Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Al Jazeera English"
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Since 1900 the global temperature has increased by 1.3°C. In that time humanity has flourished. Life expectancy has more than doubled from 32 to 73 years. Literacy has quadrupled from 21% to 86%. Humans are seven times more productive ($2,241 to $15,212 GDP per capita, per annum). People are better fed, having ⅓ more calories every day (2,192kcal to 2,928kcal). Global extreme poverty rates have tumbled from 70% to less than 10% (<$1 a day). And death from weather events have collapsed by a factor 50 from 241 million down to 5 million even while the global population has increased by a factor of 5.
There is no climate crisis. There is no evidence of a climate crisis.
Even if there is radical climate change (and that is a very, very big 'if') with the manifestation of numerous tipping points (including permafrost thaw, ocean hydrates dissociation, Arctic sea ice loss, rainforest dieback, polar ice sheet loss, AMOC slowdown, and Indian monsoon variability) the disruption to economic growth and well-being will be minimal. The world's economy will continue to grow making everyone much richer. By 2050 world mean consumption per capita should be $29,100 with tipping points or $29,300 without tipping points. Barely noticeable. Apart from it being approximately double what it is now. By 2100 world mean consumption per capita should be $71,000 with or without tipping points (Dietz et al, 2021).
This is the most fortunate time to be alive in the whole of history.
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This is climate change: There has been a 10% decline in natural disasters since 2000 (CRED). Globally the ACE index (accumulated cyclone energy) 1980-2021 shows no increasing trend. Global Hurricane Landfalls 1970-2021 (updated from Weinkle et al, 2012) shows no trend. Satellite data since 1980 shows a slight downward global trend for total hurricaine numbers with 2021 being a record low year. From the NOAA GFDL website 'Global Warming and Hurricanes, An Overview of Current Research' (dated Feb. 9, 2023). And I quote "We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes." Multidecadal variability in Atlantic hurricaines is most probably related to the AMO (Vecchi et al, 2021). NOAA data 1851-2021 shows no trend in number of hurricaine landfalls with the record high being 1886. It makes no difference if you look at the Pacific. Using data from the JMA 1951-2022 we see typhoon activity trending downwards for over 7 decades.
What the data from NOAA SPC shows about tornados: EF1-EF5 (1954-2022) no trend; EF3-EF5 (most destructive) (1954-2022) 50% decline. No EF5s in US since 2013 (a record absence).
The Global Land Precipitation Anomaly from AR5 will disappoint with deviations from the average increasing by 0.2% per decade, but if you look at the actual data, it's just very variable over the decades.
Drought appears to be decreasing globally (Watts et al, 2018) measured by SPI 1901-2017.
For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%--from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 in per year during the 2010s.
Data on disaster deaths come from (EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels,Belgium. )
There are over 5 million excess deaths per annum globally due to abnormal temperatures from the 2000-2019 study led Prof. Guo of Monash University. It found that over 90% of excess deaths were caused by excess COLD rather than excess heat. So, in a world with increasingly mild temperatures, there will be less excess death. Warming is good not bad.
Deserts have shrunk considerably since the 1980's. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015(Liu & Xue, 2020). The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. "The greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year"(NASA, 2019). Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016 (Nature, 2018). As well as human intervention, the reasons for this include forests expanding polewards aided by additional CO2 and a slight rise in temperature.
The Great Barrier Reef's coral cover has reached the greatest extent ever recorded (AIMS). If you look at the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) data, the WIO (West Indian Ocean) shows 26% hard coral cover in 1985 upto 30% in 2020. South Asia reefs shows a decline around 2000 to below 25% then a regrowth to around 40% (2010) and a decline to 25% (2020). The Red Sea shows no change at around 25% (1995-2020). So the pattern in these three areas show no relationship to each other or to a changing climate.
GCRMN data for the most important coral bioregion, the East Asia Seas, with 30% of the world’s coral reefs, and containing the most diverse coral of the ‘Coral Triangle’, show no statistically significant net coral loss since records began. The East Asia region has the biggest human population living in close proximity to reefs, and is located in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool – the hottest major water mass on earth.
On extinction the rate is very low: 900 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years (IUCN), so from observations there are an average of slightly less than 2 species lost every year. Out of a known species total of over 2 million. That gives an annual percentage loss of less than 0.0001%. That's background extinction. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. Of course, extinction is a natural part of the evolution of life on this planet with the average lifespan of a species thought to be about 1 million years (cf 930,000). It is estimated that 99.9% of all plant and animal species that have existed have gone extinct. It should also be noted that no genera have become extinct in the last 500 years.
