America absolutely needs outside expert review of climate claims used to oppose fossil fuels
John Droz
Should the United States conduct a full, independent, expert scientific investigation into models and studies that say we face serious risks of manmade climate change and extreme weather disasters?
As incredible as it may seem, US government climate science has never been subjected to any such examination. Instead, it has been conducted by government agencies and assorted climate, environmental, history, psychology and other “experts” paid by the same government agencies - to the tune of literally billions of dollars per year.
Moreover, all that time, effort and money has been spent on studies that claim carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” are causing unprecedented climate and weather cataclysms, requiring the immediate and total elimination of fossil fuels that supply 82% of all US energy. Virtually none of it has been spent on studies of the powerful natural forces that have driven global warming and cooling, other climate changes and innumerable extreme weather events throughout Earth and human history.
Replacing all that energy - under the Green New Deal we hear so much about lately, or some similar schemes - would cost this country up to $93 trillion by 2030! That’s $65,000 per family per year!
Even worse, those same agencies and government contractors have actively prevented any independent review of their work. They have intimidated, silenced and vilified anyone who attempted to question or examine their data, computer models, assumptions, algorithms and conclusions.
They are adamantly opposed to any such review now. So are some 97% of all Democrats, environmentalists and “mainstream” news media.
You have to wonder: If their work is as solid, above-board and honest as they claim - wouldn’t they be delighted to defend it in public, and prove their detractors wrong?
Since they so totally opposed to any independent review - what are they trying to hide?
President Trump’s proposed investigation would be conducted by a brand new Presidential Committee on Climate Science (PCCS), led by physicist and presidential advisor Dr. Will Happer. It would be carried out by climate scientists and experts who did not participate in the original (alarmist) studies.
A decision about launching the PCCS will be made very soon. Support for the PCCS is urgently needed.
Many who oppose the PCCS claim human responsibility for climate change and extreme weather has already been resolved scientifically. That is simply not so. A genuine scientific assessment has four necessary components. It must be comprehensive, objective, transparent and empirical.
There has never been a true scientific assessment of global warming claims, anywhere on the planet.
In fact, even repeatedly referenced reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have faced no such review - and would fail at least three of those four criteria! That is largely because the IPCC computer models and claims of climate disasters are supported by virtually no real-world evidence.
PCCS opponents also say President Trump is acting irrationally on global warming. In reality, he is taking a far more scientific position than his critics are. Skepticism is the primary pillar of Real Science. So being labeled a “skeptic” is high praise to real scientists.
If it’s Real Science, questions, skepticism and constant reexamination are essential. Consensus is out.
If it’s consensus - and questions and skepticism are prohibited - it’s not Real Science.
PCCS opponents are telling us we have to accept their “consensus science” without question. Eliminate the fossil fuels that make our factories, healthcare, jobs, heating, lighting, food, internet and living standards possible. And put the federal government in control of all future energy and personal choices.
Certainly, the “science” that supposedly supports those demands should be examined carefully and scientifically before we rush to judgment on 82% of our energy. Not according to PCCS opponents.
The bottom line is very simple. President Trump should be applauded for proposing the PCCS, and for being open-minded enough to reconsider global warming claims - before he or we accept them as gospel.
Americans need to support him against the very vocal (and self-interested) people and organizations that oppose the PCCS.
We need to take immediate action to support President Trump on this vitally important initiative.
Use the link. Send him a quick note. Real, evidence-based climate science demands that we have this PCCS review. So does the future of our country and our children.
John Droz, Jr. is a physicist and director of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED), which promotes energy policies and programs that are technically, economically and environmentally sound.
See Tony’s Heller show how the basis of the Green New Deal is fraudulent and the outcome os such a plan disastrous. Also see this analysis of 11 alarmist claims often echoed by the fake news New York Times and once reliable Washington Post.
Green New Deal Would Kill Almost Everyone, Warns Greenpeace Co-Founder
Author with Dr. Patrick Moore, ecologist and Greenpeace co-founder
CALGARY, Canada - The “Green New Deal” proposed by congressional Democrats is a “recipe for mass suicide” and the “most ridiculous scenario I ever heard,” Greenpeace Co-Founder Patrick Moore (shown) warned in an exclusive interview with The New American. In fact, Dr. Moore warned that if the “completely preposterous” prescriptions in the scheme were actually implemented, Americans could be forced to turn to cannibalism to avoid starvation - and they still would not survive. Other experts such as Craig Rucker, the executive director of the environmental group Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), also sounded the alarm about the “green” proposal in Congress, comparing it to Soviet five-year plans and calling it a “prescription for disaster.”
