jayjay8899

[sunaleisocial]

Scientists find a human “fingerprint” in the upper troposphere’s increasing ozone

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/scientists-find-a-human-fingerprint-in-the-upper-tropospheres-increasing-ozone/

Scientists find a human “fingerprint” in the upper troposphere’s increasing ozone

Ozone can be an agent of good or harm, depending on where you find it in the atmosphere. Way up in the stratosphere, the colorless gas shields the Earth from the sun’s harsh ultraviolet rays. But closer to the ground, ozone is a harmful air pollutant that can trigger chronic health problems including chest pain, difficulty breathing, and impaired lung function.

And somewhere in between, in the upper troposphere — the layer of the atmosphere just below the stratosphere, where most aircraft cruise — ozone contributes to warming the planet as a potent greenhouse gas.

There are signs that ozone is continuing to rise in the upper troposphere despite efforts to reduce its sources at the surface in many nations. Now, MIT scientists confirm that much of ozone’s increase in the upper troposphere is likely due to humans.

In a paper appearing today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the team reports that they detected a clear signal of human influence on upper tropospheric ozone trends in a 17-year satellite record starting in 2005.

“We confirm that there’s a clear and increasing trend in upper tropospheric ozone in the northern midlatitudes due to human beings rather than climate noise,” says study lead author Xinyuan Yu, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

“Now we can do more detective work and try to understand what specific human activities are leading to this ozone trend,” adds co-author Arlene Fiore, the Peter H. Stone and Paola Malanotte Stone Professor in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

The study’s MIT authors include Sebastian Eastham and Qindan Zhu, along with Benjamin Santer at the University of California at Los Angeles, Gustavo Correa of Columbia University, Jean-François Lamarque at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Jerald Zimeke at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Ozone’s tangled web

Understanding ozone’s causes and influences is a challenging exercise. Ozone is not emitted directly, but instead is a product of “precursors” — starting ingredients, such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), that react in the presence of sunlight to form ozone. These precursors are generated from vehicle exhaust, power plants, chemical solvents, industrial processes, aircraft emissions, and other human-induced activities.

Whether and how long ozone lingers in the atmosphere depends on a tangle of variables, including the type and extent of human activities in a given area, as well as natural climate variability. For instance, a strong El Niño year could nudge the atmosphere’s circulation in a way that affects ozone’s concentrations, regardless of how much ozone humans are contributing to the atmosphere that year.

Disentangling the human- versus climate-driven causes of ozone trend, particularly in the upper troposphere, is especially tricky. Complicating matters is the fact that in the lower troposphere — the lowest layer of the atmosphere, closest to ground level — ozone has stopped rising, and has even fallen in some regions at northern midlatitudes in the last few decades. This decrease in lower tropospheric ozone is mainly a result of efforts in North America and Europe to reduce industrial sources of air pollution.

“Near the surface, ozone has been observed to decrease in some regions, and its variations are more closely linked to human emissions,” Yu notes. “In the upper troposphere, the ozone trends are less well-monitored but seem to decouple with those near the surface, and ozone is more easily influenced by climate variability. So, we don’t know whether and how much of that increase in observed ozone in the upper troposphere is attributed to humans.”

A human signal amid climate noise

Yu and Fiore wondered whether a human “fingerprint” in ozone levels, caused directly by human activities, could be strong enough to be detectable in satellite observations in the upper troposphere. To see such a signal, the researchers would first have to know what to look for.

For this, they looked to simulations of the Earth’s climate and atmospheric chemistry. Following approaches developed in climate science, they reasoned that if they could simulate a number of possible climate variations in recent decades, all with identical human-derived sources of ozone precursor emissions, but each starting with a slightly different climate condition, then any differences among these scenarios should be due to climate noise. By inference, any common signal that emerged when averaging over the simulated scenarios should be due to human-driven causes. Such a signal, then, would be a “fingerprint” revealing human-caused ozone, which the team could look for in actual satellite observations.

With this strategy in mind, the team ran simulations using a state-of-the-art chemistry climate model. They ran multiple climate scenarios, each starting from the year 1950 and running through 2014.

From their simulations, the team saw a clear and common signal across scenarios, which they identified as a human fingerprint. They then looked to tropospheric ozone products derived from multiple instruments aboard NASA’s Aura satellite.

“Quite honestly, I thought the satellite data were just going to be too noisy,” Fiore admits. “I didn’t expect that the pattern would be robust enough.”

But the satellite observations they used gave them a good enough shot. The team looked through the upper tropospheric ozone data derived from the satellite products, from the years 2005 to 2021, and found that, indeed, they could see the signal of human-caused ozone that their simulations predicted. The signal is especially pronounced over Asia, where industrial activity has risen significantly in recent decades and where abundant sunlight and frequent weather events loft pollution, including ozone and its precursors, to the upper troposphere.

Yu and Fiore are now looking to identify the specific human activities that are leading to ozone’s increase in the upper troposphere.

“Where is this increasing trend coming from? Is it the near-surface emissions from combusting fossil fuels in vehicle engines and power plants? Is it the aircraft that are flying in the upper troposphere? Is it the influence of wildland fires? Or some combination of all of the above?” Fiore says. “Being able to separate human-caused impacts from natural climate variations can help to inform strategies to address climate change and air pollution.”

