MrPyrometer (MrPyro)

For the first time “in history” we decided to jump on the “Giving Tuesday” bandwagon in order to make you aware of the options you have to contribute to our work!

Projects supported by Skeptical Science Inc.

Skeptical Science

Skeptical Science is an all-volunteer organization but our work is not without financial costs. Contributions supporting our publication mechanisms from our readers and users are a critical part of improving the general public’s critical thinking skills about science and in particular climate science. Your contribution is a solid investment in making possible a better future thanks to improving our ability to think productively, leading to better decisions at all levels of our climate change challenge. Please visit our support page to contribute.

Translations of the FLICC-poster

The FLICC-Poster is the result of a successful collaboration between Skeptical Science and our German partner website Klimafakten.  It was first published in May 2020 and has been quite popular in English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish since then. The creation of additional translations of the poster requires funding for professional design and layout work. You can contribute to that effort via the form provided on this page.

Translations of the Cranky Uncle Game

The Cranky Uncle game adopts an active inoculation approach, where a Cranky Uncle cartoon character mentors players to learn the techniques of science denial. Cranky Uncle is a free game available on smartphones for iPhone and Android as well as web browsers. Even though the translations of the Cranky Uncle game are done by teams of volunteers, each language incurs costs for programming activities to get a language set up in the game. If you’d like to support Cranky Uncle “teaching” his science denial techniques in other languages, please use the dedicated form provided on this page to contribute.

Other options to contribute

Another very helpful way to support our work is to provide feedback on our rebuttals and especially the new at-a-glance sections in the basic-level rebuttals we are currently adding. And if you happen to be multi-lingual: we have a lot of content where translations could be updated or created!

Thanks for reading and any contribution you choose to make!

On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added “At a glance” section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a “bump” for our ask. This week features “How sensitive is our climate?“. More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.

At a glance

Climate sensitivity is of the utmost importance. Why? Because it is the factor that determines how much the planet will warm up due to our greenhouse gas emissions. The first calculation of climate sensitivity was done by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896. He worked out that a doubling of the concentration of CO₂ in air would cause a warming of 4-6^oC. However, CO₂ emissions at the time were miniscule compared to today’s. Arrhenius could not have foreseen the 44,250,000,000 tons we emitted in 2019 alone, through energy/industry plus land use change, according to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of 2022.

Our CO₂ emissions build up in our atmosphere trapping more heat, but the effect is not instant. Temperatures take some time to fully respond. All natural systems always head towards physical equilibrium but that takes time. The absolute climate sensitivity value is therefore termed ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ to emphasise this.

Climate sensitivity has always been expressed as a range. The latest estimate, according to AR6, has a ‘very likely’ range of 2-5^oC. Narrowing it down even further is difficult for a number of reasons. Let’s look at some of them.

To understand the future, we need to look at what has already happened on Earth. For that, we have the observational data going back to just before Arrhenius’ time and we also have the geological record, something we understand in ever more detail.

For the future, we also need to take feedbacks into account. Feedbacks are the responses of other parts of the climate system to rising temperatures. For example, as the world warms up. more water vapour enters the atmosphere due to enhanced evaporation. Since water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas, that pushes the system further in the warming direction. We know that happens, not only from basic physics but because we can see it happening. Some other feedbacks happen at a slower pace, such as CO₂ and methane release as permafrost melts. We know that’s happening, but we’ve yet to get a full handle on it.

Other factors serve to speed up or slow down the rate of warming from year to year. The El Nino-La Nina Southern Oscillation, an irregular cycle that raises or lowers global temperatures, is one well-known example. Significant volcanic activity occurs on an irregular basis but can sometimes have major impacts. A very large explosive eruption can load the atmosphere with aerosols such as tiny droplets of sulphuric acid and these have a cooling effect, albeit only for a few years.

These examples alone show why climate change is always discussed in multi-decadal terms. When you stand back from all that noise and look at the bigger picture, the trend-line is relentlessly heading upwards. Since 1880, global temperatures have already gone up by more than 1^oC – almost 2^oF, thus making a mockery of the 2010 Monckton quote in the orange box above.

That amount of temperature rise in just over a century suggests that the climate is highly sensitive to human CO₂ emissions. So far, we have increased the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ by 50%, from 280 to 420 ppm, since 1880. Furthermore, since 1981, temperature has risen by around 0.18^oC per decade. So we’re bearing down on the IPCC ‘very likely’ range of 2-5^oC with a vengeance.

Please use this form to provide feedback about this new “At a glance” section. Read a more technical version below or dig deeper via the tabs above!

Click for Further details

This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).

