U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds

My mistake, that was Chaosx.
I apologize for that.

I was reading several post and got them mixed up later into my editing.

I view Global Warming theology and environmental pollution as two separate issues

1) Human activity causing more than normal amounts of carbon dioxide and other notable gases to enter the atmosphere

2) The increase in atmospheric CO2 levels causing irregular atmospheric conditions (warming), altering weather patterns (climate change)

3) The resulting damage from the changes to climates and the atmosphere

So here's some links to Nature (a world-renowned, heavily vetted scientific journal), though unfortunately all I can pull up are abstracts. Full peer-reviewed scholarly articles regularly require a fee to access, though I doubt any of you would read through an entire article. I can dig up more, and from other sources if this doesn't satisfy anyone.

Look at the "Slope" part. The slope is -0.05 (in agreement with what Excel came up with in the graph above), but the standard error in the slope is 0.1 - in other words the negative slope is less than the expected uncertainty in the slope, and the result is very much not statistically significant. Roughly what this means is that, given this level of year-to-year noise, even if there was no real trend up or down, we would expect to get a trend reading between -0.1 and +0.1 about 2/3 of the time. So the -0.05 trend is entirely consistent with just being noise, and is not good evidence of a reduction in NPP.

I should stress here that we are not doing advanced theoretical ecology here. This is the kind of stuff scientists learn in their first undergrad stats class, or in my case, in first year undergraduate physics labs. Uncertainty analysis, OLS regressions for straight lines, etc, is absolutely basic stuff if one is a scientist.

So, I read the rest of the paper to see if I'm missing something, and when it seems like I'm not (the rest of the paper is mainly concerned with the drought/NPP connection and is quite interesting), I email the authors of the paper. I start off with Maosheng Zhao, the listed correspondence author, who is a research scientist with the Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group at University of Montana, Missoula. My initial email was as follows:

Willie Soon
Ph.D. Rocket Science
Astrophysicist and Geoscientist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Dr. Soon, your paper 'Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit' is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as having; "No Position on AGW".

s this an accurate representation of your paper?

Soon: "I am sure that this rating of no position on AGW by CO2 is nowhere accurate nor correct. Rating our serious auditing paper from just a reading of the abstract or words contained in the title of the paper is surely a bad mistake. Specifically, anyone can easily read the statements in our paper as quoted below:

"For example, Soon et al. (2001) found that the current generation of GCMs is unable to meaningfully calculate the effects that additional atmospheric carbon dioxide has on the climate. This is because of the uncertainty about the past and present climate and ignorance about relevant weather and climate processes."

Here is at least one of our positions on AGW by CO2: the main tool climate scientists used to confirm or reject their CO2-AGW hypothesis is largely not validated and hence has a very limited role for any diagnosis or even predicting real-world regional impacts for any changes in atmospheric CO2.

I hope my scientific views and conclusions are clear to anyone that will spend time reading our papers. Cook et al. (2013) is not the study to read if you want to find out about what we say and conclude in our own scientific works."


Any further comment on the Cook et al. (2013) paper?

Soon: "No extra comment on Cook et al. (2013) is necessary as it is not a paper aiming to help anyone understand the science."

Alan Carlin
Ph.D. Economics, MIT
Senior Operations Research Analyst, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Retired)

Dr. Carlin, your paper 'A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change' is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; "Explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize".

Is this an accurate representation of your paper?

Carlin: "No, if Cook et al's paper classifies my paper, 'A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change' as "explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize," nothing could be further from either my intent or the contents of my paper. I did not explicitly or even implicitly endorse AGW and did quantify my skepticism concerning AGW. Both the paper and the abstract make this clear. The abstract includes the following statement:

"The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity factor (CSF) is much lower than assumed by the United Nations because feedback is negative rather than positive and the effects of CO2 emissions reductions on atmospheric CO2 appear to be short rather than long lasting."

In brief, I argue that human activity may increase temperatures over what they would otherwise have been without human activity, but the effect is so minor that it is not worth serious consideration.

I would classify my paper in Cook et al's category (7): Explicit rejection with quantification. My paper shows that two critical components of the AGW hypothesis are not supported by the available observational evidence and that a related hypothesis is highly doubtful. I hence conclude that the AGW hypothesis as a whole is not supported and state that hypotheses not supported by evidence should be rejected.

