Tag Archives: Climate Change

The New Andrew Revkin Fan UPDATED

June 23, 2015UncategorizedAndrew Revkin, Climate Change, Climate Change, Dot Earth, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

See below for update.

Andrew Revkin has a new kind of fan. These are fans that agree with much of what Revkin says, or at least feel comfortable in his community of commenters. These fans feel their views are substantiated by what they read in Revkin’s New York Times column, Dot Earth. They seem to be Libertarian, anti-environment, anti-science, pro-fossil fuel, and frankly, anti-green. Not just one or two of Andrew Revkin’s fans, but a bunch — with numbers possibly growing — are of this mind, and this is very disturbing. If we had the technology to transport these fans back in time and put them in a small room with Andy Revkin back in the days of the Bush administration, the room would melt down. They would not be his fans, and he would be shocked to be told that some day they will be.

Revkin still has his old fans, people who are actively and intentionally green, concerned about the environment, not willing to accept a world run by fossil fuel or other major environment-harming industrial interests. These are often activists, people who take seriously their individual responsibly to be good to the only planet we have, the Earth. And I’m sure there are many ways in which these more traditional Revkin-readers still fit with and relate to the folk singer and former New York Times journalist.

I’ve been noticing this for months. I speak with a green activist about climate change. The activist is very concerned about climate change due to human produced greenhouse gas pollution, can see the effects of it, worries about future generations that will be unspeakably harmed by it. Annoyed, the activist is, with deniers of climate change, deniers of the science, those who incorrectly say that even if it is real we can’t do anything about it, or should not, falsely claiming that curtailing fossil fuel use will be worse than using the Sun’s energy to fuel our lifestyle, or perniciously saying this simply can’t be done.

And right there in the middle of the conversation about how global warming is real, human caused, important, and fixable, and about how deniers of these things are truely some kind of bad guy, I’ll hear something about how Any Revkin is great. Writes great stuff. Says great stuff. And I’m sure that to a certain extent, taking a life long career into account, considering it all, this is true.

But then I look at Dot Earth, and I see two things. First is Andy Revkin’s tendency to occupy that space between serious concern about climate change and acceptance of consensus science on one hand, and questioning of the reality and importance of climate change, on the other. In other words, Andy likes to write, often, in the space between what deniers call “warmists” and what warmists call “deniers.”

There was a time, perhaps, one could argue, and many did, that there was a valid intersection between these space, an overlap, a place where an honest broker could be effective in shepherding those who might be antagonistic towards better solutions to our existential problems in a better direction. But that ship has sailed. There is plenty of room for variation in policy approaches to climate change. But there is absolutely zero room for considering the reality of climate change or its severity. We can honestly argue about thresholds, and which decade will see what severe effects, but we can no longer argue about the existence or overall seriousness of the problem. Within climate science, scientists argue over the relative importance of Arctic Warming vs. Pacific surface warm anomalies in relation to quasi-resonant Rossby waves, about the complex dynamics of transient climate sensitivity vis-a-vis positive feedbacks, or about the order in which to load variables into climate models running on supercomputers. But nobody, really, in climate science is arguing about any of the things that are being discussed in that space between consensus science and denial.

Except Andy and a few other people, and many who call themselves green, because they are honestly and honorably green or at least want to be green, see Andy in that space and think, well, if he’s there, maybe I should be there.

As the gaping maw between good climate science on one hand and pro-fossil fuel activism on the other has grown, almost everybody has moved to one side or another, most moving towards the science unless they have some motive to be on the side that we now understand is clearly wrong. Most green people have moved to the side that prefers to save the Earth and has little interest in saving the Koch Brothers. And as this tectonic event, this rifting, in perspective has happened, Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog has stayed in the widening valley, initially I assume because it seemed like the right place to be, and eventually remained there for reasons I would feel uncomfortable guessing at.

And today, I took a look into that rift to see what was in there and what I saw was disturbing.

Tony Dokoupil of MSNBC produced some commentary about how Dot Earth has degraded to little more than Andy Revkin’s hobby blog. He makes a number of points you can agree with or not, and Andy, much to his credit — he could have ignored this but chose not to — addresses those points. I have opinions and observations I could express about Dokoupil’s commentary and about Revkin’s response, but that is neither here nor there. What I would prefer to focus on is the nature and character of the supportive commentary, a subset of the folks who jumped in to say Andy’s doing it right. The new fans.

Following is a sampling of comments on this most recent post which give a flavor for what I’m talking about. Much of what is repeated below is discredited by current science or misrepresents science. For the most part it isn’t even very skilled denialism. The denialism part is not what bothers me. Well, science denialism bothers me, but that is not what I’m talking about here. What concerns me is the apparent comfort level found among those who really want us to do nothing to address climate change with the middle ground, the honest broker. What might have once been a true middle ground is now a place where the anti-science troops hunker down and from which they snipe, like the various demilitarized zones of past meatspace wars throughout the 20th century. It is a place that should not be groomed for use in the national paper of record, and especially on a green blog.

Laird Wilcox Kansas City is comfortable at Dot Earth and appreciates Andy’s approach:

What may bother some global warmists is that Dot Earth actually opens issues up to comment in an honest way. For ideologues, and especially dogmatic AGW warmists, this is anathema — it’s giving the hated demonic “other” a voice and allowing him a voice to undermine the group consensus that drives dogmatic causes and crusades to greater and greater levels of intolerance of opposition.

To allow skeptics and others who see issues with global warmist dogma that require reconsideration of basic premises, additional testing of claims and declarations, reanalysis of date and perhaps honest and unsparing consideration of what it is that they really fear from open and vigorous debate in the public domain. Why is it necessary that “denialists” are driven from web pages, comments sections of journals and newspapers as well as warmist meetings and conventions? I don’t this this happens because everybody is assured they are full of c**p but rather that they have cogent arguments worth considering.

This tendency to reject the hated “other” with broad campaigns of marginalization, vilification, stigmatization, stereotyping and name-calling is allowing public awareness of what the AGW warmist movement harbors in its ranks – deeply insecure believers drawn to the apocalyptic catastrophizing their movement demands and a deeply dark paranoia toward all who question the dogma, writ and scripture that supports it.

It’s own intolerance and extremism should give it away in normal times.

Trusted Commenter Kip Hansen implies a link between the Dot Earth approach and a well known scientist turned (sadly) denialist:

Dr. Judith Curry, in her opening remarks at the ” Circling the square: universities, the media, citizens and politics.” conference in Nottingham, England, concluded with this:

“In conclusion, my concern is that the scientific community is extremely confused about the policy process and too many climate scientists are irresponsibly shooting from the hip as issue advocates. Apart from the damage that this is doing at the interface between science and policy, the neglect and perversion of uncertainty is doing irreparable damage to the science and to the public trust of scientists.”

I would support the same statement, with the subject being Environmental Journalists, transmogrified to: (this is a paraphrased quote, with substitutions):

“….my (Kip Hansen’s) concern is that the environmental journalist community is extremely confused about the policy process and too many environmental journalists are irresponsibly shooting from the hip as issue advocates. Apart from the damage that this is doing at the interface between journalism and policy, the neglect and perversion of uncertainty is doing irreparable damage to journalism and to the public trust of environmental journalists.”

When journalists no longer question the pronouncements of advocates — political or scientific — then they fail at their sacred trust.

Has Andrew Revkin become *that* kind of journalist here at Dot Earth? Is he “just another advocate”?

Kurt notes:

If I understand correctly, part of the criticism from “Climate Hawks” is that YOU don’t take a strong stand. (For the record, NOT my criticism; im Gegenteil: a good journalist, like a good scientist, should not let his ideology cloud facts or data!). Nevertheless, they probably wonder why you’re not fighting in the trenches like Joe Romm or Susan Goldenberg.

Keep your balance, your open mind and vor allem: keep playing music!

and, in support of Andy Revkin,

it was Revkin himself who posted the criticism on his own blog. Revkin doesn’t make the silly statement that Dokoupil lacks a scientific background; indeed, none of Dokoupils’ arguments are remotely scientific – they are about Revkin’s attention being split between competing interests, his blog style, his interaction with commenters and hosted writers, and regaining his former gravitas: “… quite simply one of the very best reporters to ever push a green noun against a green verb in newsprint.”

Robert disagreed, but wmar has a response to that:

You forgot the most important part of the list:

The Data –

for that is what is primarily on Kip and Kurt’s ‘side’. When Andy notes this it is indeed refreshing and valuable.

Adrian O has a nice example of denial in response to Portia‘s quip “Man walks into a bar in the Kirabati Islands.
Oh. Wait“:

precisely mapped how Tarawa, the main atoll and the capital of Kiribati, has GROWN CONSIDERABLY in surface since 1940.
The study and a dozen others are quoted by the IPCC which mentions that out of ALL Pacific small islands measured, a large majority, 86%, are GROWING IN SURFACE or are stable.

IPCC concludes, in section 29.3.1. OBSERVED impacts on Island Coasts (2014)
QUOTE
Sea-level rise did not appear to be the primary control on
shoreline processes on these islands
END QUOTE
http://tinyurl.com/nb5he7h

So now that you see in detail that when measured the islands are NOT sinking, you have two alternatives

1) You are relieved. You were worried that islands are sinking, but now you know that careful maps and the IPCC show that that is not the case.

2) (sadly much more likely) You feel ambushed by right wing deniers, and you know better than to look at measurements, even official: you always choose propaganda, and think that measured reality is Satan. You want Andy’s blog closed.

