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…
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…
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…
First published on Truthout: October 4, 2015. Over 20 years after a global consensus of earth scientists at the Rio Earth Summit first suggested we control carbon dioxide emissions to prevent dangerous climate change, the United States has finally acted. This is excellent news for 20 years ago but today, Kyoto V2 (the EPA’s Clean…
Final Sentence “Indeed, based on our new analysis, the IPCC’s (1) statement of two years ago – that the global surface temperature “has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years” – is no longer valid.” The abstract: Much study has been devoted…
Once again we ask “why has the apparent global temperature lagged behind accelerating CO2 emissions”? The reasons are numerous and logical, yet the media and prominent climate change deniers continue to ignore their significance, if they even understand they exist at all. Cherry picking the beginning point of the so-called hiatus by starting it during…
Work from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Zurich, Switzerland has found that about 18% of moderate daily precipitation extremes and about 75% of moderate daily hot extremes, that are currently occurring over land, are attributable to warming. An ensemble of the latest models was used to try and average the individual modeling from…
First published on Truthout.org April 24, 2015. “The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming [from 1951 through 2010].” IPCC 2013, Summary for Policy Makers.(1) This statement differs radically from the almost ubiquitous understanding that part of global warming has been caused by humanity and part is natural. In…
From the National Snow and Ice Date Center: “Air temperatures reached record high levels at two Antarctic stations last week, setting a new mark for the warmest conditions ever measured anywhere on the continent. On March 23, at Argentina’s base Marambio, a temperature of 17.4° Celsius (63.3° Fahrenheit) was reached, surpassing a previous record set…
The location of this “hole” in the North Atlantic is in a crucial area where Gulf Stream water sinks. This sinking of warm water buries heat and carbon dioxide in the deep ocean in a massive global current that stretches all the way around the tip of Africa to the Eastern and North Pacific. This…
Whatever it has been that has kept the average global temperature from skyrocketing along with greenhouse gas concentrations is likely being overwhelmed. Of most significance is an unprecedented hot spot in the North Pacific that has probably signaled an end to the current cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Last summer’s global sea surface…
From the National Snow and Ice Data Center Website for March 4, 2015. There were four warm temperature state records set in February but surprisingly, no record cold state temperature records were set. There were 13 near-record cold state temperatures (2nd through 5th coldest) and three near-record warm state records (2nd and 3rd warmest). http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2015/03/possibly-low-in-the-north-definitely-high-in-the-south/…
The Arctic is warming on average twice as fast as the global average, but in places the warming is double even this rate. Implications are immense as the Arctic is literally the worlds air conditioner, or at least most of the world as most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere. Thaw out…
First published on Truthout, February 11, 2015. The last time we had this discussion was 2013, remember? Before that it was 2010. Before that it was 2005 and everything started with the Super El Nino in 1998. Statistically, saying that 2014 was the hottest year ever is a very valid thing and if you understand…
Varying reports reveal that “tens of thousands” of individuals died in Europe in the 2003 heat wave with 15,000 in France alone. Reporting today still use the inaccurate estimates from the day. The European Union sponsored a study that laid to rest the speculation but this study’s results are so astonishing the numbers are still…
This work out of the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, reduces the lag in warming from CO2 emissions from 30 to 50 years to 10. But their constraints are quite different from what we have come to know as the temperature lag. This experiment looked at 6,000 model runs of a 100…
Earth has warmed about 0.9 degrees C on average and the Arctic on average has warmed two to three times as much as the average. Daily temperature variation and annual temperature variation make a difference. Climate scientists have been warming us for over a generation that climate change would mean greater insect infestations on a…
This installment discusses challenges with our ability to collect valid ocean warming data and how these challenges have systematically underestimated the role that our oceans have played in keeping our atmosphere cooler than the models say it should be. One thing that the climate deniers get right, maybe the only thing, is that we still…
Work from the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW (The University of New South Wales), Australia Shows what temps would be like without anthropogenic interference—including aerosols in the mid 20th century! These researchers used the latest generation of climate model simulations to investigate the occurrence of hiatus periods in the past and under two future scenarios….
First Published on Truthout, August 27, 2014 (link) The fundamental climate change policy question today is not how much we should reduce carbon dioxide emissions by when, but what will currently proposed carbon dioxide emissions reductions do to our climate in the near-term? In addition, what are the ramifications of short-lived climate pollutants that are…
