New Zealanders have been issued with a stark warning to expect "surprises" by scientists who say they cannot keep up with extreme weather events linked to climate change.
Scientists opened a climate change conference in Wellington yesterday by stating that changes in climate being experienced around the globe were beyond their worst-case scenarios.
The founding director of the Climate Change Research Institute, Martin Manning, said policy-makers needed to stop waiting for scientists to come up with answers about trends for the future, or definite measurements for how much sea levels or temperatures would rise by.
Almost simultaneously, devastating floods battered Sir Lanka, Brazil and Queensland earlier this year. Professor Manning said policy-makers should start getting prepared for greater risks, instead of waiting for the lengthy process of scientists linking events together.
Extreme rainfall around the world had been more than scientists had been predicting from climate models.
"Society needs to take over from science when we're talking about global risk management.
"We can't wait till the scientists understand everything."
Continue here
People in Canterbury are being warned of more earthquakes and aftershocks for years to come.
The Natural Hazards Manager at GNS Science, Kelvin Berryman, says it is impossible to tell for sure how long the aftershocks will continue.
But he says previous earthquakes, in this country and overseas, have been followed by seismic activity for up to 30 years.
Dr Berryman says while the current sequence of aftershocks will eventually drop off, there is a possibility it could trigger further earthquakes, beginning the cycle again
Source
View the original article here
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Showing posts with label Climate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Climate. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Saturday, 26 March 2011
Now it’s climate change to be killing the Joshua trees
Study based on fossil sloth dung found in desert caves and packrat middens
From the US Geological Survey, because doing mapping and boundary lines are sooo yesterday:
Uncertain Future for Joshua Trees Projected with Climate Change
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Temperature increases resulting from climate change in the Southwest will likely eliminate Joshua trees from 90 percent of their current range in 60 to 90 years, according to a new study led by U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Ken Cole.
The research team used models of future climate, an analysis of the climatic tolerances of the species in its current range, and the fossil record to project the future distribution of Joshua trees. The study concludes that the species could be restricted to the northernmost portion of its current range as early as the end of this century. Additionally, the ability of Joshua trees to migrate via seed dispersal to more suitable climates may be severely limited.
“This is one of the most interesting research projects of my career,” said Ken Cole, a USGS ecologist and the study’s lead author. “It incorporated not only state-of-the-art climate models and modern ecology, but also documentary information found in fossils that are more than 20,000 years old.”
By using fossil sloth dung found in desert caves and packrat middens — basically, the garbage piles of aptly named packrats — scientists were able to reconstruct how Joshua trees responded to a sudden climate warming around 12,000 years ago that was similar to warming projections for this century. Prior to its extinction around 13,000 years ago, the Shasta ground sloth favored Joshua trees as food, and its fossilized dung contained abundant remains of Joshua trees, including whole seeds and fruits. These fossil deposits, along with fossil leaves collected and stored by packrats, allowed scientists to determine the tree’s formerly broad range before the warming event.
The study concluded that the ability of Joshua trees to spread into suitable habitat following the prehistoric warming event around 12,000 years ago was limited by the extinction of large animals that had previously dispersed its seeds over large geographic areas, particularly the Shasta ground sloth. Today, Joshua tree seeds are dispersed by seed-caching rodents, such as squirrels and packrats, which cannot disperse seeds as far as large mammals. The limited ability of rodents to disperse Joshua tree seeds in combination with other factors would likely slow migration to only about 6 feet per year, not enough to keep pace with the warming climate, Cole and his colleagues concluded.
The Joshua tree, a giant North American yucca, occupies desert grasslands and shrublands of the Mojave Desert of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah; Joshua Tree National Park in California is named after this iconic species. The Joshua tree is known for its distinctive shape and height of up to 50 feet.
