[dohboi]

asg, good link. dis, jun and I had already been debunking the Happer crap, but they just keep bringing him up, as is denier way, I guess.

[jedrider]

Fossil fuel shill. Don't waste our time. We're not that gullible.

you do realize that consultants don't work for free, don't you? Do you think that various climate change cheerleaders like Mann don't charge for appearances? Do we need to remind you of all the money that these guys have taken from the government and other funds in order to support their research and lifestyle?
Pot calling the kettle black I''m afraid.

Scientists don't often charge for appearances, but they do have an expense account as part of disseminating science. They are invited to talk because they tell the truth.

[rockdoc123]

Scientists don't often charge for appearances, but they do have an expense account as part of disseminating science. They are invited to talk because they tell the truth.

That is bizarrely naive. It is well known that many of the proponents of man-made climate change charge out to speak at conferences as keynote speakers. There are a number of agencies that represent them.

Case in point:

Michael Mann is represented by Jodi Solomon Speakers Bureau, you can hire him to speak at your event for $10,000.

APB Speakers agency hires out scientists involved in the climate debate such as Jonathan Foley, David Suzuki and Naomi Oreskes.

The Lavin Agency will let you book Bill McKibben to speak at your conference or you can instead book Naomi Klein or Jared Diamond

ICMI Speakers and Entertainers will let you book Tim Flannery for speaking engagements.

The list goes on and on. Not every scientist is going to get paid to speak and some who are full-time employees of government agencies or universities are often not allowed to charge for speaking engagements. This doesn’t apply to those who are either retired or independently engaged. Speakers who get paid for conferences or other engagements are hired because they are good speakers and entertaining. The scientists most vocal and out there writing books etc are the ones who you will be paying to have speak no matter what topic they are talking about.

There is easily as many scientists who are on the pro side of man-made global warming arguments getting paid for presentations as there are on the con side of the argument.

[dohboi]

Global warming may boost economic inequality
By Warren CornwallApr. 22, 2019 , 3:40 PM
"Over the past half-century, climate change has been blamed for heat waves, flooding, and rising seas. Now, researchers say warmer temperatures are widening the chasm separating richer and poorer countries, effectively boosting the economies of many wealthy polluters while dampening growth in much of the developing world. As a result, inequality between the haves and have-nots is already 25% greater than it would be in a cooler world, the paper asserts.
Though he disagrees about the numbers, University of California, Berkeley, economist Solomon Hsiang says the paper provides clear evidence that climate change has stunted economies in the developing world. “The study’s statement that warming should have already harmed economic opportunities in poor countries is extremely important,” he wrote in an email.
The new work builds on previous research that found economic activity peaks at an average temperature of 13°C. Call it a “Goldilocks” condition that’s neither too hot nor too cold. Lower temperatures can hamper weather-dependent sectors like agriculture, but hotter temperatures can wither crops, sap workers’ energy, and exacerbate social conflicts. That study found that climate change could reduce overall global economic output by 23% by 2100."

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04 ... inequality

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... a-thunberg

'Outrage is justified': David Attenborough backs school climate strikers

broadcaster says older generations have done terrible things and should listen to young

"The outrage of the students striking from school over climate change inaction is “certainly justified”, according to Sir David Attenborough, who said older generations had done terrible damage to the planet.
In an interview with the former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, the broadcaster and naturalist dismissed critics of the widely praised global movement of school strikes as cynics.

“[Young people] understand the simple discoveries of science about our dependence upon the natural world,” he said. “My generation is no great example for understanding – we have done terrible things.”
The protests by young people were enormously encouraging, Attenborough said. “That is the one big reason I have for feeling we are making progress. If we were not making progress with young people, we are done.”"

California restaurants can now add a 1% surcharge to help fight climate change
Quote

People eating out at California restaurants may start to see an optional 1% surcharge added to their bill.
The money will go to a public fund that helps farmers who use practices that reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

To participate in the Restore California Renewable Restaurant program, eateries can choose to add a 1% fee to every diner's check.
It would still be optional for customers, but if all diners at a certain eatery pay it, the haul would be more than enough to make the establishment carbon neutral, Anthony Myint, an organizer of the initiative, told CNN.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/26/us/calif ... index.html

[Cog]

Well I guess if students are cutting class they aren't being indoctrinated with socialism. Or are they?

