(cc photo: Daniel Reichert)
There’s an old joke, maybe best known from Woody Allen film Annie Hall: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.'”
I think about that when I see corporate media coverage of climate change. There’s not much of it, and sometimes you might wish there was even less.
Take the September 26 CBS Evening News report about climate change, sort of sneak peek at the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
The tease at the top of the broadcast didn’t sound good: “Is the world getting warmer? On the eve of a major new report on climate change, Mark Phillips reports a surprising discovery.” And the headline: “Globe Not Warming as Previously Thought: UN Report” doesn’t inspire confidence either.
Anchor Scott Pelley explained:
Scientists working with the United Nations have been poring over data on climate and greenhouse gases. Their report is due out tomorrow. But anyone expecting it to show steadily rising air temperatures could be in for a surprise.
Now it’s not clear that anyone should expect that the report would show this. But suggesting that this is what you would expect to find serves to advance a long-running, completely inaccurate meme among climate change deniers–that global warming has stopped.
Now, a helpful report would debunk this notion. But CBS correspondent Mark Phillips doesn’t really seem to be after that.
He starts off sounding, well, pretty cheeky:
Another inconvenient truth has emerged on the way to the apocalypse. The new UN report on climate change is expected to blame manmade greenhouse gases more than ever for global warming, but there’s a problem. The global atmosphere hasn’t been warming lately.
There are two problems here. The first is the notion that there hasn’t been much warming “lately.” That’s misleading. As Chris Mooney explained at Mother Jones (8/28/13), temperatures have been rising every decade since the 1950s. He writes:
Okay, so it’s clearly misleading to say the planet has stopped warming. What’s actually going on? It’s pretty nuanced: According to the leaked IPCC draft report, the rate of warming at the planet’s surface (technically, the “global mean surface temperature”) is lower over the last 15 years, kind of like a car easing off the accelerator. The draft states that the rate of surface warming from 1998-2012 was 0.05 degrees Celsius per decade. But over the entire period from 1951 to 2012, it was 0.12 degrees Celsius per decade.
CBS presented its own graphic to back up its claim the the planet’s temperature isn’t increasing–though, taking the long view, it actually shows the planet getting warmer.
After this misleading introduction, the show turns to Brian King of the National Oceanographic Centre in Britain to explain that, well, you can measure warming in more ways than air temperature. The world’s oceans, for example, have warmed considerably.
At this point, we’d have a news report that started off with a false premise but more or less corrected it.
But CBS doesn’t stop there. Phillips continued:
However the apparent pause in global warming is explained, it makes the task for the world’s majority of climate scientists who urge urgent action now more difficult. For the skeptics, it’s ammunition.
Now we already established that there is not “pause in global warming”–didn’t we? Never mind, let’s hear from a climate change “skeptic”! So CBS turns to British climate change skeptic Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, who argues against cutting greenhouse gas emissions. His group uses a deceptive graphic to push the view that global warming has slowed down (Guardian, 12/4/09)–just like the CBS broadcast.
Phillips closed the segment by saying this: “Whatever happens to the temperature, the climate change debate is about to heat up.”
With reports like this, that debate is bound to be pretty frustrating.
This ain’t just fiddling while Terra burns
It’s full scale symphonia
Holy cherry picking FAIR. I’m not going to argue that there isn’t debatable evidence for both sides of the issue, but you chose not to mention how the models have been so completely wrong out of the IPCC that they’ve hurt their own credibility. Why not? If your weatherperson was this wrong consistently would you bother watching them on the news anymore? You can’t just attack people who point this out and not hurt your own credibility. The UN…although I know so many here think it’s the second coming…is IN FACT a political body that is abused by the same systems of power all governments are. AND the UN is the epitome of an elitist oligarchical political organization. It has no credibility because it has no responsibility to anyone but the elites who appoint the representatives.
WHY? WHY do you keep fawning over everything it does and present it as more valuable than representative democracies and republics? It really hurts your credibility as a “voice of the average people” when you do it and makes this all sound like a propaganda scheme. Besides…hand picked scientists by an elite corporatist organization like the UN have no credibility in my book. Sorry if that makes anyone sad because they see the UN as some utopic manifestation but tell me why I am wrong?
And lets not forget…the methods of taking these temps over the last hundred years has changed significantly and the world is quite a bit older than that. Didn’t dinos used to roam pretty far north? HMMM? Just silly egos thinking they know the history of the frikin planet and then using that to argue for more control of people at the barrel of a gun. I thought we were against violence here…I guess not if it fulfills some ideology huh?
IPCC is more politics than science.
