Climate and Weather
gregladen | October 20, 2011Urban areas can be warmer than surrounding non-urban areas because there is a lot of combustion, pavement and other structure can collect solar heat and retain it for a while, and other factors. It is not uncommon to look at a weather map where conditions for precipitation are marginal, and everywhere but the urban zone, or only the urban zone and nothing else, is showing a weather phenomenon. Because people and airports (where weather is very important) are located in or very near urban areas, it stands to reason that a lot of the data used to estimate global temperatures would be affected…
gregladen | October 19, 2011
Fool Me Twice
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America" was officially released last night in Minneapolis with appropriate fanfare and celebration. Everyone who gets to know Shawn likes him from the start and quickly learns to respect him and eventually hold him with a certain amount of well-earned awe, and like any book, we've all seen this one coming for quite some time. (I have an old pre-release copy in which every page is "00" but, surprisingly, the front cover is just like the final form.)
Shawn gave a talk at the release party, but since he is held in such high…
gregladen | October 12, 2011Rapid climate change can cause species extinction. But if a species is highly mobile or wide-ranging, then that effect may be attenuated. And, more rapid climate change would be more serious a problem than less rapid climate change. Therefore, there should be a relationship between species mobility (migration) and the rate, or velocity, of climate change vis-a-vis extinction. This is a nice set of hypotheses which have been tested in a recent paper. The abstract:
The effects of climate change on biodiversity should depend in part on climate displacement rate (climate-change velocity) and…
gregladen | October 10, 2011My first job as an archaeologist in Boston (having moved there from New York) had to do with Deer Island, the northern of two islands that separate Boston's Inner and Outer Harbors. The actual archaeology was uninteresting but the historical research was fascinating. Among the things I learned is that Boston's Inner Harbor regularly froze over. It no longer does. When the Continental Army placed the British in Boston under Siege at the beginning of the Revolution, the idea of holding off an assault until the harbor froze over was routine. No one expected the harbor to not freeze over.…
gregladen | September 25, 2011There was a poll.
On climate change, 69% of respondents said that they believe that "there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades," with 26% saying that they did not believe it, 2% volunteering that there is some or mixed evidence, and 3% saying that they didn't know or refusing to answer the question. Among those who believed that there is evidence (whether solid or mixed), 64% said that "[c]limate change is caused mostly by human activity such as burning fossil fuels" came closest to their view, while 32% preferred "[c]…
gregladen | September 22, 2011The first global map of the salinity, or saltiness, of Earth's ocean surface produced by NASA's new Aquarius instrument reveals a rich tapestry of global salinity patterns, demonstrating Aquarius' ability to resolve large-scale salinity distribution features clearly and with sharp contrast. NASA/GSFC/JPL-Caltech
One of NASA's newest Big Sci machines has generated a high quality map of ocean salinity. It is still preliminary and a few months of calibration is needed, but soon enough Aquarius will start monitoring ocean salinity on an ongoing basis.
Ocean salinity is important because it…
gregladen | September 19, 2011In order to do good climate science, you have to understand and control for the sources of variation in the system. In any system that involvs metric change over time, there are four sources of variation:
1) Measurement or observational error (goofs, inaccuracies, bad calibration). The speed was 23 feet per second but the instrument read 22.5 or the observer wrote down 32 by accident, etc.
2) Internal (secular, natural) variation. If A causes changes in B over time, variation in B that would have happened anyway don't count in understanding the A-B link.
3) Causal relationship (causal…
gregladen | September 19, 2011I want to say a word about what a proxyindicator is. And isn't.
I noticed that the term is not in some, perhaps many, dictionaries, so I guess this leaves me free to do what I want with it! But wait, the term "proxy" is of course in the dictionary. It is an ancient short version of the word "procuracy" which is the authority to act for another. Thus, a proxy vote. Proxyindicator (or proxy indicator) is a term widely used in climate science though it is used in many other fields as well to refer to a measurement that is indirect, or more accurately, that stands in for the direct measurement…
gregladen | September 6, 2011You all know about the latest dustups and new research related to climate change, including the resignation of the Editor-in-Chief of a major journal as well as some new papers about global warming. There has been so much activity over recent days that I thought a new link farm would be a good thing. So, here it is. Please let me know if I've missed anything!
07-29-2011
On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance
09-02-2011
Opinion: The damaging impact of Roy Spencer's science
In his bid to cast doubts on the seriousness of…
gregladen | September 6, 2011The question of whether clouds are the cause of global warming has been settled:
No, they are not.