Global temperatures maxed out in 2016 and have been lower ever since (UAH v6 global satellite data). 500 billion tonnes of emissions in that time, and no warming.
There is no climate crisis.
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@user-yb4pq4my1o Keep track of the climate. The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
How about some quotes from the UN's IPCC AR6?
"There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions."
"There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions."
"Observed mean surface wind speed trends are present in many areas, but the emergence of these trends from the interannual natural variability and their attribution to human-induced climate change remains of low confidence due to various factors such as changes in the type and exposure of recording instruments, and their relation to climate change is not established. . . The same limitation also holds for wind extremes (severe storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms)."
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living through a global climate crisis. None.
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The retreat of Himalayan glaciers began before the current warming and was caused by reduced precipitation (Shekhar, 2017. Singh, 2020.). This supported by further work done by Schneider (2014), and Chen (2019). The retreat was due to a reduction in precipitation. Currently, precipitation is half of what it was 20 years previously. Research by Salerno (2015) "challenges the assumption of the main driver [i.e. temperature] of glacier mass changes".
Satellite data shows the glaciers in the Karakoram largely unaffected by current warming. Of 1219 glaciers surveyed, 79.5% were stable, 5.3% were advancing, and 7.6% retreating (Rankl, 2014).
Swiss Alps glacier extents were smaller than 2000 C.E. during the warmer-than-today Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and throughout 75% of the Holocene, or when temperatures were 1-3°C warmer (Schimmelpfennig et al., 2022).
Glaciologists Bohleber et al, 2020 of the Austrian Academy of Science discovered from ice cores that the 3500-meter high Weißseespitze summit was ice free 5900 years ago.
There is “no evidence” that Jostedalsbreen, a southern Norway glacier, even existed during the first several thousand years of the Holocene, or when CO2 hovered near 260 ppm (Winker, 2021).
In Alaska's Glacier Bay the melt rate from 1780 to 1880 was much greater than the melt rate from 1880 to the present.
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. Glacial retreat is certainly not evidence of this.
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The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
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There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis.
The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
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This is a scare story about things you cannot see.
To quote the Chief Scientist at the National Oceanography Centre, Professor Penny Holliday, "There hasn't been a slow down. There hasn't been a slowing of the AMOC."
Actual observations using the RAPID-MOCHA array from 2004 to 2023 show, that although there can be a great deal of variability of flow in the ocean from month to month or even day to day, there has been no decline in the Gulf Stream, with flow oscillating around 32Sv (32 million cubic metres per second) throughout the period of observation.
Continuous section measurements of the AMOC, available since 2004 at 26°N from the RAPID-MOCHA array, have shown that the AMOC strength decreased from 2004 to 2012, and thereafter, it has strengthened again. No relationship to CO2.
MOC spanning the North Atlantic at 27°N derived from RAPID/MOCHA/WBTS, satellite altimeter, and Argo floats for 1994 to 2020 shows no statistically significant decline (-0.06 Sv per decade). Furthermore blended meridional overturning basin-wide circulation (MOC) trend estimates (Sv) based on combinations of satellite altimetry and in situ hydrography data exist for the South Atlantic for 1994 onwards: at 34.5°S (often referred to as SAMBA) is +0.48Sv per decade. This is a significant positive trend, so no decline, no tipping point, no correlation to CO2. (GLOBAL OCEANS G. C. Johnson and R. Lumpkin, Eds., 2021)
The OSNAP MOC Timeseries of observations from Canada to Greenland and across to Scotland, although a shorter timescale (from 2014), show no decline in MOC with the flow fluctuating around 17Sv.
"Florida Current transport observations reveal four decades of steady state" Volkov et al, 2024 (published in Nature). This paper shows that a key component of AMOC, the Florida Current, has remained remarkably steady for over 40 years.
There is no climate crisis.
The North Atlantic current has doubled its velocity over the course of a quarter of century (Oziel et al, 2020). This is based on actual satellite observations.
The idea the AMOC is going to shut down is based on modelling. There is minimal real world evidence to support these outlandish claims. It relies upon climate models. You know, those Magical Truth Machines that keep making false predictions. It claims with 95% certainty that the AMOC with collapse by the end of the century. Come on! Really?
