Climate Change
gregladen | January 23, 2013NOAA says 2012 was the hottest year on record.
According to the National Climatic Data Center of NOAA, 2012 was the hottest year on record in the US lower 48:
According to NOAA scientists, the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. for 2012 was 55.3°F, which was 3.2°F above the 20th century average and 1.0°F above the previous record from 1998. The year consisted of the fourth warmest winter, a record warm spring, the second warmest summer, and a warmer-than-average autumn. Although the last four months of 2012 did not bring the same unusual warmth as the first 8 months of the year, the…
gregladen | January 21, 2013Some may deny the science of climate change, but we're not listening to them any more.
Hat tip to Peter Sinclair for this clip:
gregladen | January 18, 2013As I mentioned, I'm busy, so I'll just do this in pictures, kinda like a cartoon:
There was no "walk back" by Joe. He merely added some links.
The results of the poll so far:
Personally, I'm hoping for "Force him" ... that would be fun to watch.
Meanwhile, there is a lesson here. Science denialists like Anthony Watts do not want to be disagreed with. I think we may have already known that, though.
Related posts:
What's up with that?
Greg Laden, Liar.
gregladen | January 17, 2013I know, right?
Anthony Watts, of the science-denialist Whats Up with That blog, has got his shorts in a knot because of a post I wrote indicating that he is a boob. He is upset because in a screen shot of him talking about a totally absurd pseudo-scientific claim that should have been rejected out of hand, I failed to include enough of the post to show that he was skeptical about the claim.
Let me be very very clear: This is not a claim to be skeptical about. This is a Teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars claim. A person who has reported debunked claims about alien life again…
gregladen | January 15, 2013I was a graduate student in Harvard’s Anthropology Department, which meant I had no funding. I was in the final writing stage of my thesis, and the problem I had was that teaching interesting biological anthropology (which I could do full time if I wanted) was too distracting from the mundane yet mentally challenging task of writing a PhD thesis. So, I got a job as a secretary at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Since I was able to follow instructions and was also not intimidated by Big Scary Professors as most temps were, I quickly rose through the ranks and became Richard…
gregladen | January 14, 2013A Draft National Climate Assessment has been released by the “National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee.” You can download it here … warning: it is a PDF file way over 100 megabytes
The report affirms that climate is changing and that this change is primarily caused by human activities, mostly the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere by burning fuels. The report notes an increase in weather extremes and that these extremes are being recognized by the relevant climate science as linked to these human-induced changes.
Details about the committee, the report, and…
gregladen | January 12, 2013The UK Met Office, a climate agency, released some information about the immediate future, based on modeling. Briefly, it notes that natural cooling effect may temporarily ameliorate the increase in temperatures caused by global warming in some locals; it does not say that global warming is attenuated in any way whatsoever. It is more of a long term weather forecast than a climate change prediction.
The climate science denialist community, a community run by willfully wrong miscreants and with a following of mostly ignorant sycophants, and which only likes modeling when it seems to show…
gregladen | January 9, 2013Looking just at the contiguous 48 states of the US, NOAA has determined that 2012 was the warmest year on record. It was also ranked second in "extreme" weather events including fires, major storms, and drought. Tornado activity was less than average.
