Posted on 18 October 2015 by John Hartz

SkS Highlights

Skeptical Science honoured by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry by John Cook and Understanding climate feedbacks by Eric Wolff (The Carbon Brief) each attracted the highest number of comments of trhe articles posted on SkS during the past week. Earth’s worst extinction “inescapably” tied to Siberian Traps, CO2, and climate change by Howard Lee garnered the second highest number. 

El Niño Watch

INFOGRAPHIC: Red indicates higher than normal ocean temperatures and blue shows lower than normal sea surface readings. Normal sea-level conditions appear in white.

New maps show how the 2015 El Nino is shaping up to look a lot like a strong event that occurred in 1997-98 that was dubbed a "super El Nino".

El Nino 2015 starting to look like 'super El Nino' in 1997-98, by Stuart Gary, ABC News (Australia), Oct 16, 2015

Toon of the Week

Quote of the Week

“We are in ‘injury time’ for 2°C – and things are not looking good. However, time will continue regardless even if we blow the 2°C carbon budgets, we still need to drive even harder for deep and rapid mitigation alongside preparing for the regional impacts of a 4, 5 or even 6°C future. But we must note that adaptation to such a future scenario will never be sufficient for the many millions who will suffer and die as a consequence of the fossil fuelled hedonism enjoyed by relatively few of us – including me and very likely anyone reading this; we are the high emitters who have explicitly chosen not to care.“

This is the opinion of Professor Kevin Anderson, who holds a chair in Energy and Climate Change at the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester. He is a scientific advisor to the Welsh Government’s climate change commission and regularly provides advice to the UK Parliament. He is the Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and is research active with recent publications in Nature and Royal Society Journals.

Arctic 2015: Things are not looking good! by Orri Páll Ormarsson, Iceland Monitor, Oct 17, 2015 

He Said What?

So while Sanders may have been the first to name climate change as America’s biggest national security threat, he’s not alone among his Democratic peers in seeing its danger.

Republican candidates, many of whom deny the mainstream scientific consensus on climate change, have ridiculed those who see climate change as a national security issue. Mike Huckabee tweeted a joke about beheadings and sunburn during the debate...

 This was not the first time Huckabee made the quip. After President Obama talked about the seriousness of climate change in his State of the Union speech earlier this year, Huckabee made the same joke.

“Not to diminish anything about the climate at all,” Huckabee said, “but Mr. President, I believe that most of us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn.”

The data, however, show that more deaths per year can be linked to climate change than terrorism.

The Gulf Between Democrats And Republicans On Climate Change And National Security by Patrick Smith, Climate Progress, Oct 14, 2015 

SkS in the News

During his hearing this week, Cruz also ridiculed the idea that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human activity is contributing to the warming of the planet, saying the figure had been discredited. But when watchdogs such as PolitiFact look into it, they find climate deniers are cherry-picking evidence for that claim. A review of nearly 12,000 climate abstracts published between 1991 and 2011 found that more than 97 percent of papers expressing an opinion on the matter endorsed the consensus that human activity contributes to climate change. NASA has long backed up the claim of overwhelming scientific consensus on man-made climate change, and a recent study of the broader scientific community found nearly 92 percent of non-climate scientists agree. There is overwhelming scientific agreement that the energy choices we make have a significant influence on our climate.

Ted Cruz Lies Again About the Science of Climate Change by Denis Dison, NRDC Action Fund, EcoWatch, Oct 12, 2015

SkS Spotlights 

The Carbon Brief has unveiled its new website. Click here to check it out.

Coming Soon on SkS

• New UN climate deal text: what’s in, what’s out (Sophie Yeo)
• The Brave New World of Eco Modernism (Josh Halpern)
• The pope as philosopher: faith, climate change and public reason (Lawrence Torcello)
• CO2 was higher in the late Ordovician - intermediate rebuttal (howardlee)
• The pope, climate change and the cultural dimensions of the Anthropocene (Andrew J Hoffman)
• 2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #43 (John Hartz)
• 2015 SkS Weekly Digest #43 (John Hartz) 

Poster of the Week

SkS Week in Review 

• 2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #42 by John Hartz
• Skeptical Science honoured by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry by John Cook
• Propaganda trumps journalism in conservative media climate reporting by Dana Nuccitelli (Climate Consensus-the 97%, The Guardian)
• Earth’s worst extinction “inescapably” tied to Siberian Traps, CO2, and climate change by Howard Lee
• Methane release from melting permafrost could trigger dangerous global warming by John Abraham (Climate Consensus-the 97%, The Guardian)
• Understanding climate feedbacks by Eric Wolff (The Carbon Brief)
• 2015 SkS Weekly Digest #41 by John Hartz

97 Hours of Consensus: Nathan Bindoff

Nathan Bindoff's bio page

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