The so-called Green New Deal is a massive scheme to, among other goals, restructure the U.S. economy. It is being advanced by a coalition of radical communist and socialist Democrats in Congress led by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). A resolution (H. Res. 109) “recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal (GND)” already has 67 co-sponsors in the House. If the scheme outlined in the resolution expressing the “sense of the House” is implemented, it would seek to eliminate air travel, the eating of steaks, the use of hydrocarbons, and more. It would aim to completely end all emissions of CO2 - an essential gas exhaled by every living person and required by plants - over the coming decade.
Moore, who was one of six international directors of Greenpeace, was flabbergasted that something so ludicrous could even be proposed, much less be advanced in the U.S. government. “It is quite amazing that someone that is in government - actually elected to the government of the United States of America - would propose that we eliminate all fossil fuels in 12 years,” he said in an on-camera interview with The New American from Canada. “This would basically result, if we did it on a global level, it would result in the decimation of the human population from 7-odd billion down to who knows how few people.” It would end up killing almost everyone on the planet, he added.
Worse than mass death would be the way people reacted. “It would basically begin a process of cannibalization among the human species, because the food could not be delivered to the stores in the middle of the cities anymore,” Moore continued. “The point that bothers me the most is that if you eliminated fossil fuels, every tree in the world would be cut for fuel. There is no other source for heating and cooking once you eliminate fossil fuels. You could use animal dung, if there were any animals left, but the animals would all die too because they would all get eaten.”
Moore also slammed the “social aspects” of the Green New Deal proposals such as “paying people who are unwilling to work,” according to a FAQ released by Ocasio-Cortez’ office. “I can’t believe that anyone would write that in a proposal for law in the United States of America,” he said, calling it “just unbelievable.” Indeed, that language and other half-baked ideas caused nationwide ridicule of Ocasio-Cortez and others involved in pushing the “New Deal.” The ridicule got so intense that one of its proponents eventually lied, claiming that mischievous Republicans might have put out a fake Green New Deal document to make Democrats look ridiculous. But then the truth came out, despite the FAQ being removed from Cortez’s congressional website.
But the absurdity of it all may be a boost to Republicans and President Donald Trump. “We have a situation where something completely preposterous is being backed by a large number of Democratic congressional elected representatives in the United States of America,” Moore said. “This is actually going to put Trump right over the top. I cannot see how this can possibly be negative for him. It can only be positive, because people recognize when something is preposterous. And I think that is the best word for it.”
“The best term for it is actually mass-suicidal,” Moore added. “Why would anyone vote for something that was going to result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth?” As far as what Americans could do who support the environment but not mass suicide, Moore urged people not to vote for anyone who would support the “Green New Deal.”
Speaking at a conference put on by the Economic Education Association of Alberta over the weekend, Moore also explained that so much of what climate alarmists were pushing was pseudo-science and easily discredited lies. For instance, carbon dioxide is actually doing great things in terms of greening the planet - after all, it is plant food, Moore said. He also lambasted those who say coral reefs are dying due to alleged man-made global warming, something he said was not true. Noting that trucks need hydrocarbon fuels to bring produce to market in cities, Dr. Moore explained that just that one problem alone would be absolutely catastrophic if CO2 emissions were ended.
Moore has since left the Greenpeace he helped found, because it left him. When the group was founded, “we wanted to save civilization, we didn’t want to destroy it,” he told The New American. “By the time I left Greenpeace, it had drifted into a situation in which all they had left was the green. They kind of dropped the peace, which was the human side of the situation. And now they were characterizing people as the enemies of the Earth - the human species as the enemies of nature, as if we were the only evil species.”
One of the most outrageous campaigns by Greenpeace, Moore said, was when the leadership - which had no formal science education - decided to try to ban chlorine use worldwide. “Yes, chlorine can be toxic, it was used as a weapon in World War I,” he said. “But the fact that it is toxic is why it is the most important element in public health and medicine. Adding it to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health… that has saved hundreds of millions of lives through the time that we learned to use chlorine as an anti-bacterial agent.” Nature, he added, is full of toxic materials.
