Tag Archives: climate desk

Obama Just Vetoed the GOP’s Keystone Bill, and This Democratic Presidential Hopeful Is Pissed

by pawel Posted on February 25, 2015

Mother Jones

Jim Webb is sounding increasingly serious about running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Last week, National Journal‘s Bob Moser wrote a cover story wondering whether the former Virginia senator could “spark an anti-Hillary uprising,” in which Webb explained that his absence from the campaign trail this winter was, in part, the result of major knee surgery to fix problems leftover from his days in the Vietnam War.

Webb struck his first blow against his fellow Democrats on Wednesday. But rather than targeting Clinton, his likely presidential opposition, he struck out against the party’s incumbent, President Barack Obama. In a series of tweets, Webb lashed out at the president for vetoing a bill that would have approved construction on the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Webb’s tweetstorm doesn’t tell the whole story. A letter from the EPA released earlier this month argued that, thanks to recent drops in oil prices, Keystone XL could prove disastrous for carbon emissions.

As I detailed in December, Jim Webb had an atrocious record on climate change and environmental issues while he served in the Senate. Standing up for Virginia’s roots as a coal state, Webb tried to thwart Obama’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gasses through EPA regulation, and he helped block Democratic attempts to pass a cap-and-trade law.

Clinton, for her part, has regularly sidestepped addressing whether she wants to see the pipeline constructed, though she has generally been supportive of other environmental efforts made by the Obama administration.

While Webb objected to Obama’s decision to veto this specific bill, it’s still unclear whether the two Democrats disagree on the underlying issue. Obama has strenuously rejected attempts by congressional Republicans to force immediate approval of the pipeline, but his administration has not yet said definitely if it intends to let the project go forward eventually.

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Obama Just Vetoed the GOP’s Keystone Bill, and This Democratic Presidential Hopeful Is Pissed

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How Screwed Are Your State’s Oysters?

by Amilianp2t Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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When carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and cars rise into the atmosphere, they don’t always stay there. While the majority of these emissions hang around to create the greenhouse effect that causes global warming, up to 35 percent of man-made carbon falls into the ocean. When that happens, the pH level of the ocean drops, causing a phenomenon known as ocean acidification. Some scientists call this the “evil twin” of climate change.

Over the last century, the oceans have become about 30 percent more acidic, a faster rate of change than at anytime in the last 300 million years. That’s really bad news for any sea creatures that live in hard shells (shellfish) or have bony exoskeletons (i.e., crabs and lobsters), and for coral. Fish larvae and plankton can also be affected. And since many of these organisms are food for bigger fish and mammals, ocean acidification puts the whole marine ecosystem at risk.

Of course, humans depend on these critters as well, especially in coastal communities whose economies are deeply tied to the fishing industry. In the last few years, the threat to oyster harvests in the Pacific Northwest has been well documented. But every bit of the US coastline bears some level of risk, according to a new report in Nature. The study offers the first comprehensive projection of which parts of the US coast will be worst off, and when ocean acidification could reach dangerous levels there.

Julia Ekstrom, a climate adaptation researcher at the University of California-Davis, combed through existing scientific literature for three key types of data: How ocean acidification is projected to change in different regions over the next century; how dependent individual local economies are on the shellfish harvest (the study focused only on bivalves like oysters—other critters could be the subject of future research); and social factors that could help communities adapt, like pollution controls (runoff from rivers can also affect local pH) or the availability of other jobs. That data, combined, led to the map below.

Purple indicates the time at which ocean acidification is expected to become serious enough to significantly affect shellfish (darker is sooner); red indicates how vulnerable a region would be to a drop-off in shellfish productivity. So Washington, for example, could see the impacts soon but is relatively well-prepared to handle them. Impacts to the Gulf Coast are expected much further in the future but could be more economically severe.

Ekstrom et al, courtesy Nature

The good news is that many of what could be the hardest-hit communities still have time to prepare. Then again, the outlook could be worse in some places (Maine, for example) if you conducted similar research on lobsters and other vital fisheries. Ekstrom said localized predictions like this are key to enabling communities to prepare and can also help scientists decide where to focus efforts to monitor and track acidification as it progresses.

