Responding to the trolls

What the chemtrails climate change deniers don’t get is I am not saying that this is not going on. I just refuse to look into to it all because these people are constantly trying to distract and take the discussion away from what is important.

Each and every one of them is a closet climate change denier (yes, denier, not “sceptic”)

If we are being sprayed to modify the climate clearly the whole thing is a huge failure as global temperatures reach new records.

The trolls and the falsifiers are on the attack

Seemorerocks

This demonstrates a la-Nina which is having little effect on global temperatures, especially ocean temperatures

Yesterday was a terrible day.

The day after hearing Guy McPherson speak in Wellington I badly needed a day of recovery way from the internet.  Much of it was spent just sitting in a char.

Unfortunately, some of it was spent with a iPad in my hand so I wasn't exactly taking a real day off.

In my sensitised and grieving state I came across the following from someone who until yesterday was a Facebook "friend".

Mr. Ulsacker says:

"The biggest enemy of climate change truth are the climate change predictions by people with something to sell to you.

"The second biggest enemy of climate change truth are the proponents and followers who fail to hold fanatical predictions to account.

"Those two factors alone have been enough to completely wreck the entire movement for decades."

Robin Westenra The politicisation began wih official bureaucratic denial.of facts that were known 25 years ago. The science from those brave enough not to be muzzlec is unequivocal.

Like · Reply · 3 · 6 December at 21:45

Tate Ulsaker Even if politicization began from denial, that isn't any reason to 

bandy about faked numbers and fanatical claims. There is nothing brave about 

faking or fantasizing. That is an effort that gives short term results that seem to help but long term it discredits the truth. Sticking with the truth wherever it may lead is the only heroic action in my view.

Tate Ulsaker Robin, you are a great guy and researcher. These claims are below you. Keep the high ground on this issue bro. The limelight claimed by Guy will fade with his claims, probably long before. Truth remains.

Tate Ulsaker Probably between the two arguments aye Kent? Between the gulf of climate change exaggeration types and the ones who accuse that it is all made up to get a global government. Sadly, both sides see their own trends and the faults of the other but fail to look at what they are doing to perpetuate the gulf of misunderstanding. It is cult thinking. In cults, everything we do is great regardless, we are the chosen ones. The other guys are wrong regardless, they are against us and anything we can do to make them look bad is justified no matter how wrong.

Like · Reply · 2 · Yesterday at 07:17

I am here to tell people that I will not tolerate libel and ad hominem attacks on my friend, Guy McPherson

****

This morning I woke to a private message which alerted me to the item below in which he tried to convince me that I had to look into chemtrails …

“In the interests of becoming more aware it is important to believe in the possibility of everything until you know otherwise... “

It seems by refusing to entertain the ideas of the chemtrails proponents I am a fascist?!

“Blocking certain discussion topics is ignorant and fascistic behaviour...exactly who are you serving?”

Interestingly soon after I reponded to a private message in which he pointed my attention to his well-reasoned piece (sic) the Facebook piece was removed.

****

Yesterday I was in a pretty brittle state so I responded with a few comments of my own on Facebook:

 "I am in grief over the world, especially the natural world from what I know to be abrupt and catastrophic climate change.

"If I read so much as one word of libel attacking Guy Guy McPherson (as opposed to disagreeing with, or discussing technical aspects) like one person today I will react instantly by defriending.

"t does not matter in the slightest what positions they take on other subjects (such as Russia and geopolitics).

"One word even suggesting that theories about chemtrails" are science will elicit the same response.

" do not need "friends"like that."

And further....

"We live in such a crazy fucking world where some half-baked idea that someone dug up from the back of their mind is called fact and scientific data collected over a generation or more or logical thought is called an "opinion" or a "religion". Beam me up, Scotty. Get me out of here"

What irritates me most is that a generation of people have arisen that are a product of a dumbed down “education system” who are incapable of rational thought or of determining what is science and what is not.

Truly a “post-fact world”

By contrast I am old enough to have gone through a good, liberal education that taught me a few skills.

.....

"I first heard about global warming back in 1988 and heard the message of Teddy Goldsmith, founder of the Ecologist who said back then more or less what Guy McPherson is saying now. No one sent him hate mail or death threats. He was just an eccentric old man making dire predicaments.

*This was the time when we were warned that we had a 10 year window of opportunity to do something.

"My grief began, not with hearing Prof. McPherson's message - although it has pushed it home - but with the Copenhagen COP15 meeting when it became obvious world leaders had no intention of doing anything but sit on their hands while suppressing those who tell the full truth.

