimes surprising change, such as widespread forest dieback, due to the crossing of temperature and moisture thresholds.
Obviously mums, dads and scout leaders want emissions reductions so we can return to perfect medieval weather:
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9.1 out of 10 based on 84 ratings
Welcome to Higher Education 2016: Whatever you do, don’t ask questions, don’t ask for evidence, and don’t discuss your doubts on class forums. “We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change’” All outside sources for research must be peer reviewed by the IPCC.
Students in the University of Colorado expressed concern about the first online lecture in “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age”. All three Professors together replied via email that students should Drop class if they dispute man-made climate change
“The point of departure for this course is based on the scientific premise that human induced climate change is valid and occurring. We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” states the email, a copy of which was provided to The College Fix by a student in the course.
“Opening up a debate that 98% of climate scientists unequivocally agree to be a non-debate would detract from the central concerns of environment and health addressed in this course,” the professors’ email continued.
“… If you believe this premise to be an issue for you, we respectfully ask that you do not take this course… — signed Professors, Rebecca Laroche, Wendy Haggren and Eileen Skahill
The ban included discussions on online forums among students (we wouldn’t want people polluting the thoughts of believers, would we?) And no thoughts or arguments outside of those approved by an unelected, unaccountable foreign committee shall be considered.
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8.9 out of 10 based on 116 ratings
 Oh the futility. Australia’s entire annual production of carbon from all that mining, construction, industry and everything is replicated in China every 18 days.
If we cut our emissions by an obscene, bleeding 25%, we will spend billions and yet China will undo all our hair-shirt “savings” in just 5 normal days. (And that’s at current rates, it gets worse by 2030).
Australia is a giant coal and iron quarry built at the far end of the Earth, with a tiny, but rapidly growing population spread across a vast land. Transport distances are eye-watering. We run 94% of everything off fossil fuels and there are no more easy cuts to be made. Gaia gave us more uranium than any other country but we are religiously opposed to nuclear power. (What would it take to change that — a bomb from China?). We’ve got more Sun, hot rocks and empty space than anywhere, so if solar, wind or geothermal were going to work on Planet Earth, it would be here. We are God’s Gift to the renewable industry — yet they all fail. (Today, Flannery’s Geothermal project crashed, last week Windorah’s solar farm shut, and last month, the whole state of South Australia nearly closed.) Earlier this year Tasmania — the renewables wonderland was flying in emergency diesel generators and seeding clouds to make electricity.
If China’s emissions increase (how could they not) then by 2030 it will only take China 8 days to outdo a 100% cut in Australian emissions.
In other words — by 2030, for all the pain it takes us to achieve a 25% cut in our current emissions. It will only China 2 days to undo our “gain”.
Thanks to Tom Quirk for graphing these from the COP 21 data (Paris UN meeting) — Jo
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Guest post by Tom Quirk
Australian target for annual CO2 emissions in 2030 is equal to the annual increase in emissions from China in 2030. At that time China will match Australia’s annual emissions in 8 days.
The data for China for 1970 to 2013 comes from CDIAC, For the year 2014 Edgar[i] reports that the emissions increase is one third of the increase in 2013.
 … Each year China adds “another Australia” to its output.
 …. Though notice the falloff in the last few years as China’s bubble economy pops. (Remember that graph showing the freaky sudden input of the Chinese government last December?)
We can also compare total Australian emissions with total Chinese emissions:
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8.9 out of 10 based on 43 ratings
Matt Ridley in The Australian explains how every man and his dog is forecasting the doom of the Arctic sea ice, and not only have they been wrong year after year, but they all assume that if the ice all melts it’ll be a global disaster. But Earth’s already been-there done-that, and for years, and it was no-biggie. Polar bears obviously got through it, as did seals. Humans without protective solar panels somehow spread far and wide, and generally flourished.
I suspect the main climate refugees from the Arctic would have names like Donner and Blitzen. This is the one thing Matt doesn’t explain — in 8,000BC when the ice melted, what the heck happened with Santa?
This was a period known as the “early Holocene insolation maximum” (EHIM). Because the Earth’s axis was tilted away from the vertical more than today (known as obliquity), and because we were then closer to the Sun in July than in January (known as precession), the amount of the Sun’s energy hitting the far north in summer was much greater than today. This “great summer” effect was the chief reason the Earth had emerged from an ice age, because hot northern summers had melted the great ice caps of North America and Eurasia, exposing darker land and sea to absorb more sunlight and warm the whole planet.
