climate change
illconsidered | July 29, 2010Dr Roy Spencer, normally a darling of the septics, is getting the full denialist savaging over at his own blog for daring to defend the physical basis for the greenhouse effect.
CanadaFreePress saw "NASA" in his job title and must have mistaken him for Jim Hansen as they hold nothing back in their scorn.
All very amusing!
illconsidered | July 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 Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsJuly 25, 2010 Note, Chuckles, Surrender, COP16+, BASIC Group, CEM, Asian Adaptation, Anthropocene Warm Lakes, Oxygen, Subsidies, Post CRU, Anderegg, Monckton's Shame, Pepsigate Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…
pronald | July 27, 2010Brilliant talk by photographer Joel Sartore here at the Aspen Environment Forum, sponsored by the National Geographic and the Aspen Institute.
"What can I do to get people to care about the environment? I want people to fall in love with these animals as much as I did so the world pays attention. I need to do a better job but what else can I do? Why should anyone care about mussels? Because they filter our water. We need these things to keep our planet healthy.
We need to take care of our pollinating species. Without pollinators we have to use paint brushes to pollinate our orchards by…
pronald | July 27, 2010Climate change is the ultimate threat multiplier that will make other problems such as agricultural productivity worse.
This is one of the conclusions at a panel called "Trusting Climate Science" here at the
Aspen Environment Forum, sponsored by the National Geographic and the Aspen Institute.
I am experimenting with liveblogging from the meeting. Lets see how it goes.
The first panel I attended featured Andrew Revkin, Peter Huybers, Mohan Munasinghe, moderated by David Brancaccio.
"The pace of sea level rise is uncertain" says Revkin. It is a distraction to argue about the pace when we…
illconsidered | July 26, 2010I am a skeptic.
Not a climate skeptic, not in the sense of the improperly commandeered word we use in the climate debates. In my experience they know little of real skepticism as a general rule. But me, I really do dislike taking assertions on their face if I don't have all the facts and I really do try to form my own opinions, especially about people.
So I have tried very hard to reserve judgement on Judith Curry and her emerging role in the climate blogosphere despite reading some pretty damning reviews of her blog performances from voices in my own "camp". My first awareness of her is…
sastyk | July 25, 2010I assume you noticed the quiet demise of the Climate Bill, consented to by most of the people who claimed they gave a damn about the climate. It was a lousy, weak, inadequate bill, but that's still no excuse for giving up the ghost. This makes the 1 bazillionth time in my lifetime I've been ashamed to be associated (if only because the US has no real left, and thus anyone on the left ends up with a default association with the Dems) with the American Democratic Party. I'm used to it by now.
On the other hand, maybe the death of our attempt to deal with climate change will force a change in…
illconsidered | July 23, 2010"I don't think that anyone disagrees with the fact that we actually are in a cold period that started about nine years ago."
Um...okay. I guess that's true if your definition of "anyone" excludes every single scientific agency that concerns itself with climate indicators and those of us who actually look at them. A good dose of boring old real reality from the Union of Concerned Scientists follows:
In response to a question during an ABC News / Washington Post interview today about recent heat waves and record temperatures, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said, "I don't think that anyone…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2010Driving home with the Free-Ride offspring yesterday, we heard a story on the radio that caught out attention. (The radio story discusses newly published research that's featured on the cover of Nature this week.) When we got home, we had a chat about it.
Dr. Free-Ride: What did you guys learn from that story on the radio about the yellow-bellied marmot?
Elder offspring: That, in the short term, climate change is good for some species.
Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me more about that.
Elder offspring: Well, it made the marmots increase in size and numbers.
Elder offspring: I was going to say that!
.…
illconsidered | July 21, 2010Geoengineering is getting more and more attention in political discussions as well as research. I am by no means a proponent of any geoengineering scheme I have heard of and the majority of them try to address surface temperature only and therefore do nothing about "the other CO2 problem", aka ocean acidification.
I must confess that H. E. Taylor's article a while back went some way in convincing me that like it or not we need to be considering these perilous pathways. He basically makes the compelling argument that we are in fact now, unwittingly or not, geoengineering our global climate…
hrynyshyn | July 20, 2010Stanford physicist Robert B. Laughlin shared a Nobel prize in 1998 for helping explain something called the fractional quantum Hall effect. That particular phenomenon has nothing to do with climatology, and neither does the rest of Laughlin's c.v. Still, one might expect something cogent about the public policy challenge posed by anthropogenic climate change if it appears under the byline of such a scientific luminary. One would, in this case, be wrong.
