tzor wrote:Check and Mate ... 5 Surprising Scientific Facts about Earth’s Climate

No "surprising facts" there. Same old, same old, same old denier hogwash.

tzor wrote:1. Climate Has Always Changed—Always

Not news. Climate has always changed. Drastic changes, however, are accompanied by mass extinction. The last time the climate changed at this pace, during the "Great Dying" at the end of the Permian, 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species were lost. We don't know exactly how long it took. All we can say for sure is that it was less than 30,000 years. How much less is a matter of some conjecture.

All other warming periods were much slower and gradual than that one. Even so, they typically cause an increase in extinctions.

Short-term cooling periods sometimes come about, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Long-term cooling periods, like long-term warming periods, come around on scales of tens of thousands of years.

The speed of onset is far more dangerous than the absolute magnitude of the change (although absolute magnitude isn't risk-free, either.) This is the fastest change we know about. Two degrees in two centuries is radical. Are you really willing to risk a mass extinction greater than the one at the end of the Permian? We don't know how bad it might get, but we do know that life is fragile. It wouldn't take much to go from 96% of marine species lost to 100% of marine species lost.

tzor wrote:2. Temperature Increase in the Past Was Not Caused by Humans

No shit, Sherlock. Nobody said it was.

tzor wrote:3. The Arctic and Antarctic Are Doing Better than Ever!

LOL. Did you even follow the links? The authors of the FEE article cherry-picked a comparison with the Mid-Holocene Warm Period and said we have more polar ice than during that period. Again, no shit, Sherlock. The Mid-Holocene was quite a warm time. It was the peak of the 40,000 year axial-wobble cycle.

On the axial-wobble cycle, we should now be in a cooling phase. The temperature should be falling, not rising. The fact that the earth is warming fast during a time that it should be cooling is strong evidence that the anthrogenic changes we have brought about are overwhelming the natural cycles.

tzor wrote:4. Polar Bears and Other Species Are Not Dying But Flourishing!

Really? This is just one more bit of denialist hogwash that just won't go away. Clifford Kraus started this myth by saying "there are more than 20,000 polar bears roaming the Arctic, compared to as few as 5,000 40 years ago." The trouble with that is, while the 20,000 is reasonably accurate (best current estimate 23,000), the 5,000 is nonsense. It's pure smoke and mirrors. One Russian author in 1956 said there might be 5,000 to 8,000 polar bears in the world. He didn't do any kind of counting, he just took anecdotal accounts from bear hunters and wildly extrapolated from there. Climate change deniers have latched on to the "5000" figure as if it was gospel truth (I wonder why they didn't latch on to the 8000 number instead?) and keep repeating it, despite the fact that its just a wild guess by one man who didn't do any real counting. Even rudimentary attempts at actually counting polar bears didn't begin until the late 1980s.

In the next 40 years or so we'll have much more accurate surveys. But going 50 years into the past, any number was pure guesswork.

tzor wrote:5. Carbon Dioxide Is Not a Temperature Control Knob

Vijay Jayaraj (M.S., Environmental Science) is the Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. He currently lives in Udumalpet, India.

And his "evidence" for this is that "global temperature between 2000 and 2016 failed to rise as anticipated". In fact, the global temperature between 2000 and 2016 did rise dramatically, by 0.6 degrees. So, his "evidence" is just an assertion completely contrary to observable facts: