Here is a simple test. Watch this animation of successive months of data from NASA’s AQUA satellite. It is a record of methane release from the Arctic from March 2003 until March this year. If it doesn’t send a chill down your spine, you simply don’t know enough important stuff. If you see it and think “so what?” and do nothing – ask nothing – learn nothing – you are a danger to everybody else. And your children. And their children. 
Superb TED film about the various ways plants get pollinated. Watch out for the hummingbird versus the bee bit. Aerobatics to die for.
Moonlit pollination too.
Ponder on the delicate interactions and interdependencies of nature shown then watch 131 years of global temperature changes in 26 seconds. Consider how natural systems are very sensitive to small changes in the environment.
NASA | Temperature Data: 1880-2011
And the same sort of information in graphical form from the World Meteorological Society. Next time you hear someone claiming that global warming has stopped because “there hasn’t been any warming for 15 years”, show them this. They won’t believe you because they are terminally thick or bad but at least you will have tried!
One of the biggest sources of climate change misinformation on the web, deceptively disguised as “scepticism”, is Wattsupwiththat, run by retired meteorologist Anthony Watts. Watts is the person on the Internet most responsible for viciously smearing scientists and spreading disinformation on global warming, particularly disinformation on the surface temperature record. He gets huge numbers of people reading it. For some years he has been promoting the idea that the apparent rise in global temperature has a lot to do with poor siting of the thermometers used to measure temperature changes and he organised a lot of volunteers to photograph and criticise the placement of thermometers because they were located near to tarmac, concrete, air conditioners etc. His theory is that the recorded rise in global temperatures is more down to urban thermometers getting hotter due to hot air from the tarmac etc. boosting the measurements rather than the planet heating up. Like many, indeed most, of the denialist arguments one sees, it sounds quite plausible – some of the stupid, ignorant or mendacious types who come up with the propaganda know how easy it is to lie to the public – others do the lying accidentally, because their poor judgement leads them to deceive themselves.
The real science of course went Duhhh!! The effects that Watts and his minions have been ruthlessly claiming are a big flaw in global warming science have, of course, always been known about and the science has always adjusted the raw data to take account of this. If Watts acknowledged this at all, he would then lead his readers to think that these legitimate, necessary adjustments were data fudging! How can science win against someone using paranoid arguments like that? The tragedy is that too many of the gullible public lap up this crap, as one can clearly see if one reads the comment sections of online TV or newspaper websites.
Over the last few months there has been a tremendous excitement in the Wattsup end of the climate science denialism blogosphere because one of the few scientists they listen(ed) to - Dr Richard Muller - announced that he was going to run a huge investigation into the temperature records. On his team was Professor Judith Curry – another darling of the deniers who writes a sort-of (her stated positions are very often rather muddled) sceptical blog, Climate etc. The research was even backed by, amongst others, the infamous Koch Foundation which bankrolls a fair bit of the denialist infrastructure. They were expecting this “unbiased” study to overturn the current scientific view on how much we are warming. Back in March, Anthony Watts even wrote (very unwisely, as it turned out…)
“And, I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise”
Well the results are in. The climate scientists were right all along and the denialists were full of ****. Is Anthony Watts accepting his Nemesis with good grace and acknowledging that his "big idea" was disastrously wrong? Sadly, no. Those who use paranoid thinking can always wriggle out somehow and Watts and his ilk are wriggling like champion eels in a world title wriggling competition.
Here’s a couple of media excerpts:
Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post: “For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there. The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight”.
“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal.
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find,” Muller wrote. “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”
Here’s Pete Sinclair’s climate crock – Bad, Badder, BEST – that sticks the knife in to finally show up Watts as the weasel that he is.
A comment to a letter I had published in the JEP on behalf of J-CAN (which was in answer to a previously published climate denialist eccentric’s letter) although otherwise spot on illustrated an error that some make in their appreciation of the threats from climate change. This particular online comment (from "Pip Clement") included this phrase:
“Fortunately for most of the people on here they will be dead by the time the effects really become apparent”
This is what I replied:
“The effects are likely to become apparent way earlier than you suggest. Worse than that, if we do nothing, we will discover in our lifetimes (even the older ones’) that we have gone beyond the point of no return, when we will not be able to reverse the situation.
The dice will have been cast long before our grandchildren will need to the ones to “be lucky”. Who needs to be lucky? It’s us.”
