Climate Change
gregladen | December 14, 2012But not as severely as they should have been.
The IPCC, as you know, comes out with a set of reports every five years. The reports are written by groups of experts. Draft reports are widely accessible to people who register themselves as "experts" and there is no quality control in that process, in order to keep things as transparent as possible. This means that the worst climate change denialists can simply sign up as "experts" and flood the scientists trying to write these reports with irrelevant and stupid comments, thus, I presume, wasting valuable time and effort. But, such is the cost…
gregladen | December 14, 2012When I was in 5th grade one of my classmates announced that she and her family (they were a family of singing folksingers) planned to take a trip in a boat they had built around the continent. In that class were were all required to give talks on various topics of our choosing, and she gave a talk on that. We were all impressed by many aspects of the planned adventure, but one thing stood out: During this trip the folk singing family would pass dangerously close to Haiti, which was on very bad terms with the US at that time (I believe it was a Soviet Satellite or something along those…
gregladen | November 29, 2012There are these things called "Atmospheric rivers." They are big long things up in the air that are loaded with water vapor, and much of the rain and other precipitation we experience comes out of them. This is notable when one of these rivers is extra wet, and there is an extra wet one out West in the US.
The Sierra Nevada range will be accumulating something like 16-20 inches of rain, but where that translates into snow, it will be up there in the 12 foot range, maybe more. There will be a very significant risk of flash flooding north of Sacremento and places in northern California and…
gregladen | November 29, 2012From NASA:
PASADENA, Calif. - An international team of experts supported by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has combined data from multiple satellites and aircraft to produce the most comprehensive and accurate assessment to date of ice sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica and their contributions to sea level rise.
In a landmark study published Thursday in the journal Science, 47 researchers from 26 laboratories report the combined rate of melting for the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica has increased during the last 20 years. Together, these ice sheets are losing…
gregladen | November 28, 2012You all know Don Prothero. He is an active member of the Skeptics and Science Blogging community. He is the author of several books, one of which you are totally supposed to own and if you don't it's kinda lame: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. It occurred to me today that I never produced a formal review of one of Don's other books that I really enjoyed: Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet. The reason for my skipping that review is that I had a radio interview with Don during which we discussed the topic as some length.…
gregladen | November 28, 2012Climate Denial Crock of the Week gives us this new video. Details here.
We are not yet where we need to be with this "when did you stop beating your wife" question sometimes in the form of:
"Can you REALLY attribute ANY storm to Global Warming, really? No? Then is global warming really real? Really?")
Next time someone says something like that to you, consider answering the question with a question:
"Which major storm of the last two decades or so did not include any of the extra climatic energy provided to this planet by the release of fossil Carbon and other greenhouse gasses into…
gregladen | November 21, 2012A probabilistic quantification of the anthropogenic component of twentieth century global warming is a paper just out that examines an important conflict in the conversation about climate change and global warming. Before getting to the details, have a look at this graph from the paper:
This is temperature increasing on the earth over a century or so. Notice that there is what looks like a warming around 1940 on top of an otherwise mostly warming trend, followed by a bunch more warming.
The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, in 2007, referring to data that ran up to 2005 inclusively, said…
gregladen | November 21, 2012One of the reasons that we have not, as a species, as a group of nations, dealt effectively with Anthropogenic Global Warming is the effectiveness of climate science denialism. There are denialists in Congress, on the Internet, and everywhere. They have not succeeded in making a valid scientific argument regarding Global Warming, but they have kept the rhetoric in the foreground, which has allowed interests protecting Big Oil to keep the hapless Main Stream Media focused on a false balance between scientific consensus and unreasonable doubt. As a result, the last decade or so has been a…
gregladen | November 20, 2012You may have heard that the release of greenhouse gases has recently gone down, to match levels of several years ago. Why, then, do we have someone saying that greenhouse gasses have reached a new record high?
There are two, maybe three, reasons.
First, even though CO2 release from the US may be lower now than it has been in a few years, it is still high (it was high a few years ago, so we've reduced to a level that is high!). More importantly, the US has reduced its release of CO2 primarily for incidental economic reasons. With a recession/depression going on, there is less money being…
gregladen | November 14, 2012I would almost count it unethical that the New Scientist has a thing that looks like a blog post (an article you can comment on) that has some science in it, but that you have to be a paid subscriber to comment on. WTF New Scientist? What are you trying to pull?
