climate change
hrynyshyn | January 23, 2009No sooner had I finished writing about the Eos poll on the near unanimity of the climatology community on the anthropogenic cause of global warming than I came across another poll on the general public's position. And I did not take heart.
The authors of the Eos paper referred to a 2008 Gallup polll that found 58% of Americans think "human activities rather than natural causes explain the rise in the Earth's temperature." Around 38% say it's natural.
Troubling enough. But then along comes this new Rasmussen poll that find only "44% of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the…
hrynyshyn | January 21, 2009Tim Lambert beat me to it (surprise), so you can read Deltoid's take on the new poll of the Earth sciences that finds that the more your working life is dominated by climatology, the more likely you are to accept the basic conclusions of the anthropogenic global warming consensus. I'll just add a couple of thoughts.
The survey, which appears in the latest issue of EOS, the official (subs req'd) newsletter of the American Geophysical Union, contrasts the findings of a recent Gallup poll to its own. When asked a variant of the question "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing…
hrynyshyn | January 15, 2009Nous somme du soleil
-- Anderson/Howe, "Ritual"
It's sad that it's come to this, but I feel compelled to offer some guidance on the persistent allegation that the Earth is about to enter an ice age. It all started a few days ago, when Matt Drudge added a link to an English-language Pravda (?) story claiming that "a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science" points to the impending end of the current interglacial period. Never one to care what Drudge is linking to, I tried to ignore it. But then I started getting email.
The most depressing came from someone…
edyong | January 2, 2009It's not a good time for corals. Last year, a third of coral species went straight into the endangered lists after being assessed for the first time, and it looks like 2009 isn't going to bring any reprieves to the doom and gloom. In particular, a new study provides hard evidence that the mightiest of coral super-colonies - the Great Barrier Reef - is in trouble.
Like reefs across the world, the Great Barrier Reef faces many threats, including pollution, physical destruction, predatory starfish and perhaps most importantly, the many effects of climate change. Glenn De'ath and colleagues from…
revere | December 29, 2008The fact that EPA has just approved a safer and more environmentally sound refrigerant is amazing news in itself. But the story behind this new product is even more amazing. The material, called HCR-188c, is a hydrocarbon blend of common materials (among them ethane, propane, isobutene, normal butane) that have no ozone depleting potential and very little in the way of greenhouse gas type of heat trapping. Even better, appliances require only a quarter the amount as current refrigerants (hydrochlorofluorocarbons, HCFCs, and hydrofluorocarbons, HFCs), costs 20 cents per charge compared to 62…
edyong | December 20, 2008
Miners used to take canaries into unfamiliar shafts to act as early warning systems for the presence of poisons. Today, climate scientists have their own canaries - amphibians. Amphibians - the frogs, toads and salamanders - are particularly susceptible to environmental changes because of their fondness for water, and their porous absorbent skins. They are usually the first to feel the impact of environmental changes.
And feel it they have. They are one of the most threatened groups of animals and one in three species currently faces extinction. The beautiful golden toad (right) was one of…
ddobbs | December 18, 2008Atop other Obama appointments, this is one I suspect America's scientists will welcome. From the Washington Post:
Report: Holdren to Lead White House Science Policy
By Joel Achenbach
President-elect Obama will announce this weekend that he has selected physicist John Holdren, who has devoted much of his career to energy and environmental research, as his White House science adviser, according to a published report today.
The Obama transition office would not confirm Holdren's selection. Last night, asked by The Post to comment on the science adviser search, Holdren responded by e-mail that…
edyong | December 16, 2008The Humboldt squid is not an animal to mess with. It's two metres of bad-tempered top predator, wielding a large brain, a razor-sharp beak and ten tentacles bearing 2,000 sharp, toothed suckers. It cannibalises wounded squid, and it beats up Special Ops veterans. But over the next few years, the Humboldt faces a threat that even it may struggle against, one that threatens to deprive it of the very oxygen it needs to breathe - climate change.
The Humboldt squid (also known as the jumbo squid) lives "chronically on the edge of oxygen limitation". Through an unfortunate combination of…
revere | November 24, 2008The science of climate change is difficult and everyone agrees there are uncertainties and a contested point or two. But some points are asserted over and over again and aren't really contested. They are just plain false. Yet no matter how often they are refuted they rise again from the dead, true zombie lies. One of the great things about writing on the internet is the ability to link to really excellent pieces and Darksyde over at DailyKos has just such a piece you owe it to yourself to read. It's not short but not excessively long, either. Just long enough to get the job done. And the job…
revere | November 21, 2008John Dingell (D-MI), longtime Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has done some good things in his time, but overall he's been a net minus. When Henry Waxman (D-CA) toppled him from his perch today my feeling was an uncharitable, Good Riddance. The vote in the Democratic Party caucus was close but not very close: 137 - 122. Dingell has not been representing the people of his District as much as he has been representing the US Automakers. He he got the sobriquet Dirty Air Dingell the old fashioned way: he earned it:
The Energy and Commerce panel is one of the most important House…
revere | November 15, 2008You probably never heard of the EPA Appeals Board, but they have just handed down a ruling that will affect scores of power plants using coal. Affect them how? Not clear at the moment:
The uncertainty resulted when an Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel on Thursday rejected a federal permit for a Utah plant, leaving the issue for the Obama administration to resolve.
