Climate Change
gregladen | March 13, 2013Today, the Christian Science Monitor published on their web site a piece, Global luke-warming: Is the threat of climate change overstated? by James Stafford. It is an interview with climate science denialist Anthony Watts, in which Watts gives his usual argument that climate change is not important. Well, not his actual usual argument, because he has several different conflicting things to say about climate change, ranging from it isn't happening it's actually cooling to it is only warming a little to yeah, it's warming a lot but we'll adapt.
The thing is, interviewing a denialist like…
gregladen | March 9, 2013This is a must watch video from the US Senate:
I'm pretty sure I heard once that there is a rule in the Senate that you can't call another Senator a liar using that word (lier). So when you see Senator Whitehouse not using that word, that may be why.
gregladen | March 7, 2013A representative of the conservative group gets it wrong while smirking at Bill Nye at the same time:
Read all about it here at Media Matters.
gregladen | March 2, 2013For the last 25 years or so there has been a decrease in the amount of ice that remains on the surface of the Arctic Ocean every summer. This is a trend that can be attributed to global warming, which in turn, can be attributed to the steady release of previously fossilized Carbon to the atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. But over the last few years, this decrease in ice has been much more dramatic. The trend has steepened. The formation and melting of ice has to do with air and water temperatures. This in turn can be affected by how much ice there is, because ice…
gregladen | February 28, 2013From Peter Sinclair:
One of the most feared of climate change "feedbacks" is the potential release of greenhouse gases by melting arctic permafrost soils. New research indicates a critical threshold of that feedback effect could be closer than we once thought.
gregladen | February 27, 2013You all know that the Arctic Ice melts more each summer than ever before. In a few years, the Arctic will be ice free during the summer. The rate of annual melting is greater than expected even just a few years ago. Please note that the increasing melt of Arctic sea ice does not bode well for the associated Greenland Ice Sheet which is also showing signs of melting at a higher rate than expected. The melting of Arctic sea ice has a number of important environmental implications, but the melting of the Greenland Glacier has that plus more; it will contribute significantly to sea level rise…
gregladen | February 26, 2013Last February 17th, there was a big rally at the Los Angeles City Hall where people demanded action on climate change and an end to our reliance on fossil fuel. The city of Los Angeles gets 39% of its electricity from coal fired plants, so that would be hard.
But today, we've learned that "...Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will be "signing papers" in the coming weeks that will wean L.A. from coal-fired power within 12 years."
Apparently, the mayor made this announcement at a UCLA event discussing related issues, and it was a real jaw dropper, truly unexpected. This will require…
gregladen | February 26, 2013There will be a discussion on Climate Desk Live about this topic tomorrow, Feb 27th. Details and access to the event are HERE.
Increasingly, the US Navy is leading the charge towards clean energy, which can in turn impact national security an even climate change. Through investments in biofuels, construction of a more energy-efficient fleet, forward thinking about issues like rising sea levels and a melting Arctic, and commitments to reduce consumption and reliance on foreign oil, the Navy is leading the charge of a vast energy reform effort to "change the way the US military sails, flies,…
gregladen | February 26, 2013[View the story "Why does the science community shun the Bloggies?" on Storify]
Why does the science community shun the Bloggies?
I was shocked to discover that @bloggies is unaware of the reason that science blogs no longer participate in the contest. @bloggies noted: Prominent climate skeptic blogs tend to campaign for nominations, while other science blogs don't seem to mention the Bloggies.
Storified by Greg Laden· Tue, Feb 26 2013 10:47:37
@gregladen I don't know what the reason is myself.The Weblog Awards
.@Bloggies Maybe I'll write a blog post about it and send you the link if you…
gregladen | February 26, 2013
See Peter's original post here, which also covers the recent alarming finding by NASA regarding Eastern US forests. EG, " The warming climate this century has caused new stresses on trees, such as insect pest outbreaks and the introduction of new pathogens. Scientists consider both climate change and disease to be dominant driving forces in the health of forests in this region."
gregladen | February 25, 2013I recently posted a simple Internet meme suggesting that if we subsidized solar energy like we subsidized fossil fuels that this could be good. I posted that on Google Plus an it engendered way over 300 comments, many of which attempted to explain, often rather impolitely, that solar energy was inefficient or in some other way bad. I'm pretty sure most of those comments come to us courtesy of the bought and paid for climate change denialist campaign, funded by Big Oil to the tune of many tens of millions of dollars to date. Most of the commenters were saying similar things, most of which…
gregladen | February 24, 2013Is there a problem with John Abraham’s argument about Obama’s Legacy?
