Climate Change
gregladen | August 14, 2014A new paper advances our understanding of the link between anthropogenic global warming and the apparent uptick in severe weather events we’ve been experiencing. Let’s have a look at the phenomenon and the new research.
Climate Change: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.
It is mostly bad. Sometimes it is ugly. I was looking at crop reports from the USDA and noticed an interesting phenomenon in Minnesota, that is repeated across much of the US this year: Fewer acres are in crops but among those acres that are planted there is a high expected per-acre yield. The higher yield will make up for the…
gregladen | August 7, 2014Lots to talk about here:
Published on Aug 1, 2014
Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak On Melting Ice and Global Impacts (1080p HD)
This film brings you the voices of climate scientists - in their own words.
Rising temperatures in the Arctic are contributing the melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and destabilization of a system that has been called "Earth's Air Conditioner".
Global warming is here and is impacting weather patterns, natural systems, and human life around the world - and the Arctic is central to these impacts.
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Scientists…
gregladen | August 6, 2014I don't like the messaging Holdren almost always seems to start with: "While we can't attribute a single bla bla bla to climate change" (it is not the right way to phrase what is happening, this is a good video just out:
gregladen | August 5, 2014The National Review is a political magazine, and Mark Steyn, I think, writes for them (I really don't keep track). A while back Steyn and/or the National Review made some seemingly very defamatory statements about Michael Mann, the climate scientist. Career-damaging really icky accusations of fraud and such. They were bogus accusations, but they were also not just trollish yammering of the type we see all the time from the science denialist gaggle. So, Mann sued them.
I prefer the Law and Order version of law. Something happens on Monday, on Tuesday everything is confusing, on…
gregladen | August 3, 2014So, you accept the science of climate change and global warming as legit. But you often encounter people, at family gatherings, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, at social events, etc. who don't. Do you keep your mouth shut when someone says something clearly wrong that brings the science into question illegitimately? If you do, and others are listening, then one voice, a denialist voice, is influencing people. Probably better to say something.
The problems is that the denialist schtick involves having a lot of different arguments, with absolutely no regard as to legimacy, against the…
gregladen | July 31, 2014The US Drought Monitor produces an assessment of drought conditions every week. The drought in California has taken a large jump over the last few days, with the highest category, "Exceptional," jumping from 36.49% to 58.41%. At the start of the calendar year, that category was represented in California by 0%, so this is a continuation of an ongoing trend. The image above is the current map from US Drought Monitor.
I made a couple of other graphics that demonstrate the problem.
This is the percent area in California covered by severe to exceptional drought since the most recent time that…
gregladen | July 30, 2014Mark Your Cosmic Calendar: 774/775
One wonders if anyone felt it. Did Charlemagne feel it as he led his forces across Pagan Saxon Westphalia, knocking down Irminsuls and making everyone pretend to be Christian or else? Did the people of Bagdad, just becoming the world’s largest city, notice anything aside from their own metro-bigness? Did the Abbasid Caliph Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi have the impression something cosmic was going on that year, other than his own ascendancy to power? Or was it mainly some of the Nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere that were changed, not forever but…
gregladen | July 24, 2014The original hoser, I'm told by an unimpeachable source from way up in Canada, was the guy who went out to his front yard in the middle of the winter and hosed down the lawn in order to make some flat ice, so he and his friends could play hockey. A better way to get ice is to find a cove or embayment along a small lake that is protected from the wind; clear off the snow and you've got a nice flat surface. If that is not available, clear the snow off the rugged and rough ice that forms on many lakes, build a dam of hard packed snow around it ... and hose that down. Even better, build a…
gregladen | July 23, 2014We just experienced the warmest two months (May and June) on record, meaning, essentially, in well over 100 years. This is because of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Does this mean that 2014 will be the warmest year on record? Probably not, in part because February was pretty cold and that lowers the score for the year. But it will be a warm year.
There is a strong correlation between the temperature in June and what turns out to be the global mean for the year. This can be shown empirically by calculating a simple correlation coefficient for each month of the year and the year's…
gregladen | July 22, 2014One of the things climate change science deniers say, to throw you off, is that Antarctic sea ice is expanding. They even claim that the amount of expansion of Antarctic sea ice offsets the dramatic retreat of Arctic sea ice (see this for the latest on the Arctic). I've even seen it argued, in that famous peer-reviewed publication Twitter, that there is an inter-polar teleconnection that guarnatees that when the ice on one end of the earth expands the ice on the other end of the earth contracts, and visa versa, so everything is fine.
