The Guardian’s “100 Months To Save The World” – Part II
The Guardian’s “100 Months To Save The World” – Part II
By Paul Homewood https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/aug/01/climatechange.carbonemissions
According to the Guardian’s Andrew Simms, we are two months away from reaching a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change.
So, how much has the world’s climate changed since 2008?
Atmospheric temperatures have barely changed in the last eighteen years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998/trend
Arctic sea ice extent in September has remained stable:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php
Winter Arctic ice extent has barely changed since 2005:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php
Antarctic sea ice has been growing rapidly: (note that data since April is spurious, due to satellite problems).
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
And global sea ice is also stable:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
Hurricanes keep on doing what hurricanes do:
http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php#!prettyPhoto
Tornadoes remain at historically low levels:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events/us-tornado-climatology/trends
Major droughts in the US are a thing of the past:
And the same in Australia:
In short, far from climate catastrophe, people would be excused for not noticing any change at all the the Earth’s climate.
Meanwhile, all of that extra CO2 in the atmosphere has contributed to a remarkable greening of the world:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/rise-in-co2-has-greened-planet-earth/
And global food production continues to rise in leaps and bounds:
…
The Guardian’s “100 Months To Save The World”
The Guardian’s “100 Months To Save The World”
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/the-guardians-100-months-to-save-the-world/
By Paul Homewood https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/aug/01/climatechange.carbonemissions
Eight years ago, the Guardian launched its “100 months to save the world” campaign, a series of monthly posts by Andrew Simms.
The basic message of that first article was that we were all doomed unless we transformed our economy to look something like Cuba’s.
It is worth emphasising that this was not 100 months to get some sort of climate agreement. In Simms’ own words:
Because in just 100 months’ time, if we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change. That said, among people working on global warming, there are countless models, scenarios, and different iterations of all those models and scenarios. So, let us be clear from the outset about exactly what we mean.
The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, is the highest it has been for the past 650,000 years. In the space of just 250 years, as a result of the coal-fired Industrial Revolution, and changes to land use such as the growth of cities and the felling of forests, we have released, cumulatively, more than 1,800bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently, approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO2 are released into the Earth’s atmosphere every second, due to human activity. Greenhouse gases trap incoming solar radiation, warming the atmosphere. When these gases accumulate beyond a certain level – often termed a “tipping point” – global warming will accelerate, potentially beyond control.
In other words, if we did not take action to immediately start cutting emissions, within eight years it could be too late to do anything about it.
The “100 month” figure was, apparently, not just plucked out of the air, as Simms goes on:
So, how exactly do we arrive at the ticking clock of 100 months? It’s possible to estimate the length of time it will take to reach a tipping point. To do so you combine current greenhouse gas concentrations with the best estimates for the rates at which emissions are growing, the maximum concentration of greenhouse gases allowable to forestall potentially irreversible changes to the climate system, and the effect of those environmental feedbacks. We followed the latest data and trends for carbon dioxide, then made …
The Guardian’s ‘100 months to save the planet’ was always just a fantasy
The Guardian’s ‘100 months to save the planet’ was always just a fantasy
By Paul Homewood http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/08/the-guardians-100-months-to-save-the-planet-was-always-just-a-fa/
Homewood
Booker follows up on my post last week:
You may not have noticed, but 2016 was the hottest year for over 100,000 years. At least this was the claim reported last week by The Guardian, under the headline “Planet at its hottest for 115,000 years thanks to climate change, experts say”.
The “experts” in question are a bunch of US scientists led by James Hansen, the former Nasa employee who did so much to set the great global warming scare on its way in 1988. And of course such a claim could only be made by ignoring all the evidence that the earth was actually hotter than today during the Mediaeval Warm Period, less than 1,000 years ago, and even more so during the thousands of years of the Holocene Optimum, following its emergence from the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
But Hansen and his gang do not stop there. They argue that we can only hope to save the planet by finding ways to suck vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere, at a cost, they estimate, of up to $570 trillion. That figure which may trip off the tongue, but it equates to seven times the world’s entire current annual GDP, or $77,000 for every human being now alive.
British explorer Lewis Gordon Pugh (right) kayaks past polar ice in the Arctic Credit: Jason Roberts/AFP Photo
If this only shows how dottily desperate some of our wilder climate alarmists have become, we may come back to earth a little by focusing on another version of the great climate scare which also got The Guardian very excited eight years ago, when it launched a campaign under the heading “The final countdown”. This proclaimed that we then had only “100 months” left to save the world from “irreversible climate change”: soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, dangerously rising sea levels, more hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and all the other familiar harbingers of catastrophe.
Now those “100 months” are up, it has prompted the diligent Paul Homewood to publish on his website, Not A Lot of People Know That, a set of graphs meticulously compiled from official data. The show what has actually happened to the earth’s climate in these past …
Scientist who said Arctic would be ice free by now eats humble pie as data show there’s MORE ice now than four years ago
Climate change scientist who said Arctic would be free of sea ice by last month eats humble pie as data show there’s MORE there now than there was four years ago
- Professor Peter Wadhams predicted in 2012 that the Arctic would be ice-free by September this year
- But figures show there was 1.6 million square miles of sea ice last month
- He has been criticised by other scientists for making ‘dramatic’ predictions
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A prominent climate change scientist has been forced to backtrack on his prediction that the Arctic would be free of sea ice by September this year – after data showed there is more now than four years ago.
Professor Peter Wadhams, from the University of Cambridge, predicted in 2012 that the Arctic would be ice-free by September this year.
However, figures show there was 1.6 million square miles of sea ice last month – which is actually 20 per cent more than the figure recorded in 2012.
Professor Peter Wadhams, from the University of Cambridge, has been forced to backtrack on his prediction that the Arctic would be free of sea ice by September this year
Professor Wadhams told The Telegraph that he still expected the disappearance of Arctic sea ice in ‘a very small number of years’, but admitted it had not happened as quickly as he had forecast.
He said: ‘My view is that the trend of summer sea ice volume is relentlessly downward, such that the volume (and thus area) will come to a low value very soon – in a very small number of years.
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