Global Warming
gregladen | June 6, 2013A paper came out in today’s Nature about glacial melting and its contribution to sea level rise. This paper does not present new research, but rather summarizes and evaluates the last several years of research on modeling and measuring contiental glaciers and their dynamics.
From the Abstract:
Since the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, new observations of ice-sheet mass balance and improved computer simulations of ice-sheet response to continuing climate change have been published. Whereas Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing pace, current…
gregladen | June 5, 2013Since 2001 the amount of Arctic Sea ice that has melted during the summer has generally increased. There may have been a long term trend in melting of ice in the northern hemisphere generally, including mountain glaciers, the Greenland glaciers, and seasonally, Arctic Sea Ice. But the seasonal melting of Arctic Sea ice seems to represent a metastable shift unprecedented in available data. There is probably a tipping point followed by positive feedback. From 2001 onwards, the amount of sea ice melted each summer has gone up, and this has resulted in two related effects: 1) The total amount…
gregladen | June 4, 2013This is a guest post by David Kirtley. David originally posted this as a Google Doc, and I'm reproducing his work here with his permission. Just the other day I was speaking to a climate change skeptic who made mention of an old Time or Newsweek (he was not sure) article that talked about fears of a coming ice age. There were in fact a number of articles back in the 1970s that discussed the whole Ice Age problem, and I'm not sure what my friend was referring to. But here, David Kirtley places a recent meme that seems to be an attempt to diffuse concern about global warming because we…
gregladen | May 20, 2013There is a book called "The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania" produced by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is famous for doing all that work to prove that smoking is not bad for you, and more recently, that climate change is not real or is not important or is not human-caused etc. etc. Heartland is a libertarian "think" tank that receives money form big corporate interests like Tobacco and Petroleum and then uses that money to advance the interests of those corporate entities, regardless of the actual truth of the situation. They also use…
gregladen | May 16, 2013An important study has just been published1 examining the level of consensus among scientists about climate change.
The issue at hand is this: What is the level of agreement in the scientific community about the reality of climate change and about the human role in climate change? The new paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, address this question and the answer is very clear. The number of climate scientists who question the reality of global warming or the human role in global warming is vanishingly small.
This is not the first…
gregladen | May 11, 2013Here's a template for a letter I hope you will consider sending/emailing to all of your elected representatives at the municipal, state, and federal levels, if you are in the US. Thanks
Dear [elected official]
I am writing to ask you to join the very small but hopefully growing number of elected representatives and executives in noting the important news this week regarding the human contribution to the amount of atmospheric CO2. This week the landmark value of 400 ppm was reached, which is a significant amount more than the pre-industrial baseline level of about 280 ppm. As an elected…
gregladen | May 9, 2013Experiment showing the absoption of infrared radiation by carbon dioxide. From the BBC 2 program "Earth: The Climate Wars"
gregladen | April 15, 2013Why is it snowing so much in the Northern US States this Spring? Two words: Global Warming. Let me ‘splain.
Weather is all about air and moisture. The distribution of air is uneven, with some places having more air in big piles, other places having less air, into which the extra air from the big piles of air tends to spill. The big piles form because the surface beneath is relatively warm, causing the air to expand more than in adjoining areas. As air falls off these giant mounds of seeming nothingness, it forms low pressure systems that consist of swirling moving masses, made up of air of…
gregladen | April 11, 2013Climate sensitivity is the number of degrees C that the earth's average temperature (of the atmosphere air and water on top of the "earth" per se) will increase with a doubling of "pre-industrial CO2" in the environment.
This is an important number ... and it is a number, and to save you the suspense, the number is about 3 ... because it tells us what the direct effects of the release of fossil Carbon (mainly in the form of CO2) from the burning of fossil fuels would be.
Here's the thing. Climate change denialists would like the number to be 1, or some other number lower than 3. Well, we…
gregladen | April 9, 2013There is a new Gallup poll that together with earlier data from Gallup provides some interesting information about attitudes in the US about global warming.