This can happen in two cases.
a) You are totally uninterested in those islands, but you NEED to feel desperate in order to feel good about yourself, or

b) You are totally uninterested in those islands, but you have considerable gain if you seed despair, e.g. you have green investments, you are a green CEO, etc.
*
Denver and Kirbati are submerged.
Why Denver?
Why Kiribati?

I’m going to include a comment by Robert to address some of the issues above lest I be repeating a bad message:

i see we’re still not reading the material, AO. well, I’m here to help, though I do think that the masters of science generally do try and do their homework before spouting off.

1. Both the IPCC appendix and the unpublished study you cited agree on two things: a) sea levels generally continue to rise in the Pacific (and have risen approx. 200 mm. over the last 130 years).

2. The rises, together with other natural and “anthropogenic,” events, continue to change islands, reefs and atolls in ways that are not clearly understood.

3. Very generally speaking, Kiribati’s bigger islands have gained in area, while the smaller have lost area.

4. Some of this is wholly natural, in the sense that this sort of geography tends to move, shift, and change a fair amount.

5. However–and your authors are explicit about this–a large part of the reason that the larger islands have tended to grow is that more people live on them, and they’ve been building sea walls, retainers, dredges, etc. like crazy.

In brief, no, these islands don’t just sink. (Actually they don’t really sink at all; they get eroded away, the sea level rises, etc.) The processes involved are complex, just as they are with global warming.

However, the overall pattern is clear.

So read your own material, willya? And grow a sense of humor.

That there are denialist comments on Andy Revkin’s blog is not an issue at all. What he or his editors allow is entirely up to them. My position on blogging comments will be well known to my own readers. There can’t be hard and fast rules. It is entirely appropriate to exclude any and all trolls and at the same time it is entirely appropriate to allow their discussions. There is no free speech issue here (anyone who feels excluded from a given outlet can go get their own outlet). The problem, to reiterate but it probably needs to be said a couple of times, is that Andy Revkin’s approach to many of the climate related issues is to give service to positions that are simply untenable and, very likely, damaging.

Andrew Revkin is not a climate science denialist. But he is occupying a space where, given the evolution of this issue in recent years, few who understand the severity of the problem occupy any more, for good reason. So, as long as people are lining up to advise Andrew Revkin as to what he should do, I’ll add this. Take one of your feet off the dock or the boat, before you fall in!

Update Added June 25

In a response to my post, regarding my assertion that there is zero room for debate about the reality of climate change, Andy Revkin wrote, at Dot Earth:

“Zero room.” That’s scientific.

Yes, it is. There is zero room for debate when an issue has been pretty much settled. In science debate can come up anywhere, you never know, but for all practical purposes we do not debate if the Earth is hollow or solid or flat or round, or that germs cause many diseases, or that frogs reproduce as most other tetrapods do rather then spontaneously emerging from mud.

The Earth is warming. No room for debate there. Many factors affect global surface temperatures. Some are natural, some are human-caused. The sum of the natural effects does not produce the warming we see. The human effects have caused, over the last several decades, a certain amount of cooling (from aerosol pollutants) and a certain amount of warming (from greenhouse gas emissions and related positive feedbacks, and damage to Carbon sinks). So the warming trend is human caused. No room for debate there. Climate change is causing loss of life, damage to property, and threats to food production through drought and excessive rain. Sea levels can not possibly fail to rise over coming decades, wiping out coastal properties including human settlements, harbors, agricultural lands, etc. No room for debate on these effects. Killer heat waves have become more common and this will get much worse. No debate about that. Ocean acidification is happening and will get worse. This is not debated. There is some debate about how much we can adapt to some of these effects, but adaptation will be costly and there are limits. So, yes, there is some debate there. There is no debate that we need to keep the Carbon in the ground. There is some debate (but it is highly questionable) about the idea that we can get energy by releasing Carbon but at the same time use energy to un-release the Carbon. There are serious physical limitations to such an approach. There is a vibrant and real debate about which non-fossil-Carbon technologies we should use to produce energy, given the possible mix of technologies such as wind, PV solar, thermal solar, passive geothermal, tidal, hydro, and nuclear. That’s a real debate. There is real debate about pricing carbon or regulating energy production, about subsidies and incentives, etc.

So to repeat my original post, I said “… there is absolutely zero room for considering the reality of climate change or its severity.” Andy Revkin claimed that this is not true, that there is a debate. Until he said that I had not realized that Revkin was on the fence about the reality of climate change. I wrote “Andrew Revkin is not a climate science denialist,” but I have now been corrected. Apparently that is not true. This comes as an utter surprise to me.

And, in fact, I don’t believe it. I think his “that’s not scientific” argument was not well thought out, something of a knee-jerk reaction, in which you tell the person who seems to be disagreeing with you that they don’t know how to think rationally. (In fact, in his comments, he did that twice. Wrong both times.)

In the comments section (below) Andy wrote:

If you’d asked me about my comment policy and your concerns about my “fans” in that space I might have reminded you that comment contributors — as at most blogs — are a tiny subset of the overall readership. I find it puzzling that someone with scientific training would claim to detect significant trends in such a small and skewed sample (commenters tend to have lots of free time and strong opinions) and then use those “findings” to demean the work of someone whose second National Academy of Sciences Communication Award was for Dot Earth. It’s always imperfect. I don’t have enough time to vet all comments for factual content. Folks can feel free to dive into the conversations there or ignore them. They don’t even appear unless you click.

But I had written in my post “that there are denialist comments on Andy Revkin’s blog is not an issue at all. What he or his editors allow is entirely up to them. My position on blogging comments will be well known to my own readers. There can’t be hard and fast rules. It is entirely appropriate to exclude any and all trolls and at the same time it is entirely appropriate to allow their discussions.

I’m not talking about comments. As Andy and others have pointed out, denialist comments on Dot Earth get addressed by those who disagree. I often do the same thing on my blog.

The point I made in this (original) blog post is that Andy Revkin operates a forum that caters to a middle ground that has disappeared, and that feeding activity in this middle ground is counter-productive, demanding a cost we can’t afford to pay. That is my criticism. I further noted that this is important because of Andy’s cachet with the green community.

Susan Anderson (below) says:

Andy’s promotion of voices from the so-called middle has become a reliable indicator prompting people like me to, for example, look up the credentials and work of Martin Hoerling, Roger Pielke Jr., and a variety of others. I don’t remember if he promotes Lomborg.

Meanwhile, it is very sad, Andy is a fine writer, an excellent researcher, has a reputation deep and wide from his history (he turned around 2008), and is an attractive speaker who gets invited everywhere.

His less popular articles on local ecology and initiatives are more than fine, and it is sad that they are not given top billing by his audience, while the fight goes on … and on … and on … getting nowhere and encouraging apathy.

Well put, Susan.

Metzomagic (below) notes that Revkin brought some standard “middle of the road” questions to bear in his interview with Jeremy Shakun. Yes, he did, but if I was interviewing him I would have asked similar questions to give him an opportunity to address them, which he did. Indeed, Andy points out that the current change in surface temperatures is not so much as hockey stick but rather something much more serious and severe. (In thinking about an alternative to hockey stick to represent the shape of the time serious I keep coming back to various dentistry tools.) This makes me believe that Andy is is on board with the reality of and seriousness of climate change.

And that, really, is the problem as I see it. Andy has one foot on the dock, one foot on the boat, but he really wants to be on the dock. Questioning of the reality and importance of climate change, that boat won’t float. I think it is time for Any to just get himself fully and squarely on the dock.

Another update: This discussion continues with Andy Revkin’s new post: In Weighing Responses to Climate Change, Severity and Uncertainty Matter More than ‘Reality’

Michael With Mike Mann On Pope

June 18, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, popeGreg Laden

Michael Mann was interviewed by Michael Smerconish about the Pope’s recent letter on climate change:

Here’s the NYT piece by Justin Gillis mentioned by Mann.

The graphic at the top is form here.

May 2015 Global Surface Temperatures Break Record

June 18, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, May 2015, May Temperature NOAAGreg Laden

NOAA has released the data for average global surface temperature for the month of May. The number is 0.87 degrees C (1.57 degrees F) above the 20th century average for their data set. This is the highest value seen for the month of May since 1880, which is the earliest year in the database. The previous record value for may was last year. This year’s May value is 0.08 degrees C (0.14 degrees F) higher than that.

According to NOAA:

<li>The May globally-averaged land surface temperature was 2.30°F (1.28°C) above the 20th century average. This tied with 2012 as the highest for May in the 1880–2015 record.</li>

<li>The May globally-averaged sea surface temperature was 1.30°F (0.72°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest for May in the 1880–2015 record, surpassing the previous record set last year in 2014 by 0.13°F (0.07°C).</li>

This is the NOAA graph for May temperature anomaly values from 1880 to the present:

Here is a graph showing the surface temperature averaged over the 12 month periods ending in May (inclusively) for the entire data set:

Just for fun, I requested the same graph but with a trend line plotted for the time period sometimes referred to by climate science denialists as the “pause” period, which Wikipedia defines as 1998 – 2012. Notice that the trend for the “pause” (aka “FauxPause”) is still rising, and that it sits among data that are rising much faster.

And, for the record, the following plot shows a trend line running from the publication of the famous Hockey Stick research by Mann, Bradley & Hughes to the present. This is the amount of surface warming that has happened since, more or less, the full-on birth of the climate science denialism industry.