The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.
The…
edyong | November 15, 2008
Climate change is not just about surface warming and glacial melting. The carbon dioxide that human activity is pumping into the atmosphere also dissolves in the world's oceans, slowly increasing their acidity over time. And that spells trouble for corals.
Corals may seem like immobile rock, but these hard fortresses are home to soft-bodied animals. These creatures - the coral polyps - build their mighty reefs of calcium carbonate using carbonate ions drawn from the surrounding water. But as the water's pH levels fall, these ions become depleted and the corals start to run out of their…
illconsidered | October 29, 2008Anthony Watts has a post up purporting to show a very large UHI effect in Reno, Nevada.
I will just take his numbers and methods at face value, even though many questions come to mind. After all, 10oF is a big jump from outskirts to downtown, but maybe that is correct and not contaminated from engine heat. Also note this, which is specifically about Reno and shows how the UHI effect is removed from the data.
(pretty convincing, no?)
The problem is the conclusion that is at the very least strongly implied: if Urban Heat Islands are that pronounced, maybe global warming is just an artifact…
revere | October 22, 2008The interconnected web of health and the environment never ceases to amaze me. A good example is a new report from India's Sundarban islands suggesting that climate change, among other things, is contributing to an increase in tiger attacks:
Wildlife experts say endangered tigers in the world's largest reserve are turning on humans because rising sea levels and coastal erosion are steadily shrinking the tigers' natural habitat.
The Sundarbans, a 26,000 sq km area of low-lying swamps on India's border with Bangladesh, is dotted with hundreds of small islands criss-crossed by water channels.
"…
revere | October 15, 2008I am not in the habit of reading classic horror stories but this weekend I picked up John Kenneth Galbraith's 1955 book, The Great Crash: 1929. Unfortunately it is non-fiction. And even more unfortunately it is selling well in the university bookstore. Galbraith is gone but his book lives on. In a new Foreword written in the 1990s he noted that it has never gone out of print since its publication more than 50 years ago, mainly because every decade or two we have a new stock market crisis to renew interest. Since 1929 these crises have all been harbingers of recession, not depression. It isn't…
edyong | October 10, 2008
The twenty-first century is having a troubled infancy. Eight years in and it is facing the twin perils of climate change and a looming energy crisis. Solutions to both are in high demand and many research dollars and pounds are being channelled into developing environmentally-friendly, renewable resources.
Biofuels - the product of living things - certainly fit the bill, being both renewable and biodegradable. But there is always a catch. Currently, biofuels are mostly a matter of harvesting single crops grown on fertile soils such as corn or sugarcane or waste products such as straw.
In…
revere | September 30, 2008A fascinating paper in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases has more details on a problem we first mentioned, on the basis of news reports, back in June. It's about a possible relationship between West Nile Virus infection and the mortgage crisis, but the paper also gives a dramatic example of how the physical, biological and social environment can affect disease patterns and risks in populations.
Infection with West Nile Virus is primarily a disease of birds. It is transmitted from bird to bird by mosquito bites and the disease is maintained by the cycling between birds and mosquitoes…
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…
sciencewoman | August 28, 2008I'm part of a team submitting a proposal to NASA, and as such, I had to register in the NASA proposal tracking system, creatively named NSPIRES. But I was a little less than inspired when I got to the first step of the registration process. The screen shot and my analysis are below the fold.
The last name on my birth certificate has nothing to do with my professional identity and I don't want an automatically generated username (or similar) that I'm not going to remember because I would never use my birth last name for that purpose. My name change didn't come through marriage, but 81% of US…
revere | August 20, 2008Everyone seems to agree about one thing concerning Vice President Cheney's senior aide, F. Chase Hutto III. He never met an environmental regulation he didn't just hate and oppose on principle. According to the Washington Post he has been instrumental in keeping our air and water dirtier than it needs to be. Just another day at the office in the Bush administration. Now, in the waning days of the Bush Reich, they want to name him a high official in the Department of Energy where he will in charge of policies related to climate change. The foundation of the climate change debate is the science…