Global Warming
gregladen | February 2, 2017There have been significant wildfires in Chile since November, and they continue. These are the worst fires Chile has seen in known history, and Chile has been keeping track of its history for quite a while.
Are these fires climate change caused? Apparently so. Chile has had a rain deficit for well over a decade, though it as been extra dry for about five years. Drought experts call it a "mega-drought." Droughts tend to have climate change links, and this one is no exception. A study from just one year ago links anthropogenic climate change to the drought.
Within large uncertainties in…
gregladen | January 12, 2017The term "Evangelical" is a bit of a moving goal post. But, there is a strong association between Evangelical and getting climate science totally wrong in a way that is actually materially damaging to our planet and to future generations. So, it is not hard to be angry at Evangelicals because they are ruining it for everyone.
But, within the "Evangelical" movement, there are people who are trying to change that. I wish them luck. One person is Katharine Hayhoe, and here she is talking about that:
Another is my friend Paul Douglas, famous meteorologist. He wrote Caring for Creation: The…
gregladen | January 6, 2017You already know abut the North American Conveyor current. Briefly: The major ocean currents happen because the equatorial ocean is warmer, and since water (unlike land) can move (though not as fast as air) the dissipation of this heat across the surface of the Earth results in warm water moving, at the surface, north or south away from the Equator, where it loses its heat and finds it way back to the equatorial regions, usually as deeper, cooler water.
Conveniently, this process also involves increasing the salinity of the water far from the equator, as evaporating water becomes saltier.…
gregladen | December 12, 2016UPDATE: The Department of Energy has reportedly refused Donald Trump's request for names of DOE employees and contractors who have been engaged in climate change research. That does not mean that Tump will never get those names. Once he is President, he can get the names. But for now, he'll have to sit it out.
The Donald Trump transition team circulated an eight page questionnaire to the US Department of Energy. Such questionnaires are not normal. This particular questionnaire is deeply disturbing.
There are seventy-four questions. They provide insight into likely Trump administration…
gregladen | October 23, 2016My friend Paul Douglas calls himself an albino unicorn. He is a Republican (one of my few Republican friends!) and an evangelical Christian (one of my few evangelical Christian friends!) who is extremely well informed about climate change, and who acts on a day to day basis as a climate warrior, informing people of the realities of climate change at several levels.
I tend to think of Paul as a tire, because he is where the rubber meets the road. His job is informing corporations and such about the risks they are facing right now, today, tomorrow, next week with respect to weather. Paul…
gregladen | October 12, 2016The Royal Society is the world's oldest extant scientific society. And, it is a place where scientific controversy has a home. Both Huxley and Wilberforce were members back in the 19th century, when young Darwin's ideas were first being knocked around.
More recently, just a few weeks ago, the Royal Society accidentally agreed to host a talk by coal baron and formerly respected science writer Matt Ridley. Matt Ridley has been a great disappointment to us scientists and science teachers. Many of us used his book as a supplementary reading in our evolution courses, for example (Ridley was a…
gregladen | October 10, 2016It turns out that there is an untold story behind the "discovery" of the famous Hockey Stick graph by Mike Mann and his colleagues. It is an excellent example of how science works, worthy of repeating, say, in a science classroom.
Anthropogenic Climate Change is very serious business. And, therefore, there has been far too little humor applied to communicating about this problem. Mike Mann and his co-author Tom Toles have started to backfill that gaping hole in the collective effort to bring the most important existential issue of our time to everyone's attention.
Hurricane Matthew wasn'…
gregladen | October 10, 2016Climate change is a settled issue. It is now widely and recognized as real, and as one of the top, if not THE top, existential problems the world faces today. Americans want climate change stopped, and they want the next version of the US Government, the one that starts in January, 2017, to work hard to reduce the human release of greenhouse gas as rapidly as possible.
How do we know this?
Because no one mentioned a thing about it during last night's debate!
A few months ago, I would have expected presidential debates to have included climate change pretty much in every iteration. It…
gregladen | September 27, 2016The US is already behind in its agreed to commitment to clean power
A study just out in Nature climate Change suggests that the US is already behind in its commitments to reduce the use of fossil fuel as an energy source, and the concomitant release of climate-warming greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
The paper, by Jeffery Greenblatt and Max Wei, says:
Current intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs)are insufficient to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature change to between 1.5 and 2.0◦C above pre-industrial levels, so the effectiveness of existing INDCs will…
gregladen | September 26, 2016You've probably already heard about his paper because everyone is all a tizzy about it. There is a fundamental complaint being made about one of the paper's conclusions. I've been paying careful attention to what my colleagues are saying about that one aspect of the paper, and I get their point but I'm not sure if they are right. I'll explain that later.
What everyone so far has almost entirely missed, though, is the actual point of the paper, and that is important and while I'm sure it could be improved with further work, this is good stuff and important.
One of the major contributions…
gregladen | September 23, 2016The American Geophysical Union just lost whatever remaining credibility it had as a scientific society earlier today when it announced no change in policy regarding taking money from ExxonMobil.