The amount of warming in the US (where a majority of you’all live) is less than globally, because certain other regions have warmed much more (like the Arctic). But the warming still has an effect. Considering just heat, which for many is compensated for by potentially costly building cooling system, there is more heat and thus more demand for cooling. Heating and cooling engineers express this in terms of “cooling degree days.” This is essentially the number of degrees you have to cool a structure accumulated over days, making certain assumptions you can read about here.

So, how have cooling degree days changed in the US? Here’s the graph.

If you live in certain parts of the country, this can be more extreme. The graphic at the top of the post is the change over time in cooling degree days in the American Southwest.

Skeptics Dare Heartland Institute to Take Up $25,000 Climate Challenge

June 15, 2015UncategorizedBet, Center for Inquiry, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Heartland Institute, WagerGreg Laden

This is a press release from the Center for Inquiry:

Skeptics Dare Heartland Institute to Take Up $25,000 Climate Challenge

A leading science advocacy group is throwing down the gauntlet to the Heartland Institute, a group that claims that global warming stopped in 1998, with a stark, simple challenge: If the 30-year average global land surface temperature goes up in 2015, setting a new record, the Heartland Institute must donate $25,000 to a science education nonprofit.

The challenge is presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), a program of the Center for Inquiry, which held its “Reason for Change” conference last week in Buffalo, at the same time as Heartland’s own climate conference in Washington, DC. Heartland’s gathering opened with a keynote address by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who believes that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

Among the key findings of a 2013 report published by Heartland was that “The level of warming in the most recent 15 year period [since 1998] is not significantly different from zero” and “natural variability is responsible for late twentieth century warming and the cessation of warming since 1998.” While the report’s authors dismissed global warming forecasts published by mainstream scientists, they have avoided making any testable predictions of their own.

“If anyone really thinks that human-caused global warming is a hoax, and that the climate has stopped heating up, they must also believe that temperatures will now stabilize or drop,” said Mark Boslough, a physicist and CSI Fellow who devised the challenge. “Well, that’s a testable claim, so let’s test it.”

“It’s time for the Heartland Institute to put its money where its exhaust pipe is,” said Ronald A. Lindsay, president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, home of CSI. “If Earth’s climate gets hotter, and keeps getting hotter, the naysayers at Heartland should publicly own up and pay up.”

If CSI’s prediction proves incorrect, and the 30-year average global temperature does not go up, CSI agrees to donate $25,000 to an educational nonprofit designated by the Heartland Institute.

CSI offered the following challenge:

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) hereby presents to the Heartland Institute a challenge as to whether the Earth’s climate will set a new record high temperature this year. The challenge will be settled using the NASA GISS mean global land surface temperatures for the conventional climate averaging period (defined by the World Meteorological Organization as 30 years) ending on December 31, 2015. If the global average temperature does not exceed the mean temperature for an equal period ending on the same date in any previous year for which complete data exist, CSI will donate $25,000 to a nonprofit to be designated by Heartland. Otherwise, Heartland will be asked to donate $25,000 to a science education nonprofit designated by CSI. It is CSI’s intent to repeat this challenge every year for the next 30 years.

“The theme of Heartland’s climate conference was ‘Fresh Start,'” observed Lindsay. “By predicting that a new record average temperature will be set every year for the next 30 years, we are in effect giving them 30 ‘fresh starts.’ I fear that what we’ll all find, however, is that as temperatures rise and the crisis deepens, each ‘fresh start’ will grow more and more stale.”

Last December, Fellows of CSI – which includes noted scientists, journalists, and other luminaries such as Bill Nye, Ann Druyan, Richard Dawkins, David Morrison, Sir Harold Kroto, Joe Nickell, Eugenie Scott, and Lawrence Krauss – circulated a widely noted open letter, drafted by Boslough, calling for the news media to refrain from referring to those who deny the scientific consensus on climate change as “skeptics.” Learn more at http://bit.ly/SkepticsDeniers.

How Warm Was May?

June 15, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, May NASA GISSGreg Laden

Human released greenhouse gas pollution continues to warm the surface of the planet. May was thought to be likely a very very warm month but it turns out to be merely very warm (only one “very”) according to data released this morning.

Shockingly, May turned out to be, in the NASA GISS data set, less warm than expected. (I mainly get my cues for what to expect from my friend and colleague John Abraham, who has written up the May NASA GISS results HERE.) At the same time the May data came out (earlier today) the data for April was adjusted by NASA (these adjustments happen all the time, they are always small). So, May 2015 and April 2015 had the same anomaly value in the NASA GISS database, 71. That’s in hundredths of a degree C, which itself doesn’t mean much. The base period is 1951-1980, which is a time period after which considerable surface warming had already occurred. The lowest value in the top 20 warmest months since 1880 is 74, the highest 93, so May 2015 is not quite on that list but still warm compared to the baseline, which averages zero (because it is the baseline).

Using a 12 month moving average based on these data, we’ve had record or near record 12 month periods since some time in 2014. The present 12 month moving average is the fourth highest in the adjusted, updated data, but with all five of the highest periods occurring since the beginning of this year. Here’s a graph of the 12 month moving average:

It is also interesting to look at the year to date. How warm is 2015 compared to previous years through May? Here’s a graph of that too:

Either way you look at it, surface temperatures are rising. What does that mean? This.

Higher resolution graphics are available here.

What does “Global Warming” mean?

June 7, 2015Uncategorized#FauxPause, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

The Problem with terminology

There is some confusion about the way we talk about global warming. Most of this confusion arises during the communication of science to the public or to policy makers. Part of this confusion rests within the science itself; There is no meaningful confusion about the nature of global warming or how it is observed, but there are some terminological glitches of the kind that arise in science all the time, and that rarely matter to the science itself.

The most commonly used indicator of global warming is a graph that is meant to show the effects of global warming over time. This may be by decade, yearly, or monthly, or using a moving average using a period such as 12-months or some other time period. This is an example:

NASA GISS TEMP ANOMALY 1880-PRESENT

The vertical axis is temperature anomaly, the standard way scientists measure changes in heat over time. Each data point is calculated from thousands of roughly head-height thermometers across the Earth’s land surface, combined with a measure of global sea surface temperatures. As we go back in time there are fewer data sources, and the sea surface temperature is measured differently. During any given year, there are parts of the globe that are underrepresented. The way these deficiencies in the data are addressed varies across the major data sets (from the US, Great Britain, or elsewhere) though all the different data sets use most of the same original raw data. This graph is based on the data provided by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). All of the different data sets show the same thing, a general increase in global surface temperatures, and the variation over time, the up and down squiggles, is similar for all the data sets. They differ only in details.

It is an important fact that as the line indicating global surface temperature going up across the indicated time span, the amount it goes up varies. There are short periods of time when the temperature value goes up rather quickly then drops a bit, and there are periods of time during which the value goes up and down without much increase over several years running.

When we see a brief period (a few years, or a decade, etc.) where the trend varies from the long term trend, we need to ask why this is happening. Most of the dramatic upward spikes turn out to be El Niño years, when the ocean is adding a lot of stored heat into the atmosphere. Most of the periods where the rise in temperature value is somewhat lackadaisical are periods both lacking an El Niño event and having a number of La Niña events, during which the Pacific Ocean is soaking up more heat than average (that heat comes back out during El Niño periods).

There are also periods when the rise in global temperature is attenuated by additional aerosols in the atmosphere. This may be caused by a high rate of volcanic activity or the explosion of a particularly large volcano. Also, at one point, we see general increase in the upward trend that is probably a combination of a) cleaning up some of the human caused aerosols with the Clean Air Act and similar regulatory changes, and b) an increase in the human output of greenhouse gas pollution.

A significant cause in the variation of this signal over time, related to El Niño and La Niña events, is probably the result of one or more long term oscillations in the relationship between the ocean and the atmosphere. I’ve written about recent research addressing this phenomenon here. These multi-decadal oscillations probably explain most of the waviness in the line.

We have recently moved past a period of a relative slowdown in the increase in global surface temperature and are now experiencing a rapid rise in average global temperature. The way this slowdown is discussed is part of the confusion about global warming. To the average person, the term “slowdown” might sound like “decrease,” but it is not a decrease in surface temperatures, but a reduction in the rate at which surface temperatures are going up for a few years.

Nonetheless, the recent slowdown has been exploited by those who argue that global warming is not real, or is not, somehow, caused the way scientists say it is. It has been termed a “hiatus” or a “pause.” This terminology is problematic. A hiatus is a gap. When we “pause” something (like using a pause button) we stop it. The stop button on your music device stops the music. The pause button also stops it. The difference between stop and pause is what happens after you restart it, or a difference in the internal working mechanism. In the old days, for example, if you stop an audio or video tape, the magnetic head that reads the data is lifted off the tape, but if you hit “pause” the magnetic head stays on the tape so restarting is smoother. (If you pause for too long the magnetic head can damage the data on the tape!) Thus, “pause” and “stop” are functionally the same thing when it comes to whether or not the music or video is playing. A “pause” in global warming would be a stop in global warming. That, however, did not happen.