Earlier polls have shown increase and decrease in concern about global warming, and changes in what people think of news about climate change and the severity of the problem. Recently, there has been a shift towards greater concern which follows a low point, which, in turn, follows a period of global concern.
One question involves reading off a list of specific concerns related to global warming and asking participants to rank their…
gregladen | March 23, 2013It is important to get this right. There is something interesting happening in the Arctic right now, and some people are pointing to it and jumping up and down and yelling about how it is a major climate change event. But it may very well not be. Or it could be. The thing that is happening is something that normally happens, but there are features of the event that are odd. We won't know its significance until the Northern Summer, and even then we won't be sure if this is just an unusual thing for this year or a new trend because, by definition, trends run over periods of time.
Every year as…
gregladen | February 24, 2013Is there a problem with John Abraham’s argument about Obama’s Legacy?
John Abraham wrote a piece in the Guardian titled Keystone XL decision will define Barack Obama’s legacy on climate change: Does the president have courage to say ‘no’ to a project that will lock us into decades of dependency on this dirty energy? in which he states:
Alberta has 1.8 [trillion] barrels of oil contained within the tar sands. Extracting and burning all of that tar will cause a global temperature increase of about 0.4 degrees C (0.7 degrees F). That is about half of the warming that humans have already caused…
gregladen | February 20, 2013This is being discussed here, thought I'd show you this:
Use of the terms "Global Warming" vs. "Climate Change" in books
gregladen | February 20, 2013You hear, again again, that climate and weather are not the same thing. This has led to assertions such as "you can't attribute a single weather event to climate change." But climate and weather are not distinctly different. Climatologists and meteorologists have made statements like this because people do confuse and conflate current conditions and weather forecasts on one hand with climate systems and climate change observations and modeling on the other. Saying "climate and weather are not the same thing" is a convenient segue into a discussion of how certain conclusions may be invalid…
gregladen | February 10, 2013Climate experts have pointed out that Nemo, the very bad nor’easter that just hit the Northeastern US and Maritimes, is partly an effect of global warming. Some meteorologists have responded with an incorrect response, a recitation of a now tired and useless mumbling retort that I’m afraid may even have it origin among scientists who should know better, and at the very least was kept alive by them for far too long: “Well, you can’t really attribute any given weather event to climate change.” Some regular people who are not climate scientists have repeated that faleshood as well. Then there…
gregladen | February 8, 2013This graph shows the extremes in one-day precipitation in a given month relative to the amount of precip in that month for the Northeastern US. So, if the green bar is at 30%, that means that that 30% of month's precip fell in one event. The way this is computed is a little complicated because it is hard to define an "event" in time and space in relation to the time and space coordinates (as it were) we normally use. Check the source of the graph for a more detailed explanation. The point of this graph is that the opposite is true from what many expect: It isn't the case that the snow was…
gregladen | February 8, 2013Here's a graph from the USDA:
This comes from a post by Peter Sinclair: USDA: Warming Will Devastate Agriculture.
Also from that post, this interview with Phil Robertson of Michigan State University related to the question of C02 as "plant food."
gregladen | February 6, 2013... at any serious level, and then, only if enough Republicans get thrown out of the House to allow committee work and legislation to happen. From The Hill:
House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans have rebuffed Democrats’ bid to require the high-profile panel to hold hearings on links between climate change, extreme weather and threats to coastal areas.
On Wednesday the Committee, along party lines, voted down Democratic amendments to its formal oversight plan for the 113th Congress.
One defeated amendment, from Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), would have required hearings on the role of…
gregladen | February 6, 2013Minnesota has two populations of moose, one in the northwestern part of the state, one in the northeastern part of the state. Both are in decline. The decline seems to be mainly due to disease, which in turn, seems to be exacerbated by the occurrence of shorter, warmer winters and longer summers.
Today, the Minnesota DNR is announcing an indefinite halt to the annual moose hunt, because the latest surveys show that the population is in very serious decline. From a brief preliminary report in the Star Tribune:
Based on the aerial survey conducted in January, the new population estimate is…