climate change
illconsidered | July 5, 2010Check out Peter's latest Climate Crock:
Oh those hysterical enviro-wacko-loons...
sastyk | July 5, 2010The northeast is having its first heatwave of the year, and I thought it was a good time to re-run a piece I wrote about what to do in extreme heat if you don't have air conditioning. Because we all know what heatwaves mean - not just physical stress, health crises and unnecessary deaths from heat, but also blackouts and brownouts as everyone charges up their a/c. So what do you do when the power is out and the heat is on? These suggestions include, I think, the most important strategy - be aware of other people.
There are a lot of parallels between dealing with extreme heat and extreme…
hrynyshyn | July 1, 2010Penn State's internal investigation into climatologist Michael Mann's integrity is over. The conclusion:
The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University.
More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing,…
illconsidered | June 23, 2010Kevin Rudd is quite suddenly not the Prime Minister of Australia anymore.
I know we have a high proportion of Aussie regulars here, so I'll just ask: what does this mean for Australia's climate change policy? I travel to Australia regularily but did not know that was coming, is that just because I don't pay attention?
illconsidered | June 23, 2010No too long ago the usual suspects were all a-twitter about arctic sea ice, which was tracking very close to the long term average.
This was in late March, and though you would think a weather man would understand what weather is, this temporary upwards tic prompted the remarkable vapidity of this lead: "We've all seen that Arctic Sea ice area and extent has expanded and is back to normal".
Well, that was then, and this is now:
Now, not only have we left the long term average behind, the current seasonal extent has dipped below one standard deviation less than normal and is even well…
hrynyshyn | June 23, 2010"I thought I better come see the bears because the next time I am in this country they will be all gone."
-- Polar bear tourist in Churchill, Man.
Ecotourism. Sounds so responsible, or least, non-exploitative. But let's face it: Anyone who flies long-distance to get close to some endangered piece of nature at risk from climate change is doing their bit to push those species that much closer to extinction. A paper published recently in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism tries to quantify the irony. "The carbon cost of polar bear viewing tourism in Churchill, Canada" (Subs req'd) looks at the…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2010The more peer-reviewed papers a climatologist has published and the more often those papers are cited, the more likely it is that the researcher supports the science underpinning anthropogenic climate change (ACC). That's the conclusion of a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone working in or following the field. But scientists like to put numbers to things, and the paper, "Expert credibility in climate change" does a pretty good job of doing just that.
There's a marvelous, interactive, graphical…
illconsidered | June 22, 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 Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose...June 20, 2010 Chuckles, Bonn, BASIC, COP16+, Cochabamba, Kyoto Fraud, Free Science, Changing Oceans, CO2 Link Bottom Line, Subsidies, MCF, Doubts, Doubts 2, IPCC Review, Post CRU, Late Comments Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Agricultural Outlook 2010, IP Issues, Food Production…
hrynyshyn | June 21, 2010Few stories about climatology generated as much attention, positive and negative as one by Jonathan Leake in London's Sunday Times back in January. "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" claimed that references to threats to the Amazon rainforest from global warming were "based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise." As pretty much anyone without an ulterior motive who bothered to look into the matter quickly discovered, that wasn't true. Now, more than five months later, the Times has apologized for the story.
Joe at Climate…
hrynyshyn | June 16, 2010The most intelligent thing I've read so far about Obama's speech Tuesday night, the one that included not a single mention of climate change, comes from Ezra Klein at the Washington Post. He's talking about the assumption that fear doesn't motivation people, only inspiration does.
But that strikes me as depressing evidence of how unlikely we are to succeed. I simply don't believe you could've passed health care if you couldn't have talked about covering the uninsured, and I don't think stimulus would've worked without the spur of the unemployed. It's not that people wanted to hear about…
hrynyshyn | June 16, 2010The latest report from the National Climatic Data Center reminds us that the planet is continuing to warm as expected. Most of the attention will be afforded to the global picture, for good reason:
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2010 was 0.69°C (1.24°F) above the 20th century average of 14.8°C (58.6°F). This is the warmest such value on record since 1880.
