2015 SkS Weekly Digest #47
Posted on 22 November 2015 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... He Said What?... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...
SkS Highlights
The Road to Two Degrees, Part One: Feasible Emissions Pathways, Burying our Carbon, and Bioenergy by Andy Skuce attracted the highest number of comments of the the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Exxon climate revelations are just part of a long history of science misinformation by John Cook garnered the second highest number and 2015 shatters the temperature record as global warming speeds back up by Dana the third.
Toon of the Week
Hat tip to I Heart Climate Scientists
Quote of the Week
When the world heats up, economies around the globe will cool down. That's according to a new study which predicts that rising temperatures due to climate change will wreak havoc on economic output.
"Our best estimate is that the global economy as a whole will be 23 percent smaller in 2100 than if we would avoid climate change entirely," said co-author of the study Solomon Hsiang, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley.
The study looked at the relationship between temperature and economic activity in 166 countries over a 50 year period. The findings indicate climate change will widen global inequality, perhaps dramatically, because warming is good for cold countries, which tend to be richer, and more harmful for hot countries, which tend to be poorer. In the researchers' benchmark estimate, climate change will reduce average income in the poorest 40 percent of countries by 75 percent in 2100.
Unmitigated Climate Change to Shrink Global Economy by Ben Gruber, Reuters/Climate Central, Nov 21, 2015
He Said What?
“I think probably everyone including negotiators from other countries understands that the president cannot appropriate money on his own,” said Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. “I think the larger concern is that faced with the choice of Paris collapsing without an agreement or saying ‘Yes, I’ll go find a way to get the money,’ U.S. negotiators will say, ‘Yes, we will find a way to get the money.’
“I think it’s very important that Congress acts first and says, to the world, ‘Let’s be clear, we will not appropriate that kind of money.'”
Senate Republicans Just Promised To Undermine The Paris Climate Negotiations by Samantha Page, Climate Progress, Nov 19, 2015
Coming Soon on SkS
- How Exxon Overstates the Uncertainty in Climate Science (John H. Cushman Jr.)
- A sixth nail in the global warming ‘pause’ myth (John Abraham)
- Exxon's two faces: what #ExxonKnew vs. what #ExxonDid (Dana)
- Buoy-only temperature data (Kevin C)
- The Deep Ocean: Climate change’s fingerprint on this forgotten realm (Roz Pidcock)
- 2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #48 (John Hartz)
- 2015 SkS Weekly Digest #48 (John Hartz)
Poster of the Week
SkS Week in Review
- 2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #47 by John Hartz
- So what's really happening in Antarctica? by Jonathan Bamber (Real Climate)
- SBC Energy Institute Climate Factbook by Glenn Tamblyn
- 2015 shatters the temperature record as global warming speeds back up by Dana Nuccitelli (Climate Consensus - the 97%, The Guardian)
- Book review: Climate Change, What Everyone Needs to Know by John Abraham (Climate Consensus - the 97%, The Guardian)
- The Road to Two Degrees, Part One: Feasible Emissions Pathways, Burying our Carbon, and Bioenergy by Andy Skuce
- Exxon climate revelations are just part of a long history of science misinformation by John Cook (The Conversation)
- 2015 SkS Weekly Digest #46 by John Hartz
97 Hours of Consensus: Pramod Aggarwal
Pramod Aggarwal's bio page & Quote source
Help us do science! we’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of Skeptical Science readers. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve SkS and contributing to SCIENCE on blog readership. You will also get FREE science art from Paige's Photography for participating, as well as a chance to win a t-shirt and other perks! It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here: http://bit.ly/mysciblogreaders. For completing the survey, readers will be entered into a drawing for a $50.00 Amazon gift card, as well as for other prizes (i.e. t-shirts).
Just recently the Prime Minister of New Zealand stated that he wouldn't consider a greater commitment to limiting carbon emissions until new technology made this possible. In our case, our major emissions are methane from animal burps. This is such a cop out and outside his pay grade. The job of legislators is to legislate and there is so much that they could do right now. They only have to go for the low hanging fruit. No need for subsidies. For instance:
Tip the playing field legislatively to be favourable to electric cars, solar panels small and large wind and hydro
Insititute Jim Hansen's Tax and Dividend but here I would make a tiny change. Give the money by electronic transfer to every registered tax payer. The data base already exists which would make the proceedure much less expensive to institute. You don't have to be paying tax, just be registered.
No need to go on. You will have lots of such ideas which could be done by politicians right now. However PPCT (who pays the piper calls the tune). If we don't get vested interests out of paying for elections, none of this will ever happen.
http://mtkass.blogspot.co.nz/2015/01/ppct.html