In his own keynote address at the conference, CFACT’s Rucker - who famously boarded Greenpeace ships to “punk” them with propaganda banners reading “ship of lies” and “propaganda warrior” - explained that much of the environmentalist movement has it backwards. The real key to preserving the environment, he said, is free markets, private property, and prosperity. Poor nations do not have the resources to protect the environment. And socialist-ruled nations have the worst environmental track-records of all. Meanwhile, freer and wealthier nations such as the United States, Canada, Japan, and Western Europe have remarkably clean environments.
In an interview with The New American, Rucker celebrated freedom. “What’s good for people is good for nature,” he said, calling for pro-growth policies that benefit people rather than government- enforced scarcity. “It’s like the old Chinese proverb: When there is food on the table, there are many problems; when there is no food on the table, there is one problem. Societies that do not take care of their people don’t have the resources to take care of the planet.”
Rucker, a top leader of the non-totalitarian environmental movement, also slammed the “Green New Deal” being advanced in Congress. “It is a horrible idea,” he said, blasting the original New Deal as well. “But I actually think it is more like the Soviet 5-year plan… They want to be off fossil fuels within 10 years. That is insane. It is not that we are embracing fossil fuels, but this is a government-driven objective much like the old Soviet plans were government-driven objectives. It is going to fail. And the problem is, it is going to take a lot of people down with it… This is going to really hurt people. It is a prescription for disaster.”
Citing University of Maryland business Professor Julian Simon, Rucker used a hilarious example to illustrate the point. If the ideology of the sustainable-development movement were used 100 years ago, there would be great concern about where humanity was going to get enough whale oil to use as lighting. But of course, since then, electricity and light bulbs have taken the place of whale oil, thereby eliminating the alleged prospect of resources running out. The same concept applies to other resources, too, he said. When the price goes up due to scarcity, people will find substitutes and new ways of getting what they need - at least they will if markets are allowed to operate. “People are not just mouths, they are also hands and a brain,” he said.
He also drew a distinction between the “conservation” ethic, in which man is included in how to protect the planet, and the “preservation” ethic and the “Deep Green ecology” that views man as a “virus on the planet” that needs to be removed. Obviously, efforts to conserve nature should have the well-being of man in mind, he said.
Rucker and Moore both served at keynote speakers at the annual “FreedomTalk” conference Economic Education Association of Alberta. This writer gave a speech focusing on the indoctrination of children taking place in public schools - and particularly the implications of it for freedom. Other speakers highlighted the problems with the man-made global-warming hypothesis, the looming public pension disaster, and much more.
Despite the failure of predictions (Gore’s 10 claims all failed here) and the top 11 climate alarmist claims (updated rebuttal here), democrats and weak kneed republicans are exploring carbon sequester solutions and energy limitations and some even the Green New Deal.
It is a political hoax and it endangers our future. Electricity prices would rise 3 to 5 fold and more and gasoline prices if the UN suggested carbon taxes were imposed would be $50/gallon.
See the results where it has already been tried here (northeast states Regional Greenhouse Initiative and California environmental mandates) and abroad.
I have two grown children and three grandchildren. I was fortunate to have been brought up in America. Europe has been the first globalization - one world government and anti fossil fuel experiment. it has failed on many levels. You will never hear about it in the MSM which has strong socialist tendencies..
Unemployment reached a new high in Europe in 2013. Joblessness in the 17-nation EU currency area rose to 12.2 percent in the spring, EU statistics office Eurostat said, marking a new record since the data series began in 1995. The risk is high that will be your future unless you open your mind and...do your homework on government and the economy.
Deepening unemployment crisis is a threat to the social fabric of the euro zone. Almost two-thirds of young Greeks are unable to find work, exemplifying southern Europe’s ‘lost generation’. In France, Europe’s second largest economy, the number of jobless rose to a record in April, while in Italy, the unemployment rate hit its highest level in at least 36 years, with 40 percent of young people out of work. In Spain, the overall unemployment reached a record 27.2% due to a combination of the progressive big government anti-business policies and the enviro pushed green energy subsidies. This green push (wind power is not only a health hazard to humans and deadly to birds (killing millions worldwide including many endangered species like eagles and condors), but among the most inefficient of all energy sources) caused energy prices to skyrocket, shutting businesses or forcing manufacturers overseas.