A hiatus or a pause in global warming is at present physically impossible. Our climate system operates in such a way that increasing the amount of human generated greenhouse gas pollution, all else being equal (or more or less equal), will increase the global heat imbalance and force the surface temperatures upwards. The implication of a “pause” or “hiatus” (stopping, or a gap in, warming) is that global warming is not happening for a period of time, as though the physical process stopped working, and the implication of that is that physics does not work the way climate scientists know it works. This is why “pause” is so beloved a meme in the denier community. If there is a pause, the science must be wrong. But even if there were sufficient aerosols from a huge volcanic eruption to actually lower global surface temperatures significantly for a short time, the greenhouse gasses previously and continuously added by humans would remain and continue to exert an upward effect on temperature. Once the aerosols settle, which does not take long, the added greenhouse gasses will remain for many decades (even centuries) and warming will continue until an equilibrium is reached. That would not be a pause or hiatus, just a bit more wiggling in the line marching ever upward.

Book suggestions: For a good overview of climate change, see “Dire Predictions.” For a good overview of climate change denialism, see “Climatology vs. Pseudoscience.”

Process vs. pattern

Global warming is a process. More greenhouse gasses along with the resulting positive (heat increasing) feedback effects that accompany that increase cause a heat imbalance and the parts of the Earth that can absorb heat from the sun directly or indirectly become warmer. Global warming is also a pattern. It is a pattern we observe in the average global temperature measures such as the surface temperature measurement described above.

If you can show that the pattern as observed is not as expected, that would bring into question the process of greenhouse gas-caused changes in the Earth’s heat, right? Well, no. The answer is no because the way the process works and the way we generally observe the pattern are not the same thing.

Look at these two graphs.

OHC

GMST

The upper graph shows the temperature of the part of the ocean, the upper 700 or 2000 meters, that can be warmed indirectly by increasing greenhouse gas pollution over a period of time. The lower graph shows the same thing for the sea surface and the atmosphere. These graphs are dramatically different in the x-axis. The ocean heat content graph only goes back to the late 1950s, while the surface graph goes back to 1880. This is because of difference in the data that are available.

Now, have a look at this graph:

BUBBLE GRAPH SHOWING DISTRIBUTION OF HEAT IMBALANCE

This graph shows the relative percentage of the overall warming that occurs in the ocean vs. the atmosphere and a few other systems. The ocean heat graph above, which shows no recent period of time during which heat does not go up, represents over 90% of the heat increase due to global warming. The surface represents only a small percentage. In the following graph, I simply cropped each of these two graphs to show only 1960 to the present, then scaled them so the surface graph and the ocean graph are in proper relationship to each other on the vertical axis. This is a bit hokey but it makes the point:

HYBRID GRAPH SHOWING GMST AND OHC SCALED

Wow. When we refer to the process of global warming, we are referring to changes in the Earth’s heat balance, which is a combination of what climate scientists call “forcings” (not my favorite term but it is the one in use) that move heat imbalance either up or down. Human caused greenhouse gas pollution is a positive forcing, which in turn causes a number of other feedbacks, also positive. So the total result of greenhouse gas pollution is an increase in temerature over time until some future point where the forcing stops (because we stop using fossil fuels) and the heat imbalance eventually settles out (far into the future). Aerosols from other human pollution or volcanoes, etc., force in the opposite direction. The net outcome has been, for decades, an increase in temperature. The cobbed together graph above shows that all of the forcing combined has resulted in a steady upward increase in temperature. The graph also demonstrates that even large up or down deviations in the pattern of surface temperature are not especially relevant to the total process of warming.

When we refer to the pattern of global warming, however, we generally do not refer to overall changes in heat balance, but in practice, we refer to changes only in global means surface temperature. Why? Because that is the measure for which we have data over a long period of time. It is like this. Say you want to know if your child has a fever. You may put a thermometer in the child’s mouth, or some other orifice, or put a heat sensitive strip on the child’s forehead, or an ear thermometer in the ear. In so doing, you have measured the child’s temperature, right? Well, no. What you measured is the temperature of the child’s mouth, or distal large intestine, or forehead, or ear drum. You don’t call the nurse hot line and say, “Help, my child’s mouth is 104 F, what do I do?” You use the measurement you took of one tissue or body part to estimate the child’s overall body temperature. Well, actually, you use the measurement you took to see if your child’s temperature-related homeostasis is off. In any event, you used a measurement of a small part of your child’s body to estimate internal temperature.

When climate scientists show you a graph of mean surface temperature and talk about global warming, they are not ignoring the ocean. They are simply measuring the surface as an indicator of an ongoing change in the Earth’s heat imbalance, using data that are available, understood, and cover a long time period. So they are talking about the process of global warming (which involves the oceans, the air, the sea surface, the ground under your feet, ice, etc) but using a readily available and useful tool to track it.

As a result, the term “global warming” to many climate scientists means “overall positive heat imbalance most of which is in the ocean.” To some scientists, “global warming” refers to global mean surface temperature change, and the ocean is viewed as a reservoir where heat is stored, waiting in the pipeline to come out later. That is really the same thing, and both acknowledge the difference between surface temperature measurement and ocean heat content measurement. When you actually look in the published literature, you see no confusion or changes in terminology. You really don’t see the term “global warming” being used very often when referencing measurements. If the measurement being discussed is the heat in the ocean, you see the term “ocean heat content” (OHC). When the measurement being discussed is the surface temperature record, you see a term like “Global mean surface temperature” (GMST). And, you don’t even see these terms used on their own; At some point in the scientific paper, the actual data set used to derive these values is specified.

This does not imply that the difference between ocean heat content and global surface temperature is not important. It is very important. For one thing, we live at the surface. Heat waves are a phenomenon of the atmospheric temperature at the same location it is measured by all those thermometers. Tropical storms form more frequently or grow larger with a higher sea surface temperature. A warmer atmosphere holds more water. Relative changes at different latitudes in surface temperature appear to have changed how weather systems behave, giving us the phenomenon known as “weather whiplash” causing frequent droughts (short or long term) and regional inundation with exceptional rain or snow. The deeper (down to 2000 meters) heat in the ocean does not directly cause those things.

But, the heat in the ocean does contribute when it comes out, like during an El Niño, adding to the surface heat. And, there are other effects of heat in the ocean, causing important ecological changes including ocean acidification. It isn’t really that complex. Both the ocean (down to 2000 meters or so) and the surface (SST and the bottom of the atmosphere over land) are warming. The total amount of heat that the ocean can absorb is huge (because water holds more heat than air). The heat moves back and forth between the sea and the air. Numerous effects occur. The whole shebang together is global warming, but we often represent the phenomenon as changes in surface temperatures because that is an excellent measurement.

Perhaps we should not use the term “global warming” for the pattern of surface temperature changes, because global warming is bigger than that, it includes more stuff. But the surface is where we are at, and just like we say “my child has a fever” because our child’s forehead feels hot and the ear drum is verified as warmer than it should be with an optical thermocouple, we can refer to the GMST and speak of global warming. Because it is.

On several occasions, I have had lengthy discussions with colleagues who are full time well respected climate scientists about this terminology. As far as I can tell, two things are true: 1) left on their own, these scientist would probably sort out into two groups who prefer two different ways of using terms like “global warming” and “surface temperature” and such; and 2) this matters about as much as what color pocket protector they are using to hold their mini-slide rules. It does not matter at all. As discussed above, when doing the science, the systems to which one refers and the data one makes use of are specified unambiguously and differences in the way these terms may bleed out into public (and policy making) space are not important. Outside the science, in that public and policy making space, the terms do become important, but not because they have problems. They become important only because they are being used, exploited, by deniers of science to misdirect and mislead.

And, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, this is normal. Terminological messiness occurs in all areas of science. I once copied out all of the glossary definitions of major phenomena in population genetics, from a well written textbook produced by a well respected population geneticists, into a handout. Every definition from that glossary contradicted or complexified at least one other definition. It was a mess. But it was also real. Each term had been introduced at a different time by different scientists for different reasons with different problems trying to describe something somewhat different. Had a committee of population geneticists sat down for two years, long after the science had been worked out in some detail, and generated a glossary of terms (like “bottleneck,” “genetic drift” and “founder effect”) there would be no contradictions or ambiguities (though there might be a few black eyes along the way). Even the term “gene” has multiple and often contradictory meaning in use, and that gets worse when dealing with the literature over a couple of decades. This emerged over time as we learned more about what a “gene” actually is. Yet, population geneticists and DNA experts do not have any problem doing the science. These are just quirks that emerge at the interface of the rational pursuit of truth in science and this crazy thing we have called language.

New Research On Global Warming Hiatus

June 4, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming Hiatus, PauseGreg Laden

There is no such thing as a “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming.

There is, however, variation as the earth’s surface temperature steadily rises as the result of the human release of greenhouse gas pollution. Every now and then that variation results in a period of several years when the rise in global temperature is relatively slow, and a recent such period has been termed a “hiatus” or “pause.” But that signifier mainly comes from those who deny the reality of global warming, and is often used by them as an argument that global warming is somehow not real. It is real, and they are wrong.

Looking at an upward shift in global surface temperatures, seeing some variation, and claiming that this variation obviates the long term and rather startling trend can only mean one of two things. One possibility is that the person making that observation is ignorant of both the nature of the Earth’s climate system and of the nature of measurements of this kind. The other possibility is that the person making that observation is willfully obfuscating the science, in an effort to distract from the reality of human caused climate change. Neither speaks well of the individual making this observation.

Having said all that, variations in the upward trend of surface temperatures are both interesting and important. There are several possible causes, and understanding these causes is important in understanding the overall system. Part of this variation may be difficult to quantify or track natural variation in the system. Part of this variation may be issues with the measurement system. After all, the long term trend is derived from the stringing together of different data sets collected with different methods, so we would expect some measurement effects. A good part of this variation, maybe most of it, is thought to be the shifting of heat between the global surface (the sea surface and the bottom of the atmosphere) and the deeper ocean, through a variety of mechanisms. A long term trend has recently been nailed down by several studies including work by Michael Mann and his colleagues, and has to do with the ocean-air interaction as well. From a post by Mann on Real Climate:

In an article my colleagues Byron Steinman, Sonya Miller and I have in the latest issue of Science magazine, we show that internal climate variability instead partially offset global warming….

