Human-caused Global Warming Research Articles

The potential role of actively open-minded thinking in preventing motivated reasoning about controversial science

Ideologically motivated rejection of scientific evidence can be harmful to individuals and society, especially regarding consequential issues like climate change. A growing base of evidence suggests a cognitive style known as Actively Open-Minded Thinking (AOT) may reduce ideological rejection of scientific findings. In this article, we test the association between AOT and Americans' beliefs that global warming is mostly human-caused, a position supported by scientific consensus. We hypothesized that political conservatives with high AOT would be more likely than those with low AOT to acknowledge human-caused global warming. We predicted no such effect for liberals. Contrary to expectations, there was an unmoderated relationship between AOT and human causation belief. Higher levels of AOT were associated with increased likelihood of belief in human-caused global warming, regardless of participants' political ideology, scientific knowledge, or scientific media use. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Cult of the Climate Change Polar Bear: Knut is Dead, Long Live Knut

Harvey et al (2017) evaluate public commentary on internet web diaries (blogs) about polar bear science as a proxy to measure climate change ‘denial,’ a term used to delegitimize dissenting views on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and climate change. Greenpeace has long employed the polar bear in its advocacy advertising for climate change action. The animal achieved cult status in 2005 when a polar bear cub nicknamed Knut, was rejected by its mother at the Berlin zoo. He was adopted and raised by a German zookeeper, to the delight of the public world-wide. Knut’s appearance on the world stage coincided with the release of the climate change movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” billed as “By far the most terrifying film you will ever see.” Knut’s rise to fame overshadowed the work of a National Academies Press report that questioned the validity of the radiative forcing/greenhouse gas theory of human-caused global warming. Knut died in public on March 19, 2011, drowning in the waters of his enclosure. This paper deconstructs Harvey et al (2017) and the framing of climate change in relation to polar bears and Knut, addressing influences in financial markets and the value of the internet public forum.

The spatial distribution of Republican and Democratic climate opinions at state and local scales

Even as US partisan polarization shapes climate and energy attitudes, substantial heterogeneity in climate opinions still exists among both Republicans and Democrats. To date, our understanding of this partisan heterogeneity has been limited to analysis of national- or, less commonly, state-level opinion poll subsamples. However, the dynamics of political representation and issue commitments play out over more finely resolved state and local scales. Here we use previously validated multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) models (Howe et al., Nat Clim Chang 5(6):596–603 2015; Mildenberger et al., PLoS One 11(8):e0159774 2016) combined with a novel approach to measuring the distribution of party members to model, for the first time, the spatial distribution of partisan climate and energy opinions. We find substantial geographic variation in Republican climate opinions across states and congressional districts. While Democratic party members consistently think human-caused global warming is happening and support climate policy reforms, the intensity of their climate beliefs also varies spatially at state and local scales. These results have policy-relevant implications for the trajectory of US climate policy reforms.

At the Mountains of Monstrosity: Towards Ecomonstrous Entanglements through Images of a Fjord

Twenty-first century developments in ecophilosophy argue for a growing awareness that nonhumans (‘organic’ or otherwise) possess both vibrant agency and dark interiority and, therefore, humans – even environmentally conscious ones – must relinquish their presumed centrality and apartness from other things (anthropocentrism). Standard motivations for environmental responsibility, such as appeals to the crisis of human-caused global warming, are here postponed in order to seek means of allowing nonhuman agency and interiority to ‘speak’ or make itself felt. The article claims mountains themselves initiated this human-nonhuman entanglement and tries to follow their lead into reconfigured (non-anthropocentric) visions of coexistence. Its many-appendaged ecopoetics is comprised of photographs and recollections of mountains stitched together with the conceptual tools of monster theory, object-oriented ontology, and vital materialism. Viewed through this theoretical nexus, a hole in a photograph of the Lysefjord provokes the suggestion that holes in ontology are perforations through which human being seeps into nonhuman being and is therein transfigured, emerging porous and suffused, as much ‘the environment’ as anything else. The article’s necessary provisionality means further engagement – especially from other ‘witnesses’ of mountains – is required to test its effectiveness as an aesthetic-contemplative preface to deeper, wiser ecological ethics.