The question was raised in July in a paper by Spencer and Braswell, published in the Peer Reviewed Journal Remote Sensing called "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance." (See this.) Spencer and Braswell's paper claimed that the Earth's temperature was not really rising due to fossil carbon in the form of CO2 being pushed into atmosphere. Rather, they said, any variation we see in global temperature is a result of natural…
gregladen | September 2, 2011There has been a major dust-up in the climate denialist world. A study published in late July made false claims and was methodologically flawed, but still managed to get published in a peer reviewed journal. The Editor-in-Chief of that journal has resigned to symbolically take responsibility for the journal's egregious error of publishing what is essentially a fake scientific paper, and to "protest against how the authors [and others] have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions" taking to task the University of Alabama's press office, Forbes, Fox News and others.
Let me break it down for…
gregladen | July 11, 2011I woke up this morning and the world was slightly different than it was the night before. Well, it probably always is a little different each day, but there are certain times when you notice this. I'm not talking about the bits of siding, roofing, and trees scattered about the landscape because of the very severe thunderstorm we had last night, although I suppose this is indirectly related.
If you are not a Minnesotan this will take some explanation:
Don Shelby newscaster, was the Walter Cronkite of the Twin Cities. Stately in appearance, white-haired (since birth, presumably), deep…
gregladen | June 28, 2011And what do we do about it?
Global warming is for real, and it is important. Just as important is the fact that global warming is largely anthropogenic. Global warming is important because conditions for life on the planet are changing due to warming as well as other changes caused by the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere, in ways that will have, on balance, negative impacts; That it is anthropogenic is important because this means we have identified a cause of an important negative effect and thus could potentially curtail it. The anthropogenic nature of global warming is also…
gregladen | May 25, 2011People are asking me: Is the recent spate of tornadoes caused by global warming? The usual answer to that question is that you can't answer the question because a tornado is not caused by climate ... it is cause by weather ... and global warming (which is real, and which is cause by humans) is climate change.
However, that is not really the best answer to the question. Ultimately, I want to propose an analogy for how to think about this question, but first, a stab at a good answer, which if modified could probably be improved:
Question: Is Anthropogenic Global Warming the cause of the…
gregladen | March 8, 2011These masses of ice are now contributing more new meltwater to the world's seas than all other melting ice combined.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study -- the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass -- suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.
The nearly 20-year study reveals that in 2006, a year in which…
gregladen | February 16, 2011How do you separate harmless belief in religion or superstition and ... well, harmful belief in religion or superstition? We have been having a bit of a go-round* between some of my regular blog readers, including my Catholic but not anti-Evolution niece whose daughter recently acted in a commercial for the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Sondrah and I respectfully agree to disagree about certain issues, but clearly do agree on the importance of having real science, and not creationism, taught in public schools. That is what a lot of people who think of themselves as religious prefer,…
gregladen | November 13, 2010I am speaking of Representative John Shimkus, R-Ill, and the truly astonishing words he uttered before Congress demonstrated in a video that is constnatly being trolled off Google and YouTube by those who don't want you to see it:
Source and more information here.
If God's Word is infallible, unchanging, and perfect, then dinosaurs did not live in a different era than humans, and not in great antiquity, and what geologists and paleontologists say about the "age of dinosaurs" must be the word of Satan designed by the dark lord of the underworld to confuse us.
If God's Word is infallible,…
gregladen | November 10, 2010You've heard that the Arctic ice cap has shrunk, and that there are sea lanes open in the northern summer that had not been open previously, and on and so forth.
Since the start of the satellite record in 1979, scientists have observed the continued disappearance of older "multiyear" sea ice that survives more than one summer melt season. Some scientists suspected that this loss was due entirely to wind pushing the ice out of the Arctic Basin -- a process that scientists refer to as "export." In this study, Ron Kwok and Glenn Cunningham at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif…
gregladen | October 11, 2010
This is astonishing.
...Scientists and conservationists are expressing alarm at the appearance of thousands of walrus on Alaska's northwest coast, a dramatic demonstration of the effects of diminished Arctic sea ice brought on by global warming....
source
gregladen | September 16, 2010Scientists have been measuring sea ice very carefully since 1979. Prior to that, there are estimates that are of varying degrees of usefulness. I know for a fact that many New England lighthouses were attached to land by winter-long ice in places that have not had sea ice in any living person's memory, and there are similar bits and pieces of historical data suggesting that sea ice was once much more extensive in the Northern Hemisphere than at present.
Since 1979 there have been three years in which Arctic sea ice reached a rather alarming minimum size prior to reforming. We are in one…