[That] natural cooling in the Pacific is a principal contributor to the recent slowdown in large-scale warming is consistent with some other recent studies, including a study … showing that stronger-than-normal winds in the tropical Pacific during the past decade have lead to increased upwelling of cold deep water in the eastern equatorial Pacific. Other work by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shows that the there has been increased sub-surface heat burial in the Pacific ocean over this time frame, while yet another study by James Risbey and colleagues demonstrates that model simulations that most closely follow the observed sequence of El Niño and La Niña events over the past decade tend to reproduce the warming slowdown.

I discussed that research here.

And now, there is a paper just out in Science that explores the measurement part of the variation in increasing global surface temperature. Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus by Thomas R. Karl, Anthony Arguez, Boyin Huang, Jay H. Lawrimore, James R. McMahon, Matthew J. Menne, Thomas C. Peterson, Russell S. Vose, and Huai-Min Zhang looks at changes in various measurements used to generate the basic data to track global surface temperatures. From the abstract:

Much study has been devoted to the possible causes of an apparent decrease in the upward trend of global surface temperatures since 1998, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the global warming “hiatus.” Here we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century. These results do not support the notion of a “slowdown” in the increase of global surface temperature.

An example of a measurement issue has to do with how sea surface temperatures are obtained. In the old days, most temperature measurements taken from boats involved the “bucket technique” which involves directly sampling the surface water. Later, this shifted to using thermometers measuring water temperature at intakes on board ship. The two methods measure the same thing, but because they are slightly different measurements, produce results slightly biased in relation to each other. Adjustments to these measurements apparently assumed that all the ship measurements had gone to the intake method, while in fact, some had not. This requires a small adjustment in how the numbers are used in the surface temperature estimate. The authors assert that similar small changes in the data are required for some other measurements as well.

The new analysis produced in this paper shows a consistant difference between the data as previously adjusted and how the authors feel it should be adjusted, with the older methods generally resulting in lower temperatures than the newer adjusted data. The difference between the two is especially large during the so-called “Hiatus” period. Here is the fancy graphic from the paper that shows this:

This is important and valid work. But, with respect to the public and policy-related conversation about anthropogenic global warming, this is really dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s. The difference between a temperature curve without this new adjustment and with it is very small. This graphic at the top of the post is the top part of the paper’s Figure 2, comparing the proposed new corrections and the previous corrections for the instrumental record from 1880 to the present. You can see that the better estimate of temperatures is in fact higher for the so-called hiatus, and varies from the older method noticeably here and there, but there is nothing in this new curve that changes anything important.

Michel Mann has discussed this research on his Facebook page, here. John Abraham writes at The Guardian,

The end result is that the temperature trends over the past 17 or so years has continued to increase with no halt. In fact, it has increased at approximately the same rate as it had for the prior five decades. But the authors went further by trying to cherry-pick the start and end dates. For instance, they stacked the cards against themselves by purposefully picking a very hot year to start the analysis and a cool year to terminate the study (1998 and 2012, respectively). Even this cherry-picked duration showed a warming trend. Furthermore, the warming trend was significant.

Sou at HotWhopper has it here. See also this and this and this.

I’ve heard about a number of commentaries from the denialist community. See the Hot Whopper link above for some of that. But really, who cares what a bunch of science deniers say about science?

Does global warming destroy your house in a flood?

June 3, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, flooding, Global Warming, Global Warming, Severe weather, weather whiplashGreg Laden

Joe and Mary built a house.

They built it on an old flood plain of a small river, though there’d not been a flood in years. This was a 500-year flood plain. Not a very floody flood plain at all.

The local zoning code required that for a new house at their location the bottom of the basement needed to be above a certain elevation, with fill brought in around the house to raise the surrounding landscape. But Joe’s uncle was on the zoning board, and it wasn’t that hard to get a variance. This saved them thousands of dollars, and they built the house without the raised foundation or the fill.

Over the previous fifty years much of the hilly wooded land up river from Joe and Mary’s house had been converted to agriculture. This changed the nature of the flow of rain across the land surface and into the groundwater. It caused the streams to rise more quickly when it rained, rather then slowly over several days fed by springs linked underground to the forest. Downstream, a century ago, engineers built a bridge for the new road, and they put the pilings closer than would be done in modern times. This caused flotsam from spring floodwaters to accumulate at the bridge, backing up water quite a good distance upstream. A large marsh that fed into the river, upstream from Joe and Mary’s house, normally flooded during high water, holding much of the excess. But about a decade ago, Joe’s uncle built a large housing development there, filling the marsh. There was controversy, and it was even covered in the local Pennysaver, but he got the variance. All these things would have made flooding near Joe and Mary’s house to be much worse than otherwise, but that never happened. The 500-year flood zone hadn’t had any 500-year floods in a long time, maybe 500 years.

Meanwhile, while the forest was being cleared, the road and its bridge built, the housing development constructed over the marsh, and Joe and Mary’s house erected, everybody was putting CO2, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. By the last decade or so of the 20th century, there was significant global warming. The increase in global surface temperature was not even; The Arctic warmed more than the rest of the planet. This caused a change in the behavior of the polar jet stream. Instead of occasionally becoming curvy and kinky and slow moving, the jet stream started to do this all the time. Then these waves went “quasi resonant” meaning that the large curves and loops would sit in one place for a long time, weeks or months. Meanwhile the heated up atmosphere started to take on more water vapor. Air that was wet enough to rain in the old days held the vapor longer because of the warmth, but when the super saturated air let the water out in the form of rain or snow, there was a lot of it. Since the weather systems follow the jet stream, they slowed down and would hang around for a long time in one region, raining and raining and raining while elsewhere there would be short term droughts.

One day, at Joe and Mary’s house, it started to rain. It rained four or five inches in a week. The basement got wet. The tomatoes were overwatered, and their leaves cringed. Everybody’s shoes started to smell. The dark, cloudy, wet days produced a sense of ennui.

Then, on the eight day, it really rained. It rained four inches in one day. The groundwater had been saturated, the streams and the river were already high. The torrential rainstorm raised the river to the 100 year flood level. Then to the 500 year flood level. Then a few feet more. Joe’s uncle’s housing development flooded. The bridge with its jam of flotsam became a dam. The water flowed around Joe and Mary’s house, filling the first floor with three feet of dirty water. Snakes took refuge on their roof. Their car floated away.

Eventually the water receded and Joe and Mary’s home was a total loss. The insurance guy had come by to give them the good news. They would receive a full payout for replacement cost of the home. While they were chatting, the insurance guy noted that the flood was caused by the dam of tree branches and house parts down at the bridge. Joe remembered his uncle’s housing development, the controversy about the flood basin, and noted that may have been a problem. The insurance guy agreed. Mary said she had read about how replacing forest with corn fields made runoff worse, so the streams and rivers would flood more. Joe and the insurance guy nodded. Yes, yes, that was a factor too. Nobody mentioned the fact that Joe and Mary had failed to build their home to code, but they were thinking it. They didn’t mention it because, really, they would only have raised the whole house by about two and a half feet, and the flood was higher than that, so what did that matter?

A few days later Joe and Mary were down at the coffee shop to meet a contractor to talk about using their insurance money to build a new house. They were sitting with the contractor going over preliminary plans, but were distracted by two graduate students form the nearby university sitting at the table next to them. They were talking about the flooding. They were talking about how global warming, caused by that CO2 being released into the atmosphere all these years, had caused the flooding. They were talking about the amplification of warming in the Arctic, the jet streams getting curvy and slowing down, the quasi resonant waves and the extra moisture in the atmosphere.

The contractor became annoyed. He had heard about global warming and all that, everybody had. But he also knew that the last four winters were unusually cold and snowy. His cousin had bought a Tesla electric car a few months earlier, and his cousin was an annoying tree hugging hippie. And, he remembered, he had heard an actual climate scientist on the TV the other day saying something about global warming and storms. In fact, he remembered quite clearly what the scientist had said. And now he wanted to say it too.

The contractor turned to the two graduate students, and got their attention. “Couldn’t help overhear your conversation,” he said to them. “But you know, you can’t attribute a single flood, or other weather event, to global warming. This was just a flood.”

Global warming. Dancing backwards and in high heels for more than 20 years.*

Bad Climate Science Debunked

June 2, 2015UncategorizedChristopher Monckton, Climate Change, Climate Change, Climate Models, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

Recently, a paper published in a Chinese journal of science by Monckton, Soon and Legates attracted a small amount of attention by claiming that climate science models “run hot” and therefore overrepresent the level of global warming caused by human greenhouse gas pollution. The way they approached the problem of climate change was odd. The Earth’s climate system is incredibly complex, and climate models used by mainstream climate scientists address this complexity and therefore are also complex. Monckton et al chose to address this complexity by developing a model they characterize as “irreducibly simple.” I’m not sure if their model is really irreducibly simple, but I am pretty sure that a highly complex dynamic system is not well characterized by a model so simple that the model’s creators can’t think of a way to remove any further complexity.

