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Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

via aleksey godin

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Climate models dating back to the early 1970s accurately foretold how greenhouse gases would fuel a hotter future, such as the July heat wave that sent Parisians flocking to the Fountaine du Trocadéro.

Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images

By Warren CornwallDec. 4, 2019 , 12:00 PM

Climate change doubters have a favorite target: climate models. They claim that computer simulations conducted decades ago didn’t accurately predict current warming, so the public should be wary of the predictive power of newer models. Now, the most sweeping evaluation of these older models—some half a century old—shows most of them were indeed accurate.

“How much warming we are having today is pretty much right on where models have predicted,” says the study’s lead author, Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Climate scientists first began to use computers to predict future global temperatures in the early 1970s. That’s when newfound computing power coincided with a growing realization that rising carbon dioxide levels could boost global temperatures. As the issue gained public attention, critics questioned the reliability of rudimentary model predictions. Even a 1989 news article in Science radiated skepticism, stating that “climatologists may have a gut feeling that the greenhouse effect is heating up the Earth, but they have not been close to proving it.”

Today, the models are much more sophisticated. Mainframe computers driven by paper punch cards have given way to supercomputers running trillions of calculations in 1 second. Modern models account for myriad interactions, including ice and snow, changes in forest coverage, and cloud formation—things that early modelers could only dream of doing. But Hausfather and his colleagues still wanted to see how accurate those bygone models really were.

The researchers compared annual average surface temperatures across the globe to the surface temperatures predicted in 17 forecasts. Those predictions were drawn from 14 separate computer models released between 1970 and 2001. In some cases, the studies and their computer codes were so old that the team had to extract data published in papers, using special software to gauge the exact numbers represented by points on a printed graph.

Most of the models accurately predicted recent global surface temperatures, which have risen approximately 0.9°C since 1970. For 10 forecasts, there was no statistically significant difference between their output and historic observations, the team reports today in Geophysical Research Letters.

Global temperatures have risen approximately 0.9°C since 1970, though some areas have warmed much more than others.

Berkeley Earth

Seven older models missed the mark by as much as 0.1°C per decade. But the accuracy of five of those forecasts improved enough to match observations when the scientists adjusted a key input to the models: how much climate-changing pollution humans have emitted over the years. That includes greenhouse gases and aerosols, tiny particles that reflect sunlight. Pollution levels hinge on a host of unpredictable factors. Emissions might rise or fall because of regulations, technological advances, or economic booms and busts.

To take one example, Hausfather points to a famous 1988 model overseen by then–NASA scientist James Hansen. The model predicted that if climate pollution kept rising at an even pace, average global temperatures today would be approximately 0.3°C warmer than they actually are. That has helped make Hansen’s work a popular target for critics of climate science.

Hausfather found that most of this overshoot was caused not by a flaw in the model’s basic physics, however. Instead, it arose because pollution levels changed in ways Hansen didn’t predict. For example, the model overestimated the amount of methane—a potent greenhouse gas—that would go into the atmosphere in future years. It also didn’t foresee a precipitous drop in planet-warming refrigerants like some Freon compounds after international regulations from the Montreal Protocol became effective in 1989.

When Hausfather’s team set pollution inputs in Hansen’s model to correspond to actual historical levels, its projected temperature increases lined up with observed temperatures.

The new findings echo what many in the climate science world already know, says Piers Forster, an expert in climate modeling at the United Kingdom’s University of Leeds. Still, he says, “It’s nice to see it confirmed.”

Forster notes that even today’s computer programs have some uncertainties. But, “We know enough to trust our climate models” and their message that urgent action is needed, he says.

The new research is a useful exercise that “should provide some confidence that models can be used to help provide guidance regarding energy policies,” adds Hansen, now director of the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program at Columbia University.

He communicated with Science from Madrid, where world leaders are gathering this week for the 25th annual United Nations climate conference. Delegates from around the world are negotiating how to implement emissions cuts agreed to at the 2016 meeting in Paris. Meanwhile, a U.N. report issued last month showed greenhouse gas emissions have continued to climb since then, and that many of the biggest polluting countries aren’t on track to meet their promises.

Trump threatens to bomb Iranian cultural sites

Mafia wannabe Don Donald Trump has warned that he is ready to bomb sites important to Iranian culture if Teheran retaliates against the assassination of a top Iranian general hat he ordered earlier this week. In an astounding threat, which some experts say will amount to a war crime if it is carried out, the US President raised the stakes in his confrontation with Iran to unprecedented levels.

How bland positive messages help Russian trolls spread disinformation

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  • When we read examples of fake news headlines from the 2016 election, they seem blatantly false.
  • However, the data shows that most Russian trolls were mostly sharing posts meant to camouflage their actions, with a small percentage of posts sharing fake headlines.
  • As the 2020 elections approach, researchers are discovering that Russian trolls are becoming more sophisticated and savvy in how they spread disinformation.

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All of us like to think that we would know when people are manipulating us online. Reading headlines such as “Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president” or “ISIS leader calls for American Muslim voters to support Hillary Clinton” seem like obvious fabrications (they are).

Especially now, after the 2016 election’s revelations have come to light, we all like to think that we’re smarter and more prepared to question blatantly fake news. But researchers suggest that we might not actually have a great handle on what Russian trolling looks like in the lead up to the 2020 election.

The Internet Research Agency’s new approach

Internet Research Agency

The Internet Research Agency (IRA) first formed in 2013, employing thousands of employees whose sole job was to write up fake blog articles, craft polarizing comments, and share disinformation through social media accounts. We might think of the IRA as primarily issuing the blatantly fake headlines described above, that only the very ignorant could fall for this kind of propaganda, but in reality, the IRA’s employees function more like savvy marketers than they do Orwellian propagandists — though there’s admittedly less of a difference in this case than we might like.

In a recent article for Rolling Stone, researchers Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren described their knowledge of the on-going disinformation campaign being waged by the IRA. As researchers into state-sponsored disinformation and its influence, Linvill and Warren have been keeping their fingers on the pulse of the post-2016 internet trolls. They write:

“Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.”

Linvill and Warren offer examples of modern troll posts — typically, they aren’t stirring up conflict between black or blue lives matter or claiming that Hillary Clinton has been running a pedophilia ring in the basement of a pizza parlor. Instead, they’re posting tweets like one from a fictional “Tyra Jackson” celebrating former football player Warrick Dunn’s charity work, a tweet that garnered nearly 290,000 likes.

In Linvill and Warren’s previous research, they broke down the kinds of posts that Russian trolls made into separate categories. The most common by far were what they termed “camouflaging” posts, or posts that had no overt political connection, which accounted for more than half of the troll accounts’ activity. They were related to local news stories, uplifting posts like the one made by Tyra Jackson, blandly positive messages such as “Start each day with a grateful heart #GoodMorning #happywednesday,” and similarly disarming, normal subjects.

This camouflaging posts made it all the more convincing when they did sow disinformation. Linvill and Warren found that, at least in the lead up to the 2016 election, troll accounts were most likely to support the right and attack the left. This finding makes intuitive sense; conservative forces did win the 2016 election, after all, so it seems reasonable that Russian trolls were going at-bat for the right. Importantly, however, a significant portion of Russian troll activity landed on the left-side of the political spectrum. In Linvill and Warren’s research, they found that 12 percent and 7 percent of Russian troll posts attacked the left and supported the right, respectively, but 5.4 percent and 7.4 percent attacked the right and supported the left as well.

It can be tempting to conclude that Russia’s goal is to support conservative politicians given the results of the 2016 election, but the data suggests that their true goal is merely to widen our political divide in a party-agnostic way. Consider a tweet from the fictional twitter account @politeMelanie that Warren and Linvill uncovered:

“My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.”

This is a completely made-up anecdote, but were a left-leaning individual to come across it, they might accept it as true since it reinforces stereotypes regarding the intolerance and ignorance of religious and political groups. We might like to think that we wouldn’t fall for this, but the 300,000 people who liked it probably took it at face value.

The idea that divisiveness itself is the goal of Russian trolls is better seen in which politicians they’ve attacked or defended in the past. For example, once the Republican primaries started in 2016, the IRA’s instructions to its employees was to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them).”

We might chalk this strategic decision up to Putin’s well-known personal animosity with Hillary Clinton, but we can see a similar dynamic emerging in the current democratic primaries. Middle-of-the-road candidates such as Joe Biden are frequently the target of Russian trolls, while the most polarizing candidates such as Donald Trump and Sanders enjoy greater support. The goal is to amplify the differences between opposite ends of the political spectrum until staying true to one’s party makes more sense than staying true to one’s country.

The IRA knows that this goal can’t be accomplished through a direct, brutish disinformation campaign; instead, it takes a subtle touch that they are consistently perfecting.

Boris Johnson’s silence on Suleimani assassination is ‘deafening’ say critics

Politicians attack the prime minister for not addressing the Middle East crisis from his holiday on Mustique

Boris Johnson was facing growing criticism on Saturday night for failing to cut short his Caribbean holiday as the Middle East faced one of the gravest crises since the Iraq war in 2003.

Related: I have no confidence Boris Johnson will keep us out of a quagmire in Iran

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