Climate Change
gregladen | October 11, 2010
This is astonishing.
...Scientists and conservationists are expressing alarm at the appearance of thousands of walrus on Alaska's northwest coast, a dramatic demonstration of the effects of diminished Arctic sea ice brought on by global warming....
source
gregladen | September 16, 2010Scientists have been measuring sea ice very carefully since 1979. Prior to that, there are estimates that are of varying degrees of usefulness. I know for a fact that many New England lighthouses were attached to land by winter-long ice in places that have not had sea ice in any living person's memory, and there are similar bits and pieces of historical data suggesting that sea ice was once much more extensive in the Northern Hemisphere than at present.
Since 1979 there have been three years in which Arctic sea ice reached a rather alarming minimum size prior to reforming. We are in one…
gregladen | September 15, 2010I've noticed that a lot of smart people who nonetheless "did not accept" AGW, or at least, denied the "A" part of it, have stoped talking about it lately. I'm speaking here of people I know personally. You know who you are, and you know you were wrong, and I just wanted to say that I forgive you. Mostly.
In the mean time, have a look at this:
That is from NOAA's new Climate Services site, where you too can mess around with the data and get the bejeebus scared out of you. Click here. If you dare.
They need a graph for pirates.
gregladen | September 15, 2010This Rob Dunbar is NOT Robin Dunbar the Archaeologist.
Rob Dunbar hunts for data on our climate from 12,000 years ago, finding clues inside ancient seabeds and corals and inside ice sheets. His work is vital in setting baselines for fixing our current climate -- and in tracking the rise of deadly ocean acidification.
gregladen | August 3, 2010In the 1960s, the whole idea of a "greenhouse effect" was well understood, and assumed to be an important potential factor in climate change. So was glaciation, and the short and medium term future of the Earth's climate was less clear than compared to now. But the basics were there ... C02 was being released into the atmosphere, this could cause a greenhouse effect, and that would warm the earth. Certainly by the early 1980s, it was possible to make some thumb-suck estimates of how much the earth would warm given various assumptions about CO2, and it was not that difficult to see that a lot…
gregladen | August 2, 2010Why does the wind blow, and why does it blow the way it does?
When I teach human evolution, I feel compelled to bring in climate change. When I do that, I find it very unsatisfying to mention climate change as a thing that simply happened. I need to also discuss how climate itself works, both now (in the present era) and generally speaking. That can be hard. There are so many variables that matter, and that if you leave out will come back and bite you later when you suddenly need them to explain something. Anyway, when addressing climate and how it works, it is very difficult to not…
gregladen | August 2, 2010
See the missing bit? That is a 1.5 kilometer retreat of the so-called "calving front" of the glacier.
In truth, this particular sort of even is not that unusual, but what is interesting is that new satellite monitoring capabilities allow researchers to notice these events more or less when they happen, as opposed to during less frequent inspections of satellite imagery.
And, there are some climate-change related features of this event.
"While there have been ice breakouts of this magnitude from Jakonbshavn and other glaciers in the past, this event is unusual because it occurs on the…
gregladen | August 1, 2010Steve Andrew dared to tickle the dragon's tail and now he is paying for it. The dragon in this case, is Climate Denialists in the Right Wing Media.
Andrew posted something about the recent, very alarming news that global warming seems to be cutting back significantly on the supply of oceanic plankton. The worst case scenario of this sort of process is, actually, mass extinction and everybody dies. There are less severe scenarios as well, but none of them are very much fun.
So yes, even as the climate chickens come home to roost, the denailists can't keep their bought and paid for (by the…
gregladen | August 1, 2010Anthropogenic global warming has been suspected for decades, and a simple one paragraph long characterization of the problem 40 years ago was substantially identical to any accurate characterization we might make today. One has to wonder why after 40 years of time we still see headlines telling us that it might, after all, turn out to be true that anthropogenic global warming is real. Indeed, it is a bit disconcerting when the inestimable climate blog RealClimate notes that this is the 35th "Anniversary of Global Warming" as a term in the peer reviewed scientific literature (though I…
gregladen | July 28, 2010
The Triassic is old. This book is new. That is a hard to beat combination.
