global warming
Tag archives for global warming
Are we having more forest fires in the US?
Posted by Greg Laden on January 30, 2013 
I’m not sure about the NUMBER of fires. That might be hard to count. If five small fires emerge and are put out, there are five fires. If five fires emerge, join into one configuration, and wipe out a handful of mountain villages in the Rockies, that’s one fire. It might be better to look…
Jennifer Francis at the Weather and Climate Summit
Posted by Greg Laden on January 27, 2013 Published on Jan 25, 2013 Session 6: Dr. Jennifer Francis – Rutgers University Topic: Wacky Weather and Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice: Are They Connected?
2012-2013 climate review and outlook
Posted by Greg Laden on January 25, 2013 With Masters, Mann, Hayhoe and Douglass. From Climate Denial Crock of the Week.
2012 Was The Hottest Year on Record (NOAA)
Posted by Greg Laden on January 23, 2013 NOAA says 2012 was the hottest year on record. According to the National Climatic Data Center of NOAA, 2012 was the hottest year on record in the US lower 48: According to NOAA scientists, the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. for 2012 was 55.3°F, which was 3.2°F above the 20th century average and 1.0°F…
We’re gonna do the climate change thing
Posted by Greg Laden on January 21, 2013 Some may deny the science of climate change, but we’re not listening to them any more. Hat tip to Peter Sinclair for this clip:
Anthony Watts is threatening to sue me
Posted by Greg Laden on January 18, 2013 As I mentioned, I’m busy, so I’ll just do this in pictures, kinda like a cartoon: There was no “walk back” by Joe. He merely added some links. The results of the poll so far: Personally, I’m hoping for “Force him” … that would be fun to watch. Meanwhile, there is a lesson here. Science…
Seven Lessons To Learn In Order To Save The Planet (Updated)
Posted by Greg Laden on January 15, 2013 
I was a graduate student in Harvard’s Anthropology Department, which meant I had no funding. I was in the final writing stage of my thesis, and the problem I had was that teaching interesting biological anthropology (which I could do full time if I wanted) was too distracting from the mundane yet mentally challenging task…
An Assessment of Climate Under Global Warming
Posted by Greg Laden on January 14, 2013 
A Draft National Climate Assessment has been released by the “National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee.” You can download it here … warning: it is a PDF file way over 100 megabytes The report affirms that climate is changing and that this change is primarily caused by human activities, mostly the release of fossil…
NOAA: 2012 Warmest Year on Record for the US 48
Posted by Greg Laden on January 9, 2013 
Looking just at the contiguous 48 states of the US, NOAA has determined that 2012 was the warmest year on record. It was also ranked second in “extreme” weather events including fires, major storms, and drought. Tornado activity was less than average. The report came out yesterday and states: In 2012, the contiguous United States…
Debunking climate change denialism
Posted by Greg Laden on January 9, 2013 
Climate change science denialism has pretty much run its course. We’ve been experiencing a large number of climate change related events (see this list for a brief summary) lately. It may well be that the number per year of such alarming events will go down and up over time. It may be that we will…
The Australian Heat Wave
Posted by Greg Laden on January 7, 2013 
Australia is experiencing a heat spell. The Climate Information Services of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has issued a special statement (I’ll provide some details below). This is not unexpected, since over the last few years global warming due to the human release of large amounts of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere has been heating…
Global Warming Moves South #BigAussieHeat
Posted by Greg Laden on January 7, 2013 
Summer is coming on strong south of the Equator, and in Australia this has meant unprecedented record high temperatures, and in the state of Tasmania, severe brush fires that have destroyed numerous homes, adding to the bad news from fires in the southeastern mainland. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said “And while you would not put…
Is Greenland’s Ice Melting Way Fast, and Why? You can help.
