THE GUARDIAN
"US to stage its largest ever climate strike: 'Somebody must sound the alarm'"
Oliver Milman in New York
20 SEPTEMBER 2019
The US is set to stage its largest ever day of protest over the climate crisis, with tens of thousands of students joined by adults in abandoning schools and workplaces for a wave of strikes across the country.
Climate strikes will take place in more than 1,000 locations in the US on Friday, with major rallies in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Miami.
Globally, more than 4,500 strikes are planned across 150 countries.
The young strikers’ totemic figure, the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, will take part in the New York walkout and will speak to massed protesters in Manhattan.
Authorities in New York City have announced that its student population of 1.1 million is able to skip school in order to attend the strikes.
In March, more than 1 million school students took part in a global climate strike but Friday’s iteration is likely to be swelled further by adults encouraged to walk out of their workplaces in support of the young protesters, who are demanding a halt to fossil fuel projects and a complete shift to renewable energy.
Dozens of companies, including Patagonia, Ben and Jerry’s and the Guardian, will support striking staff, with major unions also backing the walkouts.
Thousands of websites, such as Tumblr and Kickstarter, are set to “go dark” as tools are downed on Friday lunchtime.
Hundreds of doctors have written medical notes to excuse students from their classes due to the threat posed by the climate crisis.
“This is going to be the largest mobilization for climate action in history,” said Alexandria Villaseñor, a 14-year-old who has been protesting outside the UN headquarters over climate every Friday since December.
“World leaders can either listen now or listen later because our voice is only going to get louder as the climate crisis gets more urgent."
"Adults need to step up and support us."
"Civil disobedience breaks the system and once it’s broken it’s an amazing opportunity to make things better.”
Dulce Belen Ceballos Arias, an 18-year-old from San Francisco, said she will be striking because “I want children of my own and I want them to have a better life than me."
"I don’t want that to be taken away by climate change.”
Students in Boston will also be excused school, with a crowd of 10,000 expected to assemble.
“We are excited to disrupt business as usual, to demand a Green New Deal,” Audrey Maurine Xin Lin, an 18-year-old organizer in Boston, in reference to the resolution put forward by progressive Democrats to enact a second world war-style economic mobilization to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.
A parallel protest will take part in New York, highlighting the impact of the climate crisis on people of colour and to mark the second anniversary of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico.
In Seattle, more than 1,500 Amazon employees will strike over the company’s climate policies.
The strikes have been backed by several cities.
“When your house is on fire, somebody needs to sound the alarm,” read a joint statement by the mayors of New York, Paris and Los Angeles.
“Young people in our cities, displaying incredible maturity and dignity are doing just that.”
The sprawling strikes represent a remarkable escalation of Thunberg’s decision last year to start skipping school on Fridays to protest against inaction by the Swedish government over the climate crisis.
A global movement has since grown from the 16-year-old’s stand, with young people expressing outrage that their generation is being left a world with increasingly punishing heatwaves, storms, flooding and societal unrest.
Thunberg, who has abjured plane travel, arrived in New York on a solar-powered racing yacht last month and has since become a focal point for the climate movement, appearing on talkshows and in Congress to excoriate its members, as well as meeting Barack Obama, who called her “one of our planet’s greatest advocates”.
Her US sojourn will culminate with a UN climate summit, to be held in New York on Monday.
She will address world leaders who have assembled to help revive the flagging international effort to avoid disastrous global heating.
The US and Brazil, lead by nationalist leaders disdainful of climate science, have slowed momentum, with a UN report last week warning that the required ambition is lacking among most countries.
“The audacity of kids simply asking leaders to lead is extraordinary."
"We are indebted to them,” said Rachel Kyte, special representative for the UN secretary general for sustainable energy.
“They are rightly impatient."
“Not every country is aligned to the need for fast action."
"The hope is that the US will join in at the point where public opinion is able to influence the national voice more than it does today.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/us-to- ... P17#page=2
ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE GUARDIAN
'We won't stop striking': the New York 13 year-old taking a stand over climate change"
Oliver Milman in New York @olliemilman
Tue 12 Mar 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 19 Sep 2019 02.04 EDT
Alexandria Villasenor looks a slightly incongruous figure to stage a lengthy protest over the perils of catastrophic global warming.
The 13-year-old, wrapped in a coat and a woolen hat, has spent every Friday since December seated on a frigid bench outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City with signs warning of climate change’s dire consequences.
Most passersby, probably hardened to confronting New York street scenes, scurry past, eyes diverted downwards.
But some mutter words of support, while the odd passing driver rolls down their window to offer a thumbs up.
There is media interest, too.
On a recent Friday protest stint, a microphone was being pinned to a shivering Villasenor by an NBC crew.
“I stayed out there for four hours and I lost circulation in my toes for the first time,” she said afterwards.
Cold weather in winter is routinely used by Donald Trump to disparage climate science – in January the president tweeted “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” – but Villasenor has experienced enough in her nascent years to grasp the scale of the threat.
Her concern has driven her to help organize the first nationwide strikes by US school students over climate change, on 15 March.
More than 100,000 young people are expected to skip school on the day and attend rallies demanding radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Villasenor was born and raised in Davis, California, in the teeth of the state’s fiercest drought in at least 1,200 years.
She recalls seeing the dead and dying fish on the shores of nearby Folsom Lake as it dried up.
In November, Davis was shrouded in a pall of smoke from record wildfires that obliterated the town of Paradise, 100 miles to the north.
“I have asthma so it was a very scary experience for me, I couldn’t leave my house at all,” Villasenor said.
“Just walking to the car would make my eyes sting."
"We rolled up towels and put them under the windows."
"A lot of my friends were going out in the smog and I was texting them to see if they were OK, as I’m the mom of the group.”
Villasenor’s family subsequently moved to New York, the switch hastened by concerns over her health due to the smoke.
The young student then swiftly became an activist after reading how warming temperatures are making the western US far more prone to the sort of huge wildfires that menaced her hometown.
After bouncing around a few youth-led climate groups, Villasenor struck up a rapport with fellow students Isra Hirsi, in Minnesota, and Haven Coleman, from Colorado.
The trio set about creating Youth Climate Strike US, the first major American response to the recent mass school walkouts by European students frustrated by adults’ sluggish response to climate change.
“My generation knows that climate change will be the biggest problem we’ll have to face,” Villasenor said.
“It’s upsetting that my generation has to push these leaders to take action."
"We aren’t going to stop striking until some more laws are passed.”
The American students preparing to join a global wave of school strikes on 15 March have been spurred by the actions of Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old Swede who started taking every Friday off school to call for more rapid action by her country’s leaders.
In a gently excoriating speech, Thunberg told governments at UN climate talks in December that “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”
Those under 20 years old have never known a world where the climate isn’t rapidly heating, ensuring that their lifetimes will be spent in average temperatures never before experienced by humans.
For someone getting their first taste of politics it can be hard to digest that precious little has been done to avert a future of disastrous droughts, floods and storms since James Hansen, then of Nasa, delivered his landmark warning on climate change to Congress 30 years ago.
“It was confusing at first because I expected politicians to be on to this, given what the scientists were saying,” said Chelsea Li, a 17-year-old at Nathan Hale high school in Seattle and local strike organizer.
“But I didn’t see any action."
"We are going to have to do the things the adults are too afraid to do because it’s our futures we are fighting for.”
The American strikers’ challenge appears particularly steep.
It’s one thing protesting in the UK, where carbon dioxide emissions have plummeted to levels not seen since Queen Victoria’s reign, or Germany, where the government has pledged to phase out all coal use within 20 years.
It’s quite another to appeal to Donald Trump, who has called climate science an elaborate Chinese hoax and has overseen the dismantling of Obama-era efforts to reduce emissions from coal plants and vehicles.
Youth-led groups like the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour have seized the initiative from traditional green groups but have been met with the same unyielding political establishment.
In a videoed exchange since parodied on Saturday Night Live, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the veteran Democrat, clasped her hands behind her back and patiently told a group of middle and high schoolers that they weren’t yet able to vote for her and their demands on climate were unrealistic.
There was no way to pay for the Green New Deal, a plan to decarbonize the economy championed by progressives, according to Feinstein.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said, an assurance alluding as much to political inertia as political experience.
“I think she was trying to dismiss me,” said Isha Clarke, a 16-year-old from Oakland who had confronted Feinstein.
“I think she was making excuses for why she didn’t have to listen to us."
"For older people there’s no urgency, they are used to the system and compromising.”
Clarke said the interaction with Feinstein was disappointing but the backlash was “amazing”, with the California senator releasing and then dropping her own climate plan after it was savaged for being too weak.
Feinstein also offered Clarke an internship, which she has yet to accept.
“It’s sort of tricky because you have to play the game to change it but I don’t want it to cover up everything that happened,” Clarke said.
“Most young people are very aware of climate change, a lot of them are super passionate about it but they don’t have the resources to make their voices heard."
"They don’t realize they have the power to create change.”
That voice will be heard on 15 March when students forgo their classes in order to make a plea that they hope won’t be dismissed as indulgent truancy.
Parents and teachers may have to brace themselves for future walkouts.
“My parents are very supportive, they understand my beliefs,” said Villasenor, as she repositioned her placards for the cameras.
“If we’re not going to have a future, then school won’t matter any more.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... nvironment
'We won't stop striking': the New York 13 year-old taking a stand over climate change"
Oliver Milman in New York @olliemilman
Tue 12 Mar 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 19 Sep 2019 02.04 EDT
Alexandria Villasenor looks a slightly incongruous figure to stage a lengthy protest over the perils of catastrophic global warming.
The 13-year-old, wrapped in a coat and a woolen hat, has spent every Friday since December seated on a frigid bench outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City with signs warning of climate change’s dire consequences.
Most passersby, probably hardened to confronting New York street scenes, scurry past, eyes diverted downwards.
But some mutter words of support, while the odd passing driver rolls down their window to offer a thumbs up.
There is media interest, too.
On a recent Friday protest stint, a microphone was being pinned to a shivering Villasenor by an NBC crew.
“I stayed out there for four hours and I lost circulation in my toes for the first time,” she said afterwards.
Cold weather in winter is routinely used by Donald Trump to disparage climate science – in January the president tweeted “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” – but Villasenor has experienced enough in her nascent years to grasp the scale of the threat.
Her concern has driven her to help organize the first nationwide strikes by US school students over climate change, on 15 March.
More than 100,000 young people are expected to skip school on the day and attend rallies demanding radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Villasenor was born and raised in Davis, California, in the teeth of the state’s fiercest drought in at least 1,200 years.
She recalls seeing the dead and dying fish on the shores of nearby Folsom Lake as it dried up.
In November, Davis was shrouded in a pall of smoke from record wildfires that obliterated the town of Paradise, 100 miles to the north.
“I have asthma so it was a very scary experience for me, I couldn’t leave my house at all,” Villasenor said.
“Just walking to the car would make my eyes sting."
"We rolled up towels and put them under the windows."
"A lot of my friends were going out in the smog and I was texting them to see if they were OK, as I’m the mom of the group.”
Villasenor’s family subsequently moved to New York, the switch hastened by concerns over her health due to the smoke.
The young student then swiftly became an activist after reading how warming temperatures are making the western US far more prone to the sort of huge wildfires that menaced her hometown.
After bouncing around a few youth-led climate groups, Villasenor struck up a rapport with fellow students Isra Hirsi, in Minnesota, and Haven Coleman, from Colorado.
The trio set about creating Youth Climate Strike US, the first major American response to the recent mass school walkouts by European students frustrated by adults’ sluggish response to climate change.
“My generation knows that climate change will be the biggest problem we’ll have to face,” Villasenor said.
“It’s upsetting that my generation has to push these leaders to take action."
"We aren’t going to stop striking until some more laws are passed.”
The American students preparing to join a global wave of school strikes on 15 March have been spurred by the actions of Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old Swede who started taking every Friday off school to call for more rapid action by her country’s leaders.
In a gently excoriating speech, Thunberg told governments at UN climate talks in December that “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”
Those under 20 years old have never known a world where the climate isn’t rapidly heating, ensuring that their lifetimes will be spent in average temperatures never before experienced by humans.
For someone getting their first taste of politics it can be hard to digest that precious little has been done to avert a future of disastrous droughts, floods and storms since James Hansen, then of Nasa, delivered his landmark warning on climate change to Congress 30 years ago.
“It was confusing at first because I expected politicians to be on to this, given what the scientists were saying,” said Chelsea Li, a 17-year-old at Nathan Hale high school in Seattle and local strike organizer.
“But I didn’t see any action."
"We are going to have to do the things the adults are too afraid to do because it’s our futures we are fighting for.”
The American strikers’ challenge appears particularly steep.
It’s one thing protesting in the UK, where carbon dioxide emissions have plummeted to levels not seen since Queen Victoria’s reign, or Germany, where the government has pledged to phase out all coal use within 20 years.
It’s quite another to appeal to Donald Trump, who has called climate science an elaborate Chinese hoax and has overseen the dismantling of Obama-era efforts to reduce emissions from coal plants and vehicles.
Youth-led groups like the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour have seized the initiative from traditional green groups but have been met with the same unyielding political establishment.
In a videoed exchange since parodied on Saturday Night Live, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the veteran Democrat, clasped her hands behind her back and patiently told a group of middle and high schoolers that they weren’t yet able to vote for her and their demands on climate were unrealistic.
There was no way to pay for the Green New Deal, a plan to decarbonize the economy championed by progressives, according to Feinstein.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said, an assurance alluding as much to political inertia as political experience.
“I think she was trying to dismiss me,” said Isha Clarke, a 16-year-old from Oakland who had confronted Feinstein.
“I think she was making excuses for why she didn’t have to listen to us."
"For older people there’s no urgency, they are used to the system and compromising.”
Clarke said the interaction with Feinstein was disappointing but the backlash was “amazing”, with the California senator releasing and then dropping her own climate plan after it was savaged for being too weak.
Feinstein also offered Clarke an internship, which she has yet to accept.
“It’s sort of tricky because you have to play the game to change it but I don’t want it to cover up everything that happened,” Clarke said.
“Most young people are very aware of climate change, a lot of them are super passionate about it but they don’t have the resources to make their voices heard."
"They don’t realize they have the power to create change.”
That voice will be heard on 15 March when students forgo their classes in order to make a plea that they hope won’t be dismissed as indulgent truancy.