The report came out yesterday and states:
In 2012, the contiguous United States (CONUS) average annual temperature of 55.3°F was 3.3°F above the 20th century average, and was the warmest year in the 1895-2012 period of record for the nation. The 2012 annual temperature was 1.0°F warmer than the previous record warm year of 1998. Since 1895,…
gregladen | January 9, 2013Climate change science denialism has pretty much run its course. We've been experiencing a large number of climate change related events (see this list for a brief summary) lately. It may well be that the number per year of such alarming events will go down and up over time. It may be that we will forget that some of them are happening because we grow used to them. But they are happening at a larger rate than just a few years ago, the years are getting warmer and warmer, and the effects predicted by the science have been manifest as predicted, but for on thing: They are happening sooner,…
gregladen | January 8, 2013First, a word about the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's position on climate change, heat, and fires. It has been suggested (by a commenter here) that the BoM is claiming that the current heat wave is not related to climate change, but rather, a matter of natural variability and a late arriving monsoon. But that is not true. The BoM has a different take on the current situation. From Ben Cubby, an Australian journalist:
The heatwave that has scorched the nation since Christmas is a taste of things to come, with this week’s records set to tumble again and again in the coming years, climate…
gregladen | January 7, 2013Australia is experiencing a heat spell. The Climate Information Services of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has issued a special statement (I'll provide some details below). This is not unexpected, since over the last few years global warming due to the human release of large amounts of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere has been heating everything up. In fact, a paper that came out mid (southern) winter 2008 predicted that by the end of the century, extreme high temperatures in Australia would reach 50 degrees or more. I'll provide some data for that too. But first, since most of…
gregladen | January 7, 2013Summer is coming on strong south of the Equator, and in Australia this has meant unprecedented record high temperatures, and in the state of Tasmania, severe brush fires that have destroyed numerous homes, adding to the bad news from fires in the southeastern mainland. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said "And while you would not put any one event down to climate change ... we do know that over time as a result of climate change we are going to see more extreme weather events." That is not exactly true, of course. There are no climate related events that lack the fingerprint of global climate…
gregladen | January 6, 2013You know about Albedo. No not Libido, Albedo. Sunlight is to varying degrees reflected off the surface of the earth more or less back into space. That is Albedo. The vast regions of snow and ice covered glacial surfaces in the northern and southern Polar regions contributes to a good amount of the Earth's Albedo. In the north, the biggest chunk of that is the ice-covered subcontinent of Greenland.
Over the last several years, Greenland's Albedo has diminished. This was in part predicted by scientists who expected that warmer conditions would change the nature of ice and snow crystals…
gregladen | January 1, 2013A collection of videos ... that you will enjoy.
BBC Wonders of Life Trailer:
Climate 2013: Perspectives of 8 Scientists:
Chasing Ice movie reveals largest iceberg break-up ever filmed:
Kathleen Dean Moore at Nobel Conference 48 on the greatest violation of human rights ever seen:
With all due respect to the introducers, the talk actually starts at 8 minutes. Also, the best line delivered in any talk this year starts just after 42 minutes and 50 seconds (but really, start at 40:40 for best effect). It would be interesting to hear comments about the religious vs. secular approaches both…
gregladen | December 31, 2012This is the time of year when we list the “top ten” stories or events of the year. That we do this in late December is not totally arbitrary. A year, unfortunately (given it’s odd number of days and uncomfortable near-synchronization with lunar cycles), is not arbitrary, but rather, imposed on us by the realities of orbital geometry. That we often list the top, best, worst, funniest, most important, or whatever “ten” items is of course arbitrary. Had tetrapods evolved differently so that humans had 9 fingers on each hand, perhaps we’d be listing 18 items. Or if the development of numbers and…
gregladen | December 28, 2012And by "Prestigious" I mean .... well, see for yourself in this story from Media Matters for America (Reposted with permission):
Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year: Marc Morano
ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano has been called "the Matt Drudge of climate denial," the "king of the skeptics," and "a central cell of the climate-denial machine," and he revels in these descriptions. Although he has no scientific expertise, he is adamant that manmade global warming is a "con job" based on "subprime science." Morano gained prominence working for two of the most vocal climate deniers in the U.…
gregladen | December 28, 2012Top “Ten” Recent Books (focusing on 2012 but including the last few years) on Climate, Science denialism, Energy, and Science Policy are (including one Post Warming novel) are:
Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand by Haydn Washington and John Cook
Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise (Kindle Single) by Daniel Grossman, TEDx Books (Kindle Single)
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Rising Sea Levels: An…
gregladen | December 28, 2012A group of us, all interested in climate science, put together a list of the most notable, often, most worrying, climate-related stories of the year, along with a few links that will allow you to explore the stories in more detail. We did not try to make this a “top ten” list, because it is rather silly to fit the news, or the science, or the stuff the Earth does in a given year into an arbitrary number of events. (What if we had 12 fingers, and “10” was equal to 6+6? Then there would always be 12 things, not 10, on everyone’s list. Makes no sense.) We ended up with 18 items, but note that…
gregladen | December 16, 2012On June 6th, 1944, some 160,000 soldiers aboard about 5,000 boats of diverse design crossed the English Channel and carried out the Invasion of Normandy, one of the more important events in recent history. Many of the soldiers were so sick from choppy seas that leaving the boats and walking or running into German gunfire seemed like a good idea. The invasion was originally planned for the 45h of June, but a very precise weather forecast told the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, to wait until the next day. The forecast for the 6th of June, integrated with the logistical features of the…