By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.

Summary: Left and Right in America are in thrall to propaganda. Here is the latest in climate doomsterism. This shows how it turns science into propaganda. It does not explain why we love these stories. It does not explain how we can regain our skepticism and desire to see the world clearly. See the end section for those answers.

Here is the latest in doomster coverage by Chris Mooney in the WaPo…

“Two years ago, former NASA climate scientist James Hansen and a number of colleagues laid out a dire scenario in which gigantic pulses of fresh water from melting glaciers could upend the circulation of the oceans, leading to a world of fast-rising seas and even superstorms. “Hansen’s scenario was based on a computer simulation, not hard data from the real world, and met with skepticism from a number of other climate scientists. But now, a new oceanographic study appears to have confirmed one aspect of this picture — in its early stages, at least. “The new research, based on ocean measurements off the coast of East Antarctica, shows that melting Antarctic glaciers are indeed freshening the ocean around them. And this, in turn, is blocking a process in which cold and salty ocean water sinks below the sea surface in winter, forming ‘the densest water on the Earth,’ in the words of study lead author Alessandro Silvano, a researcher with the University of Tasmania in Hobart. This Antarctic bottom water has stopped forming in two key regions of Antarctica, the research shows — the West Antarctic coast and the coast around the enormous Totten glacier in East Antarctica.”

Buried into the article is information putting this in a less dramatic context.

“Hansen said that ‘this study provides a nice small-scale example of processes that we talk about in our paper. …On the large-scale issue, it is too early to say how these feedback processes will play out, based on empirical evidence,” Hansen said by email. “If we stay on business-as-usual [greenhouse gas] emissions rates, so that global warming continues to increase, I expect that the freshwater injection rate will increase (mainly via ice faster ice shelf breakup and underwater melt) and sea ice area will increase. This experiment will be playing out over the next years and decades.'”

Deeper still into the article, Mooney reveals a detail which overturns the narrative.

“One limitation with the current study, however, is that although the researchers have found that deep water is not forming in two key Antarctic regions, they cannot say when a change in these regions occurred. Measurements do not go back far enough for that, study author Silvano said. Thus, it’s possible that deep water formation in these regions shut off a long time ago, well before the modern period of intense climate warming. That would make it harder to pin current events on human-caused climate change.”

Translate “make it harder to pin …on human-caused climate change” into “we’ll try, but have no evidence.”

Mooney relies on a staple of alarmists, what Andrew Revkin calls the “single study syndrome” (e.g., see his NYT articles here and here). The mainstream media broadcast scary papers but never mention those that contradict the doomster climate story. For example, a new paper by Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate: “The impact of recent forcing and ocean heat uptake data on estimates of climate sensitivity.” This is one of several paper suggesting that the climate is much less sensitive to CO2 than the major climate models assume. Letting people learn about this science would ruin the science is science is settled narrative.

It is not just politics. Climate alarmism serves a larger purpose for journalists. We live in what Peter Moore calls “the Crisis Crisis.” News exaggerated into fake news as too many journalists compete for clicks.

“It’s bad news Biblical style: plagues of swarming journalists are swallowing — and selling — every doomsday scenario in sight. …they’re talking crisis: drugs, vanishing rain forests, terrorism, Armageddon. They’re inflating stories to ten times their natural size, decrying the end of the world. Their graphics are flashier than video games, their footage better than MTV, their high-tension talk scarier than s-f.”

Amplifying this to cause panic

The WaPo article is too intellectual to cause mass panic. So it is amplified by the Leftist media. Alternet runs several articles like this every week, and none that challenge the narrative.

By Thom Hartmann (Independent Media Institute) at Alternet.

“Is Europe about to experience famine?”

Lots and lots of speculation. No mention of contrary research. Mooney’s article is its foundation. Mountains of hysteria built on a molehill, concluding that doom is nigh (as a thousand other articles have said in the past 30 years).

“Given the stakes – the survival of much of the western world, and “civilization” as we know it – we all must step up and become political activists.

“Note to Republicans and GOP donors: It’s no longer just your children and grandchildren whose lives you’re ruining in a distant future when you think you’ll be dead. If this happens as soon as it looks like it may, it will be you and your friends, too.”

Going mad about climate change

Janine Jackson interviews Dahr Jamail on “CounterSpin”, 27 April 2018. This got a large audience when listed at Naked Capitalism.

Jackson: “Antarctic glaciers are melting at dramatic rates, scientists are finding. …The most severe projections of potential impact are almost impossible to grasp: billions of people displaced? coastal cities disappeared?”

