Trump better not be wavering. He promised he would reject this Obama BS.
The global elite have no right to dictate what type of cars we drive, the temperature in our homes, the cost of our electricity, natural gas and fuel etc. If Merkel wants to screw over her people with skyrocketing energy prices and Germans continue to take it, that's their business.
The illegal Paris "agreement" is nothing but a clever end-around Congress because the Kyoto treaty was flatly REJECTED by the Senate. Another flat out left wing attack on capitalism and free people.
The global elite have no right to dictate what type of cars we drive, the temperature in our homes, the cost of our electricity, natural gas and fuel etc. If Merkel wants to screw over her people with skyrocketing energy prices and Germans continue to take it, that's their business.
The illegal Paris "agreement" is nothing but a clever end-around Congress because the Kyoto treaty was flatly REJECTED by the Senate. Another flat out left wing attack on capitalism and free people.
[h=1]Climate change: How do we know?[/h]
This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.) Find out more about ice cores (external site).
The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.
Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over decades to millennia.1
Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.
The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century.2 Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many instruments flown by NASA. There is no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.
Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.3
[h=3]The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:[/h]
[h=2]Sea level rise[/h]
[h=2]Global temperature rise[/h]
[h=2]Warming oceans[/h]
[h=2]Shrinking ice sheets[/h]
[h=2]Declining Arctic sea ice[/h]
[h=2]Glacial retreat[/h]
[h=2]Extreme events[/h]
[h=2]Ocean acidification[/h]
[h=2]Decreased snow cover[/h]
[h=3]References[/h]
[h=2]Scientific Consensus[/h]Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.
Click here for a partial list of these public statements and related resources.
[h=2]Latest resources[/h]
The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.
Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.
The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century.2 Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many instruments flown by NASA. There is no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.
Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.3
[h=3]The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:[/h]
[h=2]Sea level rise[/h]
-
Global sea level rose about 8 inches in the last century. The rate in the last two decades, however, is nearly double that of the last century.4Image: Republic of Maldives: Vulnerable to sea level rise
[h=2]Global temperature rise[/h]
-
The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.5 Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with 16 of the 17 warmest years on record occurring since 2001. Not only was 2016 the warmest year on record, but eight of the 12 months that make up the year — from January through September, with the exception of June — were the warmest on record for those respective months. 6
[h=2]Warming oceans[/h]
-
The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.7
[h=2]Shrinking ice sheets[/h]
-
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.Image: Flowing meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet
[h=2]Declining Arctic sea ice[/h]
-
Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades.8Image: Visualization of the 2007 Arctic sea ice minimum
[h=2]Glacial retreat[/h]
-
Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.9 Image: The disappearing snowcap of Mount Kilimanjaro, from space.
[h=2]Extreme events[/h]
-
The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events.10
[h=2]Ocean acidification[/h]
-
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent.11,12 This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the oceans. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.13,14
[h=2]Decreased snow cover[/h]
-
Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and that the snow is melting earlier.15
[h=3]References[/h]
- IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers
B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere,” Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46
Gabriele C. Hegerl, “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method,” Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306
V. Ramaswamy et.al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling,” Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141
B.D. Santer et.al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes,” Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483.
- In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
- National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php
- https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf
Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.
The global sea level estimate described in this work can be downloaded from the CSIRO website.
- https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp
- https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20170118/)
- Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).
- L. Polyak, et.al., “History of Sea Ice in the Arctic,” in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7
R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, “Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008,” Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009
http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html
- National Snow and Ice Data Center
World Glacier Monitoring Service
- "Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change," National Academies Press, 2016
https://www.nap.edu/read/21852/chapter/1
Kunkel, K. et al, "Probable maximum precipitation and climate change," Geophysical Research Letters, (12 April 2013) DOI: 10.1002/grl.50334
Kunkel, K. et al, "Monitoring and Understanding Trends in Extreme Storms: State of the Knowledge," Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2012.
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei.html
- http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification?
- http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification
- C. L. Sabine et.al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2,” Science vol. 305 (16 July 2004), 367-371
- Copenhagen Diagnosis, p. 36.
- National Snow and Ice Data Center
C. Derksen and R. Brown, "Spring snow cover extent reductions in the 2008-2012 period exceeding climate model projections," GRL, 39:L19504
http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/snow_extent.html
Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, Data History Accessed August 29, 2011.
