global warming
gregladen | May 17, 2016I've got a new post up at 10,000 Birds on a study looking at changing populations of several hundred common species of birds in Europe and North America (mainly the US).
The two subcontinents exhibit dramatically different patterns, as shown in the enigmatic graph above.
Go to the post to unravel this intriguing mystery!
gregladen | May 12, 2016Subtitle: Politicians School Scientists In How To Do It
Alternative Title: Where were Bernie and Hillary????
You need to know right away that the Lede to this story is buried way the hell down the page.
That’s OK, though, because others are covering this, and the point of my missive is to put the current situation into a somewhat larger context. Ultimately, the point I want to make is this: Even when a problem is mired in deeply entrenched corporate interests, small groups of tenacious heroes can make the world measurably better, and there is such a thing happening right now in the…
gregladen | May 10, 2016This is a segment of The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, in which climate scientist Professor Michael Mann provides important perspective on the link between climate change and other disasters such as tornadoes. (See also: The Meaning of the Fort McMurray Fire).
Michael Mann is the author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, and Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding Climate Change (a visually rich summary of the most recent IPCC report) as well as the forthcoming book combining climate science and political cartooning, The Madhouse Effect: How…
gregladen | May 6, 2016The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy, by climate scientist Michael Mann and cartoonist Tom Toles is now available for pre-order. I've not gotten my review copy of it yet, but it looks fantastic.
From the publisher:
The award winning climate scientist Michael E. Mann and the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Tom Toles have fought at the frontlines of climate denialism for most of their careers. They have witnessed the manipulation of the media by business and political interests and the…
gregladen | April 29, 2016
This is a guest posts by Claire Cohen Cortright.
Claire Cohen Cortright is a mother, climate activist, and biology teacher living in upstate New York. She
is an active member of Citizens Climate Lobby and moderator at Global Warming Fact of the Day.
______________________________________________
It is time, now, for climate activists to get vocal.
As it becomes more clear that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, there is increasing talk about the importance of unifying the party. Negotiations are on the horizon … for Vice President and for the Party’s…
milhayser | April 28, 2016Research makes it increasingly clear that along with drilling for oil and mining coal, extracting natural gas from deep underground causes serious damage to the environment and to public health. On The Pump Handle, Kim Krisberg examines the contamination that may result from dumping fracking wastewater into disposal wells, writing "about 1,000 different chemicals are used in the fracking industry, with more than 100 being known or suspected endocrine disruptors." Researchers collected water samples downstream from wells in West Virginia, and after "exposing both female and male mammalian sex…
gregladen | April 20, 2016Corals are ocean-dwelling invertebrates in the same phylum as jellyfish. Corals are tiny and create an exoskeleton that is fixed to something hard, like the remains of previously existing corals. So these organisms build up a geological stratum, a reef, beneath the surface of the sea, often close enough that parts of the reef are exposed at the lowest water level. The coral reef system is the substrate for one of the Earth's major ecological zones.
Corals are symbiotic with a single celled dinoflagellate, a kind of algae that combines available nutrients such as ammonia and the…
milhayser | April 14, 2016On Pharyngula, PZ Myers doesn't just want cut your grass—he wants to tear it out by the roots and leave it to rot in the sun. He quotes J. Crumpler on The Roaming Ecologist, who calls lawns "sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments [...] that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage." To make matters worse, lawnmower use adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, while beautiful bermuda grass requires a lot of H2O in a world that is increasingly insecure about water. During the…
gregladen | April 6, 2016There is a new study out in Nature that is liable to be misinterpreted, or that may be flawed in a way that lends itself to misuse, in the context of climate science driven policy.
The study is "Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate variability over the past twelve centuries" by Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Paul J. Krusic, Hanna S. Sundqvist, Eduardo Zorita, Gudrun Brattström & David Frank
I'll make just a few comments here, but mainly, I want to point you to comments by climate scientist Michael Mann (author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines and…
gregladen | March 21, 2016Remember that movie, The Day After Tomorrow? Check out this (not too new but still very current) video by Greenman3610, with Stefan Rahmstorf">Stefan Rahmstorf, Jason Box, and Michael Mann, looking at the real life version of that phenomenon.
gregladen | March 18, 2016Though not enough. And for the wrong reasons. But this is still good news.
