Super Nino may have caused the temperature peak, but the chaos is weather too. The big question is, “how much will it cool off next year?” It may not be much. The way the extremes are increasing (and have you seen the recent jump in sea level rise) it is becoming obvious that we have…
New research has for the first time defined the tipping point between a stable WAIS and an Antarctica that collapses uncontrollably. Potsdam Institute researchers (Levermann and Feldmann) tell us is that if we do not return our oceans to their preindustrial temperature by 2050, we will see out of control collapse of the WAIS and…
We have entered the non-linearly increasing phase of climate change impacts. This is pretty much standard climate science that climate scientists said we would endure if we delayed action. Could they have imagined that we would delay for 20 years? What would they have said 20 years ago about what we should expect if the had…
Two degrees C was first suggested as an upper limit to where we should allow our climate to warm by Nordhaus (Yale) in the American Economic Review in 1977 with the justification that this amount of change would exceed the temperature envelope where our mature civilization has developed. Nordhaus cites Sellers 1974 and NCAR 1974…
Scientists have been planning for how to implement a transformation to an alternative energy infrastructure for more than several years now. Jacobson 2013, represents years of effort and others have been doing the same. We know how to evolve our energy infrastructure, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how efficient…
The driver of our climate system has changed in the last two decades from one that is controlled by annual emissions, to one that is controlled by already emitted CO2. This means that previous strategies to control annual emissions are no longer meaningful and we must now turn our attention to the already emitted climate…
For 24 years we have been attempting to implement climate reform, but because strategies are complex, controversial and inequitable, we have nothing to show for this effort save a near-failing carbon credit program in the EU. By giving ourselves permission to seek zero warming, we go beyond the failed strategies of the past into a…
Pop Quiz: How Much of the Warming is Natural? Or more precisely; “How much warming has been caused by mankind’s emissions of fossil greenhouse gases?” None About half Most of it All of it None of the above This is a piece of science I have been struggling with since I discovered the Milankovitch cycles…
