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News Briefs 16-10-2018

By Gregon

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Quote of the Day:

What’s important is not to become the wound. Not to spend your life and your time and your attention on the hurt and the heartbreak. Take it and make art with it, instead, or use it to push yourself forward, into things, not away from them.

Neil Gaiman

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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4 Comments

    1. That link was bullshit.

      The usual suspects who cannot hold a candle to real climate scientists doing the most comprehensive and longitudinal study of our climate in history…

      Thanks but no thanks.

  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1850&v=52Mx0_8YEtg

    “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” — Carl Sagan

    “The real deniers are people who think our climate was and should remain static and unchanging.” — Paul Driessen and Chris Skates

    “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” — Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

    1. There was a period of cooling from approximately 1940-1970, but carbon dioxide (CO2) levels went up. The film uses this point both deceptively and repeatedly. The goal here is to try to lead the viewer into thinking that AGW theory only considers the correlation between CO2 and global temperature.[1] Thousands of scientists would have to be pretty stupid to overlook this, and fortunately, they haven’t. Aerosols play a major role in AGW theory, and there was a significant forcing from aerosols during this period that caused cooling.[2][3] Hilariously, the ones overlooking evidence against their views here are the deniers who just totally ignore all of the literature on the period of 1940-1970.
      Solar activity accounts for current warming. This isn’t so much misleading as flat-out wrong. Total solar activity has been declining over approximately the past 35 years.[4] The graph presented actually stops around 1970 to… well, leave this part out. Other graphs related to solar activity employ similar cherry-picking tactics and outright fabrication of data (see Friis-Christensen’s complaint below).
      Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. The film throws out the statistic that water vapor makes up 95+% of atmospheric green house gases and ties it into cloud feedbacks. This, of course, is true. But it’s also a blatantly out-of-context statistic that says nothing about the effects of an increase in CO2, nor about the relationship between CO2 and water vapor (i.e., that an increase in CO2 will increase vapor and water vapor acts more like a feedback mechanism than a driver), or that current evidence is showing a positive feedback effect for clouds.[5][6]
      The models are broken because certain parts of the atmosphere aren’t warming as shown by weather balloon and satellite measurements. Simply a lie. The film relies on more outdated and cherry-picked data (e.g., not adjusting for instrumental and other non-climatic artifacts in the data) to present this as “fact”, ignoring the actual literature on how these measurements are taken that show warming in the troposphere as well as on the surface.[7][8][9][10] Deniers often ignore this warming because it refutes a number of proposed alternate theories to AGW, such as the “urban heat-sink” effect.
      CO2 ‘lags’ warming in the ice core records. Silly climatologists, how could they get cause and effect so mixed up? Some more wilful ignorance from deniers. Why, it’s almost as if they’ve never heard of things like the role of Milankovitch cycles (these are changes in the Earth’s orbit) in initiating warming and the subsequent positive feedback in CO2 release.[11] (Or maybe they prefer to just ignore the scientific literature, as usual.)
      The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was much warmer than current temperatures, therefore, any current warming is natural and/or good for us. Put on your Viking helmets, it’s time for another classic PRATT. The only “evidence” given to support this is a graph of a temperature reconstruction based on reconstructions done back in 1966 and 1988. They conveniently forget to mention this fact, though. For bonus deceit points, it is sourced simply to “IPCC”. The figure was, in fact, included in an IPCC report… the first one issued in 1990. The report itself even stated that the reconstruction was not global (in fact, the MWP was found to be largely an artifact of using only European proxies in later research). Not only does that not show current temperatures, it fails to take into account all the evidence since then that has shown current warming to be far and away above that of the MWP. Paleoclimatology has advanced quite a bit since 1990 and the IPCC itself no longer uses that reconstruction.[12][13][14] Science changes over time.
      Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans. This is another patently false talking point.[15] They probably ripped this one off from Ian Plimer.
      Hey, remember global cooling? Science was wrong back then, so obviously it’s wrong now! Some scientists did argue for “global cooling” back in the 1970s, but there never was a consensus and proponents of the hypothesis called for further research, not widespread political action. The primary hyping came from “pop-science” publications. The serious scientists who did argue for it based their theory on: a) the cooling effects of ever-increasing amounts of aerosols (which, as we may recall from the “1940-1970 cooling” point above, caused significant cooling during the middle of the century), or b) the natural cycles of glaciation which would lead to an ice age in the next 20,000 years. Point a) was avoided by clean-air acts reducing aerosol production (in other words, an intellectual victory for environmentalists), and point b) obviously has nothing to do with imminent global cooling. Deniers conveniently forget to mention either of these things.
      In addition to that, the majority of papers published in the 1970s (when the “cooling” phenomenon was hyped) actually predicted warming.[

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