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UN Study Shows Record-High Increases For Atmospheric CO2 In 2013
Figures released Tuesday by a United Nations advisory body reveal that 2013 saw new recorded highs for both carbon dioxide and methane, as well as the largest year-over-year rise in carbon dioxide since 1984, reflecting continuing worldwide emissions from human sources but also the possibility that natural sinks (oceans and vegetation) are near their capacity for absorbing the excess. From the Washington Post's account:
The latest figures from the World Meteorological Organization’s monitoring network are considered particularly significant because they reflect not only the amount of carbon pumped into the air by humans, but also the complex interaction between man-made gases and the natural world. Historically, about half of the pollution from human sources has been absorbed by the oceans and by terrestrial plants, preventing temperatures from rising as quickly as they otherwise would, scientists say.
“If the oceans and the biosphere cannot absorb as much carbon, the effect on the atmosphere could be much worse,” said Oksana Tarasova, a scientist and chief of the WMO’s Global Atmospheric Watch program, which collects data from 125 monitoring stations worldwide. The monitoring network is regarded as the most reliable window on the health of Earth’s atmosphere, drawing on air samples collected near the poles, over the oceans, and in other locations far from cities and other major sources of pollution.
The new figures for carbon dioxide were particularly surprising, showing the biggest year-over-year increase since detailed records were first compiled in the 1980s, Tarasova said in an interview. The jump of nearly three parts per million over 2012 levels was twice as large as the average increase in carbon levels in recent decades, she said.
The diplomacy is already complete for imposing carbon tariffs on China. We should proceed now. http://news.slashdot.org/story...
Some "hiatus" with 2013 and 2012 and 2010 and 2009 and 2008 and 2007 and 2006 and 2005 and 2004 and 2003 all making the list of top 10 hottest years since we started measuring.
Not that it matters, because you repetitive dolts have exactly zero null hypotheses that you've got any hope of establishing.
You need a global array. Last December-January-February together were the seventh warmest on record globally. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
You don't say. Honest question to deniers: when you see this "hiatus" point, do you all go "ha very clever"? Or do any of you recognize extraordinarily short term thinking that doesn't honestly reflect the reality of statistical analysis of noise affected datapoints?
Please I'd like to think there's at least one among your number who has enough hope to see the extraordinary dishonesty in this point.
And, yet, we've seen articles recently which say the ocean may be absorbing some of the heat, and this one saying the levels are at the highest ever and have increased by the most ever.
So, yes, you probably are a denier, because you seem to be wanting to ignore the actual evidence out there.
Do we understand our climate and all of the factors 100%? Nope. Do we have really strong indications we're causing change? Absolutely.
Will we be really screwed if we keep acting like nothing is happening until it's too late? Betcherass we will.
It's mostly the fossil fuel industry and people who own their stocks who have the most stake in saying "not to worry, nothing is happening, you can't prove it, la la la".
It's a mentality of keep levels the same so we can keep profits up, and until we're faced with 100% irrefutable proof we'll keep claiming nothing is happening.
That's either stupidly ignoring the problem, or actively trying to divert attention and making it sound like nothing is happening.
That's pretty much the definition of denial.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
it was cold. once. where i live.
therefore prolonged global warming is a myth.
because we all know anecdotal local data completely disproves long term multidecade global averages and trends.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
saying otherwise makes you a denier.
No it doesn't - it just shows that you really don't give a fuck about any future human beings. It's the kind of selfishness that ignores even the slimmest chance that you are wrong because even if you are you will not have to deal with the consequences.
You're like a screaming child that wants their own way no matter how much someone else has to suffer. You're difficult to ignore and eveyone wants to slap you.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
because.....why?
what exactly do they get out of doing such a thing?
There are millions of scientists involved in this worldwide.
What do they get out of it? Public funding? Research grants? Cause Lord knows we just lavish scientists with tons of public money in this country.....no wait, thats the exact opposite of what we do. and further, they dont get to pocket what little money they do get. that's illegal.
the ONLY climate "scientists" who get rich from their research and live high on the hog are those in the employ of the fossil fuel industries.
Speaking of motivations...lets look at the fossil fuel industries. unlike those "lying AGW scientists", they actually do recieve tons of money from the government. hundreds of billions a year. and they make even more in profits selling their product. and they spend billions in lobbying every year.
so yes, let's talk motivations and stakes you AC idiot.
the phrase "global million scientist conspiracy exposed by plucky group of oil billionaires" is not reflective of reality.
rather reality illustrates just how mentally deficient your post is.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
When you climb to the top of a plateau you are at the highest point AND you are no longer going up.