Parents and teachers may have to brace themselves for future walkouts.
“My parents are very supportive, they understand my beliefs,” said Villasenor, as she repositioned her placards for the cameras.
“If we’re not going to have a future, then school won’t matter any more.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... nvironment
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
Hi Livyjr,
Thanks for your message.
Yes,plants do need CO2 to survive; they also need water; too much of either is not a good thing.
While it is true that CO2 is essential for growth, that does not necessarily mean that extra CO2 is better for plants, but a NASA posting at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/20 ... hurt-crops does talk about both the benefits and drawbacks of increased CO2 on crops.
More CO2 also has other effects on increased temperatures that can cause extra stress on plants, and associated changes in precipitation, either too much from warmer temperatures, or prolonged droughts can of course be quite negative for plants.
CO2 fertilization is also not the only cause of the increased plant growth — nitrogen, land cover change and climate change by way of global temperature, precipitation and sunlight changes all contribute to the greening effect.
To determine the extent of carbon dioxide’s contribution, researchers ran the data for carbon dioxide and each of the other variables in isolation through several computer models that mimic the plant growth observed in the satellite data.
Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect at 9 percent, and I can get you that paper if you like, and I have seen other papers that note that nitrogen is actually the limiting factor in plant growth and that extra CO2 actually puts more stress on vegetation
The 4th National Climate Assessment was published in November 2018 at https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/ and chapter 9 is devoted to the effects of climate change on agriculture.
I would also note that extra CO2 in the atmosphere winds up in the ocean, and this extra CO2 becomes converted into a weak carbonic acid, however weak it is, this process is leading to a change in the pH levels of the ocean and this ocean acidification could wind up having large impacts on the production of ocean ecosystems that we also depend on for food.
I understand that there are folks who believe that we are proponents of some political point of view when it comes to the science of climate change, but I have to tell you that this is simply not the case.
We are not conducting any propaganda campaign to match any political views.
A scientist would love to do nothing more than to find that they have been the one who found something that no one else has.
We at NOAA do not overstate the effects of carbon emissions on global warming - these results have been repeated over and over again in literally thousands of independent studies across the globe, not just NOAA, not just NASA, but from scientists at institutions from Australia to Japan to Europe to North and South America.
With respect to climate, it is clear to us from the work of 97-99% of climate scientists around the world that have come to very similar conclusions related to carbon emissions and global warming.
As a Government scientists me and my colleagues frankly have no incentive to come up with things that take the side of any particular political narrative.
I wish that I could report that there were no problems associated with extra CO2 in the environment and that everything was great, but that would not be science, it would be advocating something with no facts or basis in science.
The Earth has warmed and cooled naturally throughout its history.
Those fluctuations in temperatures are quite in line with fluctuations in carbon dioxide (CO2), and so as CO2 levels have risen and dropped, so has global temperature.
Going from an ice age to an interglacial period and back again, Earth's average temperature changed anywhere from 7°F to 12.5°F (4-7°C).
These fluctuations in global average temperature happened because gradual, ongoing changes in Earth’s orbital mechanics (e.g., eccentricity, obliquity, and precession) changed our planet’s tilt relative to the sun.
The gradual shift in Earth’s tilt changed where and how much sunlight fell on the Northern Hemisphere.
Thus, there was a slight increase in the amount of sunlight shining where most of our planet’s landmass is located, which was just enough to nudge our world in a warming direction.
Averaged over the entire surface of the planet, this change in radiative forcing was about 1 watt per square meter — roughly the equivalent of one little Christmas tree light bulb of sustained energy input for every square meter of Earth’s surface area.
Then, as the Earth would transition from an ice age to an interglacial, other factors (known as “climate feedbacks”) in the climate system came into play, added to, and accelerated the warming.
Based on the 800,000 year old Vostok Antarctic ice core data, changes in CO2 follow changes in temperatures by about 600 to1000 years, as illustrated in the attached figure below from Shakun et al (2012).
This has led some to conclude that CO2 cannot be responsible for current global warming.
However, this statement does not tell the whole story.
In the case of warming, the lag between temperature and CO2 is explained as follows: as ocean temperatures rise, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere.
In turn, this release amplifies the warming trend, leading to yet more CO2 being released.
In other words, increasing CO2 levels become both a contributor to and effect of further warming.
This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation.
Additional positive feedbacks which play an important role in this processinclude other greenhouse gases, and changes in ice sheet cover and vegetation patterns.
So, while the orbital cycles triggered the initial warming, overall, more than 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming occurred after increases in atmospheric CO2 levels.
In the figure below, average global temperature is depicted in blue, Antarctic temperature in red,and atmospheric CO2 concentration as the yellow dots.
Many times when people pose the proposition that you seeing if the CO2 in the atmosphere is a function of there being more people, because the respiration of more people would add more CO2 to the atmosphere.
While that is an interesting supposition, the amount of CO2 emitted by humans pales in comparison to the amount of CO2 that is released from the burning of fossil fuels.
The average human exhales about 2.3 pounds of CO2 on an average day.
The exact quantity depends on your activity level — a person engaged in vigorous exercise produces up to eight times as much CO2 as their more sedentary neighbors.
Take this number and multiply that by a population of 7 billion people, breathing away for 365.25 days per year, and you get an annual CO2 output of about 2.9 billion tons of CO2.
International CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion for 2018 topped out at about 37.1 billion tons.
So the human race breathes out about 7.8% as much as from the carbon we burn.
The human population in 2008 was about what it is now (still in the 7 billion neighborhood) and that year, CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion for 2008 topped out at about 34.7 billion tons,and so that year the respiration rate from humans was 8.4%, and so in some sense the percentage contribution of CO2 from human respiration to the global total has decreased slightly over the past 10 years.
So, yes, there is a correlation in the growth of global population and CO2, but it is not simply from the respiration of people, but more people on the planet means more CO2-generating activities such as electrical power generation, industrial activities, automobiles, airline travel, agriculture,and so on in order to support more people.
I have attached graphs of the last 400,000 years of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere; In Earth’s distant past (about 3.2M years ago).
The real impact of population growth and projections, is that more people will mean more CO2 as long as we keep burning fossil fuels; and yes, respiration is part of it, but a very small percentage.
From isotopic analysis, we know quite well that human activities (e.g., burning fossil fuels, biomass burning, cement production) are responsible for driving up CO2 from a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm to about 410 ppm today.
In fact, most of that increase in CO2 has occurred since the late 1950s.
In Earth’s distant past, it would take between 5,000 to 20,000 years to see the magnitude of change in CO2 levels that humans have caused in just the last 60 years.
Humanity’s increase in atmospheric CO2 and other heat-trapping gases produces a sustained radiative forcing of about 4 watts per square meter over Earth’s entire surface area, which is about 4 times greater than the change in radiative forcing mother nature required to nudge Earth into and out of ice ages on roughly 100,000 year cycles over the last 1-2 million years.
A 2012 study by Shakun et al. [and attached] looked at temperature changes 20,000 years ago (the last glacial-interglacial transition) from around the world and added more detail to our understanding of the CO2-temperature change relationship - so yes Milankovitch cycles are involved, but not without CO2 as the underlying cause.
Shakun et al (2012) found the following:
(1) The Earth's orbital cycles triggered warming in the Arctic approximately 19,000 years ago, causing large amounts of ice to melt, flooding the oceans with fresh water.
(2) This influx of fresh water then disrupted ocean current circulation, in turn causing a seesawing of heat between the hemispheres.
(3) The Southern Hemisphere and its oceans warmed first, starting about 18,000 years ago.
As the Southern Ocean warms,the solubility of CO2 in water falls.
This causes the oceans to give up more CO2, releasing it into the atmosphere.
So, while the orbital cycles triggered the initial warming, overall, more than 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming occurred after that atmospheric CO2 increase (again in the attached Shakun figure depicting Average global temperature in(blue), Antarctic temperature in (red), and atmospheric CO2 concentration (yellow dots).
Also, and this is noted in the very final two attachments here of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent - and this is also backed up by significant paleoclimatic data that verifies that not only was Arctic sea ice more extensive in the past but much thicker and older.
This is coupled with plots of Antarctic and Greenland land ice loss from 2002-17 based on GRACE satellite data that I have also attached; this loss of land ice is contributing to significant rises in sea level.
Later, as Earth’s orbital mechanics tilted the Northern Hemisphere away from the sun, these processes slowed and then reversed, leading our world back into ice ages.
These processes explain why Earth has warmed and cooled on roughly 100,000-year cycles for at least the last one million years.
It’s important to note that the rate of warming observed over the last 60 years — at precisely the time we’ve observed such a rapid buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere (most notably CO2) — is roughly 50 times faster than our world warmed coming out of a given ice age.
Today’s unusually rapid rate of temperature rise over such a short period of time points to only one thing: the addition of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
The relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and heating at the surface of the planet (including the ocean) is well-known, however that is only about 7% of the global heating at the surface of the planet, with the remaining 93% being observed in the oceans down to 2000 meters deep; and the data for that component can be found at https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/.[/b][/color]
As Levitus et al (2005) stated (and attached). "Based on the physical properties and mass of the world ocean as compared to other components of Earth's climate system, Rossby [1959] suggested that ocean heat content may be the dominant component of the variability of Earth's heat balance."
Updated work [Levitus et al., 2000, 2001] has confirmed Rossby's suggestion.
Warming of the world ocean due to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases was first identified in a report by Revelle etal. [1965].
The delay of atmospheric warming by increasing greenhouse gases due to initial heating of the world ocean was suggested by the National Research Council [NRC, 1979];and that 1979 paper (Charney paper) is attached here.
Here we present new yearly estimates for the 1955–2003 period for the upper 300 m and 700 m layers and pentadal (5‐year) estimates for the 1955–1959 through 1994–1998 period for the upper 3000 m of the world ocean.
The 1959 book by Rossby is far too large to send in an e-mail, but can be easily found on-line at https://math.nyu.edu/~gerber/courses/20 ... n-1959.pdf
Sunlight penetrating the surface of the oceans is responsible for warming of the surface layers.
Once heated, the ocean surface becomes warmer than the atmosphere above, and because of this heat flows from the warm ocean to the cool atmosphere above.
The rate of flow of heat out of the ocean is determined by the temperature gradient in the 'cool skin layer', which resides within the thin viscous surface layer of ocean that is in contact with the atmosphere.
It's so named because it is the interface where ocean heat is lost to the atmosphere, and therefore becomes cooler than the water immediately below.
Despite being only 0.1 to 1mm thick on average, this skin layer is the major player in the long-term warming of the oceans.
The cool skin behaves quite differently to the water below, because it is the boundary where the ocean and air meet, and therefore turbulence (the transfer of energy/heat via large-scale motion) falls away as it approaches this boundary.
No longer free to jiggle around and transfer heat via this large scale motion, water molecules in the layer are forced together and heat is only able to travel through the skin layer by way of conduction.
With conduction the steepness of the temperature gradient is critical to the rate of heat transfer.
Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, trap heat in the atmosphere and direct part of this back toward the surface.
This heat cannot penetrate into the ocean itself, but it does warm the cool skin layer, and the level of this warming ultimately controls the temperature gradient in the layer.
Increased warming of the cool skin layer (via increased greenhouse gases) lowers its temperature gradient (that is the temperature difference between the top and bottom of the layer), and this reduces the rate at which heat flows out of the ocean to the atmosphere.
One way to think about this is to compare the gradient (steepness) of a flowing river - water flows faster the steeper the river becomes, but slows as the steepness decreases.
Ocean heating is critical marker of climate change because an estimated 93% of the excess solar energy trapped by greenhouse gases accumulates in the world's oceans.
And, unlike surface temperatures, ocean temperatures are not affected by year-to-year variations caused by climate events like El Niño or volcanic eruptions.
Unfortunately, while the oceans have taken the brunt of the warming, these warming oceans have tremendous impacts on changing weather and climate patterns, and eventually, the heat stored in the oceans is going to be spilling over into atmospheric surface temperature rises; with current CO2 levels at nearly 415 parts per million, these impacts are simply going to increase; increased CO2 and other greenhouse gases such as methane are going to continue this trend.
We can also look at anomalies of the sub-surface oceanwater temperatures, and the final attachment here is an example that shows some considerable warming in the for example the western Atlantic; I have attached that vice a global plot for convenience purposes only as my files available to me at home are more limited.
So, I have attached this as an example of what we monitor on regular basis, and again, monitoring anomalies vice actual temperatures is a much more effective way of monitoring changes in temperature from a climate standpoint.
The same concept applies to the cool skin layer - warm the top of the layer and the gradient across it decreases, therefore reducing heat flowing out of the ocean.
An important point not be be glossed over here, is that changing the temperature gradient in the cool skin layer by way of greenhouse gas warming is a worldwide phenomenon.
Once the gradient has changed, all heat leaving the ocean thereafter has to negotiate its way through the layer.
With the gradient lowered, the ocean is able to steal away a little bit more from heat headed for the atmosphere.
It is in this ever-present mechanism that oceans are able to undergo long-term warming (or cooling).
Obviously it's not possible to manipulate the concentration of CO2 in the air in order to carry out real world experiments, but natural changes in cloud cover provide an opportunity to test the principle.
Under cloudy conditions, the cloud cover radiates more heat back down toward the ocean surface than happens under clear sky conditions.
So the mechanism should cause a decline in skin temperature gradients with increased cloud cover (more downward heat radiation), and there should also be a decline in the difference between cool skin layer and ocean bulk temperatures - as less heat escapes the ocean under increased atmospheric warming.
This was observed in an experiment carried out in 2004, aboard the New Zealand research ship Tangaroa.
Using instruments to simultaneously measure the 'cool skin', the ocean below, and the amount of heat (longwave radiation) reaching the ocean surface, researchers were able to confirm how greenhouse gases heat the ocean.
It should be pointed out here, that the amount of change in downward heat radiation from changes in cloud cover in the experiment, are far greater than the gradual change in warming provided by human greenhouse gas emissions, but the relationship was nevertheless established.
You can read more about this in the paper by Minnett et al(2005) that I have attached here as well.
Later, as Earth’s orbital mechanics tilted the Northern Hemisphere away from the sun, these processes slowed and then reversed, leading our world back into ice ages.
These processes explain why Earth has warmed and cooled on roughly 100,000-year cycles for at least the last one million years.
