It looks like a political manifesto badly dressed up as “skepticism”.
All the condescending terms and the political bias and polemics and the linking to blogs and fossil fuel propaganda sources, shows this is just lobbyism for self serving interests. Spamming and promoting self serving interests and linking to ones own blog ,isnt that a violation of Quora rules?
Linking to your own blog is a circular argument and is not proof of anything.
I will rather link to well known respected scientific bodies and peer reviewed science.
There is a ton of bad science and straw men here so bear with me. This will take time.
Here we go:
“The climate debate has never been about whether climate change is real. It is. The debate is over its scale, its attribution (how much of it is caused by mankind), and its effects (beneficial vs. harmful).”
There is no discussion over
- is GW all caused by us ?
2. and is it harmful?
Science have clearly said YES to both those questions.
IPCC:
Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), Volume I peer reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, the world’s most prestigious academy, founded by Abraham Lincoln,
with over 200 Nobel Price winners among their members.
“Based on extensive evidence … it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,”
For the warming over the last century,
“there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
NASA:
The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:
The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.
ROYAL SOCIETY
Human emissions over the last two centuries have altered the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. As a result, more of the Sun’s heat is retained warming the ocean and the atmosphere. Global mean surface temperature is now about 1 °C higher than that in the late 19th century and is expected to increase further in the future, with the trajectory dependent on human activity on emissions
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iS IT HARMFUL?
The Little ice age was not very cold and it was not global like uniform global at the same time.
during the LIA, temperatures were at most only about 0.5°C cooler than the early 20th century.For comparison, temperatures have risen by a full 1°C over the past 120 years, and 0.7°C over just the past 40 years.
“what they call “1.5 °C” is referenced to an estimate of the average temperature during the chilly Little Ice Age, rather than to current temperatures, to make the number sound bigger.”
Thats total nonsense. A delusion in your head.
We have left the stable temperatures that allowed the development of agriculture and human civilization to arise.
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Then comes the mandatory denier nonsense about Roman warm period and medieval climate anomaly.
DEniers still dont know regional from GLOBAL.
No matter what happened before, it's NOW that matters. Imagine if it was a medieval warming period that was global and as hot as today. First, it must have had a different reason than increased greenhouse effect, and secondly, it ended. Thus: it was Natural variability.
The climate changes we see now are explained by basic physics, not from measurements of a temperature thats been relatively stable for thousands of years.
We are well above Medieval temperatures today.
THE “HOCKEY STICK” IS STRONGER THAN EVER:
Why Michael E.Manns "hockey stick" is here to stay:
- Its affirmed by US National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
- It’s confirmed and improved by the 4 most comprehensive studies done on the matter (+ ca 150 other studies).
- New paleo-science further improves the Stick.
Its affirmed by US National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
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The warming we have now is NOT modest. Its 20 times faster than when we left the last ice age.
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The “greening earth” in Sahara is not good at all. It amplifies GW. Darkening the earth's albedo is a very bad idea right now.
Greening the earth adds to the land albedo effect and is amplifying global warming. Two new studies confirm that as atmospheric chemistry changes and the thermometer shifts, so does vegetation’s reaction to climate change. One team of scientists, focusing on any new leaves that plants may turn over in a fast-changing climate, found that leaves will become thicker as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere soar – the consequence of fossil fuel combustion, and the indisputable driver of global warming.
This means that they − and therefore forests − could also become less efficient at sequestering carbon, allowing ever more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to accelerate warming.
Increased carbon dioxide levels in air restrict plants' ability to absorb nutrients. Rising carbon levels threaten diets of hundreds of millions of poor. Carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster and create fewer micro-nutrients. Rising carbon emissions could make vital food crops from wheat to rice less nutritious and endanger the health of hundreds of millions of the world's poorest.
Estimated 20 years of healthy life lost per 1000 people in Africa by 2050, with south-east asian and middle-eastern regions not far behind.
Plant growth has one limiting factor. In most of the world the limit is water. In mid-high latitudes it's sunlight. In really high latitudes it's water again (for plants frozen water is the same as no water). In tropical rain-forests the limit is trace nutrients; there's practically none in the soil, it's all in the biomass and leaf litter. The thing was that CO2 never was the limiting factor so more CO2 won't give more plant life.
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Then comes the silly idea of CO2 as “plant food”.
Thats just a small part of a bigger picture.
Plants in greenhouses gets ONLY the extra CO2. Plants on the outside gets the extra warming which comes with the extra CO2. Plants in greenhouses gets fertilizers and nutrients and weeds is not a problem. Everything outside greenhouses gets none of that.
