global warming
illconsidered | September 10, 2013This 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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Chronicling a new Age of Consequences
September 8, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, Guyana, G20, PIF, A Plan, Hiatus, Maldives, Potash
Bottom Line, A Change?, Big Banks, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Related Papers
Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Land Grabs, IP Issues, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production
Hurricanes, Weather Machine, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather
Carbon Cycle,…
gregladen | September 7, 2013Joe Kernen is a business finance talking head who co-hosts CNBC's Squawk Box. I don't know if he actually knows much about Wall Street, but I can prove he doesn't know squawk about Climate Science. Have a look (warning: Might make you dizzy):
Something about a low participation rate because people are getting older. But that's kind of unclear. Obviously, what is needed is a nice clear analogy from .... climate science!
So, the warmest period ever was in the 1930s when there were much lower CO2 levels. I did not know that.
Then the glaciers retreat and there are big forests. Arm…
gregladen | September 1, 2013Andrew Revkin thinks so:
It is hard to interpret this as meaning anything other than the crisis of Arctic Sea ice melting too much and too fast is over. This is an important thing, because the rapid and widespread melting of sea ice in the Arctic seems to be causing a thing called Arctic Amplification, which means in normal human terms that the Arctic is warmer (amplified) than normal. This causes a decrease in the differential between equatorial heat and polar heat in the Northern Hemisphere which seems to change the way the Jet Streams operate which in turn causes Weather Whiplash, where…
esiegel | August 30, 2013"Being told about the effects of climate change is an appeal to our reason and to our desire to bring about change. But to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change, even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas, is a glaring injustice, which also triggers anger and outrage over those who seek to ignore it." -Sigmar Gabriel
With all of the scientific issues subject to politicization in this world, there's arguably none that raises such strong emotions as the issue of global warming and climate change. This is the final installment of a three-part series on how one could…
esiegel | August 29, 2013"We make the world we live in and shape our own environment." -Orison Swett Marden
If you had never heard of global warming before, how would you figure out whether it's real or not? And if it is real, how would you figure out what humanity's role in it is? To answer this, I've decided to do a three-part series on how you'd go about figuring this out, putting aside all politics, economics, opinion and any other non-scientific factors. If you missed part 1, you can check it out here; today we're going to build on that and talk about what determines the temperature of a planet with an…
illconsidered | August 28, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 54
Table of Contents
Chapter 56
Chapter 55
Spacemen, September 11, 2057
From my vantage point in UNGETF, I was able to monitor the activities of the various groups. All year, I heard about rocket launches, mostly by the Swiss-German consortium Brahmaputra, but the odd one was by the L1 construction group Carillon. The Group 6 cloudmakers had their first batch of ships sailing for Antarctica. More of the old tankers were being refurbished weekly. The target number of vessels for north and south had been raised to 600. Sometimes when things don…
esiegel | August 28, 2013"There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it." -David Attenborough
It's been a long time since I've written anything on this blog about global warming, climate change, or most Earth-based environmental topics in general. After all, I'm a physicist -- an astrophysicist in particular -- and although I'm well-versed in the physics of the Earth and in science in general, it's not my particular area of expertise.
Image credit: NASA, Johnson Space Center, Apollo 17 crew.
Recently, I've had a number of requests to take a…
gregladen | August 28, 2013A few items of interest from the intertubes:
Mann: Reality and threats of climate change are clear
This is a guest column in the Times Dispatch by climate scientist Michael Mann discussing ongoing legal issues.
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli certainly has some odd characters coming to his defense in this paper for his attempts to go after climate scientists like myself.
First came Charlie Battig, who sought to defend Cuccinelli’s 2009 attempt to subpoena my personal U.Va. emails ...
Most recently the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley of Edinburgh, Scotland, used offensive personal attacks and…
gregladen | August 28, 2013Climate science denialist Christopher Monckton wrote a post at WUWT blog in which he describes the non-existent stall in global warming. At the end of the post he writes:
Meanwhile, enjoy what warmth you can get. A math geek with a track-record of getting stuff right tells me we are in for 0.5 Cº of global cooling. It could happen in two years, but is very likely by 2020. His prediction is based on the behavior of the most obvious culprit in temperature change here on Earth – the Sun.