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How Screwed Are Your State’s Oysters?

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How Michele Bachmann Inspired Factcheck.org to Debunk Lies About Science

by CWVAdriann Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

Four years ago, Michele Bachmann slammed Rick Perry—then the governor of Texas—for his executive order mandating HPV vaccinations. “I’m a mom of three children,” Bachmann said during a GOP presidential debate. “And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong.”

Bachmann, who at the time was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, expanded on her allegations the next day. “I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Fla., after the debate,” she said on the Today show. “She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. It can have very dangerous side effects.” (Watch it above.)

Bachmann’s suggestion that the HPV vaccine is dangerous was completely false. “There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement,” explained the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The 2016 campaign is just around the corner, and even though the Iowa caucuses are nearly a year away, we are already being inundated with dubious claims from potential candidates. Frequently, those claims touch upon issues related to science. Just in the past few weeks, we’ve heard Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) questioning vaccine safety, potential candidate Ben Carson suggesting immigration could be spreading disease, and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) claiming that global temperature data had been “falsified.”

Enter Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which operates the nonpartisan Factcheck.org. Founded in 2003, Factcheck was one of the first websites devoted to refuting misleading assertions about US politics. Last month, Factcheck launched Scicheck, a new project that evaluates the scientific claims made by politicians. In just a few weeks, Scicheck has countered inaccurate statements about issues ranging from climate change to the economic impact of the Human Genome Project.

On this weeks’ episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, I asked Jamieson what inspired her organization to focus on scientific issues. She credits Bachmann.

“When Michele Bachmann in the last election made an allegation about the effects of…a vaccine, in public space on national television…the journalists in the real context didn’t know how to respond to the statement as clearly as they ought to,” explains Jamieson. “The time to contextualize is immediately. That should have been shot down immediately.”

So when the Stanton Foundation approached Factcheck to offer funding for a new initiative, the group decided that what it needed to do was hire “real science journalists” with the expertise to refute false claims and to get those corrections “into the bloodstream of journalism more quickly,” says Jamieson. “That’s how it happened. It’s thanks to Michele Bachmann.”

But Jamieson is keenly aware that it isn’t enough to simply rebut inaccurate claims in real time. One of the key challenges facing science communication is that voters frequently get their news from highly ideological media outlets that sometimes misrepresent the scientific consensus on controversial issues. This has contributed to substantial gaps between what the general public thinks and what scientists think on a wide range of issues, from evolution to the safety of genetically modified foods. To combat this problem, Jamieson recently proposed a new communication strategy called LIVA, an acronym that stands for leveraging scientific credibility (L), involving the audience (I), visualizing the data in a dynamic way (V), and creating relatable analogies for the reader (A). This method has shown promise in shifting people away from their partisan lens and helping them to better understand science. It even seems to work with one of the most polarizing scientific issues of all: climate change.

In Jamieson’s recent study, self-identified conservatives were shown a misleading article from Fox News with the headline “Arctic sea ice up 60 percent in 2013.” Part of this group was then shown additional information using the LIVA method, contextualizing the decades-long downward trend in sea ice and leveraging the credibility of NASA’s measurements. In the end, study participants who were subjected to the LIVA method were more likely to agree with the scientific consensus of a long-term decline in sea ice.

Gary L. Gehman/Annenberg Public Policy Center/PNAS

Jamieson is optimistic that these new science communication methods and sites like Scicheck will improve the overall political discourse. She has hired veteran science journalist Dave Levitan to lead this effort at Scicheck. And while it’s too early to tell if it will be successful, Levitan hopes that his work will make politicians “think more carefully when they talk about science.”

To listen to my entire interview with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, click below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How Michele Bachmann Inspired Factcheck.org to Debunk Lies About Science

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New York City Is About to Get a Lot Hotter

by MackenzI22 Posted on February 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The New York City Panel on Climate Change has released its latest report, and it’s just the kind of reading to warm those frigid winter bones. By the 2080s there could be an 8.8-degree rise in temperature as well as six heat waves a year, sweltering conditions that scientists say will “increase the number of heat-related deaths that occur in Manhattan.”