This research was funded, in part, by NASA.

[jcmarchi]

Scientists find a human “fingerprint” in the upper troposphere’s increasing ozone

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/scientists-find-a-human-fingerprint-in-the-upper-tropospheres-increasing-ozone/

Scientists find a human “fingerprint” in the upper troposphere’s increasing ozone

Ozone can be an agent of good or harm, depending on where you find it in the atmosphere. Way up in the stratosphere, the colorless gas shields the Earth from the sun’s harsh ultraviolet rays. But closer to the ground, ozone is a harmful air pollutant that can trigger chronic health problems including chest pain, difficulty breathing, and impaired lung function.

And somewhere in between, in the upper troposphere — the layer of the atmosphere just below the stratosphere, where most aircraft cruise — ozone contributes to warming the planet as a potent greenhouse gas.

There are signs that ozone is continuing to rise in the upper troposphere despite efforts to reduce its sources at the surface in many nations. Now, MIT scientists confirm that much of ozone’s increase in the upper troposphere is likely due to humans.

In a paper appearing today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the team reports that they detected a clear signal of human influence on upper tropospheric ozone trends in a 17-year satellite record starting in 2005.

“We confirm that there’s a clear and increasing trend in upper tropospheric ozone in the northern midlatitudes due to human beings rather than climate noise,” says study lead author Xinyuan Yu, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

“Now we can do more detective work and try to understand what specific human activities are leading to this ozone trend,” adds co-author Arlene Fiore, the Peter H. Stone and Paola Malanotte Stone Professor in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

The study’s MIT authors include Sebastian Eastham and Qindan Zhu, along with Benjamin Santer at the University of California at Los Angeles, Gustavo Correa of Columbia University, Jean-François Lamarque at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Jerald Zimeke at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Ozone’s tangled web

Understanding ozone’s causes and influences is a challenging exercise. Ozone is not emitted directly, but instead is a product of “precursors” — starting ingredients, such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), that react in the presence of sunlight to form ozone. These precursors are generated from vehicle exhaust, power plants, chemical solvents, industrial processes, aircraft emissions, and other human-induced activities.

Whether and how long ozone lingers in the atmosphere depends on a tangle of variables, including the type and extent of human activities in a given area, as well as natural climate variability. For instance, a strong El Niño year could nudge the atmosphere’s circulation in a way that affects ozone’s concentrations, regardless of how much ozone humans are contributing to the atmosphere that year.

Disentangling the human- versus climate-driven causes of ozone trend, particularly in the upper troposphere, is especially tricky. Complicating matters is the fact that in the lower troposphere — the lowest layer of the atmosphere, closest to ground level — ozone has stopped rising, and has even fallen in some regions at northern midlatitudes in the last few decades. This decrease in lower tropospheric ozone is mainly a result of efforts in North America and Europe to reduce industrial sources of air pollution.

“Near the surface, ozone has been observed to decrease in some regions, and its variations are more closely linked to human emissions,” Yu notes. “In the upper troposphere, the ozone trends are less well-monitored but seem to decouple with those near the surface, and ozone is more easily influenced by climate variability. So, we don’t know whether and how much of that increase in observed ozone in the upper troposphere is attributed to humans.”

A human signal amid climate noise

Yu and Fiore wondered whether a human “fingerprint” in ozone levels, caused directly by human activities, could be strong enough to be detectable in satellite observations in the upper troposphere. To see such a signal, the researchers would first have to know what to look for.

For this, they looked to simulations of the Earth’s climate and atmospheric chemistry. Following approaches developed in climate science, they reasoned that if they could simulate a number of possible climate variations in recent decades, all with identical human-derived sources of ozone precursor emissions, but each starting with a slightly different climate condition, then any differences among these scenarios should be due to climate noise. By inference, any common signal that emerged when averaging over the simulated scenarios should be due to human-driven causes. Such a signal, then, would be a “fingerprint” revealing human-caused ozone, which the team could look for in actual satellite observations.

With this strategy in mind, the team ran simulations using a state-of-the-art chemistry climate model. They ran multiple climate scenarios, each starting from the year 1950 and running through 2014.

From their simulations, the team saw a clear and common signal across scenarios, which they identified as a human fingerprint. They then looked to tropospheric ozone products derived from multiple instruments aboard NASA’s Aura satellite.

“Quite honestly, I thought the satellite data were just going to be too noisy,” Fiore admits. “I didn’t expect that the pattern would be robust enough.”

But the satellite observations they used gave them a good enough shot. The team looked through the upper tropospheric ozone data derived from the satellite products, from the years 2005 to 2021, and found that, indeed, they could see the signal of human-caused ozone that their simulations predicted. The signal is especially pronounced over Asia, where industrial activity has risen significantly in recent decades and where abundant sunlight and frequent weather events loft pollution, including ozone and its precursors, to the upper troposphere.

Yu and Fiore are now looking to identify the specific human activities that are leading to ozone’s increase in the upper troposphere.

“Where is this increasing trend coming from? Is it the near-surface emissions from combusting fossil fuels in vehicle engines and power plants? Is it the aircraft that are flying in the upper troposphere? Is it the influence of wildland fires? Or some combination of all of the above?” Fiore says. “Being able to separate human-caused impacts from natural climate variations can help to inform strategies to address climate change and air pollution.”

