Author Archives: AlissaBateman

Americans want the EPA to do its job, even if Trump and Pruitt don’t.

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

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Americans want the EPA to do its job, even if Trump and Pruitt don’t.

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There’s a 99% chance this will be the hottest year on record

There’s a 99% chance this will be the hottest year on record

By on May 18, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Odds are increasing that 2016 will be the hottest year on the books, as April continued a remarkable streak of record-warm months.

Last month was rated as the warmest April on record by both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which released their data this week. In the temperature annals kept by NOAA, it marked the 12th record warmest month in a row.

How global temperatures have differed from average so far this year.NOAA

Global temperatures have been hovering around 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above preindustrial averages — a threshold that’s being considered by international negotiators as a new goal for limiting warming.

While an exceptionally strong El Niño has provided a boost to temperatures in recent months, the primary driver has been the heat that has built up from decades of unabated greenhouse gas emissions.

Nearing 1.5 degrees C

NOAA announced its temperature data for April on Wednesday, with the month measuring 1.98 degrees F (1.1 degrees C) above the 20th century average of 56.7 degrees F (13.7 degrees C). It was warmer than the previous record-hot April of 2010 by 0.5 degrees F (0.3 degrees C).

NASA’s data showed the month was about the same amount above the average from 1951-1980. The two agencies use different baselines and process the global temperature data slightly differently, leading to potential differences in the exact temperatures anomalies for each month and year.

Both agencies’ records show that global temperatures have come down slightly from the peaks they hit in February and March, which ranked as the most anomalously warm months by NASA and NOAA, respectively.

Climate Central has reanalyzed the temperature data from recent months, averaging the NASA and NOAA numbers and comparing it to the average from 1881-1910 to show how much temperatures have risen from a period closer to preindustrial times.

The analysis shows that the year-to-date temperature through April is 1.45 degrees C above the average from that period. Governments have agreed to limit warming this century to less than 2 degrees C from preindustrial times and are exploring setting an even more ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees C, which temperatures are currently close to.

“The fact that we are beginning to cross key thresholds at the monthly timescale is indeed an indication of how close we are getting to permanently exceeding those thresholds,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, said in an email.

A year-to-date look at 2016 global temperatures compared to recent years.Climate Central

It will take a significant effort to further limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to realize those goals, experts say. Carbon dioxide levels at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii are already poised to stay above 400 parts per million year-round. They have risen from a preindustrial level of 280 ppm and from 315 ppm just since the mid-20th century.

Hottest year?

As El Niño continues to rapidly decay, monthly temperature anomalies are slowly declining. They are still considerably higher than they were just last year, the current title-holder for the hottest year on record.

Given the head start this year has over last, there is a more than 99 percent chance that 2016 will best 2015 as the hottest year on the books, according to Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the agency’s temperature data.

If 2016 does set the mark, it will be the third record-setting year in a row.

It is likely, though, that the streak would end with this year, as a La Niña event is looking increasingly likely to follow El Niño, and it tends to have a cooling effect on global temperatures.

But even La Niña years today are warmer than El Niño years of previous decades — a clear sign of how much human caused-warming has increased global temperatures. In fact, the planet hasn’t seen a record cold year since 1911.

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There’s a 99% chance this will be the hottest year on record

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Scientists try to replicate climate denier findings and fail

Scientists try to replicate climate denier findings and fail

By on 26 Aug 2015commentsShare

Does the Ted Cruz in you ever wonder whether global warming really is just a hoax? Whether skeptics really are the Galileos of our time? Whether climate scientists really do just want to make money? Well, wonder no more. A group of researchers just tried to replicate 38 peer-reviewed studies that support skeptic talking points, and surprise! They ran into some trouble.

In a paper published last week in the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, the researchers reported a number of problems with the 38 studies, including questionable physics and incomplete data sets. They also found that some of the studies were published in peer-reviewed journals that didn’t specialize in climate science, and therefore probably didn’t have the proper experts looking over the work.

One of the most common problems the researchers encountered was something called “cherry-picking.” Not to be confused with actual cherry-picking (which is now endangered thanks to climate change), data cherry-picking is a big science no-no in which researchers falsify results by including only the data that support those results and not the data that don’t.

Dana Nuccitelli, one of the coauthors of the study, gave an example of such cherry-picking in an article he wrote for the Guardian. In the example, Nuccitelli and his colleagues were trying to reproduce a 2011 study linking climate change to the moon and solar cycles:

When we tried to reproduce their model of the lunar and solar influence on the climate, we found that the model only simulated their temperature data reasonably accurately for the 4,000-year period they considered. However, for the 6,000 years’ worth of earlier data they threw out, their model couldn’t reproduce the temperature changes. The authors argued that their model could be used to forecast future climate changes, but there’s no reason to trust a model forecast if it can’t accurately reproduce the past.

As long as we’re predicting the future with a faulty model of the past, give me your hand — I’ll tell you how happy you’ll be in 10 years. And speaking of magic, another problem that Nuccitelli and his colleagues came across in multiple studies was a disregard for basic physics:

In another example, Ferenc Miskolczi argued in 2007 and 2010 papers that the greenhouse effect has become saturated, but as I also discuss in my book, the ‘saturated greenhouse effect’ myth was debunked in the early 20th century. As we note in the supplementary material to our paper, Miskolczi left out some important known physics in order to revive this century-old myth.

Dubious physics came up again in the context of “curve fitting” — what scientists do when they fit data to a certain trend like rising temperatures. It’s pretty easy to abuse this practice, otherwise known as “mathturbation” or “graph cooking,” as Nuccitelli points out on the website Skeptical Science. Take, for example, the time that Peabody Energy found a positive correlation between life expectancy and coal use. In order to do it right, Nuccitelli writes in the Guardian, scientists should at least obey the laws of physics:

Good modeling will constrain the possible values of the parameters being used so that they reflect known physics, but bad ‘curve fitting’ doesn’t limit itself to physical realities. For example, we discuss research by Nicola Scafetta and Craig Loehle, who often publish papers trying to blame global warming on the orbital cycles of Jupiter and Saturn.

OK — so these contrarian studies are a bit dodgy. But then again, Galileo wasn’t perfect, either. When it came to understanding how tides worked, he was totally off! Granted, he was at least obeying the laws of physics as scientists understood them at the time, but who knows? Maybe these climate change contrarians just know something that we don’t.

Fortunately, Nuccitelli and his colleagues made the software that they used for their research open source, so anyone can replicate their replications. And then someone else can replicate their replication of the replications, and so on and so forth until we’re all burnt to a crisp and microbes have taken over the Earth.

Source:

Here’s what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers

, The Guardian.

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Scientists try to replicate climate denier findings and fail

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