Compare those predictions to what’s already occurred and it’s easy to be worried. Mean temperatures in New York rose 3.4 degrees from 1900 to 2013, a slug’s crawl compared to the rate of fossil-fueled scorching predicted for the rest of the century. There were an annual average of two heat waves in the 1980s; dealing with half-a-dozen every year sounds like hell.

And because it’s never too soon to dream of the warm season, the report drops this bomb: “It is more likely than not that the number of the most intense hurricanes will increase in the North Atlantic Basin, along with extreme winds associated with these storms.” (The changing climate’s effects on wintry nor’easters is uncertain, it adds.)

There are plenty of other alarming things to parse in the panel’s report, put together by policymakers and NASA. The space agency has picked out these notes and projections:

“Mean annual precipitation has increased by a total of 8 inches from 1900 to 2013. Future mean annual precipitation is projected to increase 4 to 11 percent by the 2050s and 5 to 13 percent by the 2080s, relative to the 1980s base period.”
“Future mean annual temperatures are projected to increase 4.1 to 5.7 degrees F by the 2050s and 5.3 to 8.8 degrees F by the 2080s, relative to the 1980s base period.”
“Sea levels have risen in New York City 1.1 feet since 1900. That is almost twice the observed global rate of 0.5 to 0.7 inches per decade over a similar time period. Projections for sea level rise in New York City increase from 11 inches to 21 inches by the 2050s, 18 inches to 39 inches by the 2080s, and, 22 inches to 50 inches, with the worst case of up to six feet, by 2100.”

It is “virtually certain” swollen seas will ratchet up the frequency and ferocity of coastal flooding, warns the panel. The New York of 2100 could have double the amount of land vulnerable to historic floods than currently outlined in FEMA’s proposed flood-insurance rate maps. (By 2016, people living within the FEMA zones will be required to buy flood insurance if holding mortgages from government-backed lenders.)

Queens faces the biggest threat from the encroaching seas, and next it’s Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Manhattan. To see if your neighborhood could be gentrified by carp, consult this map showing how far historic (aka 100-year) floods could travel in a high-emissions scenario:

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New York City Is About to Get a Lot Hotter

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There’s a Horrifying Amount of Plastic in the Ocean. This Chart Shows Who’s to Blame.

by AleciaUynx Posted on February 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Marine scientists have long known that plastic pollution in the ocean is a huge problem. The most visible sign of it is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an accumulation of waste (actually spanning several distinct patches) floating in the ocean. It’s at least twice the size of Texas and can be seen from space. This pollution has an incalculably lethal effect on everything from plankton to whales.

So just how much plastic is there? A new study in Science yesterday put out some pretty horrifying numbers: In 2010, the study finds, between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons (that’s about 10.5 billion to 28 billion pounds) of plastic entered the oceans—the median of those estimates is 1.3 times the weight of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

If we want to crack down on all that plastic, knowing where it all comes from could be as important as knowing how much there is. That’s the main idea behind this study. A team of scientists led by University of Georgia environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck set out to calculate how much plastic every one of the world’s 192 coastal countries dumps into the ocean. To do it, they combined data on each country’s per-capita waste generation, the size of the population living within 50 kilometers of the ocean, the percentage of waste that is plastic, and the percentage of plastic waste that is “mismanaged” (defined as “either littered or inadequately disposed”).

The last step is to estimate how much of the mismanaged coastal plastic waste actually washes into the sea. (This is the step that explains the wide uncertainty range in the grand totals above.) Jambeck drew on existing literature on waste streams from places like South Africa and the Bay Area to reach an estimate of 15-40 percent; she then applied that range across the board.

The chart below shows the worst offenders, in terms of total plastic pollution in the ocean in 2010, using data from the study. The top-ranks belong to middle-income countries with rapidly growing coastal populations that lack the resources to keep pace with waste management infrastructure. By contrast, even though the United States has relatively good waste management, its per-capita waste production is so high that it makes the top 20.