Sea surface temperatures (SST) were trending downwards 2000-2018 (HadSST 4), and from 1950-1980, and from 1880-1910. The oceans warmed at a faster rate 1910-1940 than 1980-2010. Remember CO2 has been accumulating in the atmosphere at an accelerating rate all the time, so there is little correlation between the two.
The North Atlantic ocean has cooled and warmed rapidly and repeatedly during the current interglacial with no correlation to CO2 e.g. 10,300-10,200 years before the present (y BP), 9,500y BP, 6,000-5,900y BP, 5,400-5,300y BP, 2,500-2,300y BP, 1,700-1,600y BP (Berner et al., 2008. See Figure 8 in the paper). There is a high frequency (18 events) of SST variability on the order of 1-3°C during a 10-50 year time resolution throughout the Holocene in the North Atlantic with no correlation to CO2. And Life just carried on.
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The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
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@Richard482 Sea level appears to be rising at a small 3mm per year. Atolls in the Pacific nations of the Marshall Islands and Kiribati, as well as the Maldives archipelago in the Indian Ocean, have risen up to 8 percent in size (Ford and Kench, 2020). 89% of the globe’s islands and 100% of large islands have stable or growing coasts (Duvat, 2019). No island larger than 10ha decreased in size.
As regards NOAA tide gauge data, let's look at some examples from around the world. N.B. All sites show a linear Relative Sea Level Trend: Kanmen, China 2.40mm/yr; Sydney, Australia 0.75mm/yr; Ferandina Beach, Florida 2.20mm/yr; Los Angeles, California 1.04mm/yr; Mera, Japan 3.8mm; Cascais, Portugal 1.32mm/yr; Newlyn, UK 1.94mm/yr.
Jevrejeva, et al (2014) estimated 2 mm/year (± 0.3), and Church and White (2006) estimated 1.7mm/year (± 0.3). So that's a total rise of between 126 and 151mm (less than 6 inches) from 2024 to the end of the century.
Or try PSMSL data: Kwajalein (Marshall Islands) 1.95mm/yr; Maldives (Indian Ocean) 3.21mm/yr; Lautoka (Fiji Islands, Pacific Ocean) 3.50mm/yr; Port Elisabeth (South Africa) 2.34mm/yr.
Remember, all linear over many decades, or more than a century.
Anyway, if you prefer satellite data NOAA's trend was +3.0mm/year Global Mean Sea Level (1993-2022), again linear last time I looked for each set of satellite data (but hey, it may have accelerated in the last month).
NASA satellite data (1993-present) for Global Mean Sea Level shows a rise of 3.3mm per year. That's the same as two stacked penny coins.
There is no relationship to the exponential increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. It's going to be decades before even your big toe is submerged.
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@Richard482 The problem with all these models and projections is that Antarctica is not playing the game.
The whole of East and West Antarctica is cooling, and has been for 40 years. East Antarctica has cooled by an impressive 0.7°C per decade. Resulting in an overall substantial and statistically significant decline of 2.8°C since 1980. So much for "Global" warming. I am referring to a paper by Zhu et al (2021) that looked at the reanalysed ERA5 satellite dataset. Check out table 4. Furthermore, the Antarctic Peninsula ice has since been shown to be on the increase “The eastern Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet has grown in area over the last 20 years, due to changing wind and sea ice patterns.” (University of Cambridge, May, 2022.)
In reality, "there have been statistically significant positive trends in total Antarctic sea ice extent since 1979." (Fogt et al, 2022. Published in Nature) "since 1979 is the only time all four seasons demonstrate significant increases in total Antarctic sea ice in the context of the twentieth century".
A study of Antarctic ice shelves from 1980 to 2021 (Banwell et al, 2023) showed meltwater volume dropped with "decreasing trend in both annual melt days and meltwater production volume over the 41 years.”
"Overall, the Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 km² since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area. Our observations show that Antarctic ice shelves gained 661 Gt of ice mass over the past decade." (Andreasen et al, 2023). It is from a paper entitled "Change in Antarctic Ice Shelf Area from 2009 to 2019". They use MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite data to measure the change in ice shelf calving front position and area on 34 ice shelves in Antarctica from 2009 to 2019. Also, as the mass gain (661Gt) was given, you could calculate the volume of the ice gained using the formula: Volume = Mass ÷ Density (assume Density of glacier ice 0.9167 Gt/km³). This would give you (well not you obviously) an Ice Gain Volume ≈721km³. That's how much extra of the lovely white stuff there is around Antarctica. Imagine standing in the centre of this extra ice. It would stretch beyond the horizon in all directions and would be 45 storeys high.