Results of the study, “Past and ongoing shifts in Joshua tree distribution support future modeled range contraction,” appear in a current edition of “Ecological Applications.” The research team included Kenneth L. Cole, U.S. Geological Survey; Kirsten Ironside, Northern Arizona University; Jon Eischeid, NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory; Gregg Garfin, University of Arizona; Phillip B. Duffy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of California; and Chris Toney, USDA Forest Service.
Thursday, 24 March 2011
Climate Craziness of the Week: IPCC’s Pachauri claims 17cm of sea level rise made the Tsunami worse, but let’s check
From this article in The Hindu: (h/t to WUWT reader Adam Gallon)
“In the 20th century, sea-level rise was recorded at an average of 17 centimetres. If the sea-level was significantly lower, clearly the same tsunami would have had a less devastating effect. Therefore, sea-level rise is a kind of multiplier of the kinds of threats and negative impacts that will take place anyway,”
It seems to me that clearly Dr. Pachauri can’t mentally manage the concept of scale. Here’s the NOAA wave height graphic that was flashed around the world on news media shortly after the Tsunami Warning was issued, while the tsunami was still traveling across the Pacific:
Note the inset I added, now here’s that inset area magnified with the color key added and the 17cm Pachauri mentions marked:
Hmmm, for the people of Japan in the hardest hit areas, I don’t think it would matter much. But let’s compare the numbers and find out.
We can describe it another way in the scale of familiar human experience. Wiki gives this 2006 value for the average height of the Japanese people, the left figure is male, the right is female:
Let’s look at some other things:
Bonsai trees reach an average height of two feet (61cm)
From Wiki, the height of the sea wall at the Fukushima reactor site:
“The plant was protected by a sea wall and designed to withstand a tsunami of 5.7 [570cm] meters…”
The actual height of the Tsunami wave there:
…but the tsunami had a height of about 14 meters [1400 cm] and topped this sea wall
OK let’s make some scale imagery to help visualize these values:
Now let’s insert the image above into the image which shows the height of the Tsunami as reported at the Fukushima reactor complex:
That 17 centimeters that Dr. Pachauri speaks of makes all the difference, doesn’t it?
Note to other bloggers: feel free to use these graphics under “fair use” terms, but please provide a link back to this article at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/23/climate-craziness-of-the-week-ipccs-pachauri-claims-17cm-of-sea-level-rise-made-the-tsunami-worse/
Bonsai trees reach an average height of two feetFlood Experience Boosts Climate Change Acceptance
How convenient for governments that employ weather modification technology…
Scientific American People who have directly experienced flooding are more likely to be worried about climate change, according to a new studyBy Lauren Morello and ClimateWire | March 21, 2011
AFTER THE FLOOD: People who have directly experienced flooding are more likely to be worried about climate change and willing to adopt energy-saving behavior, according to a new study. Image: Frankie Roberto, via WikiMedia Commons
People who have directly experienced flooding are more likely to be worried about climate change and willing to adopt energy-saving behavior, according to a new study.
Researchers at two British universities based their findings on a 2010 survey of 1,822 individuals across the United Kingdom.
“We show that those who report experience of flooding express more concern over climate change, see it as less uncertain and feel more confident that their actions will have an effect on climate change,” the authors write. “Importantly, these perceptual differences also translate into a greater willingness to save energy to mitigate climate change.”
Previous psychological research suggests that many people are relatively unconcerned about climate change because they perceive it as a distant issue that will not directly affect them.
For more go here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=flood-experience-boosts-climate-change-acceptance
I wrote for Investigate Magazine from 2000-2005, then decided to invest my energy in the alternative media, when I became aware of the rise of fascism that was being concealed from the public under the guise of hoaxes, such as the "war on terror," by the mainstream media. Flood Experience Boosts Climate Change Acceptance
How convenient for governments that employ weather modification technology…
Scientific American People who have directly experienced flooding are more likely to be worried about climate change, according to a new studyBy Lauren Morello and ClimateWire | March 21, 2011
AFTER THE FLOOD: People who have directly experienced flooding are more likely to be worried about climate change and willing to adopt energy-saving behavior, according to a new study. Image: Frankie Roberto, via WikiMedia Commons
People who have directly experienced flooding are more likely to be worried about climate change and willing to adopt energy-saving behavior, according to a new study.
