Seems that AP has succumbed to the poor sensitive little science deniers who call for jail time for climate scientists. It's more than political correctness - it's political correctness gone haywire. Usually it's the extreme right wing ideologues who moan about people who conform to "political correctness" - except when they want a euphemism for their own behaviour. Instead of calling climate science denial denial of climate science, AP wants to pretend that rampant deniers only doubt climate science. Which is nonsense. Deniers don't doubt. They just "know" that all the science of the past 200 years is wrong. Deniers reject science. They prefer to think that for the past 200 years there has been a giant hoax perpetrated on the illiterati (that is, deniers).
From denial to doubt? No, it's still denial
Paul Colford wrote at AP about a change to the AP Style Guide:
Our guidance is to use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science and to avoid the use of skeptics or deniers.
I don't know what's got into Anthony Watts. Yesterday he thought it was June instead of July, and wrote about an upcoming release of May data from NOAA, when that report had already been released a month ago.
Today Anthony seems to think that 2050 is behind us (archived here). That it's been and gone. That we're already past the middle of this century. He wrote about a "failed prediction" from Joe Romm of Climate Progress, quoting him as writing (my emphasis):
In 2007, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. Last year, a comprehensive literature review, “Drought under global warming: a review,” by NCAR found that we risk multiple, devastating global droughts worse than the Dust Bowl even on moderate emissions path. Another study found the U.S. southwest could see a 60-year drought this century.
One of the pluses of having a blog is that you can be self-indulgent from time to time, and use it to let off a little steam.
Derailing a conversation of substance
A short while ago I was informed on Twitter that I'd derailed a "conversation of substance". I thought I'd merely commented on a tweet from Roger Pielke Jr, which wasn't a reply to anything that I could see. Though looking again now, Roger was talking to quite a few people, so it's quite possible he was engaged in a conversation. Therefore I suppose my comment could be considered a rude intrusion on a cosy chat (oddly enough, by @MichaelBTI who, as far as I could tell, was never a part of that conversation either).
Jim Steele seems to be addicted to making up stuff. Today he wrote a long article for Anthony Watts' blog WUWT, picking on Katharine Hayhoe and Don Cheadle, who featured in the Years of Living Dangerously (which I haven't seen). Jim wrote a long article short on facts and long on his normal rejection of science (archived here). At one stage he wrote:
The truth is there has been no climate warming in Texas.
To support his claim he put up a chart that he described as "Plainview TX temperature trends found online from the US Historical Climate Network". I don't know why he stopped at 2012. Anyway, I've got a better chart if you want to know about Texas temperatures. It's a statewide chart, not just one small town in the north of the state. The data is from NOAA. I converted it from Fahrenheit to Celsius and plotted it as an anomaly from the twentieth century mean.
You can see how much hotter it's been getting, consistently - in Texas. It's been hotter for longer for any time in the record going back to the late 1800s. Much hotter, with 2012 being nearly two degrees Celsius above the twentieth century average.
I can't be bothered going through the rest of Jim's diatribe. He does end up blaming Joe Romm for whatever Katherine Hayhoe said. Jim's a climate science denier. He's written a book about his denial. It pays to check every word he writes. What I suggest for anyone who's come looking to find out more about Jim Steele, you can type his name into the search box above. This is by no means the first time he's lashed out at scientists or misrepresented data.
You can read about how Jim doubled down when I pointed out he'd got his seas wrong and his seasons wrong. [Update: You can see Jim continues to "double down" in the comments below. Not once has he conceded that the NOAA data shows warming or that the paper he himself cited states that Texas has warmed (which it does). Not only does the paper state that Texas has warmed, it attributes some of this warming to human factors! Sou2:10 pm AEST Thurs 17 April 2014]
The IPCC AR5 WGIII Summary for Policy Makers is now available for download. Without making a recommendation for any particular option, it assesses "the scientific, technological, environmental, economic and social aspects of mitigation of climate change". It also assesses societal implications of different mitigation policies.
For this assessment, about 900 mitigation scenarios have been collected in a database based on published integrated models.
That's a lot of mitigation scenarios to work through! I'm still reading the report as I write this. It looks as if the main report will be chock full of facts and figures as well as emphasising what will probably seem obvious to most readers.
One item that fits in the "facts and figures" category is this one, about how if we don't do something, we're stuffed:
Without additional efforts to reduce GHG emissions beyond those in place today, emissions growth is expected to persist driven by growth in global population and economic activities. Baseline scenarios, those without additional mitigation, result in global mean surface temperature increases in 2100 from 3.7 to 4.8°C compared to pre‐industrial levels 10 (median values; the range is 2.5°C to 7.8°C when including climate uncertainty, see Table SPM.1)
Yep, the report comes right out and says we could be heading for a temperature rise of 7.8°C.
We've not done enough to stay safe. We've not promised to do enough to stay below 2°C of warming. But we can get there if we put our collective mind to it.
Estimated global GHG emissions levels in 2020 based on the Cancún Pledges are not consistent with cost‐effective long‐term mitigation trajectories that are at least as likely as not to limit temperature change to 2°C relative to pre‐industrial levels (2100 concentrations of about 450 and about 500 ppm CO2eq), but they do not preclude the option to meet that goal (high confidence). Meeting this goal would require further substantial reductions beyond 2020. The Cancún Pledges are broadly consistent with cost‐effective scenarios that are likely to keep temperature change below 3°C relative to preindustrial levels. [6.4, 13.13, Figures TS.11, TS.13]
The more we delay the more dangerous and costly it becomes and the fewer choices we'll have.
