illconsidered | October 6, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundupskip to bottom October 5, 2008 Top Stories:Ecuador, Google, Energy Plan, Ocean Acidification, Bailout, Hadley, Sunspots, Melting Arctic Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperature Record, Paleoclimate, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Brazil & Amazon, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science…
illconsidered | October 5, 2008[UPDATE: turns out this one was actually too funny to be real...oh well, I can't tell reality from satire since McCain put Palin on his ticket, his soulmate and all that...apologies and how embarassing and all that.]
If too funny to be real, or too real to be funny is what you find yourself wondering about this whole Palin for VP thing, then you have got to read this. It is Todd Palin live blogging the debate (or as much as he could watch before being so bored he starts channel surfing!) and it includes gems like this:
9:30 - OK, got a little lost there. I think that energy independence is…
illconsidered | October 1, 2008Here is a very well done little animation about "tipping points" and climate change. It is by Leo Murray and it seems is a winner or candidate for some "Green" film festival I have never heard of.
Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.
Olive Heffernan gives it a positive review on the scientific content at Nature's Climate Feedback blog.
If you have 11 minutes I recommend it, or just forward a link to a friend.
illconsidered | September 29, 2008 Another Week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose...This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundupskip to bottom September 28, 2008 Top Stories:Methane, GCP CO2 Report, WCI, RGGI, Carbon Trust Report, CGI Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Finance & Climate, Amphibian Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Tutorials, Solar Cycle Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, Sea Levels Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods &…
illconsidered | September 29, 2008The following article is a guest post by H. E. Taylor, who you might recognize as the one who graciously provides us with the weekly GW news roundups. Enjoy!
The New AgeAn Argument for Geo-engineeringIf you study civilizations of the past which have collapsed [1, 2, 3, 4], a curious fact emerges. Look at Rome, Sumeria, the old kingdom of Egypt, the lowland classic Maya, the Olmec, the Huari Empire of the central Andes, the Chacoan and Hohokam of southwestern America, the Minoans, the Harrapans of the Indus valley, Easter Island. These cultures all had different religions, different economic…
illconsidered | September 28, 2008So I was just listening (a little late, I know) to Friday's DemocracyNow, and they had a segment on the impending 700 billion dollar obscenity congress is about to roll over on.
One of the guests said he anticipates another 1 million foreclosures still to come over the next two years.
Offered as perspective, not a policy recommendation:
700 billion dollars is enough to give all 1 million defaulting mortage holders $700,000 dollars each.
illconsidered | September 24, 2008Well, the good news is a recent finding of 740,000 year old permafrost in the Canadian arctic. What this suggests is that the permafrost may be more resilient than previously thought. If this ice is 740Kyr old, then it did not melt during the last three inter-glacial cycles. The peak warmth of at least the Eemian, 120Kyr ago, was a couple of degrees warmer than now, and some serious effort might keep temperatures from rising above that high marker.
The reason this is good news is because of the large (huge) quantities of methane stored in clathrates in this permafrost. If released, this…
illconsidered | September 22, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...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(skip to bottom) September 21, 2008 Melting Arctic, Arctic Geopolitics, Permafrost, CO2 Uptake, Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis, Abrupt Climate Change, Tutorials Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Temperatures, Ozone, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Transportation, Sequestration, Geoengineering Journals, Misc. Science Kyoto-2…
illconsidered | September 20, 2008Colbert has the CEO of GM, Bob Lutz, on his show and it is a pretty good one. The discussion is about GM's new hybrid car, the Volt. The two most memorable moments are 1. Lutz cynically revealing he doen't believe the whole CO2 global warming thing and that 32,000 scientists think it is sunspots(!) and 2. Colbert asking if he can recharge his Volt using the cigarette lighter in his Hummer! That was a real LOL moment : )
Watch it here:
(saw this on Treehugger)
illconsidered | September 19, 2008 This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.Objection:
Sea ice at the north pole recovered a whopping 9.4% from 2007 to 2008 despite the doom and gloom predictions of the alarmists. Yet another wheel falls off the global warming bandwagon.
