Global Warming

[Neferti]

Perhaps we are all just getting older and are feeling the "heat" more? You do realise that you dehydrate quicker as you age, apparently. So drink lots of kool aid.

[mellie]

Perhaps we are all just getting older and are feeling the "heat" more? You do realise that you dehydrate quicker as you age, apparently. So drink lots of kool aid.

.....

"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is a figure of speech commonly used in the United States that refers to a person or group holding an unquestioned belief, argument, or philosophy without critical examination. It could also refer to knowingly going along with a doomed or dangerous idea because of peer pressure. The phrase oftentimes carries a negative connotation when applied to an individual or group. It can also be used ironically or humorously to refer to accepting an idea or changing a preference due to popularity, peer pressure, or persuasion.

-Wiki

My apologies for stating the obvious here, though I doubt some of our Kool-Aid sippin commies would have appreciated Nefs post otherwise.

[Rorschach]

Well that was rather pathetic SN... Karl Steffen is an alarmist fool, who wants to keep well paid by sucking at the Climate teat. Much like that idiot Flannery.

Those cartoons are cartoons FAIL!

And the claims made have been refuted debunked or are easily explained as statistically insignificant.

[Rorschach]

As for the HOTTEST YEAR on record...
We already covered that before SN.

Ummm looks like some evidence that the planet is warming up....

2014 Officially Hottest Year on Record

The Japanese declare 2014 one for the record books thanks to global warming
January 5, 2015

The upward march of the world’s average temperature since 1891 is a trademark of human-influenced global warming with 2014 being the latest stop on the climb.

It’s official: 2014 has taken the title of hottest year on record. That ranking comes courtesy of data released Monday by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), the first of four major global temperature recordkeepers to release their data for last year.

The upward march of the world’s average temperature since 1891 is a trademark of human-influenced global warming with 2014 being the latest stop on the climb. All 10 of the hottest years have come since 1998.

The average temperature was 1.1°F above the 20th century average according to JMA’s data. That edges 1998, the previous warmest year, by about 0.1°F.

One big difference between 2014 and 1998 is that the latter was on the tail end of a super El Niño, which has the tendency to spike temperatures. In comparison, 2014 was the year of the almost El Niño.

Instead, record warmth in other parts of the Pacific as well as the hottest year on record in Europe were some of the main drivers in fueling the heat. Joe Romm of Climate Progress also notes that heat in Australia early in the year and California’s hottest year further contributed to the heat.

Seasonal temperatures also paint a picture of a planet that didn’t get a break. Spring, summer and fall were all record-setting hot. Last winter was the only season not to set a record, and even that was still the sixth-warmest winter.

JMA is one of the four major groups that use both ground measurements and satellites to compute the planet’s average temperature. The other three include NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. and the Hadley Center in the U.K. There are subtle differences in how they analyze temperature data, but there’s generally broad agreement, particularly the upward trend in temperatures over the past century.

The other groups are expected to release their data in the coming weeks and confirm that 2014 was indeed the hottest year on record. And some scientists think it could get even hotter sooner. Strong trade winds in the Pacific have likely had a dampening effect on the global average temperature by essentially allowing the ocean to store more heat, but those winds are expected to weaken in the near future as part of a natural fluctuation.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... on-record/

Wrong wrong wrong.... lie lie lie.... for the last week the luvvies have been trying to build it up all over the media, but unfortunately for them, I was correct and it is only the 3rd hottest on our dubious records that go back a piddling 100-150 years.
Now if the CO2 has kept going up and the predictions for the last 17 years has been for exponential increases, why has it not happened if their THEORY was correct.
Why was it the 3rd hottest year and not the HOTTEST year?
If as they claim the CO2 tax mad such a difference why are they shooting themselves in the foot again by making such false claims now?
BTW a hot or cold year in Japan does not make it global...

[Rorschach]

One more time for SN who prefers LW Prog alarmist cartoons than reality...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/19 ... rd_claims/

Now, however, the BEST boffins have broken ranks with the NASA/NOAA/UK Met Office climate establishment and bluntly contradicted the idea that one can simply say "2014 was the hottest year on record". According to BEST's analysis (pdf):

Our best estimate for the global temperature of 2014 puts it slightly above (by 0.01 C) that of the next warmest year (2010) but by much less than the margin of uncertainty (0.05 C). Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.

That may seem like not such a big deal, but it is really. At the moment the big debate in this area is about the "hiatus" - has global warming been stalled for the last fifteen-years-plus, or not?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... right.html

The Nasa climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.
In a press release on Friday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’.
The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all.
Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much.
As a result, GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent. However, when asked by this newspaper whether he regretted that the news release did not mention this, he did not respond.

[Rorschach]

Panic! 2014 hottest year ever (Not so fast, say the satellites)

What’s almost as good as an actual record? A could-be-a-record Headline!

“2014 could become the hottest year on record” – said CBS, The Guardian, Time, Washington Post, Discover Magazine, The Japan News, Wired, and 319 other outlets.

None of the investigative hardened editors or science reporters knew enough to ask the question, “what do the satellites say?” Which would have been interesting because the satellites say “bollocks”.

On his site, Dr Roy Spencer explains that 2014 won’t be the warmest year on record. Satellites track almost all of the Earth for 24 hours a day and the data shows that we don’t need to go back to the Medieval Warm Period to find a hotter year, just back to 2010.

It might be the hottest year if you live in a white louvered box above a carpark, next to a concrete-heat-sink-superstructure, and not far from a runway. Though even then you might need to be homogenized and adjusted to really feel the heat. But for the rest of the surface of the Earth, 2010 is not a record, not even close.

