Global Warming
gregladen | January 16, 2015A new documentary you'll want to see.
An eye-opening documentary exploring the tactics of climate change deniers.
An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that global warming caused by human activity is one of the most critical dangers our planet faces. But a well-organised band of professional spinners and obfuscators toil in the shadows to pretend there is a genuine debate on the subject. That's the argument put forward by this provocative new documentary from Robert Kenner, director of the Oscar nominated food industry expose, 'Food, Inc'. Adapted from the book of the same title by…
gregladen | January 15, 2015I just did an interview on Green Diva Radio, and talked about a lot of climate change science news. For those who want to see the sources, here is a quick summary:
On Friday, NASA and NOAA are expected to announce that 2014 was the hottest year on record. I had been planning to write an extensive blog post going into all sorts of details about how that works, how they calculate it, etc. But then the people at Climate Nexus wrote a post that would have blown mine out of the water with the detail and informtation provided in it. Go here to read this excellent post: 2014: Putting The Hottest…
gregladen | January 10, 2015This is serious. A highly regarded and widely recognized planetery physicist put together the most dangerous scientific ingredients that exist: skepticism of the established science, a comprehensive list of hypotheses that stood in opposition to that established science, a huge amount of data, a healthy amount of funding including a good chunk from energy companies that mainly sell fossil carbon based fuels, and a hand selected research team of others who were also skeptics.
In the end, he came up with an explanation for what people call Global Warming. Personally, I believe him. I think…
gregladen | January 9, 2015I did an interview on Green Diva, which you can tune into and enjoy HERE or here:
My part starts just after 30:40 into the show, but do feel free to listen to the whole thing!
gregladen | January 7, 2015I did a thing called the "Green Round Table" in which I addressed a number of questions about climate change and global warming.
HAVE A LOOK
gregladen | January 4, 2015The following is a letter from John Irving, posted originally on his Facebook page and reprinted here as a guest post:
NOTE: JOHN NOW HAS HIS OWN WEB SITE AND HAS POSTED HIS LETTER THERE. So do note that there are comments, including by John, below, but also go and visit his site!
John Irving
Dear Industrial Capitalists and members of the %0.01,
I feel obliged to inform you that you’ve made a huge strategic blunder and things aren’t probably going to work out very well for you soon.
You recall that way back in 1965 - 50 years ago this year - President Lyndon B. Johnson was warned about…
gregladen | December 22, 2014With what may be the warmest year in centuries about to close, I thought it would be fun to have a graphic comparing the march of global average temperature over several years about a century ago with the present state of affairs. This graphic is based on NASA's data, using John Abraham's estimate for the 2014 temperature (it might end up being a tiny bit different). There is more information about those sources here.
[click on the graphic to get to a larger version]
Just to be clear on how to read the graph ... the red dot is not anywhere in particular on the horizontal scale. The X and…
gregladen | December 20, 2014Enough! That's Peter Doran's opinion on the "debate" about a scientific consensus on climate change. There clearly is one -- a strong one. So why do the public and the politicians think otherwise? Why the big disconnect between what the vast majority of scientists know to be fact, and what the public thinks. Dr. Doran blames the way media reports on science, and he blames a few of the loud voices on the right. He presents an idea to change a lot of the minds of people who deny the scientific consensus on climate change which will hopefully lead politicians to action. Peter Doran is a…
gregladen | December 17, 2014A new study has recently been published that looks at the ecology of bristlecone pine growth at Sheep Mountain, and the tree ring signal those trees produce, at high altitudes in the Southwestern US. This is important because tree rings are an often used proxyindicator for reconstructing past climates. Those who keep track of the paleoclimate research will recall, for example, that tree rings were one of the proxyindicators used by Michael Mann and his team in constructing the famous "Hockey Stick" graph showing a dramatic increase in the Earth's temperature since the onset of industrial…
gregladen | December 17, 2014In early December I wrote a post called "2014 will not be the warmest year on record, but global warming is still real." The very first thing I said in that post is that I was going out on a limb. I also discussed whether or not one year mattered, and I discussed the nature of the phrase "X is the Yth warmest year on record," going into details on what "the record" is and how we measure this.
I want to reiterate something very important that I mentioned then. Here, we are talking about a combination of measurements from the sea surface and the air just over the land (about where your head…
gregladen | December 10, 2014Matt Ridley is a British journalist whom some in the science community are now quietly referring to as an “anti-science writer.” He has taken up the cause of denying the widely held and deep scientific consensus on climate change. He has a recent blog post he seems to have been compelled to write in response to a new study on the use of tree rings as a proxyindicator for past temperatures. I’ll be writing about that research in a day or two. Ridley’s post is embarrassing, and especially annoying to me because for several years I used his book on evolutionary biology as a recommended (or…
gregladen | December 4, 2014The Road to Paris is a web site created by the ICSU, "...a non-governmental organization representing a global membership that includes both national scientific bodies (121 National Members representing 141 countries) and International Scientific Unions (30 Members)," founded in 1931. If the ICSU had not existed when the UN was formed, the UN would have formed it. Think of the ICSU as the UN of Science. More or less.
(Follow Road to Paris on Twitter.)
Anyway, Road to Paris refers to the 2015 international meetings on climate change, and the purpose of the web site is to provide excellent…
gregladen | December 3, 2014I'm going out on a limb here. 2014 has been a very warm year. We've had a number of record setting months. But, a couple of months were also coolish, and November was one of them. December started out cool (like November ended) globally, but actually over the last few days the global average temperature has been going up. But, unless December gets really warm really fast, is is probably true that we will break some records but not all. This entire discussion, however, is problematic for a number of reasons.
How much does one year matter?
How warm or cold a given year is does not matter…
gregladen | November 25, 2014Watch as documentary filmmaker Vanessa Black visits the Gulf of Mexico to learn more about Big Oil.
gregladen | November 17, 2014The term "Polar Vortex" was thrown around a lot last year, in reference to the persistent mass of very cold air that enveloped much of southern Canada and the US. As you will remember, Rush Limbaugh accused climate scientists and librul meteorologists of making up the polar vortex to scare everyone into thinking climate change is real. You may also remember Al Roker pointing out on national TV and on Twitter that the term "polar vortex" has been in meteorology textbooks for decades.
This year, with a new wave of cold air arriving unseasonably in the upper middle part of the US, the term is…
gregladen | November 14, 2014Check out this new paper in the RNCSE, by John Abraham, John Fasullo, and Me.
gregladen | November 14, 2014A new study just out in Science suggests that we will have an increase in lightning strikes of about 12 percent for every degree C of global warming. That could add up. From the abstract:
Lightning plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry and in the initiation of wildfires, but the impact of global warming on lightning rates is poorly constrained. Here we propose that the lightning flash rate is proportional to the convective available potential energy (CAPE) times the precipitation rate. Using observations, the product of CAPE and precipitation explains 77% of the variance in the…
gregladen | November 14, 2014The data for October has just been added to the NOAA GISS instrument record, which runs from 1880 to the present.
October was the warmest on record, just beating out 2005.
Overall, it is looking increasingly likely that 2014 will tie or beat the record for warmest year in the instrumental record, in terms of surface temperature. This does not count the ocean warming which is substantial. But we tend to look at the surface record as an approximation of global warming.
Here's the graph:
Just looking at the daily values (but from a different database) for November, this is turning out to be…
gregladen | November 12, 2014Have a look at this new video from Peter Sinclair:
Peter has an interview with Jeff Goodell, contributing editor of Rolling Stone, which you will want to see. They talk about the political aspect of sea level rise in Florida.
More about sea level rise here.