Global Climate Change Science News

[cronus]

The Earth is screwed. We need to construct a space ark and get the f~ck of this rock before it all goes pear shaped big time.

[pErvinalia]

We'd just fuck up the space ark. May as well stay here.

[cronus]

We'd just fuck up the space ark. May as well stay here.

Could try geo-engineering I guess? Choices. We need more choices.

[Seth]

We'd just fuck up the space ark. May as well stay here.

Speak for yourself and please do.

Anybody remember the movie "Silent Running?" I just found it on Hulu...or Netflix...or Apple TV...can't remember which.

[Animavore]

Good article on how lies and misinformation about consensus affect public perception.

Yes, there really is scientific consensus on climate change

US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron have both observed that there is 97 percent agreement among climate scientists that humans are causing global warming. So too have US Secretary of State John Kerry and US presidential primary candidate Senator Bernie Sanders. Conversely, US Senator Ted Cruz and former US Senator Rick Santorum—current and former presidential primary candidates respectively—have both argued that the 97 percent consensus figure is “bogus.”

Stuck in the middle of this public tug-of-war is a confused populace. Studies in 2009 and 2010 both found 97 percent agreement among climate scientists that humans are causing global warming. Nonetheless, a US national survey in 2015 found that only 12 percent of Americans were aware that the scientific consensus was over 90 percent. How did consensus become such a contentious topic? And what, if anything, can be done about it? A new study showing that the “lack of consensus” claim is a myth may have some impact on the conversation.

The answer to the first question dates back to market research conducted around 2002. Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and pollster, found that when people realised there was scientific agreement on global warming, their views on climate change altered accordingly. In a 2002 memo to the George W. Bush White House, Luntz advised Republicans that in order to win the public debate on climate policy, they should cast doubt on the scientific consensus. He wrote that “you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

Conservatives complied with this recommendation. An analysis of newspaper opinion pieces on climate change written by conservative columnists from 2007 to 2010 found that the most common argument was “there is no scientific consensus on climate change.” You can’t accuse conservatives of ignoring the evidence on climate change—at least, they didn’t ignore the market research on how to effectively confuse the public.

About a decade after Luntz published his climate strategy, social scientists began to catch up, realising the psychological importance of public perception of consensus. They labelled perceived consensus a “gateway belief” influencing a range of other climate beliefs and attitudes, including support for climate change mitigation policies. Social scientists began exhorting climate scientists to educate the public about their high level of agreement on human-caused global warming.

But the damage had already been done. Opponents of climate action had spent years casting doubt on the scientific consensus. Recent research has shed disturbing light on just how effective this type of misinformation can be. The positive effect of accurate scientific information can be cancelled out by misinformation. Further exacerbating the problem is the way the mainstream media often covers climate change, granting equal weight to both mainstream scientists and contrarian voices who are in a tiny minority. This form of false-balance media lowers public acceptance of climate change science.

[cont] http://thebulletin.org/yes-there-really ... change9332

[Animavore]

A nice helping of just desserts topped with irony.

It’s become a go-to strategy for climate change deniers to demand subpoenas and documents from scientists whenever they get a whiff of a potential controversy. But they like it less when the same tactic is used on them.

Attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands Claude Walker served the conservative think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) with a subpoena last Thursday, demanding several decades’ worth of communications, emails, and other documents pertaining to CEI’s work on climate change policy and donor information. By subpoenaing CEI, Walker is broadening “a multifaceted legal inquiry into whether fossil fuel companies broke any laws as they sought for decades to undermine the scientific consensus and head off forceful action to address the climate crisis,” reports InsideClimateNews.

Libertarian and conservative writers at at The Blaze, American Thinker, The Washington Times, Bloomberg View, and Cato Institute have criticized the subpoena, calling it the product of “hysterics,” part of an “absurd climate inquisition,” and a chapter in “Al Gore’s climate witch hunt.” CEI itself called the move “an affront” to its First Amendment rights, adding that if Walker succeeds, “the real victims will be all Americans, whose access to affordable energy will be hit by one costly regulation after another.”

cont. http://grist.org/politics/conservatives ... hemselves/

[Animavore]

The island of Kiritimati is one of the world’s most remote places — one of several dozen atolls making up the tiny island nation of Kiribati, a speck in the Pacific Ocean more than a thousand miles south of Hawaii. But, isolated as it is, news of its devastated coral is turning heads around the world. A recent expedition has revealed that the reefs around Kiritimati have suffered a catastrophic mass die-off — an event that epitomizes what may be an ugly truth about the ability of coral reefs around the world to adapt to the growing threat of climate change.

