Posted on 9 August 2015 by John Hartz

SkS Highlights

We are the Asteroid - Scientists’ Heighten Concerns About Global Extinctions* by Peter Sinclair attracted the highest number of comments of the articles posted on SkS duing the past week. Statistics says the long-term global warming trend continues by John Abraham garnered the second highest number of comments.

*Includes a video produced by Peter Sinclair for the Yale Climate Communications project.

Celebrate!

The Skeptical Science Facebook page has reached a new milestone — 100,000 likes and counting.

The SkS Facebook page is a key tool for communicating the science of climate change and related matters. 

Kudos to all-volunteer SkS author team members who maintain the SkS Facebook page. 

Toon of the Week

Hat tip to I Heart Climate Scientists 

Quote of the Week

“California is burning,” he* said. “What the hell are you going to do about it?”

He stressed that he didn’t just mean this year’s terrible fire season, and he used the ravages of wildfires this season and in past seasons to make the case that climate change is both real and destructive.

“This is a wakeup call,” he said. “We have to start coming to our senses. This is not a game of politics. We need to limit our carbon pollution. These are real lives and real people. This problem cannot be solved year by year.

*California Governor Jerry Brown

Jerry Brown says ‘California is burning’ and climate change is to blame by C.W. Nevius, Thursday, August 6, 2015 

He Said What?

Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) is the rare GOP presidential candidate who has acknowledged that climate change is a real problem requiring us to “protect” the “creation that the Lord has given us.” But just days after earning plaudits for his relatively moderate-sounding approach in Thursday’s GOP presidential debate, Kasich adopted a climate-change denialist approach on Sunday.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd called Kasich one of the “big winners of Thursday’s debate,” and praised him for an “impressive performance for the supportive crowd” in his home state and read a Time magazine quote comparing him to Pope Francis.

Kasich distanced himself from the Pontiff on economic issues and environmental ones. “I think that man absolutely affects the environment, but as to whether, what the impact is… the overall impact — I think that’s a legitimate debate.”

He then added: “We don’t want to destroy people’s jobs, based on some theory that is not proven.”

Ohio Governor Kasich: Do Nothing On Climate Change Because It’s An Unproven Theory by Josh Israel, Climate Progress, Aug 9, 2015 

SkS in the News

John Cook's SkS article, What 1970s science said about global cooling is cited and linked to by Phil Plait in his Bad Astronmy/Slate blog post, Mike Huckabee: Exactly Wrong About Global Warming.

In his Globe and Mail article, Car companies investing in EVs set for massive windfall, Jeremy Cato stated:

There is no climate-change skepticism among scientists, though. John Cook, of the University of Queensland, reported in Environmental Research Letters that, after combing through thousands of research abstracts, his team found that 97 per cent endorsed the notion of human-driven climate change. Moreover, among the 10,000 scientists who had expressed a position on human-driven climate change in the peer-reviewed literature, 98.4 per cent endorsed the consensus, he told the Huffington Post.

The Consensus Project is indirectly cited by Marshall Shepherd in his Forbes op-ed, My 5 Ground Rules For Writing About Climate As The U.S. Announces Key Climate Plan. 

SkS Spotlights: Population Institute

Vision

We envision a world where girls and women have achieved full gender equality; all women have access to reproductive health services, every child is a wanted child, and where global population is brought into balance with a healthy global environment and resource base.

Mission

Our mission is to improve the health and well-being of people and the planet by supporting policies and programs that promote sexual and reproductive health and rights. We build support for those policies and programs by educating policymakers, policy administrators, the media, and the general public about:

• The essential importance of achieving gender equality and promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights;
• The adverse impacts of overpopulation on the environment, scarce natural resources, biodiversity, and efforts to eliminate hunger and severe poverty in developing countries; and
• The personal, social and economic benefits that arise from expanding access to family planning services and information.

Click here to access the website of the Population Institute.

Coming Soon on SkS

• The 1C Milestone (Rob Honeycutt)
• Potentially the largest die-off of coral reefs ever observed (Rob Painting)
• Guest Post (John Abraham) 
• Geoengineering is ‘no substitute’ for cutting emissions, new studies show (Robert McSweeney)
• How to make sense of ‘alarming’ sea level forecasts (Andrew Glikson)
• Weely News Roundup (John Hartz)
• Weekly Digest (John Hartz)

Poster of the Week

SkS Week in Review 

• 2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #32 by John Hartz
• How This El Niño Is And Isn’t Like 1997 by Andrea Thompson (Climate Central)
• Charles Koch gets some climate science right, but economics wrong by Dana Nuccitelli (Climate Consensus-the 97%, The Guardian)
• We are the Asteroid - Scientists’ Heighten Concerns About Global Extinctions by Peter Sinclair (Yale Climate Connections)
• PBL survey shows strong scientific consensus that global warming is largely driven by greenhouse gases by Bart Verheggen (My View on Climate Change)
• The most influential climate change papers of all time by Roz Pidcock (The Carbon Brief)
• Statistics says the long-term global warming trend continues by John Abraham (Climate Consensus-the 97%, The Guardian)
• 2015 SkS Weekly Digest #31 by John Hartz

97 Hours of Consensus: Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

Quote derived with author's permission from:

"Despite the mounting evidence, there are still some who would deny the veracity of human-caused climate change and its potential to disrupt and harm our communities ... The latest [IPCC] report makes no bones about stating the consensus that human-driven climate change is occurring and it is important. Hundreds of changes have already been observed that are consistent with climate change, temperature rises (documented below), and associated issues such as ocean acidification."

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg's bio page