Ross Gelbspan: “In Conclusion…” (posting from Climate Science Watch): "Ross Gelbspan: “In Conclusion…”
Posted on Saturday, January 02, 2010
“The truth is that, even assuming the wildest possible success of these initiatives—that humanity decided tomorrow to replace its coal and oil burning energy sources with non-carbon sources—it would still be too late to avert major climate disruptions,” says journalist-author Ross Gelbspan. “Despite this reality, the activists are still focusing on the causes—and not on the consequences—of the crisis. All these initiatives address only one part of the coming reality.” We share Gelbspan’s view, outlined in a recently posted video, that an essential part of the solution is “a coordinated global public-works program to rewire the world with clean energy.” We would add—in light of the potential future Gelbspan describes and scientific assessments project—that a coordinated strategy of adaptive preparedness that seeks to limit, if possible, the damage from global climatic disruption must be a major component of a comprehensive climate policy. See Details for the video and links to sources."
Saturday 23 January 2010
Richard Somerville: A Response to Climate Change Denialism
1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science are firm. This is solid settled science. The world is warming. There are many kinds of evidence: air temperatures, ocean temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and much more. Human activities are the main cause. The warming is not natural. It is not due to the sun, for example. We know this because we can measure the effect of man-made carbon dioxide and it is much stronger than that of the sun, which we also measure.
2. The greenhouse effect is well understood. It is as real as gravity. The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. We know carbon dioxide is increasing because we measure it. We know the increase is due to human activities like burning fossil fuels because we can analyze the chemical evidence for that.
3. Our climate predictions are coming true. Many observed climate changes, like rising sea level, are occurring at the high end of the predicted changes. Some changes, like melting sea ice, are happening faster than the anticipated worst case. Unless mankind takes strong steps to halt and reverse the rapid global increase of fossil fuel use and the other activities that cause climate change, and does so in a very few years, severe climate change is inevitable. Urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.
4. The standard skeptical arguments have been refuted many times over. The refutations are on many web sites and in many books. For example, natural climate change like ice ages is irrelevant to the current warming. We know why ice ages come and go. That is due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes that take thousands of years. The warming that is occurring now, over just a few decades, cannot possibly be caused by such slow-acting processes. But it can be caused by man-made changes in the greenhouse effect.
5. Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned. Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.
6. The leading scientific organizations of the world, like national academies of science and professional scientific societies, have carefully examined the results of climate science and endorsed these results. It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody. The first thing that the world needs to do if it is going to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it.
2. The greenhouse effect is well understood. It is as real as gravity. The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. We know carbon dioxide is increasing because we measure it. We know the increase is due to human activities like burning fossil fuels because we can analyze the chemical evidence for that.
3. Our climate predictions are coming true. Many observed climate changes, like rising sea level, are occurring at the high end of the predicted changes. Some changes, like melting sea ice, are happening faster than the anticipated worst case. Unless mankind takes strong steps to halt and reverse the rapid global increase of fossil fuel use and the other activities that cause climate change, and does so in a very few years, severe climate change is inevitable. Urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.
4. The standard skeptical arguments have been refuted many times over. The refutations are on many web sites and in many books. For example, natural climate change like ice ages is irrelevant to the current warming. We know why ice ages come and go. That is due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes that take thousands of years. The warming that is occurring now, over just a few decades, cannot possibly be caused by such slow-acting processes. But it can be caused by man-made changes in the greenhouse effect.
5. Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned. Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.
6. The leading scientific organizations of the world, like national academies of science and professional scientific societies, have carefully examined the results of climate science and endorsed these results. It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody. The first thing that the world needs to do if it is going to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it.
New UK-China graduate training initiative
Postgraduate students are invited to apply for a new British Council programme aimed at helping businesses in the UK and China fight climate change. Students will be selected from the Tyndall Centre partner Universities and the Chinese Universities of Fudan, Peking, Tongji and Tsinghua.
The 'Climate change solutions through action' initiative is looking for 15 UK and Chinese students to take part in this unique training opportunity from April to May 2010.
They will be given environmental business consultancy training and asked to work together intensively to come up with innovative solutions to specific challenges facing real businesses.
UEA/Tyndall Centre is the lead academic partner in this initiative that is being delivered by the Norwich Business School's carbon management expertise, working alongside Forum for the Future and the Ministry of Science and Technology in China.
See Tyndal Centre link for more details
The 'Climate change solutions through action' initiative is looking for 15 UK and Chinese students to take part in this unique training opportunity from April to May 2010.
They will be given environmental business consultancy training and asked to work together intensively to come up with innovative solutions to specific challenges facing real businesses.