The one significant driver of the average global temperature trend since 1610 is disclosed at http://conenssti.blogspot.com/
By cherry picking starting dates you can show slowing in the “warming” but the IPCC predicts have been remarkably accurate. Lets face it, when 97% of the worlds top climate scientist are 95% certain that burning fossil fuels is moving us toward a +2 degree tipping point in climate change, its a good bet that we have a serious problem. Lets get past the fossil fuel funded talking points and discuss what policies will best insure that our children have a hospitable climate in which to raise their children. We owe them that regardless of our political differences.
As the old saying goes, ‘if you are going to predict the future you must first explain the past’.
When it comes man made global warming I have yet to read an explanation for what we know as the medieval warm period when temperatures were higher 1000 years ago without any man made global warming.
You only have to look at any map of the world and see Greenland and ask why when the vikings discovered did they give it such a name? Was it because it was covered in ice, no, they set up farms and grew plants on fertile land. I recently read an article from a so called climate scientist who said, quote “even the vikings were guilty of false advertising”. That was his best explanation for what we can clearly see as a natural cycle of warming and cooling on planet earth regardless of C02 levels
It is time to start moving past the climate change deniers, they will never be convinced and we no longer have the luxury of waiting for them to give up.
As one climate change scientist stated, it is time to realize that the modeling is going to be more accurate and less precise in the near future.
By more accurate, he meant that we are getting better at taking into account all the secondary feedback effects – ocean warming, changes in reflectivity of the ice sheets as there is more exposed land and less ice, etc.
Less precise, as we account in the short term for all these additional feedback mechanisms the models will be more variable, as they will be more sensitive to all the assumptions made in accounting for the relative strength of all these interactions
Climate change deniers & their corporate funders will seize on any uncertainty in the details of the modeling to create more confusion.
So it’s time to stop putting all the details of the models at the center of the arguments and look at the incontrovertible basics
The atmosphere and the oceans are warming on a long term scale. Any slow down in atmospheric warming reflects in significant part absorption of CO2 by the oceans, resulting in increasing acidification and a whole host of new threats to vital ecosystems, including essential fishery food supplies
Glaciers are retreating at a rate above all past predictions. If the run-off from Tibetan glaciers starts failing, essential water supplies to hundreds of millions of people or more will be put at risk.
All of this is what we have today with a less than 1 C temperature rise above historical levels. The major new direction in IPCC reporting is to talk in terms of total CO2 load. We can add less that 1000 GTons CO2 from all sources (buring fuels, deforestation, etc) and keep temperatures below 2 C rise. We have already added over 500 GT. The remaining CO2 loads represents burning well under 25% of the known fossil fuel reserves by 2050 when other greenhouse gas sources are taken into account
We no longer have the time to wait for the creationists & flat earthers to come to their senses. Jesus will not come back to save us. It’s up to us.
It was named Greenland to get people to settle there, not because it was green.
The Medieval Warm Period was not a global event, it was a series of regional events.
There is no legitimate debate whatsoever. These are pollution industry propaganda campaigns posing as factual reporting. The IPCC consensus itself is a compromise and inaccurate due to political pressure. Man made Global Warming and its causation of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, etc.are now known to be as real as evolution.
Thanks to Mr. McGonagill for pointing out a couple of facts that other climate denier/corporate propagandists missed. I have been to Greenland and I can assure everyone that the land is not fertile farmland, nor has it ever been as such. Almost all food must be flown in. I travelled there with my spouse who is a climate scientist and we would both suggest reading and rereading SJN’s comment for he./she speaks the truth. “We don’t have the time for creationists and flat earthers to come to their senses.”
Anyone can notice the renewed advertising appearing on network news shows – for the American Petroleum Institute – energytomorrow.org
They bought a half minute of commercial time – and they are the dominant advertiser for the Sunday news talk shows. Of course CBS will be careful not to bit the hand that feeds it. And as the IPCC reports so clearly, we might expect more paid advertisments for the broadcast news industry. This amounts to paid propaganda.
The climate is changing, the insects tell me so! The trees and plants and mammals that keep moving north tell too. Who would ever imagine the Nile Virus coming to California!
Look for your insurance rates to go up and your coverage to go down. Look for coastal home sales to flatline and yes, invest in sand….Florida’s buying a lot of that as the beach…dis…a…ppears….!
The oceans are warming and are covered with a plethora of plastic bags and so, learn to love jellyfish as they seem to be taking over all those warming oceans.Is there a new cookbook on the horizon…”50 Shades of Jellyfish?”
CBS wonders what happened to global warming…and I wonder, what happened to CBS!
There isn’t one person in a thousand posting here that can grasp the physics, chemistry, oceanography, statistics, and computer modeling that go into the climate change debate. Everybody starts out knowing the truth and then casts around for evidence to back it up.