The Greenland ice sheet is thought to contribute 0.7mm/yr to sea-level rise. That sounds small because it is pitifully small. Antarctica contributes 0.36mm to sea-level rise per year. (That's essentially nothing as well.) The remainder is due to the thermal expansion of the ocean, and is a signal of past warming rather than current.
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There has been a 10% decline in natural disasters since 2000 (CRED). Normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920, so you're 50 times less likely to die from a climate-related disaster in a world that's 1°C warmer than 100 years ago (EM-DAT, CRED/UC). Deaths from drought have declined by 99%!
As an example of good news, Climate Change saved 555,103 lives in England and Wales between 2001 and 2020 (ONS, 2022).
Globally the ACE index (accumulated cyclone energy) 1980-2021 shows no increasing trend. Global Hurricane Landfalls 1970-2021 (updated from Weinkle et al, 2012) shows no trend. Satellite data since 1980 shows a slight downward global trend for total hurricaine numbers with 2021 being a record low year. From the NOAA GFDL website 'Global Warming and Hurricanes, An Overview of Current Research' (dated Feb. 9, 2023). And I quote "We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes." Multidecadal variability in Atlantic hurricaines is most probably related to the AMO (Vecchi et al, 2021). NOAA data 1851-2021 shows no trend in number of hurricaine landfalls with the record high being 1886. There is also no trend in the frequency of major hurricanes (Cat 3 +) for the same period, although the trend for the last 20 years is downwards. It makes no difference if you look at the Pacific. Using data from the JMA 1951-2022 we see typhoon activity trending downwards for over 7 decades.
There is evidence cited in AR6 (IPCC) that Australia is experiencing the lowest frequency of tropical cyclones in the last 550 to 1,500 years, and that windspeed overland throughout the Northern Hemisphere has been dropping in recent decades. Also the number of intense storms (below 960 mbars) in the Northern Atlantic has fallen sharply since 1990 (Tilinina et al, 2021).
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report, Chapter 11,"Weather and Climate Extreme Events in Changing Climate" concludes that changes in the frequency and intensity of most severe weather events (with corresponding intense rainfall) have not been detected nor can they be attributed to human caused climate change.
What the data from NOAA SPC shows about tornados: EF1-EF5 (1954-2022) no trend; EF3-EF5 (most destructive) (1954-2022) 50% decline. No EF5s in US since 2013 (a record absence).
There has been no clear change in annual precipitation over the Earth's landmasses between 1850-2000 (Wijngaarden, 2015).
Drought appears to be decreasing globally (Watts et al, 2018) measured by SPI 1901-2017.
Deserts have shrunk considerably since the 1980's. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015(Liu & Xue, 2020). The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. "The greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year"(NASA, 2019). Observations of Earth’s vegetative cover since the year 2000 by NASA’s Terra satellite show a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of the century. Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016 (Nature, 2018). As well as human intervention, the reasons for this include forests expanding polewards aided by additional CO2 and a slight rise in temperature. Increased CO2 causes this in two ways: it has a direct fertilising effect (the CFE), and it increases drought tolerance by reducing stomata. This greening of the Earth due to CO2 is now "an indisputable fact" (Chen et al, 2024). In fact, 55.15% of those areas greening have been doing so at an accelerated rate since 2001. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the Earth's primary productivity has increased by more than 30% (Campbell et al, 2017 and Haverd et al, 2020).
The Earth’s natural vegetation productivity actually increased 6% in 18 years (Nemani et al, 2003) with 42% of this increase coming from the Amazon rainforests.
Between 1961 and 2021 global cereal production increased 250% and cereal yield increased over 200%. Land used for cereal hardly increased (Data from World Bank, FAO/UN). This is the only time in human history that you are more likely to be overfed rather than underfed. We should be thankful we were borne into an age of such abundance. A US DoE study (Taylor & Schlenker, 2021) estimated that a 1 ppm increase in CO2 led to an increase of 0.4%, 0.6% and 1% in yield for corn, soybeans and wheat, respectively, and that CO2 increase was the main driver of the 500% yield growth in corn since 1940. Global tomato production has set a record each year for the past 10 years. Banana production has doubled in 20 years. All 10 of the largest sugar crops in global history occurred during the past 10 years. All 10 of the 10 largest rice crop years occurred during the past 10 years (UNFAO). 2023 was another record cereal crop.