With regard to quantification, I state that the economic benefits of reducing CO2 are about two orders of magnitude less than assumed by pro-AGW economists using the IPCC AR4 report because of problems with the IPCC science. Surely 1/100th of the IPCC AGW estimate is less than half of the very minor global warming that has occurred since humans became a significant source of CO2."


Any further comment on the Cook et al. (2013) paper?

Carlin: "If Cook et al's paper is so far off in its classification of my paper, the next question is whether their treatment of my paper is an outlier in the quality of their analysis or is representative. Since I understand that five other skeptic paper authors whose papers were classified by Cook et al. (Idso, Morner, Scaffeta, Soon, and Shaviv) have similar concerns to date, the classification problems in Cook's paper may be more general. Further, in all six cases the effect of the misclassifications is to exaggerate Cook et al's conclusions rather than being apparently random errors due to sloppy analysis. Since their conclusions are at best no better than their data, it appears likely that Cook et al's conclusions are exaggerated as well as being unsupported by the evidence that they offer. I have not done an analysis of each of the papers Cook et al. classified, but I believe that there is sufficient evidence concerning misclassification that Cook et al's paper should be withdrawn by the authors and the data reanalyzed, preferably by less-biased reviewers.

One possible explanation for this apparent pattern of misclassification into "more favorable" classifications in terms of supporting the AGW hypothesis is that Cook et al. may have reverse engineered their paper. That is, perhaps the authors started by deciding the "answer" they wanted (97 percent) based on previous alarmist studies on the subject. They certainly had strong motivation to come up with this "answer" given the huge propaganda investment by alarmists in this particular number. So in the end they may have concluded that they needed to reclassify enough skeptic papers into "more favorable" classifications in order to reach this possibly predetermined "answer" and hoped that these misclassifications would go unnoticed by the world's press and governmental officials trumpeting their scientifically irrelevant conclusions. Obviously, whether this was actually done is known only to the authors, but I offer it as a hypothesis that might explain the apparently widespread and one-directional misclassifications of skeptic papers. Mere sloppy analysis should have resulted in a random pattern of misclassifications."

I would even take a step further and say I do believe that the climate changes. But to attribute humans and their release of CO2 as both being the main culprit is not something I endorse.

In March of 2012, the climate alarmist website Skeptical Science had their forums "hacked" and the contents posted online. In a forum thread titled, "Introduction to TCP" (2012-01-19) John Cook layed out the game plan for the 97% consensus study, Cook et al. (2013) 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature',

Climate change has dangerous consequences for a large portion of the planet's species including ours. T

New ideas exist they just wait to be invested in.

If you're responding to snippits of posts, copy/pasta {quote="Asura.Saevel" pid=2951788} (insert brackets) at the beginning rather than {quote} to reference who you're responding to for each blurb.

It's actually even easier than that. Highlight the text you want to quote, hit Quote, and it does the magic for you.

Caitsith.Zahrah said: »If you're responding to snippits of posts, copy/pasta {quote="Asura.Saevel" pid=2951788} (insert brackets) at the beginning rather than {quote} to reference who you're responding to for each blurb.
It's actually even easier than that. Highlight the text you want to quote, hit Quote, and it does the magic for you.

I'm leaving now, good day.

That doesn't seem to work well for multi-layer stuff.

Good, people don't need giant stupid quote trains

(I'll put it on the list of things to fix)

Speaking of limos:

So I just skimmed over the first 20 pages of this thread... All that needed to be said is already there. So I'm gonna quietly step out now.

Define "normal"?

1900's normal
1500's normal
-2000 BC normal
-60,000 BC normal
-400,000 BC normal
-65,000,000 BC normal?

Each period had a different amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere, some of those phases had CO2 about 4~5x the amount it is now. There were no humans around to cause this.


*** prove this. So far there has been zero increase in global temperatures for over the past eighteen years. Not a single climate model predicts this, every last one of them has us burning up with snow being a distant memory.


Again *** prove this. You don't get to hand waive and say "just trust me folks".


I frequently read the full articles, and actually understand what they are saying. Nature Magazine is now a joke, they are one of the entities implicated in the Climategate emails and are responsible for shutting out dissenting opinions of Climate science. There is no peer review process anymore, instead the senior editor stands approves the submission of his friends and then they approve his submissions. This was another problem revealed after the emails were released, you had a group of people agreeing before hand to approval each others submissions "for the cause". "Nature" magazine is about as reliable now as Mother Jones. It has lost a ton of credibility in the last decade after Phil Jones and his crew were outed as having colluded to control the message. Again when confronted about it the response was typically "it's for a good cause".

there's new breakthroughs in battery tech again

Somehow I imagined Bill Nye would ride around town on one of these.