The comments following my replies are worth reading too if seeing breath-taking stupidity and arrogance expressed floats your boat…
The dangers from global warming do not simply come just from effects directly attributable to the rise in average planetary temperature. Often overlooked, or not publicised, are the consequences of the effects on the ecosphere – all the animals, birds, trees, plants, insects, fungi, bacteria, plankton etc. that forms the vast interlocking web of life. These systems are far more sensitive to changes in planetary temperatures than climatologists’ thermometers and satellites and large effects are already obvious such as the acidification (reduction in alkalinity for the ultra-picky) of the oceans, the reduction in plankton numbers - in the past 60 years, algal biomass has decreased by about 40% - click for Nature article - and now here is evidence, from satellite photographs, of the huge impacts on pine forests in the US of the epidemic of pinebeetle infestation
Left: September 22, 2003. Right: September 25, 2010. Mountain Pine Beetles killed about 60 percent of the medium-to-large lodgepole pines on the western slopes of the park between the years depicted here. In the 2003 image, dense vegetation (dark green) is seen near the centre. In the 2010 image, the dark green has been replaced by shades of brown over large areas, indicating tree loss. Warmer winters are allowing more pine beetles to survive. In addition, summer drought stresses the trees and renders them more vulnerable to pine beetle attack Read more here click this link or this one about a researcher investigating the die off. It’s not just a simple matter of more winter warmth = more pine beetles = more die off of trees, the full story is a bit more complex than that, but this is exactly the sort of large scale effects that will start happening to the natural world way before the climate changes are obvious in temperature trend lines to casual observers such as those who get their world view from the newspapers, and opinionated television motor-mouths.
It's been a while since I posted a climate crock video. This one is about the way the denialists deliberately misquoted the so called Climategate emails and misrepresented the meaning of the words to suggest corrupt practices by the scientists involved. The denialists lied, misrepresented and distorted. Repeatedly. The video goes on to investigate Dr Richard Muller, who was the subject of the following quote taken from my reply on behalf of J-CAN to Gerard Baudains’ last JEP letter, which was a piece of ludicrous fantasy, mixed up thinking and deceptive assertions. I simply don’t understand how someone can be so wrong, so confidently.
(click for link to post in which the letters – Baudains’ and mine - were quoted)
“Perhaps the timing of his letter (Friday 1st April) is explicable because of the high hopes of the “sceptics” for the preliminary findings, announced the previous day, of a large new study (B.E.S.T) from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the integrity of global temperature measurements which was led by a scientist who has been critical of aspects of the mainstream position in the past.”
Dr Muller, up until very recently, was a "darling of the denialists" because he was preparing a report into the temperature records that such luminaries of the denialosphere as Anthony Watts, who runs the execrable Wattsupwiththat anti-science site, were expecting to confirm their ridiculous and paranoid anti-science B.S. Muller's report in fact confirmed that the temperature records used by global warming scientists were valid and that Anthony Watts "big thing" that he based his whole website on - which is that the temperature records must be unreliable because some of the readings were taken near heat sources such as hot tarmac and air conditioner outlets - was wrong. Watts' belief, that poorly sited readings were significant evidence against the demonstrated warming that mainstream science accepts, was completely wrong. Muller is also caught on camera (more than once), when he was playing to receptive audiences, repeating the same very inaccurate propagandised distortion and lies, as to what was actually in the Climategate emails, as was promulgated by the denialosphere. Dr Muller (PhD) is far from being stupid so what should we think of his integrity for spreading deceit?
Forest Gump said “stupid is as stupid does”. Not all denialists are thick or evil but it’s very hard to understand how those who are apparently intelligent people can be so confused about reality. Perhaps there is something in the idea that some people can be negatively intelligent whereby they use their intellectual abilities to fool themselves and only look at information that confirms their prejudices.
Earth Hour 2011: 8.30pm, Saturday 26 March. Turn your lights off for just one hour. In addition to showing “solidarity” with actions to reduce energy use you just might prevent an attack by…?
Enjoy this Australian advert for Earth hour where some ordinary blokes can’t be bothered to turn off the light because “it’s only one light” and “every other light in Australia is off” .
Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million individuals and more than 2,000 businesses turned their lights off for one hour to take a stand against climate change. Only a year later and Earth Hour had become a global sustainability movement with more than 50 million people across 35 countries/territories participating. Global landmarks such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, CN Tower in Toronto, Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and Rome’s Colosseum, all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.