Those of us living in the U.S. Southeast are sweltering through a record-breaking heat wave, so there will be much nodding of heads. Of course, regional weather isn't the point. So it's useful to…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2010In a desperate bid to help staunch the propagation of a particularly insidious meme, I offer this attempt to help clear up any confusion:
Mike Hulme and Martin Mahony of the School of Environmental Sciences University at East Anglia have a paper forthcoming in Progress in Physical Geography that explores the IPCC, "its origins and mandate; its disciplinary and geographical expertise; its governance and organisational learning; consensus and its representation of uncertainty; and its wider impact and influence on knowledge production, public discourse and policy development."
The paper does…
hrynyshyn | June 14, 2010Smoke and Mirrors:
Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century
By Burton Richter
Cambridge University Press, 218 pages.
Do we really another book summarizing the science of climate change and the available response options? Sure. Why not? What's the harm? In this era of hyperfractionated audiences and echo-chambers, there's no such thing as too many arrows in our collective quiver. This one, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter, doesn't contribute anything new. But at this point in the conversation, there's not much new to contribute, just novel approaches to making the argument…
illconsidered | June 14, 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 YearsJune 13, 2010 Chuckles, Bonn, REDD, COP15, COP16+, IPBES, IPY-OSC, Northern Weather, Backgrounder Bottom Line, Total Subsidies, Subsidies, UNCFG, Free Science, Beeville Hoax, Post-CRU Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…
hrynyshyn | June 11, 2010I've never been completely comfortable using the fate of small island states -- places like Tuvalu and Kiribati and the Seycelles that might be the first to go under as sea levels rise -- as poster kids for the consequences of climate change. For one thing, as difficult as it would be for their populations to abandon their homes, there's just not that many people involved, and so there was never any real chance that their pleas would have much of an effect on industrialized countries. The reality is people react to threats to their own quality of life, not those facing a tiny group on the…
hrynyshyn | June 10, 2010A debate at TED in February over nuclear power's merits as a clean source of electricity featured Whole Earth Catalog guru Steward Brand (pro) and Stanford energy systems analysts Mark Jacobson. A lot of ground covered in 23 minutes, including just how much ground various clean energy options cover.
The winner? It was a slam dunk for ...
I'll let you figure it out for yourself.
"Does the world need nuclear energy?" is an important question, for at least two reasons. First, Congressional legislators seem intent on including increased support for the nuclear industry in any climate or energy…
hrynyshyn | June 9, 2010NASA's James Hansen has few peers when it comes to the title of leading climatologist-turned-policy-wonk, but Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia (yes, that university) is giving him a run for his money. Hulme's latest entry is a cautionary tale involving the challenges involved in geoengineering.
In Yale e360, Hulme argues that the technical obstacles to making the Earth's climate do what we want aside, the politics of trying to change the radiative heat balance of the atmosphere are problematic in the extreme.
Who, he asks,
is entitled to initiate the large-scale deployment of a…
hrynyshyn | June 8, 2010There's a small community of bloggers and activists who spent the weekend scratching their collective heads in hopes of figuring out what was behind a story that came out of a little place called Beeville, Texas. Last week word came from a local paper than a fourth-grader had won a "National Science Fair" prize by "Disproving Global Warming."
The story immediately drew skeptical analysis, as there hasn't been a "National Science Fair" for some time. More curious was the notion that a fourth-grader could manage to do what thousands of climatologists who make their living trying to find holes…
illconsidered | June 7, 2010Chris S recently posted a lengthy comment, an extended excerpt from a recent Proceedings of the Royal Society paper. Full citation is: Solar change and climate: an update in the light of the current exceptional solar minimum
Mike Lockwood
Proc. R. Soc. A 8 February 2010 vol. 466 no. 2114 303-329
The abstract is here.
It makes for a very interesting read with lots to think about so I though I would promote it to a post of its own....
The history of science reveals a series of 'controversies'. These often develop into a state where there is little debate within the relevant academic…