global warming
gregladen | April 7, 2014An Open Letter on the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline from Scientists and Economists
April 7 , 2014
President Barack Obama
The White House 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Secretary John Kerry
U. S . Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
Dear President Obama and Secretary Kerry,
As scientists and economists, we are concerned about climate change and its impacts. We urge you to reject the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline as a project that will contribute to climate change at a time when we should be doing all we can to put clean energy alternatives in…
illconsidered | April 4, 2014The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 85
Table of Contents
Chapter 87
Chapter 86
And Baby Makes Four, March 18, 2060
At the next UNGETF meeting, Rhamaposa reported that Group 12 was sponsoring an Arctic sunbug project. He didn't have a lot of details, just that Group 12 had contracted with Graves and Lorenz LLC to do the work.
"What you will hear in the media is a dispute with local Inuit over the location of the ground receiving station. Like all colonized peoples, they have a long history of fighting the powers that be."
I had sent Peter a report on my investigation of the…
gregladen | April 4, 2014April 27th, I'll be giving a talk hosted by Minnesota Atheists at the Maplewood Library, 3025 Southlawn Dr, Maplewood, Minnesota. Details are here.
Details:
You may attend any part of the meeting you wish, here's the schedule:
1:00-1:15 p.m. – Social Time
1:15-1:45 p.m. – Business Meeting
1:45-2:00 p.m. – Break
2:00-3:30 p.m. – Talk by Greg Laden
4:00-whenever – Dinner at Pizza Ranch (1845 County Road D East, Maplewood MN)
This will be a talk about climate change focusing on current and challenging research questions that everyone needs to know about, as well as the relationship between…
illconsidered | April 1, 2014This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom
March 30, 2014
Chuckles, COP20+, WG2, Earth Hour, WMO, Ponder
CSLDF, Change?, Energiewende, Bottom Line, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Policies
Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, GMOs, Production
Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Forecasts, Extreme Weather, New Weather
GHGs, Aerosols, Weather Machine, Climate…
gregladen | March 31, 2014STFU.
Seriously. For your own good.
Every time you make a move you seem to create your own pile of dog do and step in it. The latest own-goal for those who deny climate science was scored after an unreasonable and obnoxious attack on Professor Lawrence Torcello, of RIT. Details here and here.
Those mentioned above, and others such as the Drudge and Infowars, lied. They lied knowingly, blatantly, obnoxiously. They willfully misconstrued Lawrence Torcello's word and his research in order to make climate scientists look like Hitler. This is not a new tactic and it didn't work before.
And…
gregladen | March 28, 2014I'm going to update this graph every now and then.
There are 12 lines on this graph.
The colorful squiggles up along the top are the first ten years of Arctic Sea ice extent for the period for which we have really good data. So this is 1979 - 1988. There is reason to believe that this is the "normal" sea ice extent track over the year from which we have seen significant deviation over recent decades.
The dark thick line is the average of all of the years from 1979 to 2010. Notice that the first ten years are all above the average except for a few little bits.
The partial line below all…
gregladen | March 27, 2014Michael Mann, Byron Steinman, and Sonya Miller have just put out a new paper on climate change which addresses a number of key concerns. The paper is called “On Forced Temperature Changes, Internal Variability and the AMO.” Here’s the abstract:
We estimate the low-frequency internal variability of Northern Hemisphere (NH) mean temperature using observed temperature variations, which include both forced and internal variability components, and several alternative model simulations of the (natural + anthropogenic) forced component alone. We then generate an ensemble of alternative historical…
illconsidered | March 26, 2014The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 84
Table of Contents
Chapter 86
Chapter 85
Tephra, February 3, 2060
I got a late night call from Rhamaposa that shocked me awake. "I just wanted to check how you were coming with that Cambridge Bay inquiry," he said.
With a sinking feeling, I realized that between my funk and the holidays, it had completely slipped my mind.
For a second, I considered a Matt-style gambit, but I opted to come clean. "I'm sorry, Peter. I have been a little overloaded and haven't got around to it yet."
He took this admission in stride and signed off saying, "Okay…
gregladen | March 26, 2014This is a followup on Are the climate science deniers criminals?, which explored recent work by Lawrence Torcello, a philosopher at Rochester Institute of Technology. (See: Is Organised Climate Science Denial Criminally Negligent?)
Professor Torcello's point was made in part by reference to the tragic events at L'Aquila, Italy, where a screw up mainly by non-scientist government official seems to have resulted in unnecessary deaths due to an earthquake. Torcello notes:
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus…
gregladen | March 25, 2014After 16 minutes, Michael Mann on climate change, climate sensitivity, etc.
Why does Joan of Arc Being look so worried? The fire hasn't even touched her!
