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Nations Unite in Global Agreement on Climate Change
Accord for the first time binds rich and poor governments into reducing greenhouse-gas emissions
The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 2015 6:17 p.m. ET

PARIS—More than 190 nations have agreed on a plan to limit climate change, ending a decadeslong search for an accord requiring the world’s economies to regulate the emission of gases that scientists say are causing the earth to warm.

After two weeks of negotiations here, 195 countries united Saturday around a document that is effectively a blueprint for how the world will tackle global warming.

Negotiators sealed the deal after changing provisions that would have triggered a requirement that the agreement be approved by the U.S. Congress, where there are many lawmakers skeptical about a climate accord. They won over developing nations at the last hour by exempting them from obligations to help pay the bill for confronting climate change.
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The deal calls for wealthy economies such as the U.S. and the European Union to shoulder more of the burden, including a pledge to channel at least $100 billion a year to poor countries to help them respond to climate change.

The deal also requires action for the first time from developing nations, including large emitters such as China and India, to find ways to lower the trajectory of their emissions growth, even as they attempt to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.(...)

California Tuolumne snowpack 40 percent of worst year
By Alan Buis,
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory | NEWS | April 2, 2015

New NASA data find the snowpack in the Tuolumne River Basin in California's Sierra Nevada — a major source of water for millions of Californians — currently contains just 40 percent as much water as it did near this time at its highest level of 2014, one of the two driest years in California’s recorded history. The data were acquired through a partnership with the California Department of Water Resources, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the Turlock and Modesto irrigation districts.
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California Imposes First Mandatory Water Restrictions to Deal With Drought
NYTIMES, By ADAM NAGOURNEYAPRIL 1, 2015

PHILLIPS, Calif. — Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday ordered mandatory water use reductions for the first time in California’s history, saying the state’s four-year drought had reached near-crisis proportions after a winter of record-low snowfalls.

Mr. Brown, in an executive order, directed the State Water Resources Control Board to impose a 25 percent reduction on the state’s 400 local water supply agencies, which serve 90 percent of California residents, over the coming year. The agencies will be responsible for coming up with restrictions to cut back on water use and for monitoring compliance. State officials said the order would impose varying degrees of cutbacks on water use across the board — affecting homeowners, farms and other businesses, as well as the maintenance of cemeteries and golf courses

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Mitt Romney: 'I'm One Of Those Republicans' Who Believes In Climate Change
AP | By MICHELLE L. PRICE and STEVE PEOPLES
Posted: 01/22/2015 10:03 am EST


While hitting familiar Republican points criticizing the size of the federal debt, Romney at times sounded like a Democrat, calling for President Barack Obama and other leaders in Washington to act on common liberal priorities such as climate change, poverty and education.

"I'm one of those Republicans who thinks we are getting warmer and that we contribute to that," he said of climate change, charging that federal leaders have failed to enact global agreements needed to tackle the problem.

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Dom_Quixote Escreveu:Apesar da minha visão quixotesca das coisas há uma parte de mim que ainda consegue ver a realidade... e não... não é boa... assados no forno... talvez... e depois qual é o problema? Hein? Não é comigo, não vai ser com o meu filho nem com o meu neto...

Dom_Quixote Escreveu:E eu, pobre de mim, que aqui ando numa luta constante contra ventos e marés, continuando a acreditar ser possível tudo melhorar, não claudicando (nunca!) vejo-me na contingência de dizer que a humanidade terá o que merecer...

2014 warmest year in modern record
By Steve Cole, NASA Headquarters, and Leslie McCarthy, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies

The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880, according to two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists.

The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000. This trend continues a long-term warming of the planet, according to an analysis of surface temperature measurements by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

In an independent analysis of the raw data, also released Friday, NOAA scientists also found 2014 to be the warmest on record.

“NASA is at the forefront of the scientific investigation of the dynamics of the Earth’s climate on a global scale,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The observed long-term warming trend and the ranking of 2014 as the warmest year on record reinforces the importance for NASA to study Earth as a complete system, and particularly to understand the role and impacts of human activity.”

