Climate Letter #1305

An introduction to Motherboard—

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Every so often I stumble into a website of obviously high quality that I should have been aware of long ago but for some reason missed the boat.  That is the case with Motherboard.  Now, having found this one example of their work, shown below, that was published a month ago, I have added their “Climate Change” category link to my regular daily list.  You may want to take a look at that link, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/topic/climate-change to see the kind of things they have been covering in 87 stories so far.  It’s quite good.
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This story, written by British author Nafeez Ahmed, got my attention because it brought forth a number of ideas, plus links to material, that have been on my mind for some time, as indicated by the title, “The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic.”  That is something many climate scientists have been saying ever since the first IPCC report was published (in 1990) and those that followed.  The IPCC is by intention a very conservative body, taking a highly cautious approach to matters of uncertainty.  The science behind climate change, meanwhile, by its very nature deals with inescapable uncertainties at all levels.  It tries to reconstruct a past from an assortment of the strangest of clues, and it tries to predict the future when all that can be seen is a hazy outline.  Even the present realities are hard to describe because there are so many complicating forces that interact and keep changing.  Every bit of new research, no matter how convincing, easily becomes subject to future adjustments and cannot just be accepted at once.
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Once the IPCC has made its case other UN bodies take over and set up procedures for translating the findings into recommendations for policy makers at the highest levels of government, doing so in a way that nearly all must agree to because there is no alternative to full cooperation.  That has led to numerous complaints that the positions taken by the IPCC are watered down still more, enough to create ways of making them acceptable to all different kinds of national leaders, who still retain further options for holding back needed actions that are unpopular.  That entire picture is in plain sight, and Dr. Ahmed does not hesitate to explain how it falls short, and the radical nature of the transformation that would be required to change it.
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Extra comment:  My own “discovery,” which was made a few months ago, that land surface temperatures have been rising considerably faster than ocean surfaces, is something that all climate scientists know about but have not taken the time to think much about.  This is an oversight that needs to be corrected, because if my conclusions are wrong the explanation that shows why they are wrong would necessarily be meaningful, and perhaps unusual.  If they are right they point to stark evidence, the kind that stares you in the face, that the IPCC conclusions and everything that has followed from them are far too conservative.  In fact, we have already shot past the 1.5C target on land while the oceans have lagged far behind, for reasons not hard to explain.  The oceans will catch up, inevitably, due to natural processes seeking equilibrium, but it will take time.  Land itself will for some time surely continue to grow warmer at a pace much faster than the average rate for the globe, which is 70% weighted in favor of oceans.  (Go to http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/ and click on “with 1889-1920 base period” below the top figure.)
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There is one more website worthy of study, which takes some time and effort to fully appreciate the value of.  Here it is:  https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-every-part-of-the-world-has-warmed-and-could-continue-to-warm  It will give you the temperature history of 64,000 parcels of the Earth’s surface from the late 19th century to the average of the last ten years, an amazing amount of information.  I recently took the time to check records on bits of all the major land masses and the same for all the oceans, to get a clearer picture.  One clear finding is that land surfaces in the Northern Hemisphere have warmed considerably more than those in the Southern.  That raises questions about whether there is some special kind of inertia holding up “progress” in the South, but absent in the North.  Ice-covered Antarctica is counted as land but (from sparse records) shows only a few signs of any warming at all
Carl

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