Must-Have High-Resolution Charts: ‘Carbon Pollution Set To End Era Of Stable Climate’

Many folks asked for high-resolution and Celsius versions of the chart I posted 10 days ago:

Temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013) plus projected warming this century on humanity’s current emissions path (in red, via recent literature).

The high-resolution F version is here and the high-resolution C version is here.

As an aside, readers know I have scaled back my coverage of the denier blogs for two reasons. First, their traffic has flat-lined or declined since Climategate, and despite their best efforts, they can’t get any real traction on social media. Second, and no doubt related to the first, they are so darn monotonous. Pretty much every story is, “The latest piece of peer-reviewed science about climate science and/or the danger of unrestricted carbon pollution is false because….”

Science put 12 men on the moon and got them back, science eliminated smallpox, science put massive computing power in the palm of your hand, and science saved the ozone layer with its just-in-time warnings of the dangers of CFCs (that people heeded). Science builds a beautiful edifice on a solid foundation.

Anti-science delayed action on smoking regulations, delayed or rolled back environmental standards, and, now, is working over-time to stop or slow action on carbon reductions needed to prevent needless suffering for billions of people and countless future generations. Anti-science destroys life, by suffocating it in a “foundation” of quick-sand.

For those who read the deniers blogs, you probably know that they have come up with a truly inane way to try to undermine the 2013 Science paper, “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years” by Shaun Marcott et al that is the source of most of the data for the chart above.

They are arguing that the warming of the past century the authors found in their proxy records is in error. What makes this so head-exploding is that the uptick just happens to match the uptick in the heavily documented and independently verified instrumental record. So the disinformers are spending most of their time attacking the one part of the paper we know is unequivocally is true. That is the quintessence of anti-science.

The fact is Marcott et al doesn’t have findings that are a big surprise to anyone who follows temperature reconstructions. Indeed, as the NY Times pointed out in its post on the paper, “a graph produced by Robert Rohde for his Global Warming Art Web site years ago nicely captures the general picture.” Here it is:

Look familiar? What Marcott et al added to the already imposing edifice of climate science was the most comprehensive reconstruction to date.

And, yes, that chart is by the same Robert Rohde who led the statistical analysis of the Koch-funded BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature) study that confirmed for the umpteenth time the accuracy of the instrumental record — indeed confirmed that “Global Warming Is Real” and “On The High End” and “Essentially All” Due To Carbon Pollution.

You might recall the disinformers said they would abide by whatever that skeptic-led study found. Until it confirmed climate science. Then they would have none of it. Such is the monotonous, flat-lining nature of anti-science.

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Two Charts That Make The Case For More Infrastructure Spending

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the U.S. economy added 157,000 jobs last month, which is not enough to quickly bring down the unemployment rate. At the same time, America faces a huge infrastructure gap that is going to cost it 3.5 million jobs over the next decade.

The obvious solution should be more infrastructure spending, especially considering that the U.S. can borrow at historically low rates. This would help address the twin problems of a deteriorating infrastructure and persistently high unemployment. As this chart from BLS shows, U.S. construction jobs are far below where they were a decade ago:

As Calculated Risk noted, public construction spending “is now 17% below the peak in March 2009 and at the lowest level since 2006.” This chart shows the year over year change in construction spending since 1994 (the yellow-ish line is public spending):

Study after study has shown that infrastructure spending has a huge return in terms of jobs and economic growth. According to Smart Growth America “every $1 billion in additional funds committed to highway projects between 2009 and 2010 produced 2.4 million job-hours.” As Kristina Costa and Adam Hersh noted, “the return on investment on transit projects was even higher, with 4.2 million job-hours produced by every $1 billion in investment.” Meanwhile, the San Francisco Federal Reserve found that “each dollar invested into infrastructure boosts state economies by at least two dollars.”

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Three Charts Reminding The GOP That Domestic Spending Is Already Headed Toward Historic Lows

Republicans like to portray President Obama as a big government spender, despite the fact that government spending under Obama has grown at its slowest pace since the Eisenhower administration. The GOP is also trying to pretend the spending cuts that Obama has signed into law over the last two years simply didn’t happen.

In fact, under its current trajectory, non-defense discretionary spending — everything from education to food safety to transportation to housing to veterans’ benefits — will hit historic lows in the next decade, as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden showed in these charts:

If the so-called “sequester” comes into force in March, which House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) says it will, domestic spending will fall even more. “Instead of totaling 3.2 percent of GDP in 2017, nondefense discretionary spending would total less than 3 percent of GDP and would be on its way down to 2.6 percent by 2022. This is less than two-thirds of what was previously its lowest level,” Linden wrote.

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