It’s important to note that the rate of warming observed over the last 60 years — at precisely the time we’ve observed such a rapid buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere (most notably CO2) — is roughly 50 times faster than our world warmed coming out of a given ice age.
Today’s unusually rapid rate of temperature rise over such a short period of time points to only one thing: the addition of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
The spike in CO2 from 1950 to today after a fairly stable level of CO2 for 800,000 years or so (as shown in the attached figure from NASA) is not a natural phenomenon; it is caused by one thing and one thing only, the burning of fossil fuels.
There is a pretty large and bona fide body of peer-reviewed scientific climate literature citations that cover a lot more than just a warming atmosphere, but involves a warming ocean, ocean acidification (even if you don't believe the CO2 involved in that is from human emission), sea level rise, sea ice receding in both the Arctic and Antarctic, the loss of land ice in Greenland and Antarctica, species migration, greater weather extremes (e.g., longer droughts, heavier rain events, longer heat waves), increases in the spread of infectious disease and invasive species, coral reef bleaching, etc.
I really would suggest that you should consult the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report at https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repo ... _FINAL.pdf; it will give you a rather detailed and very well cited report on the various aspects of climate change from a physical science perspective.
There is also some other very good information to be found on the IPCC web site at http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm.
These reports were put together by hundreds of scientists from across the world, and they base their evaluation on the entire body of climate scientific literature; there is nothing political here, it is completely based on science.
If anything, the IPCC report will give you a feel for the scale of the scientific research in this area across a diverse array of climate topics, that again, all point to the reality of the climate change science reflected on the climate.gov website.
With respect to global climate change, our work is based on a rather large and well-vetted body of peer reviewed scientific literature.
I can't go over everything here, but we are pretty comfortable with the we are doing which represents the best science that we are aware of.
We are following a well-vetted, large, and diverse body of scientific literature that has been developed since the 1820s.
The new Little Ice Age that some mention, is no doubt based on predictions of a new Maunder Minimum (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimumin) the 2030s that in some places on the Internet have said to equate to a "60% reduction in the sun’s output’" which of course would totally freeze the earth.
What is really going on is a 60% reduction in the peak of the solar (sunspot) cycle, so we are talking about less than 0.1% decrease in total solar output (not 60%) which would mean that solar output reaching the Earth would drop by 1-2 Watts per square meter — or by about 0.1% — for 2-3 decades.
This would represent a milder version of what happened during the “little ice age” in the 1600s and 1700s.
The big difference now is that there is a lot more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere than there was in the 1700s (about 40% more CO2 and more than twice the methane) which has added up to more than 2 Watts per square meter increase in the energy absorbed at the ground, compared to the 1700s.
So, if the predicted decrease in solar output was to occur, it would roughly counter some of “global warming” that we have seen since the mid-20th century, for 20-30 years or so.
But it would be a temporary respite at best and would not take away from the urgency of action on climate change and greenhouse gases, as that is what will shape our environment for centuries to come.
Additionally, the "Little Ice Age" from the 1600s to 1800s was the result of more than a sunspot minimum.
A series of major volcanic eruptions helped to cool the earth during that time.
Plus there were other smaller factors that came together to give us what’s call the “Little Ice Age ”.
A reduction in solar output in the 2030s and 2040s would have an effect, but against the backdrop of continually rising greenhouse gas concentrations, it would be only a temporary drop from the warming trend.
El Niño events do exacerbate a trend in anomalously warm seasons as you can see from the attached chart from 1880-2017, but that does not change the case that greenhouse gas emissions from humans is the primary cause of the warming going on.
The rate of temperature change over the past century is simply unprecedented and points to the increases of these heat trapping gases and not tectonic plate movement.
I would also bring your attention to an attached paper from Davies and Davies (2010)which shows that the total heat flow for the planet is 47 TW +/- 2TW, which is equivalent to 0.09Wm-2.
So, if you look at the cubes figure I have attached, the volumes of the cubes are proportional to the magnitude of the energy flow from various sources.
The solar irradiance is the incident energy, averaged over the area of the Earth (divided by four);irradiance varies over 11 year cycles and, at the top of recent cycles, can reach 341.7 Wm-2.
The increase in anthropogenic forcing since pre-industrial times comes from the IPCC.
The heat flow from the Earth’s interior is the 47 TW figure from Davies and Davies (2010) averaged over the surface area.
The energy flow from the human energy production is based on the attached paper from Flanner (2009).
Tidal energy is the total energy input from the gravitational interaction between the Earth, Moon and Sun; a small part of this energy is included in the energy flow from the Earth’s interior.
The net increase in the amount of planetary energy flow arising from human activities (mainly the greenhouse effects from emissions of carbon dioxide) since the industrial revolution Is more than twenty times the steady-state heat flow from the Earth’s interior.
Any small changes in the Earth’s heat flow over that time period — and there is no evidence for any change at all — would plainly be inconsequential.
Given how small the 0.09Wm-2 contribution from the heat from the Earth's interior is is why it is not noted on the Trenberth Figure that I refer to below and have now attached.
For example, on Trenberth's figure, a line representing geothermal energy flow would have a thickness of 6 microns, the thickness of a strand of spider-web silk; ocean tidal energy, one-tenth of that; Earth tidal energy less than one-tenth even of that.
So while earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers and tides are mighty forces of nature and, in relation to a human individual, they are, when compared to the transfers of energy within the climate system, quite insignificant to merit any consideration.
As you no doubt know, the Earth’s climate has varied widely over its history, from ice ages characterized by large ice sheets covering many land areas, to warm periods with no ice at the poles.
Several factors have affected past climate change, including solar variability, volcanic activity and changes in the composition of the atmosphere.
Data from Antarctic ice cores reveals an interesting story for the past 400,000 years.
During this period, CO2 and temperatures are closely correlated, which means they rise and fall together.
However, based on Antarctic ice core data, changes in CO2 follow changes in temperatures by about 600 to 1000 years, as illustrated in the attached figure (Vostok ice core records for carbon dioxide concentration and temperature change).
This has led some to conclude that CO2 simply cannot be responsible for current global warming. However, this statement does not tell the whole story.
The initial changes in temperature during this period are explained by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which affects the amount of seasonal sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface.
In the case of warming, the lag between temperature and CO2 is explained as follows: as ocean temperatures rise, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere.
In turn, this release amplifies the warming trend, leading to yet more CO2 being released.
In other words, increasing CO2 levels become both the cause and effect of further warming.
This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation.
Additional positive feedbacks which play an important role in this process include other greenhouse gases, and changes in ice sheet cover and vegetation patterns.
If anything volcanic activity has a cooling effect on the planet given the radiation reflecting profile of the aerosols released from volcanoes.
There have been several times in Earth’s past when Earth's temperature jumped abruptly, in much the same way as they are doing today.
Those times were caused by large and rapid greenhouse gas emissions, just like humans are causing today.
Those abrupt global warming events were almost always highly destructive for life, causing mass extinctions such as at the end of the Permian, Triassic, or even mid-Cambrian periods.
The symptoms from those events (a big, rapid jump in global temperatures, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification from CO2 being absorbed in ocean waters and being converted to carbonic acid and thus turning the pH of the oceans towards the acidic side of the pH range) are all happening today with human-caused climate change.
So yes, the climate has changed before humans, and in most cases scientists know why.
In all cases we see the same association between CO2 levels and global temperatures.
And past examples of rapid carbon emissions (just like today) were generally highly destructive to life on Earth; and as I stated earlier, the rise in CO2 levels since the late1950s to today on the level of nearly 100 parts per million, would naturally take something on the range of 5,000 to 20,000 years; we have managed to do it in about 60 years.
The rate of temperature rise over such a short period time points to only one thing and that is the addition of greenhouse gases into the environment.
One could say that such change is due to the sun, although the final attachment I supplied shows a divergence in relatively low solar activity with a rise in temperature does not justify that.
The increase in CO2 concentration as you can see from the first attached graph is directly related to the increase in global temperature - and for that there is no argument in the scientific community.
CO2 may constitute a relatively small percentage of gases in the atmosphere, but frankly, its thermal properties are quite potent when it comes to holding in heat.
Without any CO2 in the atmosphere, the average annual global temperature would be closer to -18º Celsius (0º Fahrenheit) rather than the 15ºC (59º degrees F) that it is now.
The properties of CO2 and how it affects temperature actually goes back to research dating back to the 1850s and some of that is noted here.
The carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere today are ones that likely haven’t been reached in 3 million years, and frankly the linkage between carbon dioxide and rising temperatures has been realized by scientists dating back to 1856 (see https://www.climate.gov/news-features/f ... ce-pioneer), with a major paper describing this that actually dates back to the Swedish scientist 1896 Arrhenius [see https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Featu ... nius_2.php]; his estimates of the actual temperature rise with rises in CO2 may have been a bit over-estimated, but he got the basic science right.
I think that you would benefit from looking at the article at the following link at http://www.climatecentral.org/news/clim ... ears-21312.
Also, from isotopic analysis, we know quite well what is responsible for CO2 levels to have gone from a pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm) to the nearly 410 ppm of today; in fact the levels since the late 1950s have jumped from 330 ppm to the 410 ppm levels we are seeing today; and I attached a graph of that as well.
The AIRS data issue you raise is a good one, but just because the CO2 in the troposphere may not be as well mixed as thought of before, does not take away from the more important feature of CO2, which is its ability to hold in heat.
However, I think that you are attributing something to Chahine that was not what he intended, and so you may want to read his paper at https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10 ... S-87-7-911 (itis too large to attach here).
What studies have found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy as a result of studying AIRS data.
The change in outgoing radiation over CO2 bands is consistent with theoretical expectations.
Therefore, Griggs (2004) found "direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect".
This result has been confirmed by subsequent papers using the latest satellite data.
Griggs 2004 compares the 1970 and 1997 spectra with additional satellite data from the NASA AIRS satellite launched in 2003.
Chen 2007 extends this analysis to 2006 using data from the AURA satellite launched in 2004.
Both papers found the observed differences in CO2 bands matched the expected changes based on rising CO2 levels.
Thus we have empirical evidence that increased CO2 is preventing longwave radiation from escaping out to space and contributing to the heating of the planet.
As for both sides of the issue, yes, that might be the case in the popular media, but frankly from a scientific view it is not.
That humans are causing global warming is the position of the Academies of Science from 80 countries plus many scientific organizations that study climate science.
More specifically, around 95% of active climate researchers actively publishing climate papers endorse the consensus position.
There have been several studies of the literature concerning climate science and depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, it’s somewhere between 90% and 100% that agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus among publishing climate scientists; and one of those studies, Cook et al (2016) is attached here FYI.
The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming; and so as for "both sides of the debate", from a scientific standpoint, there simply are not two sides, and to teach students that would simply be wrong.
I do not believe that our children are being indoctrinated in the public school system; we should only be teaching science in science classes.
It is not my intent to get into an argument with you or to anger you, but I am simply providing you with some of the fundamental and underlying scientific basis of the science associated with global climate change which is large and diverse, and I hope that you find this to be of some assistance.
Regarding the underlying science that I have discussed in this message; there is a rather large body of well-vetted scientific information, and there is only so much one can address in an e-mail; and so I would really suggest that you dig into both the IPCC work, as well as in the attachments to this e-mail.
Our science is quite true and not political, you may believe that not to be the case, and while that is certainly your right to do, it again is just not the case.
Contrary to some popular opinion, scientists do not make things up to match some political narrative, such an effort would be drummed out of the peer review process; as someone who has peer reviewed papers, I will tell you that getting a paper published via that process is quite difficult.
The published science needs valid data, vetted methodology and analysis, and conclusions that match what is going on in a statistically significant manner.
So, while there are many blogs out there that counter what we have been saying, frankly, blogs are not science.
There are any number of blogs out there declaring what you have; unfortunately, they do not pass the scrutiny of scientific review, they tend to cherry-pick data, obfuscate the issue, and are able to do so in the comfort of not having to have their work reviewed.
Anyone who has tried to publish a scientific paper will tell you that it is a high-bar to pass.
Thanks for listening, and again, while it is not my intent to engage in any debates with you, I am happy to answer any specific follow-up questions you may have; and I hope that what I have provided you here is of some use.
I have admittedly provided you with a lot of stuff here, not to paper over things, but rather to give you an idea of why we do what we do, and while I have sent a lot of things by you, frankly, this is only a tiny sampling of the large body of climate science that is out there; hopefully this will give you a slightly better view of what we do and why we do it.
If not, well, that is fine, you are certainly entitled to your opinion, but I am just providing the facts here.
Regards.
Howard Diamond, PhD
Climate Science Program Manager at NOAA's Air Resources Laboratory
Thanks for your message.
Yes,plants do need CO2 to survive; they also need water; too much of either is not a good thing.
While it is true that CO2 is essential for growth, that does not necessarily mean that extra CO2 is better for plants, but a NASA posting at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/20 ... hurt-crops does talk about both the benefits and drawbacks of increased CO2 on crops.
More CO2 also has other effects on increased temperatures that can cause extra stress on plants, and associated changes in precipitation, either too much from warmer temperatures, or prolonged droughts can of course be quite negative for plants.
CO2 fertilization is also not the only cause of the increased plant growth — nitrogen, land cover change and climate change by way of global temperature, precipitation and sunlight changes all contribute to the greening effect.
To determine the extent of carbon dioxide’s contribution, researchers ran the data for carbon dioxide and each of the other variables in isolation through several computer models that mimic the plant growth observed in the satellite data.
Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect at 9 percent, and I can get you that paper if you like, and I have seen other papers that note that nitrogen is actually the limiting factor in plant growth and that extra CO2 actually puts more stress on vegetation
The 4th National Climate Assessment was published in November 2018 at https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/ and chapter 9 is devoted to the effects of climate change on agriculture.
I would also note that extra CO2 in the atmosphere winds up in the ocean, and this extra CO2 becomes converted into a weak carbonic acid, however weak it is, this process is leading to a change in the pH levels of the ocean and this ocean acidification could wind up having large impacts on the production of ocean ecosystems that we also depend on for food.
I understand that there are folks who believe that we are proponents of some political point of view when it comes to the science of climate change, but I have to tell you that this is simply not the case.
We are not conducting any propaganda campaign to match any political views.