In Spain, 2.2 jobs were lost for every green job created and only 1 in 10 green job was permanent. In Italy it was 3.4 jobs lost for every temporary green job, Spain ceased subsidization, but the damage has been done. In Germany where electricity prices have doubled, 800,000 homes had their electricity turned off during the last brutal winter, the 5th straight such throwback winter to the Little Ice Age. In the UK 25 to 50% are still in energy poverty. Many pensioners have had to choose between heating and eating. Bet you did not hear about the many tens of thousands of deaths in the cold. The German government remarked that solar provide 0% of the electrical needs that winter. In December 2010, when the UK had the second coldest December since the Little Ice Age in 1659, the massive wind farms produced less than 0.5% of their energy needs.
Sadly, even as Europe has soured on the green dream and are furiously building coal and gas power plants, our government was using Europe as a model. After you graduate with the burden of tens of thousands or in some cases well over $100,000 in college loans, you will find it difficult getting the job you need and deserve and the home you dream about. You can thank your liberal progressive teachers and professors and the last progressive administration for misleading you into the direction this country should head and for the way you voted. Academics have tenure and don’t have to worry about losing their jobs. They are ideologues who refuse to concede the policies they and the administration in Washington (mostly Academics without real world experience) support, have caused the number of people working today to be lower than in 2008, and will limit the hiring of graduates in the foreseeable future. When I was a college professor, I taught my students how to think not what to think. Is that happening at your school? If not you are not being educated, just brainwashed.
Votes have consequences. The health care bill hurting the middle class (insurance was not down $2,500 as promised but up by that amount for most families for less coverage). You will bear the cost of this monstrosity in the future. You will pay for it big time or if you opt out, you paid a penalty. And you will be burdened with supporting social security and medicare because the government already used the deductions to pay for its spending spree. Retirees paid for their support but that money is long gone. The ACA took social security and medicare to a whole new level.
Despite what you have been told, corporations big and small are not evil. Entrepreneurs are demonized for being successful, but they are the job creators. Penalizing them diminishes the potential you have for getting a rewarding job and successful career. You have been lied to since elementary school in your science classes with the liberal green curriculum on climate change that demonizes fossil fuel energy. It is perfectly reasonable to be green minded and work towards conservation of our resources. But CO2 has been incorrectly blamed for the natural cycles of temperatures and weather extremes of drought, flood, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat and cold. It has been called carbon pollution, a term that really should apply to particulate matter, largely removed from even coal plant effluence with scrubbers.
In fact, EPA’s own charts show a 30% decline in these small particles and ozone the last three plus decades. Natural gas burns clean. The US is exporting fuel oil but no thanks to the administration, which has blocked drilling on all federal lands and offshore and has blocked the Keystone Pipeline. It is the heavy drilling and fracking in states on private land that has made the US as big as OPEC. After destroying the coal industry, the radicals at the EPA wanted to stop this and block natural gas by blocking the long used fracking process. The last administration admitted openly they want $8 gasoline and heating oil to make their renewables cost seem less onerous.
Instead of a health hazard (inconceivable since every breathe you take emits 100 times more CO2 than is present in the atmosphere), CO2 is plant food and has helped greatly improve global crop yields and feed the increasing population. In future stories, we will show you how all the claims made demonizing CO2 have been falsified by real data (see this rebuttal of 11 top alarmist claims here).
But isn’t there a consensus of scientists on global warming? Sure among the scientists and modelers on the receiving end of some of the hundreds of billions in grants - worldwide $2 trillion is spent on this scam. The Green New Deal would cost more than our entire budget - $32 trillion the next decade that would bankrupt our country (especially if combined with Medicare for all) for no benefit and great pain with unreliable, unaffordable energy supply, brownouts and blackouts, a huge rise in taxes, unemployment, a collapsed health care system.
But among those not feeding at the trough. 31,487 American scientists have signed a petition, including 9,029 with PhDs that concluded “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth.”
The great author and medical doctor Dr. Michael Crichton said about consensus:
“Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.”