[h=2]Scientific Consensus[/h]Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.
Click here for a partial list of these public statements and related resources.
[h=2]Latest resources[/h]
-
Video: Antarctic ice loss 2002-2016
-
Video: Greenland ice loss 2002-2016
-
Video: Seasonal changes in carbon dioxide
Scientists just published an entire study refuting Scott Pruitt on climate change
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt speaks with coal miners in Sycamore, Pa., in April. (Justin Merriman/Getty Images)
In a sign of growing tensions between scientists and the Trump administration, researchers published a scientific paper Wednesday that was conceived and written as an explicit refutation to an assertion by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt about climate change.
The study, in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, sets up a direct test of a claim by Pruitt, made in written Senate comments following his confirmation hearing, that “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming.”
After reviewing temperature trends contained in three satellite data sets going back to 1979, the paper concludes that the data sets show a global warming trend — and that Pruitt was incorrect.
[So much water pulsed through a melting Greenland glacier that it warped the Earth’s crust]
“Satellite temperature measurements do not support the claim of a ‘leveling off of warming’ over the past two decades,” write the authors, led by Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Santer co-authored the study with three Livermore colleagues and scientists from MIT, the University of Washington in Seattle and Remote Sensing Systems, which keeps one of the three satellite temperature data sets.
“In my opinion, when incorrect science is elevated to the level of formal congressional testimony and makes its way into the official congressional record, climate scientists have some responsibility to test specific claims that were made, determine whether those claims are correct or not, and publish their results,” said Santer in an interview, when asked about the framing of the research.
The study wades into an ongoing and highly fraught debate over how to interpret the temperature records of the planet’s lower atmosphere, or troposphere, provided by polar orbiting satellites.
Such data have often been cited by climate change doubters so as to suggest that there is no global warming trend, or that global warming has recently slowed down, and therefore to contradict thermometer-based measurements taken at the planet’s surface (which show a clear warming trend).
Play Video 0:55
EPA chief unconvinced global warming caused by humans
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, says he is not convinced carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of climate change and wants Congress to weigh in on whether CO2 should be regulated. (Reuters)
But the new study finds that all of the three satellite data sets — kept by Remote Sensing Systems, the Center for Satellite Applications and Research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Alabama at Huntsville — show a long-term warming trend in the middle to upper part of the troposphere. After correcting for a cooling-down of the stratosphere (the layer above the troposphere), the paper finds that the trend is roughly 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit per decade for the first two data sets, and 0.26 degrees Fahrenheit per decade for the third.
The study further examined whether any shorter temperature trend in these data sets could be described as a “leveling off,” as Pruitt had put it. It did so by examining 20-year periods in the data sets and comparing those with the predictions of climate simulations that reflected the natural variations of the climate but excluded human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. These models were thus meant to represent what the climate would do on its own if humans were not altering it.
The study finds warming trends for all the 20-year periods, including the “last two decades” referred to by Pruitt, although it acknowledges that the trend is somewhat lower over these later periods. But it attributes this to natural climate variations, including a very strong El Nino event in 1997 and 1998 that caused dramatic warmth around the beginning of the 20-year window that ends in the present.
Even in these periods that saw somewhat less warming, the study finds that it was still far more warming than would be without human perturbations of the climate. “The probability that internal variability could produce warming exceeding that observed over the last 20 years is only 1.6 %, 3.1 %, and 6.3% (respectively)” in the three data sets, the authors find.
CONTENT FROM CLEVELAND CLINIC
Looking sick can make you feel sicker
Cleveland Clinic set out to find the most comfortable chairs for patients to sit in during chemotherapy treatments at its new Cancer Center.
“Pruitt is not correct in saying that warming has leveled off,” Santer said. “It hasn’t in any of the satellite data sets, and indeed, in older and newer versions of the three satellite data sets, we judge the most recent warming to be statistically significant — to be larger than the warming that our current model-based estimates tells us that we should see due to internal variability alone.”
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Another solid piece of work by Santer et al. that demonstrate multi-decadal satellite-derived global tropospheric temperatures are increasing far more than we would expect from natural causes,” said Thomas Karl, a longtime climate researcher who formerly headed NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “Other satellite instruments, which measure temperatures closer to where we live, work and grow our food show at least as much, or more warming, in recent decades.”
