Computer models

key to sununu and tillerson BS

SEE ZELDIN ENDANGERMENT 7 25

December 5, 2025

‘Climate doom is not science’ – Retracted study in journal Nature ‘fails even as a piece of speculative modeling’

December 5, 2025

‘Climate doom is not science’ – Retracted study in journal Nature ‘fails even as a piece of speculative modeling’

By Admin

December 5, 2025

Climate doom is not science

IFrame Content

By Ross Clark

The costs of not dealing with climate change are, of course, much higher than the costs of dealing with it. We know this because, as climate campaigners keep telling us, climate change is going to set the world alight and unleash mad tempests which are going to wreak destruction on the global economy. Not a few of them have been trying to prove this by parroting a paper by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published in the journal Nature in 2024 which concluded that a rise of 8.5 Celsius in global temperatures by 2100 will shrink the economy by 62 percent. Never mind that hardly anyone thinks that such temperature rises are even remotely likely – we are certainly not presently experiencing even nearly such an upwards trend in global temperature – the paper was widely reported as scientific fact rather than as a piece of highly speculative modeling.

But now it appears that the paper fails even as a piece of speculative modeling. Following a critique by economists at Stanford University in August the paper has been withdrawn by Nature. A cock-up with the data for a single country, Uzbekistan, turns out to have skewed the figures so much that, when corrected, the paper suggested a fall of 23 percent in global economic output, not 62 percent.

Needless to say, the reaction of some climate campaigners has been to say that 20 percent of the global economy is still quite a lot of money, and still shows the dramatic impact of a changing climate. But that is hardly the point. If you can magically reinstate 40 percent of global output by correcting some statistics for Uzbekistan, what does it tell you about the whole exercise? This, and all other modeling of its kind, are essentially useless. Economic forecasts for 12 months ahead have shown themselves to have a pretty appalling record. Why does anyone think that a study trying to predict the global economy in 75 years’ time – climate change or no climate change – has any veracity whatsoever? All the model is doing is reflecting the assumptions which are put into it, which are themselves skewed by the prejudices of the people who build it. In this case, and in the case of all this kind of research, that tends to focus on negative effects of a changing climate – higher temperatures and rainfall – while ignoring the positive changes: fewer cold extremes and a world which appears to be becoming steadily less windy.

…

One apocalyptic paper in a scientific journal has been exposed as deeply flawed – a piece of news which is unlikely to be reported with nearly as much enthusiasm as the original paper. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to be bombarded with fanciful, doom-laden predictions regarding climate change. There is a deep negative bias in this kind of work, and that will remain the case.

The post Climate doom is not science appeared first on The Spectator World.

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AN GRIST 11 25

Consider your morning cup of coffee. Your kettle’s heating element — or flame on a stove — warms up water that you infuse with beans and pour into a mug. Maybe you get busy and the cup of joe sits there for a while, releasing its heat into the atmosphere of the room, until it reaches equilibrium with the indoor temperature. In other words: It got cold.

*This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here

Now consider that the expansive Southern Ocean, which wraps around Antarctica, could one day do much the same thing. Since the Industrial Revolution kicked off, humans have dialed up the kettle to its max, adding extraordinary amounts of heat into the atmosphere, more than 90 percent of which has been absorbed by the sea. (It’s also taken up a quarter of our CO2 emissions.) Under climate change, the Southern Ocean has been storing warmth which, like your morning jolt, can’t stay there forever, and will someday return to the atmosphere.

New modeling suggests that this “burp” of heat — the scientists called it that, by the way — could be abrupt. In a scenario where humanity eventually reduces its greenhouse gas emissions and then goes “net negative,” finding ways to remove those planet-warming pollutants from the atmosphere, global temperatures fall. But suddenly the Southern Ocean belches its accumulated heat, leading to a rate of planetary warming similar to what humanity is causing right now. And the thermal burping would continue for at least a century.

Put another way: According to this modeling, at least, humans figure out a way to reverse climate change, only to see the Southern Ocean essentially restart it. While there would be nothing our descendants could do to stop this — since the warming would be driven by already stored heat — the calculations are yet another urgent call to reduce that pollution as quickly and dramatically as possible.

This sudden eructation is not a sure thing, however — it’s the prediction of a model. But it’s a step toward understanding how the planet could respond as humans continue to manipulate the climate, both warming and cooling it. “The question is: How will the climate system, and specifically the ocean, react to scenarios where we remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and when we have a net global cooling effect?” said Svenja Frey, an oceanography PhD student at Germany’s GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and coauthor of the paper.

The Southern Ocean may encircle the frozen continent of Antarctica, but it’s very effective at storing heat: It alone holds around 80 percent of the warmth that’s taken up by all the oceans. Some of this comes from currents that transport relatively toasty waters south, but also lots of upwelling in the Southern Ocean brings cold water to the surface to be warmed up.

The skies above the Southern Ocean are also somewhat less reflective than elsewhere around the globe. Cargo ships and industries in the Northern Hemisphere spew air pollution in the form of aerosols, which themselves bounce solar energy back into the cosmos and help brighten clouds, which reflect still more. That cooling phenomenon has vied, in a sense, with the warming that’s come from the burning of fossil fuels. “That competition hasn’t been as prevalent over the Southern Hemisphere, because it’s this slightly more pristine atmosphere,” said Ric Williams, an ocean and climate scientist at the University of Liverpool, who studies the Southern Ocean but wasn’t involved in the paper.

In the scenario the researchers modeled, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increases by 1 percent every year until the total amount is double what the planet had before the Industrial Revolution. Then negative emissions technologies reduce the carbon concentration by 0.1 percent annually. (The study didn’t look a specific techniques, but one option is direct air capture of CO2, though this remains expensive and limited in scale.) In response, the atmosphere, land, and oceans cool.

But something starts brewing in the Southern Ocean. Its surface becomes colder, but also saltier due to the formation of new sea ice: When sea water freezes, it rejects its salt, which is then absorbed into the surrounding waters and makes the surface layer heavier. “At the same time, we have these warm, deeper waters,” Frey said. “At some point, the water column becomes unstable, and that’s when we have the deep convection event.”

In other words, a burp. It’s just one way that our planet’s extraordinarily complex and intertwining systems might respond to rising and falling emissions in the centuries ahead. “There’s very large uncertainty in the Earth system response to net-negative emissions — we don’t understand that very well,” said Simon Fraser University climate scientist Kirsten Zickfeld, who studies these dynamics but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “We may well encounter surprises along the way, as this paper shows.”

To be clear, in this scenario, removing atmospheric carbon significantly reduces global temperatures, even factoring in the burp. And the faster we move away from fossil fuels, the less CO2 we’ll have to remove down the line. “Doing negative emissions and reducing our carbon load in the atmosphere is a good thing,” Williams said. “I would just add that, rather than do negative emissions, it’s better not to do the positive emissions in the first place.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/oceans/hey-so-one-day-the-ocean-might-burp-up-a-bunch-of-heat/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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REF 1?

epa-endangerment-finding-repeal-proposal

NO LNX

In Game-Changing Climate Rollback, E.P.A. Aims to Kill a Bedrock Scientific Finding

The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts and appears to represent a shift toward outright denial of the scientific consensus.

By Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman

Reporting from Washington

July 29, 2025

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Tuesday the Trump administration would revoke the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change.

Speaking at a truck dealership in Indianapolis, Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. planned to rescind the 2009 declaration, known as the endangerment finding, which concluded that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. The Obama and Biden administrations used that determination to set strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other industrial sources of pollution.

“The proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,” Mr. Zeldin said. He said the proposal would also erase limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks on the nation’s roads.

Without the endangerment finding, the E.P.A. would be left with no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that are accumulating in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts. It marks a notable shift in the administration’s position from one that had downplayed the threat of global warming to one that essentially flatly denies the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change.

It would not only reverse current regulations, but, if the move is upheld in court, it could make it significantly harder for future administrations to rein in climate pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

Without the United States working to reduce emissions, it becomes far tougher for the world to collectively prevent average global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That is the threshold beyond which climate scientists say there is significantly greater risk from increasingly destructive storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves, as well as from species extinction.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also moved to scrap restrictions on pollution from power plants, halt key measurements of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and delay approvals of wind and solar energy projects on federal lands.

“Today’s E.P.A. announcement ignores the blindingly obvious reality of the climate crisis and sidelines the E.P.A.’s own scientists and lawyers in favor of the interests and profits of the fossil fuel industry,” former Vice President Al Gore said in a statement.

To justify the proposal, the E.P.A. cited a report that the Energy Department commissioned from five scientists known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, namely that it is being driven by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The New York Times first reported that the Energy Department had hired these scientists, including Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled,” and John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming.

In their report, the scientists criticized the computer models used to predict climate change, saying they tend to overestimate warming. They also wrote that carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, has positive effects by helping plants grow and increasing agricultural productivity. And they asserted that overall, government climate regulations have a limited effect on global temperature rise.

The E.P.A. echoed this last argument in the proposed rule, saying greenhouse gases from cars on American roads do not contribute significantly to climate change because they are a small share of global emissions. Reducing these emissions to zero “would not have a scientifically measurable impact” on global climate trends or on public health and welfare, the agency said. Instead, the agency said, climate regulations are what pose the true threat to public health and welfare, because they increase the price of new vehicles and leave fewer choices for car buyers.

Many environmental activists and lawyers criticized those arguments, noting that transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States. If the U.S. motor vehicle sector were a country, it would be the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to the E.P.A.’s own data.

“If vehicle emissions don’t pass muster as a contribution to climate change, it’s hard to imagine what would,” said Dena Adler, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

Dan Becker, who leads transportation policy for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, called the E.P.A. proposal a “cynical one-two punch” that will lead to more gasoline-burning vehicles on the road and fewer tools to reduce tailpipe pollution. He said that the auto-emissions rules being rescinded were projected to prevent 7 billion metric tons of emissions from entering the atmosphere while saving the average American driver about $6,000 in fuel and maintenance over the lifetime of vehicles built under the standards.

“The E.P.A. is revoking the biggest single step any nation has taken to save oil, save consumers money at the pump and combat global warming,” Mr. Becker said.

The administration’s plan has its backers. Daren Bakst, who directs the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research organization, said, “It is unreasonable to claim that pollutants contribute to endangerment if emissions are de minimis.”

Mike Braun, the governor of Indiana, said at the event in Indianapolis that the Biden administration’s vehicle emissions rules had burdened the auto industry in the state. “As a lifelong entrepreneur for 37 years actually in the automotive business, I think I know a thing or two about it, and you can count on Indiana being for common sense and reining in government,” he said.

John Bozzella, chief executive of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a lobbying group for most major carmakers, said in a statement that he was still reviewing the E.P.A.’s announcement. “At the same time, there’s no question the vehicle emissions regulations finalized under the previous administration aren’t achievable and should be revised to reflect current market conditions, to keep the auto industry in America competitive,” he said.

While the Chamber of Commerce and fossil fuel groups had fought the endangerment finding when it was first written, none have been clamoring in recent years for its reversal. This year Marty Durbin, who leads the chamber’s energy institute, called the finding “settled law” and said his group, which is a major business lobbying organization, was not seeking its repeal.

“I’m not aware of anyone in industry who has been pushing for it,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, an energy attorney with the law firm Bracewell who served in the E.P.A. during the administration of the first President George Bush and, later, that of President George W. Bush.

The plan to eliminate the endangerment finding showcases the political evolution of Mr. Zeldin, who for years took moderate positions on climate change and other environmental issues.

A former congressman from a coastal community on Long Island that is struggling with rising sea levels linked to global warming, Mr. Zeldin once joined a bipartisan caucus to address climate change. In 2019 he broke with fellow Republicans to vote against an amendment that would have prohibited the E.P.A. from reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

An ally of Mr. Trump who prominently defended him during House impeachment hearings, Mr. Zeldin moved to the right on energy and other issues during his unsuccessful bid for governor of New York in 2022. Just weeks after his nomination to lead the E.P.A., Mr. Zeldin declared that he would be “driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion” by repealing regulations on greenhouse gas emissions

“There are people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country,” Mr. Zeldin said on the conservative podcast “Ruthless” earlier on Tuesday. One of the co-hosts of the program called the endangerment finding “the left’s tent pole to begin the whole climate grift,” to which Mr. Zeldin agreed.

The proposed repeal of the endangerment finding is all but certain to draw legal challenges, and David Doniger, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said he expected that it would eventually be struck down in court. He noted that climate science has advanced significantly since 2009, when the finding was issued.

After the proposal is published in the Federal Register, the E.P.A. will solicit comments from the public for 45 days, Mr. Zeldin said. The agency will then finalize the rule, most likely in the next year.

Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.

Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.

A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: E.P.A. To Retract Bedrock Finding On Climate Crisis. Order Reprints

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REF ALSO NYT

Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change

The three scientists joined the administration after it dismissed hundreds of experts who were assessing how global warming is affecting the country.

Steven E. Koonin, dressed in a dark suit and yellow tie, gestures as he speaks while sitting on a stage.

Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author, was hired by the Energy Department. He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, as a scientist for the oil and gas company BP and as an under secretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.Credit...Aaron M. Sprecher/Bloomberg

By Maxine Joselow

Reporting from Washington

July 8, 2025

The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.

The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.

Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.

In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

It was not immediately clear what the three scientists were working on or whether they were being paid. Representatives for Dr. Koonin, Dr. Spencer and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.

In a brief phone interview and follow-up email, Dr. Christy said he was not working on the endangerment finding nor collecting a government salary. He declined to comment further.

A vast majority of scientists around the world agree that human activities — primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal — are dangerously heating the Earth. That has increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts and colossal bursts of rain like the storm that caused the deadly flooding now devastating central Texas.

A small minority of scientists, however, rejects this consensus. Dr. Koonin, who has said he is a friend of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, has been one of the loudest critics.

During President Trump’s first term, Dr. Koonin proposed that the Environmental Protection Agency conduct a “red-team, blue-team” exercise to challenge mainstream climate science. A “red team” of climate skeptics would critique major scientific reports on global warming, and a “blue team” of climate scientists would then rebut these claims. At the time, mainstream climate scientists said the proposal would make a mockery of scientific research and create a platform for marginal views that had already been disproved in the normal course of scientific debate.

Image

Roy Spencer, in a dark suit, blue shirt and tie, holds a microphone in one hand and points to a projection on a screen with the other hand.

Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist and researcher at the University of Alabama, in 2012. He has argued that while human activity has caused some warming, its influence has been smaller than that of natural variations in global cloud cover.

Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator at the time, told coal industry executives that he planned to conduct the exercise. But John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, ultimately blocked the effort.

Now, Dr. Koonin is listed as a “special government employee” in the Energy Department’s internal email system, the records show. Federal law says special government employees are executive branch appointees named to “perform important, but limited, services to the government, with or without compensation, for a period not to exceed 130 days” during a one-year period. Elon Musk had that classification when he began Mr. Trump’s cost cutting initiative, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Dr. Koonin also serves as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning research organization on Stanford University’s campus. He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, a scientist for the oil and gas company BP and an under secretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.

In his 2021 book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters,” Dr. Koonin argued that while the planet was warming and human activities had played a role, the scientific consensus was not as certain or as dire as it was frequently portrayed.

In a phone interview in November, Dr. Koonin said that the book had made an impression on Mr. Wright, who ran the oil and gas company Liberty Energy before he was confirmed as energy secretary in February.

“He reached out when I wrote the book and said, ‘This is great,’” Dr. Koonin recalled. “He asked me to come talk to his company at one point — it was a couple years ago — and we got to know each other.”

He added, “Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last couple years, and I think he is well aligned with what I wrote in the book.”

Dr. Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, also has a connection to Mr. Wright. In a report published last year by Liberty Energy, Mr. Wright cited atmospheric temperature records that Dr. Spencer had collected. (The overall report, titled “Bettering Human Lives,” made the case that fossil fuels were “essential” to solving global poverty, a claim that some experts have called misleading.)

In addition to his role at the University of Alabama, Dr. Spencer is a policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, a conservative group that rejects mainstream climate science. He previously served as a scientist at NASA and as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing group responsible for creating Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the new administration.

Dr. Spencer has argued that while human activity has caused some warming, its influence has been smaller than that of natural variations in global cloud cover. While some of Dr. Spencer’s past work has been funded by the government, he has accused federal climate researchers of being biased because they receive taxpayer money.

“The popular opinion that government-funded research is unbiased must be considered quite naïve,” he wrote in his 2010 book “The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists.”

Image

John Christy, dressed in khaki shorts, sneakers and a blue polo shirt, sits on a chair in front of a large wall map of the world.

:{John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts that human activity has caused global warming, in 2014

Dr. Christy has worked closely with Dr. Spencer to maintain atmospheric temperature records at the University of Alabama. He has also served as Alabama’s state climatologist since 2000. A vocal critic of climate models, he championed the “red-team, blue-team” exercise and served on an E.P.A. scientific advisory board during the first Trump administration.

When asked about his Energy Department role in a brief phone interview, Dr. Christy said he was an “unpaid person who’s available to them if they need it.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed alarm that the Energy Department had hired the three scientists.

“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.,” Dr. Mann wrote in an email.

Dr. Mann added that the Trump administration appeared to have fired hundreds of “actual government science experts” and replaced them with “a small number of reliable foot soldiers.”

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said it would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding, which cleared the way for the government to regulate the planet-warming gases emitted by cars, power plants and other industrial sources.

On his first day back in the White House, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that charged the E.P.A. with reviewing the “legality and continuing applicability of” the endangerment finding. And last week, the agency sent a proposal to reconsider the finding to the White House budget office, a first step in repealing it.

An E.P.A. spokesman, Mike Bastasch, declined to comment on the proposal before its public release.

Brad Plumer contributed reporting from Washington.

Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2025, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Energy Department Hires Skeptics of Climate Change

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kert WSJ inside exxon strat many docs in discovey finder 1988 frank sprow

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-climate-change-documents-e2e9e6af

"Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change" | SEJ

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no lnx

WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change

Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Tillerson era

By Christopher M. Matthews

and Collin Eaton

Sept. 14, 2023

2487 RESPONSES

Exxon Mobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action.

Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives.

Exxon’s public acceptance in 2006 of the risks posed by climate change was an early act of Rex Tillerson, an Exxon lifer who became CEO that year. Some viewed him as a moderating force who brought Exxon in line with the scientific consensus.

The documents reviewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, cast Tillerson’s decadelong tenure in a different light. They show that Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial.

Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public.

One of the lawsuits is from Hawaii’s Maui County, where wildfires killed more than 100 people in August. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleged the island faced increased climate-related risks, including more dangerous wildfires, caused by fossil-fuel companies. Some of the lawsuits may go to trial as soon as next year.

:{“I know how this information looks—when taken out of context, it seems bad,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in response to the Journal’s inquiry about the documents. “But having worked with some of these colleagues earlier in my career, I have the benefit of knowing they are people of good intent. None of these old emails and notes matter though. All that does is that we’re building an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions—both our own and others—and spending billions of dollars on solutions that have a real, sustainable impact.”}:

Under Woods, who became CEO in 2017, Exxon has committed to spend $17 billion over five years on emissions-reducing technologies. Exxon didn’t address detailed questions sent by the Journal.

WHAT’S NEWS

Exclusive: Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change

Tillerson declined to comment through a representative.

Exxon turned millions of pages of documents over to the New York attorney general during that office’s yearslong investigation, announced in 2015, into whether the company misled investors about the impact of climate regulation on its business. The Journal reviewed summaries of the documents that Exxon’s lawyers had determined were the most significant. After the attorney general narrowed the focus of the case, the documents weren’t made public.

The documents summarize emails between top executives, board meetings and Tillerson’s edits of speeches, among other things.

After a nearly three-week trial in 2019, Justice Barry Ostrager of the New York State Supreme Court ruled the New York attorney general failed to prove its case.

“Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve Exxon Mobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change,” Ostrager wrote.

Throughout Tillerson’s tenure between 2006 and 2016, Exxon executives in their internal communications attempted to push back against the notion that humans needed to curtail oil and gas use to help the planet—despite the company’s public statements that action was needed.

In 2012, after the pre-eminent scientific authority on climate change warned of global calamity if carbon emissions continued unabated, Tillerson disagreed and directed Exxon researchers to “influence” the group.

As pressure mounted to stop drilling in the Arctic due to rapid glacial melting and other environmental impacts, Exxon fretted about a key project in Russia’s far north and worked to “de-couple climate change and the Arctic.”

July 2013

Exxon’s deal to explore the Arctic with Russia’s Rosneft came amid

growing public concern about melting polar ice caps. In an email discussion

with other executives about how to protect the project, a corporate issues

adviser wrote:

“

As this shapes up, part of the moral argument for leaving the Arctic alone

will be based on this notion that it is fundamentally unjust for the people

who prompted the ice melt to then profit from development. It’s one reason

I think we will need to push back hard- albeit in a nuanced way- against this

notion that the whole area is ‘pristine’ and untouched by the hand of man.”

“The general perception is that Tillerson was softer and stopped funding the bad guys” that were espousing climate change denial, said Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity that partly focuses on environmental issues. “This is the first X-ray into Tillerson’s head and shows he wanted to throw climate mitigation off the rails. It’s obituary-changing.”

The fund has issued grants financing litigation and other support for around two dozen cases against Exxon, whose predecessor, Standard Oil, was founded by family patriarch John D. Rockefeller. The fund has invested millions of dollars in a broader campaign against big oil companies.

Seminal warning

A study published earlier this year in the journal Science determined Exxon’s climate modelers had predicted warming temperatures with precision since the 1970s, in line with the scientific consensus. The study was funded, in part, by a grant from the Rockefeller Family Fund.

In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen issued what’s now seen as a seminal warning on climate change when he testified before Congress that Earth was warming dangerously and humans were causing it.

Frank Sprow, then Exxon’s head of corporate research, sent a memo to colleagues a few months later articulating what would become a central pillar of Exxon’s strategy.

“If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur,” wrote Sprow. “Any additional R&D efforts within Corporate Research on Greenhouse should have two primary purposes: 1. Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal). 2. Preserve Exxon’s business options.”

Sprow’s memo was adopted by Exxon as policy, he said in a recent interview.

Exxon stopped most internal climate research, instead funding it through university and research organizations, Sprow said. Exxon’s corporate research division was redirected from broader scientific study to focus on “science to support our business.”

Sprow said he and former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond acknowledged the climate was changing but questioned to what extent human activity was causing it and how serious and rapid the impacts would be. The January study in Science said that Exxon’s climate modelers mostly attributed the changes to humans.

Martin Hoffert, who worked as a consultant to Exxon on climate science in the 1980s, said Sprow’s memo sent another message: “It’s an oblique way of saying we’re in the oil business and we’re not going to get out of the oil business, and we’ll do everything we can to make money on the oil business.”

By the time Tillerson became CEO in 2006, Exxon’s positions on climate change had become a public-relations nightmare, according to Sprow, who retired from the company in 2005.

Public shift

Exxon’s public shift on climate change came after the Royal Society, a British scientific academy, criticized the company for spreading “inaccurate and misleading” views on climate science in 2006. Exxon responded in a letter that it recognized “the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere poses risks that may prove significant for society and ecosystems.”

An Eagle Scout and a civil engineer by training, Tillerson spent his entire career at Exxon before becoming CEO in 2006. He left in 2017 to become then-President Trump’s Secretary of State.

