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...just this year it was reported that, while the ozone holes above the poles are shrinking, the ozone layer is *thinning* above urban areas: https://www.atmos-chem-phys.ne...

A recent paper predicts global cooling starting as soon as 2040 from the rapid melting of ice sheets. http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net...

Your numbers are low. However, the more egregious statement I'll take exception to is this one:

We have no evidence that a planet 8c warmer than it is now would be incompatible with human life.

No, 8 degrees C is not "incompatible with human life"!!

That's a strawman argument. Eight degrees C of warming would be a catastrophe in pretty much every way-- people are currently arguing about how bad two degrees of warming would be-- but if you are hearing people say that it would be "incompatible with human life," figure out who those people are and stop listening to them.

Relax. Although the submitter's write-up uses the binding "will", the actual paper is about as firm as the (in)famous Geico commercial. The one about 15 minutes, that could save you 15%. Or more...

It is safer that way — when the time comes and the mongered fear does not materialize, the "researchers" can shrug and offer you some new and improved fears to worry about without having to explain their past mistakes. "We never said it will happen, only that it could."

Pedantically speaking, such statements are not falsifiable and thus non-scientific. Consequently, any "scientists" using them in a supposedly "scientific" article is a con-artist...

Let me know once you've got a photograph of the six-winged beasts of Revelations.

My guess is that you'll live long enough to see the ravages of climate change (whether or not they include megaboulders... that part has not been collaborated by other researchers). It won't exactly be an end-of-the-world type thing (sorry to disappoint), but maybe at that point in your adult life you'll be able to reconsider the value of trusting indirect revelation over empirical/rational/mathematical analysis.

The paper starts talking about boulders on page 3781: http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net... - it's only a small part of the paper.

The logic is that increased temperature gradients will increase frequency and ferocity of storms in the North Atlantic. It draws upon evidence from the past where this happened, the sea can throw massive boulders great distances. The paper provides evidence that this isn't due to rare tsunamis but powerful storms. This isn't exactly new information to be honest, just the scale.

Of course your counter-argument - personal attacks on the scientists - shows great maturity on your part, and a willingness to engage. Not.

Just another Trumpist Trumping his Stubby Horn.

Here is the pdf. http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net...

Hold on there mister, the Laschamp event only lasted less than 500 years, and occurred in the middle of an ice age, over 41,000 years ago. I don't know about you, but I see a whole lot of unknowns that make it very difficult to conclude that "the climate didn't change". ... I would prefer to not draw any conclusions from what little data we have of this event.

So your preferences are different than Richard Alley's. He concluded at 43:01 that "We had a big cosmic ray signal, and the climate ignores it. And it's just about that simple. These cosmic rays didn't do enough that you can see it."

Maybe this is because Richard Alley's estimate that the Laschamp anomaly lasted "for a millenium or so" matches other estimates that are longer than 500 years.

We have the technology to measure GCR's, and we have the technology to measure cloud cover. Let's verify the theory of GCR's and cloud formation, let's quantify it, and then let's see if we can accurately predict cloud cover and irradiance fluctuations based on this data.

I've explained that the maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.

Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al. suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”

Another update: Snow-Kropla et al. 2011 makes similar points.

I've been faithfully following science stories on the BBC site for years now, and this one stands out like a sore thumb. Until now, they almost always interviewed independent UK scientists to help them interpret the impact of the original research in a new and noteworthy publication. Specifically, they almost always interview a scientist who downplays the impact, and usually also one who is more excited about it. I've always assumed this was part of their journalistic standard, and a shining example for a lot of other news outlets; interpreting scientific papers is tricky, and including varying opinions of independent scientists is paramount to giving the audience the full picture.