Jamail: “…The most important study recently regarding the Antarctic and sea level rise was published in Science Advances on the 18th of this month, and the title of the study is “Freshening by Glacial Meltwater Enhances Melting of Ice Shelves and Reduces Formation of Antarctic Bottom Water.” …

“And so this is worrisome for numerous reasons. One, that for a long time, scientists believed that Antarctica, being the ice continent, would either not be dramatically impacted by human-caused climate disruption, or at least minimally. But now what this means is that at least 10 percent of Antarctica’s coastal glaciers are now in full retreat, and because of this feedback loop, that retreat’s only going to speed up, and ultimately this feedback loop will start happening on other glaciers in Antarctica as well.

“And so for sea level rise, we already know that the Arctic sea ice is dramatically melting, which is going to only intensify the melt rate in the Arctic. Of course, Greenland, we know, is melting at record rates as well. And so now with Antarctica – save dramatic, dramatic changes in mitigation, in fossil fuel CO2 emissions across the planet, on a very, very abrupt timescale – right now, at current trajectories, we are on course, at a minimum, to hit the worst-case projections of sea level rise, which, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is 8.5 feet by 2100 {Ed.: in the RCP8.5 scenario}. But these worst-case projections, unfortunately, keep being upgraded every time more and more reports, like the one we’re discussing today, are being released. …

“So the urgency is clear. Sea level-rise projections are being increased dramatically. We are talking, in the longer run, billions of people being displaced by sea level rise. Entire megacities on the coast, like New York and Tokyo, that are going to have to be relocated entirely, or completely abandoned to the sea. …”

As SOP for climate alarmists, Jamail focuses on the implausible RCP8.5 scenario, the worst case given in the IPCC’s AR5. Even the Climate Central analysis of sea level shows only continued slow rising under the RCP2.6 and RCP4.5 scenarios. Note that their graph is in centimeters (one CM equals 0.4 inches). Also ignored is that the seas have been rising since the end of the last ice age – and will continue to do so until the next one.

About Dahr Jamail.

Dahr Jamail is a staff reporter at Truthout , where he has worked since 2008 – except for tour with Al Jazeera from 2010 to 2013. He reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years. He has won several awards for his work, the most recent being the Izzy Award for excellence in independent journalism. He lives and works in Washington State. His reporting is a hard-core green alarmist. For example, he wrote about the certain massive health and environmental disasters from the BP oil spill in 2013 and that Fukushima “could become worse than Chernobyl” (2011). See his website.

Jamail has written three books. The fourth will be released in January: The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption .

The result

A steady diet of doomsterism has warped the perspective of bien pensant leftists. As Steve Rose explains in The Guardian’s review of Infinity War.

“Thanos’s methods {galactic genocide} are hardly humane, but there is a logic to his argument: climate change and environmental destruction are inarguable threats. Human existence is unsustainable.”

I doubt Rose would so casually admit there is logic to anything Donald Trump or Paul Ryan said. But a psychopath planning to achieve sustainability by killing half the people in the galaxy – that he grudgingly admires. Even mass murder looks good by comparison to certain doom.

We have become very gullible. I doubt that any reform of America is possible until that changes. For more about that, see these posts.

The paper

By Alessandro Silvano et al in Science Advances on 18 April 2018.

An oceanographic survey was conducted on the continental shelf of the Sabrina Coast (115° to 125°E) between February 2014 and March 2015. They ran this data though a model, as described in the abstract.

“Strong heat loss and brine release during sea ice formation in coastal polynyas act to cool and salinify waters on the Antarctic continental shelf. Polynya activity thus both limits the ocean heat flux to the Antarctic Ice Sheet and promotes formation of Dense Shelf Water (DSW), the precursor to Antarctic Bottom Water.

“However, despite the presence of strong polynyas, DSW is not formed on the Sabrina Coast in East Antarctica and in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica. Using a simple ocean model driven by observed forcing, we show that freshwater input from basal melt of ice shelves partially offsets the salt flux by sea ice formation in polynyas found in both regions, preventing full-depth convection and formation of DSW. In the absence of deep convection, warm water that reaches the continental shelf in the bottom layer does not lose much heat to the atmosphere and is thus available to drive the rapid basal melt observed at the Totten Ice Shelf on the Sabrina Coast and at the Dotson and Getz ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea.

“Our results suggest that increased glacial meltwater input in a warming climate will both reduce Antarctic Bottom Water formation and trigger increased mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet, with consequences for the global overturning circulation and sea level rise.”

For More Information

For more information see posts about doomsters, about shockwaves, about the precautionary principle, about the keys to understanding climate change, and especially these …

Important: see these posts about making America more skeptical and better able to clearly see the world.

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