Al Gore and friends promised Rampant Desertification

15 yearas agao, the chicken littles promised rampant desertification AND rising sea levels.

seems it may not be so.

Two Decades of Global Dryland Vegetation Change
​

Reference
Andela, N., Liu, Y.Y., van Dijk, A.I.J.M., de Jeu, R.A.M. and McVicar, T.R. 2013. Global changes in dryland vegetation dynamics (1988-2008) assessed by satellite remote sensing: comparing a new passive microwave vegetation density record with reflective greenness data. Biogeosciences 10: 6657-6676.
Andela et al. (2013) set the stage for their study by noting that drylands cover nearly 30% of the global land surface, and that over the last few decades many of their native ecosystems "have faced increased pressure from human demands and climate change," citing Asner et al. (2004), Dore (2005) and Liu et al., 2013).
Seeking to learn how dryland ecosystems around the world may have been responding to the concomitant pressures exerted by both man and nature, Andela et al. employed two satellite-observed vegetation products "to study the long-term (1988-2008) vegetation changes of global drylands: the widely used reflective-based Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the recently developed passive-microwave-based Vegetation Optical Depth (VOD)," the first of which products "is sensitive to the chlorophyll concentrations in the canopy and the canopy cover fraction, while the VOD is sensitive to vegetation water content of both leafy and woody components," which when used together, in their words, "helps to better characterize vegetation dynamics, particularly over regions with mixed herbaceous and woody vegetation."
In describing their findings the five researchers report "NDVI was more sensitive to herbaceous vegetation changes and short-term precipitation variations," while VOD "was more sensitive to changes in woody vegetation and longer-term precipitation variations." And, as a result, they remark that "co-trends between NDVI and VOD provide evidence of widespread woody vegetation encroachment at the expense of the herbaceous vegetation component in arid regions, and arid shrublands in particular." And as their ultimate conclusion about the matter, they concluded that the "spatial distribution of trends suggests that a global driver (e.g., CO2 fertilization) is causing a change in relative performance of woody vegetation compared to herbaceous vegetation," while further noting that evidence for woody thickening and encroachment was also found for some semi-arid drylands. Thus, in spite of the postulated growing negative impacts of man and climate alike, the greening of the earth continues - and in places where it's toughest of all to be green (arid lands) - with the proposed impetus for the phenomenon being the likely-enabling role of anthropogenic-induced atmospheric CO2 enrichment.
Additional References
Asner, G.P., Elmore, A.J., Olander, L.P., Martin, R.E. and Harris, A.T. 2004. Grazing systems, ecosystem responses, and global change. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 29: 261-299.
Dore, M.H.I. 2005. Climate change and changes in global precipitation patterns: What do we know? Environment International 31: 1167-1181.
Liu, Y.Y., Dijk, A.I.J.M., McCabe, M.F., Evans, J.P. and de Jeu, R.A.M. 2013. Global vegetation biomass change (1988-2008) and attribution to environmental and human drivers. Global Ecology and Biogeography 22: 692-705.

Well, that was probably the easiest post I've ever had to read... NOT.

Nothing against you Franc...

So, WTF did it actually say?

bczoom said:

Well, that was probably the easiest post I've ever had to read... NOT.

Nothing against you Franc...

So, WTF did it actually say?

Click to expand...

It said that despite the dire warnings about Climate change, CO2 has greened some of our deserts.

with the proposed impetus for the phenomenon being the likely-enabling role of anthropogenic-induced atmospheric CO2 enrichment.

Sorry, bad day so I've had a couple beers. Still don't have a clue but I get the jist.

This spelled it out for me. OK, not really.
"with the proposed impetus for the phenomenon being the likely-enabling role of anthropogenic-induced atmospheric CO2 enrichment."

Gore and all the chicken little's will just say they're wrong. They don't want their money machine shut down.
Mike

bczoom said:

Sorry, bad day so I've had a couple beers. Still don't have a clue but I get the jist.

This spelled it out for me. OK, not really.
"with the proposed impetus for the phenomenon being the likely-enabling role of anthropogenic-induced atmospheric CO2 enrichment."

Click to expand...

Most scientist are not without humor. But it is most often rather wry.
I believe that line was a directed bit of sarcasm.

Researchers should not be allowed to use words with more than two syllables in their reports, so dummies like me can read and understand them. I seem to remember someone telling me that newspapers are written at an 8th grade level so anyone with half a brain can read them and understand what's being conveyed. Always worked for my half of a brain.

JEV said:

Researchers should not be allowed to use words with more than two syllables in their reports, so dummies like me can read and understand them. I seem to remember someone telling me that newspapers are written at an 8th grade level so anyone with half a brain can read them and understand what's being conveyed. Always worked for my half of a brain.

Click to expand...

The problem with that reliance on you news media is that the conversion from 25 cent words to 2 cent words may be a loss of the validity of the message.

I mean seriously, you would trust the mainstream news to give you the truth about global warming, Carbon emissions, Climate change and what we should do about it?

Two words of advice here;
Regarding the coming climate change, adapt or die
Regarding the news media, don't count on them to give you a warning, much less the tools, to do it

Back in the 80's there was a popular book dealing with the then new idea of global warming. I wish I could remember the titile. It predicted that in 30 years Kansas would be a desert, and we would be growing wheat in Iowa, as not enough rain for corn. Current drought here excepted, the book was way off on it's predictions. Since that time I don't pay much attention to this idea of global warming, as it has proven in my mind to be nothing more than a fearmongering hoax...