A scientist would love to do nothing more than to find that they have been the one who found something that no one else has.
We at NOAA do not overstate the effects of carbon emissions on global warming - these results have been repeated over and over again in literally thousands of independent studies across the globe, not just NOAA, not just NASA, but from scientists at institutions from Australia to Japan to Europe to North and South America.
With respect to climate, it is clear to us from the work of 97-99% of climate scientists around the world that have come to very similar conclusions related to carbon emissions and global warming.
As a Government scientists me and my colleagues frankly have no incentive to come up with things that take the side of any particular political narrative.
I wish that I could report that there were no problems associated with extra CO2 in the environment and that everything was great, but that would not be science, it would be advocating something with no facts or basis in science.
The Earth has warmed and cooled naturally throughout its history.
Those fluctuations in temperatures are quite in line with fluctuations in carbon dioxide (CO2), and so as CO2 levels have risen and dropped, so has global temperature.
Going from an ice age to an interglacial period and back again, Earth's average temperature changed anywhere from 7°F to 12.5°F (4-7°C).
These fluctuations in global average temperature happened because gradual, ongoing changes in Earth’s orbital mechanics (e.g., eccentricity, obliquity, and precession) changed our planet’s tilt relative to the sun.
The gradual shift in Earth’s tilt changed where and how much sunlight fell on the Northern Hemisphere.
Thus, there was a slight increase in the amount of sunlight shining where most of our planet’s landmass is located, which was just enough to nudge our world in a warming direction.
Averaged over the entire surface of the planet, this change in radiative forcing was about 1 watt per square meter — roughly the equivalent of one little Christmas tree light bulb of sustained energy input for every square meter of Earth’s surface area.
Then, as the Earth would transition from an ice age to an interglacial, other factors (known as “climate feedbacks”) in the climate system came into play, added to, and accelerated the warming.
Based on the 800,000 year old Vostok Antarctic ice core data, changes in CO2 follow changes in temperatures by about 600 to1000 years, as illustrated in the attached figure below from Shakun et al (2012).
This has led some to conclude that CO2 cannot be responsible for current global warming.
However, this statement does not tell the whole story.
In the case of warming, the lag between temperature and CO2 is explained as follows: as ocean temperatures rise, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere.
In turn, this release amplifies the warming trend, leading to yet more CO2 being released.
In other words, increasing CO2 levels become both a contributor to and effect of further warming.
This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation.
Additional positive feedbacks which play an important role in this processinclude other greenhouse gases, and changes in ice sheet cover and vegetation patterns.
So, while the orbital cycles triggered the initial warming, overall, more than 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming occurred after increases in atmospheric CO2 levels.
In the figure below, average global temperature is depicted in blue, Antarctic temperature in red,and atmospheric CO2 concentration as the yellow dots.
Many times when people pose the proposition that you seeing if the CO2 in the atmosphere is a function of there being more people, because the respiration of more people would add more CO2 to the atmosphere.
While that is an interesting supposition, the amount of CO2 emitted by humans pales in comparison to the amount of CO2 that is released from the burning of fossil fuels.
The average human exhales about 2.3 pounds of CO2 on an average day.
The exact quantity depends on your activity level — a person engaged in vigorous exercise produces up to eight times as much CO2 as their more sedentary neighbors.
Take this number and multiply that by a population of 7 billion people, breathing away for 365.25 days per year, and you get an annual CO2 output of about 2.9 billion tons of CO2.
International CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion for 2018 topped out at about 37.1 billion tons.
So the human race breathes out about 7.8% as much as from the carbon we burn.
The human population in 2008 was about what it is now (still in the 7 billion neighborhood) and that year, CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion for 2008 topped out at about 34.7 billion tons,and so that year the respiration rate from humans was 8.4%, and so in some sense the percentage contribution of CO2 from human respiration to the global total has decreased slightly over the past 10 years.
So, yes, there is a correlation in the growth of global population and CO2, but it is not simply from the respiration of people, but more people on the planet means more CO2-generating activities such as electrical power generation, industrial activities, automobiles, airline travel, agriculture,and so on in order to support more people.
I have attached graphs of the last 400,000 years of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere; In Earth’s distant past (about 3.2M years ago).
The real impact of population growth and projections, is that more people will mean more CO2 as long as we keep burning fossil fuels; and yes, respiration is part of it, but a very small percentage.
From isotopic analysis, we know quite well that human activities (e.g., burning fossil fuels, biomass burning, cement production) are responsible for driving up CO2 from a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm to about 410 ppm today.
In fact, most of that increase in CO2 has occurred since the late 1950s.
In Earth’s distant past, it would take between 5,000 to 20,000 years to see the magnitude of change in CO2 levels that humans have caused in just the last 60 years.
Humanity’s increase in atmospheric CO2 and other heat-trapping gases produces a sustained radiative forcing of about 4 watts per square meter over Earth’s entire surface area, which is about 4 times greater than the change in radiative forcing mother nature required to nudge Earth into and out of ice ages on roughly 100,000 year cycles over the last 1-2 million years.
A 2012 study by Shakun et al. [and attached] looked at temperature changes 20,000 years ago (the last glacial-interglacial transition) from around the world and added more detail to our understanding of the CO2-temperature change relationship - so yes Milankovitch cycles are involved, but not without CO2 as the underlying cause.
Shakun et al (2012) found the following:
(1) The Earth's orbital cycles triggered warming in the Arctic approximately 19,000 years ago, causing large amounts of ice to melt, flooding the oceans with fresh water.
(2) This influx of fresh water then disrupted ocean current circulation, in turn causing a seesawing of heat between the hemispheres.
(3) The Southern Hemisphere and its oceans warmed first, starting about 18,000 years ago.
As the Southern Ocean warms,the solubility of CO2 in water falls.
This causes the oceans to give up more CO2, releasing it into the atmosphere.
So, while the orbital cycles triggered the initial warming, overall, more than 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming occurred after that atmospheric CO2 increase (again in the attached Shakun figure depicting Average global temperature in(blue), Antarctic temperature in (red), and atmospheric CO2 concentration (yellow dots).
Also, and this is noted in the very final two attachments here of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent - and this is also backed up by significant paleoclimatic data that verifies that not only was Arctic sea ice more extensive in the past but much thicker and older.
This is coupled with plots of Antarctic and Greenland land ice loss from 2002-17 based on GRACE satellite data that I have also attached; this loss of land ice is contributing to significant rises in sea level.
Later, as Earth’s orbital mechanics tilted the Northern Hemisphere away from the sun, these processes slowed and then reversed, leading our world back into ice ages.
These processes explain why Earth has warmed and cooled on roughly 100,000-year cycles for at least the last one million years.
It’s important to note that the rate of warming observed over the last 60 years — at precisely the time we’ve observed such a rapid buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere (most notably CO2) — is roughly 50 times faster than our world warmed coming out of a given ice age.
Today’s unusually rapid rate of temperature rise over such a short period of time points to only one thing: the addition of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
The relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and heating at the surface of the planet (including the ocean) is well-known, however that is only about 7% of the global heating at the surface of the planet, with the remaining 93% being observed in the oceans down to 2000 meters deep; and the data for that component can be found at https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/.[/b][/color]
As Levitus et al (2005) stated (and attached). "Based on the physical properties and mass of the world ocean as compared to other components of Earth's climate system, Rossby [1959] suggested that ocean heat content may be the dominant component of the variability of Earth's heat balance."
Updated work [Levitus et al., 2000, 2001] has confirmed Rossby's suggestion.
Warming of the world ocean due to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases was first identified in a report by Revelle etal. [1965].
The delay of atmospheric warming by increasing greenhouse gases due to initial heating of the world ocean was suggested by the National Research Council [NRC, 1979];and that 1979 paper (Charney paper) is attached here.
Here we present new yearly estimates for the 1955–2003 period for the upper 300 m and 700 m layers and pentadal (5‐year) estimates for the 1955–1959 through 1994–1998 period for the upper 3000 m of the world ocean.
The 1959 book by Rossby is far too large to send in an e-mail, but can be easily found on-line at https://math.nyu.edu/~gerber/courses/20 ... n-1959.pdf
Sunlight penetrating the surface of the oceans is responsible for warming of the surface layers.
Once heated, the ocean surface becomes warmer than the atmosphere above, and because of this heat flows from the warm ocean to the cool atmosphere above.
The rate of flow of heat out of the ocean is determined by the temperature gradient in the 'cool skin layer', which resides within the thin viscous surface layer of ocean that is in contact with the atmosphere.
It's so named because it is the interface where ocean heat is lost to the atmosphere, and therefore becomes cooler than the water immediately below.
Despite being only 0.1 to 1mm thick on average, this skin layer is the major player in the long-term warming of the oceans.
The cool skin behaves quite differently to the water below, because it is the boundary where the ocean and air meet, and therefore turbulence (the transfer of energy/heat via large-scale motion) falls away as it approaches this boundary.
No longer free to jiggle around and transfer heat via this large scale motion, water molecules in the layer are forced together and heat is only able to travel through the skin layer by way of conduction.
With conduction the steepness of the temperature gradient is critical to the rate of heat transfer.
Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, trap heat in the atmosphere and direct part of this back toward the surface.
This heat cannot penetrate into the ocean itself, but it does warm the cool skin layer, and the level of this warming ultimately controls the temperature gradient in the layer.
Increased warming of the cool skin layer (via increased greenhouse gases) lowers its temperature gradient (that is the temperature difference between the top and bottom of the layer), and this reduces the rate at which heat flows out of the ocean to the atmosphere.
One way to think about this is to compare the gradient (steepness) of a flowing river - water flows faster the steeper the river becomes, but slows as the steepness decreases.
Ocean heating is critical marker of climate change because an estimated 93% of the excess solar energy trapped by greenhouse gases accumulates in the world's oceans.
And, unlike surface temperatures, ocean temperatures are not affected by year-to-year variations caused by climate events like El Niño or volcanic eruptions.
Unfortunately, while the oceans have taken the brunt of the warming, these warming oceans have tremendous impacts on changing weather and climate patterns, and eventually, the heat stored in the oceans is going to be spilling over into atmospheric surface temperature rises; with current CO2 levels at nearly 415 parts per million, these impacts are simply going to increase; increased CO2 and other greenhouse gases such as methane are going to continue this trend.
We can also look at anomalies of the sub-surface oceanwater temperatures, and the final attachment here is an example that shows some considerable warming in the for example the western Atlantic; I have attached that vice a global plot for convenience purposes only as my files available to me at home are more limited.
So, I have attached this as an example of what we monitor on regular basis, and again, monitoring anomalies vice actual temperatures is a much more effective way of monitoring changes in temperature from a climate standpoint.
The same concept applies to the cool skin layer - warm the top of the layer and the gradient across it decreases, therefore reducing heat flowing out of the ocean.
An important point not be be glossed over here, is that changing the temperature gradient in the cool skin layer by way of greenhouse gas warming is a worldwide phenomenon.
Once the gradient has changed, all heat leaving the ocean thereafter has to negotiate its way through the layer.
With the gradient lowered, the ocean is able to steal away a little bit more from heat headed for the atmosphere.
It is in this ever-present mechanism that oceans are able to undergo long-term warming (or cooling).
Obviously it's not possible to manipulate the concentration of CO2 in the air in order to carry out real world experiments, but natural changes in cloud cover provide an opportunity to test the principle.
Under cloudy conditions, the cloud cover radiates more heat back down toward the ocean surface than happens under clear sky conditions.
So the mechanism should cause a decline in skin temperature gradients with increased cloud cover (more downward heat radiation), and there should also be a decline in the difference between cool skin layer and ocean bulk temperatures - as less heat escapes the ocean under increased atmospheric warming.
This was observed in an experiment carried out in 2004, aboard the New Zealand research ship Tangaroa.
Using instruments to simultaneously measure the 'cool skin', the ocean below, and the amount of heat (longwave radiation) reaching the ocean surface, researchers were able to confirm how greenhouse gases heat the ocean.
It should be pointed out here, that the amount of change in downward heat radiation from changes in cloud cover in the experiment, are far greater than the gradual change in warming provided by human greenhouse gas emissions, but the relationship was nevertheless established.
You can read more about this in the paper by Minnett et al(2005) that I have attached here as well.
Later, as Earth’s orbital mechanics tilted the Northern Hemisphere away from the sun, these processes slowed and then reversed, leading our world back into ice ages.
These processes explain why Earth has warmed and cooled on roughly 100,000-year cycles for at least the last one million years.
It’s important to note that the rate of warming observed over the last 60 years — at precisely the time we’ve observed such a rapid buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere (most notably CO2) — is roughly 50 times faster than our world warmed coming out of a given ice age.
Today’s unusually rapid rate of temperature rise over such a short period of time points to only one thing: the addition of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
The spike in CO2 from 1950 to today after a fairly stable level of CO2 for 800,000 years or so (as shown in the attached figure from NASA) is not a natural phenomenon; it is caused by one thing and one thing only, the burning of fossil fuels.
There is a pretty large and bona fide body of peer-reviewed scientific climate literature citations that cover a lot more than just a warming atmosphere, but involves a warming ocean, ocean acidification (even if you don't believe the CO2 involved in that is from human emission), sea level rise, sea ice receding in both the Arctic and Antarctic, the loss of land ice in Greenland and Antarctica, species migration, greater weather extremes (e.g., longer droughts, heavier rain events, longer heat waves), increases in the spread of infectious disease and invasive species, coral reef bleaching, etc.
I really would suggest that you should consult the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report at https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repo ... _FINAL.pdf; it will give you a rather detailed and very well cited report on the various aspects of climate change from a physical science perspective.
There is also some other very good information to be found on the IPCC web site at http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm.
These reports were put together by hundreds of scientists from across the world, and they base their evaluation on the entire body of climate scientific literature; there is nothing political here, it is completely based on science.
If anything, the IPCC report will give you a feel for the scale of the scientific research in this area across a diverse array of climate topics, that again, all point to the reality of the climate change science reflected on the climate.gov website.
With respect to global climate change, our work is based on a rather large and well-vetted body of peer reviewed scientific literature.
I can't go over everything here, but we are pretty comfortable with the we are doing which represents the best science that we are aware of.
We are following a well-vetted, large, and diverse body of scientific literature that has been developed since the 1820s.