His views on climate change were influenced by the previous generation of Exxon executives, said former company executives who worked with him. During his tenure, Tillerson took little action to curb the company’s emissions and instead believed the onus was on governments to push companies to address climate change, they said.

In 2011, scientists working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened by the United Nations, warned of global calamity if carbon emissions caused temperatures to rise more than 4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100, its worst-case scenario.

Tillerson told a top Exxon climate researcher the scenario was “not credible,” the documents show. Tillerson was “dissatisfied with media coverage,” the researcher, Haroon Kheshgi, told colleagues in a 2012 email about the findings. Further, Tillerson wanted to engage with IPCC “to influence [the group], in addition to gathering info.”

Chris Field was the co-chair of an IPCC working group during Tillerson’s tenure at Exxon. He rejected Tillerson’s criticism that the worst-case scenario laid out by the group wasn’t credible. Though emissions reductions are preventing the worst case, Field said, the science has held up over time.

“I’m honestly flattered that he thought IPCC was consequential enough to want to influence it,” said Field, who is now director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He added that the IPCC process is structured to prevent undue influence from individual businesses or other entities and that the Exxon scientists he’d dealt with were professional.

While Tillerson and others played down the risks posed by climate change, Exxon’s scientists were themselves modeling alarming increases in carbon emissions without dramatic reductions in fossil-fuel consumption.

“It’s almost reluctantly that we address C02 emissions,” Scott Nauman, a corporate planning manager, wrote in a January 2009 email as the company was preparing its annual energy outlook. “It is not a positive story. Global emissions continue to rise throughout the outlook timeframe – that’s clearly a cause for concern.”

Exxon routinely pushed back against the idea that dramatic curtailment of fossil-fuel consumption was necessary. Instead, it suggested that technological solutions, including making cars and other machines more efficient, were the most effective measure to halt global warming. Fossil fuels are responsible for more than 75% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IPCC.

Before giving a speech at an event hosted by Stanford University’s Global Climate & Energy Project in February 2009, Tillerson appeared to make edits to avoid embracing positions that would hurt Exxon’s business.

In one part of the draft speech he crossed out “oil, natural gas and coal will not meet all of the world’s needs to the year 2030.” Later, he added, “the most cost effective steps we can take to address this energy and environmental challenge is to extend our energy efficiency gains.”

Weeks earlier, Nauman had concluded in his January email that emissions would increase through 2030 despite such gains.

“We would like them to be lower, but given the state of technology, given the need for energy, given the practical choices for energy, emissions rise despite aggressive efficiency gains,” Nauman wrote.

‘Skeptic arguments’

In 2008, Exxon announced it would stop funding think tanks and other groups that questioned climate science, saying their positions “could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Exxon researchers continued to support scientific research that cast doubt on climate science and its impacts, documents show.

Later in 2008, Gene Tunison, a manager of global regulatory affairs and research planning, said Exxon should direct a scientist to help the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s influential lobbying group, write a paper about climate science uncertainty.

“I support [Exxon] co-authoring a paper on uncertainty in measuring GHGs,” Tunison wrote in an email.

May 2012

Exxon researchers met regularly about developments in climate science

but continued to discuss doubts about the scientific consensus. Ahead of

a meeting dubbed ‘Friday climate overview’ among Exxon’s top climate

scientists, one researcher said:

“Under ‘some skeptic arguments disproven’ - my question is, are there any

‘skeptic’ arguments that we consider to be not yet disproven, or credible

and worthy of further investigation?”

Tillerson also pushed back against some of the dire consequences of rising temperatures predicted by climate scientists. After a 2011 meeting, Tillerson’s chief of staff, William Colton, emailed colleagues about the CEO’s feedback on a draft disclosure about carbon emissions. Tillerson wanted the words “weather extremes and storms” deleted.

“His view was that even mentioning a possible connection between climate change and weather was possibly giving the notion more credibility than he would like,” Colton wrote.

During a 2012 board meeting about “Developments in Climate Science and Policy,” Exxon board member Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said there was “still uncertainty in predicting future climate changes and impacts.”

“Money and effort spent on climate change is misplaced,” said Brabeck-Letmathe, the former CEO of Nestlé.

In December 2015, Exxon publicly stated its support of the just-signed Paris climate agreement, a nonbinding United Nations treaty that commits countries to work to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Climate scientists have warned that if Earth warms more than 2 degrees it could cross irreversible climate tipping points. During his Senate confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State in 2017, Tillerson said he supported staying in the agreement.

Months before the treaty was signed, Tillerson had expressed skepticism about its aims.

Following a presentation on climate science to Exxon’s board of directors in April 2015, Tillerson called the 2 degrees target “something magical,” according to a summary of the meeting.

“Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough,” said Tillerson, noting that it was “very expensive” to cut the emissions needed to meet such a target.

June 2015

Tillerson received regular updates on climate science from Exxon’s chief

researchers and in some instances asked about uncertainty in

climate-change modeling. An Exxon executive wrote Kheshgi:

“Rex called this afternoon with a couple of pretty detailed questions on

climate science: [1] Do climate scientists understand and are they able to

quantify the radiative forcing/GHG/climate impacts of events like

volcanos and forest fires. If so, how and how well? Is there differentiation

between major events like Mt Pinatubo and other much smaller events?

[2] Does the climate modeling community include these events and

effects in their climate models and projections of future temperatures and

impacts? If so, how and how well? Are these types of events/impacts a

major or minor source of uncertainty?”

“When people like Tillerson argue that 2 degrees is magical, it’s in the context of how you try,” said Field, the former IPCC co-chair. “Two degrees can be affordable with the right costs and benefits globally, even if it is not the right costs and benefits for Exxon.”

Last week, the United Nations warned countries are far from meeting the Paris agreement’s goals. Exxon said in August that the world isn’t currently on track to reach the targets of the agreement, which it continues to support publicly.

Shortly after replacing Tillerson in 2017, Darren Woods spread the word that he was in search of transformative new ideas. A plan to invest in offshore wind projects made its way to the most senior levels of the company, according to people familiar with the proposal. Karen Hughes, a former top official in the George W. Bush administration and an adviser to Exxon, said she counseled that investing in renewable energy would be good for the environment and improve the company’s reputation.

To date, Woods hasn’t invested in renewable energy, arguing it’s a low-return business outside Exxon’s skill set. Instead the company has vowed to spend about $3.4 billion a year on average through 2027 curbing its emissions and helping other companies do the same, and investing in areas including carbon capture, biofuels and lithium mining. It also recently struck a deal to buy Denbury, which operates a large network of pipelines that move carbon dioxide, for about $5 billion.

Exxon currently plans to spend as much as $25 billion a year in capital expenditures through 2027, mostly on oil and gas.

Write to Christopher M. Matthews at christopher.matthews@wsj.com and Collin Eaton at collin.eaton@wsj.com

: 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8}:

Appeared in the September 15, 2023, print edition as 'Inside Exxon’s Climate Two-Step'.

---

10/18

// https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/566749-todays-climate-reality-was-predicted-by-ipcc-30-years-ago-now-what

fuck off sununu and all you hacks:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1990-ipcc-report_n_2270453

no lnx

by Wynne Parry, LiveScience Contributor:

Time has proven that even 22 years ago climate scientists understood the dynamics behind global warming well enough to accurately predict warming, says an analysis that compares predictions in 1990 with 20 years of temperature records.

After an adjustment to account for natural fluctuations, the predictions and the observed increases matched up, the current research found.

The predictions in question come from the first climate assessment report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990. The IPCC is an internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change, drawing on the expertise of thousands of scientists, so its reports carry special weight. The most recent assessment report came out in 2007.

The accuracy of the 1990 predictions is notable because scientists, 22 years ago, relied on much more simplistic computer models than those now used to simulate the future, said one of the researchers behind the current analysis, Dáithí Stone, now a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He worked on the analysis while at the University of Cape Town and University of Oxford.

What's more, two decades ago, scientists could not have anticipated a number of potentially climate-altering events. These included the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, which spewed sunlight-blocking particles into the atmosphere, as well as the collapse of industry in the Soviet Union or the economic growth of China, Stone and David Frame, of Victoria University Wellington in New Zealand, write in work published online today (Dec. 9) in the journal Nature Climate Change.

But 22 years ago, scientists understood one crucial factor:

"The prediction basically depended on how much carbon dioxide was already in the atmosphere, and that has been what's important," Stone said. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

What matters is the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution; short-term changes in emissions have relatively little effect on overall warming, Frame and Stone write.

Other climate scientists have come to the same conclusion; one recent paper warned significant emissions cuts must happen soon to limit warming to a manageable level.

The 1990 report offered a best estimate of an increase of 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) by 2030, which at the halfway point in 2010, translates to warming of 1 degree F (0.55 degrees C).

Stone and Frame compared this expected increase to two sets of temperature records for 1990 through 2010, which showed increases of 0.63 degrees F (0.35 degrees C) and 0.7 degrees F (0.39 degrees C), respectively.

The 1990 prediction did require an adjustment, since it did not take into account natural variability — which includes the chaotic nature of weather as well as longer-term natural patterns, such as the El Niño/La Niña cycle.

When Frame and Stone took natural variability into account, they found that the observed warming was consistent with the IPCC's best estimate for warming.

Soon off bs bibliography (even BS ones)

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/

R. Connolly, M. Connolly, Willie Soon, D.R. Legates, R.G. Cionco and V. M. Velasco Herrera. Northern hemisphere snow-cover trends (1967-2018): A comparison between climate models and observations. Geosciences, 9(3), 135 (2019). Journal homepage

C. Monckton of Brenchley, W. Soon, D. R. Legates, W.M.Briggs, Keeping it simple: the value of an irreducibly simple climate model, Science Bulletin, 60, 1378-1390 (2015). Journal homepage

Monckton of Brenchley, W. Soon, D. R. Legates, W.M. Briggs, Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model, Science Bulletin, 60, 122-135 (2015). Journal homepage

d R. Legates, W. Soon, W.M. Briggs, and C. Monckton of Brenchley, Climate consensus and misinformation: A rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change, Science and Education, 24, 299-318 (2015). Journal homepage

https://theconversation.com/winners-of-2021-nobel-prize-in-physics-built-mathematics-of-climate-modeling-making-predictions-of-global-warming-and-modern-weather-forecasting-possible-169329

no lnx grfx

The Earth’s weather and climate interactions form one of the most complex systems imaginable. NASA/Joshua Stevens/Earth Observatory via Flickr, CC BY-NC]

Winners of 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics built mathematics of climate modeling, making predictions of global warming and modern weather forecasting possible

October 5, 2021 9.46pm EDT

David Randall

University Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

Disclosure statement

David Randall receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Partners

Colorado State University

Colorado State University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

As a climate scientist myself, I was excited to learn that Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics. I first met Manabe when I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, so I was particularly pleased that the prize recognizes the profound importance of Manabe’s decadeslong work on the creation of climate models, as well as the application of those models to understand how increasing levels of greenhouse gases have led to global warming.

A diagram showing an image of clouds, trees, land, ice and oceans all interconnected.]

Climate and weather are influenced by many interconnected systems that all influence one another. Femkemilene via WikimediaCommons, CC BY-SA]

How complicated is the weather and climate system?

Weather is what you see hour to hour and day to day. Weather involves just the atmosphere. Climate is the average weather over decades and is influenced by the oceans and the land surfaces.

Weather and climate are complicated because they involve many different physical processes – from the motion of air to the flow of electromagnetic radiation, such as sunlight, to the condensation of water vapor – across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.

The system is incredibly complex and interconnected. For example, a cluster of small thunderstorms can influence a weather system that spans a continent.

Before about 1955, weather forecasters extrapolated future weather from changes over the previous days. They used simple but labor-intensive methods that were partly quantitative and partly based on experience.