Researchers at two British universities based their findings on a 2010 survey of 1,822 individuals across the United Kingdom.
“We show that those who report experience of flooding express more concern over climate change, see it as less uncertain and feel more confident that their actions will have an effect on climate change,” the authors write. “Importantly, these perceptual differences also translate into a greater willingness to save energy to mitigate climate change.”
Previous psychological research suggests that many people are relatively unconcerned about climate change because they perceive it as a distant issue that will not directly affect them.
For more go here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=flood-experience-boosts-climate-change-acceptance
I wrote for Investigate Magazine from 2000-2005, then decided to invest my energy in the alternative media, when I became aware of the rise of fascism that was being concealed from the public under the guise of hoaxes, such as the "war on terror," by the mainstream media. Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Ten Major Failures of So-called Consensus Climate Science
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
INTRODUCTION
The US congress sub-committee on Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings on whether to restrict in some way the EPA’s regulatory authority relative to greenhouse gas emissions.
There were 7 scientists invited to testify. Three of the four who argued not to restrict the EPA played a key role in the last IPCC report (and will also in the next one) and generally started with the position that IPCC science was sound and there was a consensus of all real scientists.
In the attached analysis we take a look at the IPCC based science. We are going to ignore all the many ‘gates’ that were uncovered like the Himalayan glaciers, Amazon rain forests, how many real scientists there were who authored the key summaries and all the issues as to whether the summaries truly reflected the scientific information in the chapters and despite claims to the contrary, how a significant percentage of citations were not peer reviewed.
We will not attempt to address the issues of sensitivity for CO2 or solar and cloud and water vapor feedbacks relative to the models. We will also ignore the many model shortcomings – like inability to forecast regional patterns, ocean oscillations, etc. Each of these alone discredit the consensus ‘settled science claim.
We will focus on how actual data compares to the consensus science, model based virtual world view of climate.
We will look at some of the major findings, assessments or model predictions from the IPCC and other national climate centers and NGOs, that we believe have failed and let you decide then whether or not the their science and model projections should be the bedrock onto which we build public policy.
The ten issues:
1. Warming is said to be unprecedented and accelerating. It is neither.
2. Global warming is not GLOBAL
3. Winters would grow increasingly warm
4. The entire Northern Hemisphere would experience less snow and snowcover
5. The arctic oscillation (AO) would become increasingly positive, aiding in the warming
6. Global warming would lead to a permanent or semi-permanent El Nino
7. Atmosphere will warm faster than surface (because that is where the heat trapping gases are).
Enlarged. Balloon data for actual 100-300 mb from 20S-20N from NOAA ARL Angell (anomalies relative to base period 1968-1977) compared to models forecasts of warming 20S-20N 100-300mb. Note the cooling observed where models suggest most GHG warming. This is similar to depictions from Singer etal NIPCC 2007 and others.
8. Record highs and heat waves are increasing
9. Sea levels are rising at an increasing, alarming rate
10. Droughts and floods will worsen
We have actually made a list of 30 such ‘failures’ or ‘shortcomings’, but decided to focus on the first ten.
See the analysis part 1 and part 2.
Monday, 21 March 2011
SAS Survival Guide 2E (Collins Gem): For any climate, for any situation
Includes new case studies and survival scenarios
The experts' survival techniques, based on John 'Lofty' Wiseman's 26 years in the SAS
Practical, easy-to-follow advice with diagrams and color illustrations
*Visit the Apple iTunes store to be fully equipped with the SAS Survival Guide iPhone App.
Price: $7.99
Saturday, 19 March 2011
First articles online at the new “Nature Climate Change”
Well, at least they established a standard early on…
h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
Thursday, 17 March 2011
Climate Change, Libya and Living Free of the Future!