Gavin Schmidt, who heads the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, said by email that when it comes to measurements of the Earth’s troposphere by satellite, “the trends over the whole period are clear.”
“This doesn’t however imply that a) there aren’t still issues with the satellite retrievals (there may well be), and b) that models did a perfect job over this time period,” Schmidt cautioned.
John Christy, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who keeps that data set and whose work has been often cited by climate change “skeptics,” agreed there is a warming trend in the satellite data overall but said that climate models predict that it should be larger. “The datasets are still significantly cooler than the model average,” he said by email.
Christy also argued that the other two data sets, which are warmer than his, are “outliers regarding the magnitude.”
The Energy 202 newsletter
Your daily guide to the energy and environment debate.
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“I wouldn’t get too excited about this study,” Christy said.
But it is not as though a scientific study refuting one of his statements to the Senate holds much risk for Pruitt, said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a political scientist at George Washington University.
“It’s significant in the sense that it shows the limits of the confirmation process, especially when the president’s party controls the Senate and senators can no longer filibuster nominees. In other words, it’s possible to float factually inaccurate statements and yet not ding your chances of confirmation,” Binder said. “Of course, the climate change issue is highly partisan: Republicans tend to disagree with a general scientific consensus that the earth is warming. So the idea that a Republican EPA nominee might give [a] factually contested statement on climate change and not pay a price is not terribly surprising.”
In the end, Santer argued, scientists should fact-check politicians even if they’re at a disadvantage when it comes to how long it takes to do so.
“These claims were made in the U.S. Senate, in a confirmation,” said Santer. “It takes time however to set the record straight, to do due diligence, to do the research necessary to address the claims. And one would hope that the scientific response receives at least some token amount of attention, and that the original incorrect claim does not dominate the public discourse on these critically important issues.”
By Chris Mooney May 24
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt speaks with coal miners in Sycamore, Pa., in April. (Justin Merriman/Getty Images)
In a sign of growing tensions between scientists and the Trump administration, researchers published a scientific paper Wednesday that was conceived and written as an explicit refutation to an assertion by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt about climate change.
The study, in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, sets up a direct test of a claim by Pruitt, made in written Senate comments following his confirmation hearing, that “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming.”
After reviewing temperature trends contained in three satellite data sets going back to 1979, the paper concludes that the data sets show a global warming trend — and that Pruitt was incorrect.
[So much water pulsed through a melting Greenland glacier that it warped the Earth’s crust]
“Satellite temperature measurements do not support the claim of a ‘leveling off of warming’ over the past two decades,” write the authors, led by Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Santer co-authored the study with three Livermore colleagues and scientists from MIT, the University of Washington in Seattle and Remote Sensing Systems, which keeps one of the three satellite temperature data sets.
“In my opinion, when incorrect science is elevated to the level of formal congressional testimony and makes its way into the official congressional record, climate scientists have some responsibility to test specific claims that were made, determine whether those claims are correct or not, and publish their results,” said Santer in an interview, when asked about the framing of the research.
The study wades into an ongoing and highly fraught debate over how to interpret the temperature records of the planet’s lower atmosphere, or troposphere, provided by polar orbiting satellites.
Such data have often been cited by climate change doubters so as to suggest that there is no global warming trend, or that global warming has recently slowed down, and therefore to contradict thermometer-based measurements taken at the planet’s surface (which show a clear warming trend).
Play Video 0:55
EPA chief unconvinced global warming caused by humans
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, says he is not convinced carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of climate change and wants Congress to weigh in on whether CO2 should be regulated. (Reuters)
But the new study finds that all of the three satellite data sets — kept by Remote Sensing Systems, the Center for Satellite Applications and Research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Alabama at Huntsville — show a long-term warming trend in the middle to upper part of the troposphere. After correcting for a cooling-down of the stratosphere (the layer above the troposphere), the paper finds that the trend is roughly 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit per decade for the first two data sets, and 0.26 degrees Fahrenheit per decade for the third.
The study further examined whether any shorter temperature trend in these data sets could be described as a “leveling off,” as Pruitt had put it. It did so by examining 20-year periods in the data sets and comparing those with the predictions of climate simulations that reflected the natural variations of the climate but excluded human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. These models were thus meant to represent what the climate would do on its own if humans were not altering it.
