This is a moment to back up a bit. I have put out lots of info on climate over the past five years, and some of it has changed. There are assumptions that people are making now, what with the sixth IPCC assessment now out.  A lot of folks reading my blog lately don’t understand many of the details of global warming that I’m writing about.

The discussion of the publicity surrounding release of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment has been particularly fact-impaired. I’ve been paying attention to these releases since 2014, and the scientists I read are condemning many media assessments of what the IPCC is saying (and not saying) about our prospects for surviving into the future. Therefore, Here are two issues that have recently been subjected to media scrutiny. They’ve been misunderstood in the current fight over the IPCC report. I wanted to explain why some of us in the NTHE movement get whiny when people say things like ‘we only have til 2040!’ We don’t have til 2040 or even 2030. 

First, there’s a phenomenon that very few people understand–global dimming or the aerosol masking effect. First written about in 2011, the scientists examining our predicament came to some interesting conclusions. The one that matters most is that particulate from burning fossil fuels works its way into the upper atmosphere and reflects solar radiation back into outer space. No particulate, no reflection. The sunlight hits the earth and heats it. This is in addition to loss of albedo–the disappearance of ice means that solar radiation isn’t being reflected back into space. We’re also losing the ability of what ice is left to reflect solar energy out of the Arctic because the ice is now coated with soot from burning fossil fuels. Instead of reflecting heat back, the blackened ice is absorbing it.

We understand global dimming because after 9/11 the US shut down all commercial airline flights for about a week. During that week, average surface temperatures went up significantly (as much as 1 C). Loss of particulate, plus loss of high-altitude contrails, meant that more solar energy was hitting the planet. Large-scale loss of carbon dioxide due to shutting down use of fossil fuels would actually lead to HIGHER temperatures as particulate fell out of the sky. And we could lose a significant amount of such activity if (as predicted) we have a significant economic downturn. 

(a BBC documentary which does a superb job of giving you the bad news about global dimming.

One of the many clueless guys I saw at one of the climate marches I attended. Did not understand ‘global dimming’. Neither did his supporters.

Second, the IPCC’s sixth assessment has been talking about our current warming over baseline of 1 C and working to keep from exceeding 1.5 C of warming and avoiding going over 2 C of  warming. Um… sorry, but we’re over 1.72 C RIGHT NOW. In April of this year Arctic Methane Emergency Group put out a long article about the UN and the IPCC (funded by the UN) have ‘moved the chains’ as my foot-ball watching friends would call it, on where the warming started in the first place. It’s all explained in this article here.  And the MSM is helping to contribute to the confusion. We were flirting with 2 C two years ago. 

Hope this clears things up. If not, here’s a handy chart from AMEG  put out two years ago showing their projections of how AGW will shake out. Remember, per other estimates, that any increase of 4 C over baseline means we’re losing trees and we’re losing staple crops.

Latest estimate for warming including breakdown of where the warming happens. Courtesy of the Arctic News Blogspot. their prediction was 10.2 C total heating by 2026