The Great Barrier Reef's coral cover reached the greatest extent ever recorded in 2022 and 2023 (AIMS) despite reports of supposed repeated bleaching. If you look at the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) data, the WIO (West Indian Ocean) shows 26% hard coral cover in 1985 upto 30% in 2020. South Asia reefs shows a decline around 2000 to below 25% then a regrowth to around 40% (2010) and a decline to 25% (2020). The Red Sea shows no change at around 25% (1995-2020). So the pattern in these three areas show no relationship to each other or to a changing climate. The Caribbean region reefs have a cover of around 0.15 ± 0.02. There is no evidence of a major reduction in coral cover in the Caribbean over the last two decades.
GCRMN data for the most important coral bioregion, the East Asia Seas, with 30% of the world’s coral reefs, and containing the most diverse coral of the ‘Coral Triangle’, show no statistically significant net coral loss since records began. The East Asia region has the biggest human population living in close proximity to reefs, and is located in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool – the hottest major water mass on earth.
Life is most diverse in the warmest parts of the world’s oceans. This has been shown across 13 major taxonomic groups from zooplankton to marine mammals. Warmer water = more biodiversity. This is a scare story about things you cannot see.
Extinction rates (1500-2009) peaked around 1900 at 50 per decade. Extinction rates have declined dramatically to around 4 to per decade in the 2000s. So the extinction rate is very low: 900 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years (IUCN), so from observations there are an average of slightly less than 2 species lost every year. Out of a known species total of over 2 million. That gives an annual percentage loss of less than 0.0001%. That's background extinction. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. Of course, extinction is a natural part of the evolution of life on this planet with the average lifespan of a species thought to be about 1 million years (cf 930,000). It is estimated that 99.9% of all plant and animal species that have existed have gone extinct. It should also be noted that no taxonomic families have become extinct in the last 500 years. In fact marine diversity at the taxonomic level of families is the highest it has ever been in the Earth's long history (see Sepkoski Curve). In a review of 16,009 species, most populations (85%) did not show significant trends in abundance, and those that did were balanced between winners (8%) and losers (7%) (Dornelas et al, 2019). There have been only 9 species of continental birds and mammals confirmed extinct since 1500 (Loehle, 2011). No global marine animals have become extinct in the past 50 years (McCauley et, 2015 using IUCN data).
There is no climate crisis.
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@buzzlightyearlight1247 Would you rather have some actual instrumental data to quote. There is no "global" warming. The northerly latitudes are warming, but the southerly latitudes are cooling with little change in trend around the Equator (NOAA-STARv5 TLT & TMT 1979-2023). Overall the Earth appears to be warming at around 0.13°C/decade (UAHv6, NOAA-STARv5, radiosondes - 28 million weather balloons, and climate reanalyses concur on this). NOAA-STARv5 TLT may even appear to show a reduction in the rate of warming globally. 1981-2023: +0.129°C/decade, 1981-2001: +0.130°C/decade, 2002-2014: +0.008°C/decade, 2015-2023: -0.060°C/decade, so when you look at actual instrumental records the warming is uneven both spatially and temporally. It's not simple it's complicated. But there's still no climate crisis.
I'm going to assume (because you are using Fahrenheit) that you are American, so how about some data from the good ol' US of A? Heat waves have not been increasing in intensity or frequency in the United States. Data from NOAA's Climate Reference Network shows no sustained increase in daily high temperatures in the United States since 2005 when that network began. In recent decades in the United States, heat waves have been far less severe than they were in the 1930s. At that time Heatwaves were more than 6 times worse with greater frequency and covering a larger area than the last decade (EPA). The most severe heatwave year was 1936, and was about 13 times worse than current. This year only 4 US states have achieved higher temperatures than 1936. Many states in 1936 achieved temperatures 15° hotter than the present. The all-time high temperature records set in most states occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. To the start of August the percentage of US Historical Climatology Network Stations reaching or exceeding 95°F (35°C) was at a record low (1895-2023) of 51%. The record high was 1931 at 93%. The trend has been consistently downwards since the thirties. The climate crisis was 90 years ago. You missed it.
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@godfreypigott You don't apparently know what I believe. Or why I believe it. Antarctica is not warming, it's cooling, with the evidence showing it has been doing so for at least 40 years, maybe more than 70 (Singh and Polvani, 2020; Bello et al, 2022; Zhang et al, 2022; Zhu et al, 2021). So no "global" warming, and no polar amplification - at least not at the South Pole. Therefore man-made climate change cannot be causing any change in the melt rate of WAIS including Thwaites. Because, you know, it would have to get warmer for the ice to melt. So if there is an increase in the movement of the ice it is coming from heat below, and that is what research suggests - geothermal flux (Dziadek et al, 2021; Martos et al, 2017).