North Atlantic influence on Holocene flooding in the southern Greater Caucasus

In the context of global climate change, flooding becomes an increasingly serious threat to modern societies, and future flooding can only be understood using long-term geological flood records also encompassing Holocene climate variability. Unlike other regions, Holocene flooding in the Caucasus region is only poorly understood so far: Whereas some rivers originating from the Lesser Caucasus were investigated, no studies exist about rivers originating from the Greater Caucasus. This study investigated the Holocene fluvial dynamics of the upper Alazani River in the southern Greater Caucasus using chronostratigraphic and sedimentologic methods applied to a fluvial sediment-paleosol sequence. By comparing these data with other paleoenvironmental and regional recent hydroclimatic data, we aimed to identify the main drivers of Holocene flooding in the southern Greater Caucasus. Our study shows a link between fluvial sedimentation around 7.3, 5.4, 3.8–2.9 and around 1.7 cal. ka BP and North Atlantic Bond events. Although probably caused by a discharge maximum during spring, fluvial sedimentation is coeval with low regional spring precipitation. As supported by recent hydroclimatic data, intensified floods during Bond events could possibly be explained with more intensive precipitation but also a prolonged snow season during colder winters. The latter would lead to more spring meltwater and thus more intensive spring discharge. Consequently, given increasing annual temperatures because of human-caused global warming, the flood maxima of pluvio-nival rivers in the southern Greater Caucasus may be expected to decrease during the next decades. Our findings underline the need of geological flood records to understand future flood patterns of rivers in mountain regions with complex runoff regimes.

Change in the magnitude and mechanisms of global temperature variability with warming.

Natural unforced variability in global mean surface air temperature (GMST) can mask or exaggerate human-caused global warming, and thus a complete understanding of this variability is highly desirable. Significant progress has been made in elucidating the magnitude and physical origins of present-day unforced GMST variability, but it has remained unclear how such variability may change as the climate warms. Here we present modeling evidence that indicates that the magnitude of low-frequency GMST variability is likely to decline in a warmer climate and that its generating mechanisms may be fundamentally altered. In particular, a warmer climate results in lower albedo at high latitudes, which yields a weaker albedo feedback on unforced GMST variability. These results imply that unforced GMST variability is dependent on the background climatological conditions, and thus climate model control simulations run under perpetual preindustrial conditions may have only limited relevance for understanding the unforced GMST variability of the future.

Fort Mcmurray Wildfire 2016: Conflating Human-Caused Wildfires With Human-Caused Global Warming

As the debate over the ratio of human versus natural influence on climate change continues, proponents of the theory of catastrophic human-caused global warming often cite various extreme events as alleged evidence of human-caused climate change. This was the immediate reaction by anti-oil activists such as Naomi Klein to Alberta’s Fort McMurray wildfire of 2016, particularly as Fort McMurray is the epi-centre of demonized oil sands activity. Most recently, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued a report claiming that 2016 was the hottest year on record, linking to a map of “evidence” of extreme events wherein the Fort McMurray fire is noted as one such example. Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada made similar claims on March 2, 2017. In fact, the archived status report of the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Association (CIFFA) for that period shows that all Alberta fires were categorized by as being ‘human-caused’ and thus preventable (“human-caused” can mean any form of human-related interaction, from a power line sparking a tree branch, to negligent campers, to intentional acts, etc.). This paper reviews relevant fire risk information related to the events of May 2016 in the Fort McMurray fire, demonstrating that a combination of human-caused interaction or negligence, human-caused lack of governmental attention to recommendations from previous reports on similarly catastrophic wildfires in the same region, in conjunction with the natural warming climate anomalies of El Nino Southern Oscillation and cyclical effects of Pacific Decadal Oscillation and natural biological aging of conifers were drivers of the Fort McMurray wildfires, not human-caused global warming. The author gratefully acknowledges Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada and the Minister of Natural Resources for permission to reproduce relevant archival fire weather maps.

SE Saline Everglades Transgressive Sedimentation in Response to Historic Acceleration in Sea-Level Rise: A Viable Marker for the Base of the Anthropocene?