An drawing of Earth divided into grids and also showing energy interactions.]

Climate models take data from today, break it into smaller three–dimensional chunks and run that data through complicated calculations to predict the future. NOAA via Wikimedia Commons]

The birth of climate models

By the late 1950s, it became possible to make forecasts by running weather models on just-emerging but rapidly improving digital computers.A weather model is a system of equations that expresses the physical laws that govern weather. “Running” a weather model means solving the equations on a computer, using data from today’s weather to predict tomorrow’s weather.

Partly because of computer limitations, the first weather models could only cover portions of the Earth – like North America, for example. But by the early 1960s, faster computers made it possible to create models representing the whole global atmosphere.

Manabe led the development of one such model, building an interconnected web of thousands of equations that could simulate climate and climate change.

With this model, Manabe and his colleagues were able to produce fairly realistic simulations of such things as jet streams and monsoons. While modern global weather prediction and climate models are much more powerful, they can be viewed as descendants of Manabe’s early model.

When Manabe began his work in the early 1960s, some scientists had already pointed out the possibility that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide could lead to global warming. In 1967, Manabe and colleague Richard Wetherald used a simplified version of their climate model to perform the first quantitative study of the effects of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In addition to confirming that carbon dioxide increases global temperatures, they also found that increased water vapor content in warmer air amplifies overall warming because water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas.

Making predictions

Syukuro Manabe was one of the earliest researchers to use climate models to study global warming. Bengt Nyman/WIkimedia Commons, CC BY]

Climate involves both the oceans and the atmosphere, but early models had not united the two. In 1969, Manabe and his oceanographer colleague Kirk Bryan built the first climate model to include both the oceans and the atmosphere.

Building on that progress, in 1975 Manabe and Wetherald published results from a simulation of global warming using a global climate model. In this simulation, they doubled the molar fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 300 parts per million volume to 600 parts per million volume and let the model crunch the numbers.

Nearly 50 years ago, they predicted the overall warming of the Earth’s surface, much stronger warming in the Arctic, a decrease in ice and snow cover, an increase in the average global rate of precipitation and a cooling of the stratosphere. During the 1980s, Manabe’s team also used their models to identify the possibility of increased dryness over some continental regions.

All of those predictions have now come true.

Modern weather and climate models are far more powerful than the models of old and can be used to make both long–term and short–term predictions.

Linking climate, weather and chaos

The work of the other winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, Hasselman and Parisi, followed on the heels of Manabe’s early research and shows how large–scale interactions across the globe give rise to the chaotic and hard-to-predict behavior of the climate system on day-to-day time scales.

Parisi studied the role of chaos in a wide variety of physical systems and showed that even chaotic systems behave in an orderly fashion. His mathematical theories are central to producing more accurate representations of chaotic climate systems.

Hasselman filled in another gap by helping to further connect climate and weather. He showed that the highly variable and seemingly random weather of the atmosphere gets converted into much more slowly changing signals in the ocean. These large–scale, slow changes to the oceans in turn then modulate the climate.

In combination, the work of Manabe, Hasselman and Parisi has enabled scientists to predict how the chaotic, coupled behavior of the atmosphere, oceans and land surfaces will change over time. While detailed long-range weather forecasts are not possible, humanity’s ability to understand this complicated system is an incredible achievement. As I see it, Manabe, Hasselman and Parisi are richly deserving of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

losing earth: 1963 — James Hansen, a NASA scientist, figured out that Venus’s surface is hot because “the planet’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide” (30). He used “giant new supercomputers to map the planet’s atmosphere. With software programs they would create Mirror Worlds: parallel realities that mimicked our own . . . that could be sped forward to reveal the future” (31) to make predictions.

at same time sununu fluid/mech engr is doc student doing models? of? on?

// glacier melt re wackos bitch about decades, models might be optimistic?!

ew 920

Antarctica and Greenland's ice sheets are currently melting at a pace consistent with worst-case-scenario predictions for sea level rise, with serious consequences for coastal communities and the reliability of climate models.

ref

https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/fauci-birx-climate-models

no lnx many [margin]

AUCI-BIRX CLIMATE MODELS?

APRIL 13, 2020

By Paul Driessen, David Legates

Honest, evidence-based climate models could avoid trillions of dollars in policy blunders.

President Trump and his Coronavirus Task Force presented some frightening numbers during their March 31 White House briefing. Based on now 2-week-old data and models, as many as 100,000 Americans at the models’ low end, to 2.2 million at their high end, could die from the fast-spreading virus, they said.

However, the President, Vice President Pence, and Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx hastened to add, those high-end numbers are based on computer models. And they are “unlikely” if Americans keep doing what they are doing now to contain, mitigate and treat the virus. Although that worst-case scenario “is possible,” it is “unlikely if we do the kinds of things that we’re essentially outlining right now.”

On March 31,Dr. Fauci said, the computer models were saying that, even with full mitigation, it is “likely” that America could still suffer at least 100,000 deaths. But he then added a very important point:

“The question is, are the models really telling us what’s going on? When someone creates amodel, they put in various assumptions. And the models are only as good and as accurate as the assumptions you put into them. As we get more data, as the weeks go by, that might change. We feed the data back into the models and relook at the models.” The data can change the assumptions – and thus the models’ forecasts.

“If we have more data like the NY-NJ metro area, the numbers could go up,” Dr. Birx added. But if the numbers coming in are more like Washington or California, which reacted early and kept their infection and death rates down – then the models would likely show lower numbers. “We’re trying to prevent that logarithmic increase in New Orleans and Detroit and Chicago – trying to make sure those cities work more like California than like the New York metro area.” That seems to be happening, for the most part.

If death rates from corona are misattributed or inflated, if other model assumptions should now change, if azithromycin,hydroxychloroquine and other treatments, and people’s immunities are reducing infections – then business shutdowns and stay-home orders could (and should) end earlier, and we can go back to work and life, rebuild America’s and the world’s economies ... and avoid different disasters, like these:

Millions of businesses that never reopen. Tens of millions of workers with no paychecks. Tens of trillions of dollars vanished from our economy. Millions of families with lost homes and savings. Millions of cases of depression, stroke, heart attack, domestic violence, suicide, murder-suicide, and early death due to depression, obesity and alcoholism, due to unemployment, foreclosure and destroyed dreams.

In other words, numerous deaths because of actions taken to prevent infections and deaths from COVID.

It is vital that they recheck the models and assumptions – and distinguish between COVID-19 deaths actually due to the virus... and not just associated with or compounded by it, but primarily due to age, obesity, pneumonia or other issues. We can’t afford acure that’s worse than the disease – or a prolonged and deadly national economic shutdown that could have been shortened by updated and corrected models.

Now just imagine: What if we could have that same honest, science-based approach to climate models?

What if the White House, EPA, Congress, UN, EU and IPCC acknowledged that climate models are only as good and as accurate as the assumptions built into them? What if – as the months and years went by and we got more real-world temperature, sea level and extreme weather data – we used that information to honestly refine the models? Would the assumptions and therefore the forecasts change dramatically?

What if we use real science to help us understand Earth’s changing climate and weather? And base energy and other policies on real science that honestly examines manmade and natural influences on climate?

Many climate modelersclaim we face existential manmade climate cataclysms caused by our use of fossil fuels. They use models to justify calls to banish fossil fuels that provide 80% of US and global energy; close down countless industries, companies and jobs; totally upend our economy; give trillions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel replacement companies; and drastically curtail our travel and lifestyles.

Shouldn’t we demand that these models be verified against real-world evidence?Natural forces have caused climate changes and extreme weather events throughout history. What proof is there that what we see today is due to fossil fuel emissions, and not to those same natural forces? We certainly don’t want energy “solutions” that don’t work and are far worse than the supposed manmade climate and weather ‘virus.’

And we have the climate data. We’ve got years of data.The data show the models don’t match reality.

Model-predicted temperatures are more than 0.5 degrees F above actual satellite-measured average global temperatures – and “highest ever” records are mere hundredths of a degree above previous records from 50 to 80 years ago. Actual hurricane, tornado, sea level, flood, drought, and other historic records show no unprecedented trends or changes, no looming crisis, no evidence that humans have replaced the powerful natural forces that have always driven climate and weather in the real world outside the modelers’ labs.

Real science – and real scientists – seek to understand natural phenomena and processes. They pose hypotheses that they think best explain what they have witnessed, then test them against actual evidence, observations and data. If the hypotheses (and predictions based on them) are borne out by their subsequent observations or findings, the hypotheses become theories, rules or laws of nature – at least until someone finds new evidence that pokes holes in their assessments, or devises better explanations.

Real scientists often employ computers to analyze data more quickly and accurately, depict or model complex natural systems, or forecast future events or conditions. But they test their models against real-world evidence. If the models, observations and predictions don’t match up, real scientists modify or discard the models, and the hypotheses behind them. They engage in robust discussion and debate.

Real scientists don’t let models or hypotheses become substitutes for real-world data, evidence and observations. They don’t alter or “homogenize” raw or historic data to make it look like the models actually work. They don’t tweak their models after comparing predictions to actual subsequent observations, to make it look like the models “got it right.” They don’t “lose” or hide data and computer codes, restrict peer review to closed circles of like-minded colleagues who protect one another’s reputations and funding, claim “the debate is over,” or try to silence anyone who asks inconvenient questions or criticizes their claims or models. Climate modelers have done all of this – and more.

Put bluntly, what climate modelers are essentially saying is this: We don’t need data; we have models. If real world observations don’t conform to our computer model predictions, the real world must be wrong.

Climate models have always overstated the warming. But even though modelers have admitted that their models are “tuned” – revised after the fact to make it look like they predicted temperatures accurately – the modelers have made no attempt to change the climate sensitivity to match reality. Why not?

They know disaster scenarios sell. Disaster forecasts keep them employed, swimming in research money – and empowered to tell legislators and regulators that humanity must we take immediate, draconian action to eliminate all fossil fuel use – the economic, human and environmental consequences be damned. And they probably will never admit their mistakes or duplicity, much less be held accountable.

“Wash your hands! You could save millions of lives!” has far more impact than “You could save your own life, your kids’ lives, dozens of lives.” When it comes to climate change, you’re saving the planet.

With Mann-made climate change, we are always shown the worst-case scenario: RCP 8.5, the “business-as-usual” ... ten times more coal use in 2100 than now ... “total disaster.” Alarmist climatologists know their scenario has maybe a 0.1% likelihood, and assumes no new energy technologies over the next 80 years. But energy technologies have evolved incredibly over the last 80 years – since 1940, the onset of World War II! Who could possibly think technologies won’t change at least as much going forward?

Disaster scenarios are promoted because most people don’t know any better – and voters and citizens won’t accept extreme measures and sacrifices unless they are presented with extreme disaster scenarios.

The Fauci-Birx team is trying to do science-based modeling for theChiCom-WHO coronavirus – feeding updated data into their models. Forecasts for infections and deaths are down significantly. Thankfully.

So now we must demand honest, factual, evidence-based climate model as well. No more alarmists and charlatans setting climate and energy policy. Our economy, livelihoods, lives and liberties are too vital.

The fact is, models are also only as good as the number of variables they can handle, and the data quality for every variable. There is no way models can possibly factor in the hundreds of infection, treatment, death and other variables associated with COVID – and Earth’s climate is vastly more complex. Simply put, models play a role but should never be a primary driving force in setting important public policies.

links:

Trump and his Coronavirus Task Force presented some frightening numbers during their March 31. Based on now 2-week-old data and models, as many as 100,000 Americans at the models’ low end, to 2.2 million at their high end, could die from the fast-spreading virus, they said.

However, the President, Vice President Pence, and Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx hastened to add, those high-end numbers are based on computer models. And they are “unlikely” if Americans keep doing what they are doing now to contain, mitigate and treat the virus. Although that worst-case scenario “is possible,” it is “unlikely if we do the kinds of things that we’re essentially outlining right now.”

