Global Warming
gregladen | June 5, 2014This post has gone out of date. Go HERE to see a current list of excellent books on climate change.
gregladen | June 4, 2014Independent videographer Peter Sinclair's 'This is Not Cool' video explores recent headline-grabbing research on Antarctic glacial melting, the first video produced under the name Yale Climate Connections, formerly The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.
gregladen | June 4, 2014Joe Goffman, Associate Assistant Administrator for Climate and Senior Counsel for EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, explains EPA's commonsense proposal to work with states, cities and businesses to cut carbon pollution from power plants. By looking across our whole power sector, the proposed Clean Power Plan will boost our economy, protect our health and environment, and fight climate change.
This is OK, but I would seriously edit some of this text. For example, this is part of the text of this video:
Global climate change can threaten our very way of life. Floods can destroy our homes and…
gregladen | June 4, 2014Sadly, a large percentage of Americans are under the impression that climate scientists do not agree on the reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). A lot of people are simply wrong about this. They think that there is a great deal of controversy among the scientists who study the Earth's climate. But there isn't. One way we know this is from a study done by John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce, called "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature…
gregladen | May 27, 2014Excessive warmth attributable to global warming and a stalled weather system, also attributable to global warming, have caused a weather system in over southeast China to dump rain since May 12th. A million people are in the impacted area, ahlf of them have had to move or have been rescued, and the 2-6 inches of daily rain continues. 25,000 homes have been destroyed.
This area has recieved huge investments over the last few decades, since a huge 1998 storm killed thousands and caused 26 billion dollars in damage. They now fear that the present flooding will be as bad.
Here's some video (…
gregladen | May 20, 2014A few days ago I noted that April 2014 was one of the warmest Aprils on record. This morning, NOAA has released its data showing that April was actually a bit warmer than I had suggested.
NOAA has already stated that "The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces was the fourth highest for March on record, at 0.71°C (1.28°F) above the 20th century average of 12.3°C (54.1°F)" and "The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the January–March period (year-to-date) was 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average of 12.3°C (54.1°F), the seventh…
gregladen | May 20, 2014This Sunday morning, on Atheist Talk radio, I’ll interview Paul Douglas, America’s favorite meteorologists (at least when the weather is good).
When I first moved to Minnesota, which happened to be during a period of intense Spring and Summer storminess for a few years in a row (including this event which wiped out Amanda’s dorm long before I ever met her), I spent a bit of time while searching for a place to live watching the local news, to get a feel for the place. Coming from the Boston area, where the main local news stations aggressively compete with each other using their…
gregladen | May 17, 2014We saw it coming, the denialists denied, they were wrong, this is all pretty bad.
gregladen | May 14, 2014The Dark Snow Project is staring up again, it being almost summer(ish) in Greenland.
The results in the study of the odd 2012 winter are now in. That year, there was a huge spike in melting on the surface of Greenland. (Discussed here.) One idea is that a good part of this melting was caused by extra soot from extensive wildfires in North America, which increased the amount of solar energy collected on the ice surface.
The results confirm this, and the Dark Snow team is returning this year to collect more information.
Here's a video giving an overview of the project, from Peter Sinclair'…
gregladen | May 14, 2014NASA's instrumental data set for their Land-Ocean Temperature Index, which goes back to 1880, has updated for April, and it appears that this year's April is the second hottest on record. Also, we had one of the warmest winters on record, despite appearances to the contrary for those who live under the Polar Vortex. Paul Douglas posted the graphic above showing anomalies relative to a 1981-2010 base period for the months of December through February. Note that there is general warmth across the globe with a few cool spots, including a VERY cold region over North America.
If we do have an…
gregladen | May 8, 2014The weatherologists have more or less stopped saying there might be an El Niño this year. Now they are saying there will be an El Niño, and they are starting to consider how strong it will be. Well, actually, they've stopped doing that too and are now talking about whether it will be a mondo-El Niño or a mondo-mondo-El Niño.
Here is a newly released video by Peter Sinclair and the Yale Climate Forum about the coming El Niño:
I have a prediction to make. First a bit of background.
