NASA Websites Contradict Claims Made By Trump
#NASA charts/websites like this contradict Trump. Watch as Trump orders @NASA to change charts to match his decision https://t.co/kmmfWebEHl pic.twitter.com/UoMbVUgXrw
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) June 1, 2017
The statement that CO2 has not exceeded 300PPM for centuries is true, but deceptive. Actually CO2 has not exceeded this level for at least 20 million years.
Continuing business as usual to exhaust carbon, it will be 1500 ppm
Two UAH climate denying scientists Spencer and Christie manipulated satellite data using the wrong sign for the satellite drift rate and falsely showed no warming.
The few CEOs including Tillerson in the carbon industry paid to spread the fake data over the media.
Ted Cruz, Jim Bridenstine, and Scott Pruitt broadcast the climate change propaganda fueled by the false data.
Two Koch brothers at one time had the entire House Republican leadership and a quarter of U.S. senators sign an anti-climate pledge.
A few Supreme Court Justices approved Citizen’s United and suddenly a few a random billionaires can change politics and public policy to sweep everything else off the table.
The public allowed the politicians to create gerrymandered districts and elected a POTUS to destroy the planet Earth.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
“Continuing business as usual to exhaust carbon, it will be 1500 ppm”
When will that occur? Current predictions are like 600 ppm in 2100. I saw one estimate that coal oil and gas would be depleted by then. If so, where will the 900 ppm of CO2 come from?
“A few Supreme Court Justices approved Citizen’s United”
I thought it was a decision reached by a majority of justices. If you argue that they made the wrong decision then all Supreme Court decisions, those you agree with and those you don’t, become irrelevant and we descend into anarchy.
The vast majority of the Earth’s free CO2 is dissolved in the ocean or immobilized as clatrates, or confined in permafrost,, and as temperatures increase it will enter the atmosphere.
“Bacteria, Methane, and Other Dangers Within Siberia’s Melting Permafrost”
https://www.wired.com/2016/…
“Massive Permafrost Thaw Documented in Canada, Portends Huge Carbon Release”
https://insideclimatenews.o…
True, but was that 1500 ppm number based on those factors, or was it simply an extrapolation based on the current CO2 production rate? I’m open to scarry numbers, but I like to know that they are based on good rather than poor estimates.
The Infographic on Emissions vs Year by country and the resulting temperature increase from the global carbon budget should be distributed to the world. The costs will be in the trillions even in the ‘best we can do’ scenarios.
trump (“t” not capitalized intentionally) lies. Is that news?
People may debate climate change but I don’t like when deniers want to stop data collection i.e. satellites that do earth climate observation. The “need to reduce federal spending” argument is bankrupt compared to other expenditures. Besides NASA is ***very good*** developing sensor technologies as many of you pointed out in previous posts as one area NASA does well.
No. The models and the data from many sources all agree–see figure 3 to examine the human contribution as the El Ninos, solar activity, and volcanoes are subtracted out. The UAH exception is pointed out.
UAH used a model or a “retrieval algorithm” from the satellite data with the wrong sign violating all the physics, but it does show the amount of confirmation bias put forth by deniers.
Predicting climate/weather on a shorter term is indeed a challenge rather than global yearly averages.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Must be something wrong with this data. USA has reduced carbon emissions by 20% since 1992
It’s not enough.
Money has momentum.
And there is a fair amount of momentum, now, operating in the climate arena. For instance, the NYTimes points out today that there are 10 times more folks employed in alternative energy activities compared to only a decade ago. That’s a pretty big category, but still.
The future belongs to electricity. We now have the technology to make this happen. We could make the switch to renewables in a smarter, more deliberate way, were Washington to show leadership; but the switch will be made nonetheless.
More significant, perhaps, is our loss of a global leadership position. This has created a vacuum in the diplomatic arena as in so many areas of interest, a vacuum that can, I believe, lead to 22nd historians referring to the 21st as the Chinese Century.