It’s no secret that COP climate negotiations often disappoint. But the COP28 talks in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are off to a bad start… before they’ve even started. From fears about the location, to frustration of the appointment of oil man Sultan al Jaber as president, COP28 is off to a bad start before it’s even started.

Support ClimateAdam on patreon: https://patreon.com/climateadam

On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added “At a glance” section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a “bump” for our ask. This week features “How the IPCC is more likely to underestimate the climate response“. More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.

At a glance

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a United Nations body founded in 1988. Its purpose is to inform governments about the status of our scientific knowledge with regard to our changing climate. In order to accomplish this role, it gathers and summarises evidence, producing an Assessment Report (AR) every few years. Each AR is an up-to-date account of the impacts and risks of a changing climate. However, because it takes 6-7 years to bring an AR to publication, by the time one is produced, the science is already moving ahead – as is the climate. The laws of physics wait for nobody.

It is important to clear up a couple of serious misunderstandings about the IPCC that are often encountered in online discussions. Firstly, the IPCC does not conduct original scientific research. That includes modelling. But how often do we see commentators ranting about ‘IPCC models’?

In fact, climate models are managed by multiple modelling groups around the world. Together, these groups form the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). In AR6, published in 2022-23, the latest generation CMIP6 output was featured. The modellers, however, did the modelling, not the IPCC.

The above example illustrates the depth of confusion that is out there. The confusion was sown by the same merchants of doubt who created and distributed all the other denialist talking-points that we deal with here at Skeptical Science.

A second frequently-cast aspersion is that the IPCC is alarmist, exaggerating the threat of climate change to cause needless worry or panic. Let us repeat: it merely collates what the science is saying. And what the science is saying is very worrying.

We have understood the heat-trapping properties of certain gases such as water vapour, methane and carbon dioxide for more than 100 years. Yet we have raised the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide from a pre-industrial level of ~280 parts per million (ppm) to 420 ppm (in 2023). That is a 50% increase.

A CO₂ level of 420 ppm last occurred on Earth during the middle of the Pliocene division of geological time, some 3.5 million years ago. Back then, the Polar ice-sheets were much smaller and vegetation distribution, detailed by the fossil record, differed dramatically from that of today. As an example, mixed woodlands were able to grow in Arctic Siberia, where today there is just stunted tundra. Sea levels were metres higher than today’s. In AR6, the IPCC summarises, in its typically non-dramatic language:

“While present-day warming is unusual in the context of the recent geologic past in several different ways, past warm climate states (i.e. the Pliocene) present a stark reminder that the long-term adjustment to present-day atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations has only just begun. That adjustment will continue over the coming centuries to millennia.“

If you’re not worried about the threat of climate change, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Please use this form to provide feedback about this new “At a glance” section. Read a more technical version below or dig deeper via the tabs above!

Click for Further details

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob Henson

Strictly speaking, it’s not yet impossible to keep from heating our world more than 1.5 degrees Celsius beyond the average global air temperature of the mid-to-late 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum. In practical terms, though, the odds of keeping global warming to 1.5°C are dwindling fast — though just how fast has been a matter of sharp debate. Here are a few points to help you navigate this critical and contentious topic.

Why is the 1.5°C threshold for global warming important? 

The 2015 Paris agreement called for keeping the increase “well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.” A 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change described escalating risks of long-term warming above 1.5°C, such as heightened threats of extreme weather, sea level rise, crop losses, and widespread coral reef die-offs.  

How will we know if we’ve hit the 1.5°C global warming threshold?

Weather varies so much from week to week, month to month, and year to year that it takes a longer period to assess what can be considered the long-term climate (and that task is even more challenging when the climate itself is changing). Local and regional climatology, such as the average high or low on a particular date in your community, is generally based on 30-year averages, updated each decade. Thirty years is considered long enough to smooth out rises and falls in temperature, such as those produced by a sequence of El Niño or La Niña events, the natural Pacific Ocean phenomena that affect weather worldwide.

As it turns out, the Paris agreement did not specify how long global temperature would need to be at or above 1.5°C for the target to be considered breached. With this in mind, scientists and policymakers generally interpret the 1.5°C target as referring to the average over multiple decades, as opposed to daily or even monthly spikes. In other words, a hot spell may briefly push the world above the 1.5°C threshold, but the long-term average is the number to watch.

Air temperatures at ground level are monitored around the clock by thousands of land-based weather stations. Satellite and buoy data help fill in the gaps over oceans. Several entities, including NOAA, NASA, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the European Union, carry out monthly and yearly analyses of planet-wide surface air temperature. Minor differences in the agencies’ rankings can result from the different ways they treat data-sparse regions such as the Arctic.