Credulous woman believes the doomsters

Leftism sure messes up minds.  A small excerpt below.  An apparently normal woman hesitated for years before getting pregnant because of all the doom that Warmists predict.  She apparently had no natural skepticism so didn't think to doubt the predictions.  So she felt she did not want to bring kids into a world plagued by natural disasters.  And, by the time she allowed her natural instincts to take over, it was pretty late and all she has had so far is a miscarriage.

The article below is very long.  She obviously wrote it to soothe her feelings.  But on the whole I support the decisions of fruitcake women not to have children.  It means that those like them will tend to die out. It's called natural selection


By Madeline Ostrander

The librarian was nondescript in the way that everyone standing behind a counter is, probably in her 30s, with straight, fox-colored hair. When she took my stack of books, I noticed the way her sweater draped over a conspicuous melon-shaped belly, and I felt a tug in my chest and warmth rise in my stomach. It took a moment to recognize this sensation as envy. Then came another feeling: shock. I had never been jealous of any woman for carrying what looked like an uncomfortable load, or for what would come next: the messy, exhausting job of mothering an infant. Something unfamiliar had come over me.

In my late 20s and early 30s, I was terrified of becoming the sort of woman who was “baby crazy,” afraid motherhood would circumscribe my life. I politely admired but didn’t gush over my friends’ new babies. Compared with many women, I was under little pressure to procreate; neither my nor my husband’s parents had ever expressed more than a tentative longing for grandchildren. But six years ago, when I first held my 2-month-old niece, wrapped in a flower-print onesie and murmuring delicious baby noises, I felt a rush of joy, an indescribable feeling of human closeness.

My husband and I had made a home in Seattle for several years, and my friends of childbearing age tended to be writers and activists, scientists and scholars. When considering kids, they weighed not only their desires and finances but the state of the world. Many of them had read grim prognoses of what climate change would do to life on Earth. Even in the restrained language of science, the future holds unprecedented difficulties and disasters. For many people, these problems were an abstraction, but as an environmental journalist, I knew enough to imagine them in front of me. Driving across the bridge to my house, I pictured city beaches drowned by the rising sea. Watching the news, I wondered when the next colossal hurricane would strike the Gulf of Mexico or the mid-Atlantic. These thoughts are not paranoid. According to scientists’ predictions, if society keeps pumping out carbon dioxide at current rates, any child born now could, by midlife, watch Superstorm Sandy–size disasters regularly inundate New York City. She could see the wheat fields of the Great Plains turn to dust and parts of California gripped by decades of drought. She may see world food prices soar and water in the American West become even scarcer. By 2050, when still in her 30s, she could witness global wars waged over food and land. “It does make me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have kids,” one of my friends whispered to me.

More HERE





Arctic ice waxes and wanes

The post below from 2013 should be a good antidote to claims that Arctic ice has recently shrunk a little.  Sometimes it shrinks; Sometimes it grows

Earth has gained 19,000 Manhattans of sea ice since this date last year, the largest increase on record. There is more sea ice now than there was in mid-September 1990. Al Gore, call your office.

A 2007 prediction that summer in the North Pole could be “ice-free by 2013” that was cited by former Vice President Al Gore in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech has proven to be off . .. by 920,000 square miles. But then Democrats have never been good at math — or climate science.

In his Dec. 10, 2007, “Earth has a fever” speech, Gore referred to a prediction by U.S. climate scientist Wieslaw Maslowski that the Arctic’s summer ice could “completely disappear” by 2013 due to global warming caused by carbon emissions as the seas rose to swallow up places like the island of Manhattan.

The inconvenient truth is that planet Earth now has the equivalent of 330,000 Manhattans of Arctic ice, Steve Goddard notes in the blog Real Science. Even before the annual autumn re-freeze was scheduled to begin, he says, NASA satellite images showed an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretched from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores. No polar bears were seen drowning.

As the Daily Mail reports, “A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year — an increase of 60%.” The much-touted Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific froze up and has remained blocked by pack ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.

This is a far cry from those iconic pictures, taken at a low point one particularly balmy Arctic summer, of polar bears clinging to slivers of pack ice lest they drown. The bears, who can swim up to 200 miles, and whose numbers are increasing, are doing fine, much better than a U.S. economy under assault by a needless war on fossil fuels, particularly coal, all in a futile effort to head off nonexistent climate change.

This summer was supposed to bring an ice-free Arctic with not so much as an ice cube for Santa to land on. Oh, and the Himalayan glaciers were supposed to disappear, according to computer models that have so far been unable to forecast either the past or the weather for the weekend barbecue.

“We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped,” Professor Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin told the Daily Mail.

A recent study by German researchers Hans von Storch, Armineh Barkhordarian, Klaus Hasselmann and Eduardo Zorita of the Institute for Coastal Research and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology found that claims of all 65 climate-model computers used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict the future impact of carbon dioxide on climate had failed to foresee this lack of temperature rise.

Climate is affected by an infinite number of variables. Their relative importance and the complexity of their interactions are not fully understood. Put too much weight on one and not enough on the other, and you have the computer phenomenon known as GIGO — garbage in, garbage out.