[Plantagenet]

To participate in the Restore California Renewable Restaurant program, eateries can choose to add a 1% fee to every diner's check.
It would still be optional for customers, but if all diners at a certain eatery pay it, the haul would be more than enough to make the establishment carbon neutral, Anthony Myint, an organizer of the initiative, told CNN.

?????

Paying one percent more on your dinner check will somehow offset the carbon emitted due to the restaurant's heating and cooking and electricity, and all the carbon emitted by all the people who drive to the restaurant and all the carbon emitted by all the employees who drive to the restaurant, and all the carbon emitted during the trucking and storage and distortion of food to grocery stores and all the carbon emitted in shopping for the food and all the carbon emitted during the growing of the food, including all the carbon emitted by the farm machinery and the carbon emitted by the farmer and his family living in his house on the farm?

It all sounds very nice but I rather doubt its true.

Cheers!

[dohboi]

Argument by incredulity is...rather incredulous!

Meanwhile...yet another feedback, anyone??


As oceans warm, microbes could pump more CO2 back into air, study warns

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases ... 042419.php

The world's oceans soak up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans pump into the air each year -- a powerful brake on the greenhouse effect. In addition to purely physical and chemical processes, a large part of this is taken up by photosynthetic plankton as they incorporate carbon into their bodies. When plankton die, they sink, taking the carbon with them. Some part of this organic rain will end up locked into the deep ocean, insulated from the atmosphere for centuries or more. But what the ocean takes, the ocean also gives back. Before many of the remains get very far, they are consumed by aerobic bacteria. And, just like us, those bacteria respire by taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. Much of that regenerated CO2 thus ends up back in the air.

A new study suggests that CO2 regeneration may become faster in many regions of the world as the oceans warm with changing climate. This, in turn, may reduce the deep oceans' ability to keep carbon locked up. The study shows that in many cases, bacteria are consuming more plankton at shallower depths than previously believed, and that the conditions under which they do this will spread as water temperatures rise. The study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[Newfie]

I found his argument rather persuasive. The 1% tax is just another way of hiding the damage from yourself, protecting your ego.

That’s not all it is, but it’s a fair criticism.

[dohboi]

Permafrost is Thawing in the Arctic So Fast Scientists are Losing Their Equipment

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5119767
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rapid-per ... scape.html

Permafrost in some areas of the Canadian Arctic is thawing so fast that it's gulping up the equipment left there to study it.

[KaiserJeep]

If you make an impartial analysis, I think that never has there been any effective action anywhere at any time to substantially slow, halt, or reverse Global Warming.

Lotsa people talk a lot, adding more hot air to the problem.

There is one effective curb in sight, which is the exhaustion of cheap Fossil Fuels. Unfortunately that has the potential to hurt more than the warming itself.

[Ibon]

There is a strategy and it is one of those rare issues where there is almost universal consensus even though most are not aware....

We continue with our current lifestyles playing lip service to real mitigation until natural consequences force our hand.

That is the universal consensus shared by citizens, governments, corporations and this position is global.

And who said modern humans are not capable of bridging ideological differences and finding consensus?

[Plantagenet]

If you make an impartial analysis, I think that never has there been any effective action anywhere at any time to substantially slow, halt, or reverse Global Warming.

I have to disagree.

Scientists aren't stupid people, and there are also some talented politicians out there in the global community. Scientists came up with a good plan that might have worked if not for the perfidious nature of a very few politicians who betrayed the plan.

Lets look at how this went down.....

When concerns about CO2 and climate change first got serious back in the early 90s, the United Nations set up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in May 1992---almost exactly 27 years ago. The express goal of the UNFCCC was to reduce global CO2 emissions in order to minimize global warming.

