The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change

By Dr Nick Watts and uncle Tom Cobleigh and all

This article is a real hoot.  The direct effects of the tiny upwards movement in temperatures in recent decades have to be equally tiny and hence probably below the level of detection.  So the article excerpted below focuses on extreme weather events, which Lancet asserts are warming-related and more frequent.  But even that dubious strategy is disappointing to them.  Note the highlighted (red) clause in the excerpt below. The allegedly more frequent events have NOT caused more frequent deaths.  The health effects of extreme events are NIL!

So the whole article boils down to a parade of things that SHOULD affect health but don't. What a laugh!

And claiming that warming is bad for you is crazy anyway.  Winter is the time of increased deaths.  Warming would alleviate that.  Lancet has long been politicized and their claim that George Bush killed 655,000 Iraqi civilians shows how far they stray from what they know. But in this issue they have reduced themselves to absurdity.  Global warming theory clearly rots the brain

Lancet seems to hope that an impression of "consensus" will make up for their lack of facts and logic. The number of co-authors they have listed for their article must be some sort of record.  They truly are "uncle Tom Cobleigh and all"


The Lancet Countdown tracks progress on health and climate change and provides an independent assessment of the health effects of climate change, the implementation of the Paris Agreement,1 and the health implications of these actions. It follows on from the work of the 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change,2 which concluded that anthropogenic climate change threatens to undermine the past 50 years of gains in public health, and conversely, that a comprehensive response to climate change could be “the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century”.

The evidence is clear that exposure to more frequent and intense heatwaves is increasing, with an estimated 125 million additional vulnerable adults exposed to heatwaves between 2000 and 2016 (Indicator 1.2). During this time, increasing ambient temperatures have resulted in an estimated reduction of 5·3% in outdoor manual labour productivity worldwide (Indicator 1.3). As a whole, the frequency of weather-related disasters has increased by 46% since 2000, with no clear upward or downward trend in the lethality of these extreme events (Indicator 1.4), potentially suggesting the beginning of an adaptive response to climate change. Yet the impacts of climate change are projected to worsen with time, and current levels of adaptation will become insufficient in the future.

Additionally, in the longer term, altered climatic conditions are contributing to growing vectorial capacity for the transmission of dengue fever by Aedes aegypti, reflecting an estimated 9·4% increase since 1950 (Indicator 1.6).

SOURCE




Stanford Prof sues scientists who criticized him – demands $10M

Another example of a decayed Warmist brain

Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson has filed a lawsuit, demanding $10 million in damages, against the peer-reviewed scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) [link to published paper] and a group of eminent scientists (Clack et al.) for their study showing that Jacobson made improper assumptions in order to claim that he had demonstrated U.S. energy could be provided exclusively by renewable energy, primarily wind, water, and solar.

A copy of Jacobson’s complaint and submitted exhibits can be found here and here.

What Jacobson has done is unprecedented. Scientific disagreements must be decided not in court but rather through the scientific process. We urge Stanford University, Stanford Alumni, and everyone who loves science and free speech to denounce this lawsuit.

The lawsuit rests on the claim that Clack et al. defamed Jacobson by calling his assumption that hydroelectricity could be significantly expanded a “modeling error.”

Environmental Progress weighed in on this controversy when Clack et al. published their article. In our view, it’s clear that Jacobson made a false assumption about the possibility of expanding U.S. hydroelectricity.

Jacobson’s assumption speaks to the essential fallacy of the 100 percent renewables proposal.

Renewables like solar and wind require vastly larger amounts of land and mining in order to produce power that is unreliable. Under the guise of protecting the environment, renewables destroy the environment.

One of the most environmentally devastating ways of producing electricity is with hydroelectric dams. While poor nations have a right to make cheap power from hydroelectricity, their environmental impact is enormous.

Jacobson’s proposal is to expand radically hydroelectric dams so they can support unreliable solar and wind energy. Such a proposal would devastate fish species even more than they have already been devastated.