On March 31, Dr. Fauci said, the computer models were saying that, even with full mitigation, it is “likely” that America could still suffer at least 100,000 deaths. But he then added a very important point:

“The question is, are the models really telling us what’s going on? When someone creates a model, they put in various assumptions. And the models are only as good and as accurate as the assumptions you put into them. As we get more data, as the weeks go by, that might change. We feed the data back into the models and relook at the models.” The data can change the assumptions – and thus the models’ forecasts.

If death rates from corona are misattributed or inflated, if other model assumptions should now change, if azithromycin, hydroxychloroquine and other treatments, and people’s immunities are reducing infections – then business shutdowns and stay-home orders could (and should) end earlier, and we can go back to work and life, rebuild America’s and the world’s economies ... and avoid different disasters, like these:

In other words, numerous deaths because of actions taken to prevent infections and deaths from COVID.

It is vital that they recheck the models and assumptions – and distinguish between COVID-19 deaths actually due to the virus... and not just associated with or compounded by it, but primarily due to age, obesity, pneumonia or other issues. We can’t afford a cure that’s worse than the disease – or a prolonged and deadly national economic shutdown that could have been shortened by updated and corrected models.

Now just imagine: What if we could have that same honest, science-based approach to climate models?

What if the White House, EPA, Congress, UN, EU and IPCC acknowledged that climate models are only as good and as accurate as the assumptions built into them? What if – as the months and years went by and we got more real-world temperature, sea level and extreme weather data – we used that information to honestly refine the models? Would the assumptions and therefore the forecasts change dramatically?

What if we use real science to help us understand Earth’s changing climate and weather? And base energy and other policies on real science that honestly examines manmade and natural influences on climate?

Many climate modelers claim we face existential manmade climate cataclysms caused by our use of fossil fuels. They use models to justify calls to banish fossil fuels that provide 80% of US and global energy; close down countless industries, companies and jobs; totally upend our economy; give trillions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel replacement companies; and drastically curtail our travel and lifestyles.

Shouldn’t we demand that these models be verified against real-world evidence? Natural forces have caused climate changes and extreme weather events throughout history. What proof is there that what we see today is due to fossil fuel emissions, and not to those same natural forces? We certainly don’t want energy “solutions” that don’t work and are far worse than the supposed manmade climate and weather ‘virus.’

And we have the climate data. We’ve got years of data. The data show the models don’t match reality.

Model-predicted temperatures are more than *0.5 degrees F above* actual satellite-measured average global temperatures – and “highest ever” records are mere hundredths of a degree above previous records from 50 to 80 years ago. Actual hurricane, tornado, sea level, flood, drought, and other historic records show no unprecedented trends or changes, no looming crisis, no evidence that humans have replaced the powerful natural forces that have always driven climate and weather in the real world outside the modelers’ labs.

Real science – and real scientists – seek to understand natural phenomena and processes. They pose hypotheses that they think best explain what they have witnessed, then test them against actual evidence, observations and data. If the hypotheses (and predictions based on them) are borne out by their subsequent observations or findings, the hypotheses become theories, rules or laws of nature – at least until someone finds new evidence that pokes holes in their assessments, or devises better explanations.

Real scientists often employ computers to analyze data more quickly and accurately, depict or model complex natural systems, or forecast future events or conditions. But they test their models against real-world evidence. If the models, observations and predictions don’t match up, real scientists modify or discard the models, and the hypotheses behind them. They engage in robust discussion and debate.

Climate models have always overstated the warming. But even though modelers have admitted that their models are “tuned” – revised after the fact to make it look like they predicted temperatures accurately – the modelers have made no attempt to change the climate sensitivity to match reality. Why not?

They know disaster scenarios sell. Disaster forecasts keep them employed, swimming in research money – and empowered to tell legislators and regulators that humanity must we take immediate, draconian action to eliminate all fossil fuel use – the economic, human and environmental consequences be damned. And they probably will never admit their mistakes or duplicity, much less be held accountable.

With Mann-made climate change, we are always shown the worst-case scenario: RCP 8.5, the “business-as-usual” ... ten times more coal use in 2100 than now ... “total disaster.” Alarmist climatologists know their scenario has maybe a 0.1% likelihood, and assumes no new energy technologies over the next 80 years. But energy technologies have evolved incredibly over the last 80 years – since 1940, the onset of World War II! Who could possibly think technologies won’t change at least as much going forward?

The Fauci-Birx team is trying to do science-based modeling for the ChiCom-WHO coronavirus – feeding updated data into their models. Forecasts for infections and deaths are down significantly. Thankfully.

So now we must demand honest, factual, evidence-based climate model as well. No more alarmists and charlatans setting climate and energy policy. Our economy, livelihoods, lives and liberties are too vital.

omg covid delingpole zinc grift

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/08/10/how-uk-climate-science-deniers-turned-their-attention-coronavirus-covid-19

no pix twt

on December 31, 2019 many of us were reflecting on the past year and thinking about what opportunities lay ahead. Few were paying close attention to early reports ofunexplained cases of pneumonia thousands of miles away in Wuhan, the large capital city of China’s Hubei Province.

But less than three months later, on March 23, Boris Johnson was ordering anational lockdown to try and stop that virus, by then known worldwide as COVID-19, from raging across the UK. This came 52 days after the chief medical officer of England hadconfirmed the nation’s first two cases.

The coronavirus crisis once again saw the UK divided — between those putting their trust in public health experts and their recommendations, and those quick to question the science on which the government claimed to base its decisions for controlling the pandemic. For those who have watched the decades-long efforts to slow climate action, this was a familiar phenomenon. And the coronavirus pandemic seemed to give fresh ammunition to some familiar faces.

A close look at commentary on both COVID-19 and climate change reveals significant crossover between unqualified voices casting doubt on experts recommending action.

Why?

“There’s nothing mysterious about this,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive science, who studies the persistence of misinformation in society at the University of Bristol.

“I think COVID is just climate change on steroids in a particle accelerator,” he says. “The same forces are happening: You have the inevitability of a virus which is the same as the inevitability of the physics. And opposing that you have politics which motivates some people to deny the inevitables and instead resort to bizarre claims.”

Find out more about the crossover between COVID and climate science denial in DeSmog's special series

'No need to panic’

Commentators with a history of casting doubt on established climate science first turned their attention to COVID in the days just after Chinese authorities ordered the 11 million residents of Wuhan, a city the size of London, intolockdown.

On January 24,Ross Clark, a columnist for The Spectator who has lamented“hysteria” around COVID-19, said there was “no need to panic about coronavirus” despitewarnings from leading epidemiologists about the potential spread of the outbreak.

On January 29, British economistRoger Bate similarlyargued on the website of theAmerican Enterprise Institute (AEI), a climate science denying free-market lobby group, that news reports around COVID-19 were unnecessarily sparking a major political reaction.

“A contagion will happen at some point, and it’s important we recognize it and react. Unless the coronavirus mutates into something far more dangerous, this isn’t it,” he wrote[spectator pix]

the idea that governments and the media were overreacting to the coronavirus threat was echoed by libertarian online magazine:{Spiked:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:,which has takenfunding from notorious backers of climate science denial theKoch family, and hasincluded Bate and other AEI scholars among its contributors. It published an article as early as January 30 saying there was“mass hysteria in the newsrooms” around COVID.

By mid-February, the World Health Organization had declared that the threat of COVID-19 spreading across the world was“high” — yet a relaxed attitude continued to prevail among some commentators.

On February 19, centre-right blog ConservativeHome published an article by**Daniel Hannan**, a columnist and former Tory MEP,claiming that COVID-19 was unlikely to be as lethal as the common flu.

Hannan, a leading figure in the UK’s campaign to leave the EU, haslinks to various American lobby groups that have spread misinformation on climate change including theCato Institute and theHeritage Foundation. He encouraged ConservativeHome readers to “cheer up” and discouraged “panic” over the virus. That message was taken up by Clark in anotherSpectator article, arguing that “coronavirus hysteria” was “the latest phenomenon to fulfil our weird and growing appetite for doom"

[pix]

clark told DeSmog he stood by his analysis but acknowledged: “Clearly, COVID-19 took off more than I, or virtually anybody imagined it would at that stage.”

“There is a very broad range of opinions among virologists, epidemiologists and others who might be regarded as expert in this field,” he said, “so the idea that I am at odds with some mythical consensus of expert opinion is false.”

“I have been around long enough to know there is no such thing as scientific consensus on either issue [climate change or COVID], nor indeed on any matter where evidence is still emerging and open to wide interpretation,” he added.

Even after the World Health Organizationdeclared the contagion to be a pandemic in early March, commentators who have long cast doubt on warnings issued by climate scientists continued to deny that COVID-19 was a major threat.

Mail on Sunday columnistPeter Hitchens claimed that Britain was infected by a “bad case of madness,” arguing that restrictions were bein and “unreason.”

The language was familiar: Hitchens has previouslyrejected science showing human activity is responsible for global warming, and labeled measures to tackle climate change such as environmental taxes asa “sort of madness.”

For Lewandowsky, this “hysteria” narrative is part of a wider phenomenon of undermining expertise across the board, from Brexit, to climate change, and now COVID-19.

Lewandowsky points out that this also extends to many on the fringes of the political debate, such as controversial commentatorKatie Hopkins, who had over a million Twitter followers before the platform banned her, and has said the public were being“played” by the government for being asked to wear face masks. Or Brexit Party leaderNigel Farage, who described a police visit to his home as “lunacy” after he apparently broke lockdown rules.

Both have also cast doubt on the reality an of climate change.

“They’re quite explicit about saying that one person’s fact is another person’s lie, because that then enables them to avoid accountability,” Lewandowsky argues.

Miracle cures and conspiracy theories

These commentators’ contributions to the debate haven’t been without consequence. Some have spread conspiracy theories that have had real-world impact, while others have admitted to ignoring official safety guidelines, putting the public at risk of catching the disease.

ColumnistJames Delingpolewrote in a March 28article for the Spectator Australia titled ‘Wu Flu Notes’ that he had gone about his daily business despite having symptoms that align with coronavirus and that it was possible he had “infected lots of graduates.”

Some days later, Delingpole posted a tweet claiming a “high-powered zinc formula” had helped him recover from the illness without the need to go into intensive care – despite little being known about whether any such formula can be a cure for the virus.

He went on to write, “what I’d like more than anything is for this stuff to be available on the open market for everyone. But to mass produce it my friend needs ££££. If I crowdfunded it who’d be interested?” He concluded his request by asking for “potential big money backers."

[twt]

delingpole’s zinc promotion was comparable to comments made by US conspiracy theoristAlex Jones, who, a few weeks prior, hadreceived a cease-and-desist letter from a top New York attorney based on claims he had marketed and sold fraudulent COVID-19 treatments on his conspiracy website. US President Donald Trump was also widely criticised for suggesting that disinfectant taken internally could be a treatment for the virus.

Theories about miracle cures can take hold partly as a result of personal politics, Lewandowsky argues. Under lockdown, “you’re asked to stay at home and to look after other people by not doing what you’d like to do, and that is very challenging if you’re a believer in personal freedom and autonomy,” he says.

The same can be said of the motivations for spreading misinformation on climate change: “A lot of climate denial is very high-pitched, frenetic, emotional, angry, toxic – and that’s all triggered because people’s identity is at stake.”

The desire to reach for conspiracy theories may also stem from a need to feel that individuals still retain some control, says Evita March, a senior lecturer of psychology at Federation University Australia. “Conspiracy theories offer the believer some comfort in that there is still behavioural predictability,” she says.

And there were plenty of conspiracy theories flying around, pushed by long-time climate science deniers.

Piers Corbyn, brother of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, was quick to promote the idea that coronavirus was thefault of politically liberal billionaires, and that it was related to the**Chinese-developed 5G mobile network**.