The UNFCCC decided to create international climate accords (ie. treaties) that would require global reductions in CO2 emissions. The plan was to create a "practice" treaty to allow countries to work out ways to reduce CO2 emissions and then to follow that with a second treat MANDATING reductions in CO2 emissions, with penalties and sanctions for those countries that didn't live up to the treaty requirements.

The UNFCCC "practice" treaty was the Kyoto Accords, signed into effect in 1997. The stated purpose of this treaty was to have nations reduce their global CO2 emissions, but there were no penalties for those nations who did't meet their targets. Even more problematic, Al Gore and Bill Clinton signed off on an exemption for China, i.e. China was allowed to INCREASE their CO2 emissions ... thereby utterly negating the whole purpose of the treaty. This created huge problems, i.e. the treaty was never ratified by the US Congress because various Senators refused to ratify a treaty that put obligations on the US while exempting China from those same regulations. Even worse, CO2 emissions in China exploded, to the point that China today is by far the world leading CO2 producer.

Nonetheless, the UNFCCC forged ahead with the original plan and tried to get a second climate treaty written that would MANDATE CO2 emission reductions by all signatory nations. A draft of this treaty was worked up and agreed to in Bali in 2007, and scheduled for ratification in Copenhagen in 2009. Unfortunately the US had an election in 2008, and Obama was elected President. One of Obama first actions as President was to go to Copenhagen and derail the signing of the second UNFCCC climate treaty.

At this point the whole UN climate treaty process came undone. Without the planned second mandatory treaty, the possibility of reducing global CO2 emissions was lost. The UNFCCC did produce a second climate treaty---the Paris Accords in 2015----but this treaty is just a rehash of the Kyoto Accords, i.e. the CO2 reductions targets are all voluntary, there are no penalties for not meeting them, and once again China (and now also India) are completely exempted from having to reduce CO2 at all.

SO I must disagree, KJ.

The UNFCCC did a good job of moving towards reducing CO2 emissions, at least at the start. The Kyoto Accords were a good first attempt to put together a treat requiring reductions of CO2. While Al Gore and Clinton almost screwed the whole process by giving China an exemption from reducing their CO2 emissions, the UNFCCC successfully regrouped and did actually produce a draft treaty requiring global CO2 emissions reductions in Bali. They even got China to agree to reduce CO2 emissions. It was a pretty darn successful process up to that point.

But then Obama came on the scene, and blocked the the UNFCCC process by derailing the signing of a new treaty REQUIRING CO2 reductions in Copenhagen. If it hadn't been for Obama, we might well today have a global treaty mandating reductions in CO2 emission in effect today.

Cheers!

PS: I'm personally familiar with this story because I played a small role in the UNFCCC process, as I was involved with other scientists in climate research and was named an official US science delegate to one of the UNFCCC conferences.

There were a lot of good people involved, and there was a good plan developed to slow global warming by reducing CO2 emissions. The treaty was ready to be signed, and the world's leaders had assembled to sign it. The world came very close to getting something done on this. Unfortunately Obama screwed it up, and I don't see any way to put it back together now. IMHO We are now on the highway to hell unlimited global warming, and the reason is the incompetence of one arrogant and perfidious politician named Barry Soetoro Barrack Obama.

CHEERS!

[KaiserJeep]

Plant, in terms of what actually happened: Alot of hot air came out of people's mouths. Carbon spewed into the atmosphere at ever increasing rates, as it still does.

Good intentions mean nothing. Actions are everything. Sorry if bluntness offends you.

[Tanada]

I feel obligated to point out that almost nobody achieved their Kyoto protocol goals in addition to China getting a free pass and going on a building spree putting up two new Coal burning power plants a week for almost a decade.

Sure you can say we learne4d things from Kyoto, but mostly what we learned is politicians talk much but do little when what they promise is not actually that important to their voting base.

Lots of coasters claim they are all concerned about CO2 emissions and solving the problems, but the vast majority of those same people emit more CO2 today than they did 10 or 20 years ago. Its all just feel good noise, which I figured out back around 2003 when I saw how little was actually being done to achieve Kyoto goals.