Somewhere around 1990, but you could justify an earlier date if you like, science knew enough about global warming, the increase in the planet's surface temperatures caused by human release of greenhouse gas pollution and other human effects, to have initiated meaningful action to shift our energy supply away from fossil fuels. We didn't know exactly what would happen, but we knew stuff would happen. How long has it taken for this science to turn into effective policy to address global warming? We don't know, because…
gregladen | March 7, 2016Climate Change: A Wicked Problem: Complexity and Uncertainty at the Intersection of Science, Economics, Politics, and Human Behavior, by Frank Incropera, is a textbook suitable for use in advanced high school or college classes, but also an excellent primer on the topic for anyone interested in it. Incropera spares little details in describing how the Earth's climate system works, and how human generated greenhouse gases, and other effects, change the energy balance of the planet to produce the phenomenon we call "global warming," and other effects.
Incropera addresses the panoply of causes…
gregladen | February 24, 2016The Arctic Sea freezes over. The Arctic Sea melts. This happens every year. The average date for the maximum extent of Arctic Sea ice, based on a period of 1981-2010, is March 12. The minimum extent is reached, on average, about September 15h.
Every year for the last several years, the minimum ice has been much lower than average in extent, and many years in a row have seen record minima. This is considered to be the result of global surface warming caused by human release of greenhouse gas pollution.
It is said that we can't use the maximum ice cover to predict the minimum ice cover…
gregladen | February 24, 2016A new paper (commentary) on the so-called "pause in global warming" puts it all together.
First let's establish this as a starting point. When climate science contrarians refer to a "pause" or "hiatus" in global warming, they usually mean that the process of warming of the Earth's surface caused by the human release of greenhouse gas is not a thing. They are usually implying, or overtly claiming, that the link between CO2 and other greenhouse gas pollutants and surface warming was never there to begin with, and previous warming, warming before "the pause," was natural variation. Many even…
gregladen | February 23, 2016Human caused greenhouse gas pollution has locked us into a situation where the global sea level will rise, at an unknown rate, high enough to inundate most major coastal cities and vast areas of agricultural land in low lying countries, and wipe out thousands of islands. Entire countries (small, low lying ones, and pacific ocean nations) will either disappear entirely or be made very small. Even as we head towards a likely limit in global food production in relation to increasing demand, large productive agricultural areas will be destroyed. As far as I can tell, there is nothing to stop this…
gregladen | February 19, 2016Tropical cyclone Winston is now a Category 4 storm and is probably going to make a direct hit on Fiji, tomorrow, Saturday. It will likely be a record storm for Fiji.
The storm is fueled by high sea surface temperatures, which extend to a significant depth, which probably caused the storm to intensify rapidly and to such a high state.
Jeff Masters and Bob Henson have written up the important information on this storm, here.
Fiji has been hit with a number of bad tropical storms, mainly concentrated in recent decades.
UPDATE (Friday PM Central)
Jeff Masters and Bob Henson are now…
gregladen | February 16, 2016Recently NASA GISS released the measurement of the Earth's surface for January 2016. I added this latest measurement to the long term database (from 1880) and calculated the running 12 month average of surface temperatures. This is the resulting graph:
These are anomaly values, as indicated. January was the warmest month recorded in terms of anomaly, and it follows December 2015 as the previous warmest month. The top warmest anomalies in the entire NASA GISS database (going back to 1880) are listed below.Notice that all of these years are recent, and notice that the warmest and most recent…
gregladen | February 11, 2016I don't normally write about faith (I'm an atheist, I'd be bad at it), but I do often write about climate change. But my friend and colleague Paul Douglas happens to be an Evangelical Christian, Republican, and Rock Star Meteorologist. You've seen his work if you've seen the movies Jurassic Park or Twister. If you are from the Twin Cities area, you are probably still mourning his departure from WCCO TV, where he was famous for giving highly accurate weather forecasts, and acknowledging the realty of global warming.
Paul calls himself an albino unicorn, because he is a Republican and an…
gregladen | January 29, 2016I'm not sure what an "album" is, but I think it is like a CD.
Anyway, if you don't know who Baba Brinkman is, check this out. (he previously produced "The Rap Guide to Evolution.")
Then, head on over to the Indiegogo site to see his project. This is likely to be a go, with your help. He's a fourth of the way there already, and he has a lot of fans and supporters. I have no doubt that this so-called "album" will be great.
Also by Baba Brinkman:
The Rap Guide to Religion
The Rap Guide to Evolution
The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised [Explicit]
The Rap Canterbury Tales
The Rap Guide to…