Study: Surgery is warming the planet – Anesthetic gases accumulating in atmosphere
Grasping For Pause-ible Deniability On Climate Change
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/grasping-for-pause-ible-deniability-on-climate-change.html…
New Yorker: ‘Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?’
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture
I accepted its supremacy as the environmental issue of our time, but I felt bullied by its dominance. Not only did it make every grocery-store run a guilt trip; it made me feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future.
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Climaticmatic stress are not well studied, but birds have been adapting to such stresses for tens of millions of years, and they’re surprising us all the time.…
Arctic Ice Decline: A New ‘Pause?’
http://www.thegwpf.com/arctic-ice-decline-a-new-pause/
When satellite observations of Arctic ice extent began in 1979 it was obvious that a long-term decline was already underway. That decline appeared to be monotonic until the mid-2000s when, for a while at least, it seemed to have accelerated. The ice extent in the summer of 2007 was a record low, and was accompanied by cries from some quarters of imminent collapse.
The same was said in 2012 when another low was observed. However 2012 was an unusual year as an intense storm occurred in August and its effects on concentrating the ice cover can be clearly seen in the data. Likewise 2007 was an exceptional year.
We now know that year had what was later called an “unusual atmospheric pattern,” that is clear skies under high pressure that promoted a strong melt and at the same time winds brought warm air into the region.
These exceptional years became statistically important as using them to guide a straight line through the Arctic ice decline made its gradient even steeper.
A New “Pause?”
Examining the sea ice extent data for the past eight years it is obvious that there has not been any statistically significant downward trend, even though there is more noise (interannual variability) in the data. There are interannual variations but they do not form a trend. For the 2002 – 2006 period the annual differences are mostly in the extent of maximum and not minimum ice cover. The period 1990 – 1996 displays much more interannual variability. The main difference between the ice-curves is that in recent years there has been an increase in the gradient around the beginning of June.
Of the general decline and the interannual variability how much is due to external forcing and how much to internal variability? Estimate from climate models give about equal measure to forcing and internal variability, Kay et al (2011), Stroeve et al (2012). That 50% internal variability is almost never illustrated graphically when presenting Arctic ice data.
That the minimal extent of Arctic ice has “paused” is admitted by Swart et al (2015)
“…from 2007–2013 there was a near-zero trend in observed Arctic September sea-ice extent, in large part due to a strong uptick of the ice-pack in 2013, which has continued into 2014.”
Swart et al (2015) maintain that “cherry-picking” such short periods can be …
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry pulls no punches: Draft APS climate ‘statement is an embarrassment to the American Physical Society’
…The 97 Percent Climate Change Consensus That Wasn’t
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2015/04/06/97-percent-climate-change-consensus-wasnt
Cook’s paper, because of its poor research methods, doesn’t even prove the limited claim 97 percent of the academic literature supports a human role in climate change.
Cook and his colleagues, including a small group of environmental activists, claimed to examine abstracts of more than 12,000 papers. Tol writes:
They did not check whether their sample is representative for the scientific literature. It isn’t. Their conclusions are about the papers they happened to look at, rather than about the literature. Attempts to replicate their sample failed: A number of papers that should have been analyzed were not, for no apparent reason.
The sample was padded with irrelevant papers. An article about TV coverage on global warming was taken as evidence for global warming. In fact, about three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsements had nothing to say about the subject matter.
The environmental activists Cook enlisted to determine what the papers under consideration claimed about climate change did not work independently. Rather, they freely compared notes, discussing their work. They disagreed among themselves concerning what the papers were about 33 percent of the time. Sixty-three percent of the time, they disagreed with the authors of the papers concerning their messages and findings. This is post-modern science at its worst. Critics and outside ‘experts’ rather than the authors themselves have the final say over what an author or team of researchers are truly saying in their own paper. The original authors are simply offering one opinion, not necessarily the definitive one, concerning what their research shows.
In addition, writes Tol, “Cook broke a key rule of scientific data collection: Observations should never follow from the conclusions. Medical tests are double-blind for good reason. You cannot change how to collect data, and how much, after having seen the results.” Yet this is precisely what Cook did. Computer time stamps from the research reveal Cook’s team collected data for eight weeks, analyzed it for four weeks, and then collected three more weeks of data. The same people who collected the data analyzed it. After the initial analysis, they changed their classification scheme in the middle of the study and collected more data.
The paper’s reviewers did not question this gross misconduct. Instead, the editor praised the authors for “excellent data quality.”
These methodological errors should lead to the paper being withdrawn with an apology from the authors and the journal.
Going back …
Wash Post: ‘Climate-change deniers are in retreat’
WaPo: ‘What will happen after people stop ignoring the evidence on climate change’
‘Has The UK Guardian Rolling Stoned Christy & Spencer?’
Has The Guardian Rolling Stoned Christy & Spencer?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/04/has-the-guardian-rolling-stoned-christy-spencer/
That tireless ecological zealot over at The Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli, took the opportunity of our 25th anniversary of satellite-based global temperature monitoring to rip us a new one. Comparing John Christy and me to “scientists who disputed the links between smoking and cancer”, Dana once again demonstrates his dedication to the highest standards of journalism. Well done, Grauniad. I prefer to compare us to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who rejected the scientific consensus that peptic ulcers were due to too much stress or spicy food. While they eventually received the Nobel Prize after years of ridicule and scorn from the medical research community, we have no illusions that we will ever be credited for our long-standing position that global warming fears have been overblown. I’m sure the UN’s IPCC will find a way to take credit for that, and get another Peace Prize for it. (I wonder if Marshall and Warren were being paid off by the spicy food lobby?) The “97% of all climate scientists agree“ meme that Dana bitterly clings to has been thoroughly discredited…. as if scientific consensus on something so poorly understood as climate change (or stomach ulcers 15 years ago?) really means anything, anyway. To prove that Dana should probably avoid trying to interpret simple graphs, let’s examine this chart he so likes, which allegedly shows that our (UAH) global temperature dataset has been continually adjusted for errors over the years, resulting in an increasing warming trend: Now, setting aside the fact that (1) we actually do adjust for obvious, demonstrable errors as soon as they have been found (unlike the IPCC climate modelers who continue to promote demonstrably wrong models), and (2) RSS gets about the same (relatively benign) warming trend as we do, let’s examine some other popular temperature datasets in the same manner as the above graph: Looks a lot like Dana’s plot, doesn’t it? Do you want to know why? Is it really because all those other temperature dataset providers were also busily correcting mistakes in their data, too? No, it’s largely because as the years go by, the global temperature trend changes, silly. About the only thing Dana got reasonably correct is his article’s tag line, “John Christy and Roy Spencer are pro-fossil fuel and anti-scientific consensus.” You’re damn right we are. But not because we are paid to say …