The latter conspiracy, alsopromoted by Infowars’ Jones, had significant real-world consequences. Over the Easter weekend it wasreported that 20 phone masts had been subject to arson attacks. According to Mobile UK, the trade association for four mobile network operators, an estimated 50 masts had beentargeted by April 15

[bbc pix]

david Lawrence, a researcher at campaign group Hope Not Hate, told DeSmog that theories around 5G have existed for a number of years, so “the stage was already set.” ”When the global COVID-19 outbreak occurred, there was both a susceptibility to be exploited and a ready-made explanation to hand,” he said.

“In some ways this is similar to climate change,” said Lawrence, “in that people who work in industries that would be negatively affected by efforts to reduce carbon emissions might be more likely to find reasons to reject the scientific consensus.”

Such conspiracy theories become popular — whether in relation to climate change or COVID-19 — because they are a means of “simplifying and attributing blame,” particularly during a time when “people feel that they have lost control over their lives,” says Lewandowsky.

“Some will seek comfort in the idea that there are bad people out there causing the pandemic because, for some, knowing there are bad people responsible for terrible things is more comforting than to assume that these things are uncontrollable,” he says. “It allows people to direct anger at someone.”

Distrusting modellers

Many commentators directed their fire at a familiar foe — scientific models.

On April 1, the same day the United Nations announced thepostponement of the annual UN climate change conference, two prominent UK climate science deniersargued in The Wall Street Journal that the pandemic had “dramatically demonstrated the limits of scientific modelling to predict the future.”

Benny Peiser andAndrew Montford, the Director and Deputy Director of the UK’s principal climate science denial campaign group the**Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)**, criticised policymakers for using academic research that was subject to a “lack of quality control.” “In normal times this doesn’t matter much, but it’s different when studies find their way into the policy world,” they wrote.

They did not mention that the GWPF’s own approach to ‘peer-review’, which undercover reporters in 2015 showed operated on the basis of sending reports to its members of its own advisory council. The model has been described by UK charity Sense About Science, whose Advisory Council included GWPF advisor Matt Ridley, as “a way of trying to give scientific credibility to certain claims in the hope that a non-scientific audience will not know the difference.”

Eight days later, Breitbart’s Delingpole similarly criticised scientific modelling,dismissing research from the University of Washington forecasting more than150,000 deaths from the disease across the US as “operating in the realms of purest fantasy.” Whether on climate change or the pandemic, “we have no idea whether or not we can trust” scientific experts and their modelling, Delingpole argued[pix BB]

clark takes a similar view, telling DeSmog: “on both COVID-19 and climate change there are a lot of people who seem to favour the results of modelling over real-world observation.” Those who want action “will latch on to any model” that suits their ends, he claimed, and will “decide that is 'the science', that it is fact, beyond all challenge.”

Anarticle in Spiked likewise argued in April that “worst-case scenario thinking” and “doomsday forecasts” from models had clouded political judgement, referencing the obesity crisis, swine flu, and climate change.

This process of regularly casting doubt on models represents the “weaponisation of the scientific method,” says Imran Ahmed, founder of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. “Those sorts of sly tactics that have been used by these groups have amounted to an entire culture of how they spread information, spread ideas, and build audiences for their groups.”

“It’s expressed through philosophical strands which are anti-expert, faux-populist and conspiracies” and can include the “incel movement, climate denial, vaccine denial, identity-based hate,” he argues.

“As new facts emerge and as the understanding of the scientific movement changes,” says Ahmed, “these actors look back at previous consensuses and say, ‘see, they were lying back then.’”

Attacking environmentalists

As well as attacking coronavirus experts on their response recommendations, many commentators who oppose climate action also attacked those looking further ahead by putting forward proposals to ensure recovery plans were consistent with governments’ environmental pledges.

For months, commentators who regularly question the veracity of mainstream climate science denounced environmental activists for supposedly distracting the world with climate change amid the threat of pandemics.

On March 12, Telegraph columnistSherelle Jacobs argued that university funding should be redirected away from climate change research and towards “the scientifically uncontested problem of pandemics.” The day after, when the UK was effectively put under a national lockdown, Dutch climate science denial groupCLINTEL published anopen letter titled “Fight virus not carbon.”

Greenpeace,The Climate Group, and many other environmental organisations believe that the government should include environmental policies in coronavirus economic recovery measures to “build back better,” particularly as the country seeks to position itself as a climate leader ahead of hosting the UN climate talks in November 2021.

Some commentators spun this argument to imply that the environmental movement was happy that the virus has spread.

On March 22, former Top Gear presenterJeremy Clarkson claimed in the Sunday Times that “greens just can’t stop smiling” because COVID-19 was “their idea of a wet dream.” Spiked contributor Ross Clark echoed this position in a response to DeSmog’s questions, saying that “there is a strand of opinion on the left which wants these crises — climate change and COVID — to be as big as possible because they see it as a way of undermining capitalism, and other aspects of our lives, and reforming society in their own dream vision.”

On March 25, a couple of days after Clarkson’s polemic appeared, Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill similarly argued that the pandemic was “a glimpse of the dystopia greens want us to live in.”

“The truth is that if the COVID-19 crisis has shown us anything, it is how awful it would be to live in the kind of world greens dream about. Right now, courtesy of a horrible new virus, our societies look not dissimilar to the kind of societies Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, green parties and others have long been agitating for,” he wrote.

[pix] o’Neill reiterated this position when contacted by DeSmog, saying both the “green movement” and the reaction to COVID represented “privileged Westerners taking political decisions and actions” to the detriment of some of society’s most vulnerable. “Progressives should be questioning the impact of the reaction to COVID-19 on working people and poor people,” he said.

In June, 57 charitieswrote to Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking him to put the creation of jobs in low-carbon sectors at the forefront of his economic recovery plans. They also asked the government to cancel the debts of developing countries struggling with both the impacts of the pandemic and the climate crisis.

Delingpole later wrote in acolumn for Breitbart saying environmentalists were celebrating the lockdown as a blueprint for a “new world order.” The GWPF took this argument one step further,publishing an image of a crying woman with the text, “net zero, like lockdown but permanent” — a reference to the UK government’s plans to slash the country’s emissions.

As these pieces were appearing, a Twitter account claiming to represent the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the East Midlandsposted an image of an XR-branded sticker on a lamppost with the words, “corona is the cure, humans are the disease.”

Official XR accounts were quick to condemn the tweet andsaid that they were not affiliated with the newly created account, which has since been deleted. But various outlets and commentators used the tweet to condemn the protest group.

Gaia Fawkes, the environmental section of political blog Guido Fawkes,suggested the post showed that XR was “in favour of extinction,” though it acknowledged coordinators of the organisation had “distanced themselves” from the supposed splinter group. A spokesperson for the site told DeSmog it stood by its reporting despite well-publicised doubts over the authenticity of the East Midlands organisation, stating it was “unaware of any publicly available list of ‘official’ [XR] groups at the time.”

The GWPF likewise claimed the Twitter account’s “anti-human sentiment” was “widely shared” among environmentalists,rejecting claims that the East Midlands account was fake.

Author and Guardian columnist George Monbiot suggests that while it is predominantly money that is behind climate science denial or tobacco industry lobbying, “with COVID-19, the motive definitely varies,” but the outcome is essentially the same.

“There are a lot of very well-paid people who are very professional and they’re using the expertise that they’ve gathered in other areas of dispute about scientific facts and the policies arising from them, and applying those directly to the pandemic,” he argues.

“Take their power seriously, but don’t take any of their arguments at face value,” Monbiot concludes. “It’s not worth trying to deconstruct the nonsense they come out with.”

Political impact

Unlike in theEU referendum or Trump’s presidential campaign, pushing anti-expert rhetoric may no longer be a winning strategy in the wake of COVID-19. Polling shows that despite worry about the pandemic and its impacts, the public still wants governments totackle climate change. And politicians attaching themselves to the anti-science bandwagon are now struggling in the polls.

For the Centre for Countering Digital Hate’s Ahmed, attacking the concept of expertise around COVID-19 is “the first truly great strategic mistake by those who espouse this radical world view.”

The US and UK are two of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, and both have leaders “who have been denying evidence and fact,” says Lewandowsky. “Johnson and Trump are creating a situation in which the very thought that we could establish a common truth is under attack,” he says. Both are regularly backed by commentators who also openly question the concept of expertise, whether on climate change or coronavirus.

But these positions have begun to hurt both leaders. Johnson has plummeted from a position of public popularity prior to the UK’s lockdown to anegative approval rating almost four months later. And the gap between the majority of Americans who disapprove of Trump’s leadership and those keeping faith with the president now sits ataround 15 percent, numbers that could see him lose November’s election.

That may reflect a wider shift in the public mindset, Lewandowsky argues: “My hope is that the COVID crisis has kind of given us a reset here, and there’s some evidence that people are beginning to say that we do need experts and data.”

SO WE'VE KNOWN FOR A WHILE WE WERE LOSING ICE GLACIERS FASTER THAN PREDICTED, BUT NOW WE FIND PART OF THE PROBLEM IS IN MODELS, IRONIC AS USED FOR BS MYTH SO LONG

yikes OMFG note models not good at tip pt

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/top-scientists-warn-of-an-amazon-tipping-point/2019/12/20

dec. 20, 2019 at 12:14 p.m. PST

Deforestation and other fast-moving changes in the Amazon threaten to turn parts of the rainforest into savanna, devastate wildlife and release billions of tons carbon into the atmosphere, two renowned experts warned Friday.

“The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances.“Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”

Combined with recent news that the thawing Arctic permafrost may be beginning to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, it’s the latest hint that important parts of the climate system may be moving toward irreversible changes at a pace that defies earlier predictions.

The speed of the transformation in some key systems, such as Greenland’s ice and the Arctic’s permafrost, has “indeed been underestimated by climate science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And that’s partly because we cannot really capture them well in our models.”

In interviews, Lovejoy and Nobre said they decided to sound a dire alarm about the Amazon after witnessing the acceleration of troubling trends. The combination of rising temperatures, crippling wildfiresand ongoing land clearing for cattle ranching and crops has extended dry seasons, killed off water-sensitive vegetation and created conditions for more fire.

How we know that global warming is real]

The Amazon is 17 percent deforested, but for the large portion of it inside Brazil, the figure is closer to 20 percent. The fear is that soon there will be so little forest that the trees, which not only soak up enormous quantities of rainwater but also give off mist that aids agriculture and sustains innumerable species, won’t be able to recycle enough rainfall.At that point, much of the rainforest could decline into a drier savanna ecosystem. Rainfall patterns would change across much of South America. Several hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide could wind up in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. And such a feedback loop would be tough to reverse.

That point of no return, commonly referred to by scientists as a tipping point, “is much closer than we anticipated,” Nobre said in an interview.

The troubling news comes on top of other alarming developments regarding the Earth’s climate.

This month, nearly 100 scientists detailed how the Greenland ice sheet’slosses have accelerated in recent decades, growing from 33 billion tons lost per year in the 1990s to a current average of 254 billion tons annually.

“Greenland is losing ice faster than expected, partly because climate models aren’t good at predicting extreme melting events, but also because many of the ice sheet’s smaller glaciers have started to speed up, too,” said Andrew Shepherd, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in Britain who led the latest study. “So the [worst]-case scenario now becomes business as usual."

Separately, a report this month from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laid out evidence suggesting that the global Arctic already has become a net emitter of carbon dioxide because of the thawing permafrost. That would be a profound shift for a region that includes vast stretches of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland, and which haslong stored massive amounts of carbonin its frozen soil.

At the same time, a global die-off of coral reefs in 2016 and 2017, which included the loss of nearly half of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, shocked scientists.

