[✔️] April 7, 2023- Global Warming News Digest |

Fri Apr 7 10:04:32 EDT 2023

/*April*//*7, 2023*/

/[  BBC reports ] /
*Climate change: Norwegian seafloor holds clue to Antarctic melting*
By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent
@BBCAmos
Antarctica's melting ice sheet could retreat much faster than previously 
thought, new research suggests.

The evidence comes from markings on the seafloor off Norway that record 
the pull-back of a melting European ice sheet thousands of years ago.

Today, the fastest withdrawing glaciers in Antarctica are seen to 
retreat by up to 30m a day.

But if they sped up, the extra melt water would have big implications 
for sea-level rises around the globe...

Ice losses from Antarctica caused by climate change have already pushed 
up the surface of the world's oceans by nearly 1cm since the 1990s.

The researchers found that with the Norwegian sheet, the maximum retreat 
was more than 600m a day.

"This is something we could see if we continue with the upper estimates 
for temperature rise," explained Dr Christine Batchelor from Newcastle 
University, UK.

"Although, worryingly, when we did the equations to think about what 
would be needed to instigate such retreat in Antarctica, we actually 
found there are places where you could get similar pulses of withdrawal 
even under the basal melt rates we know are happening at the moment," 
she told BBC News.

- Scientists track iceberg the size of London
- Antarctica sea-ice hits new record low
- Vast glacier at mercy of sea warmth increase

Dr Batchelor and colleagues report their research in this week's edition 
of the journal Nature.

The team has been looking at a great swathe of seafloor off the central 
Norwegian coast. Twenty thousand years ago, this area was witness to a 
massive Northern European ice sheet in the process of withdrawal and 
break-up.

The sheet's past existence is written into more than 7,600 parallel, 
ladder-like ridges that have been sculpted in the seafloor's muddy 
sediments. These corrugations are less than 2.5m high and are spaced 
between about 25m and 300m apart.

The scientists interpret the ridges to be features that are generated at 
an ice grounding zone.

This is the zone where glacier ice flowing off the land into the ocean 
becomes buoyant and starts to float. The corrugations are created as the 
ice at this location repeatedly pats the sediments as the daily tides 
rise and fall.

For the pattern to have been produced and preserved, the ice must have 
been in retreat (advancing ice would destroy the ridges); and the tidal 
"clock" therefore gives a rate for this reversal...

The team's results show the former European ice sheet underwent pulses 
of rapid retreat at speeds of 55m to 610m per day.

Importantly, the fastest rates were observed in places where the 
seafloor was relatively flat. These are locations where the ice above 
would tend to be more uniform in thickness and where less melting is 
required to make the ice float to aid its retreat.

Similar corrugations have been detected on the seafloor around 
Antarctica but the examples are quite limited in extent. The Norwegian 
study area is vastly greater and so gives a much clearer impression of 
how quickly ice can go backwards in a warming climate.

Today, scientists use satellites to monitor the grounding zones of 
Antarctica's ocean-terminating glaciers. The spacecraft can trace where 
the ice is being lifted and lowered on the tides...
The fastest retreat has been observed at Pope Glacier in the west of the 
continent, where an average rate of 33m a day was measured over a period 
of 3.5 months in 2017.

But Pope is not one of Antarctica's mightier glaciers. Scientists are 
more interested in behemoths such as Thwaites. This body of ice is the 
size of Britain and could raise global sea levels by half a metre, were 
it all to melt.

"Four kilometres inland of the current grounding line at Thwaites, there 
is a conduit-like channel where the seabed is flat. It is the perfect 
setting for this process of buoyancy-driven retreat," said co-author Dr 
Frazer Christie of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), Cambridge 
University, UK.

"We're talking about a small area compared with Thwaites' entire 
drainage basin, but even a short-lived, very rapid retreat will have 
implications for the future dynamics of the glacier."

Drs Batchelor and Christie say their team's observations will fine-tune 
the computer models that try to forecast Antarctica's destiny in an 
ever-warming world. At the moment, these models are missing important 
details of ice behaviour.

"But this is why we look into the geological past to tell us what's 
possible. Yes, we have satellites, but their records are very short - 
only 40 years or so," commented co-author Prof Julian Dowdeswell, also 
from SPRI.

"Importantly, the geological record is something that has actually 
happened. It's an 'observation' in the real world, not just in the 
computer model world," he told BBC News.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65192825

/[ from "Living on Earth"  audio and transcript ]/
*Dire Climate Warning From IPCC*
Air Date: Week of March 31, 2023
The world has no more than a year or two to start bending the curve of 
carbon emissions downward to avoid more drastic impacts of climate 
change, according to the latest scientific consensus the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. UPenn climate scientist 
Michael Mann joins Host Steve Curwood to discuss what’s at stake for the 
planet and what’s necessary to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius...
- - https://megaphone.link/LOE8205389045
CURWOOD: So to what extent is the bad news already baked in? And what 
aspects Do we have a better chance to avoid? Do you think?