The situation at Kiritimati came to light during an expedition last month headed by researchers Julia Baum from the University of Victoria and Kim Cobb of Georgia Tech. They expected bad news before they even arrived — after all, the island is in the part of the world most strongly affected by the past year’s unusually severe El Niño event. Abnormally warm water temperatures have plagued the region for months, and as recently as November, research expeditions had observed widespread coral bleaching, disease and even some coral death as a result.

But Baum, who has studied coral in the area for years, was not wholly prepared for the devastation she met with upon arrival. She and her team estimate that about 80 percent of all the coral around the island are now dead. Another 15 percent appear to be bleached, but still alive — and Baum estimates that only around 5 percent are actually healthy. Much of the dead coral has been covered over with a fuzzy, red algae, giving the reef a haunting appearance.

“It was a horror show,” Baum said. “Rationally I know what’s happened, but emotionally it’s very hard to accept it. It seems like it can’t possibly be real that this vibrant, healthy reef that I’ve been working on so long and studying so intensely — specifically because it was one of the healthiest reefs in the world — that it could just be dramatically transformed in a matter of months into this graveyard.”

Scientists believe that the mass die-off around Kiritimati — also known as Christmas Island — is one of the worst casualties in a larger coral bleaching event that’s taking place all over the world. And now, some experts are saying the events could signal an even more disturbing revelation — the idea that we’re reaching a point where many coral reef ecosystems may not be able to adapt to the relentless progression of climate change.

cont. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... sinessonly

[Animavore]

NASA shows up on Bill Nye's Facebook to put it to denialist gullibles.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyat ... m=facebook

[mistermack]

Read all about it.

Coral dies off around Christmas Island. What on earth could be causing it? In an El Nino year?
And Christmas Island being bang in the middle of the Pacific, where El Nino's effect is most extreme?

It's a fucking mystery, so it is.

[Tero]

What, reefs just come and go at random? I think they just go. They are not coming back.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... th-amazons

[Tero]

I found the blog of some old fart who exposes hoaxes and myths. Why does he not expose global warming? And he does not even know of ozone. That is a hoax because the hole comes and goes, and has no connection to cholesterol.
http://www.charliewagner.net/hoax.htm

[mistermack]

Silly old fart doesn't expose or debunk anything.
He offers no evidence for his claims.
He just declares this and that. As if him saying it was enough.
I can't see why he ever got any attention.

[Animavore]

Ever see a denialist post an article on the webz which had the unmistakable odour of fecal matter but you couldn't place exactly the source of the stench? Well here's a handy new app written and updated by climate scientists which seeks to add annotations and ratings to news stories, including corrections and falsehood call out.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... journalism

[Animavore]

Arctic Sea Ice is Falling off a Cliff and it May Not Survive The Summer
Near zero sea ice by the end of melt season. The dreaded Blue Ocean Event. Something that appears more and more likely to happen during 2016 with each passing day.

These are the kinds of climate-wrecking phase changes in the Arctic people have been worrying about since sea ice extent, area, and volume achieved gut-wrenching plunges during 2007 and 2012. Plunges that were far faster than sea ice melt rates predicted by model runs and by the then scientific consensus on how the Arctic Ocean ice would respond to human-forced warming this Century. For back during the first decade of the the 21st Century the mainstream scientific view was that Arctic sea ice would be about in the range that it is today by around 2070 or 2080. And that we wouldn’t be contemplating the possibility of zero or near zero sea ice until the end of this Century.

But the amazing ability of an unconscionable fossil fuel emission to rapidly transform our world for the worst appears now to outweigh that cautious science. For during 2016, the Arctic is experiencing a record warm year like never before. Average temperatures over the region have been hitting unprecedented ranges. Temperatures that — when one who understands the sensitive nature of the Arctic looks at them — inspires feelings of dislocation and disbelief. For our Arctic sea ice coverage has been consistently in record low ranges throughout Winter, it has been following a steepening curve of loss since April, and it now appears to have started to fall off a cliff. Severe losses that are likely to both impact the Jet Stream and extreme weather formation in the Northern Hemisphere throughout the Spring and Summer of 2016.

https://robertscribbler.com/2016/05/02/ ... he-summer/

[Animavore]

The climate change hoax gets more elaborate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... &tid=ss_tw