It’s all pretty pointless anyway Roy points out — we’re arguing over a hundredth of a degree.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/01/201 ... peratures/

Science as a methodology for getting closer to the truth has been all but abandoned. It is now just one more tool to achieve political ends.

Reports that 2014 was the “hottest” year on record feed the insatiable appetite the public has for definitive, alarming headlines. It doesn’t matter that even in the thermometer record, 2014 wasn’t the warmest within the margin of error. Who wants to bother with “margin of error”? Journalists went into journalism so they wouldn’t have to deal with such technical mumbo-jumbo. I said this six weeks ago, as did others, but no one cares unless a mainstream news source stumbles upon it and is objective enough to report it.

In what universe does a temperature change that is too small for anyone to feel over a 50 year period become globally significant? Where we don’t know if the global average temperature is 58 or 59 or 60 deg. F, but we are sure that if it increases by 1 or 2 deg. F, that would be a catastrophe?

Where our only truly global temperature measurements, the satellites, are ignored because they don’t show a record warm year in 2014?

In what universe do the climate models built to guide energy policy are not even adjusted to reflect reality, when they over-forecast past warming by a factor of 2 or 3?

And where people have to lie about severe weather getting worse (it hasn’t)? Or where we have totally forgotten that more CO2 is actually good for life on Earth, leading to increased agricultural productivity, and global greening?

[Super Nova]

So .... the gap between the scientist in the US and the people has a big gap. May it close fast and soon. May the deniers come around.

It is not OK for a percentage of the people to believe "silly things,"

Big Gap Between What Scientists Say and Americans Think about Climate Change



But the gap may be closing between scientists and the public on global warming
January 30, 2015

On controversial topics such as climate change, a significant number of Americans do not use science to inform their views. Instead, they use political orientation and ideology.

There is good and bad news for climate scientists. The good news: Most Americans (79 percent) say that science and scientists are invaluable.

The bad news: On controversial topics such as climate change, a significant number of Americans do not use science to inform their views. Instead, they use political orientation and ideology, which are reflected in their level of education, to decide whether humans are driving planetary warming.

This comes from a public opinion poll released yesterday by Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The poll captured a significant split between what scientists and the general public believe on climate change.

In 2014, the vast majority (87 percent) of scientists said that human activity is driving global warming, and yet only half the American public ascribed to that view. And 77 percent of scientists said climate change is a very serious problem. In comparison, only 33 percent of the general public said it was a very serious problem in a 2013 poll.

Opinion Differences Between Public and Scientists
That a split exists is common knowledge among social scientists who puzzle over the gridlock on climate change in the United States. More interesting is the fact that the gap has not lessened since 2009, when Pew last did this poll. Back then, 84 percent of scientists and 49 percent of the public said human activity drives warming.

This could be interpreted as a failure by scientists to better communicate with the public, said Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of AAAS. In an editorial in the journal Science, Leshner said scientists should not shy away from polarizing topics in public.

"And the way to do that is not to have big town hall meetings where everybody's lecturing but rather to meet in smaller groups and have sessions that go through this," he said in a press conference. "I myself have frequently met with community clubs, religious groups, retirement communities and tried to have these kind of discussions as opposed to monologues."

When ideology trumps science
While the issue remains cloudy, there is some silver lining behind these numbers. Social scientists such as Dan Kahan, a professor of psychology at Yale University, have noted that asking people about their climate beliefs can be tricky since ideology can guide people's answers (ClimateWire, July 24, 2014).

So, when the pollsters questioned people differently, asking whether there is solid evidence the Earth is getting warmer, 72 percent of people said it was, up from 57 percent in 2009. Only 25 percent said the Earth is not getting warmer, up from 11 percent in 2009.

Only 3 percent of people were still undecided, which means most people have made up their minds already on the climate. Of the people who agreed the Earth is warming, about half (46 percent) said it is caused by human activity.

The increased belief in climate change was reflected last week in the Senate, when 98 senators from both parties voted that climate change is real and not a hoax. Only one, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), voted otherwise. Going on the record on their beliefs was a historic step for Republicans who have otherwise insisted that "they are not scientists" when questioned on climate change.

But about half the senators still maintained that climate change is not driven by human activity (E&ENews PM, Jan. 21). That vote was along partisan lines.

Among the public, too, climate beliefs correlate with ideology, the Pew pollsters noted. People who vote Republican are less likely to believe in climate change than people who vote Democratic.

Belief in 'silly things' is not OK
Teaching scientists how to communicate with the public on controversial science is a key priority for AAAS, Leshner said. He prescribed small group interactions, particularly ones that include religious leaders to reach people across ideological borders. Whether this will be effective is not yet known (ClimateWire, Nov. 25, 2014).

Other than climate change, AAAS is also trying to educate people on genetically modified crops, evolution, vaccination, the Big Bang and other controversial topics where science loses out.

It is important to bring people around to scientists' way of thinking, not for scientists' self-aggrandizement but because science can help people and policymakers make informed decisions, Leshner said. It is not OK for a percentage of the people to believe "silly things," he said.

"That diminishes our ability to contribute to the betterment of humankind," he said. "We need to have what science is showing be represented accurately and for people to at least have that in their toolbox when they make their own decisions

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... te-change/

[IQS.RLOW]

People are allowed to believe in anything they want unless you are advocating your utopian Stalinist Orwellian dream world? Not to worry though...the bullet in the back of your head will wake you from your dream.

[Super Nova]

People are allowed to believe in anything they want unless you are advocating your utopian Stalinist Orwellian dream world? Not to worry though...the bullet in the back of your head will wake you from your dream.

Belief in 'silly things' is not OK

[IQS.RLOW]

You mean like 18 years on no warming but claiming there is still warming?