Global Warming
gregladen | September 29, 2017This graphic, by Boggis Makes Videos and put on YouTube just a few days ago, breaks all the rules of how to make effective, understandable graphs for the general public. However, if you follow all those rules, it is difficult or impossible to get certain message across. Therefore, this graphic is necessary if a bit difficult. I would like you to watch the graphic several times with a prompt before each watching so that you fully appreciate it. This will only take you six or seven minutes, I'm sure you weren't doing anything else important.
Pass 1: How to read the graph
This graph's basic…
gregladen | September 28, 2017Two or three thoughts about the current crisis.
When there is a major climate disaster in the US, people move. Since the US is big and has large gaps in population, it looks different than when a disaster happens in some other places. Five million (or more) Syrians leaving the Levant left a major mark across the globe. A half million leaving the Katrina hit zone was barely noticed on a global, or even national, scale, not just because it was one tenth the amount, but because of our size and space as well.
Something close to half the 400K or so displaced by Katrina (over half of them from…
gregladen | September 24, 2017It isn't. Well, it is a little, but not totally. OK, it is, but actually, it is complicated.
First, you are probably asking about the Atlantic hurricane season, not the global issue of hurricanes and typhoons and such. If you are asking world-wide, recent prior years were worse if counted by how many humans killed and how much damage done.
With respect to the Atlantic, this was a bad year and there are special features of this year that were bad in a way that is best accounted for by global warming. But looking at the Atlantic hurricanes from a somewhat different but valid perspective,…
gregladen | September 19, 2017As you already know, Hurricane Maria is a Category 5 storm menacing the Leewards, and heading, likely, for Puerto Rico.
Please avoid making the mistakes that were made in talking about Irma. There will probably be no Category 5 storm hitting Puerto Rico. The storm will probably be a Category 4 before it hits. So, reporters will sloppily declare that "a category 5 storm is heading for Puerto Rico" then later Rush Limberger will say "Look there was never no such storm, see?" and so on.
But, a Category 4 storm is still nothing to sneeze into, and Puerto Rico and the other island in this storm's…
gregladen | September 7, 2017I'll just put this item from UCS here for your interest:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Study Finds Top Fossil Fuel Producers’ Emissions Responsible for as Much as Half of Global Surface Temperature Increase, Roughly 30 Percent of Global Sea Level Rise
Findings Provide New Data to Hold Companies Responsible for Climate Change
WASHINGTON (September 7, 2017)—A first-of-its-kind study published today in the scientific journal Climatic Change links global climate changes to the product-related emissions of specific fossil fuel producers, including ExxonMobil and Chevron. Focusing on the largest gas, oil…
gregladen | August 31, 2017Three statisticians go hunting for rabbit. They see a rabbit. The first statistician fires and misses, her bullet striking the ground below the beast. The second statistician fires and misses, their bullet striking a branch above the lagomorph. The third statistician, a lazy frequentist, says, "We got it!"
OK, that joke was not 1/5th as funny as any of XKCD's excellent jabs at the frequentist-bayesian debate, but hopefully this will warm you up for a somewhat technical discussion on how to decide if observations about the weather are at all explainable with reference to climate change.
[…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Remember the revelation back a year or so ago that Exxon Mobil knew all about the likely effects of the global warming they contributed to, and the subsequent denials by Exxon that this was not true, yada yada yada?
A paper has just come out that confirms what we all said then. From the abstract:
This paper assesses whether ExxonMobil Corporation has in the past misled the general public about climate change. We present an empirical document-by-document textual content analysis and comparison of 187 climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Every now and then, I hear someone giving the Republican Party credit for finally starting to get on board with 20th (or even 19th) century science, and 21st century eyeballs, to accept the idea of climate change. That is annoying whenever it happens because it simply isn't ever true and never will be.
Media Matters for America has a piece critiquing a recent Politico assertion that the tide is turning. Here is some of what they say, click through to the rest.
...
Politico's story...offers two main examples to support its argument: First, the bipartisan House Climate Solutions Caucus "has…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Posting this with no comment because it is expected and so obviously bone-headed Trump:
US President Donald Trump's administration has disbanded a government advisory committee that was intended to help the country prepare for a changing climate.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established the committee in 2015 to help businesses and state and local governments make use of the next national climate assessment. The legally mandated report, due in 2018, will lay out the latest climate-change science and describe how global warming is likely to affect the United States,…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Harvey the Hurricane will hit Texas roughly between Corpus Christi and Victoria (but stay tuned for exact details).