This is a critical time for our country. Please help support our efforts to get the truth to the decision makers and save our Country. DONATE button on the left takes you to Paypal. We are working overtime pro bono to try and get the truth exposed, with no help from the media.
A new paper in Nature Climate Change by Santer et al. (paywalled) claims that the 40 year record of global tropospheric temperatures agrees with climate model simulations of anthropogenic global warming so well that there is less than a 1 in 3.5 million chance (5 sigma, one-tailed test) that the agreement between models and satellites is just by chance.
And, yes, that applies to our (UAH) dataset as well.
While it’s nice that the authors commemorate 40 years of satellite temperature monitoring method (which John Christy and I originally developed), I’m dismayed that this published result could feed a new “one in a million” meme that rivals the “97% of scientists agree” meme, which has been a very successful talking point for politicians, journalists, and liberal arts majors.
John Christy and I examined the study to see just what was done. I will give you the bottom line first, in case you don’t have time to wade through the details:
The new Santer et al. study merely shows that the satellite data have indeed detected warming (not saying how much) that the models can currently only explain with increasing CO2 (since they cannot yet reproduce natural climate variability on multi-decadal time scales).
That’s all.
But we already knew that, didn’t we? So why publish a paper that goes to such great lengths to demonstrate it with an absurdly exaggerated statistic such as 1 in 3.5 million (which corresponds to 99.99997% confidence)? I’ll leave that as a rhetorical question for you to ponder.
There is so much that should be said, it’s hard to know where to begin.
Current climate models are programmed to only produce human-caused warming
First, you must realize that ANY source of temperature change in the climate system, whether externally forced (e.g. increasing CO2, volcanoes) or internally forced (e.g. weakening ocean vertical circulation, stronger El Ninos) has about the same global temperature signature regionally: more change over land than ocean (yes, even if the ocean is the original source of warming), and as a consequence more warming over the Northern than Southern Hemisphere. In addition, the models tend to warm the tropics more than the extratropics, a pattern which the satellite measurements do not particularly agree with.
Current climate model are adjusted in a rather ad hoc manner to produce no long-term warming (or cooling). This is because the global radiative energy balance that maintains temperatures at a relatively constant level is not known accurately enough from first physical principles (or even from observations), so any unforced trends in the models are considered “spurious” and removed. A handful of weak time-dependent forcings (e.g. ozone depletion, aerosol cooling) are then included in the models which can nudge them somewhat in the warmer or cooler direction temporarily, but only increasing CO2 can cause substantial model warming.
Importantly, we don’t understand natural climate variations, and the models don’t produce it, so CO2 is the only source of warming in today’s state-of-the-art models.
The New Study Methodology
The Santer et al. study address the 40-year period (1979-2018) of tropospheric temperature measurements. They average the models regional pattern of warming during that time, and see how well the satellite data match the models for the geographic pattern.
A few points must be made about this methodology.
As previously mentioned, the models already assume that only CO2 can produce warming, and so their finding of some agreement between model warming and satellite-observed warming is taken to mean proof that the warming is human-caused. It is not. Any natural source of warming (as we will see) would produce about the same kind of agreement, but the models have already been adjusted to exclude that possibility.
Proof of point #1 can be seen in their plot (below) of how the agreement between models and satellite observations increases over time. The fact that the agreement surges during major El Nino warm events is evidence that natural sources of warming can be mis-diagnosed as an anthropogenic signature. What if there is also a multi-decadal source of warming, as has been found to be missing in models compared to observations (e.g. Kravtsov et al., 2018)?
John Christy pointed out that the two major volcanic eruptions (El Chichon and Pinatubo, the latter shown as a blue box in the plot below), which caused temporary cooling, were in the early part of the 40 year record. Even if the model runs did not include increasing CO2, there would still be agreement between warming trends in the models and observations just because of the volcanic cooling early would lead to positive 40-year trends. Obviously, this agreement would not indicate an anthropogenic source, even though the authors methodology would identify it as such.
Their metric for measuring agreement between models and observations basically multiplies the regional warming pattern in the models with the regional warming pattern in the observations. If these patterns were totally uncorrelated, then there would be no diagnosed agreement. But this tells us little about the MAGNITUDE of warming in the observations agreeing with the models. The warming in the observations might only be 1/3 that of the models, or alternatively the warming in the models might be only 1/3 that in the observations. Their metric gives the same value either way. All that is necessary is for the temperature change to be of the same sign, and more warming in either the models or observations will cause an diagnosed increase in the level of agreement metric they use, even if the warming trends are diverging over time.
