Pirate's Cove

The Washington Post’s resident climahysteric, Chris Mooney, takes a shot at some more fear-mongering

We may have even less time to stop global warming than we thought

At least since 2013, one of the biggest concerns in the climate change debate has been the so-called carbon budget — a fixed limit to the volume of carbon dioxide emissions that we can put into the atmosphere before irrevocably committing to a considerably hotter planet.

As of 2011, that budget was about 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide before the planet is likely to careen past a 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperatures, which is above what is believed to be the Earth’s temperature before industrialization. The budget shrinks by about 41 tons a year, more recently put at about 600 billion tons (or 15 years of emissions) by a group of scientists and climate policy wonks.

But now, a team of prominent climate scientists say the budget is probably even narrower. The problem is how you define “preindustrial,” or when you consider human-caused perturbations of the atmosphere to have begun. Many analyses have taken the late 19th century as the starting point, but the new study in Nature Climate Change suggests significant human influence was afoot by at least 1750, and may have contributed as much as one-fifth of a degree Celsius of warming (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) before the late 1800s.

“Frankly, this study does indicate that it may be more of an uphill battle than we previously thought in order to stabilize warming below the commonly defined dangerous limit of 2 degrees Celsius,” said Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann, one of the study’s authors. He completed the research with scientists from the universities of Edinburgh and Reading in the United Kingdom.

This is all about attempting to assign Blame going even further back in time, in order to say we’re even more doomed unless Everyone Else is forced by government to reduce their carbon footprint, usually by the government taking more money from citizens and private entities while reducing their freedom and liberty.

Here’s the really funny part, though

Mann said that between the start of the industrial revolution in England in the 18th century and the late 19th century — when reliable thermometer records begin (by which time that revolution had spread to other countries) — humans may have added 30 or 40 parts per million of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

“Reliable thermometer records.” This from a guy who looked at the rings on a few trees and created the “hockey stick”, a doomy construction of politicized science.