The new Little Ice Age that some mention, is no doubt based on predictions of a new Maunder Minimum (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimumin) the 2030s that in some places on the Internet have said to equate to a "60% reduction in the sun’s output’" which of course would totally freeze the earth.
What is really going on is a 60% reduction in the peak of the solar (sunspot) cycle, so we are talking about less than 0.1% decrease in total solar output (not 60%) which would mean that solar output reaching the Earth would drop by 1-2 Watts per square meter — or by about 0.1% — for 2-3 decades.
This would represent a milder version of what happened during the “little ice age” in the 1600s and 1700s.
The big difference now is that there is a lot more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere than there was in the 1700s (about 40% more CO2 and more than twice the methane) which has added up to more than 2 Watts per square meter increase in the energy absorbed at the ground, compared to the 1700s.
So, if the predicted decrease in solar output was to occur, it would roughly counter some of “global warming” that we have seen since the mid-20th century, for 20-30 years or so.
But it would be a temporary respite at best and would not take away from the urgency of action on climate change and greenhouse gases, as that is what will shape our environment for centuries to come.
Additionally, the "Little Ice Age" from the 1600s to 1800s was the result of more than a sunspot minimum.
A series of major volcanic eruptions helped to cool the earth during that time.
Plus there were other smaller factors that came together to give us what’s call the “Little Ice Age ”.
A reduction in solar output in the 2030s and 2040s would have an effect, but against the backdrop of continually rising greenhouse gas concentrations, it would be only a temporary drop from the warming trend.
El Niño events do exacerbate a trend in anomalously warm seasons as you can see from the attached chart from 1880-2017, but that does not change the case that greenhouse gas emissions from humans is the primary cause of the warming going on.
The rate of temperature change over the past century is simply unprecedented and points to the increases of these heat trapping gases and not tectonic plate movement.
I would also bring your attention to an attached paper from Davies and Davies (2010)which shows that the total heat flow for the planet is 47 TW +/- 2TW, which is equivalent to 0.09Wm-2.
So, if you look at the cubes figure I have attached, the volumes of the cubes are proportional to the magnitude of the energy flow from various sources.
The solar irradiance is the incident energy, averaged over the area of the Earth (divided by four);irradiance varies over 11 year cycles and, at the top of recent cycles, can reach 341.7 Wm-2.
The increase in anthropogenic forcing since pre-industrial times comes from the IPCC.
The heat flow from the Earth’s interior is the 47 TW figure from Davies and Davies (2010) averaged over the surface area.
The energy flow from the human energy production is based on the attached paper from Flanner (2009).
Tidal energy is the total energy input from the gravitational interaction between the Earth, Moon and Sun; a small part of this energy is included in the energy flow from the Earth’s interior.
The net increase in the amount of planetary energy flow arising from human activities (mainly the greenhouse effects from emissions of carbon dioxide) since the industrial revolution Is more than twenty times the steady-state heat flow from the Earth’s interior.
Any small changes in the Earth’s heat flow over that time period — and there is no evidence for any change at all — would plainly be inconsequential.
Given how small the 0.09Wm-2 contribution from the heat from the Earth's interior is is why it is not noted on the Trenberth Figure that I refer to below and have now attached.
For example, on Trenberth's figure, a line representing geothermal energy flow would have a thickness of 6 microns, the thickness of a strand of spider-web silk; ocean tidal energy, one-tenth of that; Earth tidal energy less than one-tenth even of that.
So while earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers and tides are mighty forces of nature and, in relation to a human individual, they are, when compared to the transfers of energy within the climate system, quite insignificant to merit any consideration.
As you no doubt know, the Earth’s climate has varied widely over its history, from ice ages characterized by large ice sheets covering many land areas, to warm periods with no ice at the poles.
Several factors have affected past climate change, including solar variability, volcanic activity and changes in the composition of the atmosphere.
Data from Antarctic ice cores reveals an interesting story for the past 400,000 years.
During this period, CO2 and temperatures are closely correlated, which means they rise and fall together.
However, based on Antarctic ice core data, changes in CO2 follow changes in temperatures by about 600 to 1000 years, as illustrated in the attached figure (Vostok ice core records for carbon dioxide concentration and temperature change).
This has led some to conclude that CO2 simply cannot be responsible for current global warming. However, this statement does not tell the whole story.
The initial changes in temperature during this period are explained by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which affects the amount of seasonal sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface.
In the case of warming, the lag between temperature and CO2 is explained as follows: as ocean temperatures rise, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere.
In turn, this release amplifies the warming trend, leading to yet more CO2 being released.
In other words, increasing CO2 levels become both the cause and effect of further warming.
This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation.
Additional positive feedbacks which play an important role in this process include other greenhouse gases, and changes in ice sheet cover and vegetation patterns.
If anything volcanic activity has a cooling effect on the planet given the radiation reflecting profile of the aerosols released from volcanoes.
There have been several times in Earth’s past when Earth's temperature jumped abruptly, in much the same way as they are doing today.
Those times were caused by large and rapid greenhouse gas emissions, just like humans are causing today.
Those abrupt global warming events were almost always highly destructive for life, causing mass extinctions such as at the end of the Permian, Triassic, or even mid-Cambrian periods.
The symptoms from those events (a big, rapid jump in global temperatures, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification from CO2 being absorbed in ocean waters and being converted to carbonic acid and thus turning the pH of the oceans towards the acidic side of the pH range) are all happening today with human-caused climate change.
So yes, the climate has changed before humans, and in most cases scientists know why.
In all cases we see the same association between CO2 levels and global temperatures.
And past examples of rapid carbon emissions (just like today) were generally highly destructive to life on Earth; and as I stated earlier, the rise in CO2 levels since the late1950s to today on the level of nearly 100 parts per million, would naturally take something on the range of 5,000 to 20,000 years; we have managed to do it in about 60 years.
The rate of temperature rise over such a short period time points to only one thing and that is the addition of greenhouse gases into the environment.
One could say that such change is due to the sun, although the final attachment I supplied shows a divergence in relatively low solar activity with a rise in temperature does not justify that.
The increase in CO2 concentration as you can see from the first attached graph is directly related to the increase in global temperature - and for that there is no argument in the scientific community.
CO2 may constitute a relatively small percentage of gases in the atmosphere, but frankly, its thermal properties are quite potent when it comes to holding in heat.
Without any CO2 in the atmosphere, the average annual global temperature would be closer to -18º Celsius (0º Fahrenheit) rather than the 15ºC (59º degrees F) that it is now.
The properties of CO2 and how it affects temperature actually goes back to research dating back to the 1850s and some of that is noted here.
The carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere today are ones that likely haven’t been reached in 3 million years, and frankly the linkage between carbon dioxide and rising temperatures has been realized by scientists dating back to 1856 (see https://www.climate.gov/news-features/f ... ce-pioneer), with a major paper describing this that actually dates back to the Swedish scientist 1896 Arrhenius [see https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Featu ... nius_2.php]; his estimates of the actual temperature rise with rises in CO2 may have been a bit over-estimated, but he got the basic science right.
I think that you would benefit from looking at the article at the following link at http://www.climatecentral.org/news/clim ... ears-21312.
Also, from isotopic analysis, we know quite well what is responsible for CO2 levels to have gone from a pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm) to the nearly 410 ppm of today; in fact the levels since the late 1950s have jumped from 330 ppm to the 410 ppm levels we are seeing today; and I attached a graph of that as well.
The AIRS data issue you raise is a good one, but just because the CO2 in the troposphere may not be as well mixed as thought of before, does not take away from the more important feature of CO2, which is its ability to hold in heat.
However, I think that you are attributing something to Chahine that was not what he intended, and so you may want to read his paper at https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10 ... S-87-7-911 (itis too large to attach here).
What studies have found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy as a result of studying AIRS data.
The change in outgoing radiation over CO2 bands is consistent with theoretical expectations.
Therefore, Griggs (2004) found "direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect".
This result has been confirmed by subsequent papers using the latest satellite data.
Griggs 2004 compares the 1970 and 1997 spectra with additional satellite data from the NASA AIRS satellite launched in 2003.
Chen 2007 extends this analysis to 2006 using data from the AURA satellite launched in 2004.
Both papers found the observed differences in CO2 bands matched the expected changes based on rising CO2 levels.
Thus we have empirical evidence that increased CO2 is preventing longwave radiation from escaping out to space and contributing to the heating of the planet.
As for both sides of the issue, yes, that might be the case in the popular media, but frankly from a scientific view it is not.
That humans are causing global warming is the position of the Academies of Science from 80 countries plus many scientific organizations that study climate science.
More specifically, around 95% of active climate researchers actively publishing climate papers endorse the consensus position.
There have been several studies of the literature concerning climate science and depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, it’s somewhere between 90% and 100% that agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus among publishing climate scientists; and one of those studies, Cook et al (2016) is attached here FYI.
The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming; and so as for "both sides of the debate", from a scientific standpoint, there simply are not two sides, and to teach students that would simply be wrong.
I do not believe that our children are being indoctrinated in the public school system; we should only be teaching science in science classes.
It is not my intent to get into an argument with you or to anger you, but I am simply providing you with some of the fundamental and underlying scientific basis of the science associated with global climate change which is large and diverse, and I hope that you find this to be of some assistance.
Regarding the underlying science that I have discussed in this message; there is a rather large body of well-vetted scientific information, and there is only so much one can address in an e-mail; and so I would really suggest that you dig into both the IPCC work, as well as in the attachments to this e-mail.
Our science is quite true and not political, you may believe that not to be the case, and while that is certainly your right to do, it again is just not the case.
Contrary to some popular opinion, scientists do not make things up to match some political narrative, such an effort would be drummed out of the peer review process; as someone who has peer reviewed papers, I will tell you that getting a paper published via that process is quite difficult.
The published science needs valid data, vetted methodology and analysis, and conclusions that match what is going on in a statistically significant manner.
So, while there are many blogs out there that counter what we have been saying, frankly, blogs are not science.
There are any number of blogs out there declaring what you have; unfortunately, they do not pass the scrutiny of scientific review, they tend to cherry-pick data, obfuscate the issue, and are able to do so in the comfort of not having to have their work reviewed.
Anyone who has tried to publish a scientific paper will tell you that it is a high-bar to pass.
Thanks for listening, and again, while it is not my intent to engage in any debates with you, I am happy to answer any specific follow-up questions you may have; and I hope that what I have provided you here is of some use.
I have admittedly provided you with a lot of stuff here, not to paper over things, but rather to give you an idea of why we do what we do, and while I have sent a lot of things by you, frankly, this is only a tiny sampling of the large body of climate science that is out there; hopefully this will give you a slightly better view of what we do and why we do it.
If not, well, that is fine, you are certainly entitled to your opinion, but I am just providing the facts here.
Regards.
Howard Diamond, PhD
Climate Science Program Manager at NOAA's Air Resources Laboratory
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
thelivyjr wrote: And the real question of people's mind today is this what our climate change policy in America should be based on:
Climate activist Greta Thunberg addresses the UN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULmk8mhiClI
Your thoughts on her science, which I understand is the real deal science, would be appreciated.
Hi Livyjr,
Unfortunately, I do not make policy, nor am I in a position to comment on US Government policy.
I just focus on the science and provide the best most objective information on climate science that I can.
It is then up to policymakers and citizens to make societal decisions what to do with this information.
I frankly do not know a whole lot about Greta Thunberg other than what I see on the nightly news, but my understanding from her is that she does not have her own science, but I have heard her say recently, "listen to the scientists".
So, if that is her view, then I would say my thoughts are, yes, sounds good to me.
I hope that I am one of those scientists that people will listen to.
I believe that I have provided you with the "real deal" science here, but then it is up to you to decide if this meets with your own cognitive thoughts on the issue.
Some people simply cannot get past the idea that CO2 is doing all of this, and that is fine, I can only do so much; again, people will have to decide, much as they do with other science issues like vaccinations, flat earth information, and evolution.
I do what I can on climate.
Hope that helps.
Regards.
Howard
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
Hi Livyjr,
Well, there is only so much I can address in an e-mail.
As for water vapor, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere exists in direct relation to the temperature.
If you increase the temperature, more water from the oceans evaporates and becomes vapor.
So when something else causes a temperature increase (such as extra CO2 from fossil fuels), more water evaporates.
Then, since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, this additional water vapor causes the temperature to go up even further — a positive feedback.
Studies show that water vapor feedback roughly doubles the amount of warming caused by CO2. So if there is a 1°C change caused by CO2, the water vapor will cause the temperature to go up another 1°C.
When other feedback loops are included, the total warming from a potential 1°C change caused by CO2 is, in reality, as much as 3°C.
The other factor to consider is that water is evaporated from the land and sea and falls as rain or snow all the time.
Thus the amount held in the atmosphere as water vapor varies greatly in just hours and days as result of the prevailing weather in any location.
So even though water vapor is the greatest greenhouse gas, it is relatively short-lived.
On the other hand, CO2 is removed from the air by natural geological-scale processes and these take a long time to work.
Consequently CO2 stays in our atmosphere for years and even centuries.
A small additional amount has a much more long-term effect.
So, we're really not ignoring water vapor, but what we're trying to show is the man-made aspects of greenhouse gas emissions, and as you yourself note, water vapor produced by man is trivial compared with what nature produces, and the first attached depicts the influence of all major human-produced greenhouse gases.
There is plenty of well-vetted climate science research out there that does not ignore the role of water vapor, and again neither do we at NOAA.
In particular, Chapters 2 and 8 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report very much factors in water vapor; see
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repo ... _FINAL.pdf
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repo ... _FINAL.pdf
Finally, I would point you to a paper by Donat et al (2016) that is attached.
Yes, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, causing more rainfall, and yes, there are hot and dry areas, as well as hot and wet areas; and what Donat and his colleagues found was that precipitation extremes are increasing in both the dry and the wet regions, and precipitation totals are also increasing in the dry regions, and the research indicated that more rainfall could be expected in areas such as Central Australia, California, Central Asia, the Sinai Desert, and southern Africa; and on average over those three dry regions combining parts of Sahara, the dry parts of North America and also the Australian deserts, we can in fact expect more extreme rain events.
Wang et al (2017) and also attached very specifically documents that warming-induced hydrological changes that lead to definitive and detectable changes is the increase of precipitation intensity; again, more water vapor that is held in warmer air is leading to larger rainfall events.
Hope that helps.