Delaying mitigation efforts beyond those in place today through 2030 is estimated to substantially increase the difficulty of the transition to low longer‐term emissions levels and narrow the range of options consistent with maintaining temperature change below 2°C relative to pre‐industrial levels
The report includes some pie-in-the-sky scenarios for comparison, such as everywhere on earth starting to mitigate immediately and there is a global price on carbon. It's not all bad news. If we act properly, there will be lots of associated benefits such as clean air (which some parts of the world haven't seen in a while).
The SPM touches on different sectors: transport, buildings, and industry as well as agriculture, forestry and other land use (which has its own acronym AFOLU). It also discusses what actions have been taken around the world to mitigate, in a broader policy context. The final (short) section covers international cooperation.
By the way, the only mention of this at WUWT so far is a dig at ClimateProgress (archived here), although for some reason Anthony Watts neglected to mention that the ClimateProgress article was about WGIII.
Anthony probably didn't realise what Joe Romm's article was about, even though it's mentioned in the snapshot he took. He was too busy trying to make a "funny" out of Joe Romm writing:
You read that right, the annual growth loss to preserve a livable climate is 0.06% — and that’s “relative to annualized consumption growth in the baseline that is between 1.6% and 3% per year.” So we’re talking annual growth of, say 2.24% rather than 2.30% to save billions and billions of people from needless suffering for decades if not centuries. As always, every word of the report was signed off on by every major government in the world.
Anthony thinks he's clever, cleverer even than Dr Joe Romm
This quote from Anthony Watts (of WUWT) is funny, though once again it's not tagged as "humour". Anthony decides he is cleverer than 'alarmists', in fact he even thinks he's smarter than Joe Romm and writes:
From the University of Alberta, this news release is making the rounds, but what many of the alarmists don’t get (Joe Romm for example) is that these plants had to have a warm environment to grow in first, then they were covered by ice, emerging again after the LIA ended. Many reports are only looking at the current emergence in a warmer period as if it is unique. – Anthony
Anthony, I believe you'll find, should you ask him, that Dr Romm knows that the bryophyte was not frozen in ice before it was frozen. I wouldn't mind betting that there might even be one or two of Anthony's Dismissives who would twig to that.
Clever little Anthony is correct when he writes that the bryophytes emerged after the end of the Little Ice Age ended. They emerged about 160 years after it ended.
It took more than the ending of the little ice age for these mosses to emerge. It took human activity to heat up the world and cause a widespread and sharply accelerating ice retreat across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago according to the abstract:
Across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, widespread ice retreat during the 20th century has sharply accelerated since 2004. In Sverdrup Pass, central Ellesmere Island, rapid glacier retreat is exposing intact plant communities whose radiocarbon dates demonstrate entombment during the Little Ice Age (1550–1850 AD)....
What makes this warming unique
As for this warmer period being unique - does anyone think Anthony would be willing to admit its unique features? Here are some unique features of this warmer period:
It's the first time ever since Homo sapiens evolved that carbon dioxide has been this high;
It's the first time in the history of earth in which there has been such a rapid period of warming as a result of human activity;
This past hundred years marks the first period ever in the history of Earth that any species has had the power to choose whether to end the world as we know it or whether to limit the damage being wreaked upon life on earth.
It's probably the first major mass extinction event since the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event, which took place about 66 million years ago.
It would be the first time in the history of earth that a sentient species knowingly and willingly charged full pelt towards its own destruction, if Anthony Watts had his way.
Retreating glaciers are proving to be good news for plant scientists. Underneath one such glacier on Ellesmere Island in Canada, researchers have found plants they believe have regrown after being entombed in the glacier for more than 400 years, since a cold period called the Little Ice Age.
These plants are called bryophyte, a group that includes mosses. They are non-vascular, which means they do not have tissue that distributes resources throughout the plant and they do not reproduce through flowers and seeds. They use spores instead. But they also possess the ability to regrow from tiny fragments of themselves through a process called clonal growth. “This ability makes bryophytes pretty tough,” Andrew Fleming, a plant scientist who was not involved in the study, said.
The discovery reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was made by a team led by Catherine La Farge, an expert on bryophytes at the University of Alberta. Because the bryophytes found were not much different from similar variety found in the wild today, La Farge used radio carbon dating to confirm the age of their find.
The plants were trapped during a period known as the Little Ice Age, between the 16th and 19th centuries, when glaciers were growing in size. Arctic glaciers have recently been retreating and, since 2004, the rate of ice melt has increased dramatically. La Farge is hopeful that, in addition to these plants, the melting glaciers will release other interesting flora and fauna of that time.
When these bryophytes were found they were blackened, but sported a hint of green. See to the right of the rock in the middle. Catherine La Farge
This discovery does not displace the record of the oldest frozen plant to be regenerated. That belongs to a 32,000 year old specimen of Silene stenophylla, which was regrown by using tissue extracted from its frozen seeds.
These bryophytes are also not the hardiest plants we know. That title belongs to what are commonly known as resurrection plants, which are able to survive extreme dehydration. Some of these are commonly found in deserts, such as Selaginella lepidophylla found in Chihuahuan Desert on the border of Mexico and the US.
1. Catherine La Farge, Krista H. Williams, and John H. England (2013) Regeneration of Little Ice Age bryophytes emerging from a polar glacier with implications of totipotency in extreme environments, PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1304199110