"A generation later we have a dumbed-down population who wouldn't know a fact when they see one.

"The angry denial and insistance on turning reality on its head is, I believe, an emotional response of people incapable of rational thought to something that is very real, resembling a train bearing down on us.

"The further we go the more my patience is wearing thin.

" am looking at ways of withdrawing from the world of social media. If I had my health I'd have done it yesterday but I feel right now like a sitting target."

****

Getting back to Mr Ulsaker, it is difficult to determine when he says “those two factors alone have been enough to completely wreck the entire movement for decades” what movement he refers to.

Turns out from reading the thread that he means that Al Gore and Guy McPherson (somhow coflated) are the “falsifiers” and the “fanatics” and the “science’ is represented by Dane Wigington and the proponents of chemtrails/geoengineering theories.

Furthermore bullshit (and dare I use the term "false news story"?) below are regarded by this little group of deniers as "science".

By the way these people were upset at being called deniers - sorry, they are "sceptics"

Inconvenient: Record Arctic Sea Ice Growth In September

History Keeps Proving Prophets Of Eco-Apocalypse Wong

And...

Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists

"Global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year – the biggest and steepest fall on record.

"But the news has been greeted with an eerie silence by the world’s alarmist community. You’d almost imagine that when temperatures shoot up it’s catastrophic climate change which requires dramatic headlines across the mainstream media and demands for urgent action. But that when they fall even more precipitously it’s just a case of “nothing to see here”.

"The cause of the fall is a La Nina event following in the wake of an unusual strong El Nino."

I’m not exactly a fan of the Weather Channel who are usually downplaying abrupt climate change but they responded to the nonsense from the like of the Mail on Sunday and Breitbart.

And this is from the Washington Post - not my favoured source of information.

It’s likely Earth’s hottest year on record — and some people are talking about global cooling

It has begun.

As a powerful El Niño event, one that helped push the planet to some of its warmest temperatures on record, fades away, some voices are now heralding a new bout of sudden planetary cooling. It started last week with an article in The Mail on Sunday, and then rippled to a Breitbart article that itself received a tweet from the House Science Committee.

And if past debates over the planet’s temperature are any guide, this could just be the beginning.

The original Mail on Sunday article, by David Rose, asserted that “global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C since the middle of this year – their biggest and steepest fall on record.” The assertion, the article said, was based on measurements of the planet’s atmosphere by satellites – and moreover, measurements that were taken “over land,” thus excluding the planet’s oceans. Breitbart then said (in its headline) that this temperature “plunge” had been met by “icy silence from climate alarmists.” “The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare,” argued author James Delingpole.

Climate scientists, in turn, have been highly critical — a band of them just extensively challenged the original Mail on Sunday article at the website Climate Feedback, where they “estimated its overall scientific credibility to be ‘very low.’”

“This article is a textbook case of cherry picking—it selects only one record, ignores the limitations of the data it comments on, and forms an argument based on only a few months of a much longer record,” argue the researchers. Rose, however, argued back on Twitter that the critique “misrepresents what I wrote” and that “I never said long term trend not due to GHG!,” the acronym for greenhouse gases.

So what’s happening here?

The Mail on Sunday article chooses its words carefully, and Rose is right that he didn’t deny global warming outright — but the impact was pretty clearly to sow doubt, overall, about the causes behind the scorching temperature period we’ve just lived through.

Moreover, the selection of data remains problematic. Carl Mears, a physicist at Remote Sensing Systems, told the Post he thinks it is “very likely” that the Mail on Sunday article was using his own institution’s satellite temperature dataset. But Mears, who was not part of the Climate Feedback critique, also says he sees the reliance on land data, in particular, as “cherry picking.”

“The size of the temperature drop is increased because of a weather pattern which led to below normal temperatures over Siberia…and somewhat warmer temperatures elsewhere (including over the northern hemisphere oceans, which are not part of the land average),” Mears explained. “This is likely what led to it being a record temperature drop.”

In contrast to such a short-term temperature fluctuation over land, here is the overall surface temperature trend, including both the land and the oceans, since 1880, per NASA. It is not based on satellites, which provide a far shorter record and a problematic one in some ways. It does not yet include 2016, which is highly likely to be the hottest year of them all and would only make the figure more dramatic. But then, you don’t really need that to see what is going on:

There’s obviously no long term cooling trend here, and especially not since the 1970s. But the figure gives a hint as to how one can easily make claims about short term cooling bouts, like the ones cited above.