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Fonte: NASA Climate

An uneven deal

The Economist | Nov 12th 2014 | International

FIVE years ago next month, disagreement between America and China, the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters, scuppered the UN’s Copenhagen climate-change conference. Yesterday Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping announced a deal on emissions. That in itself is an achievement, but it may not be all it is cracked up to be since China has not conceded much, and Congress will do its best to prevent America from delivering what it has promised.

Because America is responsible for a far larger share of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than China, it was bound to accept sharper cuts. Even so, it seems to have made the bigger concessions. It has agreed to cut its emissions to 26-28% below its 2005 levels by 2025. Its emissions are already falling, and it might be able to meet its existing commitment to cut by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, but this deal requires it to double the pace of cuts after 2020.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, who hails from Kentucky, a coal-producing state, has complained in the past about “the president’s ideological war on coal” and has already attacked the deal. “This unrealistic plan, that the president would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs.” Senator Jim Inhofe, who is likely to head the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has called climate-change a hoax and compared the EPA to the Gestapo.

West Antarctic glacier loss appears unstoppable



May 12, 2014
By Carol Rasmussen, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Fonte: NASA

A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea.

The study presents multiple lines of evidence, incorporating 40 years of observations that indicate the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica "have passed the point of no return," according to glaciologist and lead author Eric Rignot, of UC Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The new study has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. They contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said these findings will require an upward revision to current predictions of sea level rise.

"This sector will be a major contributor to sea level rise in the decades and centuries to come," Rignot said. "A conservative estimate is it could take several centuries for all of the ice to flow into the sea."(...)

"The grounding line is buried under a thousand or more meters of ice, so it is incredibly challenging for a human observer on the ice sheet surface to figure out exactly where the transition is," Rignot said. "This analysis is best done using satellite techniques."

Climate Forecast: Muting the Alarm

Even while it exaggerates the amount of warming, the IPCC is becoming more cautious about its effects.



The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists' accounts of storms, droughts and diseases to come. But the actual report, known as AR5-WGII, is less frightening than its predecessor seven years ago.

The 2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm. This led to a critical appraisal of the report-writing process from a council of national science academies, some of whose recommendations were simply ignored.

Others, however, hit home. According to leaks, this time the full report is much more cautious and vague about worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees, and the overall cost of global warming.

It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature increase during this century. This is vastly less than the much heralded prediction of Lord Stern, who said climate change would cost 5%-20% of world GDP in his influential 2006 report for the British government.

The forthcoming report apparently admits that climate change has extinguished no species so far and expresses "very little confidence" that it will do so. There is new emphasis that climate change is not the only environmental problem that matters and on adapting to it rather than preventing it. Yet the report still assumes 70% more warming by the last decades of this century than the best science now suggests. This is because of an overreliance on models rather than on data in the first section of the IPCC report—on physical science—that was published in September 2013.

In this space on Dec. 19, 2012, I forecast that the IPCC was going to have to lower its estimates of future warming because of new sensitivity results. (Sensitivity is the amount of warming due to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.) "Cooling Down Fears of Climate Change" (Dec. 19), led to a storm of protest, in which I was called "anti-science," a "denier" and worse.

The IPCC's September 2013 report abandoned any attempt to estimate the most likely "sensitivity" of the climate to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The explanation, buried in a technical summary not published until January, is that "estimates derived from observed climate change tend to best fit the observed surface and ocean warming for [sensitivity] values in the lower part of the likely range." Translation: The data suggest we probably face less warming than the models indicate, but we would rather not say so.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a London think tank, published a careful survey of all the reliable studies of sensitivity on March 5. The authors are British climate scientist Nic Lewis (who has no academic affiliation but a growing reputation since he discovered a glaring statistical distortion that exaggerated climate sensitivity in the previous IPCC report) and the Dutch science writer Marcel Crok. They say the IPCC's September report "buried good news about global warming," and that "the best observational evidence indicates our climate is considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate scientists had previously thought."