MANN: Yeah, so you know, the extreme weather events, the heat waves, the 
wildfires, the floods, the superstorms. To a large extent, those are 
really related to the warming of Earth's surface, the warming of the 
ocean surface, the warming of the planet surface. And we know the 
science tells us that once we bring carbon emissions to zero, the 
planet's surface stops warming up. So that's really important. So we're 
sort of stuck with the worsening of those impacts that we've already 
seen. In the best-case scenario, we've got to live with that. But we can 
prevent them from getting worse. Now, where things are a little more 
concerning, is with say, the behavior of the ice sheets, and sea level 
rise, those sort of components of the system are sort of more cumulative 
in nature, they are a consequence of sort of the inertia of the climate 
system and the oceans, you know, will continue to warm up for decades, 
the surface might start warming up, but the sub surface of the oceans 
will continue to warm as that heat from the surface sort of diffuses 
down and penetrates into the deep ocean, and sea level will expand as 
the ocean continues to heat up. And those ice sheets are very sluggish 
in their response. So once you start to see the disintegration of those 
ice shelves, and then parts of the ice sheet, it's very difficult to 
stop that. And so some of those impacts could continue to get worse. 
Even if we stop our carbon emissions. Even if we stop the surface of the 
planet from warming up.

CURWOOD: For the years that you've been working on this. There's been 
pretty robust discussion about this problem. But at the end of the day, 
we still aren't headed in the right direction, we may be slowing down, 
there may be some more awareness. But still, if we continue with the 
present rate, this report says we're really in for it. We are in the 
process of destroying our civilization. But what's the bright side here? 
What's the opportunity here? What's thing that we're missing?
MANN: The reason for cautious optimism here is that we're not heading 
headlong into the climate crisis in the way that we were, say 10 or 20 
years ago with our carbon emissions, they've stopped going up carbon 
emissions were rising, and that was deeply problematic. Now, they've 
sort of hit a plateau where they're no longer rising globally. And we 
know that that is due in substantial part to the decarbonization of the 
global economy. We are seeing movement away from fossil fuel energy to 
renewable energy. The obstacles at this point, aren't climate physics, 
and they're not technology. The obstacles right now are entirely 
political, and political obstacles can be overcome with enough sort of 
popular support with an uprising with a global movement like we're 
seeing now with climate, the Youth Climate movement has really sort of 
recenter the conversation where it always needed to be on our ethical 
obligation to act before it's too late. And I do think that we're seeing 
a tipping point of the good kind, it gives me hope that it's not too 
late for us to do this.

CURWOOD: Michael Mann is the director of the Center for Science, 
sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, and 
author of the forthcoming book, Our Fragile Moment. Professor thanks so 
much for taking the time with us today.

MANN: Thank you Steve, always a pleasure.
https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=23-P13-00013&segmentID=1&mc_cid=c5cdb5498f&mc_eid=c0e3fd9032

/[ does not grasp gasses ]/
*Climate experts hit back at Australian politician’s bizarre theory 
about gravity’s role in global heating*
Gerard Rennick met with scorn, derision and plenty of corrections over 
viral tweet and claim that scientists are ‘cancelling gravity’

Graham Readfearn
@readfearn
Tue 4 Apr 2023

An Australian senator has attempted to undermine the entire theory of 
the greenhouse effect with a bizarre viral claim that scientists have 
been ignoring gravity’s role in heating the planet.

The tweet from the Queensland senator Gerard Rennick, a member of the 
conservative Liberal National party of Queensland which is part of the 
main opposition Coalition, has gone viral this week and has been met 
with scorn, derision and plenty of corrections from high-profile climate 
scientists.

“Senator, you should be thankful you can’t be impeached for ignorance,” 
wrote Prof Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at the University 
of Pennsylvania.
In the tweet, made last month and viewed more than 850,000 times, 
Rennick posted a video with the words “scientists ignore the fact that 
gravity plays a role in heating the earth … That’s why ‘Net Zero’ CO2 
emissions won’t stop ‘Climate Change’.”

The video features Rennick appearing in a session of parliament where he 
asked a bemused head of a government science agency whether “gases [in 
the atmosphere] trap convection”...
{ twitter https://twitter.com/SenatorRennick/status/1636230316921884672 }

/[  Simple explanation from NASA Climate Kids: 
climatekids.nasa.gov/carbon/  ]/
Dr Chris Colose, a climate scientist at Nasa, replied on Twitter that 
Rennick’s question “do gases trap convection”, “doesn’t even make sense 
as a statement. Nor does it discount the importance of [greenhouse gases].”

In an article linked from the tweet, Rennick, whose biography says he 
has degrees in taxation, commerce and finance, wrote that gravity was 
“overlooked by climate scientists who want to blame CO2 for trapping 
heat in the atmosphere”.

All of this, according to Rennick, meant CO2 was not responsible for 
global heating. Climate change was “junk science”, he wrote.

Engaging on Twitter, Mann described Rennick’s statement as “gibberish” 
and a “stringing together of scientific terms reminiscent of monkeys 
typing on a typewriter”.

When Rennick accused Mann of “cancelling gravity” in his explanations of 
the greenhouse effect, Mann showed him a mathematical explanation of how 
air temperatures change depending on altitude...
- -
Associate Prof Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at the 
University of New South Wales Canberra, pointed to Rennick’s areas of 
expertise, which don’t include atmospheric physics or climate science.

“He’s got no expertise whatsoever. It’s a bit like me going and doing 
someone else’s taxes. I wouldn’t. There’s no point,” she said.

Rennick wrote that adding CO2 “doesn’t add to the overall heat in the 
system” but Perkins-Kirkpatrick said it does trap more heat – a property 
of CO2 established in the 19th century.

Rennick tried to argue the “first law of Thermodynamics” meant “energy 
can neither be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed”.

He wrote any radiation absorbed or emitted by CO2 “doesn’t add to the 
overall heat in the system”.

But Perkins-Kirkpatrick said Rennick had again misunderstood the basics 
because energy entered the Earth’s atmosphere from the sun, and energy 
also left the atmosphere.

“Yes, energy can’t be created or destroyed but it does leave the Earth’s 
system. The Earth isn’t closed off. It’s part of the universe,” she said.

Scientists measure the Earth’s energy imbalance – that is, the 
difference between how much energy from the sun is absorbed by the Earth 
and how much radiation is emitted back out to space.

A 2021 study found this imbalance – caused mostly by adding greenhouse 
gases to the atmosphere – had doubled between 2005 and 2019, causing the 
Earth to gain more heat.

Rennick, who once accused the country’s weather bureau of engaging in a 
conspiracy to alter climate records, said it was “categorically false” 
that CO2 trapped heat like a greenhouse, because a greenhouse or blanket 
“traps convection because it a solid object”.

The common analogy that greenhouse gases act like a blanket around the 
planet is not supposed to describe exactly how the atmosphere works.

Perkins-Kirkpatrick said the analogy “isn’t perfect” but it gave a good 
example of how adding extra greenhouse gases to the atmosphere trapped 
more heat near the Earth’s surface.

Prof Steven Sherwood of the Climate Change Research Centre at the 
University of NSW, said: “There’s a saying in science when you really 
want to cut something down. ‘It’s not even wrong.’”

He said the role of convection was well understood. “It’s important and 
it is part of global warming. It is how heat gets to upper parts of the 
atmosphere. But we know that. It doesn’t falsify global warming. There’s 
just no logic [to Rennick’s tweet].”

Dr Andrew King, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, said 
both gravity and convection were included in climate modelling, and to 
suggest they were ignored was “complete nonsense”.

“It’s quite concerning that this is coming from an elected official. I 
think often as scientists we think people are sick of hearing about 
climate change and have quite a good grasp of the greenhouse effect. But 
maybe not. There’s still a big knowledge gap there in the office of 
Senator Rennick.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/05/climate-experts-hit-back-at-australian-politicians-bizarre-theory-about-gravitys-role-in-global-heating

- -

/[ some humor to follow this ]/
https://twitter.com/richardabetts/status/1642560324212518912/photo/1

- -

/[ ///" that's not right, that's not even wrong" / ] /
*Pauli and Not Even Wrong*
Posted on October 1, 2005 by woit
When I first started thinking about using “Not Even Wrong” as the title 
of a book, I did some research to try and find out where the supposed 
Pauli quote came from. No one seemed to have any information about this, 
other than the attribution to Pauli, and various different stories 
existed about the context in which he had used the phrase. I started to 
worry that these stories, like many of the best ones about Pauli, might 
be apocryphal, so I contacted a few physicists who had some connection 
to Pauli to ask them about this. Prof. Karl von Meyenn, the editor of 
Pauli’s correspondence, wrote back to tell me that the phrase doesn’t 
occur in his correspondence. He pointed me to a biographical notice 
about Pauli written soon after his death by Rudolf Peierls as the best 
source for the story of Pauli using the phrase.

Peierls writes

    No account of Pauli and his attitude to people would be complete
    without mention of his critical remarks, for which he was known and
    sometimes feared throughout the world of physics…

    No doubt many of the stories of this kind circulated about him are
    apocryphal, but the examples below come from reliable sources or
    from conversations at which the writer was present…

    Quite recently, a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist
    which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted
    Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘It is not even wrong.’