The effect was huge: about an extra 50 watts per square metre 80 degrees north in June. By contrast, the total effect of man-made global warming will reach 3.5 watts per square metre (but globally) only by the end of this century.
To put it in context, the EHIM was the period during which agriculture was invented in about seven different parts of the globe at once. Copper smelting began; cattle and sheep were domesticated; wine and cheese were developed; the first towns appeared. The seas being warmer, the climate was generally wet so the Sahara had rivers and forests, hippos and people.
Barring one especially cold snap 8200 years ago, the coldest spell of the past 10 millennia was the very recent “little ice age” of AD1300-1850, when glaciers advanced, tree lines descended and the Greenland Norse died out.
 UPDATE: This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855. The last 150 years (1705 to 1855) are highlighted in red to show the warming as the Earth began coming out of the LIA.  Created by Cuffy and Clow in 1997, and based on Greenland ice core records, this chart shows global temperatures for the past 15,000 years. | h/t Don Easterbrook. * Source: iceagenow.
It is pretty hard to measure sea-ice that might have melted 8,000 years ago. But the Greenland Ice cores show temperatures there were hotter than today, and there are some proxies to estimate the extent of the sea ice. Ridley refers to a paper (Stranne 2013) which uses 8 different proxies that suggest extended periods of hundreds of years where there was no perennial sea ice. With models (yeah, yeah) they say the Holocene warm period is all explained with extra sunlight coming in due to the orbital shift at the time (I don’t think that is controversial). They speculate that the earlier instability and temperature gyrations of 12-15,000 years ago in Greenland were due to the ice shifting from a phases of regular sea ice, to being regularly ice free. The albedo of sea ice is a reasonably important feedback.
The darker blue times in the graph below are when proxies suggest there was “low” sea ice (6,000 to 12,000 years ago).
Abstract — Stranne et al
Arctic Ocean sea ice proxies generally suggest a reduction in sea ice during parts of the early and middle Holocene (∼6000–10,000 years Before the Present) compared to present day conditions. This sea ice minimum has been attributed to the northern hemisphere Early Holocene Insolation Maximum (EHIM) associated with Earth’s orbital cycles. Here we investigate the transient effect of insolation variations during the final part of the last glaciation and the Holocene by means of continuous climate simulations with the coupled atmosphere–sea ice–ocean column model CCAM. We show that the increased insolation during EHIM has the potential to push the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover into a regime dominated by seasonal ice, i.e. ice free summers. The strong sea ice thickness response is caused by the positive sea ice albedo feedback. Studies of the GRIP ice cores and high latitude North Atlantic sediment cores show that the Bølling–Allerød period (c. 12,700–14,700 years BP) was a climatically unstable period in the northern high latitudes and we speculate that this instability may be linked to dual stability modes of the Arctic sea ice cover characterized by e.g. transitions between periods with and without perennial sea ice cover.
REFERENCE
Stranne, C., Jakobsson, M., Bjork, G. (2014) Arctic Ocean perennial sea ice breakdown during the Early Holocene Insolation Maximum , Quaternary Science Reviews, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.10.022
* h/t to Craig Thomas for pointing out and that the word “global” in Graph 2, was better off not being there. h/t to Michael for spotting that the arrows on graph 2 for the MWP and LIA were incorrect. Both fixed. Thanks to both.
9.3 out of 10 based on 66 ratings
File it under: Amazing
A “Weather Bomb” storm in the Atlantic generates pounding seismic waves that can be detected through the Earth as far away as Japan. They used 200+ stations and could detect the distance and direction of these microseismic waves. This could be pretty useful to figure out more about what’s under the crust in the same way that an “X-ray” works on us.
 Credit: Kiwamu Nishida and Ryota Takagi Press Release: An Atlantic “weather bomb,” or a severe, fast-developing storm, causes ocean swells that incite faint and deep tremors into the oceanic crust. These subtle waves run through the earth and can be detected in places as far away as Japan, where facilities using a method called “Hi-net” measure the amplitude of the storm’s P and S waves for the first time.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 45 ratings
Tell the world it is all an act.
 … It’s a do or die moment for The Cause. Brexit has hit them hard, and the Trump factor threatens to wreck everything. The Paris agreement has stalled pathetically at 1.1% of all human emissions (they need 55% to come into force). They need a gamechanger or the illusion of one.
