Alert for HotWhopper email subscribers to resubscribe

Sorry for not following up my last post sooner. There'll be another climate post shortly. 

My excuse is being consumed by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. Not me personally, I hasten to add. It's a big problem in the state next door, NSW, and has slipped from there into my home state, Victoria, a couple of times (and other parts of Australia). That's meant lockdowns to get us back to zero COVID-19. Having a slightly obsessive tendency, I've been spending too much time on the endless press conferences, news articles and tweets about the subject. This has been at the expense of writing blog articles about climate change, I'm sorry to say.

While I'm preparing the next article (or procrastinating on its writing) I want to alert people who signed up for email alerts to new articles here on HotWhopper. The normal emails will stop because Feedburner is being shut down this month. Here's the notice:

Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement , that the email subscription service will be discontinued in August 2021.

After August 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported. If you’d like to continue sending emails, you can download your subscriber contacts.

If you'd like to continue to receive email alerts, please let me know directly, using the email address to which you want them sent. You can do the same if you no longer want alerts, although the subs will be opt-in, not opt-out. That is, if you don't let me know you want to continue, you will no longer receive email updates. 

You can let me know either way by sending an email to subscribeHW at HotWhopper.com (replacing the "at" with @).  If you're already a subscriber, you should be receiving this article as an email already, but the emailed articles will only continue if I set it up. I'll probably use mailchimp, which AFAIK is reliable and secure.

Beware of internal conflicts, rivalries and toxic behaviour polluting climate action

Today I'm going to tackle a difficult but important topic - internal conflict. Given the number of people involved, the number and complexity of the issues, and the decades over which the climate movement is likely to be needed, it's a pipe dream to think there will always be harmony. At the same time, if the sort of problems mentioned here aren't acknowledged and, preferably, dealt with well, they can spread and become very destructive. Sweeping things under the carpet, pretending conflict doesn't exist, only allows it to fester and grow.

Where to from here?

I spent a lot of time in western Canada in the early 1970s. That's 50 years ago for all you young ones. The world was very different then. Edmonton was experiencing it's longest winter since, almost, forever. It was a long cold winter. In the summer in British Columbia they kidnapped whoever happened to be in the local pubs to fight the annual forest fires, but the temperatures rarely exceeded 80F. It was what people thought of as a bit unusual but not completely abnormal.

Today the world is different. Hard to believe this week, but this is what we should have expected. 

#Canada just had a temperature of nearly 50°C (Lytton, 49.6°C)
"Without human-induced climate change, it would have been almost impossible ...as the chances of natural occurrence is once every tens of thousands of years," says @metoffice scientist
Details https://t.co/fb1nIF8wny pic.twitter.com/rxKGmQqZZM

— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) June 30, 2021

Western Canada is wondering if it has been relocated to Death Valley. 

There was famine somewhere in the world back then as there is now, but today, all of a sudden we need to find food for three times as many people. 

We're trying to get on top of a global pandemic that everyone says was anticipated but that no-one prepared for.

We've accepted and supported and elected leaders who aren't game to read the writing on the wall, aren't able to act, and keep pointing the finger at someone else for their inadequacies - anyone else will do.

Alright - it's not all gloom and doom. There are some elected leaders in various countries around the world who are realists and who are keen to make sure the human race survives until at least 2100.

There are journos and communicators who are still quite sure, or at least hopeful, the message coming from the harbingers of knowledge and science will make its way through to political leaders, if not the general population. And that we'll act on it.

For even more good news - I'm coming back, soon, with some analysis and information about where we are today and what's in store. It won't be pretty.

Are you up for it?

Everything climate disinformation from the climate conspiracy-theorists at WattsUpWithThat

Anthony Watts has set up a new website for climate disinformers and wilful deniers. (H/t CJ in the comments here at HotWhopper.)

His disinformation website is called Everything Climate. Translating its stated aim from denier-speak, it is to hook people who aren't yet knowledgeable about climate to recruit them as conspiracy theorists for the climate disinformation cult.

