These are the best arguments from the 3% of climate scientist 'skeptics.' Really.
"Trump withdrew from the Paris climate deal a year ago. Here’s what has changed."
Contrarian climate scientist Roy Spencer summed up the contrarian case for a fossil fuel and tobacco-funded think tank
Dana Nuccitelli
Mon 25 Jul 2016 06.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 12.11 EST
Chewbacca and Han Solo from ‘Star Wars: Episode VII’. The best case made by climate contrarian scientists amounts to little more than ‘the Chewbacca defense’. Photograph: Allstar/DISNEY/LUCASFILM
Spencer’s arguments should of course be evaluated on their own merits, regardless of who commissioned them. However, it turns out that they have little merit on which to stand. The white paper is a classic example of a Gish Gallop .. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gish%20Gallop – producing such a large volume of nonsense arguments that refuting all of them is too time-consuming. NASA Goddard director Gavin Schmidt rightly described Spencer’s paper as:
Most of Spencer’s white paper consists of repeating a variety of long-debunked myths. It’s laid out in the form of 13 basic climate questions that Spencer tries to answer. Fortunately, SkepticalScience.com has a database of over 200 climate myths .. https://www.skepticalscience.com/fixednum.php , and summaries of what the peer-reviewed scientific research says about each. This makes it possible to handle Spencer’s 13-point Gish Gallop by simply referring to the relevant myth rebuttals. So here we go:
"I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.
The best case against climate concern is really bad
All in all, Spencer managed to cram about 24 climate myths into a 13-point white paper. Most importantly, as Schmidt noted, the bulk of those myths served no purpose.
Just consider Spencer’s very first argument. No scientist should ever claim that carbon pollution is benign because it’s only present in the atmosphere in trace amounts. For example, arsenic can be deadly if present in trace amounts in water; Spencer probably wouldn’t drink from a water source with 400 ppm .. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/16/antarctic-co2-hits-400ppm-for-first-time-in-4m-years .. of arsenic. This is an easily-refuted, scientifically-useless argument whose sole purpose seems to be fooling non-experts. It’s the climate version of the Chewbacca defense .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense .
In short, if there were a valid case against the urgent need for climate action, contrarians’ best experts wouldn’t have to scrape 24 long-debunked myths from the bottom of the oil barrel.
Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science
"Trump withdrew from the Paris climate deal a year ago. Here’s what has changed. "Syria Joins Paris Climate Accord, Leaving Only U.S. Opposed""
The Huntington Canyon coal-fired power plant in Utah. The White House, already pursuing major rollbacks of greenhouse-gas emission restrictions, is amplifying its attack on fundamental climate-science conclusions. Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
By Coral Davenport and Mark Landler
May 27, 2019
WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/climate/trump-paris-climate-agreement.html?module=inline , brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.
Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.
In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/climate/us-arctic-climate-change.html?module=inline .. to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.
And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.
Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.
As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.
The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey .. https://www.usgs.gov/ , James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.
President Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of holding public debates on the validity of climate science. Doug Mills/The New York Times
Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.
The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/climate/us-climate-report.html?module=inline , produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.
Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.
“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”
In an email, James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.
“The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Mr. Hewitt said.
However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.
The Beaufort Sea in the Arctic, a region that is warming rapidly. The United States recently declined to sign a communiqué on protecting the Arctic unless it omitted references to climate change. Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.
Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.
Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.
Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.
“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”
But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.
William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council, is pushing to create a climate review panel that would question scientific consensus. Pool photo by Albin Lohr-Jones
For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January .. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1086971499725160448 .. when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.
His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.
-- Inside Listen to ‘The Daily’: The White House Plan to Change Climate Science After two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, President Trump and his appointees are going after influential government reports. --
Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka made a well-publicized effort to talk him out of leaving the Paris accord in 2017 .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/us/politics/climate-change-trump.html?module=inline . But after being vanquished by officials including Mr. Bannon, Mr. Pruitt, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, there is little evidence she has resisted his approach since then.
The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/pompeo-arctic-china-russia.html?module=inline ” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.
“That is one of the most crude messages one could deliver,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as the NATO ambassador under George W. Bush.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the Arctic as a land of “opportunity and abundance” as a consequence of global warming. Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.
Mr. Reilly, the head of the Geological Survey, who does not have a background in climate change science, characterized the changes as an attempt to prepare more careful, accurate reports. “We’re looking for answers with our partners and to get statistical significance from what we understand,” he said.
Yet scientists said that by eliminating the projected effects of increased carbon dioxide pollution after 2040, the Geological Survey reports would present an incomplete and falsely optimistic picture of the impact of continuing to burn unlimited amounts of coal, oil and gasoline.
“The scenarios in these reports that show different outcomes are like going to the doctor, who tells you, ‘If you don’t change your bad eating habits, and you don’t start to exercise, you’ll need a quadruple bypass, but if you do change your lifestyle, you’ll have a different outcome,’” said Katharine Hayhoe, the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and an author of the National Climate Assessment.
Not all government science agencies are planning such changes.A spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, asked if its scientists would limit the use of climate models, wrote in an email, “No changes are being considered at this time.”