This research was funded, in part, by NASA.

[scitechman]

Study on Impact of Climate Change on Snowpack

Study on Impact of Climate Change on Snowpack

An international team of scientists, including one from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), has found that up to 20 percent loss in the annual maximum amount of water contained in the Western United States‘ mountain snowpack in the last three decades is due to human influence.

Peak runoff in streams and rivers of the Western U.S. is strongly influenced by melting of accumulated…

[ainews]

According to a new study, fuel from a long-ago era is still present in the atmosphere today.

The study, published in the journal Science, found that about 3 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today came from a time before the Industrial Revolution.

The study's authors say the finding helps to explain why the atmosphere has not been cooling as much as expected in recent years.

The study's lead author, Gabriela Segura, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the findings show that "the industrial revolution was not as big of a deal as we thought it was."

The study's co-author, Ralph Keeling, also of Scripps, said the findings suggest that natural processes are still playing a role in climate change.

"This is not just an anthropogenic phenomenon," Keeling said. "It's a natural phenomenon that's been going on for a long time."

The study's authors say the finding could help to improve climate models.

The study's co-author, Benjamin Santer, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said the findings "suggest that we need to revisit some of our basic assumptions" about how the atmosphere works.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt:

Summers are heating up faster than the other seasons as global temperatures rise, especially in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, and the changes carry the clear fingerprints of human-caused climate change, a new study shows.

The findings deliver another blow against two refrains commonly repeated by climate deniers: that the satellite record doesn't show that the planet is warming, and that it's impossible to know how much warming is from nature and how much is from human beings.

Both claims are wrong, say the authors of the study, published Thursday in the journal Science.

Opponents to climate action have pointed to satellites in their arguments against global warming, said lead author Benjamin Santer, a climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "But in fact, satellite temperature data show very strong signals of human effects on climate."

Santer and his co-authors looked at the satellite record going back to the late 1970s to trace how warming is impacting seasons differently. They found that while year-round temperatures are rising, the rate of that temperature increase is happening faster in the mid-latitudes during the summer than it is during the winter. That's even more pronounced in the Northern Hemisphere.

The scientists ran models to look at rates of warming and separate out the causes, taking into account the greenhouse gases that come from the burning of fossil fuels and then looking just at natural variability without mankind's influence. "We show that the human fingerprint is far larger than our best current estimates of natural changes," Santer said.

Santer and his team found that at the mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, from about 40° North (close to the Kansas-Nebraska border) to about 60° North (mid-Canada), there is a gap between how much temperatures are rising in summer compared to how much they are rising in winter. That gap grew by roughly a tenth of a degrees Celsius each decade over the 38-year satellite record as the summers warmed faster.

The reason for this, the study explains, is that much of the world's land is in the Northern Hemisphere, as opposed to the Southern Hemisphere, which has more ocean. Ocean temperatures don't fluctuate as much and are slower to reflect change.

The mid-latitudes are also where many of the world's crops are grown, and as the temperature rises and the soil dries out, that could have major implications for food sources.

Above 60° North latitude—going into the Arctic—the scientists saw the trend reverse. There, the winters are getting warmer faster, giving seasonal sea ice less time to regrow each year.

[aneddoticamagazinestuff]

Charney Report

New Post has been published on https://www.aneddoticamagazine.com/charney-report/

Charney Report

What if all leaders and nations had proves climate cheanges because of human emissions of CO2?

We all know that climate is changing. The “game” between environmentalists and world leaders under the pressure of multinational companies regards the causes that have produced and that are accelerating these changes. In other words, global warming is a phenomenon the origins of which are anthropogenic, that is caused by man?

Nobody talks about that, but there is a scientific evidence that global warming is caused by an unnatural desire to produce (and sell) more and more: the proof of this relationship dates back to 40 years ago. A group of scientists of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States led by meteorologist Jule Gregory demonstrated that the average temperature of the planet would be increased, and why (and much more accurate of what is said during such historical events as the meetings of the Kyoto or the COP21, Paris): 40 years ago, at the end of July 1979, researchers published a report in which it was highlighted the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.

The results which were arrived were so devastating that researchers scurried to communicate tothe White House, even before that to the media.

Strangely, no one, neither the White House nor other branches of the government, said anything about the the study received. They simply forgotten it. It was a period of “hot” news: Russia had invaded Afghanistan; in Italy, only a few years before, the referendum on abortion had marked a moment in history and, just a year before, in 1978, was kidnapped Aldo Moro, and soon after, in 1980, it came to pass in the disaster of Ustica, who triggered controversy in the international is not just with France, the USA and Libya; in Spain, had just been launched to the Constitution. The whole of the international policy was focused on a series of events that had blinded the heads of state and had permitted, perhaps, to realize that they were in the act changes that would have changed the planet in a few decades. Even in the USA, the government preferred to look the alrta part: the rest had just been re-established diplomatic relations with China, was launched as the first revolutionary Shuttle and Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev had signed the agreements SALT II.

May be it was this the reason whay no one took the trouble to investigate the consequences of the thesis of a group of american researchers.

