#dana nuccitelli

[c4wardltd]

via Twitter https://twitter.com/C4wardLtd

#IFTTT #Twitter

[substition]

#dana nuccitelli

[environmentalact]

#dana nuccitelli #research

[currentclimate]

About 93 percent of global warming goes into heating the oceans, compared to about 2 percent warming the atmosphere. As the hottest year in the oceans, 2018 therefore was the hottest year ever recorded for the planet as a whole. And the amount of heat currently building up on Earth is equivalent to the amount of energy released by more than five atomic bomb detonations per second, every second.

#dana nuccitelli #climate change #ocean heat waves #2019

[we-make-haste-blog]

"California has been ravaged by record wildfires in recent years. 2017 was the state’s costliest and most destructive fire season on record. The Mendocino wildfire in July 2018 was California’s largest-ever by a whopping 60 percent. Even though California’s wildfire season has traditionally ended in October, the Camp Fire raging in November 2018 is the state’s most destructive on record."

#dana nuccitelli #wemakehaste #Ourplanet #ourworld #Ourfuture #Ourchoices

[oilchangeus-blog]

As we well know, climate myths are like zombies that never seem to die. It’s only a matter of time before they rise from the dead and threaten to eat our brains. And so here we go again – American conservatives are denying the very existence of global warming.

#climate change #climate change scepticism #environment #us environmental protection agency #dana nuccitelli #climate #climate denial #climate denier #global warming #climate change denial #denialism #gop #donald trump #scott pruitt #epa #defendepa #defendscience #standupforscience #endangerment finding #greenhouse gases #extreme weather

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Yale Climate Connections:

Earlier this year, the one-trillion tree campaign was big news at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Salesforce founder Businessman Marc Benioff announced at the meeting that his company will "support and mobilize the conservation and restoration of 100 million trees over the next decade."

Back in Washington, D.C., President Trump and Republican lawmakers said they too support the international campaign — although Arkansas Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman came under fire for proposing a "Trillion Trees Act" that would pair a commitment to planting trees with a plan to increase logging on public lands. Numerous other Republican representatives are endorsing the trees effort.

Like other initiatives to tackle climate change, planting trees requires some forethought. Recent news coverage of the trillion tree campaign points to several things people should be thinking about before digging and planting.

Authors of a 2019 study from the Swiss research university, ETH Zurich, estimated that the planet can support about 2.5 billion more acres of newly planted trees — without tearing down cities and doing away with farms. And they say those trees could store about 200 gigatons of carbon (GtC) once they mature. That's equal to one-third of all the carbon that humans have emitted into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide pollution, the authors claimed. The New York Times summarized the study last year.

Scientist Zeke Hausfather, long a regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections, suggested in a series of tweets at the time that the study was misleading on a few counts. For one thing, cumulative emissions from land use and burning fossil fuels were closer to 640 GtC, "so removing 200 GtC would represent one-third of historic emissions." Hausfather also pointed to the practical and economic challenges of planting trees on every acre of available land.

India is intimately familiar with this challenge. Last summer the country planted hundreds of millions of trees as part of an initiative to keep one-third of its land area covered in trees. But the nation's high population and rapid industrialization pose challenges to sustained reforestation. Only about 60% of the saplings are expected to survive — the rest succumbing to disease and a lack of water.

A Skeptical Science article by Dana Nuccitelli, a regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections and an environmental scientist, cites additional studies that have raised several other key points. Among them:

Tundra and boreal regions unpopulated by trees play an important global role in reflecting energy from the sun back into space. Planting trees in these regions would darken landscapes at these high latitudes, causing them to absorb energy from the sun rather than reflect it — ultimately contributing to higher global temperatures and offsetting cooling created by planting trees.

The ETH Zurich researchers mistakenly considered natural savannas, grasslands, and shrublands as places where forests could be restored.

And in their ETH Zurich study, they estimated a carbon sequestration rate of 0.22 GtC per million hectares (i.e., for every 2.47 million acres). But 0.22 GtC is twice the amount cited by previously published estimates.