Now here, there's suddenly none of that; they only interviewed the first author of the paper, who naturally has a tendency to exaggerate the the impact of their research. No ill will, mind you; being passionate about one's work is a prerequisite to stay motivated as a scientists in the face of frustrating work and inhumanely long working hours. This passion will naturally bias any scientist in favor of their own research. Moreover, this kind of exaggeration is implicitly required by most granting agencies: they almost always require applicants to demonstrate wider impact, which in the case of fundamental research implies wild speculation.

Either way, since the BBC didn't do its job, allow me to cast myself in the role of the "skeptical" scientists they failed to interview. My field of research is not athmospheric science, but I'm familiar with both the underlying physical mechanisms and with fields that rely heavily on models. Here is what I learned by reading some of the paper and references. The problem they sought to tackle is that (local) athmospheric models fail to to accurately predict the amount of aerosols produced in the atmosphere from the low-volatility organic compounds emitted by boreal forests. This appears to be a well-known problem in their field, as testified by the cited references (especially ref. 2, Hallquist et al. in the open access journal "Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics" 2009, vol. 9, pp. 5155–5236). So all TFA does is provide new insights in the underlying physical processes that could likely be used to rectify the (local) athmospheric models; this is nice work and worthy of publication in Nature. As customary, the authors begin and end their paper by speculating about the wider impact of their research, which is a natural thing to do, as explained above. In this case, they speculate that (global, long-timescale) climate models may suffer from the same flaw as the above athmospheric models, and that adjusting them accordingly will lead to less extreme climate change predictions (note how nobody spoke of qualitatively different outcomes). This sounds very much unwarranted to me; in my field, coarser, higer-level models are not build on lower-level models, but on the empirical observations the latter try to explain, and judging by the Hallquist paper, the fact that boreal forests produce more aerosols than expected has already been part of our empirical knowledge for many years. Which is unsurprising: we have satellites in space that very accurately measure the planet's local albedo.

TL;DR version: the authors speculate that their cool fundamental findings might have impact on a different subdiscipline (climate science), but from the information I could find, this speculation seems both unwarranted and unlikely. Not being deeply familiar with the science, the journalist converts this speculative part (of an otherwise good paper) into a misleading headline. They make the capital mistake of only interviewing the paper's first author, who does a poor job at putting their speculation into perspective. This is particularly unfortunate because it's such a sensitive subject; given this curious break of routine practices, the journalist (and by extension, the BBC) is exposing themselves to accusations of politically/financially motivated bias.

1. Graduate education should include mandatory classroom instruction, and a heavier emphasis on giving presentations. I regularly suffer through my colleagues' miserable presentations at conferences, so I strongly believe that scientists need to develop better communication skills.
2. Re-orient science classes so they emphasise curiosity and skepticism rather than rote memorization. I've previously complained about the sad state of science education in high school and general collegiate physics courses. Some people still believe that the seasons are caused by the Earth moving farther towards/away from the Sun, and that sinks/bathtubs drain differently in different hemispheres. Maybe if science classes actually taught people how to think like scientists, these silly myths wouldn't be as widespread. Maybe people would even be interested in science in general if they didn't see the subject as a bunch of equations to be mechanically applied.
3. The scientific community has a tendency to ignore bizarre claims because they don't want to give credibility to people who believe in things like creationism, electric universe, climate-change-denialism, moon-landing-hoaxers, relativity-deniers, etc. This isn't very productive, because some people apparently get the impression that scientists dismiss these fringe views because of a massive conspiracy of suppression. I think it's a better idea to slowly and patiently explain why these examples of pseudoscience simply aren't consistent with the available evidence. I'm trying to do that on my homepage, but there's only one of me versus a horde of pseudoscientists...
4. Science journals need to be made open source, like PLoS ONE and ACP. Maybe the general public's science illiteracy is partially based on the fact that crackpots publish their "research" freely on the internet (which is why the internet is now a tarpit of scientific misinformation), whereas scientists publish articles in peer-reviewed journals that can't be accessed by anyone outside of a major university.

As you can tell, I think this article touches on a very serious problem. Sagan said it best:

"We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster." -- Carl Sagan