Regards.
Howard
Well, there is only so much I can address in an e-mail.
As for water vapor, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere exists in direct relation to the temperature.
If you increase the temperature, more water from the oceans evaporates and becomes vapor.
So when something else causes a temperature increase (such as extra CO2 from fossil fuels), more water evaporates.
Then, since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, this additional water vapor causes the temperature to go up even further — a positive feedback.
Studies show that water vapor feedback roughly doubles the amount of warming caused by CO2. So if there is a 1°C change caused by CO2, the water vapor will cause the temperature to go up another 1°C.
When other feedback loops are included, the total warming from a potential 1°C change caused by CO2 is, in reality, as much as 3°C.
The other factor to consider is that water is evaporated from the land and sea and falls as rain or snow all the time.
Thus the amount held in the atmosphere as water vapor varies greatly in just hours and days as result of the prevailing weather in any location.
So even though water vapor is the greatest greenhouse gas, it is relatively short-lived.
On the other hand, CO2 is removed from the air by natural geological-scale processes and these take a long time to work.
Consequently CO2 stays in our atmosphere for years and even centuries.
A small additional amount has a much more long-term effect.
So, we're really not ignoring water vapor, but what we're trying to show is the man-made aspects of greenhouse gas emissions, and as you yourself note, water vapor produced by man is trivial compared with what nature produces, and the first attached depicts the influence of all major human-produced greenhouse gases.
There is plenty of well-vetted climate science research out there that does not ignore the role of water vapor, and again neither do we at NOAA.
In particular, Chapters 2 and 8 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report very much factors in water vapor; see
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repo ... _FINAL.pdf
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repo ... _FINAL.pdf
Finally, I would point you to a paper by Donat et al (2016) that is attached.
Yes, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, causing more rainfall, and yes, there are hot and dry areas, as well as hot and wet areas; and what Donat and his colleagues found was that precipitation extremes are increasing in both the dry and the wet regions, and precipitation totals are also increasing in the dry regions, and the research indicated that more rainfall could be expected in areas such as Central Australia, California, Central Asia, the Sinai Desert, and southern Africa; and on average over those three dry regions combining parts of Sahara, the dry parts of North America and also the Australian deserts, we can in fact expect more extreme rain events.
Wang et al (2017) and also attached very specifically documents that warming-induced hydrological changes that lead to definitive and detectable changes is the increase of precipitation intensity; again, more water vapor that is held in warmer air is leading to larger rainfall events.
Hope that helps.
Regards.
Howard
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
A tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year and can sequester 1 ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old.
https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/trees ... eefact.htm
https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/trees ... eefact.htm
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
ACTUALLY, THE CHILDREN CAN STRIKE TIL THE COWS COME HOME, FOR ANYONE CARES …
IF THEY DON'T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL, THAT IS FINE, TOO …
LET THEM STAY IGNORANT ...
USA TODAY
"Climate strike: Students protest in San Francisco, Chicago, New York"
Doug Stanglin, Grace Hauck and Janet Wilson, USA TODAY
21 SEPTEMBER 2019
NEW YORK – A boisterous crowd of at least 200,000 people turned out to chant and march in Manhattan on Friday, joining hundreds of thousands - possibly millions - of protesters from Australia to Thailand to London in Global Climate Strike rallies.
While supporters of all ages turned out, the day was billed as a walkout by high school students to call on world leaders to step up their efforts against climate change, carbon emissions and other environmental issues.
Greta Thunberg, the noted 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist whose efforts have been raising environmental consciousness around the globe, spoke to a crowd of tens of thousands in New York City's Battery Park.
"Around the world today about 4 million people have been striking," Thunberg said.
"This is the biggest climate strike ever in history and we all should be so proud of ourselves because we have done this together."
New York City schools excused the city's 1.1 million students from class to participate.
"Climate change is worse than homework," read one homemade sign among the crowd marching from Foley Square to City Hall, and another said, "Stop denying the Earth is frying."
At one point, the crowd, gathered on a breezy, sunny afternoon outside federal courthouses, chanted: “That’s bulls--t, get off it, our planet’s not for profit!”
"We are not in school today, and we have some adults who are not at work today either," Thunberg told the crowd.
"And why?"
"Because this is an emergency."
"Our house is on fire."
Katie Elder, 19, from Milwaukee, was in New York, where she is taking two gap years between high school and college to work for Future Coalition, a network of youth organizations.
She called the turnout "amazing" that was turning into a "really, really powerful day."
Pig-tailed, nine- year-old Sophia of Queens, New York, who was carrying a hand-drawn "We speak for the trees" sign, said she'd begged her mother to let her skip school: "Mommy, can we pleeeease go to the climate march?"
She said she already bugs her not to use plastic plates or forks, and her mom agreed they could go together, along with her sister.
The global protests were timed to begin a week of activism at the United Nations, including a Youth Climate Summit on Saturday and a U.N. Climate Action Summit on Monday.
A second worldwide walkout called Earth Strike is planned for Sept. 27.
In Washington, D.C., several thousand young people marched to the Capitol building carrying signs reading “There is no Planet B” and “This can’t wait until I finish high school.”
“Basically our Earth is dying and if we don’t do something about it, we die,” said A.J. Conermann, a 15-year-old sophomore.
“I want to grow up."
"I want to have a future.”
And in Chicago, crowds grew as the young people led the march through the streets to Federal Plaza.
At the front of the marches stood Isabella Johnson, who told USA TODAY that her goal is to pressure politicians to combat the climate crisis, particularly by passing a proposed bill in the Illinois legislation for a Clean Energy Jobs Act.
"I want this country's leaders to realize that the youth will not back down, we will strike and strike and strike until they take action," she said.
"And if they refuse to take action that would ensure my generation a healthy future, then we will vote them out of office first chance we get."
Protests around the world
As rallies began in the Pacific at sunrise and circled the globe, organizers estimated that more than 300,000 demonstrators turned out on Australian streets, including Australia's largest city, Sydney, and the capital, Canberra.
The demonstrators called on Australia, which is the world’s largest exporter of coal and liquid natural gas, to take more drastic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Australia’s acting prime minister, however, called such climate rallies “just a disruption” that should have been held on a weekend to avoid inconveniencing communities.
Organizers said protesters would be turning out in 156 countries from such disparate locations as Nepal, Senegal, Quebec, Rome, Kyrgyzstan, Sweden, Bolivia and Peru:
• In New Delhi, one of the world’s most polluted cities, dozens of students and environmental activists chanted “We want climate action” and “I want to breathe clean” at a rally outside the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
• In Bangkok, hundreds of people marched in Thailand’s capital and staged a “die-in” outside the Ministry of Natural Resources to demand the government declare a climate emergency, ban coal energy by 2025 and completely replace fossil fuel energy with renewable energy by 2040.
• In Poland, which is heavily reliant on coal, thousands of students turned out to demand more efforts to fight global warning.
To mark the day, Poland’s president Andrzej Duda and first lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda helped remove trash from a forest.
• In Prague, protesters gathered in the Czech Republic's downtown Old Town Square, waving numerous banners that read “More love, less coal,” “Science, not silence,” or “Why should we go to universities when they don’t listen to the educated?” before marching through the city.
• In Kabul, the capital of war-ravaged Afghanistan, a young generation, worried that if war doesn’t kill them climate change will, took part in the global climate strike.
About 100 young people, with several women in the front carrying a banner emblazoned with “Fridays for future", marched through central Kabul.
They followed behind an armored personnel carrier deployed for their protection.
• In Antarctica, a group of nine researchers took part in the protest, despite being thousands of miles away in the snowy tundra.
Kim Bernard, an ecologist and biological oceanographer, shared a photo on Twitter.
"It's time to rise before it's too late."
"We support you, climate strikers," Bernard wrote.
"With love and hope from Antarctica."
•Thousands of school students and adults gathered outside the British Parliament in London to demand “climate justice.”
There were also rallies in U.K. cities including Birmingham, Glasgow and Belfast.
Some demonstrators held home-made placards with slogans including “Don’t be a fossil fool.”
The British government said it endorsed the protesters’ message, but didn’t condone skipping school.
More around the US
In Chicago, ahead of the main march, several labor groups rallied outside Amazon's downtown offices in support of Amazon workers who planned to walk off the job to demand Amazon take action against climate change.
Employees at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle also planned to walk out Friday.
Dozens of protesters, led by Warehouse Workers For Justice and Sunrise Movement Chicago, held signs and chanted “Fossil fuels have got to go” and “Amazon’s a big polluter, do your part to save our future.”
They also planned to join the city’s larger climate strike.
The protest, which was planned days ago, comes one day after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a new plan for the company to tackle climate change.
Though billed as a walkout, many public schools backed the effort as a civic exercise and learning exercise.
Chicago Public Schools said it sought to "respect and support our students’ desire to voice their opinions and participate in the wider conversations taking place about important social issues."
CPS allowed students to join the march but said they would receive an unexcused absence if they didn’t return to class afterward, according to a letter sent to principals earlier this week.
Payton Strobel stood on the steps of the Iowa State Capitol late Friday morning looking out at a tie-dyed sea of climate activism.
Strobel, a 14-year-old-freshman at Waukee Prarieview School, wore a black T-shirt as she held a microphone and summarized the feelings of student climate activists in the crowd.
"Our generation is the last, best hope," Strobel said.
More than 200 scientists from 38 Iowa colleges and universities signed a report released Thursday that said Iowa will have more than 67 calendar days per year above 90 degrees by 2050, compared with 23 days in recent decades.
Isabella Cook of West Des Moines told the crowd that strong thunder and lightning from a recent thunderstorm roused her into climate activism.
Like others, Cook wants businesses and politicians to find alternatives to plastic waste that harms the environment.
"We will declare a future for ourselves," Cook told the crowd.
On the steps of the Tennessee state Capitol, Nick Clancy, 17, said climate change should be a top priority due to the issues it is causing.
He said mass immigrations, water shortages and other world events should be top of mind.
But he also looked toward what happens next.
"This is for everybody," said Clancy, a University School of Nashville student.
"If we can solve climate change or dampen the effects then it will go toward solving other problems."
In the middle of the school day, 70 high schoolers in Greenville, South Carolina carried hand-painted signs as they walked down Main Street to City Hall.
"People still think that it’s a generation or two down the road, but no, this is just happening now," said Wylder Voegele, a 17-year-old student.
"It’s scary."
Elsewhere in the U.S., individual strikes were being organized by young people in their own towns and cities, similar to last year's national school walkouts aimed at combating gun violence.
In San Francisco, organizers said their march would start at the local office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who represents the area.
It’s not just students who are protesting.
Susan Sattell, 59, a mother and member of participating organization Extinction Rebellion, planned to strike Friday.
She said she joined the group after reading a United Nations report on species extinction this past May.
“I overheard my daughter Emily and her friend talking about the report."
"They were counting, and her friend said ‘Wow, we’ll be 24 when extinction starts.’"
"And my daughter said, ‘that’s pretty old, but I want to live longer than that,’” Sattell said.
Inspired by Greta Thunberg
The face of the worldwide effort is Thunberg, who came to New York on a solar-powered sailboat to attend the strike in New York City and then the summit.
While Thunberg is not the organizer, she is a major motivating force.
She gave the global movement a push starting in August 2018 when she began skipping school on Fridays to stand outside the Swedish parliament holding a sign protesting inaction on climate change.
She has also met with Pope Francis who, she said, expressed support for the climate protests and has addressed the European Parliament.
In a worldwide walkout in March, Thunberg said over 1 million people took part in 125 countries, citing numbers from climate action group 350.org.
Thunberg was in Washington to demonstrate in front of the White House and to testify before Congress.
She also grabbed a meeting with former president Barack Obama, who ended the session with a fist bump.
Thunberg told the Associated Press on Friday that the large turnout worldwide was "a victory."
“I would never have predicted or believed that this was going to happen someday and so fast,” she said.
Thunberg added that it was now up to world leaders to take action.
She said if they don’t, they should “feel ashamed.”
After speaking, Thunberg bustled to the New York City subway, surrounded by volunteer students protecting her as she took the stairs down to the Red line trains.
Teens shrieked like they were seeing a rock star.
“She’s so amazing!"
"I saw that little pink dress and I couldnt believe it was her!"
"Greta!"
"No one’s ever taking the escalator again!” said Jackson Dean of Palm Springs, a freshman theater Student at New York University.
Contributing: Morgan Hines in New York; Lucas Grundmeier in Iowa; Jason Gonzales in Tennessee; Zoe Nicholson in South Carolina.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Climate strike: Students protest in San Francisco, Chicago, New York
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/climat ... id=HPDHP17
IF THEY DON'T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL, THAT IS FINE, TOO …
LET THEM STAY IGNORANT ...
USA TODAY
"Climate strike: Students protest in San Francisco, Chicago, New York"
Doug Stanglin, Grace Hauck and Janet Wilson, USA TODAY
21 SEPTEMBER 2019
NEW YORK – A boisterous crowd of at least 200,000 people turned out to chant and march in Manhattan on Friday, joining hundreds of thousands - possibly millions - of protesters from Australia to Thailand to London in Global Climate Strike rallies.
While supporters of all ages turned out, the day was billed as a walkout by high school students to call on world leaders to step up their efforts against climate change, carbon emissions and other environmental issues.
Greta Thunberg, the noted 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist whose efforts have been raising environmental consciousness around the globe, spoke to a crowd of tens of thousands in New York City's Battery Park.
"Around the world today about 4 million people have been striking," Thunberg said.
"This is the biggest climate strike ever in history and we all should be so proud of ourselves because we have done this together."
New York City schools excused the city's 1.1 million students from class to participate.
"Climate change is worse than homework," read one homemade sign among the crowd marching from Foley Square to City Hall, and another said, "Stop denying the Earth is frying."
At one point, the crowd, gathered on a breezy, sunny afternoon outside federal courthouses, chanted: “That’s bulls--t, get off it, our planet’s not for profit!”
"We are not in school today, and we have some adults who are not at work today either," Thunberg told the crowd.
"And why?"
"Because this is an emergency."
"Our house is on fire."
Katie Elder, 19, from Milwaukee, was in New York, where she is taking two gap years between high school and college to work for Future Coalition, a network of youth organizations.
She called the turnout "amazing" that was turning into a "really, really powerful day."