But that's OK, I've got a blog and can comment here.
Link between global warming and drought questioned14 November 2012 by Fred Pearce
THE world has been suffering more droughts in recent decades, and climate change will bring many more, according to received wisdom.
"Received Wisdom" means stuff we were told, passed down to us from…
gregladen | November 13, 2012One of the most commonly winged-about facts of Earth's climate change we hear from science denialists is that sea ice in the Antarctic is increasing, therefore, there is no global warming. The fact that every other measurement of temperature and ice-osity indicates warming and melting would make a normal person think of the Antarctic situation as odd, and seek explanations, but somehow this logic does not emerge in the minds of the denialists. It has been suspected, and increasingly confirmed, for some time that the increase in sea ice in the Antarctic is the result of changes in wind…
gregladen | November 11, 2012Wrong.
October was, nationally in the US, kinda cold. Not record cold, but colder than average. However, as Jeff Masters at Weather Underground has calculated, we would have to have some kind of Snowball Earth scenario kick in for December in order for 2012 to not be the warmest year on record in the US. Here, you can read about it yourself.
In the mean time, there is an interesting weather related production coming up you may want to know about. First, check this out:
Then, check THIS out.
gregladen | November 5, 2012This is an interview at Atheists Talk (TV), an update on the war on science, and a rare opportunity to see me wearing a suit.
The first few seconds are sound free; do not adjust your television set.
I mentioned the NCSE, here's their web site.
Here's a couple of books related to the topic:
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Otto
Something on crying babies and vaccination is here, and something on milk allergy is here.
Minnesota Atheists YouTube channel is here…
gregladen | November 1, 2012Rising Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact is a new book by Hunt Janin and Scott Mandia. Janin is a writer of non fiction and scholarly books, and Mandia is a professor of physics and a science communicator who specializes in climate-related issues.
To me, sea level is one of the most interesting and important of climate related issues. Interesting because I've done archaeology at the edge of the sea, sometimes beneath it, sometimes racing ahead of it, and often, looking at changes in human settlement caused by its rise since the Last Glacial Maximum. Important because one of…
gregladen | October 31, 2012Earlier this year a paper was published in the journal Nature in which a team of scientists looked at changes in storm surge potential under conditions of global warming, and they used the New York City area in their modeling. Combined with resent research adding to the growing body of data and studies that show increased storminess with global warming, this research suggests that the increased possibility of a hurricane causing a storm surge that would actually flood the subways in Manhattan is not only possible, but pretty likely to happen in the near future. Perhaps as soon as ....…
gregladen | October 28, 2012If you are in the path...the thousand mile wide path...of Hurricane Sandy, a.k.a. Frankenstorm, then you should make sure you know what the storm could do in relationship to where you are. If you are in or near an area with mountains, look for very serious flash flooding. The winds will be strong everywhere. If you are near the coast, be aware that the highest storm surges seen in years are expected in many areas. At the same time, it is important for those of us writing or talking about this storm to be realistic and careful in making predictions. This is becasue every case of dire…
gregladen | October 23, 2012My friend and colleague Michael Mann just released the following information:
Lawsuit filed against The National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute 10/22/12
Today, the case of Dr. Michael E. Mann vs. The National Review and The Competitive Enterprise Institute was filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Dr. Mann, a Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, has instituted this lawsuit against the two organizations, along with two of their authors, based upon their false and defamatory statements accusing him of…
gregladen | October 10, 2012This has been known for years. It is very frustrating to see people ask questions like "well, what we don't know is what will global warming do?" Global warming has done, already, quite a bit and it is insulting to our collective intelligence and an affront to the families of those who have died from it to pretend nothing has happened. From desertification in Africa to heat waves in Chicago, global warming has killed people. Perhaps the following video from PBS will make this a bit more palpable to those who can't grasp this concept.
gregladen | October 1, 2012It is, as they say, melting. There are almost no mountain glaciers in the world that are advancing. In just a few years there will very few mountain glaciers.