U.S. climate expert Judith Curry suggests computer models place too much emphasis on current CO2 levels and not enough on long-term cycles in ocean temperature that have a huge influence on climate and suggest we may be approaching a period similar to 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend.

Warm-mongers such as Gore still say it’s a question of when and not if. They may be walking on thin ice, but the polar bears are not.

SOURCE




Extreme weather events DECLINED in the second half of the 20th century







New, Vast Body Of Literature Shows Rates Of Glacier Retreat, Sea Level Change, Now Significantly LOWER!

According to recently published scientific papers, the current sea level highstand, as well as the rate of glacier retreat and sea level change, are now significantly lower than they have been for much of the last 10,000 years — back when CO2 concentrations were stable and considerably lower (at about 265 ppm).

The most recent IPCC report (2013) indicates that sea levels have been rising at a rate of 1.7 mm/year, or 6.7 inches per century, since 1901 (through 2010).  This rate occurred synchronously with an approx. 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 levels.

In contrast, scientists Hodgson et al., 2016 have determined that sea levels rose at rates of 1.2 to 4.8 meters per century (47 to 188 inches, or about 4 to 16 feet per century) between about 10,500 and 9,500 years ago near East Antarctica.  This sea level rate change occurred while CO2 levels were stable to modestly declining *.

In the paper: Rapid early Holocene sea-level rise in Prydz Bay, East Antarctica, the authors write:

"Prydz Bay is one of the largest embayments on the East Antarctic coast and it is the discharge point for approximately 16% of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. […] The field data show rapid increases in rates of relative sea level rise of 12–48 mm/yr between 10,473 (or 9678) and 9411 cal yr BP [calendar years before present].”

The recently published scientific literature also indicates that not only was the historical rate of sea level rise significantly higher than it has been since the 20th century began, glaciers and ice sheets continued to rapidly retreat during the late Holocene, or within the last few thousand years.  During the Medieval Warm Period, for example, scientists Guglielmin et al., 2016 determined that glacier retreat rates in the Western Antarctic Peninsula were as high or higher than they have been in recent decades.

In the publication here, the authors write:

"Here, we present evidence for glacial retreat corresponding to the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] and a subsequent LIA [Little Ice Age] advance at Rothera Point (67°34′S; 68°07′W) in Marguerite Bay, western Antarctic Peninsula. … Based on new radiocarbon dates, during the MWP, the rate of glacier retreat was 1.6 m yr−1, which is comparable with recently observed rates (~0.6 m per year between 1993 and 2011 and 1.4 m per year between 2005 and 2011).”

Prior to the Medieval Warm Period, scientists Yokoyama et al., 2016 indicate that “the world’s largest ice shelf” collapsed due to a warming ocean and atmosphere, with ice shelf retreat rates of 100 km within a thousand years.

In the publication Widespread collapse of the Ross Ice Shelf during the late Holocene, the authors write:

"The Ross Sea is a major drainage basin for the Antarctic Ice Sheet and contains the world’s largest ice shelf. … Breakup initiated around 5 ka [5,000 years ago], with the ice shelf reaching its current configuration ∼1.5 ka [1,500 years ago]. In the eastern Ross Sea, the ice shelf retreated up to 100 km in about a thousand years. … [I]ce-shelf breakup resulted from combined atmospheric warming and warm ocean currents impinging onto the continental shelf.”

According to other scientists Bradley et al., 2016, the melt water from the Antarctic ice sheet continued to contribute up to 5.8 meters of sea level rise equivalent until about 1,000 years ago.

In another recent paper here the authors found:

"…a slowdown in melting at ∼7 kyr BP associated with the final deglaciation of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, followed by a continued rise in ESL [Holocene ice volume equivalent sea level] until ∼1 kyr BP of ∼5.8 m associated with melting from the Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

Due apparently to the high glacier-melt rates and warmer ocean temperatures (Rosenthal et al. [2013]** indicate that 0-700 m Pacific Ocean temperatures were still ~0.65° C warmer than present ~1,000 years ago), recently published scientific papers document that sea levels stood from 1 to 4 meters higher than now as recently as a few thousand years ago (see citations below).

The big mystery

These scientific conclusions beg the question: If CO2 is a primary determinant of changes in sea level, why is it that sea level highstands (and sea level rise and glacier melt rates) were significantly greater when CO2 concentrations were stable and low than they have been in recent decades?

Publications to read:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969715311700

The configuration suggests surface inundation of the upper sediments by marine water during the mid-Holocene (c. 2–8 kyr BP) [2,000-8,000 years before present], when sea level was 1–2 m above today’s level.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033589415000642

"….a [sea level] highstand at ~ 5000–3500 cal yr BP. The berms [raised land embankments] are presently at ~ + 6 m above [present] sea level, 2–3 m above the beach ridges. Human settlements were common on the ridge crests before and after the highstand. Regression to present-day sea level commenced after the highstand, which is when the sabkha began forming.”

