climate change
hrynyshyn | January 19, 2011I've long been ambivalent about the merits of Twitter. Some may recall my "Why Twitter is Evil" post of a while back. That was written with one cheek mostly occupied by my tongue. It now seems clear that, whatever the original designs, the 140-character telegraph has become an invaluable network-building and maintenance tool, particularly for authors, activists trying to organize constituencies. This is all well and good. But the medium's dark side recently became all too clear following this past weekend's wonderful Science Online 2011 conference.
The story begins Saturday afternoon at an…
hrynyshyn | January 13, 2011So, 2010 is a statistical tie for warmest year on record. This from NASA's GISS and NOAA's NCDC. Some AGW refuseniks might cling to the fact that the year just past was 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than 2005, but then you'd know they never bothered to take a stats class. As the GISS press release puts it:
The record temperature in 2010 is particularly noteworthy, because the last half of the year was marked by a transition to strong La Niña conditions, which bring cool sea surface temperatures to the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
We've also just come out of an unusually long "solar…
illconsidered | January 13, 2011Over on the history of CO2 thread, that old chestnut of an issue has been raised, namely that there's this one paper in one journal, notorious for publishing anti-science papers on climate (a field well outside its focus), that has shown wild flucuations in CO2 to levels well above today's in times as recent as 60 years ago. Therefore....Not the IPCC.
The paper is by Ernst G Beck and the journal is Energy and Environment, 2009 (sorry, all my primary links are stale...anyone?)
Here is the graph, supposedly showing global CO2 levels:
This picture is at-a-glance completely implausible.
To…
illconsidered | January 10, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...January 9, 2011 Chuckles, COP16, COP17+, Perspectives, Harbinger?, Australia, WikiLeaks, Winter Bottom Line, Subsidies, Laws, Thermodynamics, GHE, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Norther Light, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Price Index, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon…
illconsidered | January 6, 2011I have always like this graphic from Global Warming Art:
It puts the current CO2 rise into sharp perspective in terms of historical flucuations, both in its magnitude and rapidity.
Well, even better for impact is the video below from Youtube user CarbonTracker:
Especially intriguing is watching the seasonal rise and fall, the collective breathing of earth's plant life.
(passed down from Lou Grinzo to MT to here)
illconsidered | January 5, 2011Check out an hilarious post from Denial Depot where he applies a keen sense of climate skepticism to the movie Jaws. Here is his synopsis, to whet your appetite:
A group of so-called government funded "experts" whip up alarmist fears of a killer shark off the coast of Amity, a sea side town. Their goal is to destroy the local tourist industry, send Amity back to the dark ages and thus achieve their underlying socialist agenda of wealth redistribution. The heroes of this tale are the local major and business leaders who lead a successful audit of the alarmist claims and by doing so manage to…
sastyk | January 5, 2011In my recent essay "300 Years of Fossil Fuels and Not One Bad Gal" I wrote:
...a narrative in which women's entry in the workforce is responsible for our dramatic rise in fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions can look superficially like a tool for those who would prefer that women go back home and come out of the workforce, and would like to blame feminists and feminism for our present ecological disaster. Indeed, if no one has come up with this ideological claim yet, I'm sure it is only a matter of time before someone explains earnestly to me how wimmen's rights are destroying the…
illconsidered | January 4, 2011(Apologies to those whose week can not begin until they have read each and every link in the weekly news roundup, the fault is mine, het was on time as usual...)
Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsJanuary 2, 2011 Chuckles, COP16, 2010, 2011+, Gleick, CableGate, Weather, Australia, Crocs, Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, The Question,…
hrynyshyn | January 3, 2011Just in case you need a refresher:
It continues here. Meanwhile, the Onion sums it up nicely:
"Climate change is real, and we are killing our planet more every day," said climatologist Helen Marcus, who has made similar statements in interviews in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. "We need to make a serious effort to stop it, or, you know, we'll all die. There really isn't much else to say."
