Global Warming
gregladen | May 25, 2011People are asking me: Is the recent spate of tornadoes caused by global warming? The usual answer to that question is that you can't answer the question because a tornado is not caused by climate ... it is cause by weather ... and global warming (which is real, and which is cause by humans) is climate change.
However, that is not really the best answer to the question. Ultimately, I want to propose an analogy for how to think about this question, but first, a stab at a good answer, which if modified could probably be improved:
Question: Is Anthropogenic Global Warming the cause of the…
gregladen | March 8, 2011These masses of ice are now contributing more new meltwater to the world's seas than all other melting ice combined.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study -- the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass -- suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.
The nearly 20-year study reveals that in 2006, a year in which…
gregladen | February 27, 2011An inquiry by a federal watchdog agency found no evidence that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated climate data to buttress the evidence in support of global warming, officials said on Thursday.
The inquiry, by the Commerce Department's inspector general, focused on e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 ...
Read about it here.
gregladen | February 16, 2011How do you separate harmless belief in religion or superstition and ... well, harmful belief in religion or superstition? We have been having a bit of a go-round* between some of my regular blog readers, including my Catholic but not anti-Evolution niece whose daughter recently acted in a commercial for the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Sondrah and I respectfully agree to disagree about certain issues, but clearly do agree on the importance of having real science, and not creationism, taught in public schools. That is what a lot of people who think of themselves as religious prefer,…
gregladen | December 30, 2010Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Hat Tip: Ana
gregladen | November 22, 2010From USA Today:
An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say.
Review of the 91-page report by three experts contacted by USA TODAY found repeated instances of passages lifted word for word and what appear to be thinly disguised paraphrases.
USA Today story here
gregladen | November 13, 2010I am speaking of Representative John Shimkus, R-Ill, and the truly astonishing words he uttered before Congress demonstrated in a video that is constnatly being trolled off Google and YouTube by those who don't want you to see it:
Source and more information here.
If God's Word is infallible, unchanging, and perfect, then dinosaurs did not live in a different era than humans, and not in great antiquity, and what geologists and paleontologists say about the "age of dinosaurs" must be the word of Satan designed by the dark lord of the underworld to confuse us.
If God's Word is infallible,…
gregladen | November 10, 2010You've heard that the Arctic ice cap has shrunk, and that there are sea lanes open in the northern summer that had not been open previously, and on and so forth.
Since the start of the satellite record in 1979, scientists have observed the continued disappearance of older "multiyear" sea ice that survives more than one summer melt season. Some scientists suspected that this loss was due entirely to wind pushing the ice out of the Arctic Basin -- a process that scientists refer to as "export." In this study, Ron Kwok and Glenn Cunningham at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif…
gregladen | November 9, 2010As global warming progresses, habitats change in their suitability for various life forms. It may be that moose will not be able to live in Minnesota in the future; Of the two resident moose populations, the one that lives in the area more affected by global warming has pretty much died out probably due indirectly to the effects of increased temperature. There are regions of the rockies where entire forests are dead because of temperature changes. And so on.
Imagine a large flat landscape. As one moves north vs. south, average annual temperature changes, as does the number of days of…
gregladen | October 28, 2010Weather systems in the Southern and Northern hemispheres will respond differently to global warming ... the warming of the planet will affect the availability of energy to fuel extratropical storms, or large-scale weather systems that occur at Earth's middle latitudes. The resulting changes will depend on the hemisphere and season, the study found.
More intense storms will occur in the Southern Hemisphere throughout the year, whereas in the Northern Hemisphere, the change in storminess will depend on the season -- with more intense storms occurring in the winter and weaker storms in the…
gregladen | October 13, 2010I was under the impression that "Reason" magazine was a libertarian neocon climate denialist rag. I could be wrong, but that's what I thought. I was also under the impression that JREF was pro-science and at this point had gotten beyond the whole "let's remain skeptical about global warming" thaing, especially since Randi stepped in it a while back and accidentally forgot that only paid-off or delusional scientists denied AGW. But now we find the JREF site pushing Reason magaazine in a post on their site.
