Seeing the environmental forest

An old friend sent David Rose's article in the Daily Mail claiming that NASA is only 38% sure that 2014 was the hottest year on record due to the margin of error.  Unfortunately, while Rose has his facts largely correct, he jumps to the entirely wrong conclusion.

In 2009, a paper was published that measured where humanity stood in respects to the safe operating boundaries for nine environmental parameters ( Rockström et al. 2009 ).  The nine they chose were climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, rate of biodiversity loss, biogeochemical cycles (specifically, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles), global freshwater use, change in land use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution.  Using the Holocene as a baseline, they calculated threshold levels for each parameter that, when crossed, created a high risk for changes that would be damaging for human civilization.

This is an update to my previous post on this topic, which was based largely on January-November data.  The full-year data is rolling out and no matter who is measuring, 2014 was a hot year for the Earth.

This feels like I'm in the movie Groundhog Day .  If there's a cold snap in the US, there's some science denier citing it as "proof" that there's no global warming.  This argument fails for multiple reasons.

An anonymous commentator on my post about Tom Luongo raised the issue of John Casey and his views on climate change.  This is a valid challenge, since Luongo apparently got much of his misinformation from Casey.

With the completion of yet another circle around the sun, it's time to take stock of where we're headed with global climate.  I'm going to do something that is somewhat risky—extend statistical models beyond the data range that was used to create them, but necessary if we want to see where current trends will take us in the future.