John Abraham wrote a piece in the Guardian titled Keystone XL decision will define Barack Obama’s legacy on climate change: Does the president have courage to say ‘no’ to a project that will lock us into decades of dependency on this dirty energy? in which he states:
Alberta has 1.8 [trillion] barrels of oil contained within the tar sands. Extracting and burning all of that tar will cause a global temperature increase of about 0.4 degrees C (0.7 degrees F). That is about half of the warming that humans have already caused…
gregladen | February 23, 2013I was distressed to find many people who are essentially pro-environment and who generally understand climate change science being less than terribly shocked about the prospect of the Keystone XL pipeline being built. Then I began to realize that many people don't realize the order of magnitude of the problem. I'm writing a blog post about this which I'll post Sunday or Monday, but in the mean time I want to provide a list of handy dandy reliable and helpful sources of information about the pipeline and related issues.
Keystone XL decision will define Barack Obama's legacy on climate…
gregladen | February 20, 2013This is being discussed here, thought I'd show you this:
Use of the terms "Global Warming" vs. "Climate Change" in books
gregladen | February 20, 2013You hear, again again, that climate and weather are not the same thing. This has led to assertions such as "you can't attribute a single weather event to climate change." But climate and weather are not distinctly different. Climatologists and meteorologists have made statements like this because people do confuse and conflate current conditions and weather forecasts on one hand with climate systems and climate change observations and modeling on the other. Saying "climate and weather are not the same thing" is a convenient segue into a discussion of how certain conclusions may be invalid…
gregladen | February 18, 2013On February 17th, some 40,000 people showed up at an event in Washington DC in order to draw attention to the most pressing issue of our time: Climate Change. Another group of people also attended that rally. They represented the Climate Science Denialists, which in the US overlaps considerably with the Tea Party. They wore yellow jackets and called themselves "The Light Brigade." This follows the tradition of the Tea Party, who in their early days used the nickname "Teabaggers" for themselves, a term which refers to a particular sexual act, or so I'm told. I was reminded of this because…
gregladen | February 17, 2013On February 13th, 2013 48 people risked arrest at the White House gates to call on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
TAR SANDS ACTION
gregladen | February 14, 2013Peter Gleick, my sbling here at scienceblogs.com (see his blog here) is famous for a lot of things, but about one year ago he went up against the Heartland Institute and in a daring effort of investigative (if avocational) journalism, revealed that right wing conservative/libertarian "think" tank's nefarious plans to interfere with science education in an effort to discredit climate scientists in the eyes of the American public and our students through a series of rather smarmy tactics, including some really obnoxious billboards.
Scott Mandia at "Global Warming: Man or Myth?" has written a…
gregladen | February 13, 2013At 11:30 AM eastern time today, an act of "civil disobedience will take place around at the East Gate of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, just east of the picture-postcard zone." #NoKXL is the hashtag.
It is time, apparently. This is a time when more of the money that is out there is in the hands of a very small number of people and corporations, and many of these people and corporations are paying to maintain the status quo, and that status quo involves keeping our economy, or society, our species firmly planted on a track leading to the edge of a very tall cliff. Not the fiscal…
gregladen | February 11, 2013This graphic is from GRID-Arendal, a Norwegian Foundation collaborating with the UN Environment Programme. It shows CO2 concentrations in the ocean going up over a period of 20 eyars, and the corresponding drop in pH over the same time period.
Ocean acidification is a serious effect of climate change.
As carbon concentrations in the atmosphere increase, so do concentrations in the ocean, with resultant acidification as a natural chemical process.
There are more climate change related graphics HERE.