Coupled with our failure to show backbone in Europe recently (articles by Gen. McMasters et.al. in the WSJ notwithstanding), the next few decades, at least, will be very different. I advise all Americans to prepare for a radical shift in the suppositions you have about our place in the world.
A common misconception and one easily surmised when looking at the lack of atmospheric temperature increases over the past decade and a half. But the story is much deeper than that.
It’s good to see opposing views here though.
The rest of the world can continue to do their part to reduce climate change. Why so much emphasis on the US. Also private companies are not restricted for doing what they want to without govt handouts.
Regarding climate change, I have a question. Alaska has fossils of palm tree, dinosaurs, etc. Obviously the world was warmer at some time and the world is still here. Is a warmer world a bad thing? And dinos were supposedly eliminated by a meteor not global warming. Just asking.
See my comment above. The Sun is now more luminous so the same CO2 level would actually make the world hotter than it was in the era of the dinosaurs.
The Sun is not that much more luminous than time of dinosaurs, the Sun is increasing in brightness by about 1% every 100 million years.
Nevertheless we will not reach the same equilibrium. Without predictive models we do not know how far the equilibrium will shift. Without data we cannot develop those models.
1. The US is the biggest single-country emitter of carbon;
2. Private companies will do wha they see in their own best interest, which is, for sure, sometimes making the move to renewables;
3. Government ‘handouts’ may exist, in limit amounts; remember that the government can guide the economy in ways that are beneficial to all of us (see seat belts, for instance), and that one way we do that is with tax incentive or low interest loans or grants, all paltry amounts; and that sometimes, these loans can enable technology that is high risk/high reward (Solandrya notwithstanding);
3. Alaska has fossils, yes, but don’t forget that the continents move about, through long time periods; the presence of certain fossils helps geologists understand this tectonic movement;
4. And finally: is warmer a bad thing? Yes. It is bad, mostly because sea levels will rise dramatically.
Alaska reached its present polar latitude during the Cretaceous (145 to 66 million years ago) and the dinosaurs living there had to endure the extreme seasonal day-night cycles.
Yes the North Slope of Alaska was much warmer during the Cretaceous period, but it was far from tropical. The climate was more like that of the northern Rockies: meaning that dinosaurs living here had to function in relatively cold temperatures.
I think I disagree with your fourth point. Warmer isn’t inherently a bad thing, nor are higher sea levels. The problem is that we (as in the whole world) have a huge amount invested in the current global climate and sea level. I don’t just mean financially invested. Cities are where they are because ships are a fantastically efficient way to transport bulk cargo. Change sea level enough, and now we have ports which are in the wrong places, no ports in what are now good harbors, and international trade takes a massive hit. Agriculture is based on the current climate. You can’t convert the grain and corn farms in Kansas to growing rice in a year, or a decade. If the climate there shifts in that direction, there would be some very hungry decades before we could adapt. I suspect we could adapt, but is all the pain and suffering worth being able to drive a big, fancy car or air condition buildings to 65 deg F when it’s 95 deg outside?
Most of Florida was under water during the Mesozoic. The vast changes in climate and sea level will be harder to manage than the rise in CO2, which will be greatly amplified by decreased solubility of CO2 in the oceans.
The big picture.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Source? Published data? Or is this a cut and paste thing?
ROBERT A. BERNER and ZAVARETH KOTHAVALA
Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University
American Journal of Science, Vol. 301, February,2001 ,P.182–204
During these ancient periods of high CO2 the climate was much hotter and the seas much higher than they are now. But one other change cannot be ignored; the Sun is now more luminous, so the same CO2 levels will actually drive temperature higher than it was then.
The less luminous Sun pertains mainly to the era of ~3.8 to 2 billion years ago, much older than this graph which starts at 600 million years ago. Presently, the Sun is increasing in brightness by about 1% every 100 million years.
Surprisingly, the pollution layers of today can cut the sunlight by 10%– particles turn clouds into giant mirrors– “global dimming”
The most disturbing discovery of global dimming was that the reflective clouds could alter the world’s rainfall, creating famines.