We talked about this before, here.
Margaret Leinen, the AGU president, issued a communication today that says this:
Last week the AGU Board of Directors discussed the organization’s April decision to continue engagement with ExxonMobil after receiving additional information from several sources. The Board maintained its original decision after another careful and systematic review of hundreds of pages…
gregladen | September 21, 2016The Clinton Foundation started as a very successful post-presidency foundation of the type that is normally formed under the leadership of an ex president, in this case, Bill Clinton. Later, the foundation was expanded considerably and made into the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea foundation, and rivaled and exceeded earlier similar efforts to solve the world's problems. Now, the foundation is a big giant money magnet, that takes funds from all over and uses it for all sorts of great things, including addressing climate change.
It is normal for a president to step away from financial activities…
gregladen | September 20, 2016By important, I mean people who have their hands on the levers of power, more or less, in areas that affect energy policy.
I don't really care if Uncle Bob doesn't accept climate change. Uncle Bob votes for right wing yahoos anyway, that wasn't going to change. Why should it matter what Uncle Bob thinks?
Unless Uncle Bob is a top policy actor involve din climate and energy issues at the federal level or in Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, or Ohio. Right?
The Climate Constituencies Project looked at these folks (Uncle Bob's colleagues as described) to see where they stand on climate change…
gregladen | September 20, 2016For some time now ExxonMobil Corporation has been under scrutiny for having a) known about climate change, yet b) helped cause climate change, while c) investing corporate resources into getting people and the government to not take climate change seriously.
Worst case allegation: ExxonMobile has taken material steps, knowingly and intentionally, that will cause the end of civilization as we know it.
That, of course, is not illegal. But along the way, perhaps some laws have been broken, and some in the legal biz have been looking into this.
Now, suddenly, we hear from the Wall Street Journal…
gregladen | September 20, 2016White Supremacy, Climate Science Denial, Trump, Alt-Right
Peter Sinclair suddenly realized it is all one big interconnected complex hole! (Well, whole, but more like a hole because of what we are throwing into it).
Look at this classic video he made a while back:
Then, check out his post, here.
A lot of stuff about the MadHouse Effect
I reviewed the Madhouse Effect HERE.
Get Energy Smart notes that only a day after the Madhouse Effect authors highlighted nine key deniers (including Bjorn Lomborg) in the Washington Post, that venerable newspaper publishes yet another bogus editorial (…
gregladen | September 13, 2016A while back it became apparent, or should I say, more apparent, that Exxon corporation had been playing a dangerous and unethical game with the science of climate change, and for decades, misled people on the relationship between their fossil fuel related activities, the effects of those activities, and possible solutions. (They've known about this problem all along.)
Part of this seems to have involved making misstatements about climate change, and pumping resources into anti science activities and organizations.
The American Geophysical Union is the unifying organization for geologists…
gregladen | September 12, 2016Wed AM Update:
Meranti passed near the southern tip of Taiwan, and apparently it was pretty windy and nasty there. But, Taiwan has invested heavily in infrastructure with the idea of being hit with giant typhoons now and then, so things were not as bad as they could have been.
apparently Meranti is now a category 5 equivalent heading for China. The storm is expected to weaken only a bit as it makes landfall (see this post on what landfall means) so this is going to be a direct hit by a major hurricane. There are some pretty densely populated areas in the storm's path. There are also many…
gregladen | September 3, 2016Hurricanes are well defined systems with characteristics that quite literally set them apart from other storms. Large storms such as Nor'Easters are sometimes less well defined and interact more with major troughs, the jet streams, etc. We have come to understand Hurricanes as the worst case scenario, while other storms are less dangerous.
But sometimes, and I suspect more recently lately, these non-tropical storms become quite dangerous. The Great Storm of '78 killed hundreds in New England and made us suddenly realize that coastal property was a temporary thing. But we sense the danger…
gregladen | September 2, 2016Update (Sunday PM):
Hermine is still a big storm and will affect eastern regions to some degree, but the storm never reformed as a hurricane, and is not not expected to do so. Also, the storm has jinked out to the east more than expected and will likely move farther east. So, there will be some coastal effects, but not much out of the ordinary.
POST-TROPICAL CYCLONE HERMINE FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 30
NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL092016
2100 UTC SUN SEP 04 2016
CHANGES IN WATCHES AND WARNINGS WITH THIS ADVISORY...
A TROPICAL STORM WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED FROM WATCH HILL…
gregladen | September 1, 2016But I'm sure you already knew that.
The Wall Street Journal is so far behind the curve when it comes to the science of climate change, and so deep in the pockets of the oil industry, that the following is now true: If you are in business or industry, and want to keep track of important news about markets and other important things, don't bother with the Wall Street Journal. You no longer need it for the stock info (that's on your smart phone). The editorial and analysis, and I assume the reporting, from the WSJ is so badly tainted and decades behind the times that the newspaper as a whole has…