Tim McDonnell

That’s right: China alone dumped nearly 5 billion pounds of plastic waste into the ocean in 2010. But what’s even worse is just how much the study projects these numbers will grow in the future, based on predictions of population growth in each country by 2025. The chart below shows the top-ranked countries in terms of total mismanaged plastic waste (in other words, not all of this plastic is necessarily winding up in the ocean). China is still very much in the lead, and India shows a disturbing explosion of plastic pollution:

Tim McDonnell

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There’s a Horrifying Amount of Plastic in the Ocean. This Chart Shows Who’s to Blame.

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Bad Man Wants to Ban Bag Bans

by ChunNicastro Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Columbia, Mo., is considering a ban on plastic shopping bags. This is good. Plastic bags are wasteful and bad for the environment and generally terrible. They create tons of nasty litter on city streets and can block up recycling facilities. So there’s really no reason why grocery stores and other retail outlets should hand out trillions of them for free. Tons of local, regional, and national governments around the world have already figured this out, and implemented bans.

But Missouri state Representative Dan Shaul, a Republican from the suburbs of St. Louis, disagrees. That’s why he wants to ban bag bans, with a bill going before committee in the state’s legislature this week.

From the St. Louis Riverfront Times:

Shaul, a sixteen-year member of the Missouri Grocers Association, is trying to stop bag bans outright. He says he doesn’t want to burden shoppers with an additional fee at the grocery store.

“If they choose to tax the bag, it’s going to hurt the people who need that the most: the consumer,” especially the poor, Shaul says. “My goal when I go to the grocery store with a $100 bill is to get $100 worth of groceries.”

But a ten-cents-per-bag fee for forgetting your reusable bag? “That adds up pretty quick.”

Here’s the thing, though: Ban bags are actually really good for local economies, because they reduce costs for retailers and cleanup costs for governments. California, which became the first US state to ban bags last fall, previously spent $25 million per year picking them up and landfilling them.

So instead of bag ban bans, a better bill would be a ban on bag ban bans.

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Bad Man Wants to Ban Bag Bans

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This Train Plowing Through Snow Is Absolutely Astonishing

by BerryKDPPmmpcp Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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There’s a strange corner of YouTube where train-spotters post their conquests in exhaustive detail. It’s one of the weirder YouTube holes I’ve been down in a while. But…oddly comforting. This video—of a Canadian National Railway locomotive making a meal out of snow drifts left by major blizzards in New Brunswick—is like something directly out of Snowpiercer, the 2013 dystopian ice age thriller set in a climate-altered future.

While certainly mesmerizing, there’s an important issue to note that has gone unremarked upon since the video went viral. It’s unclear what precisely the locomotive is carrying, but it’s definitely pulling tankers. Its cargo may very well be oil, given that its destination is St John, New Brunswick, the location of Canada’s biggest oil refinery, the Irving Oil Refinery. That refinery was the destination for the train laden with Bakken oil that derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013. The Lac-Mégantic accident killed 47 people and prompted calls across Canada and the United States for tougher safety standards for the booming oil-by-rail network.

Mark Hallman, director of communications for Canadian National Railway, refused to give specifics about the types of cargo being pulled by the train in the YouTube clip, calling it a “mixed freight” service. But Jayni Foley Hein, an expert on energy and transportation at the Institute for Policy Integrity, says crude is one likely possibility. “Its carrying the type of tankers that generally carry oil, and given its proximity to this refinery, it’s certainly a reasonable prediction,” she said.

Despite the soaring plumes of snow, Hallman told me that the train in the video was “totally safely operated,” adding, “That’s winter in Canada. That’s what we have to deal with.” The railway’s own “Customer Safety Handbook” says that operators should take special care in wintry, snowy conditions: “Many of the service disruptions center on accumulations of snow and ice,” says the handbook. “On the track, snow mostly constitutes a problem in switches, as well as at crossings—so once the snow is cleared, the problem is solved.” In general, winter hits railway lines hard, contracting the tracks and making fractures more likely, according to Canadian National Railway.

A 10-year US Department of Transportation analysis of weather-related train accidents in America, from 1995 to 2005, found that the accidents related to snow and ice, when they did occur, often resulted in dangerous derailments. “During the winter months of December through March, the highest accident numbers arose from preexisting snow and ice conditions such as buildups that cause malfunctioning switches and derailments,” the report found.