That Antarctic Sea ice is expanding has become standard…
gregladen | July 22, 2014As it does every summer, the Arctic Sea ice is melting off. Over the last several years, the amount of sea ice that melts by the time it hits minimum in September has generally been increasing. So, how's it doing now?
The graph above shows the 1981-2010 average plus or minus two standard deviations. Before going into more detail than that, you should look at the following graphic.
The top chart shows the march of Arctic Sea ice melt for first ten years of the baseline data set only, and the bottom chart shows the last ten years of the same data set. This tells us that the two Standard…
gregladen | July 22, 2014There is an old theory in psychology that characterizes humans as a bowl of Jell-O (Jelly for some of you). Life pokes at the Jell-O, the Jell-O jiggles. Eventually the jiggles begin to change the Jell-O, so certain kinds of pokes result in certain kinds of responses. The Jell-O gurgles, babbles, notices things, learns, develops, and eventually becomes self aware.
That is a great oversimplification of a theory that was, in turn, a great oversimplification of human development, yet it does seem to apply in many ways to human behavior. When it comes to climate change, people seem more…
gregladen | July 21, 2014June 2014 was the hottest June on record, and records go back to 1880, by which time Global Warming may have started already but wasn't nearly as intense as the last half of the 20th century, according to data NOAA has released and highlighted. The previous month, May, was the hottest May on record.
June Global Land and Ocean plot
NOAA notes that this was the 38th consecutive June and the 352nd consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average, which was already elevated due to global warming. Also, the last time June was below average for the century was in 1976…
gregladen | July 18, 2014AGW -> AA -> QR -> WW -> WF -> DS -> A- -> AGW
The great cycle of climate change. Anthropogenic Global Warming has resulted in a relatively increased warming of the poles, which changes the dynamic of jet streams forming thus causing quasi-ressonant (stuck in place) Rossby Waves (curvy slow moving jet streams) which then fuels Weather Whiplash (or Weather Weirding if you prefer) which at the moment is causing unprecedented wild fires especially in Western Canada and Siberia, which causes a darkening of glacial surfaces in Greenland (Dark Snow) which decreases albedo which…
gregladen | July 17, 2014Roger Pielke Jr, who is some form or another of climate change contrarian ... his main schtick is that global warming has no negative effects and he uses questionable analyses to "prove" this ... was brought on to the well respected FiveThirtyEight run by Nate Silver, blog site a while back. Soon after joining the team he seems to have stuck his foot deeply into his mouth a few times and got called on it. One could say that FiveThirtyEight's fame and respect has been earned by being straight forward and methodologically rigorous and professional in its handling of predictions about such…
gregladen | July 17, 2014Jeffrey Sachs was interviewed today on MorningJoe about the just released report to the UN Secretary-General on climate change and energy. The report addresses the goal of reaching a low-Carbon economy by mid century in the countries that release the most fossil carbon today.
One interesting thing about this report is that Joe Scarborough, Morning Joe himself, seems to be pretty much on board with the reality of climate change science. Since Joe occupies a centrist to right position in Mainstream Media, this is important. Good for you Joe.
Here is the show:
gregladen | July 17, 2014Possibly both.
Climate change certainly has a huge effect. Increased evaporation, decreased snowpack, the stalling of air masses that cause more drying and less wetting, which in turn is caused by changes in the jet stream, which in turn is caused by "Arctic Amplification," an effect of global warming, are major causes of a three year drought coming hard on the heels of a decade of near-drought dry.
But also, Californian approaches to water management have been an issue. I recently learned that there are communities in California that don't even have water meters on people's houses. What…
gregladen | July 11, 2014The American Tradition Institute a.k.a. ATI a.k.a. Energy & Environmental Legal Institute is a "think" tank that supports or engages in climate science denialism. You can read about it here and here. Michael Mann is a climate scientist, famous for bringing to the world's attention the alarming problem of hockey-stick style global warming. According to Wikipedia:
The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize...
The ATI, Michael Mann, and the University of Virginia have been…
gregladen | July 10, 2014Showtime's Years of Living Dangerously is one of the most important and well done documentaries addressing climate change. The 2014 Emmy Nominations were just announced and this series has received two nominations: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming (Adam Bolt).
While often portrayed as an unsettled debate, the reality is that 97% of scientists agree global warming is happening and humans are to blame.
Top scientific organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Medical Association and…
gregladen | July 7, 2014Regret Labs is a new science podcast by Aric McKeown and Levi Weinhagen, produced in the Twin Cities. It is a lot of fun. I did an interview with them and it has just come out. You can listen to it here.
We talked about science, science advocacy, climate change, and the use of social media to promote good science.