Climate change...

[fish]

Earth continues to warm strongly despite sceptics’ claims

The Climate Commission has been concerned about misleading information in the media in recent weeks stating that the Earth is not warming. The Climate Commission has today released a briefing paper that corrects the confusion and confirms that the Earth continues to warm at an alarming rate.

Professor Steffen, the author of the briefing paper, stated, “The most common error is looking at either a short timeframe, or just one indicator of warming. What climate scientists do is look at the big picture and the long term to understand what is going on. When we put together all of the evidence, the heating ocean, air and land over the last 50 years, we can clearly see that Earth has been warming strongly.”

“As scientists have been saying for many years, the Earth is warming rapidly. Human activities, in particular the burning of fossil fuels, have triggered this warming. If we fail to address it, there will be even more serious implications for humanity than the impacts we are seeing already.”

The briefing paper makes the following core points:

The Earth continues to warm strongly. Scientists assess this based on long term observations of the heat content of the ocean, the air temperature (an indicator of the heat content of the atmosphere), and the amount of heat absorbed by the land, glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice.
Understanding changes in climate requires data over long time periods, at least 30 years and preferably much longer.

The best measure of global warming is ocean heat content as it absorbs nearly 90% of additional heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Global ocean heat content has increased substantially over the last 40 years, and the strongly upward trend has continued through the most recent decade up to the present.

Singling out short term trends in air temperature to imply that global warming is not occurring is incorrect and misleading.

“For whatever reason some commentators choose to cherry-pick data, presenting it in a highly selective way to make their case. That has seriously misrepresented what is actually happening, and such behaviour just isn’t good science.”

[fish]

Wine industry leading way on climate adaptation

A study has concluded many McLaren Vale wine producers are leading the world in preparing for future climate change.

It compared the region on Adelaide's southern outskirts with a French wine region, Roussillon, because of their climatic similarities.

Co-author and Adelaide University lecturer Douglas Bardsley said the average rainfall of both regions was expected to decline in the future, but average temperatures would climb.

He said McLaren Vale growers and winemakers were taking important steps to ensure they remained viable.

"They're trying new varieties, varieties from Spain for example which might be more adapted to a future drying climate," he said.

"Different types of irrigation regimes, the different ways of harvesting, of mulching, the different ways that they prune the plant so that berries are shaded during the very hot times of the day."

"Other agricultural industries and regions could learn from these activities."

[therisingblues]

However, other groups with an axe to grind also selectively fund research that suits their agenda

Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks

Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120m (£77m) to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.

The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising "wedge issue" for hardcore conservatives.

The millions were routed through two trusts, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, operating out of a generic town house in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Donors Capital caters to those making donations of $1m or more.

Great post Fish!
Of course everyone wishes climate change wasn't real, further to that, it's reassuring to be told it's not our fault, so when scientists get paid to tell people nothing's wrong, naturally people grasp the idea, even swing it around with passion, even when it's completely unfounded, non peer reviewed crap. People want to be reassured. I think putting a blindfold on isn't going to help. It might make people feel good, but that's so these billionaires can keep them passive and consuming whatever it is that made these selfish fat cats rich.

[Sky Pilot]

So it's okay to fund scientists with a vested interest to tell us dummies that the world is doomed. But terrible if someone else funds another group of scientists to tell us it is a giant furphy?
Until we put the squeeze on Serious polluters India, China etc I will continue to treat the whole scenario with the contempt it deserves.
An educated scientist will always disagree with another educated scientist. Same as lawyers, tax accountants, mechanics, politicians....

[therisingblues]

So it's okay to fund scientists with a vested interest to tell us dummies that the world is doomed. But terrible if someone else funds another group of scientists to tell us it is a giant furphy?
Until we put the squeeze on Serious polluters India, China etc I will continue to treat the whole scenario with the contempt it deserves.
An educated scientist will always disagree with another educated scientist. Same as lawyers, tax accountants, mechanics, politicians....

The difference is that these people have a pre-determined result. It's no good selecting only information that supports your view and disregarding everything else. I think you're right that scientists will disagree, that's healthy for science and it creates a need to prove ideas, hence the peer reviewed system.
Isn't it amazing though, with all that money poured into it, the "It's Not Our Fault" (INOF) group came up with NOTHING!
Think about that.

P.S. Wait for China? I think China is waiting for you. Someone's got to act first, Australia is still lucky by world standards, if we did nothing perhaps no other country of influence would either.

[fish]

Climate change to blame for summer of extreme heat and damaging floods

CATASTROPHIC bushfires, damaging rain and the most intense heatwave on record this summer are just a taste of what climate change will bring, a new report says.