#tree #climate change #carbon capture

[cellomomoncars]

#dana nuccitelli

[libr-tumbl-alternative]

"Dana Nuccitelli: Unfortunately, mainstream climate scientists are still right, and we’re running out of time to avoid dangerous global warming". Reblog with caption 🙃

#climate change #climate change scepticism #environment #oceans #paris climate agreement #cop 21 un climate change conference paris #greenhouse gas emissions #global climate talks #science #technology

[anti-sjw-kissinger]

Anyways for the nonbrainlets here’s some sources about Russian hackers changing data/doctoring things

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/05/26/russian-dnc-hackers-planted-leaks-with-fake-data/#3a58af2b52ff

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/22/turns-out-you-cant-trust-russian-hackers-anymore/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/dec/22/russian-email-hackers-keep-playing-us-for-fools

@casualdadcore

[science-criticaltheory]

2018 - The Hottest La Niña Year Ever Recorded by Dana Nuccitelli

NASA GISS global average surface temperature data for La Niña years during the period 1970–2018. (Illustration by Dana Nuccitelli)

Once the final official global annual surface temperature is published, 2018 will be the hottest La Niña year on record, by a wide margin. 

It will be the fourth-hottest year overall, and the fourth consecutive year more than 1°C (1.8°F) hotter than temperatures in the late-1800s, when reliable measurements began. 2009 will be bumped to second-hottest La Niña year on record, at 0.87°C (1.6°F) warmer than the late-1800s, but about 0.16°C (0.29°F) cooler than 2018.

El Niño events bring warm water to the ocean surface; La Niña events are cool at the surface. Since scientists measure global surface temperatures over both land and oceans, new hottest year records are usually set during El Niño events.

For this reason, it’s best to compare like-with-like. In the case of 2018, given that it was a La Niña year, it’s most useful to compare it with prior years in which global surface temperatures were cooled by La Niña events.

Defining La Niña years

There is no established scientific definition of a “La Niña year.” To compare apples-to-apples,  consider which years had similar surface temperature cooling influences resulting from La Niña events.

To do this, let’s examine the global temperature and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) data since 1970. That’s the year the Clean Air Act was expanded to authorize regulation of sulfate pollutants that 1) are also released during the burning fossil fuels, and 2) offset global warming by blocking sunlight. Since 1970, emissions of those temperature-cooling pollutants have been reduced even as greenhouse gas levels have continued to rise. As a result, global warming has proceeded rapidly over the past five decades as the increasing greenhouse effect has been unmasked.

There are various indicators of El Niño and La Niña events. There’s the Multivariate ENSO Index (or MEI for short); the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI, which is counter-intuitive in that negative numbers indicate El Niño conditions); and the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI). For our purposes, let’s take the average of the three indices (accounting for the opposite sign of the SOI) and set a cutoff – years with an average index of ± 0.3 are El Niño or La Niña years, and values in the middle represent “neutral” years.

Let’s also separate out “volcanic years,” because large volcanic eruptions like El Chichón in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991 can release enough sulfate pollution into the atmosphere to significantly block sunlight and cool global surface temperatures for about three years.

Remember too that research scientists Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf in a 2011 study estimated that there’s about a four-month lag before changes in the ENSO cycle are reflected in global surface temperature measurements. So, for example, ENSO changes from September 2017 through August 2018 influence the calendar year 2018 annual global surface temperature.

Using these criteria, since 1970 there have been 15 El Niño years, 15 La Niña years, 13 neutral years, and six volcanic years. 2018 was a fairly weak La Niña year similar to 2009 and 2012, but the global temperature was about 0.16-0.18°C (0.29-0.32°F) hotter in 2018 despite solar activity’s also remaining relatively low.

That last point is important: Those characterized as “climate contrarians” often argueeither that the Sun is responsible for global warming, or that an extended quiet solar phase will trigger a “mini ice age.” The fact that record temperatures are occurring while the Sun is in a quiet phase dispels these claims, which have long been disproved by the climate science community.

The global warming trend is clear

The overall global surface warming trend over the past five decades is 0.18°C (0.32°F) per decade. The trends among just El Niño (0.19°C or 0.34°F per decade), neutral (0.17°C or 0.31°F per decade), and La Niña years (0.19°C or 0.34°F per decade) during that period are all very similar.

Over short time intervals of a few years, if there is an abundance of La Niña events, global surface warming will appear to temporarily slow down because La Niña years are cooler than neutral and El Niño years. That happened between 1999 and 2012, when half of those 14 years were cooled by La Niña events. As a result, there were widespread claims that a global warming “pause” or “hiatus” had begun.

Fast forward, and 2014 through 2018 have been the five hottest years ever recorded. Those who proclaimed global warming had stopped or “paused” are now looking rather foolish. That’s because when looking at the big picture, the short-term temperature influences of El Niño and La Niña events cancel each other out, leaving the long-term human-caused global warming trend. That’s the 0.18°C (0.32°F) warming per decade since 1970. “In fact, a new study published in Environmental Research Letters concludes that “there is no statistical evidence for a ‘pause’.”

