Climate Change
gregladen | February 15, 2017A while back I reviewed "Climate Change: What Everyone Needs To Know" by Joe Romm (see my review here). In that book Romm provides useful advice to help people understand the impact of climate change on them, on various aspects of their lives. For example, many people choose to retire to a specific habitat and a specific geographical location. You might want to know if a real estate investment you make now will be negatively affected when the state you move to becomes inundated by the sea or too hot to live in. Sure, you're near retirement age so you are going to die soon anyway. But, will…
gregladen | February 7, 2017It is like that stabby lady in the bath tub in that movie.
Here, I'll give you a more readable version of the graphic from NOAA:
The chance of an the Pacific ENSO system being neutral, meaning, not adding extra heat to the atmosphere and not removing extra heat form the atmosphere, is about 50% from now through mid 2017.
But, the chance of a la Nina is pretty darn low, and the chance of an El Nino, which would add more heat to the atmosphere than the average year, is not only approaching 40% but it has been growing.
A second El Nino this close on the last one, which was a very severe El…
gregladen | February 6, 2017Great disasters are great stories, great moments in time, great tests of technology, humanity, society, government, and luck. Fifty years ago it was probably true to say that our understanding of great disasters was thin, not well developed because of the relative infrequency of the events, and not very useful, not knowledge that we could use to reduce the risks from such events.
This is no longer true. The last several decades has seen climate science add more climatic data because of decades of careful instrumental data collection happening, but also, earlier decades have been added to…
gregladen | February 5, 2017The year 2016 was messy and expensive and full of climate change enhanced weather disasters. There were, according to Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, over 30 billion dollar disasters last year.
This is the fourth-largest number on record going back to 1990, said insurance broker Aon Benfield in their Annual Global Climate and Catastrophe Report issued January 17 (updated January 23 to include a 31st billion-dollar disaster, the Gatlinburg, Tennessee fire.) The average from 1990 - 2016 was 22 billion-dollar weather disasters; the highest number since 1990 was 41, in 2013.
The frequency of flood…
gregladen | January 12, 2017The term "Evangelical" is a bit of a moving goal post. But, there is a strong association between Evangelical and getting climate science totally wrong in a way that is actually materially damaging to our planet and to future generations. So, it is not hard to be angry at Evangelicals because they are ruining it for everyone.
But, within the "Evangelical" movement, there are people who are trying to change that. I wish them luck. One person is Katharine Hayhoe, and here she is talking about that:
Another is my friend Paul Douglas, famous meteorologist. He wrote Caring for Creation: The…
gregladen | January 6, 2017You already know abut the North American Conveyor current. Briefly: The major ocean currents happen because the equatorial ocean is warmer, and since water (unlike land) can move (though not as fast as air) the dissipation of this heat across the surface of the Earth results in warm water moving, at the surface, north or south away from the Equator, where it loses its heat and finds it way back to the equatorial regions, usually as deeper, cooler water.
Conveniently, this process also involves increasing the salinity of the water far from the equator, as evaporating water becomes saltier.…
gregladen | December 12, 2016UPDATE: The Department of Energy has reportedly refused Donald Trump's request for names of DOE employees and contractors who have been engaged in climate change research. That does not mean that Tump will never get those names. Once he is President, he can get the names. But for now, he'll have to sit it out.
The Donald Trump transition team circulated an eight page questionnaire to the US Department of Energy. Such questionnaires are not normal. This particular questionnaire is deeply disturbing.
There are seventy-four questions. They provide insight into likely Trump administration…
gregladen | October 23, 2016My friend Paul Douglas calls himself an albino unicorn. He is a Republican (one of my few Republican friends!) and an evangelical Christian (one of my few evangelical Christian friends!) who is extremely well informed about climate change, and who acts on a day to day basis as a climate warrior, informing people of the realities of climate change at several levels.
I tend to think of Paul as a tire, because he is where the rubber meets the road. His job is informing corporations and such about the risks they are facing right now, today, tomorrow, next week with respect to weather. Paul…
gregladen | October 12, 2016The Royal Society is the world's oldest extant scientific society. And, it is a place where scientific controversy has a home. Both Huxley and Wilberforce were members back in the 19th century, when young Darwin's ideas were first being knocked around.
More recently, just a few weeks ago, the Royal Society accidentally agreed to host a talk by coal baron and formerly respected science writer Matt Ridley. Matt Ridley has been a great disappointment to us scientists and science teachers. Many of us used his book as a supplementary reading in our evolution courses, for example (Ridley was a…
gregladen | October 10, 2016It turns out that there is an untold story behind the "discovery" of the famous Hockey Stick graph by Mike Mann and his colleagues. It is an excellent example of how science works, worthy of repeating, say, in a science classroom.
Anthropogenic Climate Change is very serious business. And, therefore, there has been far too little humor applied to communicating about this problem. Mike Mann and his co-author Tom Toles have started to backfill that gaping hole in the collective effort to bring the most important existential issue of our time to everyone's attention.