Climate Commissioner Will Steffen said the extreme weather of 2012/13 was climate change in action, and more events are on the way.

In his Climate Commission report, Angry Summer, released today, Prof Steffen also said Queensland's one-in-100-year flood was one part of a "very, very unusual summer".

"We've been storing extra heat in this system for about a century now, due to increasing greenhouse gases," he said.

"When we do the sums, as we do in the climate models, for the next couple of decades you're going to see increasing likelihood of very hot weather and more record hot weather."

That means wilder weather than last summer, when a staggering 123 records were broken throughout Australia in 90 days.

It was the hottest summer, capped by the longest and most extreme heatwave on record. Sydney, Newcastle and Hobart sweltered through their hottest days on record. The average temperature in Australia was 40.3C on January 7.

Rainfall records were smashed along eastern Australia, tropical cyclones wreaked havoc, bushfires raged in every state and territory and tornadoes hit Bundaberg.

Prof Steffen acknowledges Australia has always had extreme weather.

But he argues the way these events are shifting "tells a very, very compelling story" because extreme weather events are occurring in a climate system that is warmer and moister than it was 50 years ago.

Prof Steffen said action taken now to cut greenhouse gas emissions would have a big influence on how hot it would be in the second half of the century.

Climate Commissioner Professor Tim Flannery argues the events of summer didn't happen out of the blue and were forecast decades ago by scientists warning of the dangers of man-made climate change.

"As these record-breaking conditions continue, it gets ever more difficult to deny there is a link between them and human activity," he said.

Recent news China would cap its coal use by 2015 was a "real landmark" and should give other nations the confidence to curb their own emissions more than ever before.

[Roxy the Rat Girl]

So it's okay to fund scientists with a vested interest to tell us dummies that the world is doomed. But terrible if someone else funds another group of scientists to tell us it is a giant furphy?
Until we put the squeeze on Serious polluters India, China etc I will continue to treat the whole scenario with the contempt it deserves.
An educated scientist will always disagree with another educated scientist. Same as lawyers, tax accountants, mechanics, politicians....

About 95% of the worlds scientists agree with the science of global warming, that it is happening, and that something needs to be done to address it. Only 5% don't. This hardly seems to be a topic where the jury is still out (figuratively speaking).

[The Sleeping Giant]

Where you getting that figure from?

[Sky Pilot]

Where you getting that figure from?

On the back of a drink coaster in Christine Milne's office

[Psyber]

So it's okay to fund scientists with a vested interest to tell us dummies that the world is doomed. But terrible if someone else funds another group of scientists to tell us it is a giant furphy?
Until we put the squeeze on Serious polluters India, China etc I will continue to treat the whole scenario with the contempt it deserves.
An educated scientist will always disagree with another educated scientist. Same as lawyers, tax accountants, mechanics, politicians....

About 95% of the worlds scientists agree with the science of global warming, that it is happening, and that something needs to be done to address it. Only 5% don't. This hardly seems to be a topic where the jury is still out (figuratively speaking).

Your percentages are probably true...
There is no doubt the climate is changing and that we are in a warming phase and that the warming is driving the weather shifts.
Where the jury is out is about whether the primary cause of the change is human activity, and/or how much we are contributing to it.

We have to consider also natural peaks caused by the Milankovitch cycles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Other solar cycles: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/
Long term climate oscillation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_cycle
Then there is the modifying effect of orbital accretion: http://muller.lbl.gov/papers/lbl-35665.html

We also need to be careful of trusting studies based only on meteorological records because they date only back to the 1890s and more recent dates, just after the last Little Ice Age ended: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

That said, I've been an advocate of cleaning up our pollution since the 1960s.
I just don't want us to get totally preoccupied with climate change and CO2 and ignore other noxious muck we pour out like the carcinogens in diesel (and bio-diesel) fumes.

[Jimmy_041]

The River Murray is going to dry up and we're all going to die

Oh, hang on, it didn't....................

[The Sleeping Giant]

Not against creating less pollution. Why are recent governments?

[Psyber]

Not against creating less pollution. Why are recent governments?

Not just governments.
I emailed several unions, sending the link to the W.H.O. classifying diesel fumes on the same level of carcinogenicity as Asbestos, and asking what steps they are planning to take to protect their members, since we take Asbestos very seriously, and got not one reply...
(I assume they'll raise it under the next Coalition government.)

[Q.]

Not against creating less pollution. Why are recent governments?