Their metric of agreement does not even need a geographic “pattern” of warming to reach an absurdly high level of statistical agreement. Warming could be the same everywhere in their 576 gridpoints covering most the Earth, and their metric would sum up the agreement at every gridpoint as independent evidence of a “pattern agreement”, even though no “pattern” of warming exists. This seems like a rather exaggerated statistic.
These are just some of my first impressions of the new study. Ross McKitrick is also examining the paper and will probably have a more elegant explanation of the statistics the paper uses and what those statistics can and cannot show.
Nevertheless, the metric used does demonstrate some level of agreement with high confidence. What exactly is it? As far as I can tell, it’s simply that the satellite observations show some warming in the last 40 years, and so do the models. The expected pattern is fairly uniform globally, which does not tell us much since even El Nino produces fairly uniform warming (and volcanoes produce global cooling). Yet their statistic seems to treat each of the 576 gridpoints as independent, which should have been taken into account (similar to time autocorrelation in time series). It will take more time to examine whether this is indeed the case.
In the end, I believe the study is an attempt to exaggerate the level of agreement between satellite (even UAH) and model warming trends, providing supposed “proof” that the warming is due to increasing CO2, even though natural sources of temperature change (temporary El Nino warming, volcanic cooling early in the record, and who knows what else) can be misinterpreted by their method as human-caused warming.
Greenland is melting faster than scientists previously thought, with the pace of ice loss increasing four-fold since 2003, new research has found.
Enormous glaciers in Greenland are depositing ever larger chunks of ice into the Atlantic ocean, where it melts. But scientists have found that the largest ice loss in the decade from 2003 actually occurred in the southwest region of the island, which is largely glacier-free.
This suggests surface ice is simply melting as global temperatures rise, causing gushing rivers of meltwater to flow into the ocean and push up sea levels. South-west Greenland, not previously thought of as a source of woe for coastal cities, is set to “become a major future contributor to sea level rise” the research states.
“We knew we had one big problem with increasing rates of ice discharge by some large outlet glaciers,” said Michael Bevis, lead author of the paper (no doubt with Butthead) and a professor of geodynamics at Ohio State University. “But now we recognize a second serious problem: increasingly, large amounts of ice mass are going to leave as meltwater, as rivers that flow into the sea.
The research provides fresh evidence of the dangers posed to vulnerable coastal places as diverse as Miami, Shanghai, Bangladesh and various Pacific islands as climate change shrinks the world’s land-based ice.
“The only thing we can do is adapt and mitigate further global warming - it’s too late for there to be no effect,” Bevis said. “This is going to cause additional sea level rise. We are watching the ice sheet hit a tipping point.
“We’re going to see faster and faster sea level rise for the foreseeable future. Once you hit that tipping point, the only question is: How severe does it get?”
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used data from NASA’s gravity recovery and climate experiment (known as Grace) and GPS stations scattered across Greenland to analyze changes in ice mass.
This showed that Greenland lost around 280bn tons of ice per year between 2002 and 2016, enough to raise the worldwide sea level by 0.03 inches annually. If all of Greenland’s vast ice sheet, 3km thick in places, was to melt, global sea levels would rise by seven meters, or more than 20ft, drowning most coastal settlements.
When the long term numbers are not scary enough, concentrate on one year’s weather instead!
I will explain.
Science Daily has more detail on the Bevis paper here. For some reason, it does not appear on the PNAS site yet.
Science Daily elaborate on the “faster than 2003” claim:
Bevis’ team used data from GRACE and from GPS stations scattered around Greenland’s coast to identify changes in ice mass. The patterns they found show an alarming trend - by 2012, ice was being lost at nearly four times the rate that prevailed in 2003.
Bevis said a natural weather phenomenon - the North Atlantic Oscillation, which brings warmer air to West Greenland, as well as clearer skies and more solar radiation - was building on man-made climate change to cause unprecedented levels of melting and runoff. Global atmospheric warming enhances summertime melting, especially in the southwest. The North Atlantic Oscillation is a natural - if erratic - cycle that causes ice to melt under normal circumstances. When combined with man-made global warming, though, the effects are supercharged.