Both "pause in the increase in warming" and "x of the last y years are the warmest on record" can be true statements AT THE SAME TIME.
I love the global warming debate. You are either an environmentalist nut-job or an anti-science global warming denier. We spend almost no time analyzing reports, comparing data and questioning our preconceived notions (a.k.a. rational thought), and instead dig around the internet for articles supporting our side of the argument and name-calling anyone who has any doubts about the methods or conclusions from our pet article. /. article where global warming is the subject, I can rest assured that at least 95% of the comments will either be by or in response to trolls. It's like I'm on reddit or something.
In any other scientific debate, you never hear about "Higgs Boson Deniers" or "String Theory Fanatics" or "Standard Model dinosaurs". As a matter of fact, this is pretty much the only scientific area where EVERY commentator acts as though they are experts. Whenever I see a
The story below says "US Rust Belt Manufacturing Rebounds Via Fracking Boom" and asks 'do the associated environmental risks of new "tight oil" extraction techniques outweigh the benefits to these depressed economic regions?'
Well, do they?
Honestly, this explanation doesn't sit well with me. I'd love to get in their heads, because I don't get them. But this explanation of their behavior doesn't seem to mesh with how they act.
They seem like people who want to imagine cynicism and naive skepticism lets them see further than everyone else. You know, like truther types do.
The problem is that those concerned about stopping greenhouse gas emissions don't have a viable plan without substantially increasing nuclear power production and instead those most activist about Global Climate Change are also against nuclear and have been successful at turning back the clock on nuclear power in some places.
There is a direct correlation between the reduction in nuclear in Germany and Japan and the increased use of coal. All the gains in Solar and Wind in those countries have been eaten up by the increased use of coal. You can get rid of nuclear and accept Global Warming, or you can actually head off excessive Global Warming with an expansion of nuclear. It is a direct trade and you can't have both without some new technology that we don't have yet.
Okay, first things first, before we can have an actual discussion, you have to be honest.
Claiming the models are excellent shows that you're either utterly ignorant of the topic at hand or you're flat out denying reality.
The models are constantly being adjusted and science is constantly finding reasons to account for their incorrect models that don't explain anything thats happened in the last 20 years. Denying this part of reality just makes it clear you're a 'believer', not someone who is actually thinking for themselves.
We can't even start a discussion until you actually accept reality, the models fucking suck. Its a massive, huge, unbelievably big system that we know pretty much dick about. Pretending the models are excellent is just wrong. They are better this year than they were last year, but excellent they are not.
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I'm going to wager that you didnt watch Cosmos did you? He presented probably the simplest most accessbile explanation posssible.
Here's a good link to the clip: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/nei...
That or you still dont understand the concept of averages.
It's not that "climate != weather"
It's that climate = sum(weather) / (time*area)
IE, climate is the average of weather over time or a region or both.
hurricane, tornado, drought, and heat wave to global warming?
Do those thing represent one day of local weather, or large events on large scales that last a long time?
I'll break it down for you again, and ignore your attempt to put words in my mouth, and then tell me how I'm wrong.
-Weather is what's ouside your window. It's what's happening right now. In a very small time scale, in a very small regional-scale. Local, short term observations.
-Climate is a whole bunch of those local observations strung together. It's a very large time scale, on a very large regional-scale.
Hurricanes are a climatological event that produce extreme weather (wind, rain). They are spawned by climatological factors, but grow and self-reinforce on a large scale and themselves grow to affect climate (in a way they give vent to rather large pent up energies). Tornadoes are a weather event, but the supercells that form them are themselves driven by climate trends. A heat wave is a string of related weather events. It may be localized or cover a large area, but being a string of related weather events again points more to the climate side of the scale. Droughts again: large scale, long term, climate.
In the case of AGW those scales are a) global, and b) range from a couple centuries, to several My depending on which line of evidence you're looking at.
It was unusually cold in New England this winter. That's weather. But overall, this winter was still one of the 5 warmest on record. That's climate.