The study finds warming trends for all the 20-year periods, including the “last two decades” referred to by Pruitt, although it acknowledges that the trend is somewhat lower over these later periods. But it attributes this to natural climate variations, including a very strong El Nino event in 1997 and 1998 that caused dramatic warmth around the beginning of the 20-year window that ends in the present.
Even in these periods that saw somewhat less warming, the study finds that it was still far more warming than would be without human perturbations of the climate. “The probability that internal variability could produce warming exceeding that observed over the last 20 years is only 1.6 %, 3.1 %, and 6.3% (respectively)” in the three data sets, the authors find.
CONTENT FROM CLEVELAND CLINIC
Looking sick can make you feel sicker
Cleveland Clinic set out to find the most comfortable chairs for patients to sit in during chemotherapy treatments at its new Cancer Center.
“Pruitt is not correct in saying that warming has leveled off,” Santer said. “It hasn’t in any of the satellite data sets, and indeed, in older and newer versions of the three satellite data sets, we judge the most recent warming to be statistically significant — to be larger than the warming that our current model-based estimates tells us that we should see due to internal variability alone.”
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Another solid piece of work by Santer et al. that demonstrate multi-decadal satellite-derived global tropospheric temperatures are increasing far more than we would expect from natural causes,” said Thomas Karl, a longtime climate researcher who formerly headed NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “Other satellite instruments, which measure temperatures closer to where we live, work and grow our food show at least as much, or more warming, in recent decades.”
Gavin Schmidt, who heads the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, said by email that when it comes to measurements of the Earth’s troposphere by satellite, “the trends over the whole period are clear.”
“This doesn’t however imply that a) there aren’t still issues with the satellite retrievals (there may well be), and b) that models did a perfect job over this time period,” Schmidt cautioned.
John Christy, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who keeps that data set and whose work has been often cited by climate change “skeptics,” agreed there is a warming trend in the satellite data overall but said that climate models predict that it should be larger. “The datasets are still significantly cooler than the model average,” he said by email.
Christy also argued that the other two data sets, which are warmer than his, are “outliers regarding the magnitude.”
The Energy 202 newsletter
Your daily guide to the energy and environment debate.
Sign up
But it is not as though a scientific study refuting one of his statements to the Senate holds much risk for Pruitt, said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a political scientist at George Washington University.
“It’s significant in the sense that it shows the limits of the confirmation process, especially when the president’s party controls the Senate and senators can no longer filibuster nominees. In other words, it’s possible to float factually inaccurate statements and yet not ding your chances of confirmation,” Binder said. “Of course, the climate change issue is highly partisan: Republicans tend to disagree with a general scientific consensus that the earth is warming. So the idea that a Republican EPA nominee might give [a] factually contested statement on climate change and not pay a price is not terribly surprising.”
In the end, Santer argued, scientists should fact-check politicians even if they’re at a disadvantage when it comes to how long it takes to do so.
“These claims were made in the U.S. Senate, in a confirmation,” said Santer. “It takes time however to set the record straight, to do due diligence, to do the research necessary to address the claims. And one would hope that the scientific response receives at least some token amount of attention, and that the original incorrect claim does not dominate the public discourse on these critically important issues.”
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[ FUCKING MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN B1tCHES ]
[h=1]Donald Trump to withdraw US from Paris Agreement on climate change, sources claim[/h] The departure of the world's second biggest source of greenhouse gases from the international accord designed to reduce them would be a major blow
The Independent Online
Donald Trump previously said he thought climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China Mike Theiler/Reuters
[h=1]Donald Trump to withdraw US from Paris Agreement on climate change, sources claim[/h] The departure of the world's second biggest source of greenhouse gases from the international accord designed to reduce them would be a major blow
- Ian Johnston, Mythili Sampathkumar New York
- @montaukian
- 5 hours ago
The Independent Online
What were you saying about using my brain? Geez zit...you're buying into faked news that was designed to deny science. Use your brain.
The Real TIME Cover Behind That Fake 'Ice Age' Report
It's a doctored version of a cover from 2007. Here's the real story
LILY ROTHMAN @LILYROTHMANMAY 15, 2017 11:38 AM EDT
The latest example of that phenomenon is a Politico report from Monday morning, about how fake news can make its way to President Donald Trump. The story related an anecdote in which deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland reportedly presented the President with a print-out that included an image of a 1970s TIME cover predicting a coming ice age. The problem? That cover never existed.