UEA/Tyndall Centre is the lead academic partner in this initiative that is being delivered by the Norwich Business School's carbon management expertise, working alongside Forum for the Future and the Ministry of Science and Technology in China.
See Tyndal Centre link for more details
“If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?”
Hansen invites analysts to review a new article by Hansen, Ruedy, Sato, and Lo titled “If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?” posted on Hansen’s Columbia University web site. A few key passages from the text of this 10-page analysis, which includes 9 Figures and should be studied in its entirely:
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world.
Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.
There is a contradiction between the observed continued warming trend and popular perceptions about climate trends. Frequent statements include: “There has been global cooling over the past decade.” “Global warming stopped in 1998.” … Such statements have been repeated so often that most of the public seems to accept them as being true. However, based on our data, such statements are not correct. …
[The] popular belief that the world is cooling is reinforced by cold weather anomalies in the United States in the summer of 2009 and cold anomalies in much of the Northern Hemisphere in December 2009. …
What about the claim that the Earth’s surface has been cooling over the past decade? … Given that the change of 5-year-mean global temperature anomaly is about 0.2°C over the past decade, we can conclude that the world has become warmer over the past decade, not cooler.
Why are some people so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really experiencing a cooling trend? That gullibility probably has a lot to do with regional short-term temperature fluctuations, which are an order of magnitude larger than global average annual anomalies. …
[In December 2009 (Figure 5a)]: There were strong negative temperature anomalies at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, as great as -8°C in Siberia, averaged over the month. But the temperature anomaly in the Arctic was as great as +7°C. The cold December perhaps reaffirmed an impression gained by Americans from the unusually cool 2009 summer. There was a large region in the United States and Canada in June-July-August with a negative temperature anomaly greater than 1°C, the largest negative anomaly on the planet.
How do these large regional temperature anomalies stack up against an expectation of, and the reality of, global warming? How unusual are these regional negative fluctuations? Do they have any relationship to global warming? Do they contradict global warming?
It is obvious that in December 2009 there was an unusual exchange of polar and midlatitude air in the Northern Hemisphere. Arctic air rushed into both North America and Eurasia, and, of course, it was replaced in the polar region by air from middle latitudes.
The degree to which Arctic air penetrates into middle latitudes is related to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index, which is defined by surface atmospheric pressure patterns and is plotted in Figure 6. When the AO index is positive surface pressure is high in the polar region. This helps the middle latitude jet stream to blow strongly and consistently from west to east, thus keeping cold Arctic air locked in the polar region. When the AO index is negative there tends to be low pressure in the polar region, weaker zonal winds, and greater movement of frigid polar air into middle latitudes.
Figure 6 shows that December 2009 was the most extreme negative Arctic Oscillation since the 1970s. Although there were ten cases between the early 1960s and mid 1980s with an AO index more extreme than -2.5, there were no such extreme cases since then until last month. It is no wonder that the public has become accustomed to the absence of extreme blasts of cold air.
Figure 7 shows the AO index with greater temporal resolution for two 5-year periods. It is obvious that there is a high degree of correlation of the AO index with temperature in the United States, with any possible lag between index and temperature anomaly less than the monthly temporal resolution. …
We conclude only that December 2009 was a highly anomalous month and that its unusual AO can be described as the “cause” of the extreme December weather.
We do not find a basis for expecting frequent repeat occurrences. On the contrary. Figure 6 does show that month‐to‐month fluctuations of the AO are much larger than its long term trend. But temperature change can be caused by greenhouse gases and global warming independent of Arctic Oscillation dynamical effects. …
The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend. For the time being, until humanity brings its greenhouse gas emissions under control, we can expect each decade to be warmer than the preceding one. Weather fluctuations certainly exceed local temperature changes over the past half century. But the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales.
This information needs to be combined with the conclusion that global warming of 1‐2°C has enormous implications for humanity. …
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world.
Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.
There is a contradiction between the observed continued warming trend and popular perceptions about climate trends. Frequent statements include: “There has been global cooling over the past decade.” “Global warming stopped in 1998.” … Such statements have been repeated so often that most of the public seems to accept them as being true. However, based on our data, such statements are not correct. …
[The] popular belief that the world is cooling is reinforced by cold weather anomalies in the United States in the summer of 2009 and cold anomalies in much of the Northern Hemisphere in December 2009. …
What about the claim that the Earth’s surface has been cooling over the past decade? … Given that the change of 5-year-mean global temperature anomaly is about 0.2°C over the past decade, we can conclude that the world has become warmer over the past decade, not cooler.
