Global Warming
gregladen | July 30, 2014Mark Your Cosmic Calendar: 774/775
One wonders if anyone felt it. Did Charlemagne feel it as he led his forces across Pagan Saxon Westphalia, knocking down Irminsuls and making everyone pretend to be Christian or else? Did the people of Bagdad, just becoming the world’s largest city, notice anything aside from their own metro-bigness? Did the Abbasid Caliph Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi have the impression something cosmic was going on that year, other than his own ascendancy to power? Or was it mainly some of the Nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere that were changed, not forever but…
gregladen | July 24, 2014The original hoser, I'm told by an unimpeachable source from way up in Canada, was the guy who went out to his front yard in the middle of the winter and hosed down the lawn in order to make some flat ice, so he and his friends could play hockey. A better way to get ice is to find a cove or embayment along a small lake that is protected from the wind; clear off the snow and you've got a nice flat surface. If that is not available, clear the snow off the rugged and rough ice that forms on many lakes, build a dam of hard packed snow around it ... and hose that down. Even better, build a…
gregladen | July 23, 2014We just experienced the warmest two months (May and June) on record, meaning, essentially, in well over 100 years. This is because of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Does this mean that 2014 will be the warmest year on record? Probably not, in part because February was pretty cold and that lowers the score for the year. But it will be a warm year.
There is a strong correlation between the temperature in June and what turns out to be the global mean for the year. This can be shown empirically by calculating a simple correlation coefficient for each month of the year and the year's…
gregladen | July 22, 2014One of the things climate change science deniers say, to throw you off, is that Antarctic sea ice is expanding. They even claim that the amount of expansion of Antarctic sea ice offsets the dramatic retreat of Arctic sea ice (see this for the latest on the Arctic). I've even seen it argued, in that famous peer-reviewed publication Twitter, that there is an inter-polar teleconnection that guarnatees that when the ice on one end of the earth expands the ice on the other end of the earth contracts, and visa versa, so everything is fine.
That Antarctic Sea ice is expanding has become standard…
gregladen | July 22, 2014As it does every summer, the Arctic Sea ice is melting off. Over the last several years, the amount of sea ice that melts by the time it hits minimum in September has generally been increasing. So, how's it doing now?
The graph above shows the 1981-2010 average plus or minus two standard deviations. Before going into more detail than that, you should look at the following graphic.
The top chart shows the march of Arctic Sea ice melt for first ten years of the baseline data set only, and the bottom chart shows the last ten years of the same data set. This tells us that the two Standard…
gregladen | July 22, 2014There is an old theory in psychology that characterizes humans as a bowl of Jell-O (Jelly for some of you). Life pokes at the Jell-O, the Jell-O jiggles. Eventually the jiggles begin to change the Jell-O, so certain kinds of pokes result in certain kinds of responses. The Jell-O gurgles, babbles, notices things, learns, develops, and eventually becomes self aware.
That is a great oversimplification of a theory that was, in turn, a great oversimplification of human development, yet it does seem to apply in many ways to human behavior. When it comes to climate change, people seem more…
gregladen | July 21, 2014June 2014 was the hottest June on record, and records go back to 1880, by which time Global Warming may have started already but wasn't nearly as intense as the last half of the 20th century, according to data NOAA has released and highlighted. The previous month, May, was the hottest May on record.
June Global Land and Ocean plot
NOAA notes that this was the 38th consecutive June and the 352nd consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average, which was already elevated due to global warming. Also, the last time June was below average for the century was in 1976…
gregladen | July 18, 2014AGW -> AA -> QR -> WW -> WF -> DS -> A- -> AGW
The great cycle of climate change. Anthropogenic Global Warming has resulted in a relatively increased warming of the poles, which changes the dynamic of jet streams forming thus causing quasi-ressonant (stuck in place) Rossby Waves (curvy slow moving jet streams) which then fuels Weather Whiplash (or Weather Weirding if you prefer) which at the moment is causing unprecedented wild fires especially in Western Canada and Siberia, which causes a darkening of glacial surfaces in Greenland (Dark Snow) which decreases albedo which…
gregladen | July 17, 2014Jeffrey Sachs was interviewed today on MorningJoe about the just released report to the UN Secretary-General on climate change and energy. The report addresses the goal of reaching a low-Carbon economy by mid century in the countries that release the most fossil carbon today.
One interesting thing about this report is that Joe Scarborough, Morning Joe himself, seems to be pretty much on board with the reality of climate change science. Since Joe occupies a centrist to right position in Mainstream Media, this is important. Good for you Joe.