All these things are interwoven together. Ocean currents, the jet stream, warm/cold water layer mixing, warm/cold air mixing, humidity, water/air temperature gradients...all these things combine and interact to create the global climate which you see on a daily basic as weather. If an ocean current shifts it can reduce cloud formation lowering the water content of an air mass and increasing the radiative heating of the land surface immediately inland. these combined factors can lead to a lack of rainfall and/or increase in temperates. IE, drought and/or heat wave. In Cali's case, the Sierra range normally causes some preciptation as the air mass moves eastward, trapping it as snowpack, which then feeds water over the year into the arid region we know as the Central Valley. its what allows an arid region to also be good farmland inspite of its aridity. this year, there wasnt even enough moisture in the air for the mountains to squeeze any out.
The polar vortex happened because something pushed the normal wind pattern out of shape. it allowed a large mass of unusually cool air to penetrate south a long ways. The reverse also happened: a large mass of warm moist air pushed much north than normal, leading to increased temperatures in the North Pacific and Alaska, and parts of western Canada. Some climatalogical event altered the normal roughly stable route of the vortex. The vortex itself then affects large scale climate effects and drives local extreme weather.
See, the mistake here that denier consistently make is in thinking that this is a basic input output machine. It's not. It's a web of interconnected loops. Every output is the input to another stage in the machine, and every stage of the machine is linked to every other stage. Everything is in a feedback loop to something else.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
You haven't reviewed the data, you can't, its not public, so stop acting like you know any better than I do what the truth is.
This data?
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
Looks public to me.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Stating that climate change had an impact is neither the same as attributing it as the single cause, nor the same as equating climate with weather. If you expect climate change to never have an impact on weather, then either your definition of weather or your definition of climate is very flawed.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Higher acidity [CO2 dissolved in water forms an acid] in seawater is known to disrupt the life cycles of many marine species — from reef-building corals to shellfish beloved by humans — by interfering with the creatures’ ability to use sea-borne calcium to build their shells.
This bit should be scaring the pants off us. Not because we'll suddenly not be feasting on oysters, but because of zooplankton that form delicate calcium-based shells. If those critters go bye-bye, we will likely see the collapse of more ocean fisheries as food sources dry up.
And, in something of a double-whammy, coastal regions in the tropics are often protected by reefs from the ravages of some tropical storms. If those reefs slow down their growth (that replaces damaged reefs structures), or start dissolving, we're going to be have a tidal wave (bad pun!) of starving refugees.
You don't need to believe in global warming to see those two issues becoming problems. You need enough empathy to see this as being a problem, even if it's not in your own backyard.
If you do believe in global warming, it's a crapshoot as to whether or not the oceans will rise high enough to wipe out their homes before acidification lays a licking on marine ecosystems.
Your quote is reference the Annual Average...which it is set to do, and shows absolutely NO SIGNS of not crossing that milestone.
Your post is one born of ignorance and an attempt to spread confusion.
Technically it was passed by in 2013...several times. But the monthly averages still came out slightly below 400ppm. April 2014 however was the first time the Monthly Average PPM level crossed 400ppm. And it's been theres since.
In fact I really dont see the point of your post. The trendline is quite clear, and is continually up. It has yet to FAIL to increase.
It couldnt be more irrelegent of ignorant if you had said "oh good, they have a testable predictiona bout gravity. but will they still claim gravity is real if hte apple fails to fall to the ground?"
http://www.climatecentral.org/...
http://www.climatecentral.org/...
https://www.climate.gov/news-f...
http://www.scientificamerican....
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The reefs in the Caribbean have been dying for decades, but not from acidification.
About a quarter of the way down on this page, http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/201... , you can see what happens as the stony corals die off. The branches of the corals break off and no longer supply refuge to small fish from predators. And there's less ... well ... hard stuff in the way to slow down waves. It's kind of depressing to snorkel or dive in Florida since you can see all the old coral skeletons lying on the ocean floor, slowly being covered with silt. While, of the three images, the one on the right looks the most vibrant, most of what you're seeing is soft coral (no calcium carbonate skeleton) and sponges that are, you know, spongy. Soft corals provide little or no protection to juvenile or feeder fish.
Honest answer from a denier. I've found myself jumping on the climate change skeptic bandwagon, and there are a bunch of different reasons for that, none of them having to do with the actual hard data or the models, or any of the details of the science, except for some specific tidbits that enable my skepticism. (For example, most of the models I've looked at predict milder summers and warmer winters in my particular area, and flooding in areas, not nearby, where people I don't like currently habitate)
People (myself included) don't want to hear it for the same reason that people get huffy when you mention that whole food veganism is bar none the best diet to avoid cancer and heart disease. They'll just point out the few that stil get cancer, and still get heart disease. Or smokers when you point out the cancer risks...plenty of smokers don't have a problem and live to healthy old age.
But, you CAN find a positive. If you point out that the hottie jogging down the street is always a non-smoker, and always either a vegan or a Paleo with higher than average vegetable intake, no one can really argue with that one, and if you ask one of them they'll confirm that observation every time.
When the climate change topic comes up, my brain automatically translates that the punitive corrective measures bandied about over the years...Carbon Tax, Environmental Regulation, and all the other proposed measures that wind up trading modest pollution levels for wideband economic austerity.
I know it is frustrating when you're trying to get people to stop polluting and people want to turn a blind eye to it and keep going about their business. Yet, basing your argument on science models that can predict the climate 10 years into the future yet somehow can't predict the climate tomorrow...yeah, if there are ANY holes whatsoever in your argument when you're preaching austerity, everyone is going to focus on the holes in the argument, no matter how small or short-sighted.
I think you'll find less resistance from me or anybody else if you focus on things that elicit a positive image...like pushing increased research funds for cleaner burning engines, real fuel production alternatives like algae. Things that benefit everyone, AND reduce environmental impact. But by default I'm going to automatically assume your motive is to argue for higher taxes and economic austerity, and of course I'll get turned off pretty quick.
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There's a thriving skeptic group actively doing just that, so you can still feel you're among your own kind when you look into it.
A "skeptic" group already did this. The other "skeptics" didn't like the outcome:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Envir...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Here's how it's measured at the Mauna Kea site. Accuracy is to within 0.2ppm, 1 standard deviation is 0.26ppm.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
So yeah, we know it's accurate because it's using the same techniques and technology used all over the world to measure gas fractions per mole of various gasses in many different applications. If the CO2 measurements for climate were wrong as you suspect - "rounding errors" or the like - then people would be dying left and right due to anesthesiology mismeasurements; chemical manufacturing would have far higher error rates; and other very visible and common manufacturing processes would be far less reliable than they are today. This is solid measurement technology.
Human civilization developed at about 275ppm of CO2. It took us from the dawn of civilization (first use of fire, you could argue, so over 400,000 years) to the early 19th century to budge the needle beyond small natural variations from 275ppm. From the 1820's to 1910, just under a century, we gained 25ppm. From 1910 to 1950 - 40 years - we gained 40ppm more. From 1950 to today, we've gained another 50ppm and are currently increasing at about 2ppm per year. 400,000 years - tiny amounts of change. 190 years - 33% increase; that's got to register, since CO2 drives the atmospheric temperature as the greenhouse gas with the most effect.
The problem is that we are now entering a climate regime which humanity has never been in before. Our entire civilization has been built on stable climates, and that's true of the past, too. We have many, many records of civilization which did poorly and even failed when their climate changed by an amount that is a small fraction of what we're doing now. Civilization will not collapse tomorrow, or in a decade, or in a century. It will simply become more expensive, dangerous, uncomfortable, impoverished and unstable than it is today. If you're comfortable with that as the future to leave to your grandchildren, well, more power to you. I hope you build your bunker deep.
Ignoring a problem that will lead to massive changes in the world is perhaps the least conservative action possible. The fact that we are uncertain as to the total effects of these changes down the line, but we know we're messing with the entire planet, means that inaction is even *more* dangerous, because of the possible consequences. So the claim that we need to wait before doing anything is a radical, not conservative, approach.
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There have been studies on volcanoes in the past, in general the influence of volcanoes is very small vs. man-made emissions:
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Or maybe accept ALL the evidence and weigh the overall statistics instead of extrapolating from cherry-picked points. Realizing that the difference between statistical behavior and deterministic behavior is that there's a joke about a statistician who drowned in a lake averaging 2 inches deep. Because statistics are what you use when analyzing things that fluctuate a lot and occasionally do the exact opposite of what is expected. But only occasionally.
It's not public? Horseshit.
You're just cheerleading for your team, it has nothing in particular to do with facts.