Later, in 2005, other scientists confirmed the accuracy of the forecasts reported in 1979: basing on three of the most large set of satellite data used by climate scientists over the past 40 years, results reached the ”gold standard” of certainty (the third had him in 2016). The forecasts reported in the study of the seventies were so precise that, thirty years later, in 2009, Raymond Pierrehumbert, professor of geosciences at the university of Chicago, was obliged to acknowledge that “nothing of all the knowledge achieved in recent decades has been able to contradict the conclusions of the report, Charney”.

(A sign that even then someone had tried to contradict that, which was not a theory but a thesis demonstrated, but without success).

This means that, already in 1979, scientists had demonstrated the impact of humanity on climate changes. But it also means another thing, far more relevant: that world leaders, who knew it, decided not to do anything. And they ketp doing (or better not douing) for forty years.

For all this decads research Charney ended up in oblivion. But the report had too much weight to remain hidden: the Charney report explained that “some changes in the composition of the atmosphere can change its ability to absorb the energy of the Sun”. If world leaders had devoted the attention they deserved to that research and if they had acted immediately, today the world would not find itself managing an emergency of epochal dimensions.

Why didn’t they do anything? Yet the document in the hands of world leaders was clear: “We have irrefutable proof that the atmosphere is changing and that man is contributing to this process. The concentrations of carbon dioxide are constantly increasing, which is linked to the combustion of fossil resources and the exploitation of the soil. Since CO2 plays a significant role in the thermal equilibrium of the atmosphere, it is reasonable to assume that its increase will have consequences on the climate ”. What consequences? Also in this respect the researchers, in 1979, had provided extremely precise data: Carl Wunsch, one of the authors of the Charney report, demonstrated the thesis of global warming of anthropic origin does not require complex calculations and models and predicted that a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would have led to an increase in the average global temperature of between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, due to the different scenarios considered. Exactly what has occurred in recent years!

World leaders gathered in Paris come to mind at the end of the COP21 work. All smiling, between a dinner and a group photo, while presenting the “new” plan to contain the increase in global temperatures and save the world (a plan to be implemented who knows when, especially after Trump’s decision to pull back).

Instead, all of them already knew the causes and the extent of rising global temperatures very well. And not for a short time, for decades. “The main findings of the report have aged very well,” said Mark Zelinka, a climate scientist at LLNL, who also coauthored the document. “The story that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” Benjamin Santer, lead author of the study, “We know it” told Reuters.

As Pierrehumbert pointed out: “Political decision makers have not taken these forecasts into account and have not acted preventively”. Indeed, even today they pretend not to know with certainty the relationship of cause and effect between the increase of CO2 emissions, increase in global temperatures and climate change!

The point is that, after reading the report, and especially after seeing that the predictions of scientists have already become reality, their choices can no longer be hidden behind a sort of poor knowledge. Or of ignorance. There is no doubt that those who have governed in recent decades have not considered the common good or the preservation of the planet as primary: they have ruled with only the economic advantages of a few at heart. Now, forty years after the publication of the Charney Report, he can no longer deny it.

[ntrending]

Yes, humans are causing climate change. And we've known for 40 years.

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/yes-humans-are-causing-climate-change-and-weve-known-for-40-years/

Yes, humans are causing climate change. And we've known for 40 years.

Climate change is real, and humans are causing it. Thanks to forty years of satellite data, scientists are certain of those two facts. More than that, though, experts have been clear on the inevitability of climate change—and outspoken about it—for four decades, as a new paper documents. The comment, published in the journal Nature Climate Change earlier this week, celebrates the 40th anniversaries of three key pieces of climate science that contribute to modern certainty about anthropogenic climate change: the beginning of satellite temperature measurements in late 1978 and the 1979 publications of a report and a paper that shaped how scientists looked for human fingerprints in the climate signal.

“It’s about taking a trip down memory lane and trying to understand, ‘how did we get here?’” says paper author Benjamin Santer, a climatologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “In taking that trip down memory lane, it turns out that the events of 1979 were important… and were related.”

Satellites above

The paper links these three historic anniversaries, but it started with the satellite data. “We now have forty complete years of satellite-based estimates of global scale changes in the temperature of the atmosphere,” Santer says. “And that seemed important.”

Santer’s group at Livermore “has been looking at satellite temperature data for a long time now,” he says. “The beautiful thing about satellite data is global coverage,” he says. It’s allowed scientists to find hard evidence of warming that can’t be explained by anything but human agency.

In the process of thinking about writing a paper on the forty years of satellite data, he says, “it also became clear that there were other 40th anniversaries that were important and not unrelated to the forty years of satellite temperature data.” The global satellite information allowed scientists like him to apply the insights of 1979—that anthropogenic warming can be predicted using physics, and that studying climate change requires global data—to finding what’s known as the anthropogenic climate signal.

Compare the climate signal to the melody of a song, says Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University. Each point of data—each month, year, or decade of weather of weather, for example—is a note. “The notes may dance around the melody,” he says, but they still make a central tune you can hum. “In the same way, weather may fluctuate from year to year, but it’s possible to detect the (climactic) trends.”

The Charney report

Although we now have hard proof—one-in-3.5 million chance-of-error certainty, known as five sigma certainty, which is about as close as science gets to a sure thing—of warming as a phenomena, a report released in 1979 “understood most of what was going to happen subsequently,” Santer says.