It’s far from the first time that particular hoax cover has made news. A few years ago, at another moment when it was making the rounds, Bryan Walsh explained the science behind the fake news. The meme in question shows the supposed 1977 ice age cover on one side and a real 2006 cover story about global warming on the other; the takeaway is that even the most confident reporting on global warming might be negated soon.
“[The] hoax does touch on an important part of climate science — and one that’s often misunderstood by skeptics. Call it the Ice Age Fallacy,” Walsh wrote. “Skeptics argue that back in the 1970s both popular media and some scientists were far more worried about global cooling than they were about global warming. For some reason a Newsweek article on the next ice age, published back in 1975, gets a lot of the attention, though TIME did a version of the story, as did a number of other media outlets. The rationale goes this way: the fact that scientists were once supposedly so concerned about global cooling, which didn’t come true, just shows that we shouldn’t worry about the new fears of climate change.”
Read more: Sorry, a TIME Magazine Cover Did Not Predict a Coming Ice Age
But, while some media outlets in the 1970s did report on that idea of global cooling, actual science from the time — though not as developed as today’s science on global warming is — generally predicted just the opposite: global warming. In fact, scientists had already been thinking about global warming for decades at that point.
As Walsh pointed out, the doctored cover isn’t entirely invented. The background image of the penguin does come from a real issue, from 2007. (One easy giveaway: compare the range of TIME covers from 2007 to those from 1977. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to see that the penguin photo is not something that would have appeared on the front of the magazine 40 years ago.)
The real story, written by Jeffrey Kluger, was an examination of the things that could be done to combat global warming.
It was probably always too much to believe that human beings would be responsible stewards of the planet. We may be the smartest of all the animals, endowed with exponentially greater powers of insight and abstraction, but we're animals all the same. That means that we can also be shortsighted and brutish, hungry for food, resources, land--and heedless of the mess we leave behind trying to get them.And make a mess we have. If droughts and wildfires, floods and crop failures, collapsing climate-sensitive species and the images of drowning polar bears didn't quiet most of the remaining global-warming doubters, the hurricane-driven destruction of New Orleans did. Dismissing a scientist's temperature chart is one thing. Dismissing the death of a major American city is something else entirely. What's more, the heat is only continuing to rise. This past year was the hottest on record in the U.S. The deceptively normal average temperature this winter masked record-breaking highs in December and record-breaking lows in February. That's the sign not of a planet keeping an even strain but of one thrashing through the alternating chills and night sweats of a serious illness.The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on the state of planetary warming in February that was surprising only in its utter lack of hedging. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the report stated. What's more, there is "very high confidence" that human activities since 1750 have played a significant role by overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide hence retaining solar heat that would otherwise radiate away. The report concludes that while the long-term solution is to reduce the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, for now we're going to have to dig in and prepare, building better levees, moving to higher ground, abandoning vulnerable floodplains altogether. When former Vice President Al Gore made his triumphant return to Capitol Hill on March 21 to testify before Congress on climate change, he issued an uncompromising warning: "We do not have time to play around with this."Some lingering critics still found wiggle room in the U.N. panel's findings. "I think there is a healthy debate ongoing, even though the scientists who are in favor of doing something on greenhouse gases are in the majority," says Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. But when your last good position is to debate the difference between certain and extra certain, you're playing a losing hand. "The science," says Christine Todd Whitman, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (epa), "now is getting to the point where it's pretty hard to deny." Indeed it is. Atmospheric levels of CO2 were 379 parts per million (p.p.m.) in 2005, higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years. Of the 12 warmest years on record, 11 occurred between 1995 and 2006.So if the diagnosis is in, what's the cure?
You can read the rest of the story here, in the TIME Vault.
What were you saying about using my brain? Geez zit...you're buying into faked news that was designed to deny science. Use your brain.
The Real TIME Cover Behind That Fake 'Ice Age' Report
It's a doctored version of a cover from 2007. Here's the real story
LILY ROTHMAN @LILYROTHMANMAY 15, 2017 11:38 AM EDT
Apparently, an effective hoax is like an old soldier. It never dies; it merely fades away to resurface later.