ABSTRACT Meeder, J.F. and Parkinson, R.W., 2018. SE Saline Everglades transgressive sedimentation in response to historic acceleration in sea-level rise: A viable marker for the base of the Anthropocene? Rate of global eustatic sea-level rise during the Holocene Epoch has been identified as the principle cause of observed changes or inferred evolution of nontectonic coastal systems in mid- to low-latitude areas. The rate of rise is now three times faster than it was for the past several thousand years and similar to values associated with the middle Holocene marine transgression. This acceleration can be attributed to human-caused global warming. In this investigation, the effects of accelerating sea-level rise on coastal sedimentary environments of the SE Saline Everglades were quantified. The results reveal historic changes to coastal habitat, sedimentation, and stratigraphy that are transgressive. These changes initiated during the early 20th century and are attributed to accelerating sea-level rise. A...

Communicating the Scientific Consensus on Human-Caused Climate Change is an Effective and Depolarizing Public Engagement Strategy: Experimental Evidence from a Large National Replication Study

This experimental study evaluated whether communicating the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is likely to be effective with the American public. Drawing on a large national sample (N = 6,301), we set out to replicate and extend the findings of van der Linden et al. (2015). Consistent with the original study, we find robust and replicated evidence that communicating the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change leads to significant and substantial changes in perceived scientific agreement among conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike. These findings prove robust, even among those predisposed to receive counter-attitudinal information (e.g., Fox-news watchers, global warming skeptics). Further, among conservatives, we find the greatest change in perceived consensus among the subset whose own friends and family are least likely to believe in human-caused global warming. In short, we find little evidence of identity-protective cognition and no evidence of belief polarization across these groups. We further find that communicating the scientific consensus has (positive) direct effects (across the political spectrum) on belief that climate change is happening, human-caused, and a serious threat that requires societal action. We also find that these direct effects are mediated by changes in perceived scientific consensus. In other words, public perception of the scientific consensus is an important gateway cognition. Results also show that belief in the scientific consensus is more influential in driving public engagement than perceived consensus among other groups (e.g., Americans). Lastly, although public understanding of the scientific consensus is low, we find that conservatives and moderates are significantly less aware of the scientific consensus than liberals.

The Likelihood of Recent Record Warmth.

2014 was nominally the warmest year on record for both the globe and northern hemisphere based on historical records spanning the past one and a half centuries1,2. It was the latest in a recent run of record temperatures spanning the past decade and a half. Press accounts reported odds as low as one-in-650 million that the observed run of global temperature records would be expected to occur in the absence of human-caused global warming. Press reports notwithstanding, the question of how likely observed temperature records may have have been both with and without human influence is interesting in its own right. Here we attempt to address that question using a semi-empirical approach that combines the latest (CMIP53) climate model simulations with observations of global and hemispheric mean temperature. We find that individual record years and the observed runs of record-setting temperatures were extremely unlikely to have occurred in the absence of human-caused climate change, though not nearly as unlikely as press reports have suggested. These same record temperatures were, by contrast, quite likely to have occurred in the presence of anthropogenic climate forcing.

Evading the Treaty Power?: The Constitutionality of Nonbinding Agreements

The U.S. Constitution states that the President can make treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided two thirds of Senators present concur. This high threshold for consent reflects the framers’ concern that treaties not be too easy to make. No one said the President alone could make treaties; many emphasized the contrary. James Wilson, for example, declared that “[n]either the President nor the Senate, solely, can complete a treaty; they are checks upon each other, and are so balanced as to produce security to the people”; Hamilton made similar observations in The Federalist. In modern times, however, Presidents on their own authority have made international agreements that look much like treaties. 2015 provides two examples. First, the President negotiated an agreement with Iran, China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain, and the European Union regarding Iran’s nuclear development. Known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and announced in July 2015, its principal goal was to limit Iran to non-military nuclear development in return for lifting U.S. and international economic sanctions on Iran. Second, the President joined with leaders of over 150 nations to produce the Paris Agreement on climate change, with a final version announced in December 2015. The Agreement attempted to promote and coordinate controls on carbon emissions in response to concerns over human-caused global warming. Both agreements appear to involve substantial commitments by the United States, but neither will depend on approval by the Senate (or Congress).The President contends that these agreements are nonbinding under international law and so can be made on the President’s sole constitutional authority. This essay assesses that claim. It generally agrees with the President’s basic proposition but raises concerns about the application of that proposition to the Iran and Paris Agreements. It concludes that without adequate safeguards this approach can provide the President with substantial ability to evade the constitutional checks on the treaty-making power.