The report published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1979 is often called the Charney report after the chairman of the study group behind it. “In retrospect, the Charney report seems like the scientific equivalent of the handwriting on the wall,” the authors of the new paper write. “Forty years ago, its authors issued a clear warning of the potentially significant socioeconomic consequences of human-caused warming. Their warning was accurate and remains more relevant than ever.”

The Charney report estimated that warming could reach between two and 4.5 degrees Celsius, which signatories to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are currently working to prevent. It also anticipated that clouds and ocean warming would both play a role in shaping how warming worked on Earth.

“They did that without satellite data, without full three-dimensional computer models of the atmosphere in the ocean,” he says. “It seemed worthwhile to include that in the three significant events.”

Hasselman

The same year, a meteorologist named Klaus Hasselman “published what turned out to be an extremely influential paper on climate signal detection that basically said, if there’s a global warming signal, this is how you find it,” says Santer. (Hasselman was his graduate supervisor.) Hasselman’s key innovation was to say that global warming could only be detected by looking at patterns on a global scale, rather than by studying temperature trends at any particular location. This insight was key to deciphering the anthropogenic climate signal.

“Hasselman’s paper was a statistical roadmap for hundreds of subsequent climate change detection and attribution studies,” the authors write. The weight of these studies is what led the IPCC to state, in 2013, that it is “extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

In this paper, as in every facet of American climate science, the specter of climate denialism looms large. Just last week, the Washington Post published news of a proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security headed by William Happer, a noted climate denialist.

“The initiative represents the Trump administration’s most recent attempt to question the findings of federal scientists and experts on climate change,” write reporters Juliet Eilperin and Missy Ryan, “and comes less than three weeks after Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats delivered a worldwide threat assessment that identified [climate change] as a significant security risk.”

That news may be why their new paper, which is just a comment and not a full study, was picked up by Reuters earlier this week, Santer says. Even there, though, climate denialism came into play: the Reuters story featured a prominent quote from University of Alabama professor John Christy. Christy is a member of the Trump EPA’s science advisory board and a longtime climate skeptic whose studies have been repeatedly shown to be incorrect by his peers.

Against all the politics stands the broad scientific consensus that climate change is real, and that we’re driving it. Forty years ago, Santer says, “really smart people who… understood enough about the basic science, even in the absence of all the advantages we have now, in terms of computer modeling data, they understood the basic physics. And they were right, the planet has warmed, it’s going to continue to warm if we continue to burn fossil fuels and increase levels of heat trapping greenhouse gases.”

“It’s a great paper, but it doesn’t say anything really new,” says Degroot. “It rather draws attention to a pivotal year in the history of climate science—and by implication, to the long, heartbreaking history of policy inaction in the face of that science.”

Written By Kat Eschner

[science-criticaltheory]

2 New Studies Undermine Climate Denial Arguments by John H. Cushman Jr.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry has suggested a "red team" review to scrutinize climate science, but that already happens in a far more rigorous way. It's called peer review. Credit: CSPAN

Two new studies published this month are helping resolve lingering differences between what climate models have predicted and what actual measurements have recorded. In doing so, they undermine two of the timeworn arguments used by those who question the prevailing scientific consensus on global warming.

One study, released today, took a fresh look at the vexing question of how sensitive global temperatures will be to the buildup of carbon dioxide around the earth. It reaffirmed the basic understanding that any doubling of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will result in significant planetary warming.

The other paper reexamined satellite observations of one layer of the atmosphere and showed that the space-based warming data does not collide, as dissenters frequently contend, with temperature measurements taken at the surface of the Earth. Instead, the satellite data shows a much more intense warming than before.

Both studies address uncertainties that are raised again and again by people who seize on them to suggest that not enough is known to justify aggressive action to control emissions of greenhouse gases.

But whether the question is climate sensitivity or the data collected by satellites or some other aspect of the science, the world's governments have mostly recognized that the risks of climate change are clear enough to validate policies like those enshrined in the Paris climate agreement, which seeks to limit warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius by sharply reducing emissions.

Both studies were published in highly regarded peer-reviewed journals and have been in the works for a long time. They aren't knee-jerk reactions to an intense political debate, but they could prove influential as the back-and-forth continues.

Above all, both studies serve as examples of how peer-reviewed research remains the key to sound climate policies.

By chance, they appeared just as two of President Trump's cabinet members, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, have been calling for a renewed debate over climate science under the guise of a red-team, blue-team adversarial showdown.

Many science and public policy experts say the proper forum for reasoned discussion is in established, authoritative institutions like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the National Academy of Sciences and in the peer-reviewed literature where the fine details of science face rigorous review from other scientists with expertise in the area.

As one scientist, Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in explaining peer-review in an online commentary in the Washington Post: 

"Your peers are your fiercest critics. They are constantly kicking the tires. "

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) chided Perry at a hearing last week for suggesting that the consensus was somehow imbalanced and needed to be challenged all over again, regardless of the existing rigors of peer review.

"That's exactly how science works, including climate science," Franken said. "That's the scientific process."

How much warming to expect?

