Archive for March 2011
On Friday, March 26, 2011 I gave a public talk at my institution titled Climate Change is Not Being Nice to Mother Nature to a group of mostly college-aged people. Although I spoke about the various far-ranging impacts of climate change, I focused on the impact on humans and especially the impact on New Yorkers. It is always important to focus one’s presentation to the audience at hand. Read on for a summary of the presentation as well as links to a few others I have created. Read the rest of this entry »
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study (BEST) results confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.
As Climate Progress is reporting today, climatologist Ken Caldeira states:
“I have seen a copy of the Berkeley group’s draft paper, which of course would be expected to be revised before submission.
Their preliminary results sit right within the results of NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU, confirming that prior analyses were correct in every way that matters. Their results confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.
Their analysis supports the view that there is no fire behind the smokescreen put up by climate science deniers.”
Of course it should. Scientists go to great lengths to ensure accuracy despite what you may have heard from conspiracy buffs about doctored data. The planet is getting warmer and humans are primarily responsible because we are overloading the air with carbon. This carbon is causing less heat to leave the planet which, in turn, is warming the oceans, surface, and atmosphere.
My Letter to the Editor in response to a very poor editorial:
Your March 17th editorial titled “Ending the global-warming argument” has confused science with politics. There is no informed debate that humans are overloading the air with too much carbon and that this carbon is causing the planet to dramatically warm. There is no informed debate that increasing carbon will cause this warming to continue. (For perspective, the amount of CO2 that is added to the air every day by human activities, primarily from burning fossil fuels, is equal to the amount of oil spilled by 8,000 Gulf Oil Spills per day.) Virtually every publishing scientist and all international science academies agree on this.
Who else is concerned? Military and intelligence experts warn that climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions. Health officials warn us that climate change could be the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Climate change was recently listed as the greatest strategic risk currently facing the property/casualty insurance industry.
We need to reduce our emissions of carbon for the sake of our public health, national security, and economic competitiveness. Surely it is foolish to base our economic energy needs on sources that are dwindling in supply and increasing in price when, instead, we could move toward energy efficiency and cheaper-by-the-year, infinite sources such as the sun and wind. If we stay addicted to fossil fuels and do not begin investing in those technologies now, we will be buying them from China in the future instead of selling it to them.
Update: March 24, 2011: Please see the superb post by grypo over at Skeptical Science titled The Washington Times Talks Greenhouse Law
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the US Congress has entered the intellectual wilderness, a sad state of affairs in a country that has led the world in many scientific arenas for so long. Global warming is a thorny problem, and disagreement about how to deal with it is understandable. It is not always clear how to interpret data or address legitimate questions. Nor is the scientific process, or any given scientist, perfect. But to deny that there is reason to be concerned, given the decades of work by countless scientists, is irresponsible.
This is a brief excerpt from an editorial titled Into ignorance that appears in the journal Nature. Please read the entire piece.
”A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” — Mark Twain
Chris Horner of The Daily Caller, and the usual suspects Marc Morano, Anthony Watts, and Senator James “Global Warming is a Hoax” Inhofe (R-OK) are certainly living up to this quote. They are spreading a lie about Penn State climate researcher, Dr. Michael Mann. More disturbingly, somebody in Washington, DC is feeding information to various climate deniers in a transparent attempt to discredit Dr. Mann. Could it be Senator Inhofe or his staff?
On Friday, the Glory satellite failed to reach escape velocity and crashed to Earth. In a recent reply to a news reporter, Dr. Bruce Wielicki of NASA eloquently described NASA’s role in studying climate and why the loss of this satellite was a huge setback for climate science. Dr. Wielicki has graciously allowed me to repost his response here.