Climate Change
gregladen | November 23, 2009A warning before going any further: This blog will not be used as a dumping ground for the text of climategate related "released" emails. I have surveyed my readers and overwhelmingly have been told that people would prefer to not see that. So don't do that.
Now, on with the show...
Just two items, recent blog posts on this issue:
Real Climate: The CRU hack: Context
This is a continuation of the last thread which is getting a little unwieldy. The emails cover a 13 year period in which many things happened, and very few people are up to speed on some of the long-buried issues. So to save…
gregladen | November 21, 2009The Anthropocentric Global Warming Denialist Community is collectively creaming in its collective jeans over the release of zillions of emails that definitively prove that the whole global warming conspiracy thing was made up. Real Climate has the story:
There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put…
gregladen | October 20, 2009To answer that question briefly, it is really really old if you mean "how old are the oldest rocks that are exposed by the Grand Canyon," and it is probably just a few million years old (5 or 6 by some estimates) if you mean "how long did the canyon itself take to form."An African peneplain elevated by doming along the Eastern Rift Valley. The original surface, once flat but now raised as "mountains" in the distance, is shown by the dotted line.
A repost
But Creationists, of course, have a different story, especially young earth creationists. I'm not going to recount it here. If you want to…
gregladen | October 4, 2009This is a continuation of a discussion on the role of Global Warming in the decline of moose populations in Minnesota. It is also a discussion of Global Warming denialism.
When I started to write Part II of this post, I realized that one aspect of the argument would probably distract from all the others, could be dealt with quickly and summarily, and makes a nice pithy post all by itself. This aspect is the claim made by commenter Gerard on an earlier post regarding global warming (or lack thereof) in Minnesota.
Gerard made this claim:
The average monthly high/low temperatures for January…
gregladen | September 28, 2009We have had a cool summer here in Minnesota, and this has brought out the miscreants who for their own reasons do not want to get on board with the simple, well demonstrated scientific fact that global temperatures have risen, that we humans are the primary cause, and that this climate change has negative consequences.
There are probably different reasons people do not want to get on board with this reality. The main reason especially for younger individuals is that they have been told by their political mentors to not accept global warming. The political mentors, in turn, reject global…
gregladen | September 26, 2009
What they are referring to is a paper by Mojib Latif in which he notes that the media often misrepresent global warming as a continuous, year by year increase in temperature. The truth, of course, is that annual temperature varies up and down but the baseline for this variation has been going continuously up.
Like a road going up a mountain. Often the road goes up and down and up and down cross the complex terrain of the mountain side. If, while driving up this hypothetical mountain, the road dips down for a moment, one does not say "Oh, we're going home now. This whole driving up the…
gregladen | August 28, 2009Here is a major press release by Elizabeth K. Gardner on the link between climate change and poverty, reproduced below the fold for your edification.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Urban workers could suffer most from climate change as the cost of food drives them into poverty, according to a new study that quantifies the effects of climate on the world's poor populations.
A team led by Purdue University researchers examined the potential economic influence of adverse climate events, such as heat waves, drought and heavy rains, on those in 16 developing countries. Urban workers in…
gregladen | August 25, 2009The nation's largest business group is asking U.S. EPA to hold a public debate on climate change science -- or face litigation -- as the agency prepares to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
...
"They don't have the science to support the endangerment finding," Bill Kovacs, the chamber's vice president for environment, regulatory and government affairs, said in an interview. "We can't just take their word for it."
gregladen | August 4, 2009This has come up a couple of times recently, so I thought I'd summarize the information here.
The distribution of water on Earth in cubic kilometers
Salt water:
1,318,062,462
Glaciers:
28,005,430
Groundwater:
12,270,210
Lakes:
106,396
Swamps:
13,452
Rivers:
2,446
Vapor:
13,000
Biological:
1,120
(Biological means like your spit and guts and all the juicy parts of worms and tree saps and water in bacteria and stuff.)
USGS
Wikipedia
What happens if all that glacial ice melts and ends up in the ocean?
