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Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Chris Mooney writes at Mother Jones that a new study, from the Yale and George Mason University research teams on climate change communication, shows a 7-percentage-point increase in the proportion of Americans who say they do not believe that global warming is happening. And that's just since the spring of 2013. The number of deniers is now 23 percent; back at the start of last year, it was 16 percent (PDF). The obvious question is, what happened over the last year to produce more climate denial? The answer may lie in the so-called global warming "pause"—the misleading idea that global warming has slowed down or stopped over the the past 15 years or so. This claim was used by climate skeptics, to great effect, in their quest to undermine the release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report in September 2013—precisely during the time period that is in question in the latest study. "The notion of a global warming "pause" is, at best, the result of statistical cherry-picking," writes Mooney. " It relies on starting with a very hot year (1998) and then examining a relatively short time period (say, 15 years), to suggest that global warming has slowed down or stopped during this particular stretch of time." Put these numbers back into a broader context and the overall warming trend remains clear. "If you shift just 2 years earlier, so use 1996-2010 instead of 1998-2012, the trend is 0.14 C per decade, so slightly greater than the long-term trend," explains Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at NASA who was heavily involved in producing the IPCC report. This is why climate scientists generally don't seize on 15 year periods and make a big thing about them. "Journalists take heed: Your coverage has consequences. All those media outlets who trumpeted the global warming "pause" may now be partly responsible for a documented decrease in Americans' scientific understanding.""
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/22/3099141/climate-denying-groups-funding/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-climate-change-denial-effort/
http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/climate-change-denial-a-billion-dollar-industry-of-fabrication-says-study/
(sampled from the first few hits for: https://www.google.es/search?q=climate+change+denial+lobby+billions }
No sig today...
It's not a peer-reviewed study, it's an informal systematic review.
http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/11/15/why-climate-deniers-have-no-credibility-science-one-pie-chart
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The best models that they have are ones that have as part of them global warming. Can you point us at other models that have produced better predictions ?
No, I thought not ... so let us go with the best models that we have, even if they do have flaws.
Try reading and you'll see it says nothing of the kind.
The country is facing growing public pressure from citizens to reduce air pollution, due in large part to burning coal. Its efforts to promote energy efficiency and renewable power stem from the realization that doing so will pay off in the long term, Figueres said. “They actually want to breathe air that they don’t have to look at,” she said. “They’re not doing this because they want to save the planet. They’re doing it because it’s in their national interest.” China is also able to implement policies because its political system avoids some of the legislative hurdles seen in countries including the U.S., Figueres said.
There's no "only", there's no "this is the right way to do it", there's nothing like that. There's just "China is doing these things, this is why China is able to do these things".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Too bad this wasn't linked in TFS:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/recent-pause-in-warming
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Your "translation" is a complete nonsequeter: the article states that a 17-year window is a necessary condition, not that it's a sufficient one.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If I google "California rainfall reconstruction" (because there weren't many rain meters out in California in the 1800s) I get a pile of articles on the subject showing data going back over 1000 years:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=california+rainfall+reconstruction
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Here's a Scholar link which gives more relevant results.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There is no huge record of colds in the northern hemisphere.
You know, Europe, also Skandinavia (which technically belongs to Europe), Russia (yes, left side of it is also Europe) IS ALSO IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE
And here we have since decades records warmth winters. Particular this one. You know: Finnland, polar circle, christmas: +7 degrees centigrade. That is ridiculous warm it should have been around -30 degrees centigrade, or colder. Note: if you missed the small word: polarcircle.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You realised you linked to a search with one result about a pro-climate-change lobby, and all the rest are reports on anti-climate-change lobbying efforts several times it size?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
That's how you derive models for simple systems, and parameterise models where we already know that a particular function is a good fit - you probably fitted force to strain using Hooke's law as your function to find the force constant of a spring. Unfortunately we already know that climate is a good deal more complicated than Hooke's law; in systems like these there has to be some physical justification to the model that you're using. Otherwise you might be fitting to a large number of points but only forecasting a few, as these authors are, and therefore your model is likely to be overfit and therefore unsound. Or you could just create a good model by dumb luck. Remember epicycles?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Actually, science has been pretty clear about this. If there is any question, it's not whether global warming exists but whether humans are responsible for it.
What's really happening is that global warming - like evolution - is no longer a scientific argument, but a political one. These questions are no longer being asked in the arenas of logic and reason. In those arenas the questions have already been answered. In the political arena, however, "science" isn't governed by logic and reason.
Climate change became the more popular phrase simply because so many people refused to accept that just because he planet as a whole is warming doesn't mean that every area also gets warmer. Most of the warming will happen at the poles, and that will fundamentally alter the thermal engines driving large-scale weather patterns, which can mean hotter summers and milder winters for some places, but can also mean colder summers and/or winters, as well as slower-moving storm systems which are responsible for flooding/snow-ins and droughts since their payload is all dropped over a much smaller area.
TLDR: Global warming is what's happening to the *entire planet*. Climate changes are the far more complicated regional results.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's not major theories that will need to change, it is the details. We know that CO2 warms the earth, and we know CO2 is being added to the atmosphere.
.9 degrees to 7 degrees for a doubling of CO2 (the warming effect grows logarithmically, so each subsequent doubling has the same effect as the previous). CO2 by itself will only give around .9 degrees, but there are hypothesized feedbacks that could amplify the effect of the CO2. Some of those hypothesized feedbacks are a lot more doubtful than others, but the point of the computer models is to understand the interplay between the various feedbacks.
The question is how much, and it's still an open question (there's no scientific consensus on how much). The estimates range from
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"in the mean time, the climate scientists studying the phenomena got trapped in ice?"
"The arctic disappears but the antarctic grows and the explanation is *global* warming?"
You suggest erroneously that the ice trapping a Russian vessel in the antarctic was caused by cooler conditions leading to more ice formation. In reality the trapping occurred because sea ice was blown by the wind trapping the vessel during the antarctic summer. There is abundant evidence that the antarctic, both East and West, is also melting, which is one of the reasons there is more sea ice, since when glaciers calve at greater rates there is more floating ice. Indeed the grounding line for the Pine Island glacier is rapidly advancing inland at rates not previously recorded in recent geological times.
If the climate scientists have a model that accurately predicted the past 16 years then we can talk about the future.
There are no models that did prediction 16 years ago. The Hadley Centre's had DePreSys predicts a decade, but that only came online in 2007, not 1997.
So your requirement for talking about the future is set at impossible.
That is stupid and dangerous. Talking about the future is both sensible and important.
Until then the predictions of gloom and doom are about as believable as the heavens-gate cult.
0.8C temperature rise over the past 100 years, all in a spatial and temporal distribution that matches the CO2 greenhouse effect.
Measured energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, demonstrating warming.
Continued sea level rise, demonstrating energy absorbance, either my melting ice sheets or my warming oceans, and thermal expansion.
Extinction pressure on many ecosystems because of changing rainfall, temperature, and phenological changes.
And you claim these observations are from predictions as believable as heavens-gate cult, because the last 16 years, the warming trend has only been about 0.05C per decade.
Much like the "pauses" in warming in 1978, 1987, 1997 and 2003?
I don't think you've thought this through.
No, A model is not a curve-fitting exercise.
Why don't you read up a bit on HadGEM3: Design and implementation of the infrastructure of HadGEM3: the next-generation Met Office climate modelling system, Hewitt et al, Geosci. Model Dev (2011).
As you can see, it is not an extrapolated curve fit, but an imitation of the global atmosphere, ocean and biosphere, based on physics.
For instance?