My friend and Colleague, John Abraham of St. Thomas University (he blogs here) wrote the following letter:…
illconsidered | August 26, 2013This 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 is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not WisdomAugust 25, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, Overshoot, AR5, Potash Bottom Line, Thermodynamics, CookFukushima: Note, News, Policies, Related Papers Melting Arctic, Harp Seals, Methane, Geopolitics, AntarcticaFood: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Weather Machine, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New Weather…
illconsidered | August 22, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 53
Table of Contents
Chapter 55
Chapter 54
Greenhouse, May 31, 2057
Things were not looking good. At UNGETF, we were all too aware of of the unfolding disasters. The storms and wildfires, the floods and droughts were bad enough, but food production was down again. The methane levels kept rising. Nothing we were doing seemed to have any effect.
I left the meeting with a heavy heart. As I headed for home, it was already hot. This was May. When spring starts in February, the season seems to go on forever. Calling April the cruellest month seemed…
illconsidered | August 19, 2013This 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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Another Week of Climate Instability News
Information Overloadis Pattern Recognition
August 18, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, Texas Water, Yasuni, Soot & Methane
Bottom Line, GFIs, Thermodynamics, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Policies, Related Papers
Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Food & Revolution, GMOs, Production
Hurricanes, Monsoon, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New…
gregladen | August 18, 2013The last several decades of climate change, and climate change research, have indicated and repeatedly confirmed a rather depressing reality. When something changes in the earth's climate system, it is possible that a negative feedback will result, in which climate change is attenuated. I.e., more CO2 could cause more plant growth, the plants "eat" the CO2, so a negative feedback reduces atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas bringing everything back to normal. Or, when something changes in the earth's climate system, we could get a positive feedback, where change in one direction (…
illconsidered | August 16, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 52
Table of Contents
Chapter 54
Chapter 53
Carillon, March 8, 2057
When I got home that afternoon I discovered that one of my new students had surreptitiously video logged me. Edie met me at the door with, "I watched your whole lecture today."
"What?"
"It's true. You're all over the forums. There have been thousands of downloads."
I shook my head a little dismayed.
"People want to know what's really going on and nobody believes the official reports."
Anna heard my voice and came running into the kitchen. I was hot and tired, so I dropped down…
gregladen | August 15, 2013Every northern summer Arctic Sea ice melts away and reforms for winter, but how much melts away seems to be increasing on average, at a rate that surprises climate scientists.
But there are some who see variation from year to year, and there is variation, in a rather unrealistic way. Here is a graph comparing how climate science denialists view arctic sea ice over time, compare to how "climate realists" (i.e., smart people who can read graphs and such) see it:
Go HERE to see the source and learn more about what is behind this graph.
milhayser | August 14, 2013Life has been growing on Earth for about 4 billion years, and during that time there have been a handful of mass extinctions that have wiped out a large percentage of complex lifeforms. Asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, climate change, anoxia, and poison have dispatched untold numbers of once-successful species to total oblivion or a few lucky fossils. Species also die off regularly for much less spectacular reasons, and altogether about 98% of documented species no longer exist.
Cry me a river, you say, without all that death there would have been no gap for vertebrates, for mammals, for…
illconsidered | August 12, 2013This 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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Another Week of Climate Instability News
Sipping from the Internet Firehose...
August 11, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, AGU, NOAA, Potash, Bottom Line, Coal Financing, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Policies
Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Harp Seals, Methane, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production
Hurricanes, Monsoon, Weather Machine, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New…
illconsidered | August 9, 2013(the featured image above is of the once aptly named Rio Grande, now referred to by locals as the "Rio Sand")
The LA Times has a very chilling piece on New Mexico's not so chilling climate change. Here are a few quotes to pique your interest:
"All of New Mexico is officially in a drought, and three-quarters of it is categorized as severe or exceptional."
"The last three years have been the driest and warmest since record-keeping began here in 1895."
"With water supplies at the breaking point and no relief in sight, a domino-effect water war has broken out, which might be a harbinger of the…
illconsidered | August 6, 2013This 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
August 4, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, Violence, Hallowich, Rebuilding, Potash, Bottom Line, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Policies
Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, Production, N-Fix
Hurricanes, Extremes, New Weather GHGs, Temperatures, Feedbacks, Aerosols
Paleoclimate, Oceans, Biosphere, Extinctions, Bees & CCD, Volcanoes,…