Climate Links: 02/06/2017

Are we deranged? (global warming, part 2). Leanne Ogasawara, 3 Quarks Daily. Feb. 6, 2017.

Climate Science Denial Shifts to a New Tactic Among Trump Appointees. Jeff Masters. Feb. 3, 2017.

Obama: The sham environmentalist. Ian Sinclair, Morning Star Online. Jan. 26, 2017.

History of global temperature 1880-2016. EarthSky.

2016 is officially the warmest year on record, edging out previous record holder 2015, according to NOAA. It’s the third year in a row that global average surface temperature set a new record, and the fifth time the record has been broken since the start of the twenty-first century. 

Greenland ice sheet melting 600% faster than predicted by current models. Naked Capitalism. Feb. 4, 2017.

Now, when you think about the sea level rise that results from that, our models right now, almost all the models we use in climate science, are conservative, relative to what we’re seeing when we go out and do field studies. That’s a general statement that’s true across both hemispheres. If we were to start… if we were to not meet our goals that we have, we will be in serious trouble if sea level rise within this century. ..

.. So, I think it’s a big concern and something we have to get the politicians to realize, is that they’re trying to set targets for things that appear to be happening much faster than our models are predicting. So, the models are giving us even a bit of a sense of optimism, when they really shouldn’t be, because the observations are much more dramatic than the models predict.