Since we are so uninformed and so unprepared to take up the discussion, we must depend on those who have spent their careers studying climate change, those with PhD’s in the subject, those who publish in refereed journals, those that attend the conferences. A large majority of them agree humans are causing the world to get warmer. Those who spend their time camping out at various websites not known for contributions to the climate field, give it a rest. At the very heart of it, you don’t know what you are talking about.
Warming has in fact stopped. Read the weather reports.
But the other shoe is about to drop on global warming theology. Ambient CO2 is a Dependent variable. Not the cause, but the EFFECT of warming caused by natural forces. With cooler temperatures, ambient CO2 will stop increasing or even decrease (even though CO2emissions continue to rise).
That will be definitive proof that CO2 DOES NOT cause global warming. It will also put an end to the hyper-politicized, irrational media bickering like this article.
Couple of points from a climate amateur: Possible reason for recent change in rate of increase that I haven’t seen mentioned: there has been a recent increase in volcanic action that has delivered dust into the atmosphere, blocking incoming solar radiation – how effective has this been in slowing global warming??
The recorded increase in CO2 concentration which we blame on the coal-fired Industrial Revolution may also be linked to changes in farming practices during the same period – particularly moldboard plowing and abandoning the old practice of regular fallowed land.
These practices seriously reduced humous in first world farmland, and exactly coincided with the Industrial Revolution.
Humous is a MAJOR carbon sink, to the extent that Australian agronomists believe that increasing humous by a few percent there could make Australia carbon neutral, according to one recent report. This can be done by standard sustainable farming techniques available now.
Who guessed that it could be so simple?
All measurements point to the average global temperature TREND since 1610 (the start of regular recording of sunspot numbers) being driven by something(s) that are driven by the sunspot number time-integral and OSCILLATIONS above and below the trend are the net effect of ocean cycles. Since temperatures have been accurately measured world wide, the net effect of ocean cycles has been approximately +-1/5 K with a period of 64 years. Most recent peak was in approximately 2005.
Aerosols, volcanos, change to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, etc. have had no significant effect on average global temperature.
My first post above provides a link with sub links that explain the average global temperature trend since 1610 and, with accuracy of 90%, average global temperature measurements since before 1900.
Are the models, in fact, unreliable? Are they unable to make valid predictions? Let’s review the record. Global Climate Models have successfully predicted:
• That the globe would warm, and about how fast, and about how much.
• That the troposphere would warm and the stratosphere would cool.
• That nighttime temperatures would increase more than daytime temperatures.
• That winter temperatures would increase more than summer temperatures.
• Polar amplification (greater temperature increase as you move toward the poles).
• That the Arctic would warm faster than the Antarctic.
• The magnitude (0.3 K) and duration (two years) of the cooling from the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.
• They made a retrodiction for Last Glacial Maximum sea surface temperatures which was inconsistent with the paleo evidence, and better paleo evidence showed the models were right.
• They predicted a trend significantly different and differently signed from UAH satellite temperatures, and then a bug was found in the satellite data.
• The amount of water vapor feedback due to ENSO.
• The response of southern ocean winds to the ozone hole.
• The expansion of the Hadley cells.
• The poleward movement of storm tracks.
• The rising of the tropopause and the effective radiating altitude.
• The clear sky super greenhouse effect from increased water vapor in the tropics.
• The near constancy of relative humidity on global average.
• That coastal upwelling of ocean water would increase.
Seventeen correct predictions? Looks like a pretty good track record to me.
http://bartonpaullevenson.com/ModelsReliable.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm
In response to Miner49er’s erroneous suppositions..you sound like the kind of guy who would think that all that global climate change crisis stuff is an alarmist Liberal hoax, right? So I thought I’d help out with some more sources – like the U.S. military, the private sector – especially those sectors in insurance and risk analysis, or maybe the Big Oil guys themselves.