In March 2009, hundreds of millions of people took part in the third Earth Hour. Over 4000 cities in 88 countries/territories officially switched off to pledge their support for the planet, making Earth Hour 2009 the world’s largest global climate change initiative.
On Saturday 27 March, Earth Hour 2010 became the biggest Earth Hour ever. A record 128 countries and territories joined the global display of climate action. Iconic buildings and landmarks from Asia Pacific to Europe and Africa to the Americas switched off. People across the world from all walks of life turned off their lights and came together in celebration and contemplation of the one thing we all have in common – our planet.
Earth Hour 2011 will take place on Saturday 26 March at 8.30PM (local time). This Earth Hour we want you to go beyond the hour, so after the lights go back on think about what else you can do to make a difference. Together our actions add up.
Visit our Beyond the Hour platform to share your stories and to get inspiration from the actions our supporters have shared with us already.
Calculated from NASA’s (click for more info) “Five-Year Average Global Temperature Anomalies from 1880 to 2010” and animated. Even a trainee climate scientist has been surprised at how fast things speed up right near the last couple of decades.You need to be at least a little bit scientifically literate to realise why anomalies are way more important to show the trend rather than absolute temperatures – a distinction which many cherry picking denialists, with their “it’s really cold here, so we must be in a cooling trend” garbage thinking cannot get clear in their heads but still, even they must get it, surely? Note how the warming anomalies are by far the greatest in the Arctic zone where all the permafrost and Northern sea ice is. This is happening far faster than the last full IPCC digest of the science delineated in 2007. Those models did not take this faster heating and consequently faster rate of shrinkage of the ice into account in their models. Neither did they consider the release of methane from the permafrost nor the entrained carbon.
To those complacent enough to comfort themselves with the belief that the models’ predictions are wrong I say – you were right! Sort of. The predictions of the models were wrong – they did not take enough into account – but they were wrong in a bad way. Things are worse than previously suspected. Read again my post of the 19th February entitled We’re ***’ed (We’re hosed…) which is about melting permafrost. I quoted Greg Craven who spoke recently at the AGU (American Geophysical Union):
“AGU rattled me to the core because my worst-case fears were not just confirmed, but exceeded (I found four paleoclimatologists who admitted to making plans for survival retreats), and my last hope–for the scientific community to enter the public debate–was completely dashed.”
I’ve since found out directly from Greg that the full story is that, of those he spoke to, he found four who would admit to this but they also confirmed that “many” more that they knew were doing the same.
There is a denialist video on Youtube called “Global Warming Panic explained” in which two characters from a video game have been “hacked” to have a dialogue about those awful climate scientists and the way they are hoaxing everybody but the brave “sceptics”. As is usual with all but a fraction of the sceptic/denialist material out there, it is chock full of strawmen and dishonest/stupid insinuations with an unhealthy amount of paranoid conspiracy type thinking. Greenfyre has put together, using the same characters and “game engine”, a rather good riposte which covers and discredits a very large number of the sort of rubbish arguments that echo endlessly around the denialosphere .
First look at the dangerous and misleading propaganda version then the one that attempts to correct it.
Global Warming Panic explained
Global Warming Panic explained
By the way, if anyone wants to make one of these cartoon videos (saying whatever you want), just go to http://www.xtranormal.com and create your own account.
Deniers/sceptics are all too quick to shout out that the whole of global warming science is a hoax. Yup, tens of thousands of people have faked the scientific theories since the early 1800s, the actual measurements of reality, the historical records, the pre-historical records, the even further back than that records. This colossal hoax is so all pervasive that even animals, birds and insects are joining in by pretending to be affected by non-existent changes in ecosystems. God help us, the conspirators have even persuaded dumb ice sheets and permafrost to fake it for the cause. Nature really is a lying traitor and we should never trust her again! 
It's been a while since Pete Sinclair came out with one of his marvellous Climate denial "Crock of the week" videos but here is the latest. It's a revisit of the old denier scam which goes - "whatever happened to global warming? - because its flipping cold here".
This blog has got lots of deadly serious stuff on it, like loads of other blogs but, as my title box shows, I have got a bit of a commitment to lighten things up every now and again by trying to inject some fun into the proceedings.
Once upon a time I was watching some trials bikes jumping over obstacles and flying over humps. Someone who knew I was a bit environmentally minded said that they supposed I would want to ban this sport. I said almost certainly not. My job is to work towards a civilisation where the “big things”, with the biggest potential impacts, are environmentally friendly.
