Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

""John Cook, et al and the "97% consensus" paper was revealed to be a farce, its conclusion planned in advance on his Web forum, and the methodology cooked to provide the desired result. This is--or should be--common knowledge by now. The farce of Mann's "hockey stick" has been very widely reported, as well as the FOIA-leaked emails proving it, so you have no excuse to be ignorant of it, either.""

This is patently false. CookVerheggen 2014 - 91% consensus; Farnsworth and Lichter, 2011 - 84% consensus; Anderegg et al, 2010 - 97% consensus; Doran, 2009 - 97% consensus; Bray and von Storch, 2008 - 93.8% consensus; STATS, 2007 - 95% consensus; Oreskes, 2004 - 100% consensus, Lynas et al, 2021 - >99%.

Not only was cook right that there is a consensus, but there is even now a consensus on the consensus and the consensus has grown from 97% to >99%. Cook hasn't been discredited. He's been confirmed over and over by independent groups using completely different methodologies.

This is exactly the same case with Mann. Not only has the hockey stick been confirmed independently countless times other groups have extended the paleo climate reconstruction back over 100,000 years and still come to the same conclusion that current anthropogenic warming is unprecedented. Manns emails were hacked and snippits were taken out of context to paint a misleading picture of his methodologies.

One of his biggest critics physicist Richard Muller (https://youtu.be/8BQpciw8suk here he is criticizing mann) founded an institution called Berkley Earth specifically to investigate Manns findings. He got independent funding and hired the some of the greatest experts in relevant fields including one who received a Nobel while working there. They used the most rigorous statistical methods and were the first group to synthesize every available data set. They found that not only was Mann correct, but that they previous studies had actually underestimated the warming.

""The predictions about future global average temperature anomaly does not involve reproducible experiments, and the models have, thus far, all proven incorrect.""

This is false. The planet is about 1.1C above preindustrial temps. These temps are unprecedented in over 100,000 years. Many studies have predicted that the earth would be this warm at this time with this level of co2. Models are run with multiple emissions scenarios. The way denialsts come to the conclusion you have is to pick a scenario with higher co2 levels than we actually got and claim it overestimated warming. When you pick a scenario that actually reflects the co2 levels we have the predictions are all pretty much in line with what actually has happened.

""As Cook and Mann have shown, it is, and it does""

This opinion has been bought and paid for by fossil fuel companies who paid PR companies to smear these guys. The science stands up very well, but you've bought in and it doesn't matter if 10 or 10,000 studies confirm their findings you will dismiss it as a conspiracy.

""we're using climate change now""

Global warming and climate change are both terms which are in regular usage by climatologists. Global warming is what our greenhouse gas emissions causing. Climate change is a term used to describe the knock on effects of global warming like disruption to the jet stream, increased atmospheric water vapor, droughts, etc. The only time anyone tried to change out the terms global warming for climate change was when PR expert and republican political strategist Frank Luntz used focus groups to discover people showed less concern if climate change was used instead of global warming. After that republicans began insisting that climate change was the correct terminology and this idea spread somewhat in the media and even unwitting democrats. Scientists never insisted we use the term climate change over global warming. It's ironic that a right wing PR campaign is now put forward as evidence of some kind of moving of the goal posts.

Your post struck a chord in me. I work with civil engineering (water management) which sounds like it could impact climate change. Nope. I work on how to make our processes more efficient so we can build more infrastructure faster. Infrastructure that has to be maintained CO2 emission free in the future - we are building more of it.

And I am truly bewildered. When I look at all the graphs the only thing I see is that we have to stop everything now. But what I see at work is that we just keep digging with an even faster pace.

This summer I tried to read some old Greek tragedies. The characters have to make difficult choices and it all ends with tragedy despite everyone’s best intensions and efforts. I was saddened by the resemblance on how humanity is tackling climate change. I am afraid we are writing an old Greek tragedy.

We will have to. I know it can seem like an argument against doing anything, but that is not where I'm coming from. I'm also not arguing in favor of self flagellation or individual action in the face of huge social forces.

But, given how grave and urgent the situation is getting, there is no way to convert all curent energy generation to green energy AND increase energy generation capacity to keep up with normal economic growth AND increase it many times over to electrify all transportation AND electrify all heating. And even if we were to succeed in all that, that only covers about half of US emissions at best - the other half is coming from agriculture, industry and residential emissions. Not to mention the massive emissions that are happening in China but ultimately serving the US market.

It's simply not possible to achieve the necessary time frames (net 0 in 20 years) without significantly reducing economic activity and standards of living in the short term - then growing back to current activity and standards of living in the longer term.

> This opinion has been bought and paid for by fossil fuel companies who paid PR companies to smear these guys. The science stands up very well, but you've bought in and it doesn't matter if 10 or 10,000 studies confirm their findings you will dismiss it as a conspiracy.

If dang were made aware of that comment of yours, I wonder if he would sanction you for it. Readers (as if there are any) will note that I've made no such ad hominem comments about you, but have only commented on the facts and the logic of the issue.

Now, since I claimed that Cook, et al was a farce, you've said:

> Not only was cook right that there is a consensus, but there is even now a consensus on the consensus and the consensus has grown from 97% to >99%. Cook hasn't been discredited. He's been confirmed over and over by independent groups using completely different methodologies.

Again, this claim of yours is false. In fact, the claims of Cook, et al have been repeatedly proven to be misleading, false, and intentionally so:[0]

    Two-thirds of the papers that Cook and his colleagues examined expressed no view at all on the consensus. Of the remaining 34%, the authors claimed that 33% endorsed the consensus. Divide 33 by 34 and you get 97%. But this result is essentially meaningless, because they set the bar so low.

    The survey authors didn’t ask if climate change was dangerous or “manmade”. They only asked if a given paper accepted that humans have some effect on the climate, which as already noted is uncontroversial. It could mean as little as accepting the “urban heat island” effect.

    So a far better question would be: How many of the studies claimed that humans have caused most of the observed global warming? And oddly, we do know. Because buried in the authors’ data was the answer: A mere 64 out of nearly 12,000 papers! That’s not 97%, it’s one half of one percent. It’s one in 200.

    And it gets worse. In a follow-up study[1], climatologist David Legates read those 64 papers and found that a third of them didn’t even say what Cook and his team claimed. Only 41 actually endorsed the view that global warming is mostly manmade. And we still haven’t got to it being “dangerous”. That part of the survey results was simply invented, by politicians and activists.

    Other researchers have condemned the Cook study on other grounds too. For instance economist Richard Tol showed[2] that over three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsing even the weak consensus actually said nothing at all on the subject. And evidence later emerged[3] that the authors of the paper were drafting press releases about their findings before they even started doing the research, which indicates an alarming level not of warming or of consensus but of bias.

Now, rather than assail you with accusations of conspiracy and partisanship, as you have repeatedly done to me, I'll leave speculation about your motives to the reader (as if there are any left here). But we can all see which kind of comment gets upvoted here, and which kind gets downvoted to death. "Science," indeed.

0: https://climatediscussionnexus.com/videos/the-97-consensus-s...

1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9

2: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

3: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/09/Warming-cons...