Messrs. Lewis and Crok argue that the average of the best observationally based studies shows the amount of immediate warming to be expected if carbon dioxide levels double after 70 years is "likely" to be between one and two degrees Centigrade, with a best estimate of 1.35C (or 2.4F). That's much lower than the IPCC assumes in its forthcoming report.

In short, the warming we experienced over the past 35 years—about 0.4C (or 0.7F) if you average the measurements made by satellites and those made by ground stations—is likely to continue at about the same rate: a little over a degree a century.

Briefly during the 1990s there did seem to be warming that went as fast as the models wanted. But for the past 15-17 years there has been essentially no net warming (a "hiatus" now conceded by the IPCC), a fact that the models did not predict and now struggle to explain. The favorite post-hoc explanation is that because of natural variability in ocean currents more heat has been slipping into the ocean since 2000—although the evidence for this is far from conclusive.

None of this contradicts basic physics. Doubling carbon dioxide cannot on its own generate more than about 1.1C (2F) of warming, however long it takes. All the putative warming above that level would come from amplifying factors, chiefly related to water vapor and clouds. The net effect of these factors is the subject of contentious debate.

In climate science, the real debate has never been between "deniers" and the rest, but between "lukewarmers," who think man-made climate change is real but fairly harmless, and those who think the future is alarming. Scientists like Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Richard Lindzen of MIT MITD -21.88% have moved steadily toward lukewarm views in recent years.

Even with its too-high, too-fast assumptions, the recently leaked draft of the IPCC impacts report makes clear that when it comes to the effect on human welfare, "for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers," such as economic growth and technology, for the rest of this century. If temperatures change by about 1C degrees between now and 2090, as Mr. Lewis calculates, then the effects will be even smaller.

Indeed, a small amount of warming spread over a long period will, most experts think, bring net improvements to human welfare. Studies such as by the IPCC author and economist Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University in Britain show that global warming has probably done so already. People can adapt to such change—which essentially means capture the benefits but minimize the harm. Satellites have recorded a roughly 14% increase in greenery on the planet over the past 30 years, in all types of ecosystems, partly as a result of man-made CO2 emissions, which enable plants to grow faster and use less water.

There remains a risk that the latest science is wrong and rapid warming will occur with disastrous consequences. And if renewable energy had proved by now to be cheap, clean and thrifty in its use of land, then we would be right to address that small risk of a large catastrophe by rushing to replace fossil fuels with first-generation wind, solar and bioenergy. But since these forms of energy have proved expensive, environmentally damaging and land-hungry, it appears that in our efforts to combat warming we may have been taking the economic equivalent of chemotherapy for a cold.

Almost every global environmental scare of the past half century proved exaggerated including the population "bomb," pesticides, acid rain, the ozone hole, falling sperm counts, genetically engineered crops and killer bees. In every case, institutional scientists gained a lot of funding from the scare and then quietly converged on the view that the problem was much more moderate than the extreme voices had argued. Global warming is no different.

Mr. Ridley is the author of "The Rational Optimist" (HarperCollins, 2010) and a member of the British House of Lords.

Ornithological trends
This bird has flown

Why some species are thriving outside southern England
Jan 11th 2014 | The Economist


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The overall populations of woodland, farmland and migrant perching birds are up in northern England and Scotland but down in the south. The same is true of individual species such as the garden warbler, bullfinch and swallow. The number of cuckoos, a closely-watched species, declined by 63% in England between 1995 and 2010 but by only 5% in Scotland. Raptors are faring especially well in the south, but their numbers are rising in most parts of Britain.

Partly this reflects climate change, suggests Simon Gillings of the BTO. Some birds are drawn to warmer winters in Scotland and northern England; visiting migrants may stick around for longer. Hard though it may be to believe during a week of torrential rain, the south is becoming drier, pushing snipe northward. More efficient farming has squeezed some farmland species.
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Atomez Escreveu:É que há dúvidas mais que razoáveis que o aumento da temperatura nos últimos anos tenha sido "extraodinariamente rápido", ou seja, que esteja fora da margem de variação natural do clima.