After the Lac-Mégantic disaster, both the United States and Canada agreed to get rid of the older and more dangerous versions of the tanker involved in that tragedy, the “DOT-111.” (We covered the cons of this tanker extensively last May.) In mid-January, Canada announced it would take the tankers off the network years sooner than the United States will, putting the two countries at odds over increased safety measures on the deeply integrated system.

The dangers of carrying oil by rail have fueled a key aspect to the ongoing debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. When the US State Department issued its long-awaited environmental-impact statement on the project last year, one of its most significant findings was that if the controversial pipeline wasn’t built, oil-laden rail cars would pick up the slack. “Rail will likely be able to accommodate new production if new pipelines are delayed or not constructed,” it argued. (More recently, falling oil prices have led the EPA to question that line of reasoning.)

NBC recently reported that in America, trains spilled crude oil more often in 2014 than in any year since the government began collecting data in 1975.

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This Train Plowing Through Snow Is Absolutely Astonishing

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Obama: Climate Change Is an "Urgent And Growing Threat" To National Security

by RogerCurry Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama listed climate change alongside international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and infectious disease in a new national security strategy plan released today. The plan called climate change “an urgent and growing threat to our national security” and also called for the United States to diversify its energy sources to insulate the country from disruptions to foreign fossil fuel markets.

This isn’t the first time the Obama administration has singled out climate as a major national security risk: A Pentagon report in October said global warming has become a short-term priority for strategic military planning. But the issue gets much more airtime in today’s strategy than it did in the administration’s first, issued back in 2010, where it merited just a few passing references. Overall, the document is in line with the more aggressive climate message that has emerged this year from the White House. You can read it below:

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Document Gw 01 (PDF)

Document Gw 01 (Text)

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Obama: Climate Change Is an "Urgent And Growing Threat" To National Security

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World Leaders Will Meet This Year to Decide the Fate of Our Planet. They Already Sound Pessimistic.

by Clark36Uxkhmrw Posted on February 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article first appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Heartbreaking news Wednesday on that whole global warming thing. Two of the leading architects of a major UN agreement on climate, scheduled to be agreed upon this December, are trying to soften expectations. This is particularly disappointing because Paris had previously been billed as the most important negotiations since the failure in Copenhagen in 2009.

Miguel Arias Canete, the climate chief of the European Union, was in Washington this week for talks on climate change with the lead of the US delegation, Todd Stern. He was quoted in the Guardian as saying, “If we have an ongoing process you can not say it is a failure if the mitigation commitments do not reach 2°C.”

Actually, you can. Because keeping climate change to less than 2-degrees Celsius—the arbitrary point at which scientists and world governments have agreed is the start of “dangerous interference with the climate system”—is the entire goal of the UN climate negotiations. That’s it. That’s what the world is fighting for. All of the eggs have been put in that basket.

But wait, there’s more (also from the Guardian):

In Brussels, meanwhile, the UN top climate official, Christiana Figueres, was similarly downplaying expectations, telling reporters the pledges made in the run-up to the Paris meeting later this year will “not get us onto the 2°C pathway.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem very hopeful. I mean, honestly, what is the point of even conducting these talks if your boss says—10 months in advance—that you will fail?

Now, this year’s negotiations probably won’t be a total failure. The Paris climate talks (seriously, click that link, it’s a great explainer) are expected to produce the world’s first global agreement on climate change, with every member country expected to submit domestic targets for reducing greenhouse gases. That’s something to celebrate. Representatives from nearly 200 countries are assembling in Geneva next week to write the draft agreement.

But with Wednesday’s statements, it’s now looking more and more likely that, when taken together, those targets won’t be sufficient to keep global warming to manageable levels.

Instead, the 2015 agreement is looking more and more like a way to peer pressure global laggards (like Canada, Australia, Japan, and, in the past, the United States) from doing the bare minimum on climate. That’s something we ought to be excited about, but incremental progress like this is in no way a substitute for meaningful government action on climate.