Not just governments.
I emailed several unions, sending the link to the W.H.O. classifying diesel fumes on the same level of carcinogenicity as Asbestos, and asking what steps they are planning to take to protect their members, since we take Asbestos very seriously, and got not one reply...
(I assume they'll raise it under the next Coalition government.)

Goes into the too hard basket. Like most environmental concerns.

[Roxy the Rat Girl]

The River Murray is going to dry up and we're all going to die

Oh, hang on, it didn't....................

No we didn't all die but there were numerous suicides, people deserted farms as they were rendered unviable, livestock perished, generational family businesses went broke, people lost everything they had, communities were deserted, and issues of poor physical and mental health became abundant.

Have a bit of respect for those who suffered you prat.

[fish]

There is no doubt the climate is changing and that we are in a warming phase and that the warming is driving the weather shifts.

Where the jury is out is about whether the primary cause of the change is human activity...

The science says that:

Rising CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels has affected global temperature much more than natural climate variability during the past century.

[fish]

Humanitarian disaster blamed on climate change

For the first time, we have proof that climate change has led to a humanitarian disaster. The East African drought of 2011, which resulted in a famine that killed at least 50,000 people, was partly caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

The drought was brought about by the failure of two consecutive rainy seasons: the "short rains" in late 2010 and the "long rains" at the start of 2011. Climatologist Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK, and his colleagues ran climate models, with and without a human influence on climate, and compared the likelihood of the rains failing.

Humanity's activities had no effect on the short rains – they failed because of a strong La Niña in the Pacific. "That's natural," says Stott.

But climate change did affect the long rains, making them more likely to fail (Geophysical Research Letters, doi.org/kmv). The model could only reproduce the scale of the drought if it included greenhouse gas emissions.

[Roxy the Rat Girl]

Where you getting that figure from?

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm

"In the scientific field of climate studies – which is informed by many different disciplines – the consensus is demonstrated by the number of scientists who have stopped arguing about what is causing climate change – and that’s nearly all of them. A survey of all peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject 'global climate change' published between 1993 and 2003 shows that not a single paper rejected the consensus position that global warming is man caused. 75% of the papers agreed with the consensus position while 25% made no comment either way, focusing on methods or paleoclimate analysis (Oreskes 2004).

Several subsequent studies confirm that “...the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes”. (Doran 2009). In other words, more than 95% of scientists working in the disciplines contributing to studies of our climate, accept that climate change is almost certainly being caused by human activities.

We should also consider official scientific bodies and what they think about climate change. There are no national or major scientific institutions anywhere in the world that dispute the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Not one."

[Ian]

Not against creating less pollution. Why are recent governments?

Not just governments.
I emailed several unions, sending the link to the W.H.O. classifying diesel fumes on the same level of carcinogenicity as Asbestos, and asking what steps they are planning to take to protect their members, since we take Asbestos very seriously, and got not one reply...
(I assume they'll raise it under the next Coalition government.)

Spot on Psyber, Oxides of Nitrogen (NoX) are the "quiet" one when it comes to diesels emissions, they are a carcinogen and have the potential to do more damage than CO2, High Opacity and particulate matter.
Unlike your typical "black smoke" pollutants that older diesels commonly emit, NoX is not visible to the naked eye, and more disturbingly it is a by product of high combustion temperatures which are required for the modern "cleaner" diesels to achieve their otherwise much lower emissions. Most modern "clean" diesels produce dangerously high amounts of NoX and the most effective way to reduce it...............richen up the mixture and produce more particulates and opacity.

[Roxy the Rat Girl]

Not against creating less pollution. Why are recent governments?

Not just governments.
I emailed several unions, sending the link to the W.H.O. classifying diesel fumes on the same level of carcinogenicity as Asbestos, and asking what steps they are planning to take to protect their members, since we take Asbestos very seriously, and got not one reply...
(I assume they'll raise it under the next Coalition government.)

Spot on Psyber, Oxides of Nitrogen (NoX) are the "quiet" one when it comes to diesels emissions, they are a carcinogen and have the potential to do more damage than CO2, High Opacity and particulate matter.
Unlike your typical "black smoke" pollutants that older diesels commonly emit, NoX is not visible to the naked eye, and more disturbingly it is a by product of high combustion temperatures which are required for the modern "cleaner" diesels to achieve their otherwise much lower emissions. Most modern "clean" diesels produce dangerously high amounts of NoX and the most effective way to reduce it...............richen up the mixture and produce more particulates and opacity.

Thanks Psyber for raising this as I was previously unaware of this quite disturbing issue. Do you know where I might go to get more info (aside from a random google search)?