Climate Change
gregladen | November 14, 2014The data for October has just been added to the NOAA GISS instrument record, which runs from 1880 to the present.
October was the warmest on record, just beating out 2005.
Overall, it is looking increasingly likely that 2014 will tie or beat the record for warmest year in the instrumental record, in terms of surface temperature. This does not count the ocean warming which is substantial. But we tend to look at the surface record as an approximation of global warming.
Here's the graph:
Just looking at the daily values (but from a different database) for November, this is turning out to be…
gregladen | November 12, 2014Have a look at this new video from Peter Sinclair:
Peter has an interview with Jeff Goodell, contributing editor of Rolling Stone, which you will want to see. They talk about the political aspect of sea level rise in Florida.
More about sea level rise here.
gregladen | October 29, 2014Fred Upton is the incumbent Republican Congressional Representative for southwest Michigan’s 6th district. Upton is considered to be one of Michigan’s most powerful Republicans. He is the Chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which is an important position in relation to climate change. He has been in the House since being elected in 1986. Most of his elections since then, including after redistricting (when he went from the 4th to the 6th district) were easy wins. In 2012 he was “primaried” by the righter-wing, but still won handily (Wikipedia editors, note that Upton’s Wiki entry…
gregladen | October 28, 2014This was technically difficult owing to internet conditions but interviewer Vijay Kishore Vaidyanathan did a great job with what he had. In particular he did a great job editing out the constant explosions in the background!
https://soundcloud.com/mobile-journalism-4/talk-with-prof-greg-laden
gregladen | October 23, 2014Arctic Sea Ice extent continues to be a problem. This year, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, ARctic Sea ice reached its lowest extent this year on September 17th, which is about the sixth lowest extent on record, following a multi-year trend of decline. There is variation from year to year. This year's minimum was almost exactly the same as last years. With the exception of 2001, minimum extent has been below the climatalogical average every year since 1998.
Dana Nuccitelli has a post on this with excellent discussion and some nice graphics, and he has also produced a…
gregladen | October 22, 2014Some time in the 1970s.
I keep hearing about this 17 year long pause in global warming. So I went and looked. I did a regression analysis of the last 17 full years of surface temperatures from the GISS database. There is an upward trend in warming during this period and it is statistically significant.
Then I calculated a "running slope" over 17 year long periods from the beginning of the record (plus 8 years) to the end of the record (minus 8 years). For each slope I tested to see if the slope was less than +0.1 (the average slope across the record is 0.75). If a year centered on any…
gregladen | October 21, 2014I could rephrase this question. What should we do about climate change. The reason I might rephrase this is because we may not be that sure of what we can do, but we should do something. Or, more accurately, some things. There are a lot of possible things we can do, and we have little time to do them. So, maybe we should do all of them for a while. We could spend years working out what the best three or four things we can do might be, and try to implement them. But there will be political opposition from the right, because the right is inexplicably opposed to any action that smells like…
gregladen | October 17, 2014Two items related only because these two seem to like each other and there are coeval happenings.
Mark Steyn and Dr. Michael Mann's book
Michael mann wrote a great book called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. It really is a good book, I highly recommend it.
Mark Steyn is a right wing talking head and shock jocky guy whose behavior is that of a seventh grader. Since Mann's book was published, numerous anti-science and anti-environment Internet trolls have posted bogus, harassing, one-star reviews on Amazon of Mann's book. Often, these reviews come in…
gregladen | October 13, 2014We have been having a run of very warm months, and according to the GISS database, updated yesterday, September was the warmest on record, and the records go back to the late 19th century. This is global average temperature of the surface.
I'll have more about this later, as other databases are updated. Sometimes one data set shows slightly different results than others, so it is good to look at them all as a group. Also, NOAA has not updated its climate watcher thingie yet.
If October, November and December turn out to be very warm as well, 2014 will end up being one of the top three or…
gregladen | October 9, 2014Did you ever leave your freezer door slightly open on a humid day only to find chunks of new ice formed at the gap? When that happens, did you conclude "Oh, my freezer is colder than usual, I wonder how that happened?" No. You concluded that you had left the door slightly open, some cold got out, and vapor froze on your gasket.
Sea ice is hard to make. The sea is salt water, so it has a lower freezing point than fresh water. The sea has potentially large waves and lots of currents. This is just not a situation where ice can easily form. Yet, it does form on the oceans near the Earth's…
gregladen | October 7, 2014What is the role of the ocean's abyss in global warming?1
I’ve already posted on a study published in Nature Climate change that shows that the amount of extra global warming related heat in the Southern Oceans is greater than previously thought. There is another paper in the same journal by Llovel et al, “Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade.” This paper verifies previous research that the oceans absorb a lot of the excess heat, but looks specifically at the ocean below 2,000 meters, which the paper referrs to in places as "deep" but that…
gregladen | October 6, 2014The sun warms the Earth's surface. Additional greenhouse gases and associated positive feedbacks (like, additional additional greenhouse gasses) increase that effect. So, it gets warmer, and by "it" we mean the "surface" of the Earth. This is usually measured as the temperature near the surface across the land and the surface of the sea (Sea Surface Temperature or SST). But over 90% of the heat added by global warming goes into the ocean.
We know how much heat goes into the ocean (other than SST) two ways. One is direct measurements using equipment that samples water at depth, and the…
gregladen | October 3, 2014The American Meteorological Society, in it’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), has released a report called “Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 from a Climate Perspective.” Three studies looked at excessive heat in Australia, three at drought or dry conditions in California, and 14 looked at various other extreme events (though some of those events may overlap or be related) for a total of about 15 different phenomena.
There was a pattern in the results. The studies looking at heat all suggested a link to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This is not surprising because…
gregladen | September 29, 2014As you know, I do the occasional science-related interview on Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio, on Radio AM 950. (See this for a list of all, or at least most, of the work I've done with that show.)
On Sunday October 5th at the ungodly hour of 9:00 AM Central Time, I'll be interviewing Michael Mann, and Mike Haubrich will host. There is plenty to talk about but if you have a specific topic you'd like to see covered, or a specific question, feel free to note it below in the comments section.
It is also possible to call in or send an email to the station during the show. Listen to the show…
gregladen | September 29, 2014This is about the law suit filed by Michael Mann against the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg because of accusations they made that were actionable. Michael Halpern summarized:
Competitive Enterprise Institute’s space technology and policy analyst, Rand Simberg, recently wrote a blog post in which he compared Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann to former university football coach and convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky. CEI published the post on its own blog, and the National Review decided it was appropriate to pass along. Michael…
gregladen | September 27, 2014I want to put a solar panel on my roof so that I am releasing less greenhouse gas into the environment. But then I hear that manufacturing solar panels causes the release of greenhouse gasses, so I have to subtract that from the good I think I'm doing. But then I realize that the people who are making the solar panels have to change their method so they release less greenhouse gas into the environment.
We hear this argument all the time (for example, here). You think you are doing something "green" but it really isn't green because yadayadayada. I am suspicious of these arguments because…
gregladen | September 22, 2014Who is Steve McIntyre? From DeSmogBlog.com:
Stephen McIntyre has been a long-time mining industry executive, mostly working on the “stock market side” of mining exploration deals. He published a blog called Climate Audit where he attempts to analyse in sometimes long and extensive detail the work of climate change scientists where he documents “statistical mistakes” in peer-reviewed scientific literature. ...
McIntyre has been described as a “persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003” and has been a prominent critic of…