Mann uses the analogy of a person jumping (or being thrown?) off a tall building, and as he passes the third floor notes that everything is fine. Another analogy that might be helpful is being burned at the stake. After they tie you to the stake and pile up the wood, you're fine. Then they light the wood on fire and you're still fine. For a while.
The climate sensitivity graph above is from here.
illconsidered | March 24, 2014This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Information Overload is Pattern RecognitionEquinox EditionMarch 23, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, WWD, WWK, WG2 Leak, Triage, Warnings, CSLDF, Energiewende, CookFukushima: Note, News Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, AntarcticaFood: Crisis, Fisheries, Svalbard, Land Grabs, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Forecasts, New Weather GHGs, Aerosols, Feedbacks, ENSO, Temperatures Paleoclimate, Attribution, Oceans…
illconsidered | March 19, 2014The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 83
Table of Contents
Chapter 85
Chapter 84
The Sorceror's Apprentice, January 27, 2060
A couple of days after the December UNGETF meeting, I got a call from Drew Matheson in Yellowknife. He was a field worker slash forester reporting to Group10. Behind him as we talked I could see great swathes of lichen, covering a stand of pine trees. I assumed it was EF1 --- it was blue-grey.
He wanted to know if I had investigated the interactions of EF1 and northern pine before I released it.
When I admitted that I hadn't, he looked more annoyed than…
illconsidered | March 18, 2014A very good video on the gulf that exists between the climate science experts and the general population in terms of awareness and alarm regarding anthropogenic climate change:
(from a comment on a P3 thread)
The essence of this impending calamity is, more than anything else, a story of betrayal: betrayal of a naively trusting population by its political leaders and even more by its news media. When the denial of this crisis is finally seen to be as implausible and ludicrous as it already is, it may be too late. It may be too late already to avoid truly terrible consequences, but we must…
gregladen | March 18, 2014Well before mid century we will probably pass a threshold beyond which we'll really regret having not curtailed the release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere in the form of Carbon Dioxide. The best case scenario for "business as usual" release of the greenhouse gas is that some of the carbon, or some of the heat (from sunlight) gets taken out of the main arena (the atmosphere and sea surface) and buried or reflected somewhere for a while, and this all happens on a slightly delayed time scale.
The reason we know this is a little thing called science. And, more exactly, physics. And…
gregladen | March 18, 2014A few days ago I made a prediction for this year's minimum Arctic Sea Ice extent. That's still valid. Or not. Either way, it's still my prediction.
But looking at the ice over the last few days, we see that for the first time in a while the extent of ice estimated by the NSICD has stopped hugging the -2SD line and is rising upwards like a chilly Phoenix rising out of slush ashes. In fact, one could even say that Arctic Sea Ice has recovered! Just look at the last eight days of data!
Think I'm cherry picking? It's possible, let's look at the larger picture, over a whole year's cycle:…
illconsidered | March 17, 2014This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Sipping from the Internet Firehose...
March 16, 2014
Chuckles, COP20+, GCF, Tactics, RS/NAS, Warnings, Ides of March, Energiewende
World Bank, Global Legal Framework, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Anniversary, Policies, Related Papers
Melting Arctic, Methane, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Svalbard, GMOs, Production
Hurricanes, Notable Weather, New Weather, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Aerosols
Climate Sensitivity,…
illconsidered | March 14, 2014The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 82
Table of Contents
Chapter 84
Chapter 83
The World Park, December 3, 2059
The next UNGETF meeting opened like an autopsy. Peter started with a catalogue of the destruction wrought at the L1 point. "The command centre has been destroyed, as have several dozen of the 1 km. sunshields. But there were more than 2,000 of them, so a sizeable number still exist. Some were damaged by flying debris; many were not."
"Some factions have expressed a desire to repair and rebuild the cluster; however, with the AU forbidding financial support, Group 5 has…
gregladen | March 13, 2014Peter Sinclair has tackled this difficult topic with an excellent video and informative blog post. The blog post is here, and I've pasted the video below.
This is a complicated issue. The water problem in California is obviously made worse by increased demands from population growth and expansion of agriculture. Under "normal" (natural) conditions, California and the American Southwest is fairly dry and can undergo extra dry periods. But climate change seems to be playing a role here as well. It appears that recent lack of rain in the region is the result of changes in atmospheric…
illconsidered | March 10, 2014Featured image is one of 19 illustrated haiku laying out the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers, posted with permission, see them all here.
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
March 9, 2014
Chuckles, COP20+, Flood Prediction, Warnings, RS/NAS, Energiewende
Bottom Line, Thermodynamics, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Policies, Related Papers
Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Prices, GMOs, Production…