Why are some people so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really experiencing a cooling trend? That gullibility probably has a lot to do with regional short-term temperature fluctuations, which are an order of magnitude larger than global average annual anomalies. …
[In December 2009 (Figure 5a)]: There were strong negative temperature anomalies at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, as great as -8°C in Siberia, averaged over the month. But the temperature anomaly in the Arctic was as great as +7°C. The cold December perhaps reaffirmed an impression gained by Americans from the unusually cool 2009 summer. There was a large region in the United States and Canada in June-July-August with a negative temperature anomaly greater than 1°C, the largest negative anomaly on the planet.
How do these large regional temperature anomalies stack up against an expectation of, and the reality of, global warming? How unusual are these regional negative fluctuations? Do they have any relationship to global warming? Do they contradict global warming?
It is obvious that in December 2009 there was an unusual exchange of polar and midlatitude air in the Northern Hemisphere. Arctic air rushed into both North America and Eurasia, and, of course, it was replaced in the polar region by air from middle latitudes.
The degree to which Arctic air penetrates into middle latitudes is related to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index, which is defined by surface atmospheric pressure patterns and is plotted in Figure 6. When the AO index is positive surface pressure is high in the polar region. This helps the middle latitude jet stream to blow strongly and consistently from west to east, thus keeping cold Arctic air locked in the polar region. When the AO index is negative there tends to be low pressure in the polar region, weaker zonal winds, and greater movement of frigid polar air into middle latitudes.
Figure 6 shows that December 2009 was the most extreme negative Arctic Oscillation since the 1970s. Although there were ten cases between the early 1960s and mid 1980s with an AO index more extreme than -2.5, there were no such extreme cases since then until last month. It is no wonder that the public has become accustomed to the absence of extreme blasts of cold air.
Figure 7 shows the AO index with greater temporal resolution for two 5-year periods. It is obvious that there is a high degree of correlation of the AO index with temperature in the United States, with any possible lag between index and temperature anomaly less than the monthly temporal resolution. …
We conclude only that December 2009 was a highly anomalous month and that its unusual AO can be described as the “cause” of the extreme December weather.
We do not find a basis for expecting frequent repeat occurrences. On the contrary. Figure 6 does show that month‐to‐month fluctuations of the AO are much larger than its long term trend. But temperature change can be caused by greenhouse gases and global warming independent of Arctic Oscillation dynamical effects. …
The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend. For the time being, until humanity brings its greenhouse gas emissions under control, we can expect each decade to be warmer than the preceding one. Weather fluctuations certainly exceed local temperature changes over the past half century. But the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales.
This information needs to be combined with the conclusion that global warming of 1‐2°C has enormous implications for humanity. …
Friday 22 January 2010
China to speed up elimination of outdated production capacity
The government will step up efforts to eliminate outdated production capacity, said a statement issued by the State Council on Wednesday.
Eliminating outmoded production capacity was imperative to transform the economic growth pattern, boost economic growth quality and fight the global downturn, said the statement issued after a State Council executive meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao.
Eliminating outdated production capacity was also necessary to promote energy efficiency and emissions cuts and address global climate change, the statement said.
China had made positive progress in eliminating outdated production capacity, but the proportion of outdated capacity was still too high in certain key fields, said the statement.
The problems should be tackled through the law, economics, technology and necessary administrative methods.
The State Council discussed specific targets to eliminate outdated capacity in fields such as electricity, coal, coke, ferroalloy, calcium carbide, iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, construction materials and light industry and textile industry.
To realize the targets, efforts should be made to improve market admission requirements, use market mechanisms, strengthen law enforcement, promote stimulus mechanisms and step up supervision, according to the decision reached at the meeting.
Source: Xinhua
2010-1-22
Eliminating outmoded production capacity was imperative to transform the economic growth pattern, boost economic growth quality and fight the global downturn, said the statement issued after a State Council executive meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao.
Eliminating outdated production capacity was also necessary to promote energy efficiency and emissions cuts and address global climate change, the statement said.
China had made positive progress in eliminating outdated production capacity, but the proportion of outdated capacity was still too high in certain key fields, said the statement.
The problems should be tackled through the law, economics, technology and necessary administrative methods.
The State Council discussed specific targets to eliminate outdated capacity in fields such as electricity, coal, coke, ferroalloy, calcium carbide, iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, construction materials and light industry and textile industry.
To realize the targets, efforts should be made to improve market admission requirements, use market mechanisms, strengthen law enforcement, promote stimulus mechanisms and step up supervision, according to the decision reached at the meeting.
Source: Xinhua
2010-1-22
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