Next week expect a grand performance from US and China — or rather from two men who look solemn and can sign important looking carbon chastity vows on behalf of 1.8 billion people. Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping will say they have ratified the Paris agreement. Expect triumphant parades, and smiles, handshakes and talk of a historic moment. It’s all for show. China will agree to do nothing different until 2030 when its population growth peaks, and Obama can’t get the support of Congress.
But the gala performance may work if enough other countries fall for it — especially the stupidly obedient Anglosphere, and the trapped EU. India, Russia and Brazil will only buy into it they are fed enough pork. But the pork has to come from somewhere, and that’s us — The West. That’s who this show is for — western voters.
The Paris agreement has only won over 23 tin pot nations responsible for 1.1% of human emissions. They are doomed to failure without the US and China, which together control 38%. Once the largest two economies of the world are nominally, “technically”, signed — expect other countries to fall into line all over the world. That’s why it’s so important we make sure everyone knows that there is nothing real about this deal. The Chinese deal is symbolic, and an Obama deal has legal questions all over it.
In the real world, changing the planet’s weather costs a fortune. The US voters don’t care and won’t pay. The US Congress will never allow a meaningful economic hit to occur, so no real treaty, with real teeth, could get through.
China is a giant coal mine and CO2 pump
Australia is the largest exporter of coal in the world, but China digs up ten times as much as we export. In the run-up to Paris, China has built so many coal fired stations that as its economy falters it is even closing them but only because it has too many. It has so much coal power there is even discussion that it could sell the excess power to Germany because it can produce electricity so cheaply that even the transmission losses over such a distance don’t matter — electricity in Berlin is wildly expensive (thanks to their green obsession). The Chinese have been running full tilt to develop their manufacturing and electricity base — CO2 be damned. Last time there was a “historic” moment with Obama, China agreed to do nothing different til 2030. It was an unenforceable long term commitment with no consequences. Like all these international agreements, the net effect will be to produce more global CO2 as factories move to China where they produce four times as much CO2 as Western factories. But no one cares about actual CO2, just like they don’t care about real air pollution and the 5.5 million deaths from it. Xi Jinping wants the West to sign the Paris agreement — it will hobble the competition, plus China already profits from carbon penance even as it hopes to profit by selling coal fired electricity back to hobbled nations.
US Voters and the US congress won’t pay to change the weather
Anything Obama signs is a gambit of a President in his last days. The only way the US will ratify the Paris deal is through trickery and deceit. There is not the will or interest in the US to pay for climate change. Nearly one third of people in the US say “climate change a total hoax”. Only 3% of US people think the climate is the most important issue. Fully 61% in the US say climate debate is not over, and 57% don’t believe what UN scientists say. Even the term “Environmentalist” is becoming a dirty word.
No wonder Obama didn’t talk about the climate leading up to elections, he knew he couldn’t win a mandate for it, and the Congress wouldn’t agree. Instead he’s going through the rogue EPA, and using regulations rather than legislation. The Paris agreement was not called a “treaty” and had to be “non-binding” so it could avoid the bomb of getting Congressional approval. But the bomb still ticks.
Myron Ebell describes the US legal headache:
Here is the language from Article Two, Section Two, Clause Two of the U. S. Constitution: “[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”
The article by Li Jing references this curious requirement: “There are still some uncertainties from the US side due to the complicated US system in ratifying such a treaty, but the announcement is still quite likely to be ready by Sept 2,” said a source, who declined to be named.
Skeptics can still do a lot to stop this trainwreck
One: Spread the word to newspaper editors, journalists and everyone that the Obama-Xi Jinping deal will be a symbolic sham. The Paris Agreement will never change the weather, but it could wreck western economies.
Two: Help US voters understand what a Hillary election means. For all his faults, Trump may trash the climate gravy train. But Hillary is promising to outdo Obama.
UPDATE: Sept 21 is when Australia will apparently “consider ratifying the Paris Agreement”.
In Australia, treaty ratification does have to be reviewed by parliament but the final decision is the prerogative of the government, meaning Turnbull and Frydenberg may face an arm wrestle with their right-wing cabinet colleagues.
The official said Australia’s decision to accept the invitation of UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon to a special event for ratification on September 21 of this year was “under consideration”. (H/t Dennis A)
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If I didn’t live 15,000km away I would be going to this for sure, for the debates on the solar cycles, planets, ozone and oceans — and because Nils-Axel Mörner, Roger (Tallbloke) and Christopher Monckton will be there. Piers Corbyn too, the man who beat the UK Met Office for weather predictions and the brother of Jeremy Corbyn (Labour leader in the UK). CLEXIT will be launched. Nils has published more than 590 papers on sea levels around the world and set up the Pattern Recognition Journal which was drastically closed by the publisher, because it “doubted” the IPCC conclusions.
