97% of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, and to highlight that fact, Skeptical Science has launched a media event in which they reveal a comment by a scientist every hour for 97 Hours. Check in to the website to see what’s new every hour, or follow the #97hours hashtag on twitter.
I suppose the critics of the science could set up an equivalent site, but cartoons of 3 forlorn scientists saying stupid stuff won’t be quite as interesting.
Things are getting really stupid with Climate Change. U.S. wake up and start taking this seriously, please…
#TeachTheLackOfControversy
Sadly a lot of the responses to that hashtag are denialists posting skewed graphs (comparing CO2 levels from millions of years ago when the earth had a different albido, cloud-cover, biodiversity, etc..) =(
Can anyone recommend a good book that summarizes the climate change issue? I heard about two books from journalist Mark Lynas: Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet and High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis. If those books are good, perhaps I answered my own question. Just looking for the opinions and recommendations of the Pharyngulites. Thanks!
=8)-DX : Sadly a lot of the responses to that hashtag are denialists posting skewed graphs
As we all know, random people on the internet, and the politicians they serve, are WAY more equipped to dictate scientific facts than those evil, money-grubbin’, schemin’ scientists . Wake up sheeple and overthrow the Scientist Conspiracy! Benghazi chemtrail fluoride no warming!
In the real world, the climate denialists have already lost.
This is the headline this morning of the story I just read.
1. Climate change/global warming/sea level rise is happening now.
2. We have to deal with it. Doing nothing is not an option any more.
3. I’ve seen this out here. One harbor is having trouble with sea level rise and flooding. They have to do something about their infrastructure. One wingnut commissioner objected to them dealing with global warming. So they just changed the name to infrastructure adaptation or some such and kept on going.
4. This is happening everywhere. Louisiana is one of the hardest hit and is losing their coastline by the thousands of square miles. It contributed greatly to the destruction of New Orleans during the Katrina hurricane.
So they are trying to get a $50 billion plan off the ground to save their coastine. While the majority of their politicians are still…global warming deniers.
@ raven
If their real strategy was to poison the public perception of climate scientists and protect a select few very wealthy industries during a window of time (e.g. the Copenhagen talks) when they faced the uncomfortable threat of a stronger version of the Kyoto protocol and global unification on climate reparations, the denialists have won, big time. They crafted U.S. foreign policy on climate change.
In the larger picture, this is minor.
Global warming is just getting started. It’s going to keep happening for centuries at least.
The so-called skeptics already were quite uncivil when they noticed the countdown for the campaign. The knee-jerk response to these types of campaigns that communicate scientific findings to the public never ceases to amaze me. The attempt of taking over the #97Hours hashtag on twitter with climate myths is an example of that.
In the larger picture, we may have missed our window of time to easily do something about global warming.
In the slightly shorter term, these wealthy interests can rest assured that they won’t see any drop in profits due to reparations.
Yeah but how many of those scientists are called Steve? THAT’S how you do science.
Louis
Cross posted from the Lounge:
Floods in Arizona too:
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2014/09/08/phoenix-flooding-schools-closure-list-abrk/15277545/ Videos at the link.
Several news outlets have noted that floods in places like Arizona and Kashmir are more extreme thanks to global warming.
More here:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/02/16/207545/two-nature-paper-join-growing-body-of-evidence-that-human-emissions-fuel-extreme-weather-flooding-that-harm-humans-and-the-environment/
More links can be found in the Lounge comment.
1. We already missed that.
2. OTOH, it’s far from obvious that we could do anything about the CO2 rise anyway.
3. Humans aren’t good at long term planning. Our US planning horizon on a good day is 2 years, one election cycle.
4. We also aren’t good at global cooperation. Global warming is a global problem and requires a global solution. It’s happened about never. We did have the Montreal agreement to saze the ozone layer and that worked but global warming is orders of magnitude a larger problem.
5. The big problem is that our entire earth civilization is based on fossil fuels. Getting 7 billion people to change the basis of their entire civilization is asking a lot. As it turned out, it was asking them to do something all but impossible.
Even most climate scientists have given up on halting the CO2 rise. They sounded the alarm and all they got out it was witch hunts, firings, and death threats. For the last few years, the word has been adaptation. As in adapt or die.
I’ll worry about the floods in Arizona when it finally rains in California.
We all know that any one climate anomaly can’t be ascribed to global warming, yada, yada, yada.
But the southwest and California have been in droughts for years, California 3 years, the SW 14 years.
It’s getting rather dry out there to say the least. The major event this summer has been the horrendous fire season all up and down the west coast. There have been fires relatively near where I live since January including one a few weeks ago. Fortunately, the fire departments have been getting them early so we don’t have another Oakland Hills fire. So far anyway.
Earlier this summer the Great Hope was another El Nino event. It was going to be huge. It’s been shrinking ever since and still hasn’t happened. The latest is that it will be a small El Nino and probably won’t do much for California. If that is the case, next year is going to be grim.
