Sunday’s radio show is going to be a very special treat for all of us. Mike Haubrich and I are going to be speaking with Kevin Zelnio and John Abraham about climate change, global warming, and science vs. denialism.
Continue reading What would you ask an expert on climate change?
Tag Archives: Climate Change
On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance
According to a newly published paper in the journal “Remote Sensing” the Earth’s atmosphere releases into space more heat than climate scientists had previously estimated in a way that effectively removes concern about fossil CO2 being released into the atmosphere.
Continue reading On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance
Global warming denialism? It ends now.
Somewhere around 1990 I wrote an article for a monthly paper on global warming. My intention was to explain the idea behind it (the greenhouse phenomenon) and to make clear the distinction between depletion of the ozone layer and greenhouse effects (the two were getting confused on a regular basis in those days). The reason I mention this is that there was virtually nothing in that article that would not pertain today, and other than the addition of piles and piles of data, there has been almost no change in the science of greenhouse effects that has occurred since then. And by that, I specifically mean the working models for the dynamics of atmospheric response to the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere that existed then are merely simpler versions of, but not fundamentally different from, those that are used today.
Continue reading Global warming denialism? It ends now.
Minnesota AGW Denialist Jungbauer Disembowled by Respected News Anchor Don Shelby
I woke up this morning and the world was slightly different than it was the night before. Well, it probably always is a little different each day, but there are certain times when you notice this. I’m not talking about the bits of siding, roofing, and trees scattered about the landscape because of the very severe thunderstorm we had last night, although I suppose this is indirectly related.
If you are not a Minnesotan this will take some explanation:
Continue reading Minnesota AGW Denialist Jungbauer Disembowled by Respected News Anchor Don Shelby
Why is Anthropogenic Global Warming Denialism Important?
And what do we do about it?
Continue reading Why is Anthropogenic Global Warming Denialism Important?
Please try not to think about Global Warming
There is no chance that there is any connection between the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere, no chance, for instance that severe weather is increased because of global warming. Don’t give it a second thought. The following video proves that you have nothing to worry about:
Continue reading Please try not to think about Global Warming
Are all these tornadoes being caused by global warming?
People are asking me: Is the recent spate of tornadoes caused by global warming? The usual answer to that question is that you can’t answer the question because a tornado is not caused by climate … it is cause by weather … and global warming (which is real, and which is cause by humans) is climate change.
However, that is not really the best answer to the question. Ultimately, I want to propose an analogy for how to think about this question, but first, a stab at a good answer, which if modified could probably be improved:
Continue reading Are all these tornadoes being caused by global warming?
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting faster.
These masses of ice are now contributing more new meltwater to the world’s seas than all other melting ice combined.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study — the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass — suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.
The nearly 20-year study reveals that in 2006, a year in which comparable results for mass loss in mountain glaciers and ice caps are available from a separate study conducted using other methods, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost a combined mass of 475 gigatonnes a year on average. That’s enough to raise global sea level by an average of 1.3 millimeters (.05 inches) a year. (A gigatonne is one billion metric tons, or more than 2.2 trillion pounds.)
The pace at which the polar ice sheets are losing mass was found to be accelerating rapidly. Each year over the course of the study, the two ice sheets lost a combined average of 36.3 gigatonnes more than they did the year before. In comparison, the 2006 study of mountain glaciers and ice caps estimated their loss at 402 gigatonnes a year on average, with a year-over-year acceleration rate three times smaller than that of the ice sheets.
Total ice sheet mass balance between 1992 and 2009, as measured for Greenland (top), Antarctica (middle) and the cumulative sum of both ice sheets (bottom), in gigatonnes per year, as measured by the two different methods used by the researchers: the mass budget method (solid black circles) and time-variable gravity measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellites (solid red triangles). Image credit: NASA/JPL-UC Irvine-Utrecht University-National Center for Atmospheric Research
This will result in a greater increase in sea level of the medium to long term than previously estimated. Unless you live in Kiribati, in which case you’ll be fine.
Lots more details here.
Climate scientists “cleared” (again, still)
An inquiry by a federal watchdog agency found no evidence that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated climate data to buttress the evidence in support of global warming, officials said on Thursday.
The inquiry, by the Commerce Department’s inspector general, focused on e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 …
Religion crossing the line: “God is not so silly to allow people to perish” from floods and storms
How do you separate harmless belief in religion or superstition and … well, harmful belief in religion or superstition? We have been having a bit of a go-round* between some of my regular blog readers, including my Catholic but not anti-Evolution niece whose daughter recently acted in a commercial for the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Sondrah and I respectfully agree to disagree about certain issues, but clearly do agree on the importance of having real science, and not creationism, taught in public schools. That is what a lot of people who think of themselves as religious prefer, although we have seen a severe erosion of that pro-science form of religiosity over recent decades. My question is, how does a religious community (or populace) stop itself from going over what are, at least to me, some pretty clear lines that divide believing in God and a few other religious concepts from doing something that is just plain, and specifically harmful?
