Global Warming
gregladen | March 26, 2015Antarctica is pretty much covered with glaciers. Glaciers are dynamic entities that, unless they are in full melt, tend to grow near their thickest parts (that's why those are the thickest parts) and mush outwards towards the edges, where the liminal areas either melt (usually seasonally) in situ or drop off into the sea.
Antarctic's glaciers are surrounded by a number of floating ice shelves. The ice shelves are really the distal reaches of the moving glaciers floating over the ocean. This is one of the places, probably the place at present, where melting accelerated by human caused…
gregladen | March 24, 2015There is a letter signed by top scientists demanding that science museums cut all their ties to Big Fossil, and where appropriate, kick the Koch Brothers off their boards.
The letter says, in part,
As members of the scientific community we devote our lives to understanding the world, and sharing this understanding with the public. We are deeply concerned by the links between museums of science and natural history with those who profit from fossil fuels or fund lobby groups that misrepresent climate science.
Museums are trusted sources of scientific information, some of our most important…
gregladen | March 23, 2015A paper just out now in PNAS by Noah Diffenbaugh, Daniel Swain, and Danielle Touma shows that "Anthropogenic warming has increased drought risk in California." From the abstract:
... We find that although there has not been a substantial change in the probability of either negative or moderately negative precipitation anomalies in recent decades, the occurrence of drought years has been greater in the past two decades than in the preceding century. In addition, the probability that precipitation deficits co-occur with warm conditions and the probability that precipitation deficits produce…
gregladen | March 23, 2015Climate scientists have noticed a disturbing pattern in the North Atlantic. This is the relative cooling of surface waters in the area fed by the Gulf Stream. This pattern has emerged over recent decades, and may portend very rapid and potentially disruptive climate change in the upcoming decades. The cooling is not subtle at all, and looks like this:
Map based on NASA GISS data of warming 1901-2013
So what does this mean? A paper out just today describes, explains, and discusses this odd anomaly and its potential consequences. First, a bit of context.
The Earth’s climate follows certain…
gregladen | March 19, 2015And by "Shut. Up." I mean shut up about whether or not global warming is real.
The National Climatic Data Center of NOAA has just released the number representing the Earth's surface temperature for February and it is a shocking 0.82 degrees C above the 20th century average. This is the second warmest Feb on record, and I'm pretty sure it is the third warmest month on record, in that data base.
Roughly speaking, the coldest we have experienced, the Last Glacial Maximum, was about 6 degrees colder than at present. It is generally thought that we need to keep the global surface temperature…
gregladen | March 14, 2015The NASA GISS data for surface temperatures of the planet Earth are in for February, and February was warm. The anomaly value was 79, which means 0.79 degrees C above a the baseline NASA uses (1951-1980). So, while it looks like the planet has warmed by a about 8 tenths of a degree, since warming started well before 1880, it is really more like a whole degree or more. Depending on what you know and don't know about how climate works, that may seem like a lot or a little. Trust me, it is a lot.
Most interestingly, the last 12 months were the warmest 12 months in the NSAS GISS database (you'…
gregladen | March 12, 2015Pam is a tropical cyclone of category 5 strength, but is churning over waters that have high temperatures at depth, a phenomenon we seem to be seeing more often lately, as a result of anthropogenic global warming. That is why I call it "AGW Class." Strong Category 5, deep heat enhanced. It is said that this is one of only 10 Category 5 storms recorded in the basin since good data are available. The Weather Underground has the story.
In addition, there are three other tropical cyclones extant in the Pacific.
Nathan is just on the Tropical Storm-Hurricane boundary and is heading for Cape…
gregladen | March 12, 2015Human caused greenhouse gas pollution has warmed the planet. Global warming means more extreme weather. Many meteorologist who watch the weather every day see this. More and more research shows that greenhouse gas pollution changes the weather in a way that causes even more change in the weather. Changing weather systems means more lightning, increased high precipitation events in certain regions like the US Northeast, including more frequent large snow storms.
Global warming has had uneven effects. The Arctic has warmed relatively more than most of the rest of the planet. The major movements…
gregladen | March 12, 2015Human caused greenhouse gas pollution is heating the Earth and causing the planet’s polar ice caps and other glacial ice to melt. This, along with simply heating the ocean, has caused measurable sea level rise. Even more worrisome is this: the current elevated level of CO2 in the atmosphere was associated in the past with sea levels several meters higher than they are today. Even if we slow down Carbon pollution very quickly, we can expect sea levels to be at least 8 meters higher, eventually. How soon? Nobody knows, nobody can give you a time frame on this because the rate of melting of the…
gregladen | March 11, 2015Dana Nuccitelli is a key communicator in the climate change conversation. He is co-writer with John Abraham at the Climate Consensus - the 97% blog at the Guardian, and has contributed hundreds of entries to John Cook’s famous site SkepticalScience.com. He has measurably helped people to understand climate change science and the nuances of the false debate based over climate manufactured by science deniers.