“These oscillations have been happening forever,” Bevis said. “So why only now are they causing this massive melt? It’s because the atmosphere is, at its baseline, warmer. The transient warming driven by the North Atlantic Oscillation was riding on top of more sustained, global warming.”
But what happened in 2012?
Due to that weather event, the NAO, Greenland experienced an unusually mild year, with in particular a sunny summer.
Bevis asks:
“These oscillations have been happening forever. So why only now are they causing this massive melt? “
Because we have only been monitoring the melt for the last decade or two!
We know that global sea level rise was just as great in the early to mid 20th century, and there is therefore no evidence whatsoever that melting of the Greenland ice sheet was not just as great back then.
However, that was the exception. Last year, for instance, the SMB grew much more than the long term mean, as it did the year before.
Bevis’ claim that ice loss in 2012 was greater than in 2003 is based on one year’s weather, and not the long term trend.
It is worth emphasizing here that the SMB reflects both snowfall and ice melt, but not calving of glaciers. It is, of course, ice melt that Bevis is mainly concerned about here.
As we can see from the above temperature chart for SW Greenland, with the exception of 2012, temperatures since 2003 are little different to the 1920s to 40s, the last time the AMO was in warm phase, as it presently is.
There is simply no evidence at all of Greenland’s climate getting any warmer over the long term.
As for the lurid threats of multi meter sea level rise, according to DMI loss of ice from the Greenland ice sheet (from all causes) since 2003 has accounted for about 0.65mm a year of global sea level rise, little more than 2 inches per century.
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Media Ignore Inconvenient Truths When Pushing Polar Bear Invasion Stories
This story could very well be headlined: “When the internet came to Novaya Zemlya.”
Locals started to post photos and video of the more than 50 polar bears in their neighborhood.
Over the last week, social media, as well as online newspapers globally, have gone mad over the news coming out from one of the remotest towns on the planet, the closed military settlement of Belushaya Guba.
The little-known town on the Russian Arctic archipelago has since last autumn been struggling with polar bears walking the streets and around the corners of the apartment - and office buildings. Even walking by a baby-stroller inside an entrance, one of the video-recordings show.
Regional authorities have declared a state of emergency after the bears no longer react to noise - and light signals from guards trying to scare them off.
Belushaya Guba, like the entire Novaya Zemlya, is closed off military area. The newly upgraded air base Rogachevo is just a few kilometers outside of town.
But why don’t the bears want to leave the settlement? As previously reported by the Barents Observer, the Kara Sea off the east coast of Novaya Zemlya is this winter packed with very close drift ice.
Now, it appears like the human food-waste has a much more central role in the story than just the warming Arctic.
But first a look at the many media, including the Barents Observer, that last week jumped to conclusions pointing at climate changes when the stories about polar bears in trouble, or making trouble, found its way to global newsrooms.
The blog portal Polar Bear Science has collected links to many of the newspapers reporting about the sensational images from Novaya Zemlya.
The Guardian writes, “What polar bears in a Russian apartment block reveal about the climate crisis.”
The Washington Post writes under the headline, “A ‘mass invasion’ of polar bears is terrorizing an island town. Climate change is to blame” and the CBC makes a similar conclusion, headlining its article: “Russian Arctic town overrun by polar bears, climate change blamed.”
Mats Forsberg has sailed expeditions since 1982 and has assisted in TV productions about the polar bears in the Arctic. He has first-hand knowledge of polar bears’ behavior.
“These bears are well-fed,” he says to the Barents Observer after reviewing some of the videos.
“I would say these bears are not hanging around the houses due to climate changes. They have a huge amount of food dumped into nature by humans,” Forsberg says and concludes: “This is purely an on-site human-made problem.”
Some of the videos posted by local residents on Vkontakte show how tens of polar bears are eating garbage at the local dump site in Belushaya Guba. The bears actually look fat.
Evaluating media’s reporting, the blog site Polar Bear Science concludes: “Global warming is blamed for the problem but as is so often the case, that claim does not stand up to scrutiny.”
The blog is run by Susan Crockford, a zoologist with more than 35 years experience, including published work on the Holocene history of Arctic animals.
