Diary Of The Last Age

Study Shows Education And Facts Don’t Actually Matter To Republican Climate Deniers This new study looked at determinants of belief in global warming. Education, gender, general knowledge, and experience of extreme weather had little effect, the studies showed.  Some people “seem to believe that it’s all simply getting people the facts, and they will reason to the right conclusion,” Lakoff said. “It doesn’t work that way. Brains don’t work that way.” The difference is stark. In fact, according to the paper, there is a “strongly positive” link between knowledge and belief in anthropogenic climate change — but only for Democrats and Independents. That is, the more knowledgeable Independents and Democrats reported themselves to be, the more likely they were to accept the science of climate change. For Republicans, the level of reported knowledge didn’t matter. 

A new study published in Nature   discussed by ThinkProgress shows us who they are.    [A] ccording to the paper, there is a “strongly positive” link between knowledge and belief in anthropogenic climate change — but only for Democrats and Independents. That is, the more knowledgeable Independents and Democrats reported themselves to be, the more likely they were to accept the science of climate change. For Republicans, the level of reported knowledge didn’t matter.    Basically the deniers of global warming are best described as Republicans.

In a previous post I pointed out that while much is uncertain about the impact of global warming, one thing that is happening and will continue to happen whatever we might do, is a significant rise in the sea level. New research has supported this outcome.  As described in the New York Times , seas are rising at the fastest rate in nearly the last 3,000 years. The worsening of tidal flooding in American coastal communities is largely a consequence of greenhouse gases from human activity, and the problem will grow far worse in coming decades, scientists reported Monday. Those emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, are causing the ocean to rise at the fastest rate since at least the founding of ancient Rome, the scientists said. They added that in the absence of human emissions, the ocean surface would be rising less rapidly and might even be falling. The increasingly routine tidal flooding is making life miserable in places like Miami Beac...

Most of the heat generated by greenhouse gases, 93% of it, is being absorbed by the oceans.  We immediately observe that warming has clearly not slowed down any as the deniers are trying to claim.  In fact, the heat in the ocean is accelerating , and has doubled since 1997, the year deniers claim warming has stopped.  This cannot be gotten around.  Global warming has not slowed at all. Not only that, we are experiencing the consequences of this right now as the ocean heating has exacerbated the Godzilla El Nino that now has gripped the world, producing the warmest December in Europe, and droughts and starvation in Africa December temperatures in London have been warmer than July’s. Scotland is balmier than Barcelona. Artificial snow covers European ski slopes. Africa faces its worst food crisis in a generation as floods and drought s strike vulnerable countries. The CMIP 5 multi-model mean ocean heat content change from 1865 to 2015 expressed as a percenta...

A new study shows that the Southwest is going to get drier.  There's a little hope for the Pacific Northwest, but the Southwest has serious problems with water going into the future. [T]he semi-arid U.S. Southwest has begun to enter the “drier climate state” that had been long-predicted from climate models. These findings match ones from September documenting an expansion of the entire world’s dry and semi-arid climate regions in recent decades because of human-caused climate change. The new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) concludes that “The weather patterns that typically bring moisture to the southwestern United States are becoming more rare, an indication that the region is sliding into the drier climate state predicted by global models.” Weather systems that bring moisture to the southwest U.S. are forming less often, which is drying out resulting in a drier climate. This map depicts the changes in precipitation that can be attri...