The push to alter the results of at least some climate science reports, several officials said, came after November’s release of the second volume of the National Climate Assessment.
While the Trump administration did not try to rewrite the scientific conclusions of the report, officials sought to play it down — releasing it the day after Thanksgiving .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/climate/trump-climate-report.html?module=inline — and discredit it, with a White House statement calling it “largely based on the most extreme scenario.”
This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to finalize the legal rollback of two of President Barack Obama’s most consequential policies: regulations to curb planet-warming pollution from vehicles and power plants. George Etheredge for The New York Times
Opponents say that when they challenge the moves in court, they intend to point to the climate assessment, asking how the government can justify the reversals when its own agencies have concluded that the pollution will be so harmful.
That is why officials are now discussing how to influence the conclusions of the next National Climate Assessment.
“They’ve started talking about how they can produce a report that doesn’t lead to some silly alarmist predictions about the future,” said Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded research organization, and who led the administration’s transition at the E.P.A.
A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.
Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”
Outside the United States, climate scientists had long given up on the White House being anything but on outlier in policy. But they worry about the loss of the government as a source for reliable climate research.
“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”
These are the best arguments from the 3% of climate scientist 'skeptics.' Really. [...] 1) ‘Carbon dioxide is a trace gas’ is rebutted as Myth #127 .. https://www.skepticalscience.com/CO2-trace-gas.htm. [...]
Sunrise Movement @sunrisemvmt This is an outrage. Almost every major candidate has supported the call for a #ClimateDebate, but the @DNC won’t even let the American people hear their plans for one of the greatest challenges of our time. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=149232801
Thu 8 Aug 2019 18.00 AEST Last modified on Fri 9 Aug 2019 01.50 AEST
Deforestation in Brazil’s Para state. Stripping land wholesale, for uses such as cattle farms and coffee plantations, can affect the climate which then affects the health of the land. Photograph: Andre Penner/AP
The climate crisis is damaging the ability of the land to sustain humanity, with cascading risks becoming increasingly severe as global temperatures rise, according to a landmark UN report compiled by some of the world’s top scientists.
Global heating is increasing droughts, soil erosion and wildfires while diminishing crop yields in the tropics and thawing permafrost near the poles, says the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Further heating will lead to unprecedented climate conditions at lower latitudes, with potential growth in hunger, migration and conflict and increased damage to the great northern forests.
The report .. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/ , approved by the world’s governments, makes clear that humanity faces a stark choice between a vicious or virtuous circle. Continued destruction of forests and huge emissions from cattle and other intensive farming practices will intensify the climate crisis, making the impacts on land still worse.
Cattle ranch in drought-hit California, US. Intensive farming is a heavy user of water and big cause of greenhouse gas emissions. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
However, action now to allow soils and forests to regenerate and store carbon, and to cut meat consumption by people and food waste, could play a big role in tackling the climate crisis, the report says.
Such moves would also improve human health, reduce poverty and tackle the huge losses of wildlife across the globe, the IPCC says.
Burning of fossil fuels should end as well to avoid “irreversible loss in land ecosystem services required for food, health and habitable settlements”, the report says.
“This is a perfect storm,” said Dave Reay, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who was an expert reviewer for the IPCC report. “Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency. Earth has never felt smaller, its natural ecosystems never under such direct threat.”
[Insert YouTube of embedded video]
7:53 It's time we stopped treating soil like dirt – video
Prof Jim Skea, from the IPPC, said the land was already struggling and climate change was adding to its burdens. Almost three-quarters of ice-free land was now directly affected by human activity, the report says.
Poor land use is also behind almost a quarter of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions – the destruction of forests, huge cattle herds and overuse of chemical fertilisers being key factors.
IMAGE: Most of the world's land is used by humans
Emissions relating to fertilisers .. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-05/beware-of-the-n-bomb/ .. have risen ninefold since the early 1960s. Rising temperatures are causing deserts to spread, particularly in Asia and Africa, and the Americas and Mediterranean are at risk, the report says.
One of the most stark conclusions in the IPCC report is that soil, upon which humanity is entirely dependent, is being lost more than 100 times faster than it is being formed in ploughed areas; and lost 10 to 20 times faster even on fields that are not tilled.
The report recommends strong action from governments and business, including ending deforestation and enabling new forests to grow, reforming farming subsidies, supporting small farmers and breeding more resilient crops. Many of those solutions, however, would take decades to have an impact, the IPCC says.
Saplings being planted in Inner Mongolia this year to control desertification as temperatures rise. Photograph: Xinhua/Barcroft Images
[Insert: As Swine Fever Roils Asia, Hogs Are Culled and Dinner Plans Change [...] The current outbreak was first reported in mainland China in August. Since then, the virus has spread to pig herds in every mainland Chinese province, as well as to Vietnam, Cambodia and Mongolia. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=149530821]
“There is much more we could do in that space that we are not doing, partly because it is difficult,” said Pete Smith, a professor at the University of Aberdeen and a senior IPCC author. “You wouldn’t want to tell people what to eat, that would go down badly. But you could incentivise.”