9/11 grounded aircraft and created warmer days and cooler nights, but the surprise was a day/night difference of 1C due to a lack of contrails..
Global dimming is important because human greenhouse emissions produce~3 Watts/m2, while dimming subtracts ~ 1.5 masking climate change, which is one reason why the scientists took longer to realize CO2 impacts.
Reducing the particle pollution to improve health and rainfall however would unmask the sun raising temperatures another 1C–its a huge concern. Fortunately, the dedicated scientists continue their efforts and inform the World: cut emissions yesterday since 3C is on the brink of disaster. The scientist sought 1.5C…it’s not achievable.
If we can’t achieve what is ideal, we must strive to achieve what is possible. To suggest that we should ignore our contribution to global warming is to abrogate our most existential responsibility; to preserve our world for our children.
He also published his data in GSA Today March 2004 “CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate” see http://www.geosociety.org/g…
Published in American Journal of Science, Vol. 301, February,2001 ,P.182–204 by ROBERT A. BERNER and ZAVARETH KOTHAVALA, Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University. Also see GSA Today “CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate” March 2004, https://www.geosociety.org/…
The data is a bit conjectural, as can be seen by the flat lines and smooth curves. There are many sources of temperature estimates covering different time periods. The hisorical data is very useful in that it enhances our understanding of the mechanism and physics of climate change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
But whether the Earth was warmer or colder at some specific time in the past does not mean that we can safely ignore the unprecidented rate of climate change today. Most critical today is predictive modeling of the current atmospheric composition and global temperature. We need to understand and predict it, and if necessary modify what we are doing to affect it, and that requires more data and more space-based sensors, not fewer sensors and less analysis as the current Administration recommends.
The graph shown in this posting is more than a little a bit deceptive. It splices CO2 data from ice cores with instrumental data from presumably Mauna Loa. The ice core data is a low pass filter of the actual record and there may be issues with diffusion along with alteration by chemical reaction. There’s lots of discussion about the meaning of ice core CO2 data in the literature. It should not be spliced onto a high frequency instrumental record without at least showing the break in the data. Similar deceptive illustrations were made with the Hockey Stick graph when instrumental temperature records were spliced onto a proxy record of somewhat dubious validity (incorrect proxies and odd statistics). It’s very important for data to be consistent throughout a record and when changes are made in procedure, the change must be highlighted. It is sleight of hand like this that makes many real scientists somewhat skeptical of all the hysteria. Don’t trust the “experts” as they have just as much of an agenda as the people who get criticized on this site. Do your own homework and look at the numbers.
Glad to hear you are interested in the details, here’s an important piece of research:
http://science.sciencemag.o…
It appears that the primary difficulty is not atmospheric composition, but the vertical displacement of air bubbles in ice which affects the exact time scale, although not the sequence of changes. More sophisticated modeling of the process has allowed correction for the vertical drift.
However the most difficult and important element in understanding any science is that one must approach the evidence utterly free of bias and with the true willingness to consider all possibilities objectively. If one believes that climate science is hysteria, because one finds emotional comfort through faith in political leaders who make this claim, one will instinctively accept evidence that supports ones view and reject evidence that supports a different conclusion.
No amount of modeling, no matter how good, can remove the diffusion of those air bubbles. In the real world, that’s an irreversible process and in modeling and information theory, it’s still trying to make entropy go down. I think the result is that ice core data would not show a strong, short (few decade) spike in CO2. It would look like a smaller increase over a longer period.
Bingo.
We are interested in long term changes, aren’t we? The primary finding from the ice core data is that atmospheric CO2 is rising to levels not seen previously in the portion of the historical record that they can be used to observe. Could a brief spike from a major eruption be missed? Possibly, but this would not make the current data less ominous.
The real problem we face is not the accuracy of thescientific data, which is more consistent in climate science than in, say, medicine. The problem we face is extreme politicization which overcomes critical thinking and undermines the very basis of science.