For 2011, I am going to try to implement Oscar Wilde's advice:
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise…
illconsidered | December 27, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Global Warming News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomDecember 26, 2010 Chuckles, Solstice, COP16, Bolivia, COP17+, Season's Greetings, Roundups, Weather AGU, IPBES, CableGate, Pakistan, Subsidies, Amstrup, Thermodynamics, Cook Melting Arctic, Polar Bears Food Crisis, Agro-corps, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures,…
illconsidered | December 20, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Global Warming News Information Overload is Pattern RecognitionDecember 19, 2010 Chuckles, Solstice, COP16, COP17+, UN GCF, CableGate, AGU, Amstrup, Weather, Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, Year End, CSRRT, Cook, Post CRU, Shrinkology Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, GCDT, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production…
illconsidered | December 16, 2010A recent model study of some hypothetical effects of biological feedbacks of climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 came into the comments here. The paper was referenced in an article on the Register and is being misused as a revelation that the world is not going to warm so much after all.
mandas had a good go at it, identifying the assumptions and qualifications that the paper explicitly enumerated and the Register article completely ignored. I thought readers might also be interested in this video debunking from "potholer54" on youtube.
Just an aside: it is funny how worthless models are…
illconsidered | December 15, 2010Okay, we really need a topic change around here and I have about 40,000 (or is it 40??) tabs open in Firefox waiting to spark a conversation. Some are months old news now, somewhat more than stale. That gives you all an indication of the gap between my intentions and my performance these days....I have an hour before my travels back to Czech Republic begin, and I will be out of contact for a couple of days, I think the time is now.
So, lets just do a bit of a topic dump and see what catches on.
India is building a wall along its border with Bangledesh. I wonder how people who consider the…
illconsidered | December 13, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Global Warming News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...December 12, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16 Grind, COP16 Deal, COP17, Cablegate, Winter, AGU, Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, WB, IEC, Thermodynamics, CSRRT, Cook, CCPI Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Greenland, Antarctica Food Crisis, Global Crop Diversity Trust Project, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…
sastyk | December 9, 2010It is claiming I don't have permission to embed it (I do, actually), so you can see the video here.
I gave this talk back at the beginning of October, in my conference as a member of the ASPO-USA Board. This was only the second time that ASPO has had a significant talk about the connection between food and agriculture, so instead of trying to make claims about how this may play out, I focused on what we already know to be true. As you all probably know, I think that we've barely begun to plumb the depths of the connections between food and energy. I will say, if I ever give a talk there…
illconsidered | December 6, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsDecember 5, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, Kyoto, 4 Degrees+, CableGate, Cable Talk, Pakistan Subsidies, GEE, Weather, The Question, Why, Thermodynamics, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…
pronald | December 4, 2010These video photoessays - one interviewing Colombian coffee growers, another Ghanaian farmers - document how a 2-degree rise in temperature has already hurt some of the world's most vulnerable people. The videos show how rising temperatures have damaged crops, led to increased pests and disease, and ultimately forced farmers to switch to less profitable crops - or even abandon their land entirely.
These are striking examples of what the future could hold: a massive human migration as breadbaskets turn into to dust bowls.
From the CGIAR Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, Food Security
illconsidered | December 3, 2010Okay, the "Globally and Seasonally averaged" thread has grown to over 500 comments and thus reached its point of diminishing return in terms of the time it would take to read it and the utility of doing so. And while on the one hand I don't like to feed what is drifting towards to troll-like behaviour, the conversation continues and I don't want to stifle it. It began with a comment of mine at Judith Curry's blog about who is a denier and who is a sceptic. See the update in the original article for why Richard clearly falls out of the sceptic category.
So I am going to close that thread…
illconsidered | November 29, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not WisdomNovember 28, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16+, WMSoC, Schneider & Hook, CSRRT, Reforestation, GreenPeace, Pakistan Carbon Tariffs, Subsidies, UNCFG, Ecuador, GFI, Psych, Year in Review, Cook, Post CRU, IEC Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food…
illconsidered | November 27, 2010Oh boy, get out the tinfoil. Here's one the conspiracy nuts will howl over.
The temperature record that has been showing the lowest anomaly in the recent decades, HadCRU, the dataset managed by the UK's Met Office and the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), is about to be revised upwards.
Met Office scientists have reviewed the whole sea surface temperature data set between 1850 and 2006 to take account of this bias. A paper has been submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research which looks in more detail at all the biases in sea-surface temperature measurements from…