Check out the early 1940s and the years 1997-1998 above, two periods that see little global warming exclamation points. These are two particularly noteworthy El Niño periods. At the very end of the record, even though 2016 isn’t included, is the beginning of another.

As you can see, when these extra hot periods end, the ensuing months or even years can’t compete with them for temperatures. Yes, you could technically call this a cooling — or, if the transition is particularly sharp, temperatures “plummeting” – but by doing so you risk really missing the big picture about the trend pictured above. The big picture is that it’s warming, and when a large El Niño comes, it tends to set a major new temperature record, vanquishing not only all other years but all prior El Niños.

Granted, the Mail on Sunday article does correctly note that whatever cooling we’re seeing now is related to the end of El Niño. But the article also suggested that the 2016 warm temperature record may have been only El Niño related, rather than a reflection of global warming. Many scientists dispute that.

“The temperature before the 2015-2016 event was much warmer than the temperatures before the 97-98 event,” says Mears. “This means that the assertion that global warming did not play a part in the record warmth is not correct. The 2015-2016 El Nino started from a higher ‘platform,’ so it was much easier for to produce a record. ”

More generally, the key point is that what matters is the long-term global warming trend, and the mere end of El Niño certainly can’t refute that. Nobody is claiming that global warming means every year, or every month, will be hotter than the next. There is plenty of natural variability in the system which in fact ensures this won’t be the case.

And this is why, contra Breitbart’s claim about “icy silence,” scientists simply may not find the occurrence of cooling following El Niño to be a very big deal, or even necessarily worth remarking upon.

“It is normal and predictable that global temperature will fall after a strong El Nino,” explains former NASA climate researcher James Hansen, now at Columbia. “The natural oscillation of Pacific Ocean temperature associated with the El Niño/La Niña cycle adds on top of the more steady global warming trend due to increasing greenhouse gases. Global temperature with each successive El Niño is warmer than during the prior El Niño. Similarly, global temperature during each successive La Niña (the cool portion of the Pacific Ocean cycle) is warmer than the prior one — this is easy to see in the temperature record because of the strong greenhouse-gas-driven warming trend that has existed since about 1970.”

“The past 18 months have shattered global temperature records,” adds Ed Hawkins, a climate researcher at the University of Reading in the UK. “The dominant cause is the long-term increase in temperatures due to human activities but global temperatures in individual years and months also fluctuate due to weather patterns and factors such as El Niño.”

“We expect global temperatures to drop slightly as El Niño events fade, so it is unlikely that 2017 will set new records, but it will still be one of the warmest years since records began,” Hawkins continued.

 

Ed HawkinsVerified account‏@ed_hawkins

When considering changes in global temperature, it's always important to look at the big picture, rather than obsess over short-term effects

• RETWEETS813
• LIKES613
• 

11:01 PM - 3 Dec 2016

37 replies813 retweets613 likes

Hawkins also created and tweeted out this graphic in order to underscore that the long-term trend is one of warming, whatever the short-term fluctuations may be:

Still, with the recent close of an El Niño, we could be in for a battery of claims about cooler temperatures. How do we know? Because it has happened before.

The arguments about a global warming “hiatus” or “pause” that dominated circa 2012 and 2013 were focused on a period following the powerful 1997-1998 El Niño, after which the rate of subsequent warming naturally appeared somewhat less. That was especially the case if you took the very warm year of 1998 as the starting point for an analysis of the temperature trend — because you were then starting at a high point, with a very warm year.

But as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change explained in 2013, that’s questionable reasoning because, again, it’s basically a form of cherry-picking:

In addition to robust multi-decadal warming, global mean surface temperature exhibits substantial decadal and interannual variability. Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. As one example, the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05 [–0.05 to 0.15] °C per decade), which begins with a strong El Niño, is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade).

Such statements are unlikely to persuade those who believe a dip in temperatures heralds a more permanent turn.

“This strategy will work for the next 200 years, even after there are palm trees, pineapple groves, and alligators in Alaska,” explains Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at the University of Bristol in the U.K. who has published on the errors of statistical reasoning lurking behind in claims of the global warming ‘slowdown’ or ‘pause’ genre.

“Random variation will never cease and it can always be exploited by political operatives. Scientists, by contrast, consider all the evidence, and when they do, then the fact that the Earth is warming appears virtually incontrovertible.”

And the latest report on the Arctic sea ice collapse.

Arctic Sea Ice Collapse 20 November—3 December: Annual Average Volume

So I don’t get left with a nasty taste in my mouth I will finish off with the words of Guy McPherson who was able to convince a right-wing climate change denier with his logic.