The HogueProphecy Bulletin
(03 March 2011)
Hogue sighting, a week ago at the end of his street that ends with lots of woods, hooters and a willow. (Owls, that is.) It was shot the afternoon after the last "globally warmed" blizzard. A rarity at sea level, on an island north of Seattle, Washington. Photo by Drew Kampion. See drewkampion.com.
Friends,
First, some predictions about current events crowding the quickening train of our times.
CNN reports something I have been writing about since the early 1990s (click on millennium prophecies). The mainstream belatedly catches on because even the corporate controlled news cannot keep a lid on this reality any longer. This is not the first time a team of globally respected scientists have informed news agencies that your record winter storms and blizzards are a direct result of global warming pumping the atmosphere with the “gas” to fuel more powerful storms: moisture. CNN’s anchors may still carefully parse their words to fit corporate editorial limitations. For instance, calling global warming “climate change.” We do not want to talk about a warming climate change because that will upset our fossil fuel advertisers.
Climate change to what, then?
Here is the basic scientific fact: ONLY a warming climate can contain more moisture. Colder climates create dry atmospheres. The onset of an Ice Age would weaken storm activity, not feed it fuel. That is not to say that global warming may trigger an ice age. But let us stay on storm track here: a more humid global atmosphere makes storms that are more powerful. It is not just a nebulous “change”. Those clouds are floating in globally warming air. But as long as the corporate leash is on editorially tight, you will not hear the mainstream news anchors call the blizzards of this winter a symptom of global warming.
What you will hear is today’s CNN report saying that scientists warn “climate change” injecting more moisture in the atmosphere would be responsible for the violent winter weather rapidly becoming violent and early spring storms. They will not tell you the “why”, just that the climate changed.
Wild weather of winter dramatically shifting to wild spring storms is something I detailed last year when writing Predictions for 2011. Brace for record snowmelt floods in the US as globally “warmed” subtropical moisture begins to push and shove into arctic air over America’s Tornado Alley this March and then will come the hurricanes. Early — the first tropical storms in May.
Now to Libya…
In my first article about Qaddafi’s future at the onset of the uprising (click on Libyan), I said the following, posted on 22 February: “What happens in Libya will be similar but I fear it will take longer and be a far more bloody civil war. Unlike Romania’s civil war, Libya is among the most deeply entrenched tribal societies in the Arab world. This civil war will be won or lost by who can manage the complex alliances and promise patronage to key Libyan tribes…
“Gaddafi will try to take [the eastern Libyan oil fields] back, promise reward of the rich oil industry to those western tribes and sub-tribes leaders who support the crackdown.
“People inside Libya phone the outside world about Gaddafi’s acts of genocide. Believe it. This civil war could descend into a battle between Libya’s tribes to control oil resources.
“At the time of this writing (22 February 2011), Gaddafi and his tribal allies in the secret police and armed forces are ruthlessly liquidating rebels in Tripoli while air strikes on Benghazi continue.
“I predict Gaddafi intends to launch his heavily armored forces against Benghazi, the heart of the revolution.”
As predicted, his forces are gathering for a push on the rebellious eastern provinces. Once again we have another spirited and sincere revolution of the masses in an Arab country that inspires so many of us to hope that democracy can spread in North Africa and the Middle East. However, I have an ongoing concern. Like Tunisia where this Jasmine Revolution wave began, spreading to Egypt and like Egypt and all the other erupting demonstrations in Yemen, Jordan, Oman, Bahrain, Iraq and Syria: the revolutions are leaderless and remain amorphous mobs. They have a heart, but are so far running about headless.
Gaddafi is “daffy” but not dumb.
Gaddafi had planned for an eventual civil war by denying the Libyan military units in the east proper training and military equipment. He had expected the defections from those natives of the east in his military industrial complex. I sense that the early chaos has settled and Gaddafi has stabilized his command structure. The air force is once again bombing the rebels because those pilots who have refused to fight have either escaped to the East or been shot and replaced by Algerian and other mercenary pilots.