Good post Franc. Tells it like it really is.

Regards, Kirk

300 H and H said:

Back in the 80's there was a poular book dealing with the then new idea of global warming. I wish I could remember the titile. It predicted that in 30 years Kansas would be a desert, and we would be growing wheat in Iowa, as not enough rain for corn. Current drought here excepted, the book was way off on it's predictions. Since that time I don't pay much attention to this idea of global warming, as it has proven in my mind to be nothing more than a fearmongering hoax...

Good post Franc. Tells it like it really is.

Regards, Kirk

Click to expand...

I get a list of papers from the NIPCC every month or so. I like to read them and get a perspective from non biased scientists in the field of climatology.
They have no agenda to find a way to blame man for the change. They just observe the facts and conclude the benefits, or the harm, of the obvious changes in our world.
After a while, you begin to understand their lingo, as it were.

I try to pick a gem out of those articles and post it here from time to time.

Here is something dumbed down in english for ya

The so-called “pause” of global warming continued through 2013, according to NASA, as there was no statistically significant rise in global temperatures last year.
“The trends over the last 10 to 15 years compared to the trends before do appear to be lower than they were,” Gavin Schmidt, climatologist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told reporters.
“We’ve been looking at this in separate work and partially it seems to be a function of internal variability in the system, so the fact is that we’ve had more La Nina-like conditions over the last few years compared to earlier on in the 2000s or in the late 1990s,” Schmidt added.​

According to NASA, 2013 was tied with 2009 and 2006 for the seventh warmest year on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ranks 2013 as the fourth warmest year on record, tying with 2003.
“In summary they both show that the ‘pause’ in global surface temperature that began in 1997, according to some estimates, continues,” wrote David Whitehouse, who holds a doctorate in astrophysics and was the BBC’s science editor. “Statistically speaking there has been no trend in global temperatures over this period.”
“Given that the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] estimates that the average decadal increase in global surface temperature is 0.2 [degrees Celsius], the world is now 0.3 [degrees Celsius] cooler than it should have been,” Whitehouse added.
In 2013, the average temperature was 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 1.1 degree Fahrenheit warmer than the mid-20th century baseline temperature. According to NASA, the average global temperature has risen about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.
The government scientists emphasized that weather patterns cause average temperatures to fluctuate and that the increasing levels of greenhouse-gas emissions will raise global temperatures in the long run. Each year may not be warmer than the last, according to NASA, but scientists predict that each decade will be warmer than the last
“Our expectations for what temperatures should be changing like, they come from our understandings of our forcings of climate change,” Schmidt said, adding that such forcings include greenhouse gases, volcanoes, solar activity and air pollution — for example, aerosols from coal burning, smog and volatile organics.
“Our ability to properly quantify the air pollution around the world … is actually not very good, and we have had historically a problem in defining those aerosol forcings very accurately … and that has not improved,” Schmidt admitted.
Tags: Climate change, Global Warming, NASA​

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/22/n...se-in-global-warming-continues/#ixzz2rGOLz04W​

I am doing all I can to combat this global "warming" by burning a shitload of wood and coal this winter. For it being a "pause" it is a damn cold one.

More from the NIPCC

Two Decades of Overestimated Global Warming
​

Reference
Fyfe, J.C., Gillett, N.P. and Zwiers, F.W. 2013. Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years. Nature Climate Change 3: 767-769.
In a Commentary published in the Opinion and Comment section of Nature Climate Change, Fyfe et al. (2013) introduce their study of the subject by (1) stating that "global mean surface temperature over the past 20 years (1993-2012) rose at a rate of 0.14 ± 0.06°C per decade," and by (2) noting that this warming rate was "significantly slower than that simulated by the climate models participating in Phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5)." And so it was that they went on from there to look for a reason as to why such a discrepancy should exist.
The first step of the three researchers was to compute average simulated global temperatures only at locations where corresponding observations existed - which makes a lot of sense, since a person doesn't go looking for oranges in an apple orchard - and in doing so, they obtained "an average simulated rise in global mean surface temperature of 0.30 ± 0.02°C," which was more than twice as great as the real-world measured rate of warming.
But wait! Fyfe et al. report that the inconsistency between observed and simulated global warming was even more striking for temperature trends computed over the past fifteen years (1998-2012), for which period they say the observed trend of 0.05 ± 0.08°C "was more than four times smaller than the average simulated trend of 0.21 ± 0.03°C." And they also point out that the observed trend over this period, which was not significantly different from zero, actually suggested "a temporary 'hiatus' in global warming," further citing the studies of Easterling and Wehner (2009) and Fyfe et al. (2011) in this regard.
And any number that is divided by zero really is infinite, which suggests that CMIP5 simulations of global warming over the period 1998-2012 could in this sense truly - but partially tongue-in-cheek - be considered to be infinitely too large, which is about as wrong as it is possible to be wrong.
Additional References
Easterling, D.R. and Wehner, M.F. 2009. Is the climate warming or cooling? Geophysical Research Letters 36: 10.1029/2009GL037810.
Fyfe, J.C., Merryfield, W.J., Kharin, V., Boer, G.J., Lee, W.-S. and von Salzen, K. 2011. Skillful predictions of decadal trends in global mean surface temperature. Geophysical Research Letters 38: 10.1029/2011GL049508.