Plants cannot live on CO2 alone; a complete plant metabolism depends on a number of elements.
But here is the thing deniers dont tell you:
The positives effects from more CO2 is limited.
During a 20-year field experiment in Minnesota, a widespread group of plants that initially grew faster when fed more CO2 stopped doing so after 12 years, researchers report in the April 20 Science.
Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants?
Climate change’s negative effects on plants will likely outweigh any gains from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
Someone please tell the farmers of the world more C02 is "good for us" while they have their harvest hit by droughts or flooded by billions of tons of water because of AGW.
Negatives from more C02 include:
- The added heat cancels out any short termed positive effect for some of the plants. Heavy downpours and droughts are likely to reduce crop yields.A 20 years study of crops grown under enhanced CO2 finds that there is an upper limit to C3 enhancement from CO2, while C4 plants, after a sufficient length of time, adapt to high CO2 by improving their uptake of nitrogen. So: Increased CO2 ultimately depresses C3 growth, while C4 plants, which include numerous pest varieties, will become more vigorous.
- The net result is depressed food production. Plant quality declines as CO2 levels rise. CO2 enhanced plants will need extra water both to maintain their larger growth as well as to compensate for greater moisture evaporation as the heat increases. Where will it come from?In many places rainwater is not sufficient for current agriculture and the aquifers they rely on are running dry throughout the Earth. Increased carbon dioxide levels in air restrict plants' ability to absorb nutrients. Rising carbon levels threaten diets of hundreds of millions of poor. Carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster and create fewer micro-nutrients. Rising carbon emissions could make vital food cropsfrom wheat to rice less nutritious and endanger the health of hundreds of millions of the world's poorest. World hunger has risen three straight years.
- Weeds benefits faster from more C02. Pesticides becomes less effective at higher C02 levels. Increase in crop losses to insect pests in a warming climate.
- Biodiversity is already affected by GW.
- Insects and their habitats are already affected by pollution and CC. 75% of our food crops and nearly 90% of wild flowering plants depend at least to some extent on animal pollination and that a high diversity of wild pollinators is critical to pollination. Insect pests also “benefits” from warming.
- Oxygen producing phytoplankton in the oceans are already effected by global warming.
- Extra C02 makes the oceans more acid. Coral reefs are already damagedfrom coral bleaching.
- Greening the earth adds to the land albedo effect and is amplifying global warming. Two new studies confirm that as atmospheric chemistry changes and the thermometer shifts, so does vegetation’s reaction to climate change. One team of scientists, focusing on any new leaves that plants may turn over in a fast-changing climate, found that leaves will become thicker as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere soar – the consequence of fossil fuel combustion, and the indisputable driver of global warming. This means that they − and therefore forests − could also become less efficient at sequestering carbon, allowing ever more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to accelerate warming.
- Climate change happening 'too fast' for plant and animal species to adapt
- Farmers world wide are hit hard by floods and drougts. Natural Disasters Are Costing Farming Billions of Dollars a Year
- There's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that planting trees can no longer save us
Then there is the sea level nonsense:
I dont know why Burton thinks Honolulu and Stockholm Sweden is GLOBAL, you will have to ask him.
Then Burton gish gallops faster than you can say quackery quack.
He links to The Koch brother founded Cato Institute and their hired gun, Ryan Maue and his junk science.
LETS DEBUNK THIS THINK TANK SHILL:
Even other climate deniers think tanks admits Maues graphs are fake:
Global Warming Policy Foundation concedes that the Tory peer's supposedly official figures were wrong and produced by a right-wing think tank
However the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has now revealed the source of these supposedly “official” figures was a meteorologist who works for a libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, founded by US billionaire and leading climate sceptic, Charles Koch.
“It has been brought to our attention that a temperature chart prepared by US meteorologist Ryan Maue and published by Joe Bastardi, and which was referred to in the Today programme appearance of Lord Lawson, was erroneous.
It’s important to note that Maue is part of a think tank that’s co-founded by wealthy climate denial funders, the Koch brothers, and that Bastardi is a well-known climate denier. It’s likely that the GWPF already knew about their backgrounds – they just hoped no one would do a little digging and find out.
Although this admittance is weirdly satisfying, it’s also worth pointing out that the GWPF tweeted immediately afterwards that the rest of Lawson’s claims to the BBC were true – despite the fact that they were demonstrably false.
Since the ruckus, the GWPF has gone back to telling the world that man-made climate change is a massive hoax. At the same time, most of the world has continued working on combating climate change.