Entrance is open to anyone, and there is no registration fee — just a donation. If this were a government funded gravy train, it would cost hundreds to see lame predictable presentations by researchers who aren’t brave enough to question the dogma. Come to London, and watch the scientists and contributors who are pushing the bounds of science.
See the full programme and the extended abstracts in this 35 Mb document for full details.
An international multidisciplinary conference
to be held in London, UK
September 8-9, 2016
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8.9 out of 10 based on 56 ratings
Feel the guilt in the Gaia religion: New map shows alarming growth of the human footprint
“Humans are the most voracious consumers planet Earth has ever seen. With our land-use, hunting and other exploitative activities, we are now directly impacting three-quarters of the Earth’s land surface,” said Professor Laurance.
And three-quarters of 30% of the world is a fifth of the world. But algae will be feeling pretty cheezed right now. They wrecked up the whole atmosphere — but get no credit. Algae define the term “voracious consumer”. The pristine state of the atmosphere was transformed forever, plus the schmucks made oil.
But nothing changes the planet quite like a 10-20km wide rock dropping in and wiping out 90% of all species on Earth. That’s a “footprint”.
Note the magical 97% appears again — a sacred number of “certainty”:
A James Cook University scientist says a new map of the ecological footprint of humankind shows 97 per cent of the most species-rich places on Earth have been seriously altered.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 52 ratings
For years, skeptical scientists have been pointing at data that showed the the world started warming somewhere from 1700 – 1820. This has been known from glaciers, sea level studies, ice cores, boreholes, ocean heat content estimates, and more proxies than any climate-nerd cares to name.
Finally, expert climate modelers are “surprised” to discover this:
“…their study had detected warming in the Arctic and tropical oceans from around the 1830s, just 80 years after the Industrial Revolution started in England. “It was an extraordinary finding,” she said. “It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”
How many grant dollars did it take to figure out what skeptical scientists have been saying for years?
The correlation with global temperatures and actual numerical human emissions is abysmal, so now Abrams et al ignore the numbers and appear to suggest that “The Industrial Revolution” itself started the warming — as if the mere invention of the steam engine heated the world.
[Dr Abram] said the study attributed the gradual warming to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions linked to the move from an agricultural to industrialised society.
“The climate system did respond quite quickly to industrialisation …. it was a small response, but it’s a measurable one.”
Global warming started 200 years ago, but human emissions of CO2 were bugger-all-of-nothing until after World War II. Humans have put out nearly 90% of all our CO2 molecules ever since the War started. We’ve put out 30% of all our emissions ever since the year 2000. The message hammered home over and over, is that temperatures don’t correlate at all well with our CO2 emissions and never have.
Planes, cars and coal power plants make no difference to global warming
Phil Jones told us that global temperatures kept heating at the same rate in the 1880s as they did in the 1920s as they did in the 1980s. (See that graph below).
The warming isn’t any different when human CO2 emissions are small or massive. The rate of warming was the same in the 1920s when nearly half of all horsepower still came from horses. Indeed without any electricity at all, and no cars, humans “caused” warming which was as fast as a decade when a billion people flew in the sky.
Then, when the Industrial Revolution hit China, the global temperatures “paused”.
Here is a new pretty graph (click to enlarge) from Abrams et al showing what skeptics have said all along, that the world is warming out of a little ice age:
CO2 is supposed to warm the whole globe. It isn’t working out like that.
 … The warming started long before our emissions became important
The correlation looks “good” from 1979- 1999, but there are contradictions in every other time period. . Everything about this graph tells us that CO2 is not a major controller. Other forces are more important and the mainstream climate modelers don’t know what those drivers are — they are not even looking for them. (On the other hand, people free of government funded groupthink are — see Seven possible ways the sun could change our cloud cover, and Is that one new Solar force, or two? The Force-ND Hypothesis.)
 … Global warming delayed in the Southern Hemisphere:
Interestingly, the study found sustained warming was delayed in the southern hemisphere by about 50 years.
Dr Abram said this could be linked to the circulation patterns in the southern oceans that move warmer waters away from the Antarctic and into the sub-surface ocean.