Do you mean the new graphene applications?

A new NASA model is showing just how fast sea levels are rising around the world as a result of climate change.

At a news conference today (Aug. 26), NASA officials described a new computer visualization of sea level change incorporating data collected by satellites since 1992 — it reveals that sea levels are rising quickly but unevenly across the globe. The space agency will continue to investigate the global phenomenon, and new satellite missions in the coming years will increase researchers' knowledge of the topic, officials said.

"Sea level rise is one of the most visible signatures of our changing climate, and rising seas have profound impacts on our nation, our economy and all of humanity," Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., said at the news conference. ][Climate Change Impact: NASA's 21st Century Predictions (Video)]

"By combining space-borne direct measurements of sea level with a host of other measurements from satellites and sensors in the oceans themselves, NASA scientists are not only tracking changes in ocean heights but are also determining the reasons for those changes," Freilich added.

As Earth heats up, sea levels are rising because of three main factors: the expansion of seawater as it warms, melting ice sheets in places like Greenland and Antarctica, and melting glaciers across the world. Each of these factors seems to be contributing relatively equally to sea level rise right now, and NASA is deploying tools to better understand and model all three.

NASA's data reveals that, although the picture is complex, sea levels overall are rising faster than they were 50 years ago — more quickly than expected — and that the speed will likely increase in the future, primarily because of melting ice sheets.

To study sea levels, NASA has used satellite altimetry, which measures the time a radar burst takes to hit Earth's surface and return to orbiting spacecraft such as TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason 1 and then Jason 2. The measurement is extremely precise: Freilich mentioned that such a tool mounted on a jetliner flying at 40,000 feet (12,200 meters) would be able to detect the bump caused by a dime lying flat on the ground. NASA's ICESat satellite also keeps tabs on ice-sheet height with pulses of laser light.

The model also incorporates data from GRACE, twin satellites that are very sensitive to changes in Earth's mass distribution. The distance between the two spacecraft varies as ice and water move around on the planet, Steve Nerem, who leads NASA's Sea Level Change Team at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said at the news conference — and the GRACE duo can measure those changes to within the diameter of a red blood cell. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

A follow-up to the GRACE mission is expected to launch in 2017, officials said, as is ICESat-2. Jason 3 was scheduled to launch this month by SpaceX, but it must be rescheduled because of SpaceX's recent failed resupply mission to the International Space Station. And NASA has more satellites in the pipeline for later on, such as the radar-imaging NISAR (Nasa-Isro Synthetic Aperture Radar) and SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) missions in 2020.

In 2014, NASA formed a new sea-level-change research team comprising scientists with expertise in glaciology, hydrology, oceanography, geophysics and a variety of other fields, Nerem said. "You need all these fields … to actually understand all the factors that affect future sea level rise," he noted.

In addition to doing satellite-based research, NASA scientists are venturing out by land and sea to better understand the Earth's changes. A major new effort, called Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG), will begin by mapping the seafloor near Greenland with underwater probes, to see how the huge island's contours are guiding melting. Greenland's ice sheet alone would raise sea levels globally by 20 feet (6 m) if all of it were to melt, researchers said. (Me - Greenland's ice sheets are BLACK in the summer, not white. Black absorbs heat....)

Starting in September, NASA will also perform several sweeps over Greenland, with instruments on the HU-25C Guardian Falcon plane for Operation IceBridge.

"When you look across Alaska, Greenland and Antarctica, you see a whole range of climate variables," said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist based at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Looking at Alaska's glaciers tells us what Greenland will look like in a century or a few centuries. What's happening in Greenland is relevant to what's going to happen to Antarctica in the future as well. They are all connected pieces of research."

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted in 2013 that sea level would rise by 1 to 3 feet (0.3 to 1 m) by the end of the century. But the uncertainties are significant, officials said, and the actual increase could wind up being much larger. The picture NASA is developing will help predict exactly what shape those changes will take.

"Let there be no doubt: This is relevant science, and it will result in understanding that yields direct societal benefit," Freilich said. "The effects and impacts of changing sea level are being felt now, in our country and throughout the world."

This the one we need to get definitive data on then.

we have all to gain from stop using oil(but gradually cause world economics are complex). New ideas exist they just wait to be invested in.