gregladen | March 23, 2015Climate scientists have noticed a disturbing pattern in the North Atlantic. This is the relative cooling of surface waters in the area fed by the Gulf Stream. This pattern has emerged over recent decades, and may portend very rapid and potentially disruptive climate change in the upcoming decades. The cooling is not subtle at all, and looks like this:
Map based on NASA GISS data of warming 1901-2013
So what does this mean? A paper out just today describes, explains, and discusses this odd anomaly and its potential consequences. First, a bit of context.
The Earth’s climate follows certain…
gregladen | March 19, 2015And by "Shut. Up." I mean shut up about whether or not global warming is real.
The National Climatic Data Center of NOAA has just released the number representing the Earth's surface temperature for February and it is a shocking 0.82 degrees C above the 20th century average. This is the second warmest Feb on record, and I'm pretty sure it is the third warmest month on record, in that data base.
Roughly speaking, the coldest we have experienced, the Last Glacial Maximum, was about 6 degrees colder than at present. It is generally thought that we need to keep the global surface temperature…
gregladen | March 17, 2015The Louisville Insider is reporting that Answers In Genesis has filed an injunction to try to force the state of Kentucky to help pay for their religious theme park. The State had chosen to pull back from the project because Answers in Genesis would not guarantee that there would be no discrimination in hiring based on religious belief. Now, Answers in Genesis is claiming that having taxpayers not pay for a part of a religious spectacle is discrimination based on religion.
From the Insider:
In its motion on Monday, Ark Encounter seeks to force the Tourism Cabinet to send the incentives…
gregladen | March 16, 2015I'm going to be interviewing Anastasia Bodnar, an expert on agriculture who is on the board of Biolmogy Fortified, Inc, "... an independent 501(c)(3) that aims to encourage conversation about agriculture, biotech, food, and related subjects. The interview will be Sunday, March 22, DETAILS HERE. She is very interested in the intersection between science and policy when it comes to agriculture." The Interview will be next Sunday, March 22nd, on Atheist Talk Radio.
Anastasia is an expert on GMOs, and that is mainly what we'll be talking about. Mike Haubrich interviewed Dr. Bodnar on Atheist…
gregladen | March 14, 2015The NASA GISS data for surface temperatures of the planet Earth are in for February, and February was warm. The anomaly value was 79, which means 0.79 degrees C above a the baseline NASA uses (1951-1980). So, while it looks like the planet has warmed by a about 8 tenths of a degree, since warming started well before 1880, it is really more like a whole degree or more. Depending on what you know and don't know about how climate works, that may seem like a lot or a little. Trust me, it is a lot.
Most interestingly, the last 12 months were the warmest 12 months in the NSAS GISS database (you'…
gregladen | March 12, 2015Pam is a tropical cyclone of category 5 strength, but is churning over waters that have high temperatures at depth, a phenomenon we seem to be seeing more often lately, as a result of anthropogenic global warming. That is why I call it "AGW Class." Strong Category 5, deep heat enhanced. It is said that this is one of only 10 Category 5 storms recorded in the basin since good data are available. The Weather Underground has the story.
In addition, there are three other tropical cyclones extant in the Pacific.
Nathan is just on the Tropical Storm-Hurricane boundary and is heading for Cape…
gregladen | March 12, 2015Human caused greenhouse gas pollution has warmed the planet. Global warming means more extreme weather. Many meteorologist who watch the weather every day see this. More and more research shows that greenhouse gas pollution changes the weather in a way that causes even more change in the weather. Changing weather systems means more lightning, increased high precipitation events in certain regions like the US Northeast, including more frequent large snow storms.
Global warming has had uneven effects. The Arctic has warmed relatively more than most of the rest of the planet. The major movements…
gregladen | March 12, 2015Human caused greenhouse gas pollution is heating the Earth and causing the planet’s polar ice caps and other glacial ice to melt. This, along with simply heating the ocean, has caused measurable sea level rise. Even more worrisome is this: the current elevated level of CO2 in the atmosphere was associated in the past with sea levels several meters higher than they are today. Even if we slow down Carbon pollution very quickly, we can expect sea levels to be at least 8 meters higher, eventually. How soon? Nobody knows, nobody can give you a time frame on this because the rate of melting of the…
gregladen | March 11, 2015Dana Nuccitelli is a key communicator in the climate change conversation. He is co-writer with John Abraham at the Climate Consensus - the 97% blog at the Guardian, and has contributed hundreds of entries to John Cook’s famous site SkepticalScience.com. He has measurably helped people to understand climate change science and the nuances of the false debate based over climate manufactured by science deniers.