I said it at the beginning of the Libyan Revolution and I say it again, as a compassionate warning to the revolutionaries in the eastern coastal cities of Libya, such as Benghazi: Gaddafi will launch an offensive on you. It will happen this month, and you people of Benghazi will need to get yourself organized or by April, you will have Gaddafi’s tanks shooting you point blank in your streets. You will have your beach side demonstrations strafed by Gaddafi’s Tripolean and Algerian pilots in jets and attack helicopters.
Listen well; there will be no “No Fly Zone” organized by the US Navy or the NATO air forces flying across the Mediterranean from Italy. That simply will not happen as long as you continue to be a leaderless circus in the streets, playing with your rusting, second hand tanks, and shooting off into the air magazine after wasted magazine of your secondhand anti-aircraft guns for the entertainment of brave Ben Wederman’s CNN cameras.
You need to organize.
Undisciplined revolutions of leaderless masses never succeed. And many an organized revolution can also succumb to a tyrannical state, initially caught off guard, but soon finding its savage footing and take aim, putting fire and chemical weapons on the cities and towns of rebels.
***Let us change definitions of prophecy from predicting and forecasting to its deeper definition: divine inspiration.
The response to my last blog’s offer to share information and links about the meditation techniques I use has seen hundreds of readers ask for them and express their gratitude for my work. Today I wish to answer one of these readers who yesterday posted the following email. My reply is inserted in it. I wanted to share with the community at large this interchange, because many of you share these views.
RACHEL
I’d like to start by saying that I’ve been on your mailing list for over three years, and I’ve bought a few of your wonderful e-books. I know at times it must feel disheartening when it’s such a challenge to keep a venture like Hogue Prophecy going, but we need you :^)
HOGUE
Thank you for your kind words, Rachel. Thanks also for purchasing my books in the past, you have helped my work continue. (I like your pointy nosed smiley face.)
RACHEL
John, I’m a writer, and a student of epistemology and metaphysics, and I’m quite impressed with the tone of your most recent newsletters.
HOGUE
Thank you. That is nice to hear coming from a fellow writer. The last few blogs have been difficult children to rear for posting. Problem children can turn out to be great pieces, I suppose. I am at least glad that the last several have been well received.
RACHEL
In your opinion, how close do you think we really are to reaching a critical mass of collective consciousness to wake up from this dream of physical being?
HOGUE
It is a good and sincere question but perhaps it is the wrong question to ask, because it makes one think of consciousness as a collective phenomenon rather than an individual phenomenon.
It is better to ask how close you are to a critical mass of understanding by venturing inward inside your “self.”
It may sound strange, but the best thing you could do for the collective lifting of consciousness is to let all attention directed towards the collective go. Try an experiment. Gather your full awareness moment to moment on your own transformation. That should not be construed to mean you stop whatever work you are doing to better the world.
What if nothing needs to be forced to change, because this enforcer is the very thing in the way?
I am simply suggesting that you “add” something to each and every moment, each and every action or inaction. I am suggesting that awareness be nourished and added to your life. The meditations Osho taught me are not escapist. They are “engage-ist”. They are for life, not an escape from life.
RACHEL
I know a lot of people would love to find enlightenment; I know I sure would. But really, I think the most important ‘historic’ point will be that point where enough individuals begin to break their slumber, to induce a cascade effect in the rest of humanity.
HOGUE
That is how the mind reasons us away from making a critical mass of enlightenment happen. Can you see it in your mind’s words here?
You would like enlightenment. Everyone would like it… but… it is more important to think about the abstract possibilities of a critical mass of enlightenment happening…etc. In other words, let us sit back and catch the wave of changing consciousness, not “be” the wave.
See how the mind has taken you away from the only place such a critical mass consciousness is born?
The mind takes us constantly away from our center because that is how it has been conditioned in us from birth onwards.
This ensures that you will always be chasing things that are abstracts and not bringing your energy here and now to this moment, this body, this living, present evernow.