Maybe it’s because there’s more ocean in the South? Dear Dr Abram, did any of the “global atmosphere and circulation” models model that circulation accurately before your discovery? Since you were so surprised, I guess not. (The abstract confirms that).
The immovable wall
Note the usual mindless caveat:
Dr Abram said the study did not alter “anything we know about how climate has changed during the 20th century”.
Nothing ever does. That’s exactly why government-strangled-climate-science is in an endless rut, predicts nothing, and is “surprised” by the inanely obvious.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 127 ratings
 In a nutshell: a government funded group finds some bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef, and repackages the stats to come up with the apocalyptic statistic that only 7% of the reef is not bleached! The SMH reported that “93% of the corals” are damaged. The reef is 2,000 kilometers long. Did anyone really think about these headlines?
Then in a development that “no one” could see coming, local tourism is damaged, potentially costing a lot of jobs.
“And the loss of these tourists could cost our tourism industry a whopping $1 billion a year, a report out today by The Australia Institute warned.”
This inspires local dive operators (who possibly know what the reef looks like) to pay for a two week expedition to survey 28 sites. They find about 5% damage and describe the difference as phenomenal. Indeed, they say the reef is pretty much just like it was 20 years ago when they last did a survey.
We know that both sides have an interest finding a healthy or unhealthy reef. The problem starts with self-serving taxpayer funded scientists who are paid to find a crisis. But they would not get away with it if the media didn’t let them. Blame sloppy gullible journalists like Tom Arup (SMH), and Stephanie Smail (ABC) who should have asked some hard questions, and protested at the surreal headlines. Will the job-destroying ABC report the new survey?
Great Barrier Reef only 5% bleached, Cairns Post
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8.6 out of 10 based on 104 ratings
Only higher education could produce something this silly.
The University of Sussex gets the credit for a paper that argues that countries that are committed to nuclear energy are progressing slower towards the holy grail of meeting “climate targets”. This discovery coincidentally comes exactly as the UK Hinkley Point “hangs in the balance”. What were the odds?
The Newspeak starts in the headline — what’s a “climate target”. My personal climate target is to move into the tropics each winter, but the EU climate target is not about reducing temperatures over Spain, but about “more windmills”. The climate target of the EU has apparently got nothing much to do with the climate:
…the EU’s 2020 Strategy — to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, increase the share of renewable energy to at least 20% of consumption, and achieve energy savings of 20% or more by 2020…
They cluster countries in to 3 groups and discover that the countries that plan to maintain or expand nuclear energy (eg Bulgaria, Hungary and the UK) are not cutting emissions as fast as countries that have no nukes (Denmark, Ireland, and Norway).
Could it be, I wonder, because countries that have nukes have already cut their emissions (they only start counting the reductions from 2005). I scoff, I must be missing something. That’s too obvious.
But then the paper proves me wrong and does national psychoanalysis:
The team say that the gigantic investments of time, money and expertise in nuclear power plants, such as the proposed Hinckley Point C in the UK, can create dependency and ‘lock-in’ — a sense of ‘no turning back’ in the nation’s psyche.
I turn to the actual paper, thinking this must be a marketing mistake. Not so.
You may have thought energy production was about joules per megawatt hour, but it’s really a conditioning system of governance.
Whereas nuclear is nowadays often regarded simply as one type of sociotechnical regime among many, several decades ago theorists recognized that the way they operate is quintessential of the deeply political self-reinforcing dynamics in infrastructures and institutions – and even more widely, in economies, cultures, and political discourse – that are better understood as conditioning systems of governance themselves.
Nuclear power creates totalitarian states?
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9.9 out of 10 based on 56 ratings
The researchers don’t say it, but this is obviously the beginnings of cricket. (David says “baseball”).
Archaeologists found lots of round rocks like this that are around 70,000 – 1.8 million years old in a cave in South Africa. They thought they might be tools, but now reckon that they were used as a weapon for hunting. With models (yeah, yeah) these are apparently the ideal size and weight to score maximum high speed damage at 20-30m distance given the mechanics of a human arm. So before spears, people probably throw rocks overhand to hunt. We are the only animals that can do this — which might explain why a million years later people are still so enthused about cricket (and baseball).
Maybe the South Africans have an unfair advantage playing the game so much longer than everyone else. (David doesn’t think much of my theory, but cricket suddenly makes a lot more sense to me now).
Snippets from the press release:
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