climate change
illconsidered | July 20, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
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... July 19, 2009 Chuckle, Post G8-MEF, UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, Exxon Algae, Desertec, PETM, THC Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Carbon Tariffs, Solar Cycle, State of the Future Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests,…
hrynyshyn | July 17, 2009If predicting climate trends was as easy as predicting the reaction of global warming pseudoskeptics there wouldn't be any deniers left. When I came across a new study in Nature Geoscience on the cause of the massive shift in the climate 55 million years ago, my first reaction was, "How long will it take before someone completely misrepresents this paper as evidence that undermines anthropogenic global warming?"
Not long. See here, here and here, if you have the time.
In the paper, Richard E. Zeebe of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii and his…
jricco | July 13, 2009When the controversial and talented physicist Edward Teller was doing a PhD. with the great Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig, the question asked at the end of every group meeting that focused on a complex sequence of problems was "Wo ist der Witz?", supposed to be translated as "What is the point"? but more correctly translated as "What is the joke?". The joke part of it consisted of turning a wry eye at the world, donning the hat of the court jester who laughs even as the fire that he predicted would engulf the world rages on. The question about global warming that we ask is…
hrynyshyn | July 9, 2009The science machine continues to churn out depressing reports. The high-latitude permafrost contains more carbon than originally thought. The Arctic Ocean ice is even thinner than we feared. But my thoughts are dominated by the issues raised by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum in their new book, Unscientific America.
I reviewed it Tuesday. Today I came across a fascinating interview with NASA climatologist and RealClimate.org founder Gavin Schmidt. It's long but worth reading. Among the highlights is his discussion of his efforts to bridge the cultural gap between scientists and society at…
hrynyshyn | July 6, 2009For at least as long as I've been paying attention, Roger Pielke Sr. hasn't been all that popular among those are doing their best to convince the world to take the threat of climate change seriously. He's a genuine, and until recently, reputable scientist at a genuine and reputable institution of higher learning, Colorado State University. His hard-line skepticism has at times proven useful when it comes to keeping the rest of the climatology community on its toes. He accepts that humans are contributing to climate change, but is concerned that the general focus on carbon dioxide as the…
sciencepunk | July 5, 2009According to a press release from the University of Washington, tropical islands may become deserts as the climate band delivering their only supply of fresh water creeps north:
The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years, probably because of a warmer world, according to research published in the July issue of Nature Geoscience.If the band continues to migrate at just less than a mile (1.4 kilometers) a year, which is the average for all the years it…
ddobbs | July 4, 2009In case you missed them (or miss them, and want to read again ...)
The (Illusory) Rise and Fall of the "Depression Gene"
DIY circumcision with nail clippers Go figure.
Oliver Sacks meets Jon Stewart
Wheels come off psychiatric manual; APA blames road conditions
Alarming climate change chart of the day
Swine flu count in US hits 1 million; can't wait till flu season!
Will government involvement drive up health-care costs?
What if you could predict PTSD in combat troops? Oh, who cares...
awild | July 2, 2009
(a) current distribution of Sasquatch (b) Sasquatch distribution post-climate change
For those of you dallying around about how seriously to take the threat of climate change, here's something for you. If we don't cease our emissions of greenhouse gases pronto, Bigfoot will invade Arizona and Utah. I'm serious.
edyong | July 2, 2009The island of Hirta, on the western coast of Scotland, is home to a special breed of sheep. Soay sheep, named after a neighbouring island, are the most primitive breed of domestic sheep and have lived on the isles of St Kilda for at least a millennium. They're generally smaller than the average domesticated sheep, and that difference is getting larger and larger. Over the last 20 years, the Soay sheep have started to shrink.