Atomez Escreveu:Mais ainda, nos últimos 20 anos o aumento de temperatura tem sido ainda mais baixo que o previsto nos modelos matemáticos de previsão do clima! Quase que parece que o "aquecimento global" estagnou... E porquê também não se sabe muito bem. Apesar de as emissões de CO2 não terem dimunuído, antes pelo contrário.

Este é um paper científico publicado recentemente na revista Nature:

Overestimated global warming in the past 20 years

altrio Escreveu:... O que nenhum modelo explica é o aumento extraodinariamente rápido da temperatura nos últimos anos, se não tiver em conta o factor humano.

Global mean surface temperature over the past 20 years (1993–2012) rose at a rate of 0.14 ± 0.06 °C per decade (95% confidence interval). This rate of warming is significantly slower than that simulated by the climate models participating in Phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). To illustrate this, we considered trends in global mean surface temperature computed from 117 simulations of the climate by 37 CMIP5 models. By averaging simulated temperatures only at locations where corresponding observations exist, we find an average simulated rise in global mean surface temperature of 0.30 ± 0.02 °C per decade (using 95% confidence intervals on the model average). The observed rate of warming given above is less than half of this simulated rate, and only a few simulations provide warming trends within the range of observational uncertainty.

The inconsistency between observed and simulated global warming is even more striking for temperature trends computed over the past fifteen years (1998–2012). For this period, the observed trend of 0.05 ± 0.08 °C per decade is more than four times smaller than the average simulated trend of 0.21 ± 0.03 °C per decade. The divergence between observed and CMIP5- simulated global warming begins in the early 1990s, as can be seen when comparing observed and simulated running trends from 1970–2012.

The evidence, therefore, indicates that the current generation of climate models (when run as a group, with the CMIP5 prescribed forcings) do not reproduce the observed global warming over the past 20 years, or the slowdown in global warming over the past fifteen years. [S]uch an inconsistency is only expected to occur by chance once in 500 years, if 20-year periods are considered statistically independent. Similar results apply to trends for 1998–2012. In conclusion, we reject the null hypothesis that the observed and model mean trends are equal at the 10% level.

Elias Escreveu:Fica a sensação de que os defensores do aquecimento global admitem a existência de ciclos curtos (porque eles são tão óbvios como a sucessão de estações do ano) mas não os ciclos longos, porque senão lá se ia a teoria.

QuimPorta Escreveu:Atomez.... conseguiste deturpar totalmente o propósito de seja quem for que alimenta o site que citaste ...
(não digo que intencionalmente, como é óbvio - tens todo o crédito de boa fé intelectual )

A frase que retiras está classificada na categoria de "MITO" (v. Foto). A tese do autor é o que está com fundo verde

Reparaste também que estás a por no mesmo plano de credibilidade uma petição online (dos idos de 1997, pelo que se percebe, em que o crédito científico é uma cruzinha no boletim, e de identidade desconhecida) e a NASA?

Atomez Escreveu:Pois, no site da NASA diz às tantas:

Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities

Mas...

Is there a scientific consensus on global warming?
There is no consensus.
The Petition Project features over 31,000 scientists signing the petition stating "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere ...". (Petition Project)

31,487 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs

QuimPorta Escreveu:

Atomez Escreveu:Em suma, todas as que seguem a metodologia e processos científicos, avaliadas pelos seus pares e sempre com a salutar dose de ceticismo científico.

EDIT: Atomez, percebi mal o que disseste e corrijo.

Sobre o que diz a NASA, já viste o site deles?
http://climate.nasa.gov/

Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities

Is there a scientific consensus on global warming?

There is no consensus.

The Petition Project features over 31,000 scientists signing the petition stating "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere ...". (Petition Project)

Atomez Escreveu:Em suma, todas as que seguem a metodologia e processos científicos, avaliadas pelos seus pares e sempre com a salutar dose de ceticismo científico.