It's that peer-review process that led to the article published today in the journal Science Advances, the latest of many recalibrations of what climate scientists call "equilibrium climate sensitivity."

The term is defined as the amount of temperature increase to be expected from any doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. The expected range of warming has often been revised, without ever being narrowed very much. In other words, this crucial factor of climate science remains somewhat uncertain.

In its most recent comprehensive review of the climate consensus, the IPCC—an international body that draws on the research of thousands of scientists—updated the estimated range of climate sensitivity, recognizing that there was little consensus between various computer models and historical observations. The IPCC set the expected range at 1.5 degrees to 4.5 degrees. While the midpoint had changed little from earlier reports, climate skeptics seized on the new low boundary as a sign that the ultimate amount of warming the Earth faces might well be lower than generally expected.

Scientists at Harvard University, recognizing that the planet's temperature dynamics are complex and include both faster and slower mechanisms of warming, did a new analysis paying special attention to slow modes of warming that take a century or more to play out. These kinds of warming may not yet be showing up in temperature observations, but that doesn't mean they aren't on their way, they wrote.

Their accounting, spelled out in a complex statistical presentation, brings the historical temperature records into alignment with what models predict—once again undermining a favorite argument of the skeptics.

What about the satellite data?

Similarly, the recalibration of the satellite data looked more carefully at the nitty gritty details and found that the risks of warming probably haven't been exaggerated.

Skeptics often cite the satellite record of temperatures in the troposphere as if it contradicts the prevailing view of warming.

The new analysis, published in the Journal of Climate showed not just a big jump in warming of the lower part of Earth's atmosphere, but a marked acceleration. The reason: scientists corrected for the drift of satellite orbits and other factors that had distorted the observations from space.

"Climate skeptics have long claimed that satellite data shows global warming to be less pronounced than observational data collected on the Earth's surface," explained CarbonBrief. "This new correction to the RSS data substantially undermines that argument."

[suedtirolerfreiheit]

Jung. Motiviert. Patriotisch! – Süd-Tiroler Freiheit stellt Jugendkandidaten vor

Auf einer Pressekonferenz wurden die Jugendkandidaten der Süd-Tiroler Freiheit für die Landtagswahl vorgestellt. Mit einem Team von neun Jungkandidaten weist die Bewegung die jüngste Kandidatenliste in Süd-Tirol auf. Die Jugendkandidaten haben gleichzeitig ein detailliertes Programm für die Jugend Süd-Tirols ausgearbeitet und vorgestellt.

(more…)

[realitista]

So, there's still a chance?

No, We’re Sure

New analysis of 40 years’ worth of satellite data shows that it’s a near-certainty that humanity is actively causing global climate change.

Climate deniers often claim, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that the planet is heating up and natural disasters are becoming more intense and common just because that’s the way it is — incorrectly insisting that humanity’s love affair with fossil fuels has nothing to do with it. Now, scientists say the chances that that’s true are just one in a million.

Yep, Pretty Sure

According to the research by scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, that’s because climate data has now reached a so-called “gold standard” of scientific evidence — there’s only a one in a million chance that ongoing climate change could have been caused by anything other than humanity, reports Reuters.

“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” Benjamin Santer, the scientist who led the research, told Reuters. “We do.”

No Uncertainty

The scientific research process almost never eradicates uncertainty: researchers test their hypotheses to get a better understanding of the world, but there’s almost always some other factor out there that could have impacted their findings. In other words, a gold standard is not something that’s taken lightly.

The new analysis looked at the three largest satellite data sets used by climate scientists. It shows that two of those data sets reached the gold standard of certainty that humanity causes climate change back in 2005, and the third did in 2016.

That level of certainty, highly uncommon in scientific research, makes humanity’s impact on the planet very clear. And now we have to figure out what to do about it.

“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” reads the analysis.

[inhandnetworks-blog]

Study Remote Machine Monitoring & Maintenance System   Strengthens Link Between Human Activities and Climate Change

www.inhandnetworks.com

Geographical patterns of observed and simulated trends (in degrees Celsius per decade) from 1979 to 2011. Abbreviations stand for the lower stratosphere (TLS), the mid- to upper LTE router  troposphere (TMT), a Vending Telemetry  nd the lower troposphere (TLT). The observations are measurements of microwave emissions made by microwave sounding units (MSUs) on polar-orbiting satellites. MSU-based temperature data came from three different observational groups: Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH), and the Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) in Maryland. Courtesy Benjamin Santer, LLNL

Comparing 20 of the latest climate models against 33 years of satellite data has lead the scientists of a newly published study to believe, with a high degree of certainty, that human activities are linked to climate change.

New research shows some of the clearest evidence yet of a discernible human influence on atmospheric temperature.

Published online in the Nov. 29 early edition of the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the study compared 20 of the latest climate models against 33 years of satellite data. When human factors were included in the models, they followed the pattern of temperature changes observed by satellite. When the same simulations were run without considering human influences, the results were quite different.

“We can only match the satellite record when we add in human influences on the atmosphere,” said Michael Wehner, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Computational Research Division and a coauthor of the article, which involved colleagues from 16 other organizations and was led by Benjamin Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

Because the differences were so marked between models run with and without human influences, “we can conclude that these differences are unlikely to be due to natural causes  smart vending  with a high degree of certainty. In fact, in statistical terms, we are far more certain of this finding than we are of the existence of the Higgs-Boson,” said Wehner.