Let's see ... The Triassic is about here:
(You can also look it up in this PDF file supplied by the USGS.
It is situated between two major extinction events, and is especially interesting because it is during this period that modern day ecological systems and major animal groups took a recognizable form. The preceding Permian, if contrasted with modern day, would form a very stark contrast while the Triassic would be at least somewhat more recognizable.
But of course the Triassic was in many ways distinct,…
gregladen | April 18, 2010It has long been thought that there are linkages between certain viruses and the weather. The flu season is winter (in whichever hemisphere it happens to be winter in) for reasons having to do with the seasons. One early theory posited that the practices of East Asian farmers, as they tended their animals, caused waterfowl and swine and humans to share space closely enough that nasty new influenzas would emerge and spread around the world. Although that explanation for the annual seasonal flu has been dropped (if it ever really had wings... or hooves, or whatever) it is still possible…
gregladen | January 2, 2010One of the world's oldest plants turns out to be a 13,000 year-old scrub oak (Quercus palmeri, or Palmer's Oak) in Southern California. Apparently this tree has survived for so long, despite the fact that it was born in the ice age and there have been numerous climate changes since then, by cloning itself, hiding in a crevice, being small, and growing slowly. Luck was involved as well, almost certainly.
The plant was actually discovered more than ten years ago during a survey of plant diversity in the Jurupa Hills of Riverside County, and it was noted at the time that this tree was utterly…
gregladen | December 23, 2009Why Greenhouses have nothing to do with the Greenhouse Effect, and more importantly, why CAN'T I microwave toast?
A greenhouse is a glass house sealed to keep air in but made of glass allow sunlight in. This sunlight contributes to the heat in the greenhouse by warming the ground or other material in the greenhouse, and of course the light energy is used by the plants. But the point of a greenhouse is to keep air that is warmed, by the sun and/or heaters that may be required in the greenhouse, from wafting away.
This is not how the so-called "greenhouse" effect works. There is no thing out…
gregladen | December 21, 2009Every now and then I get out my old Blog Epic on Global Warming and dust it off. I'm thinking it is time to do it again. This is a seven part series of Global Warming that covers much of the basics. Enjoy. Or get mad at me. Whatever.
About two years ago, a sea change occurred in the way that climate change news is reported, much to the annoyance of the Right Wing. It is an axiom that in reporting science, there are two (not one, not three or four, just two) sides to every issue, and one side is the plank nailed to the Democratic Party Platform, and the other side is the plank nailed to…
gregladen | December 16, 2009Yesterday, James Randi put up a blog post in which he questioned the validity of anthropogenic global warming. He has subsequently made the statement that he probably has more thinking to do about global warming, and he admits that he really knows nothing about it. So Randi's blog post is, essentially, a non-starter as an issue, although there are some interesting things to think about.
James Hrynyshyn has an excellent blog post about this, in which he reports a conversation he had with Randi about Randi's post.
Randi's original post displays a rather embarrassing ignorance of earth…
gregladen | December 10, 2009... and other, related issues.
Gore's recent book: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis
Oh, and did you notice the Inhofe - "kill the gays" link?
gregladen | December 5, 2009The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe....
Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming…
gregladen | December 5, 2009Subtitled "The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity," this might be a book you should read.
James Hansen is probably the world's best known climate scientist, partly because of his own work and his testimony before Congress, and partly because he has become a target of Global Warming denialists who seem to revel in every opportunity to accuse him of fraud, deceit, or incompetence.
In Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, Hansen provides a message that is much more severe…
gregladen | December 1, 2009 It has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that stuff has been made up and foisted on the American Public.
Tim Lambert has nailed it. He shows the code that was used to adjust climate data, he shows how the adjustment was made, what it was used for, and does an excellent job of explaining the whole thing.
Lies are being spread about climate change, and Lambert has nailed it. Have a look.