The U.S. Military:
• http://monthlyreview.org/2004/05/01/the-pentagon-and-climate-change
• http://blog.marport.com/2009/12/24/pentagon-says-climate-change-a-security-threat/
• http://science.dodlive.mil/2011/01/31/video-climate-change-and-national-security/
• http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxPentagon-Rear-Admiral-David
• http://infohouse.p2ric.org/ref/21/20958.htm
• http://www.serdp.org/Program-Areas/Resource-Conservation-and-Climate-Change/Climate-Change
The Private Sector:
• http://www.bluevirginia.us/diary/7640/worlds-top-companies-do-recognize-climate-change-while-romney-ignores-it CARBON DISCLOSURE PROJECT
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2012/11/19/a-new-report-on-climate-change-the-world-bank-tries-to-wake-us-up/
• http://www.ft.com/reports/climate-change-nov2012
• http://www.globalsurance.com/blog/accounting-for-climate-change-in-the-reinsurance-industry-390020.html
• http://www.eoearth.org/article/Insurance_and_reinsurance_in_a_changing_climate
• http://www.lloyds.com/lloyds/corporate-responsibility/environment
• http://www.lloyds.com/news-and-insight/risk-insight/reports/climate-change/climate-change-and-security
• http://www.munichre.com/en/group/focus/climate_change/research/data_facts_background/default.aspx
• http://www.munichre.com/en/group/focus/climate_change/research/default.aspx
• http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2006/05/17/68491.htm
• http://ctclimatechange.com/index.php/aetna-inc/http://ctclimatechange.com/index.php/aetna-inc/
• http://www.nationwide.co.uk/home_energy_advice/climate_change/default.htm
• http://www.nationwide.com/catastrophes/global-warming.jsp
• http://science.dodlive.mil/2011/01/31/video-climate-change-and-national-security/
• http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxPentagon-Rear-Admiral-David
• http://infohouse.p2ric.org/ref/21/20958.htm
• http://www.serdp.org/Program-Areas/Resource-Conservation-and-Climate-Change/Climate-Change
The Oil Industry itself:
• http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-27/exxon-s-rex-tillerson-says-global-warming-manageable-.html
• http://www.chevron.com/globalissues/climatechange/?utm_campaign=Tier_3&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=Bing_Yahoo!&utm_term=climate_change_effects
• http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/safety_climate.aspx
And because I’m a generous guy, the United States Federal Government:
The conservative branch of power in the US, the Republicans acted to address climate change already, back in 1970. The US President at the time, Richard Nixon (a Republican), acting at the behest of his science advisers and Democratic Senator Daniel Moynihan, helped establish the US Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. Here’s a copy of the memo Senator Moynihan sent to the White House in 1969 (especially note the conclusion about needing to cease burning fossil fuels):
• http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/jul10/56.pdf
Too much to say and too little space… One thing you learn upon reading posts such as these is that from the left’s point of view one is intelligent but them. You cannot have a viewpoint unless it is theirs or you will be called names – they are believers, the opposition are deniers, flat earthers or in another arena, truthers. Funny, this from the people who always champion freedom of speech…as long as they agree with it. On this topic the claim is that the opposition is paid for by the big oil companies while their scientists are pure and above reproach. I’m sure their money for research just flows in from nowhere with no strings attached and their personal political belief system has no bearing whatsoever on how they set up their research, collect and analyze the data and decide what data to release. The earth has been freezing and unfreezing for, what, billions of years, species have come and gone – sorry polar bears but you need to adapt, just ask Mr Darwin – and they came and went without mankind even being in the picture! I could be wrong but didn’t these same scientist believe we were going into another ice age in the 1930’s or ’70’s and it was our fault then too.
I wish the “believers” would finally realize that nothing the left does is out of a desire for the betterment of mankind. It is simply another incremental step toward complete control. Open your eyes. They want control of your health care which means they can truly control you from cradle to grave. Think they won’t control what you eat and how much you can weigh, how fast you can drive and if you can own guns. It will become a financial question because it’s about your health and keeping you healthy is expensive. If you have genetics that can prove costly in the future in your offspring , well guess what, you won’t be having any kids.
Sorry for getting off topic but I think it is all interrelated. If the “believers” don’t wake up soon we will have a one world government headed by the U.N. and none of us will be free any more.
Have a great day!
Ho hum here we go again.The leading scientist last week said that the only ” problem with proving global warming, is that the earth has been generally on a cooling trend”That maybe all the models forgot to take into account the worlds oceans!Ok a few things going on here folks.Number one global warming stopped 15 years ago.Ignore the graphs above.They have been discredited.It seemed to have started in 1945,ending 15 years ago.We are now getting colder.So the scientists are rebooting.Re calibrating failed models.In essence they are back to the drawing board.The idea that a government needs to take over an economy to force their way has been revealed to be a political shell game.And that government- no longer needing the political cache they could have derived from such a move ,have callusely moved on.So the deniers were not nuts after all.The ice fields are re building.Temps are dropping.The only constant is a government led by a liar.Full of liars.Promoted by a lap dog press.As Elaine said on Seinfeld in the soup Nazi segment………..NEXT!!!!!!
Gee, the LA TImes no longer accepts letters from climate deniers, what a great and responsible action for any journal .
“Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published. Saying “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-climate-change-letters-20131008,0,871615.story
Harry I think what you just said is you dont care if all the climate change models are thrown down.You dont care if we are all freezing our asses off in an ice age.You wont care if all the scientists agree that they were wrong.YOU….will be the last man standing.Like Charlie Brown waiting for the great Pumpkin.You will be yelling WERE IS THE DOG GONE SUN” !!!
To use solar energy to dry clothes. Instead of a dryer in the washing machine. Another way to reduce global warming.
Really no matter if someone doesn’t know afterward its
up to other users that they will assist, so here it
occurs.