Laughlin's thoughts are laid out in in an essay titled "What the Earth Knows" in American Scholar. The not-so-groundbreaking thesis is that…
illconsidered | July 19, 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 overload is pattern recognitionJuly 18, 2010 Chuckles, COP16+, UN CFG, Nepal, MEF, Long Term GHGs, Diffenbaugh, Emmert, Psyche, Anderegg Bottom Line, Subsidies, IEA-UNEP, 446 Questions, Nastiness, Abuse, Media Complicity, Post CRU, Pepsigate Melting Arctic, Jakobshavn Isbrae Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, IP Issues…
hrynyshyn | July 15, 2010It would be preferable to simply ignore Christopher Monckton's seemingly laughable attempts to undermine climatology, but given the power of the Internet to turn long-discredited arguments into serious threats to academic freedom, such a strategy would not be wise. Monckton has launched a campaign against John Abraham of St. Thomas University for daring to demolish the former's mendacious presentations on global warming. Abraham's repost is thorough and devastating. So devastating and damaging to Monckton's credibility is it that Monckton is asking for his acolytes to flood the university…
illconsidered | July 14, 2010Check out this interesting essay from Michael Tobis.
Though I am not sure that the solution he hopes for matches the problem as he describes it. Isn't he suggesting we (climate solution advocates) need to come up with our own "New Coke" despite the debacle that proved to be for Coca Cola Co in the eighties?
sastyk | July 13, 2010"How did you get there, Roo?" asked Piglet.
"On Tigger's back! And Tiggers can't climb downwards, because their tails get in the way, only upwards, and Tigger forgot about that when we started, and he's only just remembered. So we've got to stay here for ever and ever - unless we go higher. What did you say, Tigger? Oh, Tigger says if we go higher we shan't be able to see Piglet's house so well, so we're going to stop here."
-AA Milne, "The House At Pooh Corner"
Note: I wrote this essay several years ago, and have been thinking about it a lot in relationship to the BP problem, so I…
hrynyshyn | July 12, 2010There's more than a few climate bloggers who have a dirty little secret. We like to excoriate those who can't tell the difference between weather and climate, or herald every momentary drop in temperature as evidence that global warming has ended, or revel in each new report that suggests not every single square millimeter of the planet's surface is experiencing dramatic climate shifts. As we should. But many of us take a peek, every morning, at the daily version of a graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center depicting current sea-ice extent in the Arctic.
We know that what happens…
illconsidered | July 12, 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 Sipping from the internet firehose...July 11, 2010 Chuckles, COP16+, USSF, GGCS, Ooops, Beer et al., Hoegh-Guldberg & Bruno, PepsiGate Subsidies, Abuse, NEAA-PBL, Slant, Muir Russell, Post CRU, Media Complicity, FOI Attack Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, GMOs & IP Issues, FAOSTAT, Food…
illconsidered | July 8, 2010Many readers have likely noted the phrase "Logging the Onset of the Bottleneck Years" prefacing many editions of the "Another Week of Global Warming News" series.
A recent commenter asked what this means. I forwarded the question to het. I think his reply makes an interesting post.
The term 'bottleneck' refers to the ecological crisis humans are experiencing as resource limits, climate change, species extinction and environmental degradation, exacerbated by population pressure, make daily life more difficult for increasingly large numbers of people.
The term 'bottleneck' has been in the air…
hrynyshyn | July 7, 2010Yet another vindication for climatology. The Muir Russel inquiry into the behavioral ethics of the climatologists at the heart of the CRU email nonsense has found...
...nothing to substantiate the complaints. Except to say that the researchers should in the future exhibit "the proper degree of openness."
"We find that their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt." There. Can we move on now? I'm losing count of the number of inquiries that come to such a conclusion.
illconsidered | July 7, 2010Via the amusing and insightful musings and insights of Marc Roberts:
(click for slightly larger and more legible image)
I think this is rather apropos given the recent retraction of one of Jonathon Leake's um, let's be kind, "dodgy" bits of journalism from the recent spate of IPCC "gates".
(Cartoon seen at In It For the Gold who uses it for the recent UVA report that again finds no academic misconduct by Mike Mann)