THeBlueCashew

QuoteLeo's done it again.



Shortly after tripping over his own tongue concerning Alberta's chinooks, Hollywood hotshot Leonardo DiCaprio is slamming the province's most precious resource.



And Alberta's oilpatch says it's time for a tutorial on the energy industry.



That's the word from the body lobbying for Canada's oilpatch in the wake of DiCaprio's condemning the energy sector as a greedy assassin of the world's climate.



"We simply cannot afford to let the corporate greed of the coal, oil and gas industries to determine the future of humanity," DiCaprio told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Tuesday.



"Studies also show us those who deny climate change will become less economically successful."



DiCaprio also alluded to companies such as the then-Exxon, who are being investigated for allegedly covering up knowledge the firm unearthed 35 years ago their industry was contributing to climate change. But DiCaprio, who toured the oilsands while making his Oscar-nominated film The Revenant in Alberta, is ignoring environmental advances made in that industry, said Chelsie Klassen, spokeswoman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.



"It clearly shows the lack of understanding of the oilsands," she said. "Since the 1990s, there's been a 30% decrease in the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions per barrel."



She said CAPP would gladly meet with DiCaprio to discuss climate change and the progress the industry has made.  

http://www.calgarysun.com/2016/01/21/leo-dicaprio-takes-another-shot-at-oil-industry

QuoteSo how does one deny that climate change is upon us and that 2015 was by far the hottest year on record? What misinformation will be disseminated to confuse the public?



One technique of denial involves "cherry-picking", best described as wilfully ignoring a mountain of inconvenient evidence in favour of a small molehill that serves a desired purpose. Cherry-picking is already in full swing in response to the record-breaking temperatures of 2015.



Political operatives such as James Taylor of the Heartland Institute – which once compared acceptance of the science of climate change to the Unabomber in an ill-fated billboard campaign – have already denied 2015 set a record by pointing to satellite data, which ostensibly shows no warming for the last umpteen years and which purportedly relegates 2015 to third place.



So what about the satellite data?



If you cannot remember when you last checked the satellites to decide whether to go for a picnic, that's probably because the satellites don't actually measure temperature. Instead, they measure the microwave emissions of oxygen molecules in very broad bands of the atmosphere, for example ranging from the surface to about 18km above the earth. Those microwave soundings are converted into estimates of temperature using highly-complex models.



There is nothing wrong with using models, such as those required to interpret satellite data, for their intended purpose – namely to detect a trend in temperatures at high altitudes, far away from the surface.



And if you just look at the surface-based climate data with your own eyes, then you will see that NASA, the US NOAA, the UK Met Office, the Berkeley Earth group, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and many other researchers around the world, all independently arrived at one consistent and certain end result – namely that 2015 was by far the hottest year globally since records began more than a century ago.



Enter denial strategy two: that if every scientific agency around the world agrees on global warming, they must be engaging in a conspiracy! Far from being an incidental ornament, conspiratorial thinking is central to denial. When a scientific fact has been as thoroughly examined as global warming being caused by greenhouse gases or the link between HIV and AIDS, then no contrary position can claim much intellectual or scholarly respectability because it is so overwhelmingly at odds with the evidence.



That's why politicians such as Republican Congressman Lamar Smith need to accuse the NOAA of having "altered the [climate] data to get the results they needed to advance this administration's extreme climate change agenda". If the evidence is against you, then it has to be manipulated by mysterious forces in pursuit of a nefarious agenda.



//http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/we-just-had-the-hottest-year-on-record-where-does-that-leave-climate-denial/

QuoteLand temperatures broke the all-time warmest record," said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, adding that the record for warmest month was broken in 10 of the last 12 months.



However, Karl also stated that 2015 was not the hottest year in the lower troposphere, the lowest section of the Earth's atmosphere, despite what could be an historically strong El Nino causing warmer-than-average temperatures.



According to satellite data that measures temperatures in the lower troposhere, 2015 was only the third warmest year on record, he said.



"We expected about 50 percent stronger response in the atmosphere because of El Nino," Karl told reporters, explaining that there was "very little response in the satellite and weather balloon data."



"There's no record in general in the lower atmosphere... but stay tuned for 2016," he said, explaining that "warmth occurs after the beginning of a subsequent calendar year."



Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, concurred, adding that because 2016 started with "a very strong El Nino, we expect it to be an exceeding warm year."



An analysis of the satellite data by John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama/Huntsville, and his colleague, Roy Spencer, also found that 2015 was just the third warmest year on record - behind 1998 and 2010.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/nasanoaa-2015-warmest-year-record-except-earths-lower-atmosphere