“The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural.”
~Dr. James Hansen (NASA)

You can find the entire study HERE.

I have said it many times … climate change deniers are the modern day flat earth society.  Americans continue to hear this message that climate change isn’t real because of large industries that pollute heavily like the coal industry, oil companies etc that are making billions in profits and do not want a transition from their industry to affect their profits regardless of the impact on the environment.

This propaganda campaign of “we don’t know if it’s man made” and “we can’t be sure” etc is intended to sow doubt in the minds of citizens in the same way the Tobacco industry successfully bought politicians and manipulated people to believe there was no provable link between cancer and smoking.  Millions of lives later – we now know Tobacco companies knew full well that they were selling cancer sticks.  Not only that – they combined their cancerous tobacco with the most addictive drug in the world – nicotine – in order to make sure they kept their customers.  Except – with tobacco … you just kill yourself or maybe someone close to you.  With climate change – there is no Planet B.

The NY Times explains the study in common speak HERE:

In the new paper, titled “Perception of Climate Change,” Dr. Hansen and his co-authors compared the global climate of 1951 to 1980, before the bulk of global warming had occurred, with the climate of the years 1981 to 2011.

They computed how much of the earth’s land surface in each period was subjected in June, July and August to heat that would have been considered particularly extreme in the period from 1951 to 1980. In that era, they found, only 0.2 percent of the land surface was subjected to extreme summer heat. But from 2006 to 2011, extreme heat covered from 4 to 13 percent of the world, they found

The findings led his team to assert that the big heat waves and droughts of recent years were a direct consequence of climate change. The authors did not offer formal proof of the sort favored by many climate scientists, instead presenting what amounted to a circumstantial case that the background warming was the only plausible cause of those individual heat extremes.

The study’s summary:

“Climate dice,” describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons, have become more and more “loaded” in the past 30 y, coincident with rapid global warming. The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (3σ) warmer than the climatology of the 1951–1980 base period. This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth’s surface during the base period, now typically covers about 10% of the land area. It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small. Wediscuss practical implications of this substantial, growing, climate change.

We’ve written about NOAA’s findings that the oceans are warming and it’s not a natural phenomenon HERE:

“During the June 2011-June 2012 period, each of the 13 consecutive months ranked among the warmest third of their historical distribution for the first time in the 1895-present record. The odds of this occurring randomly is 1 in 1,594,323.“
~National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

We have written about the IPCC – a group of 2,500 scientists that say climate change is man made HERE - an excerpt:

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is the most important anthropogenic GHG. Its annual emissions grew by about 80% between 1970 and 2004. The long-term trend of declining CO₂ emissions per unit of energy supplied reversed after 2000.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ (379ppm) and CH₄ (1774ppb) in 2005 exceed by far the natural range over the last 650,000 years. Global increases in CO₂ concentrations are due primarily to fossil fuel use, with land-use change providing another significant but smaller contribution. It is very likely that the observed increase in CH₄ concentration is predominantly due to agriculture and fossil fuel use.

Wake up.  These are the experts that you should fucking listen to.

And this climate change is having a disastrous affect on crops; Bloomberg explains HERE:

The condition of U.S. corn and soybean crops deteriorated to the worst since 1988 as the country’s most widespread drought in 56 years caused damage to plants across the Midwest. About 39 percent of soybeans were rated poor to very poor as of yesterday, more than the 37 percent of a week earlier, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in a report on its website. For corn, 50 percent got the lowest ratings, up from 48 percent a week earlier…Twenty-three percent of U.S. corn was rated good or excellent as of Aug. 5, down from 24 percent a week earlier, marking the ninth straight weekly decline, the government said. That’s the longest slump since at least 1986, USDA data show. Soybeans ratings were unchanged at 29 percent good or excellent, the first time conditions haven’t declined since June 1.

The Wall Street Journal says gently that climate change deniers need to accept that climate change is real HERE:

Many conservatives start out as climate skeptics for understandable reasons. To begin with, it’s an issue that’s long been associated with liberal Democrats. We’re all skeptical about issues presented by leaders with whom we normally disagree. Secondly, conservatives naturally insist on extensive evidence when a claim seems to justify more government action.

But one of the hallmarks of modern conservatism is to try to see the world as it is, not as one hopes it would be. Skeptics who make their decisions based on the best available information have long said they would reconsider their conclusions as the facts dictate. And many of them are concluding that the planet is warming in ways that outpace its natural rhythms. In a recent University of Texas poll, 70% of Americans, and 53% of Republicans, accepted the reality of climate change. This is not just a function of the summer’s brutal heat.

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