Trends in Extreme Weather Events since 1900 – An Enduring Conundrum for Wise Policy Advice

It is widely promulgated and believed that human-caused global warming comes with increases in both the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. A survey of official weather sites and the scientific literature provides strong evidence that the first half of the 20th century had more extreme weather than the second half, when anthropogenic global warming is claimed to have been mainly responsible for observed climate change. The disconnect between real-world historical data on the 100 years’ time scale and the current predictions provides a real conundrum when any engineer tries to make a professional assessment of the real future value of any infrastructure project which aims to mitigate or adapt to climate change. What is the appropriate basis on which to make judgements when theory and data are in such disagreement?

Rational Irrationality: Modeling Climate Change Belief Polarization Using Bayesian Networks.

Belief polarization is said to occur when two people respond to the same evidence by updating their beliefs in opposite directions. This response is considered to be "irrational" because it involves contrary updating, a form of belief updating that appears to violate normatively optimal responding, as for example dictated by Bayes' theorem. In light of much evidence that people are capable of normatively optimal behavior, belief polarization presents a puzzling exception. We show that Bayesian networks, or Bayes nets, can simulate rational belief updating. When fit to experimental data, Bayes nets can help identify the factors that contribute to polarization. We present a study into belief updating concerning the reality of climate change in response to information about the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The study used representative samples of Australian and U.S. Among Australians, consensus information partially neutralized the influence of worldview, with free-market supporters showing a greater increase in acceptance of human-caused global warming relative to free-market opponents. In contrast, while consensus information overall had a positive effect on perceived consensus among U.S. participants, there was a reduction in perceived consensus and acceptance of human-caused global warming for strong supporters of unregulated free markets. Fitting a Bayes net model to the data indicated that under a Bayesian framework, free-market support is a significant driver of beliefs about climate change and trust in climate scientists. Further, active distrust of climate scientists among a small number of U.S. conservatives drives contrary updating in response to consensus information among this particular group.

Environmental Security is Homeland Security: Climate Disruption as the Ultimate Disaster Risk Multiplier

There are several important linkages among environmental hazards and crises caused (at least in part) by human-caused global warming, and both homeland security and national security risk analysis and practice. Increasingly robust research has demonstrated (1) anthropogenic climate change and its interaction with other human environmental pressures (population, pollution, and resource consumption growth); (2) worsening climate disruption patterns and disaster projections, showing long-range risk to the very survival of human civilization; and (3) links among environmental hazards, human economic and political instability, and development of political violence. This paper discusses how and why environmental security (ES) and homeland security (HS) are linked, including the threat-multiplying aspect of climate disruption risk factors; briefly contextualizes their growing interconnectedness in both theory and policy practice; and reviews some of what is most recently known about the science of climate disruption. It reviews disaster mitigation and resilient adaptation policy implications of climate variables such as extreme heat and drought, extreme storms, sea level rise, ocean ecosystem damage, and food and water crises. Most U.S. government security-related organizations now incorporate HS-ES mission statements, but current environmental security risk management and planning investment is insufficient, and burdened by political obstruction and costly scientific uncertainties.

Fair Plan 7: Earth’s Climate Future = Humanity’s Choice

Earth’s climate future is in the hands of humanity. If emissions of greenhouse gases remain unabated, Earth’s climate will return to the climate of the Late Eocene, 35 million years ago, when sea level was 73 meters (240 feet) higher than today. Should that occur, many coastal cities around the world would be inundated. Moreover the Global Warming of this unabated Reference case will be comparable to the Global Warming from the Last Glacial Maximum 21,000 years ago to the beginning of the Holocene interglacial climate 11,000 years ago. However, this human-caused Global Warming would occur 50 times faster than that caused by nature. Alternatively, humanity can mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions to keep Global Warming below the 2&#176C maximum adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change “to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. This mitigation can either be done rapidly, as in the “80/50” Plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 80% by 2050, or much more slowly, from 2020 to 2100, as in the Fair Plan to Safeguard Earth’s Climate. The Fair Plan is a compromise between doing nothing, as in the Reference case, and rapidly reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, as in the 80/50 Plan. Regardless of the Plan chosen to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to keep Global Warming below the UNFCCC limit of 2&#176C (3.6&#176F), it should not be tantamount to our saying to one of our planetary spacecraft, Bon Voyage, call us when you get to your planetary destination. Rather, as with our spacecraft, the chosen climate-change policy should be monitored throughout the 21st century and Midcourse Corrections made thereto as needed to keep our “Climate Spacecraft” on track to achieve its “Climate Target”.