For the sake of clarity, I’ll give an example. Suppose a person is religious and thus believes in Satan1. Add to this the idea that Satan can possess a person and make them into an atheist. So then, if this religious person meets an atheist, they may feel justified in killing them because they are possessed by Satan. That would be crossing a line, to say the least. And, that is not a fictional example.
Continue reading Religion crossing the line: “God is not so silly to allow people to perish” from floods and storms
Republican takeover of the House is much worse than you may have thought, no matter how bad you thought it was
I am speaking of Representative John Shimkus, R-Ill, and the truly astonishing words he uttered before Congress demonstrated in a video that is constnatly being trolled off Google and YouTube by those who don’t want you to see it:
Source and more information here.
If God’s Word is infallible, unchanging, and perfect, then dinosaurs did not live in a different era than humans, and not in great antiquity, and what geologists and paleontologists say about the “age of dinosaurs” must be the word of Satan designed by the dark lord of the underworld to confuse us.
If God’s Word is infallible, unchanging, and perfect, then there can be no destructive climate change. There can only have been one “mass extinction” … the noachain flood.
The person who is reasonably likely to be the next US House of Representative Chair of the Energy Committee has stated that we live on a “Carbon Starved Planet” because the paleontological evidence suggests more carbon in the atmosphere hundreds of millions of years ago, yet he also claims that since God said in Genesis that there will be no more climate disasters after the Flood.
Unbelievable. This madness has got to stop.
John Shimkus has surpassed Michele Bachmann as the worlds most dangerous moron.
The melting of the Arctic ice cap is a complex process
You’ve heard that the Arctic ice cap has shrunk, and that there are sea lanes open in the northern summer that had not been open previously, and on and so forth.
Since the start of the satellite record in 1979, scientists have observed the continued disappearance of older “multiyear” sea ice that survives more than one summer melt season. Some scientists suspected that this loss was due entirely to wind pushing the ice out of the Arctic Basin — a process that scientists refer to as “export.” In this study, Ron Kwok and Glenn Cunningham at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used a suite of satellite data to clarify the relative role of export versus melt within the Arctic Ocean.*
A mosaic of satellite images shows the movement of fragmented ice away from ice edges, which scientists use to track the loss of multiyear ice due to melt. Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory. Click to hugify.
Continue reading The melting of the Arctic ice cap is a complex process
What Happens to Habitats with Global Warming?
As global warming progresses, habitats change in their suitability for various life forms. It may be that moose will not be able to live in Minnesota in the future; Of the two resident moose populations, the one that lives in the area more affected by global warming has pretty much died out probably due indirectly to the effects of increased temperature. There are regions of the rockies where entire forests are dead because of temperature changes. And so on.
Continue reading What Happens to Habitats with Global Warming?
Stormier Arctic Seas Affects Sea Ice (which was melting anyway, but still…)
Interesting to look back at this now that the Arctic Ice Cap is opening up and disappearing:
A new NASA study shows that the rising frequency and intensity of arctic storms over the last half century, attributed to progressively warmer waters, directly provoked acceleration of the rate of arctic sea ice drift, long considered by scientists as a bellwether of climate change.
NASA researcher Sirpa Hakkinen of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass., and the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia, set out to confirm a long-standing theory derived from model results that a warming climate would cause an increase in storminess. Their observational approach enabled them to not only link climate to storminess, but to also connect increasing trends in arctic storminess and the movement of arctic ice — the frozen ocean water that floats on the Arctic’s surface. Results from their study as well as what they could mean for future climate change appeared this month in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters.
“Gradually warming waters have driven storm tracks — the ocean paths in the Atlantic and Pacific along which most cyclones travel — northward. We speculate that sea ice serves as the ‘middleman’ in a scenario where increased storm activity yields increased stirring winds that will speed up the Arctic’s transition into a body of turbulently mixing warm and cool layers with greater potential for deep convection that will alter climate further,” said Hakkinen. “What I find truly intriguing about confirming the link between the rise in storminess and increased sea ice drift is the possibility that new sinks for carbon dioxide may emerge from this relationship that could function as negative feedback for global warming.”
Hakkinen and colleagues analyzed 56 years of storm track data from earlier studies and annual data on atmospheric wind stress, an established indicator of storm activity, that is generated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. The data confirmed an accelerating trend in storm activity in the Arctic from 1950 to 2006. Acknowledging ice as a harbinger of climate change, they next analyzed ice drift data collected during the same 56-year period from drifting stations and after 1979 from drifting buoys positioned around the Arctic that measured surface air temperature and sea level pressure.
James Randi EF supporting AGW denialism again?
I was under the impression that “Reason” magazine was a libertarian neocon climate denialist rag. I could be wrong, but that’s what I thought. I was also under the impression that JREF was pro-science and at this point had gotten beyond the whole “let’s remain skeptical about global warming” thaing, especially since Randi stepped in it a while back and accidentally forgot that only paid-off or delusional scientists denied AGW. But now we find the JREF site pushing Reason magaazine in a post on their site.
Someone please help me understand what I’m seeing here.