CO2
gregladen | August 16, 2017Greenhouse gases go up and down in three ways.
First, there is the annual up and down cycle that happens because there is more land in the Northern Hemisphere. I won't explain that to you now because I know you can figure out why that happens.
Second, there is natural variation up and down aside from that annual cycle that has to do with things like volcanoes and such. This includes the rate of forest fires, which increase greenhouse gases by turning some of the Carbon trapped in plant tissue into gas form as CO2. (That was a hint for the answer to the first reason!)
Third, humans.
There was…
gregladen | March 1, 2015New Research on the Effects of CO2 Pollution
A paper just published in Nature reports on the direct measurement of the effects of human greenhouse gas pollution on the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere. This is empirical verification of anthropogenic global warming.
Since the Industrial Revolution, when humans started polluting the Earth’s atmosphere with copious amounts of long lived greenhouse gases released from entombment as fossil fuels, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has skyrocketed from close to 250 parts per million (ppm) to about 400ppm. In fact, February was the first month…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Above is a graphic someone tossed at me on twitter the other day. It makes it look like CO2 emissions went way up then went way down so everything is fine. It is, of course, a lie, of sorts.
IT is actually kind of hard to find a graph just for US CO2 that goes back in historic time, but this graphic for the global energy industry clearly shows that the big picture is an upward trend:
The dip we see in recent years is simply an effect of the economy going bad, and things people do that emit CO2 being done somewhat less. Kevin Schultz wrote this up on his blog:
After a five-year decrease in…
illconsidered | August 2, 2013A commenter on the most recent edition of het's AWOGWN asks an interesting set of questions:
How would temperature data have been seen during the last 10,000 years prior to the peak of each of the previous Milankovich cycles? What caused the temperature to reverse course in those cycles and why would we not expect it to occur again this time?
First, here are the quick answers to those three questions, then some discussion. 1. It is not currently possible to resolve the temperature record that long ago to anything close to what we have today. 2. The cause of the temperature reversal is not…
gregladen | July 16, 2013No. Here's a handy graphic for you to enjoy and share, courtesy of Climate Nexus.
Also, you might want to ask the question: What has global warming done since 1998?
That question is addressed HERE, where this handy graphic is available showing the importance of ocean warming:
So, has global warming stopped? No, I'm afraid not.
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Other posts of interest:
How to get rid of spiders in your house
Why is your poop green?
How many cells are there in the human body?
Is there really a plot hole in Harry Potter Goblet of Fire?
How long is a human generation?
Is blog ever really blue?
How to…
illconsidered | May 31, 2013Coal-fired electricity production is bad on so many levels.
You'd think humans could learn from history, but sadly, no, and no. The childhood asthma statistics alone should be enough. Coal burning power plants are a leading producer of asthma causing pollution. And then there's the mercury...and the mountain-top removal, and the waste products..and, well, when do we say "enough"?
illconsidered | March 8, 2013(image info and credits)
Fake skeptics of anthropogenic global warming love to set up the straw man that mainstream climate science believes that CO2 is the one and only driver of climate change. They can then use it in many different attacks, such as gee whiz isn't it stupid that they haven't even thought of the sun's influence. This is of course patently false as even the most cursory survey of actual scientific content will quickly reveal. This straw man is also an implicit part of the argument that the "16 year pause" in global warming proves that CO2 is not a climate driver. If CO2…
illconsidered | March 8, 2013Headline of the week from NPR. It is worth noting that even if the Republican representative has now apologized for his remarks and admitted they were stupid either because he realizes it or because he has to, he has not changed his position on a special tax on bicycles.
(h/t willard)
illconsidered | January 30, 2013NASA's JPL division has an interesting article on thawing dry ice (frozen CO2) near the polar regions of Mars.
Aside from its being interesting, I only bring it up as it reminds me of the faux skeptic talking point about Mars warming, ergo the sun drives warming here on earth. It is about as far from a truly skeptical argument one could imagine as it rests (or at least it did when it originated) on the flimsiest of evidence that there is climate change on Mars at all. A truly skeptical approach would not make the leap from two photos of one spot to a global trend. Even if you establish the…
illconsidered | December 26, 2012I first saw this video at Planet 3.0 a fair while ago and have seen it posted again since. I find it very uplifting despite being a jaded climate blogger of many years. There are many other science-based music videos at www.symphonyofscience.com and I have listened/watch most (all?) of them, but this is the best as well as being on topic here.
I think it is just about the perfect mix of the various elements of outreach needed to motivate the general public: explanation, urgency and optimism.
illconsidered | November 18, 2012I don't myself visit Watts' blog unless someone points to something particularly funny or egregious, and the comment threads are so long and monotonous it is even rarer that I go there.
That said, I am always grateful to others who have occasion to do that hard work and who come back out to highlight particularly mind-blowing examples of...of... of whatever it is that adequately describes what passes for dialogue over there. So, many thanks to Holly Stick over at Rabett Run who points us to the Gray Monk at WUWT who writes:
Actually the question is whether or not CO2 is the ‘evil game…
illconsidered | September 18, 2012Now here's a great use of airplane fuel...(no, actually it is not)
(h/t Greg Laden)
illconsidered | September 10, 2012Further to my mention of Ken Caldiera's recent Scientific American article "The Great Climate Experiment" the other day, I wanted to call attention to this passages as well:
the vast oceans resist change, but change they will. At no time in Earth’s past—with the possible exception of mass-extinction events—has ocean chemistry changed as much and as rapidly as scientists expect it to over the coming decades. When CO2 enters the oceans, it reacts with seawater to become carbonic acid. In high enough concentrations, this carbonic acid can cause the shells and skeletons of many marine organisms…
illconsidered | July 1, 2011"Coolest Billboard Ever?" asks a HuffPost article posted a couple of days ago.
The billboard certainly seems "greenie". I mean come on, it is not just made out of renewable resources, it is one! It's alive. It breathes. It photosythesizes. Photosynthesis is the essence of "Green".
So what's the problem?
The problem is that this typically elaborate and ultimately meaningless gesture really epitomizes what is wrong with corporate politic's view of and use of the green movement. It is not the essence of green it is the essence of greenwashing.
Coca cola is no friend of the environment.…
illconsidered | June 24, 2011The natural world is complicated. Therefore, so is the science that tries to understand it.
Complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity are all a part of the story that describes processes that are as extraordinary as they are mundane. While these are the very characteristics of scientific study that motivate professional and amateur alike, they are also the characteristics that give delayers, doubters and liars in the climate debates ample material for confusing and misrepresenting reality.
One such complexity is the interaction of infra-red or long wave radiation (IR or LW), the ocean surface…
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 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)
jhalper | December 20, 2010
Today's guest blogger is Prof. Dan Yakir. Until recently, Yakir was head of the Environmental Sciences and Energy Research Department at the Institute, and he heads the Yatir Forest research station, which monitors, among other things, carbon exchange in a man-made semi-arid pine forest.
This piece comes in the wake of the worst fire in Israel's history, in which extreme drought, winds and a long fire season that depleted fire retardant supplies combined to flame a few embers into a major conflagration that burned thousands of acres of natural scrub forest.Tens of human lives were lost, many…
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 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…