The latest example of that phenomenon is a Politico report from Monday morning, about how fake news can make its way to President Donald Trump. The story related an anecdote in which deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland reportedly presented the President with a print-out that included an image of a 1970s TIME cover predicting a coming ice age. The problem? That cover never existed.
It’s far from the first time that particular hoax cover has made news. A few years ago, at another moment when it was making the rounds, Bryan Walsh explained the science behind the fake news. The meme in question shows the supposed 1977 ice age cover on one side and a real 2006 cover story about global warming on the other; the takeaway is that even the most confident reporting on global warming might be negated soon.
“[The] hoax does touch on an important part of climate science — and one that’s often misunderstood by skeptics. Call it the Ice Age Fallacy,” Walsh wrote. “Skeptics argue that back in the 1970s both popular media and some scientists were far more worried about global cooling than they were about global warming. For some reason a Newsweek article on the next ice age, published back in 1975, gets a lot of the attention, though TIME did a version of the story, as did a number of other media outlets. The rationale goes this way: the fact that scientists were once supposedly so concerned about global cooling, which didn’t come true, just shows that we shouldn’t worry about the new fears of climate change.”
Read more: Sorry, a TIME Magazine Cover Did Not Predict a Coming Ice Age
But, while some media outlets in the 1970s did report on that idea of global cooling, actual science from the time — though not as developed as today’s science on global warming is — generally predicted just the opposite: global warming. In fact, scientists had already been thinking about global warming for decades at that point.
As Walsh pointed out, the doctored cover isn’t entirely invented. The background image of the penguin does come from a real issue, from 2007. (One easy giveaway: compare the range of TIME covers from 2007 to those from 1977. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to see that the penguin photo is not something that would have appeared on the front of the magazine 40 years ago.)
The real story, written by Jeffrey Kluger, was an examination of the things that could be done to combat global warming.
It was probably always too much to believe that human beings would be responsible stewards of the planet. We may be the smartest of all the animals, endowed with exponentially greater powers of insight and abstraction, but we're animals all the same. That means that we can also be shortsighted and brutish, hungry for food, resources, land--and heedless of the mess we leave behind trying to get them.And make a mess we have. If droughts and wildfires, floods and crop failures, collapsing climate-sensitive species and the images of drowning polar bears didn't quiet most of the remaining global-warming doubters, the hurricane-driven destruction of New Orleans did. Dismissing a scientist's temperature chart is one thing. Dismissing the death of a major American city is something else entirely. What's more, the heat is only continuing to rise. This past year was the hottest on record in the U.S. The deceptively normal average temperature this winter masked record-breaking highs in December and record-breaking lows in February. That's the sign not of a planet keeping an even strain but of one thrashing through the alternating chills and night sweats of a serious illness.The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on the state of planetary warming in February that was surprising only in its utter lack of hedging. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the report stated. What's more, there is "very high confidence" that human activities since 1750 have played a significant role by overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide hence retaining solar heat that would otherwise radiate away. The report concludes that while the long-term solution is to reduce the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, for now we're going to have to dig in and prepare, building better levees, moving to higher ground, abandoning vulnerable floodplains altogether. When former Vice President Al Gore made his triumphant return to Capitol Hill on March 21 to testify before Congress on climate change, he issued an uncompromising warning: "We do not have time to play around with this."Some lingering critics still found wiggle room in the U.N. panel's findings. "I think there is a healthy debate ongoing, even though the scientists who are in favor of doing something on greenhouse gases are in the majority," says Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. But when your last good position is to debate the difference between certain and extra certain, you're playing a losing hand. "The science," says Christine Todd Whitman, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (epa), "now is getting to the point where it's pretty hard to deny." Indeed it is. Atmospheric levels of CO2 were 379 parts per million (p.p.m.) in 2005, higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years. Of the 12 warmest years on record, 11 occurred between 1995 and 2006.So if the diagnosis is in, what's the cure?
You can read the rest of the story here, in the TIME Vault.
Um, are you really the fucking obtuse?
I posted like 8 Time covers, and you find one that's fake and think you've actually made a valid point?
Lol
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[h=2]Here's a Crazy Story About Donald Trump Falling for an Internet Hoax[/h]White House staffers are handing the president fake news.