The same journal, Science Bulletin, has now published a paper, “Misdiagnosis of Earth climate sensitivity based on energy balance model results,” by Richardson, Hausfather, Nuccitelli, Rice, and Abraham that evaluates the Monckton et al paper and demonstrates why it is wrong.

From the abstract of the new paper:

Monckton et al. … use a simple energy balance model to estimate climate response. They select parameters for this model based on semantic arguments, leading to different results from those obtained in physics-based studies. [They] did not validate their model against observations, but instead created synthetic test data based on subjective assumptions. We show that [they] systematically underestimate warming … [They] conclude that climate has a near instantaneous response to forcing, implying no net energy imbalance for the Earth. This contributes to their low estimates of future warming and is falsified by Argo float measurements that show continued ocean heating and therefore a sustained energy imbalance. [Their] estimates of climate response and future global warming are not consistent with 29 measurements and so cannot be considered credible.

The Monckton model does not match observed temperatures, and consistently underestimates them. We don’t expect a model to perfectly match measurements, but when a model is wrong so much of the time in the same direction, the model is demonstrably biased and needs to be either tossed or adjusted. However, you can’t adjust an “irreducibly simple” model, by definition. Therefore the Monckton model is useless. And, as pointed out by Richardson et al, the basic values used in the model were badly selected.

Figure 2 from Richardson et al demonstrate the problem with bias. The pink band in the upper figure and the red/pink line in the lower figure show the Monckton model tracking across time from 1850, compared to several sets of actual observations. The irreducibly simple model may not be irreducibly wrong, but it is irreducibly useless.

Monckton et al rely on the assumption that the Earth’s surface temperature varies by only 1% around a long term (810,000 year) average. This “thermostasis”, they argue, means that there are no positive feedbacks that move the Earth’s temperature higher. This ignores the fact that for that entire record one of the main determinants of global surface temperature, greenhouse gases, has also not varied from a fairly narrow range. But now human greenhouse gas pollution has pushed greenhouse gas concentrations well outside that long term range, and heating has resulted.

The Monckton model is contradicted by observation of global ocean heat content. However, recent Argo measurements of ocean heat content indicate significant warming over the last decade.

During recent years, the rate at which global mean surface temperatures have gone up has been somewhat reduced, and various factors have been suggested as explanations. Of these explanations, Monckton et al. assume only one of these to be true, specifically, that the climate models used by all the other climate scientists are wrong. They ignore other very likely factors. Monckton et al state that models used by the IPCC “run hot” without any reference to the fairly well developed literature that examines differences between observed temperatures and model ranges. They also misinterpreted IPCC estimates of various important feedbacks to the climate system.

I asked paper author John Abraham if it is ever the case that a simpler model would work better when addressing a complex system. “While simple models can give useful information, they must be executed correctly,” he told me. “The model of Monckton and his colleagues is fatally flawed in that it assumes the Earth responds instantly to changes in heat. We know this isn’t true. The Earth has what’s called thermal inertia. Just like it takes a while for a pot of water to boil, or a Thanksgiving turkey to heat up, the Earth takes a while to absorb heat. If you ignore that, you will be way off in your results.”

I also contacted author Dana Nuccitelli, who recently published the book “Climatology versus Pseudoscience,” to ask him to place the Monckton et al. study in the broader context of climate science contrarianism. He told me, “In my book, I show that mainstream climate models have been very accurate at projecting changes in global surface temperatures. Monckton et al. created a problem to solve by misrepresenting those model projections and hence inaccurately claiming that they “run hot.” The entire premise of their paper is based on an inaccuracy, and it just goes downhill from there.”

This is not Nuccitelli’s first rodeo when it comes to the Monckton camp. “It’s perhaps worth noting that these same four authors (Legates, Soon, Briggs, and Monckton) wrote another error-riddled paper two years ago, purporting to critique the paper my colleagues and I published in 2013, finding a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming in the peer-reviewed climate science literature,” he told me. “The journal quickly published a response from Daniel Bedford and John Cook, detailing the many errors those four authors had made. There seems to be a pattern in which Monckton, Soon, Legates, and Briggs somehow manage to publish error-riddled papers in peer-reviewed journals, and scientists are forced to spend their time correcting those errors.”

Monckton et al cherry-picked the available literature, thus ignoring a plethora of standing arguments and analysis that would have contradicted their study. They get the paleoclimate data wrong, ignore over 90% of the climate system (the ocean), selected inappropriate parameters, and seem unaware of prior work comparing models and data. Monckton et al also fail to provide a useful alternative valid model.

Monckton et al failed in their attempt to demonstrate that IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity run hot. Their alternative model does not perform well, and is strongly biased in one direction. They estimate future warming based on “assumptions developed using a logically flawed justification narrative rather than physical analysis,” according to Richardson et al. “The key conclusions are directly contradicted by observations and 450 cannot be considered credible.”

Also of interest

Aside from the obvious and significant problems with the Monckton et al paper, it is also worth noting that the authors of that work are well known as “climate science deniers” or “contrarians.” You can find out more about Soon here. Monckton has a long history of attacking mainstream climate science as well as the scientists themselves. To be fair, it is also worth noting that two of the new paper’s authors have been engaged in this discussion as well. John Abraham has been eDebating Monckton for some time. (See also this conversation with me, John Abraham, and Kevin Zelnio.)

Author Dana Nuccitelli is the author of this recent book on climate science deniers and models.

Heat And Death In India: Global Warming’s Direct Effect

May 26, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, India Heat WaveGreg Laden

The Earth is warming because of what humans have been doing to the atmosphere. Global Warming has a lot of effects many of which we’ve discussed here, but the most obvious one is, well, it gets warmer. At present, India is experiencing record breaking heat and people are dying.

It is very difficult to say how many people die from the heat in any region. We can use a standard approach used by epidemiologists to estimate this number. This involves simply looking at mortality rates as they change over time to try to detect a signal, an increase, associated with the variable in question. If all sources of mortality remain the same over a period of time, but a heat wave occurs during that period and with it comes an increase in mortality, then it is possible that those extra deaths are due to the heat. Nothing, of course, is that simple, but epidemiology has some fancy tools to try to tease out reasonable numbers.

I’m reminded of the Ituri Forest, where I worked for a few years. We kept track of births and deaths, and it became apparent that deaths tended to be seasonal. More people seemed to die during the annual “hunger season.” This season occurred around June, when the first wet season crops (there are two wet seasons) were not ready, and the previous wet season’s crops were mostly used up. At the same time, other crops were not abundant and wild foods (both plants and animals) tended to be hard to come by, as the forest experienced a coeval reduction in productivity of human edible foods. But the people who died during that period rarely seemed to die of hunger. They died of other things, such as infectious disease, but presumably these other causes of mortality were more effective when combined with food stress. One hunger season, two people died in a murder-suicide. An elderly couple lived in a small village, alone, with an orphaned grandchild. It was a bad hunger season for them since their village lacked the resources to produce enough food. It is believed the elderly woman, depressed by the hunger, harvested poisonous wild yams and made a meal of them, knowingly, and fed them to her family. She and her husband died, but the child vomited up the deadly meal and survived. Those were hunger-related deaths, but as is the case with many such deaths, were embedded in a much more complicated scenario.

Right now people in parts of India are dying of the heat, but many more than those known to die of heat stroke are also dying in this more complicated way. Indian heat waves are increasing in their frequency, being one third more common by the end of a study period covering 1961-2010, according to a 2014 study. The problem has become worse due to anthropogenic global warming, and it is made even worse in El Niño years. And, we seem to be entering an El Niño period. Changes in land use and urbanization are also probably contributing factors in India.

Heat wave related death spells produce numbers in the hundreds. Something like 500 people are known to have died directly of the heat over the last few days in India. But other deaths caused by multiple factors where heat is a sort of final straw would be in the thousands.

Right now, India is very hot, and some areas are expected to become even hotter over the next several days.

Fred Barbash at the Washington Post has a good writeup on the current situation there.

UPDATE: Jeff Masters has a current write-up of the heat wave in India. At present the death rate (which is certainly an underestimate) for India places it fifth in known historic deadly heat waves.

Arctic Sea Ice Decline in 2015

May 26, 2015Uncategorizedarctic sea ice, Arctic Sea Ice, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

The surface ice in the Arctic has been melting to historic low levels every year for the last several years. The graph above shows the first ten years in the National Snow & Ice Data Center records, meant to indicate what Arctic Sea Ice “normally” does as it melts off during the northern warm months. The thick black line is the average over 1981-2010, and grey shaded area shows two standard deviations above and below that line. The blue line tracking along the lower end of the 2SD shaded area is the ice extent this year. During the period when sea ice is at its maximum, this year’s ice was low. This does not reliably predict the ultimate September minimum, but it is interesting that the sea ice extent is following an extreme course.

I’m reluctant to say anything about what will happen this year. The melting rate could slow, storms that may play a role in diminishing sea surface ice in the Arctic may not play a big role. Or, the rate of melt could increase and all the various factors that determine a year’s minimum could drive the ice off the sea to the extent that we have a record low. It would be very hard to beat the 2012 minimum extent, as that was an extreme year. But, that extreme year, show on the figure below, was not as low at the present time as the current extent.

The volume of sea ice is in some ways more important than the area it covers, because this reflects the overall Earth’s surface heat imbalance resulting from the human-induced greenhouse effect. Volume includes both new ice (formed over the previous winter) and old ice that does not melt at all in a given year. This old ice probably serves the role of keeping some of the new ice stable so it melts less, so there is a feedback. The more the volume reduces, the more the surface area may reduce, depending on various conditions.

Andy Lee Robinson has created, and regularly updated, an amazing graphic showing the change over time in Arctic sea ice volume.

California Drought Caused By Climate Change

May 22, 2015UncategorizedCalifornia Drought, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

Human released greenhouse gas pollution changes the climatic system through a variety of mechanisms. Trade winds and jet streams change their patterns of movement, and the distribution of moisture in the air changes, with precipitation either lacking more than usual or being more abundant than usual. The patterns of movement of major air masses and the increased bifurcation of air masses into more wet than usual and more dry than usual can result in long periods where region experiences excess precipitation or a lack of precipitation. When the latter happens, there can be a drought.

Increasingly, the California drought is being seen as an effect of climate change. Air masses that should have contributed precipitation in the form of mountain snow, which in turn feed the western ground water system, have been kept away. Increased temperature has increased evaporation. Other factors related to climate change have contributed. The result is an historic drought over California that shows at present no sign of stopping any time soon. There was hope that last winter there would be additional precipitation, and there was some, but not enough.

A paper just out in Geophysical Research Letters uses modeling and historic data to confirm that the current California drought is very likely an effect of climate change. The paper is “Temperature Impacts on the Water Year 2014 Drought in California“, by Shraddhanand Shukla, Mohammad Safeeq, Amir Aghkouchak, Kaiyu Guan, and Chris Funk. Here is the abstract, which is pretty self explanatory and understandable:

California is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record. Here we use a hydrological model and risk assessment framework to understand the influence of temperature on the water year (WY) 2014 drought in California and examine the probability that this drought would have been less severe if temperatures resembled the historical climatology. Our results indicate that temperature played an important role in exacerbating the WY 2014 drought severity. We found that if WY 2014 temperatures resembled the 1916-2012 climatology, there would have been at least an 86% chance that winter snow water equivalent and spring- summer soil moisture and runoff deficits would have been less severe than the observed conditions. We also report that the temperature forecast skill in California for the important seasons of winter and spring is negligible, beyond a lead-time of one month, which we postulate might hinder skillful drought prediction in California.

The caption for the graphic above is: “Percentiles of potential evapotranspiration (ETo) during WY 2014 with respect to 1979 to 2012 climatology.”

I find the ancillary finding of the lack of skill of temperature forecasts in California. One would expect low skill in forecast models that are designed under a given climatology, when that climatology shifts as it seems to have done.

New Research: Antarctic Glaciers Destabilized

May 21, 2015UncategorizedAntarctic Glaciers Melting, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Sea Level RiseGreg Laden

A large portion of the glacial mass in Antarctic, previously thought to be relatively stable, is now understood to be destablizing. This is new research just out in Science. The abstract is pretty clear:

Growing evidence has demonstrated the importance of ice shelf buttressing on the inland grounded ice, especially if it is resting on bedrock below sea level. Much of the Southern Antarctic Peninsula satisfies this condition and also possesses a bed slope that deepens inland. Such ice sheet geometry is potentially unstable. We use satellite altimetry and gravity observations to show that a major portion of the region has, since 2009, destabilized. Ice mass loss of the marine-terminating glaciers has rapidly accelerated from close to balance in the 2000s to a sustained rate of –56 ± 8 gigatons per year, constituting a major fraction of Antarctica’s contribution to rising sea level. The widespread, simultaneous nature of the acceleration, in the absence of a persistent atmospheric forcing, points to an oceanic driving mechanism.

The paper is “Dynamic thinning of glaciers on the Southern Antarctic Peninsula” by B. Wouters, A. Martin-Español, V. Helm, T. Flament, J. M. van Wessem, S. R. M. Ligtenberg, M. R. van den Broeke, J. L. Bamber.

Here is a simulation of grounding line retreat in action from NASA:

Karl Mathiesen at the Guardian has a writeup on the research here.

The sheet’s thickness has remained stable since satellite observations began in 1992. But Professor Jonathan Bamber of Bristol university, who co-authored the study, said that around 2009 it very suddenly began to thin by an average of 42cm each year. Some areas had fallen by up to 4m.

“It hasn’t been going up, it hasn’t been going down – until 2009. Then it just seemed to pass some kind of critical threshold and went over a cliff and it’s been losing mass at a pretty much constant, rather large, rate,” said Bamber.

The estimate of ice loss by this research might be overestimated, according to Andrew Shepherd, who notes that some of the thinning of the glacier could be due to changes in snowfall amounts on tip, rather than melting from the bottom. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

Caption for the figure at the top of the post:

Fig. 2 Mass variations for the sum of basins 23 and 24, as observed by GRACE and modeled by RACMO2.3.
Basins 23 and 24 are defined in (21, 22). The faint blue dots are the monthly GRACE anomalies with 1? error bars (20), and the thick blue line shows the anomalies with a 7-month running average applied so as to reduce noise. Cumulative SMB anomalies from RACMO2.3 are shown in red, with the light red area indicating the 1? spread in an ensemble obtained by varying the baseline period (20). The dashed light blue line shows the estimated dynamic mass loss (GRACE minus SMB). The vertical dashed lines indicate January 2003, December 2009, and July 2010, the start and ending of the different altimetry observations. (Inset) The GRACE time series for the individual basins 23 (blue) and 24 (red), before (full lines) and after (dashed lines) applying the SMB correction.

The risk of hot and cold weather

May 21, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Health Effects Of Cold, Health Effects Of HeatGreg Laden

A new paper is just out in The Lancet that examines the mortality risk of high and low ambient temperatures. The basic idea is that if it is either to hot or too cold, mortality may increase, possibly with the weather being a factor to augment the effects of other health problems, or as a direct result. The paper is methodologically reasonably well done but leads to conclusions that I think will be misinterpreted and misused. The paper implies that a shift to a warmer world would have lower mortality effects than a shift to a colder world might. Or, more significantly, that a shift to a warmer world will reduce ambient temperature related mortality by reducing the effects of cold. This is incorrect for a number of reasons.

Having said that, this paper does make a valuable contribution to public health, though here I’ll note that only in passing (see below).

First, I’ll give you the author’s viewpoint directly by quoting from the abstract, then I’ll tell you what I think about it.

The paper is “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study,” by Antonio Gasparrini and a host of other authors. It says:

Summary
Background Although studies have provided estimates of premature deaths attributable to either heat or cold in selected countries, none has so far offered a systematic assessment across the whole temperature range in populations exposed to different climates. We aimed to quantify the total mortality burden attributable to non-optimum ambient temperature, and the relative contributions from heat and cold and from moderate and extreme temperatures.

Methods We collected data for 384 locations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, and USA. We fitted a standard time-series Poisson model for each location, controlling for trends and day of the week. We estimated temperature–mortality associations with a distributed lag non-linear model with 21 days of lag, and then pooled them in a multivariate metaregression that included country indicators and temperature average and range. We calculated attributable deaths for heat and cold, defined as temperatures above and below the optimum temperature, which corresponded to the point of minimum mortality, and for moderate and extreme temperatures, defined using cutoffs at the 2·5th and 97·5th temperature percentiles.

Findings We analysed 74225 200 deaths in various periods between 1985 and 2012. In total, 7·71% (95% empirical CI 7·43–7·91) of mortality was attributable to non-optimum temperature in the selected countries within the study period, with substantial differences between countries, ranging from 3·37% (3·06 to 3·63) in Thailand to 11·00% (9·29 to 12·47) in China. The temperature percentile of minimum mortality varied from roughly the 60th percentile in tropical areas to about the 80–90th percentile in temperate regions. More temperature-attributable deaths were caused by cold (7·29%, 7·02–7·49) than by heat (0·42%, 0·39–0·44). Extreme cold and hot temperatures were responsible for 0·86% (0·84–0·87) of total mortality.

Interpretation Most of the temperature-related mortality burden was attributable to the contribution of cold. The effect of days of extreme temperature was substantially less than that attributable to milder but non-optimum weather. This evidence has important implications for the planning of public-health interventions to minimise the health consequences of adverse temperatures, and for predictions of future effect in climate-change scenarios.

What could possibly go wrong?

Obviously, the main way this paper could derail is when climate change denialists make the claim that global warming is good because cold weather causes more mortality than warm weather, so we’ll have less mortality. This, however, is incorrect for several reasons.

Assume the paper has correctly characterized mortality effects of weather. From this we assume that there is a certain mortality profile with temperature as the cause. Medium temperatures don’t exacerbate population level mortality but above and below that, mortality increases. This is expected for any species where temperature matters. Key life history traits including maintainance (and thus, basic survival) may be linked to temperature, and if temperature is too high or too low, things go badly. The problem with the assumption that increasing temperatures will decrease mortality is that the more logical interpretation, which fits with what we know about the biology of warm blooded animals, is that any change, up or down, in the range and average of temperatures will have negative effects. In other words it is incorrect to assume that since there is less mortality at the upper end of the range that heading for that direction is good. There is increased mortality at both ends, movement in either direction should be assumed to increase mortality in that direction.

One result of the paper, only briefly touched on but clear from the data, is that the lower end of ambient temperature mortality effects has a long distribution, while the upper end (warmer temperatures) have a lower end. This means that the two phenomena, too cold and too warm, have different statistical characteristics. For this reason, comparing the two is a rather dicy affair. It is like comparing the negative effects of driving too slow and driving too fast. Either one can mess you up on the highway, but there is a lot more room at the lower end. Where the speed limit is 60, a very very fast speed is 20 miles an hour faster, but a very very slow speed might be 50 miles an hour slower. Not only are the statistics very different (and thus not comparable between the two ends) but the mechanisms are different. With respect to temperature, colder conditions probably exacerbate mortality by requiring that the body spend more energy on maintenance, thus taking away energy from immune response. At the upper end, added heat does something entirely different, requiring an entirely different mechanism (cooling) to kick in, and in more extreme cases, causing a direct pathological outcome, heat stress.

