gregladen | September 1, 2015I've got a press release from the University of Southern California that seems important, but I don't have time today to read the study. So, you can look at the press release and tell me what you think of it.
Climate Change Will Irreversibly Force Key Ocean Bacteria into Overdrive
Scientists demonstrate that a key organism in the ocean’s foodweb will start reproducing at high speed as carbon dioxide levels rise, with no way to stop when nutrients become scarce
Imagine being in a car with the gas pedal stuck to the floor, heading toward a cliff’s edge. Metaphorically speaking, that’s what…
gregladen | September 1, 2015The Citi Global Perspectives and Solutions thingie, part of Citibank, has done a study that you can read here. It says that addressing global warming makes economic sense. So, when those science deniers are out there denying climate change they are also denying arithmetic. Shame on them.
Dana Nuccitelli, author of Climatology versus Pseudoscience and Guardian Blogger, wrote up the report at Skeptical Science:
Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions (GPS), a division within Citibank (America’s third-largest bank), recently published a report looking at the economic costs and benefits of a…
gregladen | September 1, 2015Not the book (which is good) but the thing. The storms, really.
I may have mentioned the pilot whales I saw in San Diego the other day. You've heard about changes in shark distributions, and odd fish being caught in unusual places, etc. This is all about changes in the Pacific as increased global warming affects ocean ecology. Inside Climate News has this:
A
Warmer North Pacific Is Staying Warmer, With Dramatic Impact on Marine Life
Ocean temperature fluctuations have slowed, a new study says, with an extended warm period in the N. Pacific causing a massive shift in marine life.
One study…
gregladen | September 1, 2015Two items of interest.
1) A new poll looks at conservative and liberal views of science. The findings are not especially unexpected, but the details are interesting. The image above is from this infographic, and the details are given here.
Yes, the detail are quite interesting.
2) If you care, there is some information on what the 2016 GOP candidates stand on climate change.
This is put together by CBS and is here.
gregladen | September 1, 2015Alaska is being called the poster child (state?) for climate change because things have been so strange there lately. One reason for this is the extreme warm conditions in the North Pacific and associated (probably) changes in the jet stream, as well as overall warming, which has caused coastal Alaska to become a warm place, glaciers to melt, and (in the farther north) sea ice to be less. And now, President Obama has made a trip there and given a big speech.
President Obama's speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvIrlaXU28A
More information on the President's trip here.
Meanwhile,…
gregladen | September 1, 2015Be prepared!
Did you now that September is, in the US, National Preparedness Month? The idea is to pay attention to natural threats and how to deal with them. This is a project of the USGS. Good idea to give it some thought on this tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
The USGS recommends a scientific approach, and talks about hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, sinkholes, geomagnetic storms, drought, floods, wildfire, and more. For information on all of this, including info on The Great Shakout event coming in October (where we all pretend there is an earthquake) click here…
gregladen | September 1, 2015Human caused climate change is changing the size and location of major climate zones, according to a new study.
Climate is complex, and a classic, widely used effort to wrangle that complexity into a sensible form is the Köppen classification system (and variants). We need not speak of the details here, but within this scheme there are five climate groups that include all of the possibilities for the Earth’s land surface. They are:
A: Tropical/megathermal climates
B: Dry (arid and semiarid) climates
C: Temperate/mesothermal climates
D: Continental/microthermal climates
E: Polar and alpine…
gregladen | August 31, 2015John Abraham is a scientist at St Thomas University in the Twin Cities. John is famous for doing battle with a famous science denialist (that's what the meme above refers to), for his blog at the Guardian, for his research in several areas such as ocean heat, and for keeping track of month by month increases in global surface heat caused by anthropogenic global warming.
Sunday, I had the honor of interviewing John Abraham about current developments in climate change. It was Sunday morning so you were probably either sleeping or in church, but don't worry, there's a podcast!
You can listen…
gregladen | August 31, 2015I don't care that the director or CEO of an advocacy organization concerned with poverty is an active academic. Indeed, my view of active academics is that many are largely incompetent in areas of life other than their specialized field. If that. So really, if you told me there is this great advocacy organization out there run by a well established active academic I'd figure you had that wrong, or I'd worry a little about the organization. On the other hand, everyone should care that university positions be given to active academics with credentials. So, when the University of Western…
gregladen | August 29, 2015Skylab came up in conversation the other day. And then I ran into Amy Shira Teitel's video. So, naturally, a quick blog post.
Skylab was brought down, ultimately, by interaction with the upper reaches of the atmosphere, which was in turn made more likely by solar activity. But, both the nature and extent of solar activity of this type, and its effects on the atmosphere, were not understood when Skylab was being designed and deployed. Indeed, understanding this set of phenomena was a contribution made by Skylab science. Had Skylab been launched after, rather than before, this was better…
gregladen | August 28, 2015Just a few pointers to some of today's interesting climate stories.
