I’ve noticed that a lot of smart people who nonetheless “did not accept” AGW, or at least, denied the “A” part of it, have stoped talking about it lately. I’m speaking here of people I know personally. You know who you are, and you know you were wrong, and I just wanted to say that I forgive you. Mostly.
In the mean time, have a look at this:
Continue reading Anthropogenic Climate Change: It’s for real.
This Rob Dunbar is NOT Robin Dunbar the Archaeologist.
Rob Dunbar hunts for data on our climate from 12,000 years ago, finding clues inside ancient seabeds and corals and inside ice sheets. His work is vital in setting baselines for fixing our current climate — and in tracking the rise of deadly ocean acidification.
Continue reading Rob Dunbar: Discovering ancient climates in oceans and ice
In the 1960s, the whole idea of a “greenhouse effect” was well understood, and assumed to be an important potential factor in climate change. So was glaciation, and the short and medium term future of the Earth’s climate was less clear than compared to now. But the basics were there … C02 was being released into the atmosphere, this could cause a greenhouse effect, and that would warm the earth. Certainly by the early 1980s, it was possible to make some thumb-suck estimates of how much the earth would warm given various assumptions about CO2, and it was not that difficult to see that a lot of fossil carbon was being put into the atmosphere.
Continue reading Science as a Contact Sport by Stephen Schneider
Why does the wind blow, and why does it blow the way it does?
Continue reading Why the Wind Blows: A History of Weather
See the missing bit? That is a 1.5 kilometer retreat of the so-called “calving front” of the glacier.
In truth, this particular sort of even is not that unusual, but what is interesting is that new satellite monitoring capabilities allow researchers to notice these events more or less when they happen, as opposed to during less frequent inspections of satellite imagery.
And, there are some climate-change related features of this event.
Continue reading What was that splash? Oh. Greenland melting.
Anthropogenic global warming has been suspected for decades, and a simple one paragraph long characterization of the problem 40 years ago was substantially identical to any accurate characterization we might make today. One has to wonder why after 40 years of time we still see headlines telling us that it might, after all, turn out to be true that anthropogenic global warming is real. Indeed, it is a bit disconcerting when the inestimable climate blog RealClimate notes that this is the 35th “Anniversary of Global Warming” as a term in the peer reviewed scientific literature (though I suspect it is older). (See RealClimate’s post on the anniversary for very important details!)
The phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming as a point of policy discussion is older than 35 years. Below is a memo from one White House staffer to another both to eventually become quite famous in their own ways, regarding the “carbon dioxide problem.” You will find a link to a copy of the original, and some context notes for you youn’uns who may not remember the mid 20trh century. Below the fold.
Continue reading 1969 Global Warming White House Memo
The Triassic is old. This book is new. That is a hard to beat combination.
Continue reading Triassic Life on Land: I love this book
Various environmental organizations have been using imagery of dead baby birds with toothbrushes in their guts and solid floating masses of garbage to describe and raise alarm about what has become known as the North Pacific Central Garbage Patch. Yet, the small but important amount of research that has been done there shows that the NPCGP consists of many (alarmingly many) pieces of plastic that are very small, the largest being “about the size of the fingernail on your pinkey.”
Albatross may or may not be affected by garbage, but it is not likely that the garbage shown in the guts of the baby birds in these particular media comes from the NPCGP. Yes, the plastic in the NPCGP and elsewhere may have a negative environmental effect, but the pictures of floating garbage, which are all from coastal estuarine regions down river from major “third world” population centers, are NOT of the NPCGP and thus constitute bald faced lies. Bald faced lies by organizations like Green Peace is the fuel that right wing anti-environmental pro-business neo conservative yahoos run on.
But the situation is even worse than that because of what appear to be the misguided efforts of a British Billionaire who has managed to frighten those best in a position to criticize him into remaining silent. In fact, I’m a little nervous writing this blog post.
One of the world’s oldest plants turns out to be a 13,000 year-old scrub oak (Quercus palmeri, or Palmer’s Oak) in Southern California. Apparently this tree has survived for so long, despite the fact that it was born in the ice age and there have been numerous climate changes since then, by cloning itself, hiding in a crevice, being small, and growing slowly. Luck was involved as well, almost certainly.
Continue reading Out of place oak is 13 thousand years old
To 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.”
This 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.
Continue reading Global warming and the Minnesota Moose. Part IIa
We 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.
Continue reading Global Warming, The Decline of the Moose, and “Minnesota Nice”
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 mountain thing is over. We just dipped down. No more up. That’s the end of it.” and then turn around and drive home.
I mean, really, this is pretty freakin’ simple.
If you’d like to view Latif’s power point (as a PDF file) click here. Slide three is the one these morons are talking about.