Seeing the environmental forest

Here's a study I missed when it first came out two weeks ago: Monastersky, R. 2014. Biodiversity: Life—a status report. Nature 516:159-161 . This report compiled all known data on species status.  The results are sobering.  Thousands of species are at risk of extinction, including: 41% of all known amphibians 26% of all known mammals 13% of all known birds Note: Those are the species currently at risk.  Today.  Not predicted to be at risk in the future.  Forty-one percent of all amphibians, 26% of all mammals, and 13% of all birds are already at risk of extinction today .  And those are the best known groups. The rest—insects, plants, fungi, fish, etc?  Unknown, as not enough species in those groups have been evaluated to even guess at the percentage currently at risk of extinction.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am skeptical of claims that global warming in atmospheric temperatures have paused since 1998, having written several posts questioning the existence of such a pause.  In this edition, I'll run down the main evidence that, in my opinion, show that the pause is a figment of the denialsphere's imagination.

It's nice when a topic for a new post lands in your lap.  Or, in this case, in the comments of one of your old posts.  An anonymous commentator made several statements concerning RSS that warrant a longer explanation than is possible in a reply on the comment section.  This is going to be a long, stats-heavy post.  You've been warned.

Given that 2014 is nearly over (~3 weeks to go), we're going to be hearing even more about the possibility that 2014 will be the warmest year in the instrumental record.  I myself made the pile higher and deeper with my last post .  That raised a question in my mind: Where should global temperature be in 2014 according to the warming trend since 1979 (the first full year of the satellite record)?

Back in August, I wrote a post that found the January-June period was the third hottest on record ( based on the Cowtan-Way data set which corrects the coverage bias in HadCRUT4 data).  This post will revise and update that earlier article, incorporating GISS, UAH, NCDC, HadCRUT4, and Cowtan-Way data sets.  I am not including RSS, as that data set has shown false cooling since 2000.

An old friend posted an " article " by Tom Luongo, a former chemist (B.S. from the University of Florida) who now writes the Resolute Wealth Newsletter, on Facebook.  Unfortunately, that article is chock full of lies about climate science.  Since Facebook comments aren't the best forum for debunking Gish Gallops, I'm taking the liberty of debunking them here. [Update: Since Luongo got most of his claims from John Casey, I've written something about his brand of science here .]

For anyone paying attention, the US election yesterday was a disaster for Democrats.  That party lost control of the US Senate (likely 53-47) and took a drubbing in US House races (242-174) and US governors' (24-8) races.  The end result as far as science, environmental policy, and climate change is that science deniers now control key oversight committees on science, as many news organizations have noted.  The likely result for at least the next two years is unending investigations, waste-of-time hearings, and other obstacles erected to make environmental regulators' working lives a living hell.  Forget about the US ratifying any environmental treaties, much less anything having to do with climate change.  On the state level, I expect rollbacks of renewable energy mandates at the least, along with attempts to repeal other environmental regulations and meaningless resolutions attempting to nullify various federal laws and/or appropriate federal lands for state a...