No one is disputing that CO2 levels are rising. No one can dispute that CO2 absorbs radiation in the IR spectrum. No one can dispute that having more CO2 will trap more heat in the CO2-rich regions. An early argument against AGW was that the atmosphere is already opaque to Outgoing Long-wave Radiation (OLR), which is true but incomplete. Increasing the partial pressure of CO2 extends the CO2-rich region further into space, acting like a blanket. The mean free path of an IR photon varies with altitude, but is generally in the low tens of meters, even in denialist literature. See also why IR photos from any distance look fuzzier than visible light photos. It turns out that the direct effect of a doubling of CO2 is about 3.7 W/m^2, which gives a figure of ~1 degree C rise in global temperature.
No one is particularly worried about that. The issue is that we have a shit ton of this "H2O" stuff lying around, which will phase change into a much more effective greenhouse gas given the slightest provocation. In point of fact, the ability of air to contain water vapor rises exponentially with temperature.
The figure of 1 degree C is extremely simple physics; a trivial application of the Stefan Boltzmann law. The amplifying effects are not understood quite as well, leading to a range of estimates for the total forcing effect. However, as denialists are so quick to point out, H2O is a much stronger greenhouse gas; it is not at all unreasonable to expect the combined forcing to show a positive feedback.
This is not a religious argument. Your ignorance is not equal to the knowledge of others, or even the ignorance of someone who trusts in the scientific consensus. The physics involved here is not so complicated that you could not test it yourself; an IR source, a thermometer, and a CO2 source should be all you need.
You are, for whatever reason, focusing on the noise, on your sense of outrage. You enjoy feeding that sense, especially with the idea that other people are trying to tell you what to do. You are ignoring the scientific foundation of these ideas. Science is empirical, and it took a long time before any scientist believed that humans could affect the climate, and just as long for the mechanism to be accepted. AGW has stood the test of about two centuries of real skepticism, coming from a point where there was even less evidence for it than for plate tectonics. There's practically no one misanthropic to the point where they want widespread disaster, including climate scientists. No one comes to this idea willingly. I am sure it's good to be skeptical of the extreme predictions, but jumping to another extreme (that nothing will happen) is also not warranted. I encourage you to seek knowledge, not spout ignorance.
the deniers are saying "its not happening" when every piece of evidence in the world (literally, the world) says "yes it is".
in scientific debate, there are many places to have disagreement and debate.
but reality itself isnt one of them.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
You haven't reviewed the data, you can't, its not public, so stop acting like you know any better than I do what the truth is.
All of the data. ALL OF IT. Is public. You are an idiot.
http://www.noaa.gov/climate.ht...
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
Or even just google of wikipedia for it. It's all out there.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Odd because, well, most folks (and I mean across the globe) that I know have been lauding some rather cold weather. We've seen hundred and even thousand year old records broken.
Maybe we don't necessarily agree that the temperature recordings are accurate, or rather they're accurate, but that modern satellite records (which are fairly recent and new) have not been properly synced with historical temperature records. A simple fact of which puts all models into question.
The fact that models have largely and universally failed at prediction would cause any respector of science to contemplate whether they have made an incorrect assumption - unless you've got ego or money in the boat.
You showed no evidence that the global CO2 measurements are inaccurate. But luckily, we have satellites that back up the ground collections, and agree with them. Their coverage is global.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-measurements-uncertainty.htm
Bear in mind that while there are local variations of CO2, the atmosphere is quite well-mixed, so you don't *need* a sensor every 100 square km or whatever to determine what the average CO2 levels are. Differences settle out regionally and globally, and that's backed up by the fact that the satellites agree with the ground station average quite well.
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I believe that the Earth is getting warmer. A lot of people do but where I and most of the "True Believers" differentiate is in the details. Things like how bad it will be and what is actually possible to do about it. So many of the True Believers foam at the mouth while screaming about the end of the world. I'm a little less paranoid. No doubt it will change the world but I'm not so sure about ending our existence. The other side is of course what to do and what it will take to accomplish these goals. Most True Believers talk like we can just wave a magic wand and without any real sacrifice we can reduce carbon output to a fraction of what it is now. Surely they can't really believe something so stupid? How do you force emerging nations to kill their economies for something that may or may not be the ultimate tragedy? The requirements would need force of a draconian nature and probably bring about a war to make WWII look like a scrimmage.
Further, the cite you gave actually reiterates what I'm claiming.