The predictable future is made of mind. What if the being never had a past or a future? What if being was about being eternally present?
Try bringing an awareness into your life that unlocks this eternity, while daily life with its changes and movement spins around and around like a storm circling but never disturbing this eye of the life storm: the witnessing consciousness.
Whether the rest of the world achieves a critical mass of enlightenment or not is a distraction, really — a distraction of the mind to keep you from reaching your critical mass of enlightenment right here, right now.
If enough individuals understand this, then the collective will change. But it will only change when enough individuals drop their minds’ infatuation with the abstract of a critical collective mass consciousness change.
Perhaps consciousness is like love.
When you intensely seek love, it never comes.
When you let go and just be, Love comes dancing in.
Mass consciousness changing?
The masses never become conscious. Only individuals.
In your next passage, Rachel, there is another example of how the mind in us can sound like it almost knows what it is talking about. (Please do not take that personally. Everybody’s mind does this.)
Perhaps a mind can take things personally because it is the ruler of personality. The word “personality” comes from persona — Latin for “mask”. Only the false mind programs in us pretending to be real can take things personally.
So, with that in mind – or better with that IN of meditation, watching mind, let us look again at these words:
RACHEL
Yes, the world is in trouble because of resource over-consumption, but this is really just a part of the dream (drama?) of physical reality. For individual souls, and for the collective consciousness we are all holographic fragments of, this so-called physical reality we’ve constructed is, in spiritual reality, completely mutable. There isn’t anything we can’t change, and in a heart-beat.
HOGUE
These are all unsubstantiated, spiritual platitudes. They may have a fresher, new age “mask” or “label” but these are the kind of “labeled” opiates religions old and new have been pushing on us to pop like bromides since humanity’s quest for enlightenment began.
I am not saying your words are not true. The best drugs ape truth. Look at the people who thought dropping LSD gave them enlightenment. All drugs get us addicted to the experience at the cost of forgetting the “experiencer”.
So, let us be clear. I am not saying that anything you listed above is untrue. It is a pretty picture, like a beautiful picture of a sumptuous feast. Has anyone been nourished by eating pictures of food?
RACHEL
I ask myself on a regular basis when we might start seeing the first signs of a collective ‘waking-up’.
HOGUE
I predict that the people who are looking for signs will never see this collective ‘wake up’ happen, now or any moment in the next thousand years from “now”, because it is not a collective phenomenon that ever strays like a herd of sheep, from “now.”
RACHEL
I know that we still have many hundreds of years before we grow beyond physical living…
HOGUE
We assume that we “know” — that is why it takes hundreds and thousands of years. Because we are programmed by society’s mind to think we know — to think that it will take hundreds of years before it happens. The mind programs us to postpone, to wander away from this moment — perhaps the only place outside of time when waking-up can happen.
It never happened before because I no longer live in the before. It never happens later because I do not live in later. I am not living 100 years or 1,000 years from now.
It does not happen when enough people attain a critical mass of enlightenment because they are all waiting for somebody else to start that mass consciousness rolling.
Can it happen at all unless it happens to you right here, right now?
RACHEL
…but at some point we must wake enough to at least be able to choose between focusing in the physical, or in whatever higher state of being we’re in when we’re more ‘awake’.
HOGUE
That is the mind making another bromide for the sleeping soul to drink away its divine indigestion with a lovely idea, a sweet thought — sweet dreams.
RACHEL
What are your thoughts? Ha, ha, when, John, when? ;^)
HOGUE
I have given thoughts, but do not take up and pop these thoughts as another bromide pill. Take them as a hypothesis. A challenge. I wish to give the mind indigestion because the mind cannot digest what I have indicated in these words.
Now, what if you all have a destiny with eternity that is ever yours, eternally waiting, in the unguarded instant of the next moment?
What if the advent of your critical mass of enlightenment is ever close — ever now?
Explore it. Relax into it.