The only way to promote such an environmentally devastating agenda is to claim it is good for the environment. That requires lying. Now that these lies have been exposed, it is revealing that Jacobson has resorted to a lawsuit that cannot and will not do anything more than intimidate his opponents.

Scientists and energy analysts should not be intimidated. We must stand up to bullies. We urge all lovers of nature and science to join us in denouncing this unprecedented and appalling attack on free inquiry.

SOURCE




The Media’s Reaction After Trump’s EPA Chief Cites Bible To Justify Agency Changes

Reporters spun themselves in knots after Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt used a biblical analogy to explain his recent decision to change how the agency’s science advisory panel is staffed.

Any academic who receives EPA grant money can no longer serve as an adviser on the Scientific Advisory Board, among other boards, Pruitt said at a press conference Tuesday. Yet reporters honed in on his decision to use a Bible quote suggesting that people can’t serve two masters.

“Joshua says to the people of Israel: choose this day whom you are going to serve,” Pruitt said, referring to scientists who accept government grants while also using an advisory position to give independent advice.

“This is sort of like the Joshua principle,” he said. “You are going to have to choose either service on the committee to provide counsel to us in an independent fashion or chose the grant. But you can’t do both. That’s the fair and great thing to do.”

New York Times reporter Lisa Friedman suggested on social media that the analogy was an example of Pruitt’s supposed messianic ambitions.

“I think Pruitt just likened himself to Joshua leading the Israelites to the Promised Land by ending ability of EPA advisers to get grants,” Friedman tweeted shortly after the agency chief made his comments.


“Scott Pruitt Is Using the Bible as His Guide for Reorganizing EPA’s Science Board,” liberal media outlet Mother Jones wrote in a headline addressing the topic. The outlet’s writer, Rebecca Leber, implied the so-called Joshua principle was now the new guiding metric for Pruitt and the EPA.

Pruitt, who sued the agency a dozen times during his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general, said the board will be made up of environmentalists, industry groups, academics and other experts to provide a diverse perspective on EPA science policy. The agency has more than 20 boards, but his directive only applies to Scientific Advisory Board, the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC) and the Board of Scientific Counselors.

Members of the three targeted committees got $77 million in EPA grants during the last three years. Conservative groups found CASAC members have gotten $192 million in EPA grants since 2000, an amount they say claim makes it difficult to maintain an air of independence.

Pruitt also put a big emphasis on “geographical diversity” in appointing science advisers.  Science boards have typically left out experts from large swaths of the country, especially western states that feel most of the brunt of clean air rules, EPA officials said.

Republicans have worked for years on separating the committees from grants. The House passed a bill in March, for instance, that would prevent scientists currently receiving EPA grants from serving on EPA advisory committees. The bill is stuck in the Senate.

SOURCE




Reality vs. Theory: Scientists Affirm ‘Recent Lack Of Any Detectable Acceleration’ In Sea Level Rise

According to peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science, anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the cause of Arctic sea ice decline.  In fact, peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science indicates the causal relationship is so direct and so linear that it can be said with confidence that we humans melt one square foot of sea ice for every 75 miles we travel in a gasoline-powered engine.

The modeled results are even more alarming for the polar ice sheets.   Like Arctic sea ice, the peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science says that there is a direct, causal relationship between the magnitude of our CO2 emissions and the magnitude of polar ice sheet melt.   Therefore, by driving our vehicles and heating our homes we are catastrophically melting the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets to such a degree that our CO2 emissions will likely cause sea levels to rise 10 feet during the next 50 years (by 2065).

Ten feet is the equivalent of about 3.05 meters of sea level rise by 2065.

So, according to peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science, the catastrophic melting of the polar ice sheets will produce 0.61 of a meter of sea level rise per decade, which is 61 mm/year, over the course of the next 50 (now 48 – a 2015 paper) years.  To achieve this, more than an order of magnitude greater sea level rise acceleration will need to begin . . . immediately.