Someone please help me understand what I'm seeing here.
gregladen | October 11, 2010
This is astonishing.
...Scientists and conservationists are expressing alarm at the appearance of thousands of walrus on Alaska's northwest coast, a dramatic demonstration of the effects of diminished Arctic sea ice brought on by global warming....
source
gregladen | September 16, 2010Scientists have been measuring sea ice very carefully since 1979. Prior to that, there are estimates that are of varying degrees of usefulness. I know for a fact that many New England lighthouses were attached to land by winter-long ice in places that have not had sea ice in any living person's memory, and there are similar bits and pieces of historical data suggesting that sea ice was once much more extensive in the Northern Hemisphere than at present.
Since 1979 there have been three years in which Arctic sea ice reached a rather alarming minimum size prior to reforming. We are in one…
gregladen | September 15, 2010I've noticed that a lot of smart people who nonetheless "did not accept" AGW, or at least, denied the "A" part of it, have stoped talking about it lately. I'm speaking here of people I know personally. You know who you are, and you know you were wrong, and I just wanted to say that I forgive you. Mostly.
In the mean time, have a look at this:
That is from NOAA's new Climate Services site, where you too can mess around with the data and get the bejeebus scared out of you. Click here. If you dare.
They need a graph for pirates.
gregladen | September 15, 2010There are two quick and fairly easy approaches to reducing US emissions of CO2 by several percent. These reduction would be at the household level, possibly decreasing the household cost of energy by between 20 and 30 percent (or more, depending on the household) and decreasing national total CO2 emissions by around 10% or so.
But these approaches are nearly impossible to implement. Why? Because people are ignorant and selfish.
The two methods are: 1) Replace existing technologies with more efficient ones and 2) Use energy less. I'm not talking about replacing technologies at a…
gregladen | September 15, 2010This Rob Dunbar is NOT Robin Dunbar the Archaeologist.
Rob Dunbar hunts for data on our climate from 12,000 years ago, finding clues inside ancient seabeds and corals and inside ice sheets. His work is vital in setting baselines for fixing our current climate -- and in tracking the rise of deadly ocean acidification.
gregladen | August 3, 2010In the 1960s, the whole idea of a "greenhouse effect" was well understood, and assumed to be an important potential factor in climate change. So was glaciation, and the short and medium term future of the Earth's climate was less clear than compared to now. But the basics were there ... C02 was being released into the atmosphere, this could cause a greenhouse effect, and that would warm the earth. Certainly by the early 1980s, it was possible to make some thumb-suck estimates of how much the earth would warm given various assumptions about CO2, and it was not that difficult to see that a lot…
gregladen | August 2, 2010
See the missing bit? That is a 1.5 kilometer retreat of the so-called "calving front" of the glacier.
In truth, this particular sort of even is not that unusual, but what is interesting is that new satellite monitoring capabilities allow researchers to notice these events more or less when they happen, as opposed to during less frequent inspections of satellite imagery.
And, there are some climate-change related features of this event.
"While there have been ice breakouts of this magnitude from Jakonbshavn and other glaciers in the past, this event is unusual because it occurs on the…
gregladen | August 1, 2010Steve Andrew dared to tickle the dragon's tail and now he is paying for it. The dragon in this case, is Climate Denialists in the Right Wing Media.
Andrew posted something about the recent, very alarming news that global warming seems to be cutting back significantly on the supply of oceanic plankton. The worst case scenario of this sort of process is, actually, mass extinction and everybody dies. There are less severe scenarios as well, but none of them are very much fun.
So yes, even as the climate chickens come home to roost, the denailists can't keep their bought and paid for (by the…
gregladen | August 1, 2010Anthropogenic global warming has been suspected for decades, and a simple one paragraph long characterization of the problem 40 years ago was substantially identical to any accurate characterization we might make today. One has to wonder why after 40 years of time we still see headlines telling us that it might, after all, turn out to be true that anthropogenic global warming is real. Indeed, it is a bit disconcerting when the inestimable climate blog RealClimate notes that this is the 35th "Anniversary of Global Warming" as a term in the peer reviewed scientific literature (though I…