Pig-tailed, nine- year-old Sophia of Queens, New York, who was carrying a hand-drawn "We speak for the trees" sign, said she'd begged her mother to let her skip school: "Mommy, can we pleeeease go to the climate march?"
She said she already bugs her not to use plastic plates or forks, and her mom agreed they could go together, along with her sister.
The global protests were timed to begin a week of activism at the United Nations, including a Youth Climate Summit on Saturday and a U.N. Climate Action Summit on Monday.
A second worldwide walkout called Earth Strike is planned for Sept. 27.
In Washington, D.C., several thousand young people marched to the Capitol building carrying signs reading “There is no Planet B” and “This can’t wait until I finish high school.”
“Basically our Earth is dying and if we don’t do something about it, we die,” said A.J. Conermann, a 15-year-old sophomore.
“I want to grow up."
"I want to have a future.”
And in Chicago, crowds grew as the young people led the march through the streets to Federal Plaza.
At the front of the marches stood Isabella Johnson, who told USA TODAY that her goal is to pressure politicians to combat the climate crisis, particularly by passing a proposed bill in the Illinois legislation for a Clean Energy Jobs Act.
"I want this country's leaders to realize that the youth will not back down, we will strike and strike and strike until they take action," she said.
"And if they refuse to take action that would ensure my generation a healthy future, then we will vote them out of office first chance we get."
Protests around the world
As rallies began in the Pacific at sunrise and circled the globe, organizers estimated that more than 300,000 demonstrators turned out on Australian streets, including Australia's largest city, Sydney, and the capital, Canberra.
The demonstrators called on Australia, which is the world’s largest exporter of coal and liquid natural gas, to take more drastic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Australia’s acting prime minister, however, called such climate rallies “just a disruption” that should have been held on a weekend to avoid inconveniencing communities.
Organizers said protesters would be turning out in 156 countries from such disparate locations as Nepal, Senegal, Quebec, Rome, Kyrgyzstan, Sweden, Bolivia and Peru:
• In New Delhi, one of the world’s most polluted cities, dozens of students and environmental activists chanted “We want climate action” and “I want to breathe clean” at a rally outside the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
• In Bangkok, hundreds of people marched in Thailand’s capital and staged a “die-in” outside the Ministry of Natural Resources to demand the government declare a climate emergency, ban coal energy by 2025 and completely replace fossil fuel energy with renewable energy by 2040.
• In Poland, which is heavily reliant on coal, thousands of students turned out to demand more efforts to fight global warning.
To mark the day, Poland’s president Andrzej Duda and first lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda helped remove trash from a forest.
• In Prague, protesters gathered in the Czech Republic's downtown Old Town Square, waving numerous banners that read “More love, less coal,” “Science, not silence,” or “Why should we go to universities when they don’t listen to the educated?” before marching through the city.
• In Kabul, the capital of war-ravaged Afghanistan, a young generation, worried that if war doesn’t kill them climate change will, took part in the global climate strike.
About 100 young people, with several women in the front carrying a banner emblazoned with “Fridays for future", marched through central Kabul.
They followed behind an armored personnel carrier deployed for their protection.
• In Antarctica, a group of nine researchers took part in the protest, despite being thousands of miles away in the snowy tundra.
Kim Bernard, an ecologist and biological oceanographer, shared a photo on Twitter.
"It's time to rise before it's too late."
"We support you, climate strikers," Bernard wrote.
"With love and hope from Antarctica."
•Thousands of school students and adults gathered outside the British Parliament in London to demand “climate justice.”
There were also rallies in U.K. cities including Birmingham, Glasgow and Belfast.
Some demonstrators held home-made placards with slogans including “Don’t be a fossil fool.”
The British government said it endorsed the protesters’ message, but didn’t condone skipping school.
More around the US
In Chicago, ahead of the main march, several labor groups rallied outside Amazon's downtown offices in support of Amazon workers who planned to walk off the job to demand Amazon take action against climate change.
Employees at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle also planned to walk out Friday.
Dozens of protesters, led by Warehouse Workers For Justice and Sunrise Movement Chicago, held signs and chanted “Fossil fuels have got to go” and “Amazon’s a big polluter, do your part to save our future.”
They also planned to join the city’s larger climate strike.
The protest, which was planned days ago, comes one day after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a new plan for the company to tackle climate change.
Though billed as a walkout, many public schools backed the effort as a civic exercise and learning exercise.
Chicago Public Schools said it sought to "respect and support our students’ desire to voice their opinions and participate in the wider conversations taking place about important social issues."
CPS allowed students to join the march but said they would receive an unexcused absence if they didn’t return to class afterward, according to a letter sent to principals earlier this week.
Payton Strobel stood on the steps of the Iowa State Capitol late Friday morning looking out at a tie-dyed sea of climate activism.
Strobel, a 14-year-old-freshman at Waukee Prarieview School, wore a black T-shirt as she held a microphone and summarized the feelings of student climate activists in the crowd.
"Our generation is the last, best hope," Strobel said.
More than 200 scientists from 38 Iowa colleges and universities signed a report released Thursday that said Iowa will have more than 67 calendar days per year above 90 degrees by 2050, compared with 23 days in recent decades.
Isabella Cook of West Des Moines told the crowd that strong thunder and lightning from a recent thunderstorm roused her into climate activism.
Like others, Cook wants businesses and politicians to find alternatives to plastic waste that harms the environment.
"We will declare a future for ourselves," Cook told the crowd.
On the steps of the Tennessee state Capitol, Nick Clancy, 17, said climate change should be a top priority due to the issues it is causing.
He said mass immigrations, water shortages and other world events should be top of mind.
But he also looked toward what happens next.
"This is for everybody," said Clancy, a University School of Nashville student.
"If we can solve climate change or dampen the effects then it will go toward solving other problems."
In the middle of the school day, 70 high schoolers in Greenville, South Carolina carried hand-painted signs as they walked down Main Street to City Hall.
"People still think that it’s a generation or two down the road, but no, this is just happening now," said Wylder Voegele, a 17-year-old student.
"It’s scary."
Elsewhere in the U.S., individual strikes were being organized by young people in their own towns and cities, similar to last year's national school walkouts aimed at combating gun violence.
In San Francisco, organizers said their march would start at the local office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who represents the area.
It’s not just students who are protesting.
Susan Sattell, 59, a mother and member of participating organization Extinction Rebellion, planned to strike Friday.
She said she joined the group after reading a United Nations report on species extinction this past May.
“I overheard my daughter Emily and her friend talking about the report."
"They were counting, and her friend said ‘Wow, we’ll be 24 when extinction starts.’"
"And my daughter said, ‘that’s pretty old, but I want to live longer than that,’” Sattell said.
Inspired by Greta Thunberg
The face of the worldwide effort is Thunberg, who came to New York on a solar-powered sailboat to attend the strike in New York City and then the summit.
While Thunberg is not the organizer, she is a major motivating force.
She gave the global movement a push starting in August 2018 when she began skipping school on Fridays to stand outside the Swedish parliament holding a sign protesting inaction on climate change.
She has also met with Pope Francis who, she said, expressed support for the climate protests and has addressed the European Parliament.
In a worldwide walkout in March, Thunberg said over 1 million people took part in 125 countries, citing numbers from climate action group 350.org.
Thunberg was in Washington to demonstrate in front of the White House and to testify before Congress.
She also grabbed a meeting with former president Barack Obama, who ended the session with a fist bump.
Thunberg told the Associated Press on Friday that the large turnout worldwide was "a victory."
“I would never have predicted or believed that this was going to happen someday and so fast,” she said.
Thunberg added that it was now up to world leaders to take action.
She said if they don’t, they should “feel ashamed.”
After speaking, Thunberg bustled to the New York City subway, surrounded by volunteer students protecting her as she took the stairs down to the Red line trains.
Teens shrieked like they were seeing a rock star.
“She’s so amazing!"
"I saw that little pink dress and I couldnt believe it was her!"
"Greta!"
"No one’s ever taking the escalator again!” said Jackson Dean of Palm Springs, a freshman theater Student at New York University.
Contributing: Morgan Hines in New York; Lucas Grundmeier in Iowa; Jason Gonzales in Tennessee; Zoe Nicholson in South Carolina.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Climate strike: Students protest in San Francisco, Chicago, New York
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/climat ... id=HPDHP17
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
24 SEPTEMBER 2019
TO: Howard Diamond, PhD, Climate Science Program Manager at NOAA's Air Resources Laboratory
RE: Panic and hysteria caused by the Climate Science Report
Dear Dr. Diamond:
First let me introduce myself as a licensed professional engineer with a graduate degree in engineering who was inducted into Sigma Xi back in 1975, and who subsequently became qualified as an associate level public health engineer in New York state, where a licensed professional engineer is one who performs professional service wherein the safeguarding of life, health and property is concerned, when such service or work requires the application of engineering principles and data, and a public health engineer is a person who applies engineering principles for the detection, evaluation, control and management of those factors in the environment which influence the public's health.
My reason for contacting you is that we, all the people in the United States of America have a very serious problem confronting us as a people and as a nation, and that problem is the panic and hysteria being caused by the release to our United States Congress of a so-called "scientific document" on climate science which was handed to our Congress, not by an adult, not by a scientist, whatever on earth that word means anymore, where anybody can call themselves a scientist, but by a hysterical 16-year old girl from Sweden who is convinced that the world is going to come to a cataclysmic end by 2030.
Never in my life have I seen something so irresponsible as this blatantly political stunt, and the panic and hysteria now being sown as a result of this very political action in the name of "science" reminds me of the panic sown on October 30, 1938 by Orson Welles who caused a nationwide panic with his broadcast of “War of the Worlds” — a realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth.
This so-called "science" report, Dr. Diamond, is causing panic among the children of America, to the point that many of them feel their lives are over before they have even begun, while we adults are now being accused of stealing the future of these children.
We have the Guardian newspaper promoting this fear and hysteria to sell newspapers, while advocating for civil disobedience and literal rioting.
This is incredible, and we are met with nothing but silence from the so-called "scientific community" responsible for this document while this panic builds and builds, and scared children are no longer going to go to school because they believe, based on this report given to our Congress by Greta Thunberg, they will all be dead in ten years, which is the conclusion they draw from this report, whether or not it actually says that, or implies that, which is why I am reaching out to you as a respected and responsible member of the scientific community so that hopefully, you can use your position in the scientific community to get somebody to come forth and quell this panic and hysteria caused by this climate report.
And let me say here that it is totally irrelevant as to whether I understand the report, or the "science" that is alleged to underlie it.
My goal as an adult, as a grandfather and as a responsible member of our society that is now being split and divided by the climate report which was introduced in the most political and irresponsible manner possible, to is quell this panic and hysteria as soon as possible, and that is why I am reaching out to you.
Regardless of any professional credentials and scientific knowledge I might possess, I do not have a voice here that is going to be heard by Congress, and in any event, since I did not write that report, I have no basis to tell people what it means for the future.
That is for the ones who have caused this panic and hysteria to do.
Only yesterday, we had mass demonstrations and civil disobedience in this nation with scared children being told by Greta Thunberg, who appeared before the United Nations to say as follows:
"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."
"And yet I'm one of the lucky ones."
"People are suffering."
"People are dying."
"Entire ecosystems are collapsing."
"We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth."
"How dare you!
"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control."
"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you."
"But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice."
"They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist."
"So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences."
"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018."
"Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons."
"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions?"
"With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years."
"You are failing us."
"But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal."
"The eyes of all future generations are upon you."
"And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you."
"We will not let you get away with this."
end quotes
In a USA TODAY article on the panic and hysteria set off by this climate report entitled "Climate strike: Students protest in San Francisco, Chicago, New York" by Doug Stanglin, Grace Hauck and Janet Wilson on 21 September 2019, we had this, to wit:
“Basically our Earth is dying and if we don’t do something about it, we die,” said A.J. Conermann, a 15-year-old sophomore.
“I want to grow up."
"I want to have a future.”
end quotes
Now, regardless of what anybody thinks that climate report says, this is how the children of America and the world are interpreting it, so that somebody in a position of professional responsibility for that report now needs to come forward to tell these children that yes, your lives are going to be over because the greedy adults have stolen your future, or "you are over-reacting."
Thanking you in advance for anything you might be able to do to quell this panic and hysteria caused by that document, I remain
Yours, Paul R. Plante, P.E.
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
This Day In History
Ice Age
History.com Editors
An ice age is a period of colder global temperatures and recurring glacial expansion capable of lasting hundreds of millions of years.
Thanks to the efforts of geologist Louis Agassiz and mathematician Milutin Milankovitch, scientists have determined that variations in the Earth’s orbit and shifting plate tectonics spur the waxing and waning of these periods.
There have been at least five significant ice ages in Earth’s history, with approximately a dozen epochs of glacial expansion occurring in the past 1 million years.
Humans developed significantly during the most recent glaciation period, emerging as the dominant land animal afterward as megafauna such as the wooly mammoth went extinct.
An ice age is a period of colder global temperatures that features recurring glacial expansion across the Earth’s surface.
Capable of lasting hundreds of millions of years, these periods are interspersed with regular warmer interglacial intervals in which at least one major ice sheet is present.
Earth is currently in the midst of an ice age, as the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets remain intact despite moderate temperatures.
These global cooling periods begin when a drop in temperature prevents snow from fully melting in some areas.
The bottom layer turns to ice, which becomes a glacier as the weight of accumulated snow causes it to slowly move forward.
A cyclical pattern emerges in which the snow and ice traps the Earth’s moisture, fueling the growth of these ice sheets as the sea levels simultaneously drop.
An ice age causes enormous changes to the Earth’s surface.
Glaciers reshape the landscape by picking up rocks and soil and eroding hills during their unstoppable push, their sheer weight depressing the Earth’s crust.
As temperatures drop in areas adjacent to these ice cliffs, cold-weather plant life is driven to southern latitudes.
Meanwhile, the dramatic drop in sea levels enables rivers to carve out deeper valleys and produce enormous inland lakes, with previously submerged land bridges appearing between continents.
Upon retreating during warmer periods, the glaciers leave behind scattered ridges of sediment and fill basins with melted water to create new lakes.
Scientists have recorded five significant ice ages throughout the Earth’s history: the Huronian (2.4-2.1 billion years ago), Cryogenian (850-635 million years ago), Andean-Saharan (460-430 mya), Karoo (360-260 mya) and Quaternary (2.6 mya-present).
