In 2008, I took a tiny cargo plane to the Inupiaq village of Kivalina, in the northwest of Alaska above the Arctic Circle. I had heard the village would be lost to climate change from erosion, which I imagined to be a slow, gradual, and predictable process. Touring the island and speaking to residents and government workers, I soon realized the erosion is actually often sudden, severe, and erratic, brought on by...
NASA: April tied for 4th hottest on record globally « Climate Progress. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has released its monthly global temperature data. It reveals that there is no April in the temperature record before 2005 that was warmer than April 2011. And that’s in spite of the fact that we are still in the tail end of a major La Niña and just coming out of “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a...
I’ve been watching the Climate Show since episode one and it just keeps getting better. This show is produced in New Zealand and they usually have a guest climatologist on the show. This week it’s Professor Jason Box, a prominent Greenland expert. Well worth watching: http://hot-topic.co.nz/the-climate-show-7-box-and-boxsters-the-cryosphere-special/
The disinformers and many in the media love to focus on where it is cold in the winter. It has been cool where many people live. Brr! Unfortunately for homo sapiens, it’s been staggeringly warm where the ice is. I’ll do a post on Greenland shortly, but the NSF-sponsored researchers at UCAR/NCAR have posted some staggering data on just how warm it has been in northern Canada: To put this picture into even sharper...
Skeptical Science has just released this superb and easy to understand PDF document on the evidence for AGW and the poor arguments presented by the so-called “climate skeptics”. ————————– The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism Scientific skepticism is healthy. In fact, science by its very nature is skeptical. Genuine skepticism means considering the full body of evidence before coming to a conclusion. However, when you take a close look at arguments expressing climate...
The first anniversary of ‘Climategate’, Part 1: The media blows the story of the century November 15, 2010 This week marks the one-year anniversary of what the anti-science crowd successfully labeled ‘Climategate’. The media will be doing countless retrospectives, most of which will be wasted ink, like the Guardian’s piece — focusing on climate scientists at the expense of climate science, which is precisely the kind of miscoverage that has been going on for...
September 20, 2010 Sea-level rise has the potential to reshape the coastal environment. High resolution (Credit: NOAA) Scientists analyzing measurements taken in the deep ocean around the globe over the past two decades find a warming trend that contributes to sea level rise, especially around Antarctica. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, cause heating of the Earth. Over the past few decades, at least 80 percent of this heat energy has...
It’s already clear that the climate talks in December will go nowhere – so what do we do? By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 21st September 2010. The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now expects from December’s climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings. When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don’t want to...
September 19, 2010 The amount of warming we are going to subject our children and countless future generations to depends primarily on three factors: 1. The sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor (how much warming you get if we only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm and there are no major “slow” feedbacks). We know the fast feedbacks are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is...
AFP – Wednesday, September 8SendIM StoryPrint PARIS (AFP) – – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists. In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually. Together, that...