"The growth rates of CO2 concentration have increased in recent years. The distribution of CO2 growth rates differs regionally due to the variation of source or sink. And the spatial variation of CO2 concentration is small compared to that of fluxes. Because the atmosphere is an excellent filter of spatially and temporally varying surface fluxes, integrating short-term fluctuations while retaining the large-scale signal. High growth rate in East Asia has been associated with high growth rate of fossil fuel. And high growth rate in South America is due to decreased biosphere uptake of grass/shrub region in Brazil and increased wildfire release."
"...retaining the large scale signal." That is, the global signal of increasing CO2 is not knocked down by regional or local variations.
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If marijuana decomposes or is smoked it releases the exact same amount of CO2 it consumed during its growth ....
So what would be the point? Besides dropping prices fro weed, ofc?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Is your argument really: "Since the deniers keep denying, you'll have to eventually accept that they are right because they don't stop denying"?
You do realize that this could be applied in other areas where it would be even more obviously wrong:
"Since the Evolution-deniers keep denying Evolution, you'll need to one day accept that Evolution is wrong because 'how many times am I going to have to blow off the 'deniers' before I consider maybe I'm wrong about Evolution?'"
"Since the vaccine-deniers keep insisting that vaccines are poison and don't work, you'll need to one day accept that vaccines are poison and don't work because 'how many times am I going to have to blow off the 'deniers' before I consider maybe I'm wrong about vaccines?'"
Just because a group denies something strongly and repeatedly doesn't make them right.
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The hottest year on record was 2010 - so we're 4 years in and 11 to go on your 15 years with 0 trend: http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...
You moved the goalposts, you're the first in this thread to ask for raw data, as in unadjusted daily (not monthly) values. That's gigabytes of data you're asking for which may not exist anymore - the climate models almost certainly don't use daily values after all, that's probably useful for a local weather report but unnecessarily fine-grained for long-term climate predictions.
And couldn't unadjusted values cause errors due to the urban heat island effect? That was all the rage among "skeptics" in the early/mid-2000s.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That is a huge mistake people keep making. Tomorrow has weather. Predicting the weather and predicting the climate are too very different things.
Predicting the climate is akin to predicting when you will need certain repairs on your car. Climatologists cannot say exactly when the median temperature will increase by 1 K, but they can say it will happen and predict about when it will happen. The engineers at BMW cannot predict exactly when your water pump will fail, but they can tell you that eventually it will fail and that it probably will fail around 150,000 km with about 10% accuracy.
Predicting the weather is akin to predicting whether your water pump will fail tomorrow. It's much harder to do. Maybe it sounds funny, but it might take months to fail. Maybe it sounds fine but develops a sudden unexpected leak.
It amazes me that with all the education we have, people are still confusing climate and weather.
The full name is "Climate Science Denier". It's funny how the only people making the connection from climate science denier to holocaust denier are the climate science deniers. It must be a defensive tactic.
That argument that deep austerity is needed is bogus, however. For years, economists and climate scientists and even skeptics have been arguing that whether or not the problem exists (okay, well, now they usually admit it exists), there is an entire new economic sector that can be opened up to private businesses - climate change mitigation. And that is a net *positive* to the global economy, for the economy as well as through the development of new technology. The fact that if bad things are averted we also gain economically from avoiding them is icing on the cake. The downside? All the major fossil fuel industries are looking at a "co-opt or die" scenario. Cui bono?
You can do this without extreme taxation or austerity, IF you start reasonably soon (in the next few years would be good - we passed ideal a few years back). It's the fear and exaggeration of the costs, largely put out by fossil industry interests, that is delaying change.
So if you really do just tune out and think of nutbar extremists when you consider the costs of this, what you're selecting is guaranteed to be the most expensive path through the next few decades. If you're *lucky*, the cost of that will be minimal as thousands of climate scientists are proven to be wrong. But if you're wrong, well.. That's when that choice gets ugly for your kids.
How much are you willing to be that the climate scientists and their peer-review system are so totally corrupt and incompetent that they are completely wrong? Your future, and your kids and grandkids futures? Hey... Go for it. Maybe modern climate science is the equivalent of catastrophe geology up against Alfred Wegener. But... That's a huge bet to make against the professionals.
French - The lingua franca of Europe!
That's not moving goalposts. If you ask for the data, you expect you'll get the original recordings, not a bunch of values that have been adjusted arbitrarily at someone's whim without an explanation of those adjustments and a means of extracting the original values.
Here's a terrific animation from NOAA putting the current CO2 levels in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but see it to the end.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
tldr: current CO2 levels are about 40% higher than the maximum levels seen in the last ten ice age cycles.