Approximately a dozen major glaciations have occurred over the past 1 million years, the largest of which peaked 650,000 years ago and lasted for 50,000 years.
The most recent glaciation period, often known simply as the “Ice Age,” reached peak conditions some 18,000 years ago before giving way to the interglacial Holocene epoch 11,700 years ago.
At the height of the recent glaciation, the ice grew to more than 12,000 feet thick as sheets spread across Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and South America.
Corresponding sea levels plunged more than 400 feet, while global temperatures dipped around 10 degrees Fahrenheit on average and up to 40 degrees in some areas.
In North America, the region of the Gulf Coast states was dotted with the pine forests and prairie grasses that are today associated with the northern states and Canada.
The origins of ice age theory began hundreds of years ago, when Europeans noted that glaciers in the Alps had shrunk, but its popularization is credited to 19th century Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz.
Contradicting the belief that a wide-ranging flood killed off such megafauna as the wooly mammoth, Agassiz pointed to rock striations and sediment piles as evidence of glacier activity from a destructive global winter.
Geologists soon found evidence of plant life between glacial sediment, and by the close of the century the theory of multiple global winters had been established.
A second important figure in the development of these studies was Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch.
Seeking to chart the Earth’s temperature from the past 600,000 years, Milankovitch carefully calculated how orbital variations such as eccentricity, precession and axial tilt affected solar radiation levels, publishing his work in the 1941 book Canon of Insolation and the Ice Age Problem.
Milankovitch’s findings were corroborated when technological improvements in the 1960s allowed for the analyzation of deep sea ice cores and plankton shells, which helped pinpoint periods of glaciation.
Along with solar radiation levels, it is believed that global warming and cooling is connected to plate tectonic activity.
The shifting of the Earth’s plates creates large-scale changes to continental masses, which impacts ocean and atmospheric currents, and triggers volcanic activity that releases carbon dioxide into the air.
One significant outcome of the recent ice age was the development of Homo sapiens.
Humans adapted to the harsh climate by developing such tools as the bone needle to sew warm clothing, and used the land bridges to spread to new regions.
By the start of the warmer Holocene epoch, humans were in position to take advantage of the favorable conditions by developing agricultural and domestication techniques.
Meanwhile, the mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other megafauna that reigned during the glacial period went extinct by its end.
The reasons for the disappearance of these giants, from human hunting to disease, are among the ice age mysteries that have yet to be fully explained.
Scientists continue to study the evidence of these important periods, both to gain more insight into the Earth’s history and to help determine future climatic events.
https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/ice-age
Ice Age
History.com Editors
An ice age is a period of colder global temperatures and recurring glacial expansion capable of lasting hundreds of millions of years.
Thanks to the efforts of geologist Louis Agassiz and mathematician Milutin Milankovitch, scientists have determined that variations in the Earth’s orbit and shifting plate tectonics spur the waxing and waning of these periods.
There have been at least five significant ice ages in Earth’s history, with approximately a dozen epochs of glacial expansion occurring in the past 1 million years.
Humans developed significantly during the most recent glaciation period, emerging as the dominant land animal afterward as megafauna such as the wooly mammoth went extinct.
An ice age is a period of colder global temperatures that features recurring glacial expansion across the Earth’s surface.
Capable of lasting hundreds of millions of years, these periods are interspersed with regular warmer interglacial intervals in which at least one major ice sheet is present.
Earth is currently in the midst of an ice age, as the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets remain intact despite moderate temperatures.
These global cooling periods begin when a drop in temperature prevents snow from fully melting in some areas.
The bottom layer turns to ice, which becomes a glacier as the weight of accumulated snow causes it to slowly move forward.
A cyclical pattern emerges in which the snow and ice traps the Earth’s moisture, fueling the growth of these ice sheets as the sea levels simultaneously drop.
An ice age causes enormous changes to the Earth’s surface.
Glaciers reshape the landscape by picking up rocks and soil and eroding hills during their unstoppable push, their sheer weight depressing the Earth’s crust.
As temperatures drop in areas adjacent to these ice cliffs, cold-weather plant life is driven to southern latitudes.
Meanwhile, the dramatic drop in sea levels enables rivers to carve out deeper valleys and produce enormous inland lakes, with previously submerged land bridges appearing between continents.
Upon retreating during warmer periods, the glaciers leave behind scattered ridges of sediment and fill basins with melted water to create new lakes.
Scientists have recorded five significant ice ages throughout the Earth’s history: the Huronian (2.4-2.1 billion years ago), Cryogenian (850-635 million years ago), Andean-Saharan (460-430 mya), Karoo (360-260 mya) and Quaternary (2.6 mya-present).
Approximately a dozen major glaciations have occurred over the past 1 million years, the largest of which peaked 650,000 years ago and lasted for 50,000 years.
The most recent glaciation period, often known simply as the “Ice Age,” reached peak conditions some 18,000 years ago before giving way to the interglacial Holocene epoch 11,700 years ago.
At the height of the recent glaciation, the ice grew to more than 12,000 feet thick as sheets spread across Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and South America.
Corresponding sea levels plunged more than 400 feet, while global temperatures dipped around 10 degrees Fahrenheit on average and up to 40 degrees in some areas.
In North America, the region of the Gulf Coast states was dotted with the pine forests and prairie grasses that are today associated with the northern states and Canada.
The origins of ice age theory began hundreds of years ago, when Europeans noted that glaciers in the Alps had shrunk, but its popularization is credited to 19th century Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz.
Contradicting the belief that a wide-ranging flood killed off such megafauna as the wooly mammoth, Agassiz pointed to rock striations and sediment piles as evidence of glacier activity from a destructive global winter.
Geologists soon found evidence of plant life between glacial sediment, and by the close of the century the theory of multiple global winters had been established.
A second important figure in the development of these studies was Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch.
Seeking to chart the Earth’s temperature from the past 600,000 years, Milankovitch carefully calculated how orbital variations such as eccentricity, precession and axial tilt affected solar radiation levels, publishing his work in the 1941 book Canon of Insolation and the Ice Age Problem.
Milankovitch’s findings were corroborated when technological improvements in the 1960s allowed for the analyzation of deep sea ice cores and plankton shells, which helped pinpoint periods of glaciation.
Along with solar radiation levels, it is believed that global warming and cooling is connected to plate tectonic activity.
The shifting of the Earth’s plates creates large-scale changes to continental masses, which impacts ocean and atmospheric currents, and triggers volcanic activity that releases carbon dioxide into the air.
One significant outcome of the recent ice age was the development of Homo sapiens.
Humans adapted to the harsh climate by developing such tools as the bone needle to sew warm clothing, and used the land bridges to spread to new regions.
By the start of the warmer Holocene epoch, humans were in position to take advantage of the favorable conditions by developing agricultural and domestication techniques.
Meanwhile, the mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other megafauna that reigned during the glacial period went extinct by its end.
The reasons for the disappearance of these giants, from human hunting to disease, are among the ice age mysteries that have yet to be fully explained.
Scientists continue to study the evidence of these important periods, both to gain more insight into the Earth’s history and to help determine future climatic events.
https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/ice-age
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 24, 2019 at 10:40 am
Paul Plante says :
24 SEPTEMBER 2019
TO: Howard Diamond, PhD, Climate Science Program Manager at NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory
RE: Panic and hysteria caused by the Climate Science Report
Dear Dr. Diamond:
First let me introduce myself as a licensed professional engineer with a graduate degree in engineering who was inducted into Sigma Xi back in 1975, and who subsequently became qualified as an associate level public health engineer in New York state, where a licensed professional engineer is one who performs professional service wherein the safeguarding of life, health and property is concerned, when such service or work requires the application of engineering principles and data, and a public health engineer is a person who applies engineering principles for the detection, evaluation, control and management of those factors in the environment which influence the public’s health.
My reason for contacting you is that we, all the people in the United States of America have a very serious problem confronting us as a people and as a nation, and that problem is the panic and hysteria being caused by the release to our United States Congress of a so-called “scientific document” on climate science which was handed to our Congress, not by an adult, not by a scientist, whatever on earth that word means anymore, where anybody can call themselves a scientist, but by a hysterical 16-year old girl from Sweden who is convinced that the world is going to come to a cataclysmic end by 2030.
Never in my life have I seen something so irresponsible as this blatantly political stunt, and the panic and hysteria now being sown as a result of this very political action in the name of “science” reminds me of the panic sown on October 30, 1938 by Orson Welles who caused a nationwide panic with his broadcast of “War of the Worlds” — a realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth.
This so-called “science” report, Dr. Diamond, is causing panic among the children of America, to the point that many of them feel their lives are over before they have even begun, while we adults are now being accused of stealing the future of these children.
We have the Guardian newspaper promoting this fear and hysteria to sell newspapers, while advocating for civil disobedience and literal rioting.
This is incredible, and we are met with nothing but silence from the so-called “scientific community” responsible for this document while this panic builds and builds, and scared children are no longer going to go to school because they believe, based on this report given to our Congress by Greta Thunberg, they will all be dead in ten years, which is the conclusion they draw from this report, whether or not it actually says that, or implies that, which is why I am reaching out to you as a respected and responsible member of the scientific community so that hopefully, you can use your position in the scientific community to get somebody to come forth and quell this panic and hysteria caused by this climate report.
And let me say here that it is totally irrelevant as to whether I understand the report, or the “science” that is alleged to underlie it.
My goal as an adult, as a grandfather and as a responsible member of our society that is now being split and divided by the climate report which was introduced in the most political and irresponsible manner possible, to is quell this panic and hysteria as soon as possible, and that is why I am reaching out to you.
Regardless of any professional credentials and scientific knowledge I might possess, I do not have a voice here that is going to be heard by Congress, and in any event, since I did not write that report, I have no basis to tell people what it means for the future.
That is for the ones who have caused this panic and hysteria to do.
Only yesterday, we had mass demonstrations and civil disobedience in this nation with scared children being told by Greta Thunberg, who appeared before the United Nations to say as follows:
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
“And yet I’m one of the lucky ones.”
“People are suffering.”
“People are dying.”
“Entire ecosystems are collapsing.”
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
“How dare you!
“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.”
“Fifty percent may be acceptable to you.”
“But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice.”
“They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.”
“So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.”
“To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018.”
“Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.”
“How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions?”
“With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.”
“You are failing us.”
“But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”
“The eyes of all future generations are upon you.”
“And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.”
“We will not let you get away with this.”
end quotes
In a USA TODAY article on the panic and hysteria set off by this climate report entitled “Climate strike: Students protest in San Francisco, Chicago, New York” by Doug Stanglin, Grace Hauck and Janet Wilson on 21 September 2019, we had this, to wit:
“Basically our Earth is dying and if we don’t do something about it, we die,” said A.J. Conermann, a 15-year-old sophomore.
“I want to grow up.”
“I want to have a future.”
end quotes
Now, regardless of what anybody thinks that climate report says, this is how the children of America and the world are interpreting it, so that somebody in a position of professional responsibility for that report now needs to come forward to tell these children that yes, your lives are going to be over because the greedy adults have stolen your future, or “you are over-reacting.”
Thanking you in advance for anything you might be able to do to quell this panic and hysteria caused by that document, I remain
Yours, Paul R. Plante, P.E.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-180446
THIS IS THE HYSTERICAL LITTLE "SPECIAL NEEDS" GIRL FROM SWEDEN WHO WANTS US ALL TO PANIC BECAUSE SHE IS SCARED EVERY DAY AND WHO HAS ACCUSED US ALL OF STEALING HER CHILDHOOD AND HER DREAMS ...THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 24, 2019 at 9:27 am
Paul Plante says :
Paul Plante: Does the “science” in the opinion of the consensus, to your knowledge, support the conclusion that there is going to be a cataclysmic break-down in the environment by 2030 if we don’t stop using fossil fuels right now?
Climate Science Program Manager at NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory: Frankly, I do not know, what I do know is that left to its present rate we are going to continue getting warmer and seeing a cascading effect of many environmental changes that will probably cause some serious problems.
Folks seem to want a binary – is it going to be destructive or not – and my answer again is, it depends.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-180446
NEWSWEEK
"Donald Trump Mocks 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, Twitter Reacts: 'She Has More Class in Her Little Finger'"
Shane Croucher
24 SEPTEMBER 2019
President Donald Trump appeared to mock Greta Thunberg after her emotional speech to the United Nations on Monday.
Thunberg, 16, was tearful and her voice broke as she chided world leaders for having "stolen my dreams and my childhood" with their inaction on climate change.
The Swedish activist founded the school strike campaign to raise awareness about the climate emergency and the urgent need for governments to take comprehensive action quickly.
She has since traveled the world to campaign on climate change and recently sailed across the Atlantic to New York City so she could give this speech to the U.N.
"She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future."
"So nice to see!" Trump wrote on Twitter alongside a clip of Thunberg's speech.
He tweeted after a video of Thunberg glaring at him as he entered the U.N. headquarters went viral on social media.
Trump has questioned climate change science and sought to roll back environmental protections, as well as encouraged greater production in the fossil fuel industry.
But climate scientists are near-unanimous in the view that humans are the driving force of the current changes to the climate and that time is almost out for us to halt it and reverse its effects.
"This is all wrong."
"I shouldn't be up here."
"I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean," Thunberg told the U.N.
"Yet you all come to us young people for hope."
"How dare you?"
"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."
"And yet, I'm one of the lucky ones."
"People are suffering."
"People are dying and dying ecosystems are collapsing."
"We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth."
"How dare you?"
The president faced a mixed response on social media after his "very happy young girl" tweet.
His supporters ran gleefully with his tweet, adding their own derogatory remarks about the schoolgirl Thunberg and also rejecting the science on climate change.
To others, it was a new low for Trump.
"He has now officially broken me," tweeted the actor Willie Garson.
"A horrible evil world leader, trolling a 16 year old with Asperger's, for passionately discussing scientific facts."
"And the comments support him."
"I'm done, these people are not decent, Patriots, or humans."
"We are amidst monsters."
"She has more class in her little finger..." tweeted Kirsten Oswald, a former U.K. politician.
"While most world leaders at least make an effort to preserve a livable climate for @GretaThunberg's generation, our climate denier criminal-in-chief instead makes sarcastic comments while doing everything in his power to burn her future away," tweeted Dana Nuccitelli, a climate scientist.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2