These meditation techniques I began offering since my last blog entry can be tools to access the eternity of the blissful present.
I will freely give you links, YouTube spots and other information about the meditations I use.
Just contact me.
John Hogue(03 March 2011)
PS—There is an Antichrist Unconscious that Nostradamus completely missed in his fascinating search through prophecy for the third and final man of evil threatening our future. I spend 25 years on the trail of the Antichrist, until I was looking at him face to face in the least expected encounter. Read the book about a journey to the Antichrist Unconscious and how one can be free of the shadow.
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011, by johnhogue and is filed under "Prophecy, 8.9 earthquake in Japan, Antichrist, Baharain, Benghazi, CNN, Djibouti, Egypt, evernow, Gaddafi, Japanese killer tsunami, Japanese quake, Jasmine Revolution, John Hogue, Libyan, LIbyan Revolution, Mabus, Meditation, Middle East, millennium prophecies, NATO, No fly zone, North Africa, Nostradamus, now, Obama, Oman, Osho, prediction, Predictions, predictions for 2011, Prophecy, Third Antichrist, Tunisia, Yemen ". You can leave a response here, or send a Trackback from your own site.Friday, 11 March 2011
The name game of climate change
The list of names for "global warming" floated in recent media, click image for the original story Image by: Anthony Watts
From the: University of Michigan
It’s all in a name: ‘Global warming’ vs. ‘climate change’
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Many Americans are skeptical about whether the world’s weather is changing, but apparently the degree of skepticism varies systematically depending on what that change is called.
According to a University of Michigan study published in the forthcoming issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, more people believe in “climate change” than in “global warming.”
“Wording matters,” said Jonathon Schuldt, the lead author of the article about the study and a doctoral candidate in the U-M Department of Psychology.
Schuldt co-authored the study with U-M psychologists Sara Konrath and Norbert Schwarz. For the research, they conducted a question wording experiment in the American Life Panel, an online survey conducted by RAND, with a national sample of 2,267 U.S. adults. Participants were asked to report their level of certainty about whether global climate change is a serious problem. In the following question, half the participants heard one version, half heard the other:
“You may have heard about the idea that the world’s temperature may have been going up [changing] over the past 100 years, a phenomenon sometimes called ‘global warming’ ['climate change']. What is your personal opinion regarding whether or not this has been happening?
Overall, 74 percent of people thought the problem was real when it was referred to as climate change, while about 68 percent thought it was real when it was referred to as global warming.
These different levels of belief may stem from the different associations carried by the two terms, Schuldt said. “While global warming focuses attention on temperature increases, climate change focuses attention on more general changes,” he said. “Thus, an unusually cold day may increase doubts about global warming more so than about climate change. Given these different associations and the partisan nature of this issue, climate change believers and skeptics might be expected to vary in their use of these terms.”
As part of the study, the researchers also analyzed the use of these two terms on political think tank websites, finding that liberals and conservatives used different terms. Conservative think tanks tend to call the phenomenon global warming, while liberal think tanks call it climate change.
And when the researchers analyzed responses to the survey by political orientation, they found that the different overall levels in belief were driven almost entirely by participants who identified themselves as Republicans. While 60 percent of Republicans reported that they thought climate change was real, for example, only 44 percent said they believed in the reality of global warming.
In contrast, about 86 percent of Democrats thought climate change was a serious problem, no matter what it was called. Why weren’t they influenced by question wording? “It might be a ceiling effect, given their high level of belief,” Konrath said. “Or it could be that Democrats’ beliefs about global climate change might be more crystallized, and as a result, more protected from subtle manipulations.”
The good news is that Americans may not be as polarized on the issue as previously thought. “The extent of the partisan divide on this issue depends heavily on question wording,” said Schwarz, who is also affiliated with the U-M Ross Business School and the Institute of Social Research (ISR). “When the issue is framed as global warming, the partisan divide is nearly 42 percentage points. But when the frame is climate change, the partisan divide drops to about 26 percentage points.”
For a free reprint from the journal’s online depository: http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/nfq073?ijkey=YcGpwzhzykOYkl7&keytype=ref
U-M Sustainability fosters a more sustainable world through collaborations across campus and beyond aimed at educating students, generating new knowledge, and minimizing our environmental footprint. Learn more at sustainability.umich.edu
===============================================================
From that reprint, the results in Table 2, proving once again that the people belive the climate has changed and will continue to do so. It is a rather obvious result. – Anthony
Table 2 from the paper - click to enlargeTuesday, 8 March 2011
Climate ugliness gets personal
OSU's Memorial Union Image via Wikipedia
???From World News Daily, with h/t to Green Hell Blog, something that if proven is quite disturbing. Yet given the kind of treatment I’ve recently received at the hands of an eco-zealot who can’t tolerate my views on climate, I’m not surprised. Scroll to the bottom of this piece and read what happened when I asked for a factual correction to real errors.
Some people have no scruples and no shame. – Anthony
Democrats attack Republican candidate’s children
By Art Robinson
In an effort to do my part in rescuing our country from the out-of-control Obama administration, last year I ran for Congress in Oregon’s 4th District against 12-term incumbent, far-left Democrat Peter DeFazio, co-founder of the House Progressive Caucus.
Although I won the nominations of the Republican, Independent and Constitution Parties and the endorsement of the Libertarian Party, a massive media smear campaign by DeFazio, paid for with money raised by MoveOn.org and from special interests favored by DeFazio in Washington, resulted in a 54.5 percent to 43.6 percent victory for DeFazio in a race that was expected to be much closer.
Although I had never run for public office before, I immediately announced my candidacy for Congress again in 2012.
However, when you take a stand for what’s right, sometimes there is retribution.
On Nov. 4, 2010, as soon as the election results were in and they were sure their candidate had won, faculty administrators at Oregon State University gave new meaning to the term “political payback.”
They initiated an attack on my three children – Joshua, Bethany and Matthew – for the purpose of throwing them all out of the OSU graduate school, despite their outstanding academic and research accomplishments. OSU is a liberal socialist Democrat stronghold in Oregon that received a reported $27 million in earmark funding from my opponent, Peter DeFazio, and his Democrat colleagues during the last legislative session.
Read full story here: Democrats attack Republican candidate’s children
Monday, 7 March 2011
The Sunday Silly – Josh on why the climate change “war” is like the war in Iraq
This gets the honor of “Climate Craziness of the Week”. Oh, that’s gonna leave a mark…
Josh writes in an email: her actual quote was:
“If we are to overcome the climate crisis we must move on to the equivalent of a war footing”
And she then likened the leadership this would require to Tony Blair’s in taking us to war in Iraq
But that’s too long for a satirical political cartoon, so Josh took the essence. Unfortunately I can’t seem to locate the online link as the Sunday Times link sends visitors to the paywall. It was in “features” and titled:
A very heated debate
Josh is working from the print edition in the UK, so I’ll take his word for it.
Here’s a letter Lucas penned in 2003 about the war in Iraq:
It is very telling. These quotes are pertinent:
They point not only to the imminent military war, which they recognise could have devastating consequences, but also to the ongoing economic war, which is being prosecuted by the US and Britain in particular, through the imposition of economic sanctions over a decade.
Um, in case you haven’t noticed lady, greens are waging economic war in the UK.
A recent broadsheet headline screamed: “Stop the war? Try telling that to the tyrannised people of Iraq.”
and …
An attack on the roads, bridges, ports or railways of Iraq would severely damage what is now an extremely well functioning food distribution system.
So will Lucas advocate stopping the tyrannizing of the British people by absurd green laws, protest takeovers of power plants by greens in the UK, Plane Stupid’s attacks on Heathrow airport, and threats of occasional electricity in the future?
Doubtful, in this case of greens -vs- the UK infrastructure, Lucas is the war leader.
Some deep self reflection is sorely needed by this confused woman.
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