Caterina Brandmayr, of the Green Alliance thinktank, said: “The key message from the IPCC is urgency: we need to act now to plant new forests, restore our ecosystems, and, yes, to eat less meat.”
David Viner, a professor at the University of East Anglia and a senior IPCC author, said: “Land is a vital resource and we have to look after it if we are going to have a sustainable future.”
'Warning flag': IPCC finds rapid land warming threatens food security
By Peter Hannam August 8, 2019 — 6.00pm
Temperatures over the world's land areas are warming at about twice the global rate, expanding deserts in Australia, Africa and Asia, and hitting food security hard, a new UN report finds.
The Intergov ernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that surface air temperatures between 2006 and 2015 were 1.53 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average of 1850-1900. By contrast, the combined warming of land and oceans was 0.87 degrees, the IPCC's special report on land said.
Compared with current conditions, though, land areas have warmed by about 1.8 degrees, and global mean temperatures by 1.1 degrees, said Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Insert YouTube of embedded video
Understanding drought
"Climate change, including increases in frequency and intensity of extremes, has adversely impacted food security and terrestrial ecosystems, as well as contributed to desertification and land degradation in many regions," the report's Summary for Policymakers said.
The report, compiled by 107 authors from 52 nations and released in Geneva on Thursday, noted humans typically relied on land for their homes and the great bulk of their food, fibre and feed for animals.
Mark Howden, director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University and an IPCC vice-chair, said the report was "a warning flag" about the threats and "how hard we need to go" to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Land's effect on climate
About a quarter of the earth's ice-free land was already subject to human-caused degradation, with soil losses as much as 100 times higher than soil formation, the report said.
Australia, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of east and central Asia were singled out as regions where rising evapotranspiration (caused by hotter temperatures and reduced rainfall) were causing deserts to expand.
Climate change would "ramp up" existing degradation, such as through erosion caused by more intense rainfall events, Professor Howden said.
But land would also affect the climate because land-clearing, methane from livestock, fertiliser, and other emissions related to farming and forestry are major sources of greenhouse gases.
"Just under a third of our emissions come from our food systems, globally," he said.
On the flip side, reducing land clearing and increasing soil carbon sequestration would help reduce the damaging trends, as would consumers switching to more plant-based diets rather than meat-based ones, the report said.
Temperatures are rising over land much faster than the global average with climate change. Australia is one nation where arid regions are expanding, the IPCC says in a new report. Louise Kennerly
'Not safe at 2 degrees'
Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, said the thermal inertia of the oceans meant land warmed faster than the seas.
Where lands dry out, the cooling role of evaporation diminishes, so extreme temperatures are more intense.
"It's why the 2-degree ceiling agreed in Paris [at the climate summit in 2015] isn't safe," Professor Pitman said. "Two degrees in the global mean [translates to] very, very sizeable amounts of warming in heatwave conditions over land."
He cited farming regions such as Moree in northern NSW where last January's average temperatures "slaughtered" previous records, beating the norm by close to 4 degrees.
"We're seeing those extreme temperatures rapidly rising in part because in some regions we're seeing a drying," Professor Pitman said.
Average soil moisture for the 12 months to June 30 were also the lowest on record at just 8.5 per cent for the top metre. That beat the record low of 8.7 per cent 1914-15 and compared with an average of 12 per cent, the bureau said.
Rising temperatures and increase evaporation will affect crops and other food supplies, undermining food security, the IPCC said. DPA
The IPCC report said warming, changing precipitation patterns and the greater frequency of some extreme events "has already affected food security".
"Changes in climate can amplify environmentally induced migration both within countries and across borders," the report said, adding increased displacement and threatened livelihoods may "contribute to exacerbated stresses for conflict", it said.
Alana Mann, a lead researcher at the Sydney Environment Institute, said the report should be "a big wake-up call", not least for the cities where people "assume supermarket shelves will always be full".
Dr Mann said the report also highlighted how land management had to be brought back closer to what the environment could sustain.
"All of [excessive extraction] is about driving production of food at the expense of the environment," she said.
Bushfire risks rise
The report noted populations could increasingly be exposed to wildfire as temperatures over land increase.
"Across the globe, we're seeing both changes in the intensity and seasonality of fires ... that's happening in Australia as well," Professor Howden said. "The projections are for those issues associated for fires to increase."
Extreme fire weather days are increasing in number over much of Australia, and the coming season is expected to be another active one for fire crews.Credit:Nick Moir.
Richard Thornton, chief executive of the Bushfire and Natural Hazard CRC, said authorities in Australia were preparing for another above-average fire season for much of the country.
"The evidence is all piling up from a hazards perspective," Dr Thornton said. "The future doesn't look like the past."
NSW RFS Verified account @NSWRFS
The NSW RFS Large Air Tanker (LAT) has made its first ever drop on the Lindfield Park Road fire at Port Macquarie this afternoon. The fire has flared in the strong winds however does remain behind identified containment lines. #NSWRFS#nswfires With video
Peter Hannam writes on environment issues for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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