Thus, it is is more important to persuade the majority to use alternative methods and fuels for such things as transport than to pick holes in a minority using a minuscule fraction of our planetary fossil fuel consumption. If the world only had a global population of 100,000 we could do whatever we liked to the environment and, apart from local temporary damage, we would have a completely sustainable impact. As we currently have 68,000 times that population (6.8 billion and counting) click for live current totals we have to be a lot more responsible than that.
Here’s a couple of videos from an initiative from Volkswagen (no commercial benefit to me for mentioning that!) that reckons that making going green more fun would be a good idea.
Firstly, a fab idea to encourage people to use stairs more, rather than lifts (elevators) or escalators. I was hoping that a couple of musical types would play “Chopsticks” - but give ‘em time.
Secondly, a system to help people to bin whatever non-recyclable stuff they feel they absolutely have to throw away.
Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, although it stays active in the atmosphere for less time. Unlike carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere a century or more once released, methane persists in the air for about 10 years. It will be a serious problem if the permafrost in the tundra and Alaska melts and the underground methane comes up and the previously frozen vegetation generates more. It would be even worse if the undersea methane clathrates bubbled up (a form of methane+water ice which stays down there because of the cool temperature and pressure). Large scale release of methane would be a very strong positive feedback to global warming and if it starts to happen, then we are *%$#*’ed. Large scale release of methane from clathrates has been associated with very rapid temperature rises and mass extinctions of species in the pre-historic past - Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
The story linked to below shows that it is not just “natural” releases that deserve attention because apparently there are large scale leaks from the global oil and gas processing infrastructure that have the same warming power of the emissions from over half of the coal plants in the United States. Because of methane’s lower residence time in the atmosphere, aggressively reining in emissions now would mean that far less of the gas would be warming the earth in a decade or so. Fixing the leaks would be a valuable “low hanging fruit” to get on with NOW!
click on this link to the New York Times story
This picture uses an Infra-red camera to show an “invisible” leak form a gas holder
In routine operations, great yet invisible plumes of gas enter the atmosphere when new wells are activated, old wells are invigorated to boost gas flows and wells are purged of fluids by letting out cough-like bursts of gas.
Whilst every glacier in the world is not melting and retreating (nor would they be expected too - climate change means some will grow as some areas get colder and have greater precipitation of snow and ice) it is true that the vast majority are shrinking due to gradually rising temperatures. Around 95% of the glaciers outside Antarctica are retreating. This is a very slow occurrence, however. Indeed, "glacial slowness" is a well-known metaphor for a very slow process. Enter the time lapse camera, which is the best way of showing the changes in an obvious way.
Here are two videos about the glacial retreat. The second one is probably the most dramatic but, as it is one of the excellent TED talks, there is about 10 minutes preamble (which is very well worth listening to) before the time lapse movie is shown. The whole clip is about 20 minutes in total. Bear in mind with time lapse films of glaciers that you will see the seasonal variations too – glaciers advance in winter and retreat during summer – like waves of ice breaking upon a shore. The long term time lapse shows that the “tide” of ice is indisputably going out as the climate is changing.
Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change.
This rather haunting image is from a Norwegian archipelago 
The book that saves the earth is published tomorrow (Tuesday, July 7th). WHAT'S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN by Greg Craven, assisted by the Manpollo crew (of which I am one), is launched upon an unsuspecting world. It's for non-expert ordinary people everywhere who are just a bit unsure over who to believe in the great global warming shouting match. Few trust governments fully these days so, even if they are just about all telling us the following - that climate change is happening; that it's likely to be an increasingly dangerous problem unless we do A LOT very quickly to head it off and that we need to start fixing the problem now - there's plenty of people who are still doubtful and somehow believe they are being conned. This is because the two sides in the shouting match are not evenly balanced numerically or in terms of credibility, although the way the media portrays it, you wouldn't know this.
This "crock" expose is about the view that climate science is mostly based on computer models and that we can't rely on them because they are nowhere near perfect - the proponents of this view (including a certain female Senator in our beloved States of Jersey) believe we should just carry on and not believe all the global warming "hysteria" and we'll all be just fine. Obviously, they feel lucky. It's just a shame that if too many are fooled by this irresponsible point of view, then the consequences will drag us all down along with them. They have a right to gamble with their own lives and futures, and maybe even those of their own children (dubious, ethically) but they have a responsibility not to put the rest of humanity who don't agree with them, including the vast majority of the relevant scientists in the field, at risk.