The new climate model simulations analyzed by the team will form the scientific backbone of the upcoming 5th assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is due out in 2014.

The goal of the study was to determine whether previous findings of a “discernible human influence” on tropospheric and stratospheric temperature were affected by current uncertainties in climate models and satellite data. (The troposphere is the lowest portion of earth’s atmosphere. The stratosphere sits just above the troposphere, between six and 30 miles above earth’s surface.)

To help eliminate the influence of naturally occurring climate variability, the team ran two different kinds of models: Models that included historical and projected increases in carbon dioxide and “aerosols,” such as smoke and dust, and one without. The second set of models acted as a sort of baseline that allowed researchers to filter out the effects of phenomena such as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. This “noise” can obscure the “signal” scientists are searching for in satellite data and models. Using this information, researchers were able to distinguish the clearest signal yet linking human factors to satellite-observed temperature changes between 1979 and 2011.

Analyzing geographical patterns of atmospheric temperature change over the 33-year period of satellite observations, researchers found that the lower stratosphere cools markedly in both observations and computer models. This cooling is primarily a response to the human-caused depletion of stratospheric ozone, due mostly to the once-widespread use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in spray can propellants and coolants, among other uses.

The observations and model simulations also show a common pattern of large-scale warming of the lower troposphere, with largest warming over the Arctic, and muted warming (or even cooling) over Antarctica. Tropospheric warming is mainly driven by human-caused increases in well-mixed greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide.

“It’s very unlikely that purely natural causes can explain these distinctive patterns of temperature change,” said LLNL’s Santer. “No known mode of natural climate variability can cause sustained, global-scale warming of the troposphere and cooling of the lower stratosphere.”

Wehner’s work was supported by the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program and the Earth System Modeling Program of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the Department of Energy Office of Science.

Other contributors to the study, outside Berkeley Lab and LLNL, include researchers from Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa; the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Melbourne, Australia; the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis, Victoria, Canada; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton; the University of Colorado, Boulder; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; the U.K. Met. Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, U.K.; the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Toulouse, France; North Carolina State University; the National Climatic Data Center, Asheville; the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder; the University of Adelaide, South Australia; the University of Reading, U.K.; and the Center for Satellite Applications and Research, Camp Springs.

Image: Benjamin Santer, LLNL

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[malangtoday-blog]

Tekan Angka Korupsi Malang Raya, MCW Eksplor Potensi Media Massa

MALANGTODAY.NET - Dalam rangka menyambut hari anti korupsi yang akan jatuh pada tanggal 9 Desember nanti, Malang Corruption Watch (MCW) menggelar kegiatan sarasehan dengan berbagai elemen. Hal yang menarik dari kegiatan ini yaitu sarasehan digelar bersama perwakilan media massa se-Malang Raya. "Dengan surat kabar kadang-kadang muncul kericuhan, tapi tanpa surat kabar akan selalu muncul penindasan," ujar perwakilan MCW Fahmi seraya mengutip seorang penulis sekaligus aktivis politik Eropa Benjamin Konstan. Baca Juga: Reuni Akbar 212, Rizieq Shihab Ajak Umat Bersatu Menangkan Pilpres 2019 Lebih lanjut Fahmi juga menyatakan bahwa pers atau media massa merupakan pilar keempat demokrasi setelah eksekutif, yudikatif dan legislatif. "Walaupun berada diluar sistem politik formal, keberadaan media massa memiliki posisi yang strategis dalam penyampaian informasi, pendidikan kepada publik sekaligus menjadi alat kontrol sosial," kata Fahmi dalam sarasehan yang dihadiri perwakilan media massa Malang Raya, Selasa (27/11/2018). "Kami menilai peran pers sangat strategis dan ampuh dalam memerangi perilaku korupsi," tambahnya. Perlu diketahui sarasehan yang diadakan oleh MCW menyasar kepada awak media, warga masyarakat, mahasiswa, seniman, akademisi, serta pusat-pusat kajian. Karena menurut mereka kasus korupsi tidak akan tuntas jika hanya mengandalkan para penegak hukum saja. Baca Juga: Santer Digosipkan Gabung PDIP, Ini Pesan Megawati ke Ahok "Kami ingin mengajak seluruh elemen masyarakat untuk berpartisipasi dalam memberantas korupsi yang ada di Malang raya ini," pungkasnya.

Reporter: Rosita Shahnaz Editor: Swara Mardika

Source : https://malangtoday.net/malang-raya/kota-malang/tekan-angka-korupsi-malang-raya-mcw-eksplor-potensi-media-massa/

MalangTODAY

[aneddoticamagazinestuff]

Charney Report

New Post has been published on https://www.aneddoticamagazine.com/charney-report/

Charney Report

What if all leaders and nations had proves climate cheanges because of human emissions of CO2?

We all know that climate is changing. The “game” between environmentalists and world leaders under the pressure of multinational companies regards the causes that have produced and that are accelerating these changes. In other words, global warming is a phenomenon the origins of which are anthropogenic, that is caused by man?