Here is the show:
gregladen | July 11, 2014The American Tradition Institute a.k.a. ATI a.k.a. Energy & Environmental Legal Institute is a "think" tank that supports or engages in climate science denialism. You can read about it here and here. Michael Mann is a climate scientist, famous for bringing to the world's attention the alarming problem of hockey-stick style global warming. According to Wikipedia:
The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize...
The ATI, Michael Mann, and the University of Virginia have been…
gregladen | July 10, 2014Showtime's Years of Living Dangerously is one of the most important and well done documentaries addressing climate change. The 2014 Emmy Nominations were just announced and this series has received two nominations: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming (Adam Bolt).
While often portrayed as an unsettled debate, the reality is that 97% of scientists agree global warming is happening and humans are to blame.
Top scientific organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Medical Association and…
gregladen | July 7, 2014Regret Labs is a new science podcast by Aric McKeown and Levi Weinhagen, produced in the Twin Cities. It is a lot of fun. I did an interview with them and it has just come out. You can listen to it here.
We talked about science, science advocacy, climate change, and the use of social media to promote good science.
gregladen | June 28, 2014First let me check ... are all those denialists who have been claiming that wild fires have become rare done talking yet?
OK fine.
Yes, depending on where you go and what you look at we are having a problem with wild fires in the US and elsewhere (i.e., Australia). Part of this is probably due to weather whiplash. Periods of heavier than usual rain means more fuel grows, periods of dry make the fuel ready to burn, maybe even add some extra windy conditions, and the fires are worse than usual. This leads to landslide conditions being worse later on when the unusual rains occur.
Anyway,…
gregladen | June 27, 2014Who are the founders of Greenpeace? Not Patrick Moore.
Patrick Moore is a Hippie for Hire. He makes the claim that he co-founded Greenpeace, and charges a fee to show up at conferences or other venues, or sit on boards, to provide a story that anti-environmentalists, global warming deniers, and others, like to hear. The part where he takes your money to lie, as far as I can tell, is true. The part about how he co-founded Greenpeace is apparently not true.
Here’s what Greenpeace has to say about Patrick Moore:
Patrick Moore. Did Patrick Moore found Greenpeace? Greenpeace says no. They…
gregladen | June 21, 2014In 2009 someone wrote a blog post about climate change that made all the usual science denialist claims. Hurricanes have reduced therefore global warming is not real. In this case, hurricanes are one of the main threats of climate change (a straw man) and since they are not as common these days in the Atlantic as alarmists claimed the would be (cherry picking) global warming is not a concern. There were stronger storms in the past. Katrina wasn't really all that bad. Etc. etc.
The Ice Caps (he called sea ice "Ice Caps") are not really melting that bad and besides we don't really know what…
gregladen | June 10, 2014According to the NOAA GISS global instrumental record for temperatures (1880 to the present), since 2000 (inclusively) we have had
2002 and 2003 ties for first and second warmest January. Januray 2014 was the fourth warmest, 2005 the fifth warmest.
February 2010 was the third warmest Feburary, and 2002 had the fourth warmest February.
March 2002 was the warmest, 2012 was the second warmest. March 2014 was the fourth warmest.
April 2010 was the warmest on record, April 2014 the second warmest.
We are still waiting for the data on May 2014, but during this time the warmest May on record…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Given recent attention to the issue of consensus in climate change research, this is a good time to mention a paper that came out recently by John Abraham, John Cook, John Fasullo, Peter Jacobs, Scott Mandia and Dana Nuccitelli called "Review of the consensus and asymmetric quality of research on human-induced climate change."
I'll paste the abstract below but first I'll summarize it in a sentence. The few papers that explicitly deny the basic science of climate change are rightfully rejected by the peer review process because they are crap. Bit they do find more attention by main stream…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Above is a graphic someone tossed at me on twitter the other day. It makes it look like CO2 emissions went way up then went way down so everything is fine. It is, of course, a lie, of sorts.
IT is actually kind of hard to find a graph just for US CO2 that goes back in historic time, but this graphic for the global energy industry clearly shows that the big picture is an upward trend:
The dip we see in recent years is simply an effect of the economy going bad, and things people do that emit CO2 being done somewhat less. Kevin Schultz wrote this up on his blog:
After a five-year decrease in…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Just a quick item on the pause in global warming that is said to have happened over the last X number of years. I took NOAA's instrumental record since the late 19th century and calculated the average deviation for "surface" temperatures from a baseline for the entire period. Surface temperatures refer to the lower part of the atmosphere and sea surfaces. When you look at a graph of "global warming" expressed in temperatures, this is almost always what is meant (this leaves out a lot of things, including the poles, much of Africa, and deeper ocean waters). But it is a standard and a fairly…