The Peierls article is in
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 5 (Feb. 
1960), 174-192.

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=271

/[ Wolfgang Pauli is not a related ancestor to Richard Pauli ]/

/
/

/
/

///[The news archive - looking back//at a few important news stories 
over past years show how we are pushed to forget.//]/
*April 7 *- *  April 7th has been a big day for forgetting -*

April 7, 2009: In a story entitled "New Data Show Rapid Arctic Ice 
Decline," the Washington Post observes:

    "The new evidence -- including satellite data showing that the
    average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and
    2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s --
    contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington
    Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not
    significantly declined since 1979."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/06/AR2009040601634.html

- -

April 7, 2011: In a Huffington Post piece, former fundamentalist 
Christian activist Frank Schaeffer explains religiously motivated 
climate-change denial:

    "The religious right/far right Tea Party et al. favor private
    'facts,' too. They claimed that global warming wasn't real. They
    asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who
    insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human
    actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/republicans-vomiting-on-t_b_845948.html

- -

April 7, 2012: On MSNBC's "Up," Chris Hayes discusses the prosecution 
and imprisonment of climate activist Tim DeChristopher
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIFzAgFMeSE&sns=em

- -

April 7, 2014:

• Showtime schedules a free online broadcast of the first part of its 
documentary series "Years of Living Dangerously."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brvhCnYvxQQ&sns=em

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/showtime-series-aims-to-engage-sleepy-public-on-climate-change-with-celebrity-guides/

- --

• The Union of Concerned Scientists releases a study on cable-news 
climate coverage, noting that CNN and Fox News have abandoned scientific 
accuracy on the topic.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cable-news-climate-change_n_5093099

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/07/3423224/cable-news-accuracy-climate-science/

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/04/cable-news-fox-climate-science-accuracy/ 

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2014/04/07/new-report-finds-cnn-and-fox-news-weaken-public/198775 

- -

  April 7, 2015:

• The New York Times reports on Harvard Law School Professor Laurence 
Tribe's war on the EPA's efforts to fight carbon pollution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/us/laurence-tribe-fights-climate-case-against-star-pupil-from-harvard-president-obama.html

  - -

• Washington Post op-ed columnist Dana Milbank observes:

"There is no denying it: Climate-change deniers are in retreat.

"What began as a subtle shift away from the claim that man-made global 
warming is not a threat to the planet has lately turned into a stampede. 
The latest attempt to deny denial comes from the conservative American 
Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful group that pushes for states to 
pass laws that are often drafted by industry. As my Post colleagues Tom 
Hamburger, Joby Warrick and Chris Mooney report, ALEC is not only 
insisting that it doesn’t deny climate change — it’s threatening to sue 
those who suggest otherwise...

"The turnabout at ALEC follows an about-face at the Heartland Institute, 
a libertarian outfit that embraces a description of it as 'the world’s 
most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate 
change.'

"But on Christmas Eve, Justin Haskins, a blogger and editor at 
Heartland, penned an article for the conservative journal Human Events 
declaring: 'The real debate is not whether man is, in some way, 
contributing to climate change; it’s true that the science is settled on 
that point in favor of the alarmists.'

"Haskins called it 'a rather extreme position to say that we ought to 
allow dangerous pollutants to destroy the only planet we know of that 
can completely sustain human life,' and he suggested work on 
“technologies that can reduce CO2 emissions without destroying whole 
economies.'"

(Milbank failed to acknowledge in his column that his Washington Post 
colleagues George Will and Charles Krauthammer continue, against all 
reason and logic, to reject the overwhelming scientific evidence of a 
major threat to human life from carbon pollution.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-deniers-are-in-retreat/2015/04/06/942eb980-dc9f-11e4-be40-566e2653afe5_story.html

- -

• MSNBC's Ed Schultz discusses the GOP's obsession with denying 
human-caused climate change.

http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/watch/fighting-the-gops-climate-denying-policy-424488515724

- -

April 7, 2018:
The New York Times reports:

    “As ethical questions threaten the Environmental Protection
    Administrator, Scott Pruitt, President Trump has defended him with a
    persuasive conservative argument: Mr. Pruitt is doing a great job at
    what he was hired to do, roll back regulations.

    “But legal experts and White House officials say that in Mr.
    Pruitt’s haste to undo government rules and in his eagerness to hold
    high-profile political events promoting his agenda, he has often
    been less than rigorous in following important procedures, leading
    to poorly crafted legal efforts that risk being struck down in court.

    “The result, they say, is that the rollbacks, intended to fulfill
    one of the president’s central campaign pledges, may ultimately be
    undercut or reversed.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/climate/scott-pruitt-epa-rollbacks.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news 

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