Nobody talks about that, but there is a scientific evidence that global warming is caused by an unnatural desire to produce (and sell) more and more: the proof of this relationship dates back to 40 years ago. A group of scientists of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States led by meteorologist Jule Gregory demonstrated that the average temperature of the planet would be increased, and why (and much more accurate of what is said during such historical events as the meetings of the Kyoto or the COP21, Paris): 40 years ago, at the end of July 1979, researchers published a report in which it was highlighted the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.

The results which were arrived were so devastating that researchers scurried to communicate tothe White House, even before that to the media.

Strangely, no one, neither the White House nor other branches of the government, said anything about the the study received. They simply forgotten it. It was a period of “hot” news: Russia had invaded Afghanistan; in Italy, only a few years before, the referendum on abortion had marked a moment in history and, just a year before, in 1978, was kidnapped Aldo Moro, and soon after, in 1980, it came to pass in the disaster of Ustica, who triggered controversy in the international is not just with France, the USA and Libya; in Spain, had just been launched to the Constitution. The whole of the international policy was focused on a series of events that had blinded the heads of state and had permitted, perhaps, to realize that they were in the act changes that would have changed the planet in a few decades. Even in the USA, the government preferred to look the alrta part: the rest had just been re-established diplomatic relations with China, was launched as the first revolutionary Shuttle and Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev had signed the agreements SALT II.

May be it was this the reason whay no one took the trouble to investigate the consequences of the thesis of a group of american researchers.

Later, in 2005, other scientists confirmed the accuracy of the forecasts reported in 1979: basing on three of the most large set of satellite data used by climate scientists over the past 40 years, results reached the ”gold standard” of certainty (the third had him in 2016). The forecasts reported in the study of the seventies were so precise that, thirty years later, in 2009, Raymond Pierrehumbert, professor of geosciences at the university of Chicago, was obliged to acknowledge that “nothing of all the knowledge achieved in recent decades has been able to contradict the conclusions of the report, Charney”.

(A sign that even then someone had tried to contradict that, which was not a theory but a thesis demonstrated, but without success).

This means that, already in 1979, scientists had demonstrated the impact of humanity on climate changes. But it also means another thing, far more relevant: that world leaders, who knew it, decided not to do anything. And they ketp doing (or better not douing) for forty years.

For all this decads research Charney ended up in oblivion. But the report had too much weight to remain hidden: the Charney report explained that “some changes in the composition of the atmosphere can change its ability to absorb the energy of the Sun”. If world leaders had devoted the attention they deserved to that research and if they had acted immediately, today the world would not find itself managing an emergency of epochal dimensions.

Why didn’t they do anything? Yet the document in the hands of world leaders was clear: “We have irrefutable proof that the atmosphere is changing and that man is contributing to this process. The concentrations of carbon dioxide are constantly increasing, which is linked to the combustion of fossil resources and the exploitation of the soil. Since CO2 plays a significant role in the thermal equilibrium of the atmosphere, it is reasonable to assume that its increase will have consequences on the climate ”. What consequences? Also in this respect the researchers, in 1979, had provided extremely precise data: Carl Wunsch, one of the authors of the Charney report, demonstrated the thesis of global warming of anthropic origin does not require complex calculations and models and predicted that a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would have led to an increase in the average global temperature of between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, due to the different scenarios considered. Exactly what has occurred in recent years!

World leaders gathered in Paris come to mind at the end of the COP21 work. All smiling, between a dinner and a group photo, while presenting the “new” plan to contain the increase in global temperatures and save the world (a plan to be implemented who knows when, especially after Trump’s decision to pull back).

Instead, all of them already knew the causes and the extent of rising global temperatures very well. And not for a short time, for decades. “The main findings of the report have aged very well,” said Mark Zelinka, a climate scientist at LLNL, who also coauthored the document. “The story that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” Benjamin Santer, lead author of the study, “We know it” told Reuters.

As Pierrehumbert pointed out: “Political decision makers have not taken these forecasts into account and have not acted preventively”. Indeed, even today they pretend not to know with certainty the relationship of cause and effect between the increase of CO2 emissions, increase in global temperatures and climate change!

The point is that, after reading the report, and especially after seeing that the predictions of scientists have already become reality, their choices can no longer be hidden behind a sort of poor knowledge. Or of ignorance. There is no doubt that those who have governed in recent decades have not considered the common good or the preservation of the planet as primary: they have ruled with only the economic advantages of a few at heart. Now, forty years after the publication of the Charney Report, he can no longer deny it.

[cendananews]

Mendy Cedera, Pep Guardiola Bidik Ryan Bertrand

Mendy Cedera, Pep Guardiola Bidik Ryan Bertrand

MANCHESTER — Pep Guardiola dalam dilema. Salah satu pemain andalannya Benjamin Mendy harus absen hingga April tahun depan akibat cedera lutut. Guardiola harus mendatangkan pemain baru untuk memperkuat pertahanan Manchester City.

Salah satu bidikan mantan arsitek Barcelona dan Bayern Muenchen adalah Ryan Bertrand. Kabar yang berkembang santer menyebutkan jika Pep bakal memboyong bintang…

[science-criticaltheory]

Scientists Just Published an Entire Study Refuting Scott Pruitt on Climate Change by Chris Mooney

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.

“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).

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.

“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.”

“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.”