The trouble is, the physics, and reality, do not support “mainstream” climate science models predicated on anthropogenic CO2 emissions as the principal driver of  ice sheet melt and sea level rise.  For example:

1. East Antarctica, which comprises two-thirds of the continent, has been gaining mass since 2003 (Martín-Español et al., 2017).

2. The Western Antarctic Peninsula has been rapidly cooling since 1999 (-0.47°C per decade), reversing the previous warming trend and leading to “a shift to surface mass gains of the peripheral glacier” (Oliva et al., 2017).

3. The Greenland ice sheet (GIS) has been melting so slowly and so negligibly in recent decades that the entire ice sheet’s total contribution to global sea level rise was a mere 0.39 of a centimeter (0.17 to 0.61 cm) between 1993 and 2010 (Leeson et al, 2017) .  That’s a sea level rise contribution of about 0.23 mm/year since the 1990s, which is a canyon-sized divergence from the 61 mm/year that adherents of peer-reviewed, “consensus” climate science have projected for the coming decades.

And now Australian scientists have published a new paper in the journal Earth Systems and Environment that “does not support the notion of rapidly changing mass of ice in Greenland and Antarctica“.  The paper highlights the “loud divergence between sea level reality” and “the climate models [that] predict an accelerated sea-level rise driven by the anthropogenic CO2 emission“.

In fact, the key finding from the paper is that long-term observations from tide gauges reveal a “recent lack of any detectable acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise“.    The modern rate of sea level rise acceleration – 0.002 mm/year² – is so negligible it falls well below the threshold of measurement accuracy.

The lack of a detectable global-scale sea level rise acceleration recorded in tide gauge measurements isn’t a novel finding.  In recent years, dozens of other scientists have bravely come forward to challenge “consensus” modeling that implicates anthropogenic CO2 emissions as the preeminent cause of ice sheet melt and sea level rise.

Perhaps at some point “consensus”-based climate science will jettison its focus on models and projections of perilous future climate states directly caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions and instead embrace the observational evidence that may undermine the alarm.

Until then, we will likely need to continue learning about how many millimeters we humans raise sea levels for each kilometer we drive in our fossil-fuel-powered vehicles.   Because that’s how “consensus” climate science works.

More HERE



More evidence thast the medieval warm period was widespread

The MWP is too well documented for Warmists to deny it.  Instead they claim it was a "local" effect of the North Atlantic region. But it has in fact been documented in many places worldwide.  Below is the latest such

Warming and Cooling: The Medieval Climate Anomaly in Africa and Arabia

Sebastian Lüning et al.

Abstract

The Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) is a well-recognized climate perturbation in many parts of the world, with a core period of 1000-1200 AD. Here we present a palaeotemperature synthesis for the MCA in Africa and Arabia, based on 44 published localities. The data sets have been thoroughly correlated and the MCA trends palaeoclimatologically mapped. The vast majority of available Afro-Arabian onshore sites suggest a warm MCA, with the exception of the southern Levant where the MCA appears to have been cold. MCA cooling has also been documented in many segments of the circum Africa-Arabian upwelling systems, as a result of changes in the wind systems which were leading to an intensification of cold water upwelling. Offshore cores from outside upwelling systems mostly show warm MCA conditions. The most likely key drivers of the observed medieval climate change are solar forcing and ocean cycles. Conspicuous cold spikes during the earliest and latest MCA may help to discriminate between solar (Oort Minimum) and ocean cycle (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, AMO) influence. Compared to its large share of nearly one quarter of the world's land mass, data from Africa and Arabia are significantly underrepresented in global temperature reconstructions of the past 2000 years. Onshore data are still absent for most regions in Africa and Arabia, except for regional data clusters in Morocco, South Africa, the East African Rift and the Levant coast. In order to reconstruct land palaeotemperatures more robustly over Africa and Arabia, a systematic research program is needed.

SOURCE

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