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| Headline |
Author |
Published |
Section |
The deniers are winning the war of words
Climate-skeptic books abound on Amazon's top sellers list |
Joseph Romm |
26 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| An Inconvenient Truth is so last year! Al Gore's book may have been No. 1 in 2006, but the global warming deniers and delayers are outselling everyone this year. Of course, Bjørn Lomborg's collection of cherry-picked misinformation, Cool It is the top-selling book in four categories: Climatology, Climate Changes, Public Policy, and even Conservation. But who knew that the top book in both Meteorology and Weather was the Competitive Enterprise Institute's The P ... |
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| Topics: books, climate, climate change skepticism, climate science (all these topics) |
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Arctic ice shrinks by an Alaska plus a Texas
Ice loss hits record low this month in the Arctic |
Joseph Romm |
25 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Hitting a record low on September 16, 2007, the Arctic lost half a million square miles of ice compared to its last record low just two years ago. For all the details, check out the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) website, which notes 'the Northwest Passage is still open, but is starting to refreeze.' We are still on track for an ice free Arctic by 2030, decades ahead of the climate models. This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project ... |
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| Topics: Arctic, climate, climate change impacts, climate science (all these topics) |
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Global warming and wildfires: Senate hearing today at 3:00 p.m.
Senate testimony on yet another example of climate amplifying feedbacks |
Joseph Romm |
24 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Global warming makes wildfires more likely and more destructive -- an amplifying climate feedback that releases more carbon into the atmosphere. The full committee of the Senate for Energy and Natural Resources is having a hearing on the subject today. You can get live video here -- click on Live Webcast. I'm looking forward to this hearing since one of the witnesses is Dr. Thomas Swetnam, Director of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research and Professor of Dendoc ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate science, politics (all these topics) |
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'It will happen'
An amazing AP article on sea level rise |
Joseph Romm |
24 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| This weekend, the AP released the following story: Global warming -- through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding -- is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation. Wow! The first amazing thing is the confidence with which AP makes a statement beyond ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change impacts, climate science (all these topics) |
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A methane feedback from the past strikes again
Bogs, not oceans, may have been the source of an increase in atmospheric methane |
Joseph Romm |
21 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| What triggered the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) about 55 million years ago, which saw the fastest period of warming documented in Earth's geological history? The PETM is associated with a rapid rise in greenhouse gases, particularly methane -- but the big question is where did the methane come from? The most common answer has been the ocean (methane hydrates), but new research in Nature ($ub. req'd) casts doubt on the ocean theory -- instead finding chem ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate science, greenhouse-gas emissions (all these topics) |
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When the heat and the humidity are in tandem
Another positive feedback loop |
JMG |
19 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Scientificblogging reports on the link between atmospheric water vapor and greenhouse gases: The water vapor feedback mechanism works in the following way: as the atmosphere warms due to human-caused increases in carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons, water vapor increases, trapping more heat in the atmosphere, which in turn causes a further increase in water vapor. Basic theory, observations and climate model results all show that the increase ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate science (all these topics) |
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Climate update from NOAA
Second-warmest U.S. August ever |
Joseph Romm |
17 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Let's look at some of the records for the month:, according to the National Climatic Data Center, a division of NOAA: For the contiguous U.S., the average temperature for August was 75.4°F (24.1°C), which was 2.7°F (1.5°C) above the 20th century mean and the second warmest August on record. More than 30 all-time high temperature records were tied or broken, and more than 2000 new daily high temperature records were established. Raleigh-Durham, N.C., equaled ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate science (all these topics) |
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Debunking Bjorn Lomborg: Part II
Lomborg misrepresents possible sea-level rise |
Joseph Romm |
15 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Lomborg is a champion cherry-picker when he isn't just getting his facts wrong, as I argued in Part I. He has a deceptively misleading -- and outright erroneous -- discussion of sea-level-rise projections in Cool It. Let's start with a few all-too-typical howlers: Antarctica is generally soaking up more water than Greenland is shedding, as the IPCC predicts. The IPCC estimates that the very worst additional increase to be expected from Greenland could be 8 inc ... |
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| Topics: books, climate, climate science (all these topics) |
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'Climate change: The limits of consensus'
A must-read article from Science on the underestimation of climate change impacts |
Joseph Romm |
14 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| The new issue of Science has a terrific article that underscores many of the points I have been making here. Its central argument is that the scientific consensus most likely underestimates future climate change impacts, especially in the crucial area of sea-level rise and carbon-cycle feedbacks. The authors are highly credible, led by Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer, one of the most widely published climate experts. I will excerpt the article here at length ($ub. r ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change impacts, climate science (all these topics) |
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Science Friction
U.S. climate-change research found inadequate in many ways |
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13 Sep 2007 |
News |
| Posted at 1:24 PM on 13 Sep 2007 The good news: the National Research Council finds that the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, started in 2002, has gathered some useful climate data. The bad news: well, where do we start. Less than 2 percent of the money spent by the program has gone to studying how climate change will affect humans. The NRC finds that the 13 federal agencies involved in climate research have been &q ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate science, news, politics (all these topics) |
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The desertification-global warming feedback loop
Desertification amplifies climate change, and vice versa |
Joseph Romm |
13 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Here is yet another carbon-cycle amplifying feedback not in most climate models. On the one hand, the United Nations' top climate official, Yvo de Boer, announced that: Climate change has become the prime cause of an accelerating spread of deserts which threatens the world's drylands. On the other hand, he pointed out that desertification would, in turn, accelerate climate change: You'll see a sort of feedback mechanism ... quite a lot of carbon is captured in ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change impacts, climate science, desertification (all these topics) |
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Take that, Bjørn!
Harvard economist disses most climate cost-benefit analyses |
Joseph Romm |
12 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Harvard economist Martin Weitzman has a new paper in which he points out that the vast majority of conventional economic analyses of climate change should carry the following label: WARNING: to be used ONLY for cost-benefit analysis of non-extreme climate change possibilities. NOT INTENDED to cover welfare evaluation of extreme tail possibilities, for which a complete accounting might produce ARBITRARILY DIFFERENT welfare outcomes. In short, if you don't fact ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate science (all these topics) |
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Will polar bears go extinct by 2030? Part II
Loss of summer ice in the Arctic will threaten polar bear survival |
Joseph Romm |
11 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| We've seen the USGS predict that two-thirds of the polar bear population will be wiped out by 2050. But that analysis assumes the Arctic will still have summer ice then. The USGS acknowledges (PDF) their projection is 'conservative' since it is based upon an average of existing climate models and 'the observed trajectory of Arctic sea ice decline appears to be underestimated by currently available models.' In fact, the Arctic now is poised to lose all its ice by 2030 ... |
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| Topics: Arctic, climate, climate change impacts, climate science, habitat loss, polar bears, wildlife (all these topics) |
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The phrase 'glacial change' needs to be retired
Glacial melting is accelerating more quickly than projected |
Joseph Romm |
10 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Climate change is occurring much faster than the IPCC models project. The Greenland ice sheet is a prime example. Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat recently: We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at two metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change impacts, climate science, Greenland (all these topics) |
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Republican, global warming denier, and sun worshiper
Fred Thompson's confused stance on climate change |
Joseph Romm |
08 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| He's running for president now, so let's revisit Fred Thompson's climate change confusion. He took some standard denier myths and threw in a dash of his own unwarranted sarcasm to create this mishmash on the Paul Harvey radio show: Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, politics (all these topics) |
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Australia faces the 'permanent dry,' as do we
Drought predicted to spread across Australia and the United States |
Joseph Romm |
06 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| The story of Australia's worst dry spell in a thousand years continues to astound. Last year we learned, 'One farmer takes his life every four days.' This year over half of Australia's agricultural land is in a declared drought. How bad is it? One Australian newspaper is reporting: Drought will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation's urban water industries chief ... 'The urban water industry ha ... |
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| Topics: Australia, climate, climate science, severe weather, United States (all these topics) |
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A must-read 1972 climate prediction
Rate of global warming predicted 35 years ago in Nature |
Joseph Romm |
05 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Nature just published this remarkable letter by Neville Nicholls of Australia's Monash University: Climate: Sawyer predicted rate of warming in 1972 Thirty-five years ago this week, Nature published a paper titled 'Man-made carbon dioxide and the 'greenhouse' effect' by the eminent atmospheric scientist J.S. Sawyer (Nature 239, 23-26; 1972, $ubs. req'd). In four pages, Sawyer summarized what was known about the role of carbon dioxide in enhancing the natural gr ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science (all these topics) |
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Hurricanes are getting stronger -- thanks to global warming!
Climate change is increasing the frequency of Category 5 storms |
Joseph Romm |
04 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Global warming has long been predicted to make hurricanes more intense. Well, now we are seeing more intense hurricanes. Chris Mooney has a great post on the recent storm surge of Category 5 hurricanes, now that Felix has joined that once-elite club. He notes: There have now been 8 Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes in the past 5 years (Isabel, Ivan, Emily, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dean, Felix). There have been two Atlantic Category 5s so far this year; only three ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change impacts, climate science, severe weather (all these topics) |
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Storms a brewin'
Global warming will spawn severe storms and tornados, reports NASA |
Joseph Romm |
31 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| We have known for a while that global warming is making our weather more extreme, especially extreme heat, drought, heavy rainfall, and flooding. Now we have more predictions: NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth's climate warms. Perhaps that is why we have been setting records for tornados lately. This is especially bad news for this country because, as th ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change impacts, climate science, severe weather (all these topics) |
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Taking the measure of measurement
Is climate change an artifact of computer models? |
JMG |
31 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Electric Politics has an audio interview on measuring climate change that might be of interest to many here.Here's the intro:The main knock against anthropogenic climate change -- more or less unchanged since the 1980s -- is that a cabal of cunning computer modelers have managed to dupe, co-opt, bamboozle, or intimidate climate scientists into believing fantastic, yet unsubstantiated, allegations. Recently put forward by the redoubtable Freeman Dyson, this critique also, unfortu ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science (all these topics) |
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Eye on the storm
Thoughts on Chris Mooney's Storm World |
Andrew Dessler |
31 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| I recently finished Chris Mooney's great new book Storm World. There have been lots of reviews (see Chris's blog for a pretty complete list), so I won't write another one here. Instead, I thought I would highlight the part I particularly appreciated, and what I think needed more emphasis in the book. First, the high point: The book does a great job of detailing the turbulent interface between knowledge and ignorance where science operates. Science is a contact sport, ... |
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| Topics: books, climate, climate science (all these topics) |
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Editorial vs. news
The Wall Street Journal contradicts itself on global warming |
Kit Stolz |
30 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| The Wall Street Journal is universally admired among journalists for its news and analysis; for its editorial page, not so much. A spectacular example of the latter's ability to mislead appeared yesterday, under the cute title Not So Hot, in which the anonymous editorializers adroitly attacked NASA, environmentalists, climate change models, and climatologists James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt over a statistically insignificant data correction. The misleading editorial was rew ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science (all these topics) |
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Looking over our shoulder
Thoughts on the GISS temperature adjustment |
Andrew Dessler |
26 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| There has been a lot of blogging recently about the problem with the temperature record for the continental U.S. RealClimate described the problem thusly: Last Saturday, Steve McIntyre wrote an email to NASA GISS pointing out that for some North American stations in the GISTEMP analysis, there was an odd jump in going from 1999 to 2000. On Monday, the people who work on the temperature analysis (not me), looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch bet ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate science, scientific research (all these topics) |
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Are scientists overestimating -- or underestimating -- climate change? Part III
On the climate change 'point of no return' |
Joseph Romm |
23 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| I've argued that scientists are not overestimating climate change, and in fact are underestimating it because they are omitting crucial amplifying feedbacks from their models. In this post, I'll show how these omissions suggest the climate has a 'point of no return' that severely constrains the safe level of human-generated emissions. A major 2005 study [$ub. req'd] led by NCAR climate researcher David Lawrence, found that virtually the entire top 11 feet of permafr ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate science (all these topics) |
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Are scientists overestimating -- or underestimating -- climate change? Part II
A closer look at the argument for climate change underestimation |
Joseph Romm |
23 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| My previous post debunked an article that argued scientists have seriously overestimated climate change. Now let's look at the evidence for a serious underestimation of climate change. To do that, we must understand the fatal flaw with the IPCC's over-reliance on the poorly named 'equilibrium climate sensitivity' (ECS). Recall that the ECS is the 'equilibrium change in global mean surface temperature following a doubling of the atmospheric (equivalent) CO2 concent ... |
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| Topics: climate, climate science (all these topics) |
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