NATHALIE BAPTISTE MAY. 15, 2017 12:19 PM
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo
President Donald Trump has been a climate change denier for years, alleging that global warming is a Chinese invention and declaring that cold winter days prove that it's a hoax. Perhaps not surprisingly, his staff seems to share these views.
According to Politico, Deputy National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland recently tried to get Trump riled up about climate change with a bit of fake news. McFarland reportedly slipped Trump two Time magazine cover stories. One was supposedly from the 1970s and warned about a coming ice age. The other, from 2007, discussed how to survive global warming. But there was one glaring problem: The 1970s cover was a hoax.
In 2007, Time published a cover story titled, "The Global Warming Survival Guide." Sometime after that, internet hoaxers doctored the cover to instead say "How to Survive the Coming Ice Age" and alleged that it was a 1977 cover. The hoax spread quickly, and climate deniers used it to argue that in the 1970s, scientists were actually worried about global cooling—and since it didn't happen then, the public shouldn't believe warnings about global warming now.
The hoax seems to have had its intended effect on Trump, who, according to Politico, "quickly got lathered up about the media's hypocrisy." A White House official defended McFarland in an interview with Politico, calling the Time hoax "fake but accurate." The White House didn't respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.
While the Time global cooling cover story never existed, it's certainly true that some media outlets, including Time, ran stories in the 70s warning about global cooling. One, published by Newsweek, is a favorite of climate deniers. Scientific American explained Newsweek's global cooling story in 2014:
But global cooling was never a popular theory among scientists. Even as some news outlets were writing about it, notes Scientific American, a counter theory about a warming planet was already on the rise. In fact, a survey of peer-reviewed scientific papers from 1969 to 1975 shows that the majority of scientists predicted that carbon dioxide levels would rise, causing temperatures to rise as well.
Scientists have since reached an overwhelming consensus: The planet is getting warmer, and humans are to blame. But this hasn't stoppedclimate deniers from citing the old stories as evidence that contemporary news reports about climate change shouldn't be believed. This climate denier, for example:
[h=2]Here's a Crazy Story About Donald Trump Falling for an Internet Hoax[/h]White House staffers are handing the president fake news.
NATHALIE BAPTISTE MAY. 15, 2017 12:19 PM
President Donald Trump has been a climate change denier for years, alleging that global warming is a Chinese invention and declaring that cold winter days prove that it's a hoax. Perhaps not surprisingly, his staff seems to share these views.
According to Politico, Deputy National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland recently tried to get Trump riled up about climate change with a bit of fake news. McFarland reportedly slipped Trump two Time magazine cover stories. One was supposedly from the 1970s and warned about a coming ice age. The other, from 2007, discussed how to survive global warming. But there was one glaring problem: The 1970s cover was a hoax.
In 2007, Time published a cover story titled, "The Global Warming Survival Guide." Sometime after that, internet hoaxers doctored the cover to instead say "How to Survive the Coming Ice Age" and alleged that it was a 1977 cover. The hoax spread quickly, and climate deniers used it to argue that in the 1970s, scientists were actually worried about global cooling—and since it didn't happen then, the public shouldn't believe warnings about global warming now.
The hoax seems to have had its intended effect on Trump, who, according to Politico, "quickly got lathered up about the media's hypocrisy." A White House official defended McFarland in an interview with Politico, calling the Time hoax "fake but accurate." The White House didn't respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.
While the Time global cooling cover story never existed, it's certainly true that some media outlets, including Time, ran stories in the 70s warning about global cooling. One, published by Newsweek, is a favorite of climate deniers. Scientific American explained Newsweek's global cooling story in 2014:
The story observed—accurately—that there had been a gradual decrease in global average temperatures from about 1940, now believed to be a consequence of soot and aerosols that offered a partial shield to the earth as well as the gradual retreat of an abnormally warm interlude.
But global cooling was never a popular theory among scientists. Even as some news outlets were writing about it, notes Scientific American, a counter theory about a warming planet was already on the rise. In fact, a survey of peer-reviewed scientific papers from 1969 to 1975 shows that the majority of scientists predicted that carbon dioxide levels would rise, causing temperatures to rise as well.
Scientists have since reached an overwhelming consensus: The planet is getting warmer, and humans are to blame. But this hasn't stoppedclimate deniers from citing the old stories as evidence that contemporary news reports about climate change shouldn't be believed. This climate denier, for example:
