A regurgitation from the Earth Institute of Columbia university

It was written by Renee Cho, an apparatchik for the Earth Institute, a woman in her middle years with slight academic qualifications.  It appeared under the heading "How We Know Today’s Climate Change Is Not Natural"

It is just a regurgitation of common Warmist talking points with absolutely no apparent interest in the truth of those talking points.  It is too trivial an emission to warrant a thorough fisking but just a few points will show how low is the intellectual quality of her effort on behalf of Columbia.

She says: "97 percent of working climate scientists agree" but gives no reference for that assertion.  The reference is of course to the work of John Cook, an Australian psychologist.  If she had read Cook's paper she would know that two thirds of climate scientists took no position on anthropogenic global warming.  Only one third did, which is 33%, not 97%.  A big difference.  There is NO consensus.

She says: "Antarctic ice sheets are decreasing in mass".  They are not.  Even Warmist scientists such as Zwally concede that the Anarctic overall is gaining mass.

Then she goes on to the tired old nonsense about Methane.  What she says of Methane is only true in the laboratory, not in the actual atmosphere.  The radiative frequencies CH4 intercepts are also absorbed by the much more plentiful water vapor so any  effect methane might have is heavily masked.

And so it goes.  The whole thing is amateurish trash with no regard for the truth.  If that represents Columbia, Columbia has fallen far.  I reproduce below only the first half of it


Last week, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, chaired by climate contrarian Lamar Smith, R-Texas, held a hearing on climate science. The hearing featured three scientists who are dubious about the conclusions of the majority of climate scientists, and climate scientist Michael Mann, best known for his “hockey stick graph” of temperatures over the last thousand years illustrating the impact of humans on global warming.

This week, Scott Pruitt, Environmental Protection Agency administrator, who had said that human activity was not the primary contributor to global warming, acknowledged that it plays a role—but stressed the need to figure out exactly how much of one.

Despite the many climate “skeptics” in key positions of power today, 97 percent of working climate scientists agree that the warming of Earth’s climate over the last 100 years is mainly due to human activity that has increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Why are they so sure?

Earth’s climate has changed naturally over the past 650,000 years, moving in and out of ice ages and warm periods. Changes in climate occur because of alterations in Earth’s energy balance, which result from some kind of external factor or “forcing”—an environmental factor that influences the climate. The ice ages and shifting climate were caused by a combination of changes in solar output, Earth’s orbit, ocean circulation, albedo (the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface) and makeup of the atmosphere (the amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone that are present).

Scientists can track these earlier natural changes in climate by examining ice cores drilled from Greenland and Antarctica, which provide evidence about conditions as far back as 800,000 years ago. The ice cores have shown that rising CO2 levels and rising temperatures are closely linked.

Scientists also study tree rings, glaciers, pollen remains, ocean sediments, and changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun to get a picture of Earth’s climate going back hundreds of thousands of years or more.

Today, CO2 levels are 40 percent higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution began; they have risen from 280 parts per million in the 18th century to over 400 ppm in 2015 and are on track to reach 410 ppm this spring.

In addition, there is much more methane (a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than CO2 in the short term) in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 800,000 years—two and a half times as much as before the Industrial Revolution. While some methane is emitted naturally from wetlands, sediments, volcanoes and wildfires, the majority of methane emissions come from oil and gas production, livestock farming and landfills.

Global temperatures have risen an average of 1.4˚ F since 1880. Sea ice in the Arctic has thinned and decreased in the last few decades; the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are decreasing in mass. The North and South Poles are warming faster than anywhere else on Earth. Glaciers are retreating on mountains all over the world. Spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the last 50 years.

The number of record-breaking hot temperatures in the U.S. is on the rise. Oceans are the warmest they have been in a half-century; the top layer is warming about 0.2˚F per decade. The oceans are also 30 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution because they are absorbing more CO2. Global sea levels rose an average of 6.7 inches in the last century, and in the last 10 years, have risen almost twice as fast.


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