Here is the thing:
There is a major distinction Burton miss.
- Climate change do not create bad weather, extreme weather or natural disasters, but climate change exacerbate them. Because of climate change there is an increase in more loaded extreme weathers which strengthen faster. This was as predicted by scientists.
- For “normal” extreme weathers, there are no increase, maybe even a little decline. This was also predicted by scientists.More hurricanes was at 50% certain in the latest IPCC report.
2013:
“On hurricanes, climate models predict it is more likely than not – meaning that there is over a 50 per cent chance – that the number of the most intense storms will increase in certain parts of the world. Globally, however, the IPCC says it’s likely the number of tropical cyclones will “either decrease or remain essentially unchanged”.
“It’s hard to make predictions about these types of storms as the processes involved occur on much smaller scales than climate models can currently replicate.”
“Hurricanes, tropical cyclones and typhoons aren’t getting more frequent, either: but they are getting stronger as they’re super-charged by warming oceans. They are also intensifying faster and getting bigger, slower, and with a lot more rain associated with them. It’s estimated that nearly 40% of the rain that fell during Hurricane Harvey would not have fallen if the exact same storm had occurred a hundred years ago.”
Hurricanes that intensify rapidly—a characteristic of almost all powerful hurricanes—do so more strongly and quickly now than they did 30 years ago, according to a study published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Category 3+ Hurricanes on the Rise in the Atlantic
Human-caused climate change was the driving force behind Hurricane Maria’s devastating and deadly precipitation, a new study finds.
Maria hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017 as a super-hurricane with 155-mile-per-hour winds. The record-breaking storm caused more than $90 billion in damage, with independent fatality estimates ranging from 2,975 deaths to “more than 5,000.”
The authors of the new Geophysical Research Letters study concluded that a Maria-level hurricane “is nearly five times more likely to form now than during the 1950s, an increase due largely to the effects of human-induced warming.”
How does global warming drive extreme deluges? As lead author David Keellings explained, it’s the combination of key long-term changes in the climate “like the atmosphere getting warmer, sea surface temperatures increasing, and more moisture being available in the atmosphere.”
Northwestern Pacific typhoon intensity controlled by changes in ocean temperatures
With Tropical Storm Ophelia’s transition to Hurricane Ophelia on Wednesday, 2017 became the first year in more than a century — and only the fourth on record — in which 10 Atlantic storms in a row reached hurricane strength.
More tornadoes in the most extreme U.S. tornado outbreaks
This, combined with rising sea levels, has also led to larger storm surges and the costs of the damage that goes with them. As Grinsted et al. (2013)concluded,
"we have probably crossed the threshold where Katrina magnitude hurricane surges are more likely caused by global warming than not."
Global warming also adds moisture to the atmosphere, with the increase in precipitation also adding to the flooding associated with these storms, and the damages they cause. The bottom line is that many types of extreme weather are being intensified by human-caused global warming, and that will continue in the future. And there is evidence that climate change is adding to the costs of extreme weather damage.
Warmer water fuels hurricanes, and not surprisingly, the average number of major hurricanes — those Category 3 or higher — has increased in the Atlantic basin since the 1970s. Globally, climate models project that there will likely be an increase in the wind speed and rainfall intensity of the strongest hurricanes (aka tropical cyclones), even though their frequency may remain unchanged or even decrease by the end of this century. However, the extent of these effects from climate change will vary by region
The 2017 North Atlantic hurricane season had 17 named storms, 10 hurricanes, and six major hurricanes. This is well above the 1981-2010 average of 12.1 named storms, 6.4 hurricanes, and 2.7 major hurricanes.
he ferocious “frankenstorm” known as Sandy that ripped through greater New York City five years ago remains one for the record books. Like this year’s hurricane season, it racked up tens of billions of dollars in economic damages.
Superstorm Sandy had another close, yet underappreciated, similarity to this year’s hurricanes: less affluent groups of people suffered more, both in the initial damage and recovery.
An analysis by a team I led at Stony Brook University shows that Sandy’s destructive path across Long Island, from Brooklyn to the Hamptons, was not as even-handed as media coverage often made it seem, both in its initial impact and people’s recovery.
The storm season of 2017 has already left behind an even more dramatic version of this story: Following Hurricane Harvey, Houston quickly switched water and electricity back on and emptied most emergency shelters. Meanwhile, several weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, much of the island is still in “survival mode.” Both hurricane seasons expose the close ties between severe weather events and social inequality.