Posted by Greg Laden on January 6, 2013 
You know about Albedo. No not Libido, Albedo. Sunlight is to varying degrees reflected off the surface of the earth more or less back into space. That is Albedo. The vast regions of snow and ice covered glacial surfaces in the northern and southern Polar regions contributes to a good amount of the Earth’s Albedo.…
Marc Morano Wins Prestigious Award
Posted by Greg Laden on December 28, 2012 And by “Prestigious” I mean …. well, see for yourself in this story from Media Matters for America (Reposted with permission): Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year: Marc Morano ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano has been called “the Matt Drudge of climate denial,” the “king of the skeptics,” and “a central cell of the climate-denial machine,”…
Top (mostly climate change related) Science Denialist Books
Posted by Greg Laden on December 28, 2012 Top “Ten” Recent Books (focusing on 2012 but including the last few years) on Climate, Science denialism, Energy, and Science Policy are (including one Post Warming novel) are: Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us by Maggie Koerth-Baker Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand by Haydn Washington and…
Top Climate Stories of 2012
Posted by Greg Laden on December 28, 2012 A group of us, all interested in climate science, put together a list of the most notable, often, most worrying, climate-related stories of the year, along with a few links that will allow you to explore the stories in more detail. We did not try to make this a “top ten” list, because it is…
Ice Loss at Poles Is Increasing, Mainly in Greenland
Posted by Greg Laden on November 29, 2012 
From NASA: PASADENA, Calif. – An international team of experts supported by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has combined data from multiple satellites and aircraft to produce the most comprehensive and accurate assessment to date of ice sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica and their contributions to sea level rise. In a landmark…
Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs
Posted by Greg Laden on November 28, 2012 
You all know Don Prothero. He is an active member of the Skeptics and Science Blogging community. He is the author of several books, one of which you are totally supposed to own and if you don’t it’s kinda lame: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, which I review along with some…
New CDCOTW Video on Sandy and Superstorms
Posted by Greg Laden on November 28, 2012 Climate Denial Crock of the Week gives us this new video. Details here. We are not yet where we need to be with this “when did you stop beating your wife” question sometimes in the form of: “Can you REALLY attribute ANY storm to Global Warming, really? No? Then is global warming really real? Really?”)…
Empowering the individual does not equal ensmartening the individual
Posted by Greg Laden on November 24, 2012 Imagine the following scenario. Two guys are walking down the street, in different cities. Guy A has two PhDs, one in quantum physics with a focus on dimensionality dynamics, the other in astrophysics with a focus on relativistic aspects of gravity and black holes. She has published dozens of peer reviewed papers on both topics…
A probabilistic quantification of the anthropogenic component of twentieth century global warming
Posted by Greg Laden on November 21, 2012 A probabilistic quantification of the anthropogenic component of twentieth century global warming is a paper just out that examines an important conflict in the conversation about climate change and global warming. Before getting to the details, have a look at this graph from the paper: This is temperature increasing on the earth over a century…
Success of Climate Science Denialism
Posted by Greg Laden on November 21, 2012 One of the reasons that we have not, as a species, as a group of nations, dealt effectively with Anthropogenic Global Warming is the effectiveness of climate science denialism. There are denialists in Congress, on the Internet, and everywhere. They have not succeeded in making a valid scientific argument regarding Global Warming, but they have…
Greenhouse Gas Levels Reach New Record High
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2012 You may have heard that the release of greenhouse gases has recently gone down, to match levels of several years ago. Why, then, do we have someone saying that greenhouse gasses have reached a new record high? There are two, maybe three, reasons. First, even though CO2 release from the US may be lower now…
I didn’t realize the New Scientist was a tool of climate science denialism: The question of drought
Posted by Greg Laden on November 14, 2012 I would almost count it unethical that the New Scientist has a thing that looks like a blog post (an article you can comment on) that has some science in it, but that you have to be a paid subscriber to comment on. WTF New Scientist? What are you trying to pull? But that’s OK,…
Increase in Antarctic Sea Ice
Posted by Greg Laden on November 13, 2012 One of the most commonly winged-about facts of Earth’s climate change we hear from science denialists is that sea ice in the Antarctic is increasing, therefore, there is no global warming. The fact that every other measurement of temperature and ice-osity indicates warming and melting would make a normal person think of the Antarctic situation…
October was cold. So, Global Warming isn’t real right?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 11, 2012 Wrong. October was, nationally in the US, kinda cold. Not record cold, but colder than average. However, as Jeff Masters at Weather Underground has calculated, we would have to have some kind of Snowball Earth scenario kick in for December in order for 2012 to not be the warmest year on record in the US.…
Science Debate 08 12 14 16?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 10, 2012 I am sure that by now you know about ScienceDebate Dot Org. It was set up for the 2008 US presidential election by a bunch of people including my friend Shawn Otto. The idea is to simultaneously push for an actual debate focussed on science and science policy as part of the presidential election process,…
Science Denialism: Some resources
Posted by Greg Laden on November 7, 2012 The term “War on Science” comes from multiple sources, one being Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science” (see below) and another, the made up “War on Christmas,” a term attributed to Bill O’Really. Throw in a little “Culture War” rhetoric and I think we have a good basis for the origin of the…
The War on Science: Interview
Posted by Greg Laden on November 5, 2012 This is an interview at Atheists Talk (TV), an update on the war on science, and a rare opportunity to see me wearing a suit. The first few seconds are sound free; do not adjust your television set. I mentioned the NCSE, here’s their web site. Here’s a couple of books related to the topic:…
What you need to know about Frankenstorm Hurricane Sandy
Posted by Greg Laden on October 28, 2012 If you are in the path…the thousand mile wide path…of Hurricane Sandy, a.k.a. Frankenstorm, then you should make sure you know what the storm could do in relationship to where you are. If you are in or near an area with mountains, look for very serious flash flooding. The winds will be strong everywhere. If…
, which is now available for the 
