Climate Change
gregladen | June 28, 2014First let me check ... are all those denialists who have been claiming that wild fires have become rare done talking yet?
OK fine.
Yes, depending on where you go and what you look at we are having a problem with wild fires in the US and elsewhere (i.e., Australia). Part of this is probably due to weather whiplash. Periods of heavier than usual rain means more fuel grows, periods of dry make the fuel ready to burn, maybe even add some extra windy conditions, and the fires are worse than usual. This leads to landslide conditions being worse later on when the unusual rains occur.
Anyway,…
gregladen | June 27, 2014Who are the founders of Greenpeace? Not Patrick Moore.
Patrick Moore is a Hippie for Hire. He makes the claim that he co-founded Greenpeace, and charges a fee to show up at conferences or other venues, or sit on boards, to provide a story that anti-environmentalists, global warming deniers, and others, like to hear. The part where he takes your money to lie, as far as I can tell, is true. The part about how he co-founded Greenpeace is apparently not true.
Here’s what Greenpeace has to say about Patrick Moore:
Patrick Moore. Did Patrick Moore found Greenpeace? Greenpeace says no. They…
gregladen | June 27, 2014Another Great Video from Greenman Peter Sinclair:
More details and links HERE.
gregladen | June 25, 2014We are breaking all sorts of records here in Minnesota this June, and not the records for drought (or, for once, cold). It has been raining and storming a lot, and not just in one place as happens now and then. The rains have been widespread and intensive. The flood levels of most rivers are not breaking records because those are set in the earlier Spring snow-melt driven flooding, but this time of year all the creeks, kills, and rivers should be receding not rising.
The situation is so interesting and important that our local public TV political weekly put the weather on top of the show…
gregladen | June 21, 2014In 2009 someone wrote a blog post about climate change that made all the usual science denialist claims. Hurricanes have reduced therefore global warming is not real. In this case, hurricanes are one of the main threats of climate change (a straw man) and since they are not as common these days in the Atlantic as alarmists claimed the would be (cherry picking) global warming is not a concern. There were stronger storms in the past. Katrina wasn't really all that bad. Etc. etc.
The Ice Caps (he called sea ice "Ice Caps") are not really melting that bad and besides we don't really know what…
gregladen | June 18, 2014I woke up this morning to find about a dozen reports on my iPad Damage app indicating trees down and hail damage in many communities from Mankato to Edina, south of the Twin Cities. More of the same. We have been having severe weather for about a month now, or a bit less. One day in late May, Julia and I were taking pictures of people driving too fast through the lake that formed in front of our house form a major downpour. Early in that storm we witnessed a ground strike not too far away. A short while after that an ambulance came screaming by our house, coming from the direction of the…
gregladen | June 10, 2014According to the NOAA GISS global instrumental record for temperatures (1880 to the present), since 2000 (inclusively) we have had
2002 and 2003 ties for first and second warmest January. Januray 2014 was the fourth warmest, 2005 the fifth warmest.
February 2010 was the third warmest Feburary, and 2002 had the fourth warmest February.
March 2002 was the warmest, 2012 was the second warmest. March 2014 was the fourth warmest.
April 2010 was the warmest on record, April 2014 the second warmest.
We are still waiting for the data on May 2014, but during this time the warmest May on record…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Given recent attention to the issue of consensus in climate change research, this is a good time to mention a paper that came out recently by John Abraham, John Cook, John Fasullo, Peter Jacobs, Scott Mandia and Dana Nuccitelli called "Review of the consensus and asymmetric quality of research on human-induced climate change."
I'll paste the abstract below but first I'll summarize it in a sentence. The few papers that explicitly deny the basic science of climate change are rightfully rejected by the peer review process because they are crap. Bit they do find more attention by main stream…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Above is a graphic someone tossed at me on twitter the other day. It makes it look like CO2 emissions went way up then went way down so everything is fine. It is, of course, a lie, of sorts.
IT is actually kind of hard to find a graph just for US CO2 that goes back in historic time, but this graphic for the global energy industry clearly shows that the big picture is an upward trend:
The dip we see in recent years is simply an effect of the economy going bad, and things people do that emit CO2 being done somewhat less. Kevin Schultz wrote this up on his blog:
After a five-year decrease in…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Just a quick item on the pause in global warming that is said to have happened over the last X number of years. I took NOAA's instrumental record since the late 19th century and calculated the average deviation for "surface" temperatures from a baseline for the entire period. Surface temperatures refer to the lower part of the atmosphere and sea surfaces. When you look at a graph of "global warming" expressed in temperatures, this is almost always what is meant (this leaves out a lot of things, including the poles, much of Africa, and deeper ocean waters). But it is a standard and a fairly…
gregladen | June 5, 2014This post has gone out of date. Go HERE to see a current list of excellent books on climate change.
gregladen | June 5, 2014I made a movie you might enjoy. There may be something else out there like this, probably better than this one, but it is still cool. I downloaded all the PDF files from the US Drought Monitor archives, using the version of the connected US that has only the year, month, and day on the graphic. Then I slapped them in iMovie and sped the animation up by 800% over the default 1 sec. per pic. I do not have today's rather horrifying image on it, which I've placed above.
Here's the movie:
gregladen | June 4, 2014Independent videographer Peter Sinclair's 'This is Not Cool' video explores recent headline-grabbing research on Antarctic glacial melting, the first video produced under the name Yale Climate Connections, formerly The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.
gregladen | June 4, 2014The NCSE wants to give you a free chapter from the above depicted book. Click here.
gregladen | June 4, 2014Joe Goffman, Associate Assistant Administrator for Climate and Senior Counsel for EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, explains EPA's commonsense proposal to work with states, cities and businesses to cut carbon pollution from power plants. By looking across our whole power sector, the proposed Clean Power Plan will boost our economy, protect our health and environment, and fight climate change.
This is OK, but I would seriously edit some of this text. For example, this is part of the text of this video:
Global climate change can threaten our very way of life. Floods can destroy our homes and…
gregladen | June 4, 2014Sadly, a large percentage of Americans are under the impression that climate scientists do not agree on the reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). A lot of people are simply wrong about this. They think that there is a great deal of controversy among the scientists who study the Earth's climate. But there isn't. One way we know this is from a study done by John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce, called "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature…
gregladen | May 28, 2014Yes, folks, global warming denialism is going away. Here's one more example:
I'd like to know more specifically what Joe himself thinks about all this. This segment looks like a segue, and not the kind you drive around on.
gregladen | May 28, 2014Republican lawmakers and their kin are opposing the acceptance of National Science Standards. Why? Because those standards are based on science. What they prefer is that the standards we use to guide curriculum in America's public schools be the hobgoblin of the Koch Brothers and the rest of the petroleum industry. Way to ruin the country, man. Civilization too. Nice move.
As Chris Hays points out (see below) the anti-science industry in America is leaving Creationism behind and shifting towards the denigration of Climate Science, much to our detriment.
The following interview from All…