If it is hot rock melting ice, there's nothing we can do about it, of course.
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@godfreypigott Climate scientists have a terrible record on predicting. They are lauded for producing the most fanciful visions of the future. I've been hearing these ridiculous predictions all my life: 1958 the Arctic Ocean will be Ice free in one generation. 1967 there will be global famine. 1970 there will be an ice age in the 21st century. 1970 Oceans will be dead in less than a decade. 1971 50 years away from an ice age. 1972 glacial temperatures within a century. 1974 satellites show ice age coming fast. 1978 no end to cooling trend. 1979 ice at North Pole will melt in one lifetime. 1982 environmental catastrophe by 2000. 1988 Maldives underwater in 30 years. 1989 entire nations underwater by 2000. 2000 snowfall has become a thing of the past. 2004 UK climate will become Siberian. Cities will sink into the ocean. 2006 10 years until a point of no return. 2007 if no action 2012 will be too late. Also 2007 Arctic ice free 2010, or 2015, or 2013, or 5 years take your pick. 2008 the Arctic ice sheet would melt away. Also 2008 North Pole ice free in ... 2008 ... or in 10 years. 2009 Arctic ice free in 2014. 2012 snow will be gone by 2020. 2013 Methane catastrophe in 2 years because of ice free Arctic. 2018 zero chance of permanent ice in Arctic by 2022. Also 2018 humans to go extinct by 2023 from climate change. 2022 End of Snow predicted again. The people who come up with tosh are described as 'experts' by politicians.
In reality, of course, even the IPCC knows, that apart from a little warming here and there, there is no objective evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living through a global climate crisis. None.
That man-made global climate crisis is always going to happen the day after tomorrow, and it's going to be bad so pay your tithe to eco-priest-politicians.
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@gaminghighlights2481 The retreat of Himalayan glaciers began before the current warming and was caused by reduced precipitation (Shekhar, 2017. Singh, 2020.). This supported by further work done by Schneider (2014), and Chen (2019). The retreat was due to a reduction in precipitation. Currently, precipitation is half of what it was 20 years previously. Research by Salerno (2015) "challenges the assumption of the main driver [i.e. temperature] of glacier mass changes".
Satellite data shows the glaciers in the Karakoram largely unaffected by current warming. Of 1219 glaciers surveyed, 79.5% were stable, 5.3% were advancing, and 7.6% retreating (Rankl, 2014).
Swiss Alps glacier extents were smaller than 2000 C.E. during the warmer-than-today Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and throughout 75% of the Holocene, or when temperatures were 1-3°C warmer (Schimmelpfennig et al., 2022).
Glaciologists Bohleber et al, 2020 of the Austrian Academy of Science discovered from ice cores that the 3500-meter high Weißseespitze summit was ice free 5900 years ago.
There is “no evidence” that Jostedalsbreen, a southern Norway glacier, even existed during the first several thousand years of the Holocene, or when CO2 hovered near 260 ppm (Winker, 2021).
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. Glacial retreat is certainly not evidence of this.
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@rangodenalo6185 The retreat of Himalayan glaciers began before the current warming and was caused by reduced precipitation (Shekhar, 2017. Singh, 2020.). This supported by further work done by Schneider (2014), and Chen (2019). The retreat was due to a reduction in precipitation. Currently, precipitation is half of what it was 20 years previously. Research by Salerno (2015) "challenges the assumption of the main driver [i.e. temperature] of glacier mass changes".
Satellite data shows the glaciers in the Karakoram largely unaffected by current warming. Of 1219 glaciers surveyed, 79.5% were stable, 5.3% were advancing, and 7.6% retreating (Rankl, 2014).
Swiss Alps glacier extents were smaller than 2000 C.E. during the warmer-than-today Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and throughout 75% of the Holocene, or when temperatures were 1-3°C warmer (Schimmelpfennig et al., 2022).
Glaciologists Bohleber et al, 2020 of the Austrian Academy of Science discovered from ice cores that the 3500-meter high Weißseespitze summit was ice free 5900 years ago.
There is “no evidence” that Jostedalsbreen, a southern Norway glacier, even existed during the first several thousand years of the Holocene, or when CO2 hovered near 260 ppm (Winker, 2021).
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. Glacial retreat is certainly not evidence of this.
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