Sticking instrumental records with daily resolving power onto a proxy with decadal to centrury-long resolving power is at best, highly deceptive. The paper you link to deals with the lag/lead relationship between CO2 and T, but that gets a bit dodgy when you realize that for ages greater than ~100ka, the chronology is highly dependent on ice flow models. I smell a reaction to Salby. Oh well, if you want to believe, that’s fine. But splicing records of totally different character together without big red flags is truly Sciency BS.
The almost unique feature of measuring the trapped gases in ice-cores is that its measured ‘directly’–its highly reliable — no process ‘model’ or “proxy” is required. When CO2 levels increase, so does temperature and ice cores play a key role in this relationship (along with factoring out volcanic, el nino, solar activity, global dimming) . At ~100m, the weight of the new snow sinters the ice crystals together creating an impenetrable seal. Before this depth, a ‘time lag’ can exist because ‘younger’ air can diffuse through the ‘older’ ice, so with smaller snowfall rate, 1000 yr differences can exist.
The ‘lag’ is something cc skeptics pick on.
The new method measures the concentration of nitrogen 15 to determine the depth. A very simple model can then determine the offset in depth between the gas and ice and the time ‘lag’. The scientists compared multiple locations, drastically reducing the uncertainty in this ‘dodgy’ paper.
Scientists use use Mauna Loa as a proxy for global CO2 levels is because CO2 mixes well throughout the atmosphere. The video ‘splices” Mauna Loa CO2 to South Pole CO2, then the graph expands at the end to include ice core measurements back to the 19th Century…the CO2 hockey stick.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
OCO2 is coming up with some cool data showing where CO2 mostly comes from (who knew that there were so many SUVs in the Congo?). It’s still deceptive to splice instrument records (Mauna Loa) onto a CO2 proxy. CO2 in ice is not captured instantaneously. Gas in firn gradually gets cut off from the atmosphere over decades by ice forming and closing off air bubbles. Eventually, gases are incorporated into the ice structure at very high pressure. On top of that, CO2 can diffuse within the ice. For older parts of the core, the record gets smeared out over decades and even centuries. All of the high frequency component gets filtered out. This is not as bad as “hide the decline”, but it’s still not good to show this as a continuous record. They are two distinct records with different properties. As for lead/lag, it’s fun to pop over to woodfortrees.org and plot temperature anomaly (UAH, HadCrut, SST, whatever) as a function of time and then plot annual CO2 flux (dCO2/dt where you have a year long CO2 average to smooth out the NH blips) as a function of time. Spooky. Then do a cross correlation. Heh Heh.
It is not that I want to believe or disbelieve. I am not sure where you got that idea. I want to learn the truth. Accurate instruments have amassed an extraordinary amount of data, starting with the extraordinary rise in atmospheric CO2 that does not even account for the total being generated, since much of it is still being dissolved in the oceans.
To say that the US should not lead in coping with this immense problem is to abdicate world leadership.
The toe of the hockey stick is best explained by subtracting out solar, El Nino, and volcanic activity (See Figure 3) to arrive at the human contribution to examine how the “the climate is changing” in the short term.
The scientists have been saying for 4 decades that the limit is 1.5C (now unachievable) or ~350 ppm as the World now exceeds 400 ppm. They try to convey the urgency and dire economic consequences: 2C means means 10ft or more sea level rise, underestimated by the IPCC. Climate denying scientists Spencer and Christie manipulated the data to incorrectly show no warming (“the Pause”) violating all the physics with nighttime temps warmer than the days. Please be specific when stating agendas.
Character assassination of Hansen and Gore was the tactic; yet read Hansen’s 35 yr old predictions:
“Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include
– drought-prone regions in North America, central Asia
– erosion of West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, which will add 4ft to the underestimated rise estimates.
– opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.“
100% dead on.
A reckless risk however is gambling against the science.
Its much worse, some say hysteria–the upside of sea level rise is 10s of meters, not 3-6 ft, because of the uncertainty of land ice melt. The economic and social cost of losing all coastal cities is practically incalcuable, but certainly is Trillions.