And, he’s written a book!
Graphic from Cook, Nuccitelli, Et Al 2013 paper quantifying the consensus on climate change. This figure also appears in "Climatology and Pseudoscience"…
gregladen | March 4, 2015Ubuntu Linux 15.04 will be released in April.
There is not a lot new for the average desktop user in the new release, as far as I can tell. One good "change" is a feature called "locally integrated menus." This is where the menus are, by default, where they are supposed to be, instead of, well, invisible until you stab at the menu bar that must reside at the top of your screen in Ubuntu with Unity. Then the menu appears and maybe you can use it. That was a bad idea, and over the last few revisions of Ubuntu with Unity, the top menu bar menus have slowly gone away, first as something you…
gregladen | March 4, 2015Raúl Grijalva Investigates
Raúl Grijalva is the US representative from Arizona’s 3rd congressional district, a Democrat, and a supporter of environmental initiatives. As the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee, he recently sent letters to seven universities requesting documents related to the background of climate change research, as a response to recent revelations in the New York Times of seemingly inappropriate failure to disclose industry funding sources by Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Willie Soon. These letters requested the following:
The…
gregladen | March 3, 2015And by "me" I mean all the children of future generations.
Willie Soon is a soft-money scientist at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been producing highly questionable 'science' casting, for several years, faux light on the reality of the human caused process of global warming. It appears that most or all of Soon's funding came directly or indirectly from the fossil fuel industry or supporters of that industry. (See also John Mashy's comment below about tax breaks.) Recently the dung has struck the rotating blades and the nexus of denialist 'science,' fossil fuel funding…
gregladen | March 2, 2015If you have not been living in a cave, and had you been, I’d respect that, you know about Willie Soon Gate. Willie soon is a researcher on soft money at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Soon is well known for producing research of questionable quality that anemically attempts to buck the scientific consensus that human caused greenhouse gas pollution is rapidly raising the Earth’s temperature. Soon’s links to the fossil fuel industry have been known for some time, but recently, he has gotten into even more hot water over having published papers without properly disclosing that…
gregladen | March 2, 2015OK, I admit the title of this post is possibly a bit extreme but I could not resist the symmetry. Here, I refer to both ends of civilization, the start and the finish.
I'd like to talk about a recent review published in Science, titled "Systems integration for global sustainability" written by my colleague Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute together with Jiangou Liu, Harold Mooney, Vanessa Hull, Steven Davis, Joane Gaskell, Thomas Hertel, Jane Lubchenco, Karent Seto, Claire Kremen and Shuxin Li. But I want to put this paper in a broader perspective, dipping into my training as an…
gregladen | March 1, 2015New Research on the Effects of CO2 Pollution
A paper just published in Nature reports on the direct measurement of the effects of human greenhouse gas pollution on the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere. This is empirical verification of anthropogenic global warming.
Since the Industrial Revolution, when humans started polluting the Earth’s atmosphere with copious amounts of long lived greenhouse gases released from entombment as fossil fuels, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has skyrocketed from close to 250 parts per million (ppm) to about 400ppm. In fact, February was the first month…
gregladen | February 26, 2015"Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink!: A Story for Children and their Adults" is a new children's book by Gregg Kleiner about global warming. The idea is simple. Imagine if you could see CO2? In the book, it is imagined to be pink. The imagining takes the form of a quirky father, one imagines him to be an inventor of some sort, coming up with the idea of making goggles that would allow you to see CO2 as a pink gas. This is all described by the man's patient but clearly all suffering son, who eventually dons the prototype goggles and sees for himself.
I read this to Huxley, age 5, and he…
gregladen | February 26, 2015A paper just published in Science Magazine helps explain variation we see in the long term Carbon-pollution caused upward trend Earth's surface temperatures. The research also, and rather ominously, suggests that a recent slowdown in that trend is likely to reverse direction in the near future, causing the Earth's surface temperature to rise dramatically.
The graph shown above represents the ongoing warming of the Earth's surface owing to the increased atmospheric concentration of human generated greenhouse gas pollution, mainly CO2. But, have a look at the following graph of changes in…