Human influence on tropical cyclone intensity
“As the 21st century proceeds, we expect greenhouse gas warming to further outpace aerosol cooling and PI increases to exceed those observed to date. TC intensities at any given fixed location should increase accordingly, on average; simulations suggest trends on the order of 1ms–1 decade–1 at the high end. If poleward shifts continue, these increases will be manifest in increases in activity at the poleward margins of TC basins, as well as in the occurrence of more intense storms (if perhaps fewer storms overall) in the historical cores of the basins.”
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Hurricanes are a subset of tropical cyclones and are typically called typhoons in Asia. We have already seen clear statistical evidence of greater frequency and severity of typhoons hitting land in Asia over the past 40 years.
The paper this is from was co-authored by Wei Mei & Shang-Ping Xie from the Scripps Institute of Oceanograpy and published in Nature Geoscience. As they say in the abstract:
over the past 37 years, typhoons that strike East and Southeast Asia have intensified by 12–15%, with the proportion of storms of categories 4 and 5 having doubled or even tripled.
Confounding factors in the Atlantic including shear mitigated for warmer oceans until the 2017 season, when seven records for hurricane activity and severity were broken. The accumulated cyclone energy was 50% above the level required for the season to be considered extremely active.
Three studies using three different methodologies confirmed that Hurricane Harvey was worsened by global warming.
Harvey could not have produced so much rain without human‐induced climate change.
we conclude that global warming made the precipitation about 15% (8%–19%) more intense, or equivalently made such an event three (1.5–5) times more likely.
precipitation accumulations in these areas were likely increased by at least 18.8% (best estimate of 37.7%), which is larger than the 6–7% associated with an attributable warming of 1°C in the Gulf of Mexico and Clausius‐Clapeyron scaling.
Harvey wasn’t a particularly intense hurricane by either the common Saffir-Simpson Scale or the slightly more accurate Accumulated Cyclonic Energy Scale (ACE). It’s rainfall due to first increased water vapor due to warmer water and it’s stalling over Houston due to a jetstream oscillation associated with global warming caused the problem. As a note, this is part of why Hurricane Florence is so concerning; it’s predicted to stall over the Carolinas, unleashing historically unprecedented floods.
Similarly, Sandy wasn’t a particularly strong hurricane when it hit New York and area. It was, however, very wide and very slow moving. That contributed to storm surge, flooding, a greater area of damage and more time for the winds to do damage. I’ve posited a notional improved hurricane severity scale as a thought exercise and it more correctly asserts the damaging aspect of Sandy, but fails to capture Harvey’s impact.
Summed up:
We get more loaded extreme weather which loads faster than before while “normal” extreme weathers are in status quo or a little in decline. ALL THIS AS PREDICTED BY SCIENTISTS. THATS HOW THE CLIMATE SYSTEM REACTS TO GW.
tHE POLAR BEAR NONSENSE DEBUNKED:
There’s a myth that polar bear populations are thriving because they’ve grown since the 1970s.
That growth has nothing to do with the climate – it was due to the introduction of the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears in 1973, which restricted and in some circumstances banned the hunting of polar bears, which had caused their populations to dwindle.
Global warming – specifically the rapid decline in the Arctic sea ice they need to hunt – has caused polar bear populations to decline in recent years.
The situation is serious for them, being on the red list of threatened species. (Vulnerable).
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Arrhenius’ science was solid, hs predictions of the future less impressive.
120 years later what science has gained on this topic is stupendious.
Already in 1912 the warnings was out:
A trillion dollar industry? Yes. For fossil fuels:
Most socialist subsidies and peoples tax money goes to fossil fuels:
Over the past century, the federal government has pumped more than $470 billion into the oil and gas industry in the form of generous, never-expiring tax breaks. Once intended to jump-start struggling domestic drillers, these incentives have become a tidy bonus for some of the world’s most profitable companies.
Taxpayers currently subsidize the oil industry by as much as $4.8 billion a year, with about half of that going to the big five oil companies—ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips—which get an average tax break of $3.34 on every barrel of domestic crude they produce. With Washington looking under the couch cushions for sources of new revenue, oil prices topping $100 a barrel, and the world feeling the heat from its dependence on fossil fuels, there’s been a renewed push to close these decades-old loopholes. But history suggests that Big Oil won’t let go of its perks without a brawl.
The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached$649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion.
Why are taxpayers subsidising the oil and gas companies that jeopardise our future?
Instead of hoping market forces solve the climate crisis, the government needs to stop giving tax breaks to polluters
