Seeing the environmental forest

While browsing a climate change article on Huffington Post, I noticed a global warming denier using a Watts Up With That post by Lord Monckton as "evidence" that global temperatures haven't changed since September 1996.  In it, Monckton uses least squares regression to show that satellite data from RSS is flat (trend: -0.0001394ºC per year) between September 1996 and January 2014.

An op-ed in my local paper caught my eye yesterday.  By Charles Krauthammer, it's largely a fact-free repetition of talking points trying to dispute whether or not climate change is settled science.  While my hometown paper has the editorial paywalled, it's available at the Washington Post .  Some of his points are utterly unrelated, some are badly outdated, and some are out-right lies.

This one is too good not to share.  It's the response of Paul Douglas, a meteorologist who happens to be a registered Republican, to a question on why more climate scientists do not enter the public debate (full response found here ).  His take-home line? "To the heart of your question, why don’t more climate scientists enter into the public debate? Because the debate is over. It’s the moral and scientific equivalent of debating gravity." As readers who peruse the archives of this blog know, I've spent quite a bit of time detailing why the scientific debate is over.  However, I have one quibble with Douglas' response: He fails to distinguish between the scientific debate and the public debate.  The question concerned the public debate—and the public debate is far from over.  Given the scientific illiteracy of many American voters ( 26% of whom don't even know that the Earth revolves around the sun ), it's been easy for fossil fuel interests to spread

California's drought has been in the news quite a bit lately, complete with dire predictions for agriculture and food prices across the US.  The one question I had after reading several articles is "Just how bad is it?"  The answer: Really bad.

In case you missed it, the original comments I'm answering are found at the end of my bibliography of hockey sticks found here .  Part 1 of my response is here .  Now on to the second comment .

Apparently my post listing 36 publications that all show a "hockey-stick" has attracted some attention, including from a self-proclaimed paleogeneticist who claims that he's an expert in climate models .  I'm putting my response here, as responding to the Gish Gallop of BS he wrote would take far too much space in the comments section of that post.  If he doesn't like it?  Too bad.

2013 was notable in several ways, from the record warmth in Australia to the polar vortex that gripped the Eastern US in November and December due to a weakened Arctic polar jet stream and record drought in the US state of California, along with numerous extreme weather events around the globe .

After digging through the recent State Department Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone XL Pipeline , I am quite disappointed.  While right-wingers are cheering the fact that the State Department found that building Keystone XL won't have an impact on greenhouse gas emissions, that is the wrong conclusion.  In reality, the State Department found that the tar sand oil flowing through Keystone XL will generate the equivalent of 147 to 168 million metric tons of CO 2 emission per year (Executive Summary, page 15).  That is a sizable contribution to greenhouse gas emission from one single project.  It's between 57% and 65% of the average total CO2 emissions from all the world's volcanoes combined (average combined volcanic emissions per year: 260 million metric tons, see Gerlach 2011 ) and enough to raise atmospheric CO2 levels by 0.021 ppmv per year.  And the State Department somehow thinks that isn't going to impact greenhouse gas emissions? So, how could the