You know about the so-called "hiatus" in global warming, because every Tea Partier with a mouth is yammering…
gregladen | May 6, 2014As you know, the National Climate Change Assessment report is out. I'm actually rather overwhelmed with it all. It is a turning point by way of full acknowledgment of the importance of climate change and the need to act. Good for you, government of the United States!
One small item has crossed my desk this morning tangential to the assessment but so deliciously hilarious that I did not want to let it pass without comment.
Part of the roll out of the assessment will involve President Obama speaking with meteorologists across the country. Friend of mine made the remark that Fox News wanted…
gregladen | April 23, 2014Great interview with Michael Mann on The Lang and O'Leary Exchange, CBC, on climate change, faux pause, denialism, policy, and politics.
gregladen | April 23, 2014I have a little "science by spreadsheet" project for you, concerning the relationship between El Niño and Atlantic hurricanes.
The chance of an El Niño event happening this year seems to go up every few days, with most, perhaps all, climate models suggesting that El Niño will form this Summer or Fall. Climate experts tell us that there are typically fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic during El Niño years. So, I was interested to see how many fewer. Also, there appears to be a different kind of El Niño that happens sometimes, perhaps more often these days as an effect of global warming,…
gregladen | April 22, 2014There is currently a twitter argument happening, along with a bit of a blogging swarm, over a chimera of a remark made by John Stossle and Bjorn Lomborg. They made the claim that a million electric cars would have no benefit with resect to Carbon emissions. The crux of the argument is that there is a Carbon cost to manufacturing and running electric cars. When we manufacture anything, we emit Carbon, and when we make electricity to run the cars, we emit Carbon, etc. etc.
Lomborg is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But here I want to focus on one aspect of why he is wrong that applies…
gregladen | April 22, 2014It is possible that this is the most important Earth Day. Earth Day is part of the process of broadening environmental awareness and causing positive change in how we treat our planet. We are at a juncture where we must make major changes in what we do or our Grandchildren, to the extent that they can take time away from the daunting task of survival in a post-Civilization world, will curse us.
I wrote a massive multpart blog post about Earth Day a four years ago, and here I'm giving you a slightly modified version of it, covering just a few aspects of the thing, and telling a couple of…
gregladen | April 17, 2014John Stossel, writing at Real Annoying Clear Politics, (which is not a terrible place except for John Stossel) quotes some guy named Bjorn Lomborg about electric cars, thusly:
Do environmentalists even care about measuring costs instead of just assuming benefits? We spend $7 billion to subsidize electric cars. Even if America reached the president's absurd 2015 goal of "a million electric cars on the road" (we won't get close), how much would it delay warming of the Earth?
"One hour," says Lomborg. "This is a symbolic act."
There are a lot of reasons that this is wrong. First, cars are not…
gregladen | April 17, 2014I get the impression that some of my colleagues are concerned about the phrase "War on Carbon" because it is bad messaging. That is wrong. We need to carry out a War on Carbon. We need to keep the Carbon in the ground. You know why.
Meanwhile, though, we can have some fun with the idea:
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gregladen | April 15, 2014 Henry Markram
Henry Markram, a chief editor at Frontiers, the journal that recently retracted (resulting in multiple resignations of editors from that journal), inappropriately, an important paper on climate change denialism, just made the following comment on a post on that journal's blog.
My own personal opinion: The authors of the retracted paper and their followers are doing the climate change crisis a tragic disservice by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study. They made a monumental mistake, refused to fix it and that…
gregladen | April 14, 2014First, as I've mentioned before, there is a Reddit "As Me Anything" (AMA) going on right now with Stephan Lewandowsky, and if you are into Reddit AMA's and climate change related issues you should check it out. Lewandowsky is a co-author of the famous Frontiers Retracted paper, though the subjects being discussed at the AMA range far beyond that particular issue.
Second, there is new paper out that looks very interesting. I'm still trying to absorb it and I've asked the author for some clarifications on some issues, but already the Global Warming Deialosphere is all over it, so it must have…