Harvey is passing over water that is significantly warmer than usual, owing to global warming. This storm was too disorganized to even, under normal conditions, to have a name, just a day or so. But, when this storm hits Texas late this week (maybe by the time you are reading this) it is likely to be a Category III storm.
Then, after landfall, the storm will hang around that area for a while dumping huge amounts of rain on the Texas flatness.
The target area may have 15 inches…
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 | July 5, 2017It really is true that global warming has made heat waves more common and more severe. The heat wave last month that affected the American southwest was one of these. Yet, of the 433 local broadcast events in local TV affiliates in Phoenix and Las Vegas to mention the heatwave (which was current news at the time) only one event mentioned a climate change connection, and that was to downplay it.
Similarly, governments are ignoring the connection.
This is the people who are supposed to help or at least disseminate correct information, letting everyone down for, I assume, political reasons.…
gregladen | June 29, 2017MSNBC has added Bret Stephens, climate denier formerly of the WSJ, lately of the NYT, to their list of commenters. Shame on them.
Also, shame on Wikipedia and others for referring to Stephens as a journalist. He is no more a journalist than Anne Coulter. He is a commenter. (He's way better than Coulter, of course.)
Prior related posts:
Out of the gate, Bret Stephens punches the hippies, says dumb things
Honestly, New York Times? You are entitled to publish all the opinions, but not to endorse your own facts!
My letter to the New York Times
Dear New York Times: Climate Change Is Real
The…
gregladen | June 19, 2017UPDATE (Aug 30th)
Irma is a new named storm in the Eastern Atlantic. See this post for details, eventually.
UPDATE (Aug 29th)
There is a system currently raining on Cabo Verde, off the West Coast of Africa (nee Cape Verde) that is expected to develop. It is on the verge of becoming a tropical depression. The National Hurricane Center has estimated that there is a high probability of this stormy feature becoming a tropical storm in a couple of days or so. If it gets a name, it will be Irma, unless some other large rotating wet object takes that name first.
UPDATE (Aug 29th)
How is the…
gregladen | June 19, 2017Michael Mann, author of some of the best books on climate science (including The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, and Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding Climate Change) and discoverer of the Hockey Stick (the graph, not the actual stick) has been very appropriately awarded the coveted Stephen H. Schneider Award.
Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center, Penn…
gregladen | June 2, 2017I got a letter from a Minnesota-based teacher who is getting inundated by students asking questions about Paris. Many of those questions are dogwhistles (the students do not realize that) indicating that they've been getting their information from Trump supporters, or so I can confidently guess. (The school is in an area where many voted for Trump.)
Here's my response. Short version: he lied about everything.
Most people in Minnesota who have asthma have it because of coal plant generated pollution. Shutting down the coal plants is a primary step in reducing climate change. So, even…
gregladen | June 2, 2017If you are upset about Trump and upset about Trump pulling the US out of the Paris agreement, please let me help you get through the day.
Trump announcing that the US is pulling out of Paris does not mean the end of Paris, the end of action on climate change, or much else about global warming. I'll explain why in a moment. The US pulling out of Paris could even be interpreted as better than the US staying in. I'll explain that too.
I'm not saying that Trump should have pulled out, I'm just saying that at the moment, if you are deeply concerned about the climate and the future, which you…
gregladen | May 31, 2017The climate change documentary A Sea Change will be shown at the Maple Grove Library, in the Western Twin Cities, by the Northwest Minneapolis Climate Action group, this Wednesday at 7:00 PM. See you there!
Here is a trailer:
gregladen | May 1, 2017Honestly, it is hard to have an honest conversation about science with science obstructors or deniers. That is how you know you are conversing with a denier. You try to have the conversation, and it gets derailed by cherry picking, misdirection, faux misunderstanding, or lies.
I don't care how far a person is from understanding a scientific concept or finding. I don't care how complex and nuanced such a finding is. As long as the science is in an area that I comfortable with as a scientist, educator, and science communicator, I'll take up the challenge of transforming scientific mumbo…
gregladen | April 30, 2017Climate science deniers like to call we who are correct and rational (we the good guys) "alarmists." So be it.
This is a post that closely reflects my own feelings, by my friend and colleague, Lawrence Torcello. It begins:
Most of us have wondered about the human context of past crimes against humanity: why didn’t more people intervene? How could so many pretend not to know? To be sure, crimes against humanity are not always easy to identify while they unfold.
We need some time to reflect and to analyze, even when our reasoning suggests that large scale human suffering and death are likely…