Several years ago it was important for the deniers to discredit science and progressive thinkers. Now it’s important for the deniers to simply not be wrong.
I have a good friend who is unfortunately on a steady diet of conservative BS. She’s bright, but easily swayed by her own confirmation bias. Not that long ago she was all “climate scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.” Now she’s changed her tune a bit: “Hey, no one knows what’s really going on.”
When a few coastal cities become flooded I predict she’ll start saying “This was going to happen anyway. People shouldn’t build in disaster zones.”
I am coming to believe that we will do very little too slowly to effect the perceived climate change that we are basically causing other than to slow it slightly. Does our understanding of the science of climate allow for any prediction of the climate/weather patterns that will develop when the process of change reaches a new stable point or are there too many variables to make that kind of prediction?
Of course that would depend on when or at what point we reach a new stable point in CO2 concentration .
uncle frogy
@Snodorum
Six degrees by Mark Lynas is indeed an excellent book and I highly recommend it.
It goes much further than just explaining the impact of climate change on nature ,going into how global politics will be effected and also how some people are seeing climate change as a chance to make loads of money.No not the climate scientists who deniers seem to think are only spinning man made climate change to make money but people like Pat Broe.
Here are a couple of quotes from the book regarding this fella.
It’s a few years old now but I also recommend the film ‘The age of stupid’.
Those 3 are not necessarily cranks or liars or stupid. Disagreement (factual, peer-reviewed and supported by evidence) fuels science and keeps it healthy.
If they genuinely see ways and flaws in our climate models, it’s their duty to challenge them.
This is not to say that some may actually be deluded or paid, or that their bona-fide results are not routinely exploited for political purposes.
@1: =8)-DX
We really should start up a #TeachTheConsensus hashtag or something for it once this one is finished.
@raven #13:
Ah, but you can always take solace in the constancy of the deniers claiming that climatologists and meteorologists have in this case fiddled around with their forecasts of doom and gloom over time, and therefore can’t be trusted to provide facts about anything. The evil shills.
The problem is one of deterministic versus probabilistic thinking. Some people may not know when one should apply rather than the other, nor why it should, but they certainly know which one is easier to sell to the public.
Short answer. No!!!
1. Longer answer. Sort of. We do well on macroscale global modeling. It starts to fall apart at the meso-level, continental and below.
Which means we are 7 billion mice in one giant earth size experiment.
2. To take just one feature for example. We’ve had a few cold winters in the Northern Hemisphere.
Some models say it has to do with warming of the arctic and changes in the polar jet stream. Others say warming of the north Pacific. Others say it is just random fluctuations.
The best answer from a climatologist about whether this is the new normal, “We need ten years worth of data.”
Well good luck. By that time it probably won’t matter. We will have dealt with it and be on to some other unforseen event. The Gulf Stream probably won’t stop but it might slow down and/or change course. No one knows.
snodorum
The two you mention are pretty good afaik.
For the science. Start with Spencer Weart’s Discovery of Global Warming http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm
For the extremely tedious but very important commercial opposition, you can’t go past Naomi Oreskes & Erik M Conway, Merchants of Doubt .
For an insight into the beleaguered life of a climate scientist targeted by these goons.
Prof Michael Mann wrote The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars .
You’re welcome to participate in the online climate wars if you’ve got the stomach for it. It gets a bit tiresome after all these years.
ironchew
Easily? It is already too late for some of the most vulnerable coastal cities and river deltas. The rising seas will keep on rising even if we reduce emissions to zero tomorrow. The only question is how fast will they keep rising.
There is one thing in our favour. The Milankovitch orbital forcing would have us moving towards a glaciation – or at least a substantial cooling. The human interference stabilising and then reversing this trend started a few thousand years ago with land clearing and is now careening towards disasters of various kinds. If we can sharply reduce emissions and, most importantly, start withdrawing substantial maounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and especially the ocean, we’re in a favourable position, sort of, for the planet to help us on our way.
(Though I very much doubt we’ll be able to get that glaciation back on course. The general view is that we’ve already ensured that it can’t happen.) For an entertaining view of the larger picture, climate from the perspective of a geologist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM&hd=1
Daily Kos link.
Rain in California:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mexico-hurricane-means-southern-california-rain-25317835
http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/09/07/4110836/storms-dump-rain-to-inland-southern.html
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/09/08/phoenix-arizona-rainfall-flooding/15284743/
Just wanted to pop in to thank Tiko and mildlymagnificent for the book tips! I will put them on my “to read” Amazon wish list! :)
I’m not equipped to join the online climate change wars just yet. I would just be parroting other bloggers who I happen to trust rather than understanding the issues myself. While I have confidence in our scientists and climatologists, I can’t defend their position unless I have a general grasp of it!
that one is good for a number of reasons, not just the climate change issue, but the history of science denialism as a corporate venture itself.
btw, if you are more audio-visual oriented, she did a nice lecture series on the topics in that book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPIA6l2OTg
worth watching.
not often one ends up saying:
“Yay for flooding!”