Posts tagged Global Warming

Denialism Heats Up

10
7 months ago
by dcpetterson in
Im in the Daily Mail

The Daily Mail (Photo credit: South­East­ern Star ★)

Oppo­nents of the sci­ence behind global cli­mate change have latched on to two recent devel­op­ments in their ongo­ing efforts to claim what’s hap­pen­ing isn’t hap­pen­ing. First is a counter-​​intuitive fact: Antarc­tic sea ice has reached a new his­toric max­i­mum. How can ice in the ocean around Antarc­tica be increas­ing if the earth is grow­ing hot­ter? Sec­ond is a claimed sta­tis­ti­cal lull in the rise of global land tem­per­a­tures, lead­ing Britain’s Daily Mail to con­fi­dently pro­claim, “Global warm­ing stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report qui­etly released… and here is the chart to prove it.”

Are the cli­mate change deniers right? Can we sleep soundly now? Let’s take a closer look. (more…)

Shaping Reality Through Law

17
11 months ago
by dcpetterson in

Past sea lev­els and future pro­jec­tions. (Source: EPA)

North Car­olina may decide to deny global warm­ing sci­ence in a big way.

A new state law in the works would require esti­mates of com­ing sea level change to be based on his­tor­i­cal changes from the past, ignor­ing sci­en­tific stud­ies which indi­cate how lev­els are actu­ally likely to rise in the future.

A state-​​appointed sci­ence panel pro­jected that the sea level off the coast of North Car­olina may rise as much as a meter by the year 2100. The state leg­is­la­ture appar­ently didn’t like this idea, because it would affect coastal com­mu­ni­ties, tourism, most of the big cities in North Car­olina, and much of the state’s indus­try. Plus, it is con­trary to con­ser­v­a­tive ide­ol­ogy, which holds that global warm­ing doesn’t exist — but things wouldn’t be incon­ve­nient if it did — and it shouldn’t elicit any action on the part of humans in any case. (more…)

The Secret Truth about Global Warming

19
1 year ago
by dcpetterson in

I don’t nor­mally do tin­foil hat stuff (though I do owe you all a Kennedy assas­si­na­tion arti­cle). But some impor­tant infor­ma­tion has recently come to my atten­tion, and I need to share it.

We found out that the US gov­ern­ment has dis­cov­ered that the Chi­nese have been active on Mars. The gov­ern­ment learned this because our Mars probes detected the Chi­nese equip­ment. The Chi­nese sent unmanned probes to the Red Planet — equip­ment which is pow­ered by solar energy and pro­duc­ing oxy­gen from com­pounds in the soil, intended to cre­ate a hab­it­able atmos­phere on Mars. (more…)

Of Caps and Trades and Flips and Flops

5
1 year ago
by Monotreme in

Is Mitt Rom­ney a flip-​​flopper on global warming?

Recent remarks in Penn­syl­va­nia have thrown the issue into the spot­light again.

Cer­tainly, his Repub­li­can pri­mary oppo­nents think so. For­mer Utah Gov­er­nor and for­mer Ambas­sador to China Jon Hunts­man has placed him­self clearly behind the sci­ence of man-​​made global warm­ing from CO2 emis­sions, with this August 18 tweet:

To be clear. I believe in evo­lu­tion and trust sci­en­tists on global warm­ing. Call me crazy.

(more…)

The BEST Study Yet

290
1 year ago
by dcpetterson in

The most com­pre­hen­sive exam­i­na­tion of his­tor­i­cal tem­per­a­ture data has con­firmed, unequiv­o­cally, the real­ity of global warming.

BEST study image

BEST study image

Researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley stud­ied more than a bil­lion tem­per­a­ture records going back to the 1800s, from fif­teen sources and over 39,000 sta­tions around the world. They addressed the major con­cerns and crit­i­cisms from global warm­ing deniers. Their con­clu­sion: it’s real, it’s hap­pen­ing, and it’s accelerating.

Accord­ing to the Berke­ley Earth Sur­face Tem­per­a­ture (BEST) project, the aver­age global tem­per­a­ture has risen by 1 degree Cel­sius (almost 2 degrees Fahren­heit) since the 1950s. This is in close agree­ment with the esti­mate from other major orga­ni­za­tions that main­tain offi­cial records on the world’s cli­mate (includ­ing NASA’s God­dard Insti­tute for Space Stud­ies in New York, the US National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion (NOAA), and the Met Office’s Hadley Cen­tre, with the Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia, in the UK), thus fur­nish­ing con­fir­ma­tion and sup­port for those esti­mates and mod­els as well. (more…)

The Ice, Man, Recedeth

13
1 year ago
by Monotreme in

Cling­ing to a dying lifestyle, or going with the floe? Source: myfun​space​.com

This week’s Econ­o­mist has an arti­cle about the unex­pect­edly rapid dis­ap­pear­ance of Arc­tic sea ice.

In 2007, the area of the Arc­tic Ocean cov­ered by sea ice reached a record min­i­mum, at 4.2 mil­lion square kilo­me­ters, or about 1.7 mil­lion square miles.  Sep­tem­ber of each year, at the end of sum­mer, is when the sea ice reaches its annual min­i­mum. This year’s min­i­mum, 4.3 mil­lion square kilo­me­ters, was almost as low as the record. The thick­ness, which can­not be eas­ily mea­sured, seems to have reached a his­tor­i­cal min­i­mum as well, and the total vol­ume of arc­tic ice may be as low as it has ever been in the last 8,000 years, since the global warm­ing that sig­naled the end of the last Ice Age.

The mod­els used by cli­ma­tol­o­gists are clearly faulty and have not accu­rately pre­dicted the vol­ume of sea ice. How­ever, con­trary to the asser­tions of Gov­er­nor Rick Perry, the books (mod­els) haven’t been cooked to exag­ger­ate the rate of sea ice dis­ap­pear­ance — the mod­els have under­pre­dicted the loss of sea ice. (more…)

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