Diary Of The Last Age

The ENSO , the La Nina, El Nino oscillation, strongly affects global temperatures, but mostly independently of the underlying trend from anthropogenic carbon dioxide.  Thus temperatures could rise significantly in a particular due to El Nino, but that wouldn't be due to global warming but to changes in ocean temperatures in the Pacific.  I say mostly, though, because global warming itself has an effect on the ENSO.  As global temperatures rise, the ENSO itself will rise with it. An El Nino has important effects on the weather in the Pacific Northwest, producing hot, dry weather there.  And it looks like we're going to experience a "super" El Nino in 2015, giving us a long, really hot summer. 2015 Is Crushing It For Hottest Year On Record If anything like these forecasts come true, then 2015 will be the blow-out hottest year on record. Indeed, if the high-end of recent forecasts comes true, then, as Slate meteorologist Eric Holthaus has explained , “this El Ni...

Two words, Carbon Tax.  It has to happen now, and even a conservative Cato Institute Libertarian has come around . Jerry Taylor, a longtime veteran of the libertarian think tank Cato Institute who recently founded his own libertarian organization, the Niskanen Center , is a vocal proponent of this perspective. About five or six years ago, he says, he was convinced by a series of discussions, mainly with other right-leaning thinkers, that he was wrong on climate policy. His position "fundamentally switched." In March, he released a new policy brief, "The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax," which argues for a steadily rising "revenue-neutral" fee on fossil fuel producers. Aside from a small portion set aside to cushion low-income households, all the revenue would be devoted to reducing other taxes. The carbon tax must be imposed as soon as possible if we are to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.  Now even a conservative is making the cas...

The group of global warming deniers is shrinking.  They are joining the group of those that now admit that there's warming and that it's anthropogenic, but won't admit to the serious consequences.   It’s the hottest trend in climate denial. Long gone are the days when people can publicly deny that  the planet is warming  or that  humans are responsible  without facing widespread mockery. Those who oppose taking serious action to curb global warming have mostly shifted to Stage 3 in  the 5 stages of climate denial . Stage 1: Deny the problem exists Stage 2: Deny we’re the cause Stage 3: Deny it’s a problem Stage 4: Deny we can solve it Stage 5: It’s too late I have news for them -- it is very likely going to be far worse than they realize.  I've warned about this before .   One of these hangs over us like a Sword of Damocles , the methane bound to the permafrost in Siberia .  Another is the Antarctic Larsen-C ice shelf ....

First, I'd like to bring up the furor about some apparent hiatus in global temperatures that I referred to in my last post.  The climate change deniers prefer to focus on one piece of the puzzle to the exclusion of all the others.  This is a logical fallacy endemic to deniers.  If you wish to show that there is nothing to fear from climate, you must disprove all of the evidence, not just one of them. Despite what the deniers say, global temperatures are rising right now, as I show , but there is more evidence, and it should be disturbing.  As I've described , it is possibly worse than they say because scientists usually apply a linear model because our understanding of the underlying processes aren't well developed enough to use a nonlinear model.  Proposing nonlinear models is difficult because there are so many of them, and choosing one requires a detailed theory that we don't have for many climatic processes. But there is now evidence confirming my earl...

Christopher Monckton, well known climate change denier trumpets his findings :  that global temperatures, as measured by the RSS Satellite Data, haven't risen in the last eighteen years and five months.  He fails to mention that the UAH Satellite Data does show an increase.  Instead he adds the RSS and UAH data together to show a very small increase. A serious problem with his analysis, besides his having no actual expertise in statistical analysis, is that his regression model assumes a linear trend in temperature over that interval, a very strong assumption.  I shall present here an analysis which doesn't make that assumption and which shows a clearly increasing global temperature from the middle of 2009 in both the RSS and UAH data. So far we have an increase in .8 degrees Celsius from 1880.   Fitting a linear trend from the middle of 2009 to April 2015 the RSS data projects a decadal increase of .2726 degrees, and the UAH data .6347 ...

I've confronted the issue of GMO's before .  Among people I admire GMO's have become anathema. The problem though is that we will need to be able feed eight billion people by the 50's.  Activists were warning of mass starvation back in the 1960's, but it didn't happen, and it didn't happen because of the Green Revolution .  Well, our backs may be against the wall again sometime soon, and we'll need another revolution.  And as I describe here , the anti-GMO activists may be seriously preventing this revolution from happening.  It is on this issue I diverge from my political friends severely.