illconsidered | March 3, 2009Roger puts up another post (guest post, gotta love plausible deniability) about James Hansen:
blah blah blah....dictator who ordered millions of people to be gassed and then burned in crematoria...blah blah blah
No, he isn`t (yet) calling Hansen a Hitler, but we all know how Godwin`s Law works.
Or almost all of us...
[UPDATE: Things Break has a stronger stomach than I do, and he takes a more thorough look at Roger's latest. As usual with Pielke's positions, the closer you look, the less it holds up.]
illconsidered | March 2, 2009Over 12,000 people are expected at a student climate conference this weekend and today over one thousand will gather today in Washington DC.
The focus of the DC protest is the local coal fired plant that powers capitol buildings heat and air conditioning. The target is symbolic, and congress has preemptively agreed to switch the plant to natural gas.
But the most compelling reason to pay attention to this:
Jim Hansen at NASA, [...] may be arrested today with us all
We can all expect more of this from the attack dogs, of course. (BTW, when I went to that link, the Google Ad prominently…
illconsidered | March 2, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... March 1, 2009 Top Stories:PowerShift, OCO, Smith et al., Barker et al., Ocean Circulation, Economy, Blogostorm Melting Arctic, International Polar Year, Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Earth Hour, Monsoons, Aerosols, Grumbine, Brooks Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks,…
illconsidered | March 2, 2009Just while we are on the subject of George Will and lying with impunity...
illconsidered | February 28, 2009So a couple of month's ago I signed up for the Global Population Speak Out, which (you are better off to follow the link) is a simple project intended to draw attention to the problem posed by the world's growing human population. My obligation is pretty small, fortunately, in that I was asked only to at least mention the issue in some way, some where.
I say "fortunately" because it has turned out to be a hard thing to write about for me.
It is clear that current population growth is unsustainable, and I would suspect that the current population as it stands now is itself unsustainable. The…
illconsidered | February 27, 2009Things Break does a thorough take-down of George Will's continued dishonesty in the Washington Post. For the background, if somehow you have missed this kerfuffle, check his earlier post.
The story in a nutshell is not remarkable: mainstream columnist prints op-ed full of outright falsehoods, complaints are rejected, paper stands by its right to fill the information age with disinformation. ie Facts don't matter.
The only remarkable thing really is the attention it is receiving and who knows, perhaps there will be some real consequences... like maybe people will remember this for a change.…
illconsidered | February 27, 2009I know this video is for real because since I first saw it several years ago it has been erased from YouTube at the request of the Japanese television company that produced it.
Being real does not stop it from also being surreal to the extreme!
See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.
illconsidered | February 26, 2009Today's DemocracyNow! has a segment with Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other guest discussing worsening outlooks of future warming and increased lobbying efforts from the fossil fuel industry.
We speak to Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about his warning that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising more rapidly than expected in recent years. Field says the current trajectory of climate change is now much worse than the IPCC had…
illconsidered | February 26, 2009...and he puts you on his mailing list! [Please note: Marc Morano is nowhere near as relevant as Beelzebub!! It is just a gimmick for a blog title.]
So I poked fun at Marc Morano the other day, and though he thankfully did not pop up in my comments he must have read the post because the next day I started receiving his spam.
The first email was approvingly quoting Pielke Jr, which I have no doubt thrills him. Roger's fear? Not that humanity is facing daunting challenges and may not act quickly enough, no what keeps Roger awake at night is James Hansen's belief that politicians should take…
illconsidered | February 25, 2009Contrary to the popular talking point, climate models do take into account H2O as a greenhouse gas. In fact, it is the largest single feedback factor in the climate system. And also contrary to another popular talking point, models are being validated in many ways.