To be even more reckless, Keystone can add an additional 200ppm with 100B barrels of production, but it could reach 200B barrels. Let’s see, 4+ Trillion divided by 100 billion barrels is what $40 a barrel in carbon tax–now that appears to be an agenda: obfuscate future costs of remediation of greenhouse gases.
The problem with the Stick is not the blade but with the shaft. Newer reconstructions have rehabilitated both the MWP and the LIA. But sticking instrumental records onto a proxy record that’s mostly based on bristlecone pines (that’s the early versions), that aren’t particularly T dependent according to the dendrochronologists, is just plain silly.
The scientists have for many decades performed careful measurement techniques, and while many issues have arisen they have been thoroughly investigated with uncertainties stated.
One of the most cited arguments of skeptics is MWP. Heres a detailed look at the Little Ice Age.
Yes the climate is changing due to human greenhouse gas emissions, El Ninos, volcanoes, the shifts in Earth’s orbit to change solar heating hence ice ages, and ‘dimming the sun’ We are taking reckless risks.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Well, after “hide the decline”, “upside down Tiljander” and “the rain in Maine falls mainly in the Seine”, MBH 98 and 99 are getting a bit shop worn. For a handy compilation of 80 (!) reconstructions from 57 (!!) peer reviewed papers all published in 2017 (!!!), check out:
http://notrickszone.com/201…
The MWP, and LIA have returned zombie-like and very might well be here to stay. I really love the proxy based on the harvest date for grapes in France. Clever.
Well, the latest from the White House press people is that Trump does believe in climate change, and man-made climate change at that. Apparently, he just doesn’t care for a solution unless he thinks it is a good deal for the US economy.
He has said in the past that he believes it, but he has also said that it is a Chinese hoax. Although how China could fake observations from space, tidal guages on US territory, and atmospheric CO2 measurements doen in Hawaii is unclear.
I’m glad to see that the graph I uploaded has sparked this discussion. There are a few comments and corrections I would like to make.
1) Robert A. Berner, was very respected in his field and the GEOCARB models for calculating the CO2 levels over 100’s of millions of years is considered the best obtainable to date. He died in 2015.
2) His model is NOT deceptive and is NOT calculated from ice cores. Ice cores, I believe, can only go back 100’s of thousands of years not the 100’s of millions displayed here. Berner’s model tracks the exchange of carbon between buried organic and inorganic sedimentary carbon (pedogenic minerals, phytoplankton, fossil plants etc.), the atmosphere plus oceans.
3) The US is NOT the largest emitter of CO2. China overtook the US in 2007.
4) Energy-related carbon emissions in the US have dropped to levels not seen since 1994, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).
5) According to the most recent World Health Organization (WHO) report, the U.S. is among the cleanest nations on the planet. ( http://gamapserver.who.int/… )
6) We still have a long way to go in decarbonizing our energy sources.
Where to start, where to start…
The global warming issue has forced our science community to explicate for the naive and often foolish data that is tricky to use. The results of climate research are tricky because they are beset by sigfig issues, by the relative newness of the field, by the whole problem of proxies, by discontinuities, by non-linearity, by data sets that are of limited range – and other technical problems requiring experts to sort out.
This is not an easy field. Mastery requires something more than paling knowledge. Mastery requires more than a PhD, in fact.
Yet people want simple explanations. This is why our scientists are forced to explain science as if it’s ‘belief’ or ‘faith’.
Now enter folks like the moronic Anthony Watts, the cut and paste guys, the guys that are semi-smart because they can talk about slopes but haven’t a clue about chi-squared, or variance, or, as mentioned above, trapped gasses or the efficacy of proxies or how data is properly adjusted or – or a lot of things.
But that’s just it. The totality of climate data, warts and all, is overwhelmingly obvious, yet there remain foolish folks driven mostly by anti-governmental bias. Same people who talk about taxation and thievery in the same breath.
There is no ‘other’ side to the climate story.