[onlooker]

And then they're is the pretty current figures

We are in trouble.’ Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2018

https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-e ... ff365c74a6

[dohboi]

Policy makers are seriously underestimating the reinforcing & cascading nature of positive feedback mechanisms:

Juan C. Rocha et al. (21 Dec 2018), "Cascading regime shifts within and across scales", Science, Vol. 362, Issue 6421, pp. 1379-1383, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat7850

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6421/1379

Cascading effects of regime shifts

The potential for regime shifts and critical transitions in ecological and Earth systems, particularly in a changing climate, has received considerable attention. However, the possibility of interactions between such shifts is poorly understood. Rocha et al. used network analysis to explore whether critical transitions in ecosystems can be coupled with each other, even when far apart (see the Perspective by Scheffer and van Nes).

They report different types of potential cascading effects, including domino effects and hidden feedbacks, that can be prevalent in different systems. Such cascading effects can couple the dynamics of regime shifts in distant places, which suggests that the interactions between transitions should be borne in mind in future forecasts.

Abstract

Regime shifts are large, abrupt, and persistent critical transitions in the function and structure of ecosystems. Yet, it is unknown how these transitions will interact, whether the occurrence of one will increase the likelihood of another or simply correlate at distant places. We explored two types of cascading effects: Domino effects create one-way dependencies, whereas hidden feedbacks produce two-way interactions. We compare them with the control case of driver sharing, which can induce correlations. Using 30 regime shifts described as networks, we show that 45% of regime shift pairwise combinations present at least one plausible structural interdependence. The likelihood of cascading effects depends on cross-scale interactions but differs for each type. Management of regime shifts should account for potential connections.

Title: "Risks of 'domino effect' of tipping points greater than thought, study says"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... study-says

Extract: "Policymakers have severely underestimated the risks of ecological tipping points, according to a study that shows 45% of all potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another.

The authors said their paper, published in the journal Science, highlights how overstressed and overlapping natural systems are combining to throw up a growing number of unwelcome surprises."

[jedrider]

Extract: "Policymakers have severely underestimated the risks of ecological tipping points, according to a study that shows 45% of all potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another."

We haven't!

[Newfie]

How many of the 25 presidential candidates makes Climate Change their #1 priority? Insley is the only one I know of.

How many have it in their top 5? I think there may be 2 or 3 that fit this criteria. Can’t name them, all way down in the noise I think.

[dohboi]

Estimates range form ten to fifteen minutes that were spent on CC in two hours of the debates.

On the one hand, that's an improvement from some earlier debates where it was barely mentioned. But given that many candidates describe it as 'the issue of our time' or some such, it is clearly not front and center for most, at this point, though in the last month I've been hearing more from many of them on this central issue than in the past.

The main thing is that none of them deny the problem exists, which already puts them far ahead of nearly every other major Repub leader in the country. More than that, even the comparatively centrists like Hickenlooper, not only acknowledge the science but insist it is a very serious threat of vital and central importance to address (though others do have more aggressive plans). https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/ ... ge-1528869

Meanwhile, solid majorities continue to understand that CC is real, that there is a scientific consensus about it, and nearly half say the 'worry a great deal about' it...so politicians, especially to the left of Atilla the Trump, should be highlighting it more often.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/248027/ame ... rming.aspx

[dohboi]

Could this be seen as another sort of positive (in the bad sense) feedback:

Nuclear power, once seen as impervious to global warming, threatened by heat waves – “You need to solve global warming for nuclear plants to survive”

https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/07/nu ... rvive.html

...At one plant in Connecticut a reactor was taken offline for nearly two weeks when temperatures in the Long Island Sound surged past 75 degrees....

...Plants in the U.S., meanwhile, have regularly slashed their output by anywhere from 3% to 60%.

Such dynamics could cause output from nuclear plants to fall by as much as 16% in the coming decades, according to a 2012 analysis. Moreover, climate concerns threaten to pierce nuclear’s carefully constructed – and increasingly embattled – narrative that it’s the only reliable source of zero-emissions power. Already, the country’s aging fleet of nuclear plants is facing stiff competition from cheap natural gas and, more recently, falling prices for solar and wind paired with battery storage...