Go have a read at Gristmill for a post by Andrew Dessler on a recent paper he co-authored[PDF] that seeks to assess the state of current climate science literature on the topic of water vapor feedback in models and the climate system. He describes papers raw material as a "mountain of evidence" supporting a strongly positive…
illconsidered | February 24, 2009Today's Dilbert suggests that today's generation may not escape the wrath of those coming next for the sorry mess we are leaving behind:
Well played indeed!
illconsidered | February 23, 2009I am a bit slow off the mark with this posting from Nature's Climate Feedback blog, but last month they put up a little news about iron fertilization of oceans as a geoengineering technique for removal of atmospheric CO2.
Have a read, but in a nutshell: that Indo-German experiment is going forward in the Southern Ocean and recent studies of naturally occurring blooms are not cause to celebrate, as actual sequestration into deep water is not very high.
As with this story, humanity needs to keep the cork in the champagne bottle for at least a little while longer...
illconsidered | February 23, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Information overload is pattern recognition February 22, 2009 Top Stories:Day of Mourning, Inferno & Aftermath, Inquiry, WaPo & Will Melting Arctic, Faulty Sensor, Arctic, Antarctica, Grumbine, Tipping Points, Open Access, MTobis, Economy, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Vulcan, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures,…
illconsidered | February 21, 2009The emergence of China as a dominant economic power is an epochal event, occasioning the most massive and rapid redistribution of the earth's resources in human history. The country has also become a ravenous consumer. Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism.
A very sobering read.
illconsidered | February 21, 2009Michael Tobis has another well written and thought provoking essay on In It for the Gold asking if continuing developments in climatology are going to affect mitigation policy.
It can be argued that climatology is not an important input into climate change related policy. It is premature to take climatological input into account in adaptation strategy, while on the other hand as far as mitigation goes (i.e., on the global scale) the picture has pretty much stayed about the same for some substantial time.
That idea does not fit in very well with the common denialist refrain that climatologists…
illconsidered | February 18, 2009In the climate debates, I hear it all the time: why should the US do anything when China and India are the fastest growing and largest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet? Though I make it a personal policy to never discussion mitigation policies with characters who will not even accept the reality of the problem, the question does, on its own merits, deserve a thoughtful answer.
Clearly, climate disruption due to accumulating greenhouse gases is a global problem and requires a cooperative and global solution. We all share the same planetary atmosphere, and CO2 is a well mixed gas in…
illconsidered | February 17, 2009Thanks to Crakar14, I came across this article from the India Times online:
In a major breakthrough that could help in the fight against global warming, a team of five Indian scientists from four institutes of the country have discovered a naturally occurring bacteria which converts carbon dioxide (CO2) into a compound found in limestone and chalk.
Based on this, Crakar thinks we should just continue business as usual and forget this whole global warming scare thing. (Oh, btw, that's what he thought that before too)
Now, I don't know anything more than what it says in the article, but it…
illconsidered | February 17, 2009This is just a quick note to let people know that I get a lot of legitimate comments caught in the spam filter here, and unfortunately I am not very conscientious about cleaning it out.
If you submit a comment and it does not appear, don't hesitate to let me know via email (see my email address here) .
I regret that this happened to a pair of comments that were submitted a couple of days ago, because the poster clearly put some time and effort into them and they also contain a lot of technical detail about IR absorbtion by CO2. They had fallen off the "Recent comments" list before they made…
illconsidered | February 16, 2009I recently wrote about the tragic bushfires in Australia and how it seems to me that it is reasonable to ask if this would have happened without anthropogenic climate changes.
Real Climate has the details on this in their latest post: Bushfires and extreme heat in south-east Australia.
The post is by David Karoly, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He identifies four factors in the fire's ferocity - maximum temperatures, relative humidity, wind speeds and the ongoing drought - and discusses the possible role of climate change in each of them. For three of…
illconsidered | February 16, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Information overload is pattern recognition February 15, 2009 Top Stories:AAAS, Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Nicholas Stern, Open Access, YD Impact The Australian inferno Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Aerosols, Paleoclimate, Glaciers, Sea Levels,…