First, this is the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. After ten years, the costs of that hurricane are still being paid. See this overview. Also, astonishingly, or perhaps totally expectedly, one third of Louisiana blame a Democratic Senator from the Midwest for the lousy response to Katrina by the Republican executive branch.
Meanwhile, wildfires out west are really bad. A friend of mine drove way into the rocky mountains over the last few days and noted that for a long time he couldn't even see any mountains the…
gregladen | August 27, 2015The Republican Party and its handlers, including the right wing talk radio jocks such as Rush Limbaugh, and the bought-and-paid-for media such as FOX news, did not create the Tea Party. Michele Bachmann and a few others did that.* But once the Tea Party got going, mainstream conservative Republicans, including and especially leaders in Congress, went right to bed with it. The Tea Party gave Republican strategists an easy way to garner votes and support. This was especially easy to do because America decided to elect an African American president. Make no mistake. The Tea Party is pro-…
gregladen | August 27, 2015We're gonna run out of food. When, why (not what you think), can we put it off, and if so, how? And GMOs, what about them?
I interviewed food supply expert Emily Cassidy on Atheist Talk Radio, Mike Huabrich hosting. You can CLICK HERE and listen to the interview. Additional background and some more links, including Emily's Ted Talk, here.
gregladen | August 26, 2015Saturday Mid Day UPDATE:
Erika is now an ex-tropical storm. A real hurricane has an eye. Erika is a cartoon dead eye (see graphic above).
When the Hurricane Prediction Center woke up this morning, they found Erika, ripped asunder by the rugged terrain of Hispaniola, to have "... degenerated into a trough of low pressure."
The latest update from the NWS says, "this will be the last advisory on this system by the National
Hurricane Center unless regeneration occurs."
Which gives me an idea. If Erika, this year's Atlantic "E" storm, does regenerate into a named storm, it should take the…
gregladen | August 25, 2015This Sunday, August 30th, at 9:00 AM, I'll be on the radio with John Abraham, climate scientist. This will be an edition of Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio hosted by Mike Haubrich.
The discussion of climate change will be interesting and important and you should listen live or listen to the podcast.
But this is a special week for another reason. Mike Haubrich, host of this Sunday's show (and many other shows on Minnesota Atheist Talk) will be leaving the Twin Cities in just a few days, to live in a different part of the country. It is up to him to tell you his story if he wants to. I'll…
gregladen | August 25, 2015A new paper examines what is behind the ~2% of climate change related peer reviewed research that run contrary to widely accepted scientific consensus on climate change to see why those papers are wrong.
There is a scientific consensus that increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere causes surface warming, and that CO2 is a major greenhouse gas. This consensus is based on physics. We don't need to observe the effects of human greenhouse gas pollution to know this. There is consensus that human burning of fossil fuel causes an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. We don't need…
gregladen | August 25, 2015The terrorists have defeated the railroads, and by extension, the people. Well, not totally defeated, but they won a small but important battle.
We have a problem with the wholesale removal of petroleum from the Bakken oil fields, and the shipping of that relatively dangerous liquid mainly to the east coast on trains, with hundreds of tanker cars rolling down a small selection of tracks every day. I see them all the time as they go through my neighborhood. These trains derail now and then, and sometimes those derailments are pretty messy, life threatening, and even fatal.
There has been…
gregladen | August 24, 2015What's worse than months or years without rain? Rain, after months or years, at least under some circumstances.
For instance ... it gets try, plants become vulnerable to fire. Fires happen denuding the dry landscape. Then it rains, and you get more severe floods together with landslides. You know the story because for years this has been the pattern in California.
But there is another roughly similar, or at least analogous, problem that is now being discussed. The levees that are mean to keep floodwaters contained in California were already in fairly bad shape. Prior to the drought, a…
gregladen | August 24, 2015The authors of a new paper note that "one of the principal ways in which we interact using our faces is kissing." This reminds me of an old National Lampoon joke on how the French were famous for inventing sex acts with the face. But I digress.
This paper looks at neural imaging responses of subjects who observe, in photographs, various kinds of kissing. The two main variables are who is kissing (by gender) and the nature of the kiss.
One of the authors is my friend and colleague, Sheril Kirshenbaum. She wrote the book on kissing. No, seriously, she wrote this book, which I've reviewed…
gregladen | August 24, 2015We need to act urgently to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas pollution we humans create in order to slow down and eventually stop climate change. In the mean time we see case after case of something happening that seems unusual and that seems linked to global warming. We need not wait for the jury to return a verdict in every single case in order to act. We already know what many of the effects of climate change are, and we have a reasonably good idea of what effects will arise in the future. Even so, every now and then something happens that any reasonable person might guess is linked…