Play with this for a while to get an idea. The maximum rise in sea level in that…
gregladen | June 15, 2009This is one of those science stories that is on one hand fairly simple, and on the other hand fairly complex, where the interface between simplicity and complexity causes little balls of misunderstanding to come flying out of the mix like pieces of raw pizza dough if the guy making the pizza was the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons.
What is true: A scientist named Ryskin proposes that decadal or century scale minor wiggling in the measured Earth's magnetic field is influenced by changes in ocean currents. Plausible. Interesting. Could explain some things. Not earthshaking.
What is…
gregladen | May 23, 2009One item is just published in the Journal of Climate. Simply put, the use of some very sophisticated and probably quite trustworthy models suggests that extratropical cyclones (so this means winter storms and such, mainly) will have a good deal more precipitation in them.
In the model ...
... There is a small reduction in the number of cyclones but no significant changes in the extremes of wind and vorticity in both hemispheres. ... The largest changes are in the total precipitation, where a significant increase is seen. Cumulative precipitation along the tracks of the cyclones increases by…
gregladen | May 6, 2009According to Texas Education Expert!
She knows because she looked at some web sites!!!!!!!!! Holy Crap!!!!
gregladen | April 23, 2009Educator alert: The best example of the Naturalistic Fallacy EVAH!!!! The money quote is....
"Carbon Dioxide is Natural. It is not harmful. It is part of earth's life cycle. And yet we are being told we have to reduce this natural substance, and reduce the american standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is a naturally occurring in the Earth."
Here it is... Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann:
hat tip: dump bachmann
gregladen | April 21, 2009Monica sent me a link to a Faux News story on global warming, which makes the claim that global warming is not real because ice is expanding, and not contracting, in Antarctica. It also makes the claim that 90 percent of the earth's ice and 80 percent of the earth's fresh water is in Antarctica, which I assume is mentioned because it would make Antarctica seem more important than other parts of the world, and thus the "fact" that global warming is not happening there is proof of ... whatever.
I'd like to clarify.
To start with, let's get the fresh water thing straight. Most of the fresh…
gregladen | April 10, 2009Marc Morano does not think global warming is anything to worry about, and he brags about his confrontations with those who do.
For example, Mr. Morano said he once spotted former Vice President Al Gore on an airplane returning from a climate conference in Bali. Mr. Gore was posing for photos with well-wishers, and Mr. Morano said he had asked if he, too, could have his picture taken with Mr. Gore.
He refused, Mr. Morano said.
"You attack me all the time," Mr. Gore said, according to Mr. Morano.
"Yes, we do," Mr. Morano said he had replied.
Mr. Gore's office said Mr. Gore had no memory of the…
gregladen | April 4, 2009A very large percentage of the earth's land masses were covered by glacial ice during the last glaciation. Right now it is about 10%, but during the Ice Age it was much more. Enough of the earth's water was trapped in this glacial ice that the oceans were about 120 to 150 meters lower than they are now. The thicker ice sheets were one or two kilometers thick, and they tended to slide around quite a bit, grinding down the surface of the earth and turning bedrock into dust and cobbles.
Then the ice went away, but the effects of the ice having been there are still being felt. A paper…
gregladen | February 5, 2009
Behold this humble passage by Darwin, which is what immediately follows his discussion of the octopus. This passage is a touchstone to several important aspects of what Darwin was doing and thinking, and is a poignant link to what Darwin did not know:
Repost with slight modifications
ST. PAUL'S ROCKS.--In crossing the Atlantic we hove to, during the morning of February 16th, close to the island of St. Paul.
Ah, sorry to interrupt. Saint Paul's Rocks are in the Atlantic roughly half way between South America and Africa. That geographical information should give you a hint of why…
gregladen | January 17, 2009This is the seventh in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.
This installment is about sea level rise and fall, in the past. Sea level change that results from the formation and melting of glaciers not only has an enormous impact on the physical nature of the landscape, but it also would not have gone unnoticed by people living ever pretty far from the sea!
With large amounts of the world's water trapped in glaciers (mainly continental glaciers), the sea level drops. When that ice melts, the sea level rises.
As you know, the earth is covered by two kinds of surface:…