Questionable claims from the outset

Anthony Watts is known in climate science denier circles as a climate science disinformer and conspiracy theorist. True to form, he made a number of questionable claims in his introductory article. He wrote "We have four categories at the moment, and a few dozen sub-titles covering specific claims/arguments that are commonly in the news and are contentious."  The bit about "a few dozen sub-titles" is weird, because I can only see 23 articles. I've no idea what the "few dozen sub-titles" relate to. As for the topics he claims are all contentious, some of them are so well-established they are indisputable, some are the topic of active scientific research, and some are strawmen (i.e. the Everything Climate topic is not a claim or argument in scientific circles).

Rating climate science deniers to decide how/if to engage

Climate science deniers can be grouped in different ways. Having observed them for more than a decade now, this is how I see them:

1. The uninformed - ignorant about climate, doesn't read articles on climate. Strictly speaking the uninformed are not science deniers. They just don't know anything about climate.
2. The misinformed - previously uninformed who've read & unwittingly accepted climate disinformation.
3. Wilful deniers (aka wilfully ignorant) - previously misinformed but have since been exposed to climate science findings and rejected them (usually for ideological or other reasons). All of this category by definition are conspiracy theorists.
4. Climate disinformers - know the facts but are in the business of spreading lies to feed the previous categories (usually for monetary gain and/or ideological reasons). All of this category are by definition weavers of conspiracy theories.

I'd be interested to read how other people might categorise climate science deniers.

Greetings of the season, happy hols, stay safe

 As we approach the end of this unbelievably horrid year, my greetings are more muted.

I wish all of you a happy time, whether you're with friends, family or on your lonesome. There are better times to come (and undoubtedly worse times, too). Make the most of what you have and be careful. Stay safe. 

This day last year (Christmas Eve in south eastern Australia) it was hot and smoky:

This year there's no smoke, just clear skies and a gentle summer breeze blowing. Lovely. 

In closing, here's a pic of one of the friends I made this year.

Hottest November in Australia - during a La Niña!

 What can I say? This is climate change.

Figure 1 | November mean temperature anomaly Australia. Source: Bureau of Meteorology

We're in the midst of a La Niña so it's not meant to be hot like this, let alone the hottest November in the record. 

Okay, for the purists and deniers instead of saying this *is* climate change let me say this is *expected* with climate change. No, it's really not expected. It's just what's happening. 

How about this is *consistent with* climate change. Is it really? Is this really expected this year, in 2020, when emissions are lower because of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there's a La Niña? 

I must ask you, what the heck will be "consistent with" or "expected" for the rest of this decade?

Election denial, epidemiology denial and climate science denial

Congratulations to the people of the USA, who turned out in record numbers and finally got rid of Donald Trump, his family and the various remaining hangers on who've occupied the White House for the last (almost) four years.

There has been much celebration in the media, dancing in the streets, hope on Twitter and mockery on SNL. It seems surreal to celebrate a return to sanity. What this to-ing and fro-ing shows is both the fragility and the strength of democracy.

March toward reality or away from it?

Now I hate to be a wet blanket but I have to say while this was a terrific result, the march away from reality isn't over. There are populists rearing their heads all over the world, some of whom, like Trump, express views reminiscent of the worst leaders of the twentieth century.

Apologies

I woke up this morning to find that something has changed at Google and broke this blog.

I've reverted it to a standard theme so you'll find some things missing (like the menu).

It might be a while before I work this out, along with working out where to take blogging from here on in.

Till then, take care of yourself.

Update

As you can see, I've found out what Google broke. It was probably unintentional. In any case, I was able to use a workaround and get the blog back to normal.

Sou - 7 August 3:03 pm AEST

Anthony Watts' Russian steampipes move around the world - amazing!

Every three or four years Anthony Watts (who owns a conspiracy blog called Watts Up with That, or WUWT) claims steam pipes in vast empty spaces in remote and largely unpopulated areas of Russia are what's causing global warming. This year he's at it again (archived here).

I don't need to write much about this, you can see it in pictures. In fact, Anthony himself put up a photo of steam pipes in a small town called Omyakon (population ~500), one of the coldest permanently inhabited places on earth.

The map below shows where the tiny settlement of Omyakon is located on the GISTEMP January temperature map . It's not in the middle of where the highest temperature anomalies were recorded.

Figure 1 | Temperature anomalies for January 2020 from the 1951-1980 mean, showing the location of Omyakon and its steampipes that conspiracy nutters blame for global warming. Data source: NASA GISTEMP