They are becoming gradually lighter at all ages such that today's lambs and adults weigh around 3kg less than those from 1986. Their hind legs have also shortened to a…
hrynyshyn | July 2, 2009And now we turn to a voice of reason. Ken Caldera, discussing the nuts and bolt of science, and climatology in particular, as part of a group interview with Discover magazine, reminds us all just how silly it is to argue that anthropogenic global warming is bothing but a conspiracy theory propagated by disingenuous researchers (and former vice-presidents) who are only trying to line their own pockets:
There was a climate contrarian who testified before the Senate last week. He made the claim that climate scientists were some kind of club and they all made money by somehow supporting each…
hrynyshyn | July 1, 2009 I have an extremely low attention threshold for any mention of the small town of Inuvik, NWT, tucked away in the northwest corner of Canada's Northwest Territories. Not because it's a particularly beautiful place, or politically, economically or scientifically significant, but because I spent 14 months there back in the early 1990s as editor its newspaper, the Inuvik Drum. So when a former premier of one of Canada's provinces makes a speech there, I'm one of the few people outside of Inuvik who perk up. More so when the former premier is speaking about extracting more fossil fuels from…
hrynyshyn | June 29, 2009Even the most optimistic elements of the environmental community know that Friday's passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act by the U.S. House of Representatives was the easy part. Getting something comparable through the Senate will be much tougher. Paul Krugman says it best:
Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday's debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a "hoax" that has been "perpetrated out of the scientific community." I'd call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to…
illconsidered | June 29, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
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 June 28, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:Waxman-Markey, MTR Coal Protests, Repression Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, MEF, Sarychev, Carbon Tariffs, 140 Million Year Cycle, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals,…
ddobbs | June 29, 2009Paul Krugman tunes out the noise:
Temperature is a noisy time series, so if you pick and choose your dates over a short time span you can usually make whatever case you want. That's why you need to look at longer trends and do some statistical analysis. But I thought that it would be a good thing to look at the data myself.
So here's the average annual global temperature since 1880, shown as .01 degrees C deviation from the 1951-80 average.
What this tells me is that annual temperature is indeed noisy: there have been many large fluctuations, indeed much larger than the up-and-down in the…
hrynyshyn | June 25, 2009I've been agonizing over this for weeks. My initial stance was yes, because if Waxman-Markey (a.k.a. the American Clean Energy and Security Act) doesn't make it, I doubt we can afford to wait for Congress to take another stab at it. But the lobbying over the past few days has been fierce. I get emails from both sides, and by both I mean both sides of the environmental community.
The argument against ACESA is compelling. For example, the Climate Crisis Coalitions' latest email enumerate the weakness of the bill thusly:
1) Weak cap. ACESA's cap on greenhouse gas emissions represents reductions…
hrynyshyn | June 25, 2009IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri is no intellectual slouch. But I have no idea where he gets the idea that news media are doing are bang-up job covering the science and politics of climate change. He recently wrote this baffling piece:
It is therefore fair to say that the media has (sic) helped turn public opinion in favor of action on climate change. And this attitude has seeped into the negotiations that began with the 2007 Bali meeting and continued in Poznan, Poland, late last year.
...
There is also every reason to believe that the way the media engages with this issue over the next six…
hrynyshyn | June 24, 2009Here's the headline I would have written if I was editing the West Virginia Gazette's coverage of Tuesday's protest against mountain-top coal mining:
Top government climate scientist arrested in coal protest
Here's the headline the editor(s) chose instead:
Daryl Hannah, scientist among 30 arrested at W.Va. mine protest
Sigh. Have we slid so far down the hole of celebrity worship that a second-string Hollywood personality (who hasn't made a memorable appearance on the silver screen since 1982's Blade Runner), gets top billing over the country's most senior and respected authority on the…
hrynyshyn | June 23, 2009The Congressional Budget Office is the probably the closest thing to a non-partisan source of economic analyses. On Friday it released its best guess on how much the ACES bill, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey, will cost the U.S. economy by 2020.
the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion--or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost of restructuring the production and use of energy and of payments made to foreign entities under the program, but it does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2009James Lovelock hates wind turbines, likes nuclear power and generally makes it difficult for anyone who wants to pigeonhole him in the pantheon of environmental heroes. But there's little point in denying that few earth scientists have a better grasp of the big picture when it comes to planetary ecology, so it's always worth asking him for his take on the climate crisis. His most recent pronouncements seem a little less bleak. Relatively speaking.
Here's Lovelock in 2006, on the occasion of the release of his book, The Revenge of Gaia:
We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2009Deutsche Bank recently turned on 41,000 LED lights that keep track of the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. Nice idea, but I respectfully suggest a much better one.
"If you flipped on one of the news channels that covers the financial news ... and there was a number that was updating once every five years, the commentators would have a hard time finding something to talk about," Kevin Parker, the global head of Deutsche's asset management team, told reporters. "The minute you convert that to a real-time number, it can serve as a backdrop for lots of conversations."
Those…