Every year now seems to be setting some sort of climate record. 2014 was the hottest year on record despite lacking an El Niño. 2015 quickly smashed that record, only to see it again shattered in 2016. 2017 then beat out 2014 to become the hottest year on record without an El Niño (both were neutral years). And now 2018 has become by far the hottest La Niña year ever recorded.

The data are making it increasingly hard to deny the reality and threats of human-caused climate change and the need for serious actions to address it.

#El Niño year #La Niña year #statistical significance

[2251bluewhales]

There’s recently been a spate of sea level rise denial in the conservative media, but in reality, sea level rise is accelerating and melting ice is playing an increasingly large role. In the first half of the 20th Century, average global sea level rose by about 1.4 millimeters per year (mm/yr). Since 1993, that rate has more than doubled to 3.2 mm/yr. And since 2012, it’s jumped to 4.5 mm/yr.

Thermal expansion (ocean water expanding as it warms) continues to play the biggest role in sea level rise, but its contribution of about 1.3 mm/yr is now responsible for a smaller proportion of total sea level rise (30% in recent years) than its contribution since the 1990s (40% of the total). That’s because of the acceleration in melting ice.

Glacier melt is accelerating, recently contributing about 0.75 mm/yr to sea level rise, up from 0.65 mm/yr since the 1990s. But the biggest jumps have come from ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Greenland had been responsible for about 0.48 mm/yr sea level rise since 1990, but in recent years is up to 0.78 mm/yr. A recent study in Nature Climate Change found that Greenland contributed about 5% to sea level rise in 1993 and 25% in 2014.

#climate change #sea level #oceans #environment #environmental news #environmental science #sea ice melt #sea level rise #environmentalism #global climate change

[lostbetweenthepages]

Wealth over health – it’s a perfect summary of today’s GOP platform. Quite simply, considering scientific evidence in crafting regulations does not favor the tobacco or fossil fuel industries, and so they have long sought to curtail its use. In Pruitt, polluters have finally found an ally who’s willing to stifle science in order to maximize their profits.

Republicans have so corrupted EPA, Americans can only save it in the voting booth | Dana Nuccitelli | Environment | The Guardian

#EPA #Fire Scott Pruitt

[littleearthtalks]

#climate change #climate change scepticism #environment #sea ice #polar regions #littleearthtalks #climate science #science communication #environmental politics #geography #earth science

[oilchangeus-blog]

Fight back against the denial, distortion, and disinformation that block bold action on climate change: climatetruth.org/standup

#climate change #climate change scepticism #environment #sea ice #polar regions #climate denial #disinformation #actonclimate

[rjzimmerman]

See the cartoon below. The key to political progress on climate change (and environmental issues, generally) is to isolate and ignore those who fall in the “dismissive” category. My suggestion is to give them a coloring book and a box of crayons, put them in a special room, and just leave them be. For the “cautious” and “disengaged,” we need to engage them, but not treat the issue like a science class or to frighten. Maybe focus on the possible effects on the price of bread and coffee, and the potential disappearance of beer.

Excerpt:

Numerous papers have shown that over 90% of climate science experts agree that humans are the main cause of global warming since 1950, and when considering peer-reviewed papers, the consensus exceeds 97%.

And yet as surveys by Yale and George Mason universities have found, only about 15% of Americans are aware that the expert climate consensus exceeds 90%. More recently, the Yale and George Mason team broke down American’s perceived expert consensus by their ‘Six Americas’ categorizations:

“The Alarmed are fully convinced of the reality and seriousness of climate change and are already taking individual, consumer, and political action to address it. The Concerned are also convinced that global warming is happening and a serious problem, but have not yet engaged the issue personally.

Three other Americas – the Cautious, the Disengaged, and the Doubtful – represent different stages of understanding and acceptance of the problem, and none are actively involved. The final America – the Dismissive are very sure it is not happening and are actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

As would be expected, the Alarmed and Concerned have the highest perception of the expert consensus, with the Dismissive having the lowest, and the Disengaged not having much of a clue about the level of agreement. However, the important finding in the Yale and George Mason survey is that even Americans who are Alarmed and Concerned about climate change badly underestimate the level of expert agreement on its human cause.

Average perceived expert consensus on human-caused global warming in each ‘6 Americas’ group (green) and percent in each category who don’t know the answer (grey). Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli

#climate change #environment #climate change scepticism #science