Human Evolution

I think it is helpful to put this paper in evolutionary context. Humans are primates, and as such, evolved in the tropics. We evolved, in other words, at the higher end of the temperature range discussed in this study, and should be adapted to warm conditions. Humans are hominoids (apes) which, among primates, evolved in the warmer end of that range, with extra humidity. We are hominins, a special kind of ape, that extended its habitat to include somewhat (but not too much) drier conditions. When our genus arose, we began to spread into novel habitats, including some that were cooler, but for nearly two million years various human ancestors were limited to tropical or sub tropical conditions. It was not until our species evolved that we fully adapted to the full range of conditions from very cold to very warm, from very dry to very wet. Indeed, technologically modern humans who rely on agriculutre have been excluded from the most extreme environments our foragering ancestors occupied thousands of years ago, and adapted to both physically and culturally.

In other words, from our evolutionary history we would predict that humans would suffer relatively low levels of heat related mortality and high levels of cold related mortality, and that many of our more recently developed, and limited, adaptations are to cold while our deeper and longer-term adaptations are to heat. We may even walk upright because of heat (that is one theory that has never been tossed out to explain why a chimp-like ancestor was selected to become more upright). Modern humans mostly have the physical form of a tropical African because we mostly come fairly recently from tropical Africa. Our heat related adaptations tend to be physical, long-evolved, built in. Our cold adaptations (with a few exceptions) tend to be cultural, technological, added-on. The range of temperatures that actually occur on Earth that heat stress us is limited, the range of temperatures that actually occur on Earth that cold-stress us is very large.

Our evolutionary biology predicts that we would have a higher mortality rate under cold than under heat, and this paper confirms that.

This isn’t your great great great great grand daddy’s planet

The problem arises when we leave the Earth in which we evolved and arrive on a hot new planet. Most of the physical evolution (our exact ratio of body parts, our respiratory adaptations, skin and hair related adaptations, fat distribution, etc.) and our cultural adaptations (fire, clothing, shelter, mobility, diet) that related to temperature, cold or hot, arose over the last two million years, which is coincident with the Pleistocene. During this period atmospheric CO2 levels ranged around an average of about 250ppm, rarely going above 300ppm, and never approaching 400ppm. CO2 levels correlated well with the surface temperatures in which we live, and the current atmospheric CO2 level is 400ppm and rising. It will take time (a few more decades) for the new temperature regime, the one human greenhouse gas pollution is causing, to be realized. But when that happens we’ll be living on a planet with temperature characteristics not seen during the entire course of human evolution. Some regions will have temperature ranges that go well beyond the ranges explored in this paper. Extrapolating the effects of high ambient temperatures from the last several decades to the middle of the 21st century is difficult at best.

Normal human body temperature is 98.6 degrees F. That is higher than the average daily temperature for most places humans have lived over the last 2 million years, but within the range of the highest daily temperatures. The problem is, when ambient temperatures are higher than this amount, our brains are at risk, and cooling adaptations have to kick in. If average ambient temperatures in a warm region go too high, these adaptations will not be adequate, and heat spells may become routinely fatal. If, on the other hand, in other regions of the world, average ambient temperatures went way down (like, if Florida became like Minnesota) we would adapt by changing the geographical distribution of the use of existing and well established technologies.

Putting this another way, humans can adapt, and in the past have adapted, to cooling. We can not adapt, in the warmest regions, to heating. There is not a mechanism that allows this, and there is no practical technology other than air conditioners, and it is not really practical, ore even possible to create air conditioners that would allow survival in tropical regions for anyone other than the elite and ex patriots.

Another factor, already implied above but I’ll underscore it, is the fact that moving towards warmer conditions does not remove colder conditions. The mortality induced by cooler ambient temperatures discussed in this paper is not from people freezing to death on ice flows. It is from ambient temperatures mostly above freezing, which in the absence of a technological fix, cause added stress. Even with increased surface temperatures caused by global warming, these conditions will still persist. The range of temperatures over which this cold induced stress occurs is, as stated, very large and even if overnight temperature minima rise with global warming in a given region, most of those temperatures will still be regularly represented.

From the paper:

Despite the attention given to extreme weather events, most of the effect happened on moderately hot and moderately cold days, especially moderately cold days. This evidence is important for improvements to public health policies aimed at prevention of temperature-related health consequences, and provides a platform to extend predictions on future effects in climate-change scenarios.

This is an important and valid point. This cold related mortality can be addressed with some simple technological fixes, including even a modest amount of insulation or other improvements in constructions in homes in tropical or subtropical areas where it is warm enough that many people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum (i.e., almost everybody) does not typically bother with such things. This is an important result of the paper that has nothing to do with global warming but should be paid attention to.

A potential bias

The paper relies on mortality data for cold vs. hot ambient temperature periods. However I question the ability to obtain data on heat related deaths that are comparable to cold related deaths. In the more extreme cool areas, the northern countries, there are good data on mortality. In the more extreme warm areas, along the equator, the mortality data one would ideally use are virtually non existent. Of the seven billion people who live on the earth, the one billion that are most unlikely to show up in any systematic data of any kind live along the equator, and very few (some reindeer herders in Siberia, for example) live in the cooler climates. I don’t think the authors address this kind of bias adequately.

It’s about time

The study period ranges from the 1980s to recent. This is the period of time during which about half of the surface warming experienced during the 20th century has occurred, and at a high rate. The authors do not examine change over time in mortality at either end of the temperature range. Since the key variable, ambient surface temperature, changes dramatically over the study period, this should have been addressed. It may be that due to the nature of the data this could not be done, but the paper explicitly makes assertion about change over time in the future without addressing change over time during the study period. This makes me sad.

In summary, shifting to a warmer world will have more negative effects than shifting to a cooler world, when it comes to human health related response to ambient conditions. The paper implies that warming is not as bad as cooling might have been, and this will be used by those who deny the very existence of, or human fingerprint on, or importance of, or ability to address, climate change. The paper lacks contextualization of the problem in terms of well known human adaptations. There may be significant biases or problems with respect to reported mortality an change through time during the study period in the key variable, ambient surface temperature.

Why is FOX News Anti-American?

May 21, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, fox news, Global Warming, Global Warming, National SecurityGreg Laden

It is a fiction that the right wing, and the Republican party, and their primary philosophical guru (Rush Limbaugh) and mouthpiece (FOX News) are more American, more security-savvy, and more patriotic than Liberals, Progressives, and Democrats. This fiction is part of a common bully tactic you already know about because you were either bothered by the bullies, or you were a bully, in middle school. The bully takes his nefarious trait and projects it on his victim. And now, we see yet another piece of evidence for this, one among many. FOX News has attacked President Obama for his acknowledgement of what the United States Military has been saying for some time now: Climate change is a national security issue.

President Obama made mention of this problem yesterday in his Commencement Address at the National Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. Then, according to the watchdog organization Media Matters for America, “Fox personalities criticized President Obama for calling climate change ‘an immediate risk to our national security’ during his U.S. Coast Guard Academy commencement address. But security experts agree with the president that global climate change does threaten U.S. national security.”

FOX’s Lou Dobbs in what was labeled as a “news alert” but amounts to little more than editorial Koch sucking-up-to:

FOX’s Charles Krauthammer substituted scare mongering over North Korea for addressing the existential issue of our time, climate change:

FOX’s Eric Bolling dismisses global climate change as a threat, despite what the military says. Another commenter asks if Bill Nye and President Obama are the same person. Bolling misses the point that ISIS as a phenomenon arose largely because of climate change:

And it goes on. What does the Department of Defense say? From Media Matters:

“Climate Change Will Affect The DOD’s Ability To Defend The Nation And Poses Immediate Risks To U.S. National Security.” The Department of Defense’s 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap warned that “a warming climate ‘poses immediate risks to U.S. national security’ and could trigger anything from ‘infectious disease to terrorism.'” As Mic noted, this was not the first time those in the military community have sounded the alarm on climate change:

A May report by 11 retired commanders cautioned that installations in Virginia could experience up to 7 feet of sea rise by the end of the century. The Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick argued earlier in 2014 that “water and climatic conditions have played a direct role in the deterioration of Syria’s economic conditions,” helping aggravate the country’s political divisions and spawn the ongoing civil war that now involves U.S. bombing runs. And Retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley argued that climate change will be “one of the driving forces in the 21st century” and says that inaction could result in massive and lethal extreme weather events that do damage on the level of major wars.

“Water shortages in the Middle East could benefit terrorist organizations, who can exploit hunger and unrest to tighten their grip on locals,” McDonnell wrote. “Increased shipping traffic in the melting Arctic could spark political tension between polar nations. Increasing prevalence and severity of natural disasters worldwide will become a more significant burden for military-led relief efforts.”

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Chris King told Responding to Climate Change that the threat posed by a rapidly changing planet “is like getting embroiled in a war that lasts 100 years” with “no exit strategy.” He pointed to poor countries like Afghanistan, Haiti, Chad and Somalia as likely participants in climate-triggered conflict. [source]

FOX and the right wing: Bad for America.