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World Is Finally Waking Up To Climate Change, Says 'Hothouse Earth' Author (theguardian.com)
The scorching temperatures and forest fires of this summer's heatwave have finally stirred the world to face the onrushing threat of global warming, claims the climate scientist behind the recent "hothouse Earth" report. Following an unprecedented 270,000 downloads of his study, Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, said he had not seen such a surge of interest since 2007, the year the Nobel prize was awarded to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Guardian: "I think that in future people will look back on 2018 as the year when climate reality hit," said the veteran scientist. "This is the moment when people start to realize that global warming is not a problem for future generations, but for us now." The heatwave has dominated headlines across the northern hemisphere this summer. New temperature records have been set in Africa and cities in Australia, Taiwan, Georgia and the west coast of US. Heat stroke or forest fires have killed at least 119 in Japan, 29 in South Korea, 91 in Greece and nine in California. There have even been freak blazes in Lapland and elsewhere in the Arctic circle, while holidaymakers and locals alike have sweltered in unusually hot weather in southern Europe. Coming amid this climate chaos, the "hothouse Earth" paper by Rockstrom and his co-authors struck a chord with the public by spelling out the huge and growing risk that emissions are pushing the planet's climate off the path it has been on for 2.5m years.
...I'm not sure anything is going to ever get through.
I'm damn sure nothing is going to get through in the 'alternative fact" era.
intensity of forest fires are the result of decades of misguided policy of preventing all forest fires
Locally, yes, it certainly doesn't help. When fires are up in isolated arctic wildernesses, that's something else.
sudo ergo sum
Actually its the opposite. California stopped most logging and forest management activities decades ago at he behest of environmentalists. These fires are a result of that lack of management.
"It’s hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: “America’s right to know.” It seems almost cruel to ask, ingenuously, ”America’s right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Foreign languages?”
None of those things, of course. In fact, one might well suppose that the popular feeling is that Americans are a lot better off without any of that tripe.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” - Issac Asimov
The full article can be found at https://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf
https://wattsupwiththat.com/20...
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
How can it be taken seriously when they are constantly changing the historical temperature data to match their hypothesis?
"They" are not "changing the historical temperature data to match their hypothesis". That is a made-up alternate-fact being promulgated by the deniers.
You are referring, I assume to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies historical temperature record. The analysis of the data is exhaustively documented , including a FAQ giving an overview for popular audiences that are too bored to read the actual documentation. And the original data set, and all of previous historical analyses, are available on the web, showing that the changes in analysis technique don't alter the conclusion that the climate is warming. Here, for example, are the graphs showing the results of every different correction to the analysis, dating back to 1981.
In any case, you do know that several other groups, such at BEST, also analyze historical climate data, and come out with rates of warming that are essentially the same. So your conspiracy theory that scientists are altering their data in order to hoax the public is going to be a conspiracy of hundreds, and probably thousands, of scientists in independent groups on three different continents.
In terms of personal change, you can do a lot. You can eat less meat; meat consumption is a major driver of CO2 production and methane in the atmosphere https://skepticalscience.com/animal-agriculture-meat-global-warming.htm. You can also drive less, walk places or use public transit. If you need to buy a new car, try to buy a hybrid or an electric car. If you own a house, make sure it is well insulated; don't put the air conditioner on to any colder than you need to in the hot months, and don't heat it more than you need to during the winter. Consider buying solar panels for your house. All of these are things which not only help the environment, they save you money.
Politically, the primary thing you can do is either donate to or vote for candidates who support dealing with climate change. Much of Europe is doing the right things already regarding this (with the exception of Germany's really bad decision to turn off their nuclear plants). But both the US and Australia currently have governments who are substantially not helping matters. In the US, this means generally one should be voting for Democrats. While there are some Republicans who take climate change seriously like Christie Todd Whitman and Arnold Schwarzenegger they are a functional minority which has been pushed out of the party to a large extent.
The third thing you can do is directly donate to charitable causes which help with renewable energy or otherwise help with climate issues. Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ buys solar panels for non-profits like homeless shelters and science museums. The Solar Electric Light Fund https://www.self.org/ gets solar panels for parts of the developing world; this not only helps the very poorest in the world, it also helps make sure that when Africa's economy comes more online they do so in a way that doesn't immediately involve massive CO2 production. For wind power, I recommend the New England Wind Fund https://www.massenergy.org/the-wind-fund which builds wind in the North East of the US (which currently has very little wind power and can definitely use more). Finally, in terms of immediate effects of CO2 offset per a dollar spent, Cool Earth is by many measures the most efficient way to do so https://www.coolearth.org/. Remember, every little bit helps.
massive amounts of data
That they cherry pick for their foregone conclusions? You realize Climategate's "hide the decline" was about truncating decades worth of tree data that diverged from real temperatures, right?
well-verified models that have been vetted and analyzed
The models have consistently over-predicted temperatures.
well-verified models that have been vetted and analyzed
The models have consistently over-predicted temperatures.
to the contrary, the models have fit the data to well within confidence limits, and continue to do so.
Here's an article from Forbes about the very first Global Climate Model, Manabe and Wetherald 1967, looking back at how well their predictions from fifty years ago compared to data: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly/
And here are graphs, showing that the prediction from fifty years ago (red line) fits the data (blue line) almost exactly. https://climategraphs.wordpres...
Later models have refined Manabe and Wetherald 1967, incorporating other effects than simply carbon dioxide and water vapor, but haven't changed the answer. Here is the Berkeley Earth page comparing climate models used in the IPCC report against data: http://berkeleyearth.org/graph...
The problem with the deniers, on the other hand, is that they don't have a prediction. They don't have an alternative model, they don't have anything.