“Compared to coral bleaching in 1998 and 2002, the 2016 event was much more extreme — hotter, far more extensive, and deadlier,” said Terry Hughes, an expert on the reef and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia. “The reef has changed forever."

While the speed of the changes involving the Amazon, permafrost and ice sheets has surprised experts, models that scientists created decades ago regarding the average global temperature have largely held true.

The world has experienced about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming since the late 19th century, largely because of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.

But much of the Arctic has already warmed by 2 degrees Celsius and some regions even more.

The Amazon also is warming at an accelerated rate. An analysis by The Washington Post of global temperature changes found that almost the entirety of Brazil has warmed by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since the late 1800s.

Higher temperatures and deforestation are drying out parts of the Amazon and posing a fundamental threat to the rainforest.

In the southern Amazon dry season in particular, temperatures are already 3 degrees Celsius higher than in the 1980s, and the dry season is getting longer, exceeding four months in some regions, Nobre said.

Particularly worrying, he said, is a recent study showing how trees are faring in more than 100 locations across the Amazon.Led by Adriane Esquivel Muelbert of the University of Leeds, researchers found forest transition has begun — trees accustomed to dry conditions are more likely to grow now while trees that require more moisture are disproportionately dying in places where climate changes are the greatest.

Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist and professor at the University of California at Irvine who has long studied the Amazon, said it is tricky to try to determine the tipping point.

"The definition of ‘tipping point’ can be quite broad,” Brando said, so it is difficult to say whether the Amazon has reached what scientists would call a point of irreversible change. But this much is clear, he added: “We’re not moving away from that tipping point. We’re probably driving very fast toward that direction.”

The impact of changes to the Amazon reach far beyond South America. The rainforest stores an immense amount of carbon in its enormous trees, and if they die, that carbon is released.

In a radically different part of the world, scientists last week described something eerily similar.

Ted Schuur, an expert on northern permafrost at Northern Arizona University, wrote in NOAA’s 2019 Arctic Report Card that recent studies suggest that the thawing of the permafrost — a repository for millennia of dead plant and animal remains — is likely to be contributing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as those once-frozen materials begin to decompos.

For the “science community at large,” Schuur said in an email, “this is a ‘surprising’ confirmation that the data show the Arctic currently acting as a carbon source.”

Schurr’s reasoning is based heavily on a groundbreaking study led by Susan Natali of the Woods Hole Research Center, research that is in many ways parallel to the new Amazon study. It pools the results from large numbers of scientists across the Arctic to show that in winter, permafrost soils are already emitting a lot of carbon. And those releases are probably enough to offset what happens in the growing season, when Arctic plant growth absorbs carbon.

The models that scientists have used to try to determine how the Arctic region is processing carbon were too conservative when it came to losses in winter in particular, Natali said. As a result, the potential for a transition of the Arctic from a “sink” that takes up carbon to a “source” that emits it may have been underestimated.

"The models, they project that to be happening quite a ways out in the future, but I would say it’s happening now,” Natali said.

Occasional extreme heat events in the Arctic can cause abrupt hillside collapses or “thaw slumps,” which rapidly expose very old and deep permafrost to the open air. Meanwhile, worsening Arctic fires can quickly remove insulating soil and vegetation layers from large stretches of permafrost, suddenly exposing it to the sun.

“It’s like you’re opening the top of a cooler,” Natali said.

In combination, the Amazon and Arctic news underscores that even as humans are largely failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth may increase such emissions yet further.

Still, it is possible to slow the transformation of the Amazon through reforestation, researchers said.

“A tipping point is a way to talk about a moment of system shift or system change,” Lovejoy said. “In this case, it’s not going to be instantaneous, and that’s good news. It allows you to do something about it.”

predictably 1219

guk

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/climate-models-have-accurately-predicted-global-heating-study-finds

no lnx guk

Climate models have accurately predicted global heating, study finds

Findings confirm reliability of projections of temperature changes over last 50 years

Dana Nuccitelli

Wed 4 Dec 2019 12.00 ESTLast modified on Fri 6 Dec 2019 04.09 EST

Climate models have accurately predicted global heating for the past 50 years, a study has found.

The findings confirm that since as early as 1970, climate scientists have had a solid fundamental understanding of the Earth’s climate system and the ability to project how it will respond to continued increases in the greenhouse effect. Since climate models have accurately anticipated global temperature changes so far, we can expect projections of future warming to be reliable as well.

The research examines the accuracy of 17 models published over the past five decades, beginning with a 1970 study and including 1981 and 1988 models led by James Hansen, the former Nasa climatologist who testified to the US Senate in 1988 about the impacts of anthropogenic global heating. The study also includes the first four reports by the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC).

“We found that climate models – even those published back in the 1970s – did remarkably well, with 14 out of the 17 model projections indistinguishable from what actually occurred,” said Zeke Hausfather, of the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the paper, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Timeline

Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline]

Based on modern climate model projections, if countries follow through with current and pledged climate policies, the world is on track for about 3C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100 – a situation the IPCC and others predict would be catastrophic.

The challenge in evaluating climate model accuracy lies in the fact that due to computing power limitations, simulations are only run for a few specific future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. There are an infinite number of such possible scenarios, but real-world emissions will follow only one path, and it will never exactly match the few scenarios input into climate models. Thus, if Earth warms less than in a climate model projection, it does not necessarily mean the model was inaccurate.

Put simply, climate scientists are not in the business of predicting human fossil fuel consumption but are attempting to accurately simulate how the climate will change in response to a given rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

“Future emissions depend on human behaviour, not physical systems, and climate models should be evaluated on their physics rather than the future emission projections,” said Hausfather.

In nearly half of the model projections examined in the paper, the input scenarios were significantly different from the real-world changes in greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, projected temperature changes were only consistent with observed global warming in 10 of the 17 models, with four projecting more warming and three projecting less than subsequently occurred.

However, the study authors addressed these inconsistencies by evaluating the change in temperature per change in “radiative forcing” – the global energy imbalance caused by the increased greenhouse effect and other factors – in models against what happened in the real world. This metric reveals whether the climate models are accurately producing the temperature response to a given emissions change – in essence, whether are accurately simulating the physical response of Earth’s climate system. With this factored in, 14 of the 17 models were accurate.

“The rate of warming we are experiencing today is pretty much exactly what past climate models projected it would be,” said Hausfather.

Those who oppose policies to limit the impacts of global heating have long sought to undermine the credibility of climate models. If the model projections are considered unreliable, they argue, then we do not know how urgent slowing global warming is. As a result, “climate models are unreliable” has become a popular myth propagated by climate deniers.

The latest study adds to the body of evidence supporting the accuracy of climate models, and will be welcomed by those arguing that more aggressive climate policies are needed to avoid dangerous levels of global warming. The UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2020 will be crucial, as countries will be expected to commit to scaling up the emission reductions that were pledged in the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change.

9/19 funny how you do not hear myth bs no much these days?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/terrifying-new-climate-models-warn-of-6-7c-of-catastrophic-warming-without-drastic-action/

no lnx

‘Terrifying’ new climate models warn of 6-7°C of catastrophic warming without drastic action

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 18, 2019

New climate models unveiled by French researchers Tuesday showed Earth’s average temperature could rise a “terrifying” 6.5-7.0°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century if dramatic action is not immediately taken to slash carbon emissions.

The findings, presented at a press conference in Paris, suggest theplanet may be warming significantly faster than scientists previously believed as the world’s major economies continue to burn fossil fuels at unsustainable rates.

“Unfortunately, our global failure to implement meaningful action on climate change over recent decades has put us in a situation where what we need to do to keep warming to safe levels is extremely simple,” Joeri Rogelj, an associate professor at Imperial College London, told AFP. “Global greenhouse gas emissions need to decline today rather than tomorrow, and global CO2 emissions should be brought to net zero.”

The new models are expected to form part of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, which is set to be published in 2021. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2014, presented a worst-case scenario of five degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century.

Olivier Boucher, head of the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace Climate Modeling Center in Paris, which developed one of the new models, said the latest data provide a better look at where the climate is heading without drastic changes to global energy production.

“We have better models now,” Boucher told AFP on Tuesday. “They have better resolution, and they represent current climate trends more accurately.”

Bloomberg reported that just “one of the updated climate models used by the researchers allowed for the global temperature increase to remain below 2°C by the end of the century.” That model assumed global carbon neutrality by 2060.

The worst-case scenario of 6.5-7.0°C of warming assumed continued economic expansion driven by growth of fossil fuel production.

Megara9

@Meg9Time

That 2.5 degree global temperature increase that was predicted to happen this century has been revised to 6.5-7 degrees. This is not good. https://phys.org/news/2019-09-earth-quickly-climate.html …

Earth to warm more quickly, new climate models show

Greenhouse gases thrust into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels are warming Earth's surface more quickly than previously understood, according to new climate models set to replace those used in...

phys.org

The IPCC warned last year that even limiting planetary warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century, the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, would not prevent many of the disastrous effects of the climate crisis. Warming of 6.5-7.0°C would be catastrophic.

“Higher warming would allow less time to adapt and mean a greater likelihood of passing climate ‘tipping points’ such as thawing of permafrost, which would further accelerate warming,” said Boucher.

In an email to Common Dreams, Penn State University climate scientist Michael E. Mann sounded a note of caution about the dire scenarios predicted by the new models.

“Some earlier versions of the models appeared to underestimate climate sensitivity somewhat,” said Mann, “and I suspect that some of these more recent versions are actually over-estimating it a bit.”

“I suspect, when all is said and done, we’re probably looking at something in the range of 3-4°C and no higher, at least for near-term warming,” Mann added. “If we allow the warm[ing] to persist for centuries, then other long-term positive feedbacks (vicious cycles) could kick in, giving us substantially more warming.”

new report from the United Nations detailing the looming threat of global warming should be all anyone can talk about this month, but instead, it has been largely ignored in the American political debate.

The reason is simple: Almost no one believes there's much chance the United States has the political will to do anything substantial to combat climate change. Because as long as the Republican Party holds any bit of power in Washington, D.C., it will do whatever it can to thwart efforts to wind down greenhouse gas emissions

In a new *New York Times* op-ed, economist Paul Krugman argued that the shifting responses Republicans — including now President Donald Trump — give in response to questions about climate change reveal that they are not reacting to the issue in good faith. They'll go from denying that climate change is happening, to denying that humans contribute to it, to denying that there's anything to be done about the issue — all without altering their fundamental assumption that there's no reason to impose any costs on the fossil fuel industry.

"Details aside, the very multiplicity of climate-denial arguments — the deniers’ story keeps changing, but the bottom line that we should do nothing remains the same — is a sign that theopponents of climate action are arguing in bad faith," Krugman wrote. "They aren’t seriously trying to engage with the reality of climate change or the economics of reduced emissions; their goal is to keep polluters free to pollute as long as possible, and they’ll grab onto anything serving that goal."

He added: "[We're] now ruled by people who are willing to endanger civilization for the sake of political expediency, not to mention increased profits for their fossil-fuel friends." // noam

The complete vacuity of their position has been clear for literally decades. Krugman continued:

These days, climate deniers seem to have temporarily backed down a bit on claims that nothing is happening. The old dodge of comparing temperatures to an unusually warm year in 1998 to deny that the planet is getting warmer — which is like comparing days in early July with a warm day in May, and denying that there’s such a thing as summer — has been undermined by a string of new temperature records. And massive tropical storms fed by a warming ocean have made the consequences of climate change increasingly visible to the public.

So the new strategy is to downplay what has happened. Climate change models “have not been very successful,” declared Larry Kudlow, the top White House economic adviser. Actually, they have: Global warming to date is well in line with past projections. “Something’s changing and it’ll change back again,” asserted Donald Trump on “60 Minutes,” based upon, well, nothing.