It’s too bad we’ve wasted the last two-and-a-half decades since climate change first emerged on the world’s diplomatic radar—the world’s carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 61 percent since 1990â&#128;&#139;, matching or exceeding projections for the worst-case emissions—but the world can’t sulk in failure forever. Instead, we should use this opportunity to admit that, when it comes to the climate, the UN process is irreparably broken. If we at last write off the UN process, it may help the world finally make progress on climate by instead turning to local, tangible actions that could energize people and bring about real change.

This is further evidence that the action on climate change will shift to what are currently perceived to be radical solutions. Absent meaningful action by governments, it’s up to individuals to demand change: nonviolent direct action and mass protest, a rethinking of capitalism—in short, a revolution in culture and society—are suitable to the job of limiting climate change to levels that don’t threaten entire ecosystems and thus human prosperity. Just because this sort of change is unlikely doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary.

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World Leaders Will Meet This Year to Decide the Fate of Our Planet. They Already Sound Pessimistic.

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Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year? Here’s Why It Doesn’t Matter.

by NorrisReichert Posted on February 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to NASA, all of the following statements are true:

2014 was the warmest year on record, dating all the way back to 1880.
2014 is far more likely than any other year since 1880 to have been the warmest.
There’s a 62 percent chance that 2014 was NOT actually the warmest year since 1880.

Wait. What??

OK, let’s rewind a bit. It’s a scientific fact that humans are warming the planet by releasing greenhouse gases. This has already resulted in “considerable costs,” explains Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research—ice is melting, sea levels are rising, and heat waves and fires are getting worse. Global warming is a very clear trend stretching back a century, and temperatures in any given year aren’t really that important.

Still, it was big news last month when NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration jointly announced that, in separate analyses, they had both concluded that 2014 was the warmest year on record. “When averaged over the globe, 2014 was the warmest year on record,” explained NASA earth sciences director Michael Freilich during a January 16 conference call announcing the new findings. As you can see in the chart below, both agencies calculated that 2014 was just slightly warmer than other extremely hot years—specifically, 2010 and 2005.

NOAA/NASA

Of course, calculating the warmth of the entire Earth over a full year is difficult. To do this, climate scientists analyze air and water temperature data collected from thousands of weather stations, buoys, and ships around the world. As explained in this helpful Wired article, this involves complex algorithms that correct for various inconsistencies and potential sources of error.

By far the most important source of uncertainty—at least when trying to calculate the warmest year—is the uneven distribution of temperature measurements around the world. According to NOAA climate scientist Deke Arndt, the agency has adequate temperature data for roughly 88 percent of the planet’s surface. The biggest gaps are in the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica, as well as in parts of Africa and the Arctic. (NASA uses a different methodology that includes data covering a greater portion of the globe.)

In other words, the figures reported by NASA and NOAA represent their best estimates of what the temperature readings they do have mean for the Earth’s climate as a whole. When it comes to detecting the broader warming trend, those estimates are extremely reliable. But ranking individual years is more complicated. “According to our tools, 2014 had the warmest temperature…that’s indisputable,” explains Arndt. The uncertainty, he says, comes from assessing how well those tools measure what’s actually happening, as well as from “what may have happened in the areas we didn’t measure.”

When they released their findings, NASA and NOAA attempted to quantify this uncertainty. As NOAA scientist Tom Karl explained to reporters at the time, this table (PDF) shows the probability that 2014 (as opposed to other extremely warm years like 2010 and 2005) was really the warmest year:

NOAA/NASA

So both agencies found that 2014 was far more likely than any other year to be the warmest. NOAA put the probability at 48 percent—that’s more than two-and-a-half times higher than the next likeliest year. NASA put the probability that 2014 was the warmest year at 38 percent—lower than NOAA but still much higher than any other year.

Unsurprisingly, critics pounced on the 38 percent figure. “NASA climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record…but we’re only 38% sure we were right,” blared London’s Mail on Sunday, a frequent source of climate change skepticism. The Mail story blasted NASA for having issued a press release that didn’t include the uncertainty.

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Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year? Here’s Why It Doesn’t Matter.

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year? Here’s Why It Doesn’t Matter.