And, he’s written a book!
Graphic from Cook, Nuccitelli, Et Al 2013 paper quantifying the consensus on climate change. This figure also appears in "Climatology and Pseudoscience"…
gregladen | March 4, 2015Raúl Grijalva Investigates
Raúl Grijalva is the US representative from Arizona’s 3rd congressional district, a Democrat, and a supporter of environmental initiatives. As the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee, he recently sent letters to seven universities requesting documents related to the background of climate change research, as a response to recent revelations in the New York Times of seemingly inappropriate failure to disclose industry funding sources by Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Willie Soon. These letters requested the following:
The…
gregladen | March 3, 2015And by "me" I mean all the children of future generations.
Willie Soon is a soft-money scientist at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been producing highly questionable 'science' casting, for several years, faux light on the reality of the human caused process of global warming. It appears that most or all of Soon's funding came directly or indirectly from the fossil fuel industry or supporters of that industry. (See also John Mashy's comment below about tax breaks.) Recently the dung has struck the rotating blades and the nexus of denialist 'science,' fossil fuel funding…
gregladen | March 2, 2015If you have not been living in a cave, and had you been, I’d respect that, you know about Willie Soon Gate. Willie soon is a researcher on soft money at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Soon is well known for producing research of questionable quality that anemically attempts to buck the scientific consensus that human caused greenhouse gas pollution is rapidly raising the Earth’s temperature. Soon’s links to the fossil fuel industry have been known for some time, but recently, he has gotten into even more hot water over having published papers without properly disclosing that…
gregladen | March 2, 2015OK, I admit the title of this post is possibly a bit extreme but I could not resist the symmetry. Here, I refer to both ends of civilization, the start and the finish.
I'd like to talk about a recent review published in Science, titled "Systems integration for global sustainability" written by my colleague Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute together with Jiangou Liu, Harold Mooney, Vanessa Hull, Steven Davis, Joane Gaskell, Thomas Hertel, Jane Lubchenco, Karent Seto, Claire Kremen and Shuxin Li. But I want to put this paper in a broader perspective, dipping into my training as an…
gregladen | March 1, 2015New Research on the Effects of CO2 Pollution
A paper just published in Nature reports on the direct measurement of the effects of human greenhouse gas pollution on the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere. This is empirical verification of anthropogenic global warming.
Since the Industrial Revolution, when humans started polluting the Earth’s atmosphere with copious amounts of long lived greenhouse gases released from entombment as fossil fuels, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has skyrocketed from close to 250 parts per million (ppm) to about 400ppm. In fact, February was the first month…
gregladen | February 26, 2015A paper just published in Science Magazine helps explain variation we see in the long term Carbon-pollution caused upward trend Earth's surface temperatures. The research also, and rather ominously, suggests that a recent slowdown in that trend is likely to reverse direction in the near future, causing the Earth's surface temperature to rise dramatically.
The graph shown above represents the ongoing warming of the Earth's surface owing to the increased atmospheric concentration of human generated greenhouse gas pollution, mainly CO2. But, have a look at the following graph of changes in…
gregladen | February 23, 2015A newly published study has identified changes in precipitation patterns in the US Northeast, which are likely caused by human pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, which has resulted in global warming. According to the study, there has been an increase in extreme precipitation events, and an increase in the clumping across time of precipitation, with longer or more intense rainy periods, and longer dry periods.
Generally, climate and weather watchers have noticed that arid regions are drier, wetter regions are wetter, and many feel this is a consequence of global warming.…
gregladen | February 23, 2015The Willie Soon Story broke on Saturday night, having cloned off the front page of the Sunday New York Times into a few secondary sources. But we all saw it coming. Since then there has been quite a bit more written and there will be quite a bit more.
The main thing I want to add to the discussion is this. It is clear that Willie Soon was taking piles of Big Fossil money for his climate research. It is clear that his research was widely discredited in the mainstream scientific community. It should have been easy to check to see if he was using the money properly (mainly, with respect to…
gregladen | February 21, 2015A few days ago I suggested that Willie Soon's career may be taking a nose dive soon. I was right. Tomorrow's New York Times has a story that has as many leaks as an old canoe, so we can see it now in various outlets. The story is out and linked to below.
Before going into detail I just want to note that Justin Gillis is doing a great job at the New York Times.
Anyway, you can read the following items, the most recent listed here:
Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for a Doubtful Climate Scientist
Willie Soon Gate
Willie Soon, will he soon be fired?
It really looks like Willie Soon has been paid…
gregladen | February 20, 2015From here:
Since last November, Dr. John Holdren -- the President's science advisor -- has been encouraging the public to ask him anything about climate change on social media using the hashtag #AskDrH. In his first set of answers, he covered a lot of ground -- the connection between climate change and extreme weather, temperature trends, how we know that climate change is human-cased, and more.
Today, Dr. H is answering more of your questions -- this time from students and classrooms across the country.
As the community leaders, city planners, innovators, and entrepreneurs of tomorrow,…