Hurricane Matthew wasn'…
gregladen | October 10, 2016Climate change is a settled issue. It is now widely and recognized as real, and as one of the top, if not THE top, existential problems the world faces today. Americans want climate change stopped, and they want the next version of the US Government, the one that starts in January, 2017, to work hard to reduce the human release of greenhouse gas as rapidly as possible.
How do we know this?
Because no one mentioned a thing about it during last night's debate!
A few months ago, I would have expected presidential debates to have included climate change pretty much in every iteration. It…
gregladen | September 27, 2016The US is already behind in its agreed to commitment to clean power
A study just out in Nature climate Change suggests that the US is already behind in its commitments to reduce the use of fossil fuel as an energy source, and the concomitant release of climate-warming greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
The paper, by Jeffery Greenblatt and Max Wei, says:
Current intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs)are insufficient to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature change to between 1.5 and 2.0◦C above pre-industrial levels, so the effectiveness of existing INDCs will…
gregladen | September 26, 2016You've probably already heard about his paper because everyone is all a tizzy about it. There is a fundamental complaint being made about one of the paper's conclusions. I've been paying careful attention to what my colleagues are saying about that one aspect of the paper, and I get their point but I'm not sure if they are right. I'll explain that later.
What everyone so far has almost entirely missed, though, is the actual point of the paper, and that is important and while I'm sure it could be improved with further work, this is good stuff and important.
One of the major contributions…
gregladen | September 23, 2016The American Geophysical Union just lost whatever remaining credibility it had as a scientific society earlier today when it announced no change in policy regarding taking money from ExxonMobil.
We talked about this before, here.
Margaret Leinen, the AGU president, issued a communication today that says this:
Last week the AGU Board of Directors discussed the organization’s April decision to continue engagement with ExxonMobil after receiving additional information from several sources. The Board maintained its original decision after another careful and systematic review of hundreds of pages…
gregladen | September 21, 2016The Clinton Foundation started as a very successful post-presidency foundation of the type that is normally formed under the leadership of an ex president, in this case, Bill Clinton. Later, the foundation was expanded considerably and made into the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea foundation, and rivaled and exceeded earlier similar efforts to solve the world's problems. Now, the foundation is a big giant money magnet, that takes funds from all over and uses it for all sorts of great things, including addressing climate change.
It is normal for a president to step away from financial activities…
gregladen | September 20, 2016By important, I mean people who have their hands on the levers of power, more or less, in areas that affect energy policy.
I don't really care if Uncle Bob doesn't accept climate change. Uncle Bob votes for right wing yahoos anyway, that wasn't going to change. Why should it matter what Uncle Bob thinks?
Unless Uncle Bob is a top policy actor involve din climate and energy issues at the federal level or in Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, or Ohio. Right?
The Climate Constituencies Project looked at these folks (Uncle Bob's colleagues as described) to see where they stand on climate change…
gregladen | September 20, 2016For some time now ExxonMobil Corporation has been under scrutiny for having a) known about climate change, yet b) helped cause climate change, while c) investing corporate resources into getting people and the government to not take climate change seriously.
Worst case allegation: ExxonMobile has taken material steps, knowingly and intentionally, that will cause the end of civilization as we know it.
That, of course, is not illegal. But along the way, perhaps some laws have been broken, and some in the legal biz have been looking into this.
Now, suddenly, we hear from the Wall Street Journal…
gregladen | September 20, 2016White Supremacy, Climate Science Denial, Trump, Alt-Right
Peter Sinclair suddenly realized it is all one big interconnected complex hole! (Well, whole, but more like a hole because of what we are throwing into it).
Look at this classic video he made a while back:
Then, check out his post, here.
A lot of stuff about the MadHouse Effect
I reviewed the Madhouse Effect HERE.
Get Energy Smart notes that only a day after the Madhouse Effect authors highlighted nine key deniers (including Bjorn Lomborg) in the Washington Post, that venerable newspaper publishes yet another bogus editorial (…
gregladen | September 13, 2016A while back it became apparent, or should I say, more apparent, that Exxon corporation had been playing a dangerous and unethical game with the science of climate change, and for decades, misled people on the relationship between their fossil fuel related activities, the effects of those activities, and possible solutions. (They've known about this problem all along.)
Part of this seems to have involved making misstatements about climate change, and pumping resources into anti science activities and organizations.
The American Geophysical Union is the unifying organization for geologists…
gregladen | September 1, 2016But I'm sure you already knew that.
The Wall Street Journal is so far behind the curve when it comes to the science of climate change, and so deep in the pockets of the oil industry, that the following is now true: If you are in business or industry, and want to keep track of important news about markets and other important things, don't bother with the Wall Street Journal. You no longer need it for the stock info (that's on your smart phone). The editorial and analysis, and I assume the reporting, from the WSJ is so badly tainted and decades behind the times that the newspaper as a whole has…