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018213004689

Highlights

We present a sea level change curve for mid Holocene in Uruguay.
Sea level reached 4 m amsl[above mean sea level today]between 6000 and 5500 yr BP [years before present].

A rapid sea level fall to about 1 m amsl was inferred for 4700-4300 yr BP.

A further sea level increase to about 3 m amsl [above mean sea level today]was inferred after 4300 yr BP

* Epica Dome C ice core data [Antarctica] indicate that CO2 levels declined slightly from 268 ppm 10,458 years ago to 264 ppm 9,399 years ago.

** Rosenthal et al., 2013

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617.abstract

We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4°C and 1.5 ± 0.4°C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9°C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65° warmer than in recent decades.”

SOURCE (See the original for links and graphics)





Punishing Climate-Change Skeptics

Some in Washington want to unleash government to harass heretics who don’t accept the ‘consensus.’

Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment and financial ruin. As the scientific case for a climate-change catastrophe wanes, proponents of big-ticket climate policies are increasingly focused on punishing dissent from an asserted “consensus” view that the only way to address global warming is to restructure society—how it harnesses and uses energy. That we might muddle through a couple degrees’ of global warming over decades or even centuries, without any major disruption, is the new heresy and must be suppressed.

The Climate Inquisition began with Michael Mann’s 2012 lawsuit against critics of his “hockey stick” research—a holy text to climate alarmists. The suggestion that Prof. Mann’s famous diagram showing rapid recent warming was an artifact of his statistical methods, rather than an accurate representation of historical reality, was too much for the Penn State climatologist and his acolytes to bear.

Among their targets (and our client in his lawsuit) was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank prominent for its skeptical viewpoint in climate-policy debates. Mr. Mann’s lawsuit seeks to put it, along with National Review magazine, out of business. Four years on, the courts are still pondering the First Amendment values at stake. In the meantime, the lawsuit has had its intended effect, fostering legal uncertainty that chills speech challenging the “consensus” view.

Mr. Mann’s lawsuit divided climate scientists—many of whom recognized that it threatened vital scientific debate—but the climate Inquisition was only getting started. The past year has witnessed even more heavy-handed attempts to enforce alarmist doctrine and stamp out dissent.

Assuming the mantle of Grand Inquisitor is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). Last spring he called on the Justice Department to bring charges against those behind a “coordinated strategy” to spread heterodox views on global warming, including the energy industry, trade associations, “conservative policy institutes” and scientists. Mr. Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, identified as a legal basis for charges that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, the federal statute enacted to take down mafia organizations and drug cartels.

In September a group of 20 climate scientists wrote to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch encouraging them to heed Mr. Whitehouse and launch a RICO investigation targeting climate skeptics. This was necessary since, they claimed, America’s policy response to climate change was currently “insufficient,” because of dissenting views regarding the risks of climate change. Email correspondence subsequently obtained through public-records requests revealed that this letter was also coordinated by Mr. Whitehouse.

Reps. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) and Mark DeSaulnier (D., Calif.) followed up with a formal request for the Justice Department to launch an investigation, specifically targeting Exxon Mobil for its funding of climate research and policy organizations skeptical of extreme warming claims. Attorney General Lynch announced in testimony this month that the matter had been referred to the FBI “to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on.” Similar investigations are already spearheaded by state attorneys general in California and New York.

Meanwhile, Mr. Whitehouse, joined by Sens. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), sent letters to a hundred organizations—from private companies to policy institutes—demanding that they turn over information about funding and research relating to climate issues. In his response to the senators, Cato Institute President John Allison called the effort “an obvious attempt to chill research into and funding of public policy projects you don’t like.”

Intimidation is the point of these efforts. Individual scientists, think tanks and private businesses are no match for the vast powers that government officials determined to stifle dissent are able to wield. An onslaught of investigations—with the risk of lawsuits, prosecution and punishment—is more than most can afford to bear. As a practical reality, defending First Amendment rights in these circumstances requires the resources to take on the government and win—no matter the cost or how long it takes.

It also requires taking on the Climate Inquisition directly. Spurious government investigations, driven by the desire to suppress a particular viewpoint, constitute illegal retaliation against protected speech and, as such, can be checked by the courts, with money damages potentially available against the federal and state perpetrators. If anyone is going to be intimidated, it should be officials who are willing to abuse their powers to target speech with which they disagree.

That is why we are establishing the Free Speech in Science Project to defend the kind of open inquiry and debate that are central to scientific advancement and understanding. The project will fund legal advice and defense to those who need it, while executing an offense to turn the tables on abusive officials. Scientists, policy organizations and others should not have to fear that they will be the next victims of the Climate Inquisition—that they may face punishment and personal ruin for engaging in research and advocating their views.

The principle of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court recognized in Dennis v. United States (1951), is that “speech can rebut speech, propaganda will answer propaganda, free debate of ideas will result in the wisest governmental policies.” For that principle to prevail —in something less than the 350 years it took for the Catholic Church to acknowledge its mistake in persecuting Galileo— the inquisition of those breaking from the climate “consensus” must be stopped.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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