The jet stream is getting weird.

The article discusses extreme summer and winter weather caused by contortions in the jet streams over North America and Europe. Topics include severe drought and winter weather in Europe and the U.S. between 2010-2014, a study by Shih-Yu (Simon) Wang and colleagues that suggests human-caused global warming reconfigured the jet stream, a greenhouse effect, called Arctic amplification, and connections between the El Nino/Southern Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation.

Laying Out The Attainable

Holding human-caused global warming to an internationally agreed-on level is still possible, but it will require large-scale technological shifts, says a United Nations report released on April 13. That level, set at a climate summit held in Copenhagen four years ago, is an average global temperature increase of 2 °C above preindustrial levels by 2100. “Only major institutional and technological change will give a better than even chance that global warming will not exceed this threshold,” according to the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That’s because without additional action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, emissions are expected to continue rising, driven by growth in global population and economic activities, according to the report. “The urgency is clear. Global emissions have to peak by the end of this decade,” says Jennifer Morgan, who was a review editor for the report’s chapter on international cooperation and is the ...

Book Review: Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate Scepticism, by James Painter

Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate Scepticism. James Painter. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford, 2011. 136 pp. $9.33 pbk. ISBN: 978-1-907384-07-3.Reviewed by: Rafis Abazov and Aiguliya Izbassarova, Al Farabi Kazakh National University, Kazakhstan DOI: 10.1177/1077699013506335James Painter's book reports original research commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that offers a comprehensive overview of the media cover- age of change denial, focusing on the United Kingdom and five other countries (Brazil, China, France, India, and the United States). This report was prepared in the context of global debates about change and the future of the Kyoto Protocol, and in preparation for the UN-led global summit RIO+20 in Rio De Janeiro in mid- 2012. It is an interesting and even contrarian contribution to the body of media studies, analyzing not only international mainstream views on change, but also the arguments of those who disagree with the mainstream authors and views and who have developed their own views on the change agenda. The author assesses very different groups and individuals from various political, social, and cul- tural backgrounds whom he collectively calls climate skeptics (the term covers a wide range of views from denialists and contrarians to outliers, p. 18).James Painter is the head of the Journalism Fellowship Programme at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. He has a wealth of field experience working at BBC World Service in various capacities, including the post of head of the Spanish American Service and performing research on change for the United Nations Development Program, Oxfam and Oxford Analytica. He has authored several books on the international media coverage of change, and in this report, he continues the series of comprehensive studies on the topic, aiming to track any increase in the amount of space given to sceptical voices . . . and to map significant differences both between countries and within the print media of the same country (p. 1).The issues of change and media coverage of the topic at national and inter- national levels have been studied quite intensively in recent years.1-5 However, the voices and arguments of those who are skeptical of-if not outright hostile to-the global efforts and activities on change have not been well studied nor always well understood.The author spends seven chapters evaluating the nature of skepticism in the media and presenting a series of case studies. Three of Painter's chapters deal with the political, economic, and ideological nature of skepticism, including the evi- dence and data used by scientists around the world and the ways various groups inter- pret the data, as well as the role of the media in aiding the process of denial of human-caused global warming amongst politicians and the public (p. …

Dogmatism in science and medicine: how dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth

The nature of scientific activity has changed dramatically over the last half century, and the objectivity and rigorous search for evidence that once defined it are being abandoned. Increasingly, this text argues, dogma has taken the place of authentic science.This study examines how conflicts of interest--both institutional and individual--have become pervasive in the science world, and also explores the troubling state of research funding and flaws of the peer-review process. It looks in depth at the dominance of several specific theories, including the Big Bang cosmology, human-caused global warming, HIV as a cause of AIDS, and the efficacy of anti-depressant drugs. In a scientific environment where distinguished experts who hold contrary views are shunned, this book is a welcome addition to the examination of scientific heterodoxies.

A Vaccine Against Ignorance?

A Vaccine Against Ignorance?