Democracy Has Prevailed.

September 3, 2014

The Climate, The Trib, And The Fact-Free Zone

Yep.  The Tribune Review's editorial board is still trying to disuade its loyal readership of the established science.

Note to the braintrust: Simply repeating your past assertions won't ever make them true.

Here's what they're asserting as "facts" today:
But even the loudest clucking can't drown out contrary facts. U.S. temperatures haven't risen in a decade. Global temperatures have been flat for 17 years. Prior warming was within natural variability. The IPCC's main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, isn't a pollutant. And humanity's climate impact is negligible...
Let's take them one by one, shall we?
 U.S. temperatures haven't risen in a decade. 
Not true.  There are a couple of misleads here.  First being this: In a discussion of global temperatures, selecting out a small section of the planet's surface (the US) as an indicator of the global tendencies, is almost irrelevant.  In any case, according to NOAA, the US trend is upward.  Take a look at July's average temperatures for the last century or so.  That blue line is the upward trend for the United States:


Next sentence:
Global temperatures have been flat for 17 years.
This is also simply not true.  The Independent in the UK reported last February:
In a foreword to “Climate Change Evidence and Causes”, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, say that climate change is now more certain than ever and that many lines of evidence point to human activity as the cause.

“The evidence is clear. However, due to the nature of science, not every single detail is ever totally settled or completely certain. Nor has every pertinent question yet been answered,” the two presidents say.
And then when asked about "the pause" here's the answer:
The report says there is no “pause” in global warming only a temporary and short-term slowdown in the rate of increase in average global surface temperatures in the non-polar regions which is likely to start accelerating again in the near future.

“Globally averaged surface temperature has slowed down. I wouldn’t say it’s paused. It depends on the datasets you look at. If you look at datasets that include the Arctic, it is clear that global temperatures are still increasing,”[Professor Tim Palmer of Oxford University, one of the report’s main authors] said.
And in the report itself when asked whether this recent slowdown means climate change has stopped, the answer given is:
No. Since the very warm year 1998 that followed the strong 1997-98 El Niño, the increase in average surface temperature has slowed relative to the previous decade of rapid temperature increases. Despite the slower rate of warming the 2000s were warmer than the 1990s. A short-term slowdown in the warming of Earth’s surface does not invalidate our understanding of long-term changes in global temperature arising from human-induced changes in greenhouse gases. [Emphasis added.]
And so on.  The science is clear and as Neil deGrasse Tyson said:
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
Simply repeating the same old selected evidence (there's been no warming since the '98 spike!) doesn't do anything to contradict any of the science.

3 comments:

koolaid said...

Perhaps you guys can clear up a bit of confusion.
The chart you use to support your claim that the planet is warming shows a slight cooling from the start of the chart (at the end of Earth's last effective 'climate shift' known as "The Little Ice Age") to present. So the fact is; the longer term trend - (according to your source) is cooling with a recent blip of warming about midpoint on the graph.

Also, my observations agree with your chart as it has been noticeably cooler for the last couple decades.

Thanks in advance and keep up the work.

Ol' Froth said...

The chart starts in 1900. The "Little Ice Age" ended in 1850.

Zeus0209 said...

I wonder if the conservative media might one day also deny that fossil fuels are a finite commodity.

Aside from all of the dismissive "clucking" characterization still lies the basic fact that oil, coal and gas will run out. Yet it is still too expensive to invest for our future generations by developing renewable's? The time for renewables was 40 years ago. Our collective failure to lead this charge is another indicator of our nations decline.

Imagine the irony of science one day discovering the cure to cancer by manipulating 1,000 gallons per person of crude oil, only to find that its largely been expended propelling our big fat butt's to and fro.