Answer:
It is true that the minimum summer ice extent in the arctic ocean in 2008 was 9.4% higher than the minimun in 2007. But calling this a recovery is simply not justifiable, not even by a long shot. Firstly, at 4.52 million square kilometers, this…
illconsidered | September 18, 2008Anthony Watt's blog seems to be a rather high profile climate sceptic site that usually seems to at least try to have substantive content, but I can't see watt's so interesting about this article from The Province, a BC, Canadian newspaper.
The article starts off with this remarkable statement:
As evidence to the contrary started rolling in and one prominent scientist after another abandoned ship, the global warming brigade lost much of its sizzle in the past year.
I think I can guess what he thinks is "evidence to the contrary", probably the supposed huge temeprature drop this year, the […
illconsidered | September 17, 2008This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.Objection:
The American Physical Society with tens of thousands of member scientists no longer believes that the science of global warming is conclusive. So what about that so called consenus?
Answer:
The APS has not reversed its position on climate change:
Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide…
illconsidered | September 16, 2008Despite the familiarity of this headline, it actually only became news today (and is still a little uncertain).
The National Snow and Ice Data Centre is today anouncing the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has reached its minimum extent for this year.
Some notable facts from the article:
this is the second-lowest minimum extent since at least 1979, when satellite observations became available
the area is now 2.24 million km^2 below the 1979-2000 average summer minimum
this year did not set a new record, (congratulations Stoat!) stopping at 9.4% more than the record-setting 2007 minimum
this…
illconsidered | September 16, 2008I wasn't going to talk about McCain's VP pick, Sarah Palin again, but I felt compelled to share this one unique video and make a couple of last observations....
The video is a very rear glimpse of a republican operative speaking honestly about Palin (well about anything I suppose), a revealing look inside their thinking:
Not that it was not obvious, but here is a little hard evidence that Palin's pick has nothing to do with competence or experience. Forget what this says about her, what does it say about McCain? This is his first serious decision as would-be president. I guess he choses…
illconsidered | September 15, 2008I don't know if you all do too, but I find the whole LHC thing pretty interesting.
So here's a short video (6ish minute) that gives a very simple and visual overview of how the whole thing operates:
Not at the physics grad student level or anything, but interesting for the rest of us!
Interesting factoid: at their speed of 99.9999991% of the speed of light, the accelerated protons will have a mass 7000 times that of their mass at rest.
illconsidered | September 15, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...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(skip to bottom) September 14, 2008 Top Stories:Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Permafrost, Morality, Monsoons, Tamino & Grumbine, Late Comments, Open Access Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Temperatures, Feedbacks, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration,…
illconsidered | September 11, 2008This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.Objection:
The so called "Greenhouse Effect" which is the underpinning of the entire theory of anthropogenic global warming claims that greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere absorb outgoing long wave radiation from the surface and reradiate it back, thereby warming the climate. But the upper atmosphere is colder than the lower atmosphere and the surface and the second law of thermodynamics clearly requires that heat flow from warmer areas of a system…
illconsidered | September 10, 2008Just wanted to be one of the voices acknowledging day one of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. I know very little about it, but being a blogger I don't let that get in the way of talking about it!
You can read about it on Wikipedia, The Source of All That is Knowable.
Two interesting factoids I learned from a Science Friday podcast:
1. it shoots 100's of billions of protons at a time, thousands of times per second and accelerates them to 99.999999% o the speed of light! Sounds pretty fast.
2. it will not create something that swallows the earth or destroys the whole universe because the kind of…
illconsidered | September 10, 2008For those of you who read this blog and don't read Pharyngula, (there must be a few!), I found this video to be too compelling to stop wathcing, and very powerful and moving in its message.
There really is a lot at stake in the coming election, but I have less and less hope as each week goes by.