Having grudgingly conceded that maybe the planet is indeed getting a bit warmer, the climate deniers claim to be unconvinced that greenhouse gases are responsible. “I don’t know that it’s man-made,” said Trump. And while he has sort-of-kind-of backed down on his earlier claims that climate change is a hoax concocted by the Chinese, he’s still seeing vast conspiracies on the part of climate scientists, who he says “have a very big political agenda.”

Amazingly, even after the Republican Party has been proven wrong again and again on this issue, it has felt no need to reexamine its fundamental assumptions about the issue or admit error.

And in addition to the corrupt motive of seeking to please their fossil fuel industry donors, Krugman suggests another reason for ignoring the reality of climate change. As the party has continued to devolve and lost any stable values, it clings to theunifying joy of "owning the libs." As long as liberals think combatting climate change is an important issue, Republicans will be happy to ignore it.

But politics is not just a game, despite the cartoonish arguments that have become so common on the right wing. The right's terrible policy choices have real consequences.

"We have good reason to believe that Trump and his associates are selling out America for the sake of personal gain," concluded Krugman. "When it comes to climate, however, they aren’t just selling out America; they’re selling out the whole world."

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke evaded questions yesterday about the extent of rising temperatures during a Senate budget hearing for an agency that oversees fossil fuel development on a fifth of the nation's land.

During a heated exchange with Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Zinke punted on basic questions about climate science. The secretary declined to engage in a line of inquiry that focused on government predictions of rising temperatures over the next 80 years. He claimed instead that climate models are inaccurate, a frequent talking point among climate skeptics.

"I'm concerned about whether you are clear about the magnitude of warming that is occurring," Franken said at the Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.

Franken repeatedly asked Zinke, a former congressman from Montana, if he could "tell me how much warming government scientists predict for the end of this century under a business-as-usual scenario?"

Zinke parried.

"I don't think government scientists can predict with certainty," he said. "There isn't a model that exists today that can predict today's weather given all the data."

Over the last few decades, scientists have come to use more than 30 climate models to project how climate could change in the future. The models often combine decades of weather, physics and the forcing effects of large-scale climate drivers, such as the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in order to predict future climate.

The Earth is expected to warm between 8 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 if emissions continue to rise unfettered, according to the 2014 National Climate Assessment.

Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said Zinke's explanation was "a stupid and ignorant answer."

Climate models, he said, are getting better. The simulations increasingly line up with observed changes. By using temperature records and atmospheric measurements of carbon dioxide, scientists know that in the past 200 years the planet has warmed about 1.4 F and CO2 has risen 40 percent. The present level of atmospheric CO2 is higher than it has been in the past million years.

"Well, all models are wrong, but some are useful," Trenberth said. "Weather models aren't able to accurately predict if it'll be sunny or rainy two weeks from now because they are sensitive to small disruptions.

"But the patterns of weather may still be predictable in the same sense that summer is different than winter," he added. "And that is what climate is all about: determining the effects of the sun, the atmospheric composition, the oceans, the ice and ... looking for systematic influences."

While climate modeling and weather forecasting are similar, they rely on different sets of data and measure vastly different time scales, said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"Weather forecasting is based on our ability to track weather systems (fronts, storms, wave patterns etc.) and is excellent at the 1 to 5 day range," he said in an email. "Climate forecasts by contrast predict statistics of weather as opposed to specific events."

When looking over long periods of time, the external drivers of climate — things like how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere trapping heat, and how many trees have been cut down and are no longer sequestering greenhouse gases — can be used to make statistical predictions about the climate, Schmidt said.

In a statement to E&E News, Franken said he wanted Zinke to recognize the real threat of climate change and the role his agency plays in setting policy that can affect it.

"I wanted Secretary Zinke to acknowledge that climate change is real, that without action the increase in temperatures will be large, that he listens to the climate scientists in his agency, and that he grasps that climate change will affect our public lands," Franken said. "I find it troubling, to say the least, that he failed to address any of those very important issues."

During the hearing, Zinke also seized on the Trump administration's decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement. He characterized the move as not being about climate change, but about the agreement's being a "bad deal." President Trump has repeatedly used the same language.

He then cited a White House talking point that if the agreement were implemented, it would only produce a 0.2-degree-Celsius reduction in global temperatures. Zinke called that "insignificant."

Zinke said his data point came from a report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But researchers from the Climate Interactive project, which collaborates with MIT, have refuted that point.

In fact, the study shows that the Paris Agreement could lower the expected temperature increase by 0.6 to 1.1 C (*Climatewire*, June 2).

An exasperated Franken again pressed the Cabinet secretary to answer his question about the science.

"I just want you to answer the question that I asked you. That's all I want you to do," Franken said. "Can you tell me how much warming government scientists ... predict for the end of the century under a business-as-usual scenario?"

Zinke didn't bite. Instead, he began questioning Franken.

"Can you tell me, sir, whether or not China increased its CO2 between now and 2030 under the agreement, and by what?" Zinke asked. "I will be glad to give you that answer."

The two agreed to finish the discussion in written comments submitted for the record.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092016/faster-attribution-studies-scientists-zero-climate-change-role-louisiana-floods-downpours

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/gavin-schmidt-on-why-climate-models-are-wrong-and-valuable/

Climate Model Coverage: Far From Model Journalism

Posted: 12/27/2012 1:28 pm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karthika-muthukumaraswamy/climate-model-coverage-journalism_b_2370738.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

With a less-than-stellar end to the Qatar climate talks, and with all eyes on the U.S. for more ambitious commitments ahead of the next round, it is more important than ever for the American public to be better educated on the dire implications of a rapidly warming world.

Despite a recent shift toward greater beliefin anthropogenic climate change, perception of its risks remains low among the U.S. public.

A study published in the September issue ofNature Climate Change may help explain why. After analyzing climate coverage in major newspapers, and radio and television shows, the authors find a disproportionately large focus on op-ed and editorial topics in favor of actual explanations of science.The article concludes that the media not only provides insufficient scientific coverage, but also significantly undermines the reliability of climate models (in all news sources analyzed, almost two times the coverage of climate models was negative versus positive).

Rather than merely focus on their imprecise nature, the media should take some time to elaborate on the complexity of computer models and shed light on why they are imprecise, describing what we know along with what we don't know.

Reporting should emphasize that simulating the forces that drive climate, such as ocean circulation and heat exchanges between land, air and sea, and their interactions with living ecosystems requires very sophisticated mathematical analysis. Systems of differential equations based on the laws of physics, fluid movement, and atmospheric chemistry take data from satellite observations, ocean buoys and other environmental monitoring equipment, which are then solved on supercomputers.

More importantly, these models entail dividing the Earth's atmosphere into hundreds of thousands of grid points and predicting values for various physical factors, such as temperature, heat transfer, moisture content, and radiation at each grid point. The temperature at a given grid point is predicted five to 20 minutes at a time, until a projection far in the future, say the year 2100, is reached. Because of the short time-step of just a few minutes (which enables greater accuracy), even a one-year simulation would need to process this calculation tens of thousands of times; according to the World Meteorological Organization, for just one year, this would require processing 27,000 times for each of the 2.5 million grid points on Earth.

Climate models are by no means precise. Given their complexity, assumptions and simplifications have to be made to allow even supercomputers to generate projections in a reasonable amount of time. Nonetheless, they are rigorously mathematically tested, and data from past years have reliably been able to recreate the Ice Age and volcanic eruptions from past decades.

If the general public is given an intricate look at the processes that drive climate and the methods used to predict it, anyone with the ability to recall even a basic problem from middle school physics should begin to comprehend the sheer complexity of these projections. This will, perhaps, dispel the notion of climate scientists sitting in their labs and spewing conspiracy theories about a rapidly warming world.

In the aftermath of a political campaign where Republican candidates made a mockery of science, outrightly denying evolution, stem cell research, and human-induced climate change, it is even more important for the media to step up and defend science instead of continuing to insist that there are two sides to this issue.

The fact that theNaturestudy found thatThe Rush Limbaugh Showprovided the most "explanation" of climate models among major news publications and programs should be disconcerting enough. More than a third of the articles and shows explaining models were also seen to be in political commentary outlets.

Previous studies have called for greater transparency on the part of computer modelers in order to increase public trust in modeling. A paper that argues this in the Communications of the ACM aptly quotes the "reasonable person doctrine": "Information givers should provide enough information to takers for reasonable people to make decisions."

Any less information is unacceptable, the authors state, since it does not give users the ability to make informed decisions, and instead forces them to place blind faith in the "black box" that is computer modeling. The general public are users of information with regard to global warming, no doubt, because they make decisions everyday on energy consumption and carbon footprints: reusable versus paper versus plastic bags, energy-efficient versus regular bulbs, cars versus public transportation, and so on and so forth.

While all scientific issues suffer from perfunctory reporting due to lack of time, resources and expertise of journalists, climate change particularly lends itself well to the "two sides to every issue" narrative, since so much of the research is still preliminary. And when the media encounters an event whose conclusion is unknown, it plays a guessing game, trying to predict a possible conclusion and argue for or against it, often based on little factual evidence (think presidential elections).

While this kind of coverage is corrosive anywhere, it's even more so in the case of scientific stories, where it is important to report on the uncertaintyitself rather than using it as a launching pad for pet theories.

Another reason the media gets it wrong is its endless thirst for the sensational, the controversial and the dramatic. Which is why controversies like Climate Gate or Rick Perry's belief that global warming is a hoax make it to the front pages time and again.

Want dramatic?

Consider this reporting from Bloomberg Businessweek, accompanied by this very explicit cover page in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, which took nearly 200 lives and left millions without power on the East Coast:

"Sandy featured a scary extra twist implicating climate change. An Atlantic hurricane moving up the East Coast crashed into cold air dipping south from Canada. The collision supercharged the storm's energy level and extended its geographical reach. Pushing that cold air south was an atmospheric pattern, known as a blocking high, above the Arctic Ocean. Climate scientists Charles Greene and Bruce Monger of Cornell University, writing earlier this year in Oceanography, provided evidence that Arctic icemelts linked to global warming contribute to the very atmospheric pattern that sent the frigid burst down across Canada and the eastern U.S."

Since long-form journalism with context and background is now passé, the media should at least take advantage of high-priority events like Sandy to shed light on the big picture. Unfortunately, these types of stories are exceedingly rare, but this is one way to educate audiences on the fact that computer models draw on the same logic that lies behind weather models, which most people rely on for their daily activities, and which are -- unreliable-weatherman jokes aside -- very close to accurate on a day-to-day basis.

Reporters could also make use of immersive multimedia technology to explain how models work, says Larry Pryor. Video games that allow people to "play" with real simulations can give them firsthand experience in working with computer models.

Games could be specifically designed to allow users to see causes and effects, and to analyze the impact of various factors that affect global warming.The video game, SimCity, has a**new version**with an additional climate change component to be released next year.

Citizen science and crowdsourcing projects to model and predict climate change can also be great ways to enable the public to not only acquire information, but to also take part in the research. Old Weather, for example, is a crowdsourced effortaimed at gathering meteorological data from naval logs of U.S. ships from as far back as the mid-19th century, which can be used in climate models.

Initiatives like the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication are also great approaches to get citizens interested and involved in the climate debate. By tracking public awareness of climate change, including American attitudes, risk perceptions, and views on policies, the project tests new and effective ways to involve the public in climate science research.

Recent efforts to push for the teaching of climate science in schools, where children could learn the nuances, complexities and multidisciplinary aspects of climate research would make the job of the media easier, even while preparing the next generation of scientists and engineers who will likely address these challenges head on.

Meanwhile, the media should do its job. It's the people's right to know. If there were an impending terrorist attack or dangerous epidemic that could affect millions of people, surely the media would use every channel to communicate that to the public? What about global warming -- a phenomenon that may cause entire coastlines to go under water and whole countries to disappear -- doesn't warrant communication?

This article is re-posted from Scientific American.