When permafrost melts, methane can build up beneath impermeable soils and suddenly erupt, apparently. In the formerly frozen tundra of Siberia, this is exactly what seems to have started happening. This 100 foot-wide hole of some obvious but unstated depth could have been caused by a meteorite, missile explosion or perhaps aliens. But this is…
Screen et al., Amplified mid-latitude planetary waves favour particular regional weather extremes, Nature Climate Change, June 22, 2014. Recent publications tell us that a warmer planet will have more cold extremes over high latitudes and a little south of there (the Great Lakes and northward in the US). This is because of Polar Amplification where…
The climate change enhanced polar vortex has continued to break logic records. While we are experiencing a Great Lakes with ice cover greater than anything in 20 years, large parts of the North American West are experiencing their warmest winters ever recorded and Arctic sea ice is flirting with the lowest extent in the record…
From Drexel and Stanford Universities: “The climate change counter-movement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act on the issue of global warming … Like a play on Broadway, the counter-movement has stars in the spotlight – often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians – but behind…
Even though global emissions are way up, US carbon dioxide emissions appear to be way down; down 16 percent since the peak in 2007. This would be good, but it’s a mirage. In 2011, 1.5 gigatons of CO2 were offshored in China (mostly) through goods produced there and shipped to the US. This leaves the…
The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works heard climate testimony as to whether or not climate change was real. Conservatives on the committee continued to use their tried and true talking points from the smoking, acid rain, and ozone depleting chemical controversies: that the science is not clear, the cause is not certain,…
There is surprising new sea level rise news coming from the UK and Bangladesh is in trouble. Bangladesh is a tropical monsoon nation that gets hit by cyclones on average 16 times per decade. A cyclone struck the southeastern coast in May 1991, killing 136,000 people. One to one and a half meters of sea…
Climate change projected by the IPCC 2013 report under the business as usual scenario (RCP8.5) projects climate change in the next 100 years to be as big as the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction event 56 million years ago. Changes today however are happening 100 times faster than the PETM. The PETM was likely a methane…
Methane (and natural gas), and black carbon (soot) are short-lived greenhouse gases relative to carbon dioxide, N20 (nitrous oxide) and CFC (chlorofluorocarbons). Limiting these short-lived greenhouse gases have obvious benefits in reducing warming. Focusing emissions reductions on these gasses also gives the benefit of delaying warming in the short-term, but really only in a world…
Arctic Amplification means more energy in the Arctic. It’s warmer there now so there is more energy there. The “amplification” part of Arctic Amplification refers to how the Arctic, which is warming at twice or more the rate of the rest of the world, reacts with the rest of world. The global air currents that…
A study in Geophysical Research Letters has found moss beneath a recently melted glacier on Baffin Island that dates back 44,000 to 120,000 years using radiocarbon-14 dating. This technique uses the radioactive decay rate of carbon-14, a rare but predictable version of a normal carbon atom, to date things that were once alive. The radioactive…
Climate Change Communications From the Media – A Mini Symposium Global Warming Psychology 101: Our climate has changed, but the message is not getting through. How can the media better present current climate science so that the public can convince our leaders to act? October 6th, Scholz Biergarten in Austin, 3:45 to 6:45 pm Suggested…
The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation, have been taking a serious look at some radically crazy sea level rise figures. It seems that the Australian Outback has taken over sea level rise. Those widespread floods that ended (temporarily?) Australia’s latest 10-year…
This is an easy sit-down-and-shut-up explanation for the global warming has stopped myth. In 1998 we had an extraordinary Super El Nino unsurpassed in the modern temperature record that broke the the previous record by 33 percent. This record was almost twice the previous largest jump since climate change impacts began (1981, 21%). This massive…
Increasing warming in the Pacific has been difficult to prove because of El Nino and La Nina. ENSO as it is known, or El Nino Southern Oscillation, is the periodic change in south and equatorial Pacific ocean temperatures that can wreak havoc around the globe. El Nino (warming equatorial and south Pacific ocean temperatures) conditions…
“Climate change looks far more threatening than it did six years ago” said Lord Nicholas Stern, a professor of economics and chairman of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics. Stern, Chief economist for the Blair administration in the UK, World Bank Chief Economist, and author of the single most exhaustive evaluation…
Have I got a couple of good ones for you tonight(?!) From the Australian National Institute of Science (CSIRO–Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) and the Dresden University of Technology in Germany; One’s opinion on climate change is not as common as one thinks. We tend to overestimate how many people have the same opinion…
I have been busy and let my posting fall behind. Not because of the Zombie Apocalypse—it’s not that bad yet, I have simply fallen behind because of: Three articles on Truthout (see below), my book printer has a new beautiful color printing process and lots of local advocacy work. I also have several other posts…
The most recent discoveries in climate science bear little resemblance to what we hear in the media. Greenland’s melt in 2012 for example has been widely advertised in the media as just another weather event, similar to many in the past. The adage that we cannot tell for sure if any single weather event was…
Welcome to climate change. It gets weirder every day. An old old friend saw a white-tail hawk in Manvel last week. Manvel is just south of Houston and is an uncommon sighting on the far northern edge of this Mexican bird’s normal territory. We have red bud trees blooming in Austin on the first day…
