Diary Of The Last Age

But are they getting any information about it?   Global warming shouldn't be an controversial issue. Young people should be apprised of what the future world they will inherit may be like.  They should be allowed to express the concerns.  In my view there should be demonstrations and activist groups of young people bringing this to the attention of their political representatives.  But that is not happening. In my day when I was in high school, the latter 50's, civil rights was controversial but there was no one keeping us from expressing our opinions on this topic, or from learning about it in school.  In school there was no requirement for "teaching the controversy", i.e., presenting positions in opposition to civil rights.  Nor were there any parents upset about this.  I'll have to say, though, that where my wife Jan grew up, South Carolina, it was a very different story. But now, the study of climate change in high school is very controversial ...

The global temperature over the last 15 years or so has slowed down providing an opening for people denying global warming to post claims that the planet is not warming.  By going back to 1998, a record year due to an El Nino (and not to greenhouse gases) denialists have attempted to show that the global temperature is actually declining.  This attempt however is classic lying with statistics called "cherry picking". Global temperatures have slowed though.  As I've discussed before  this has to do with ocean temperatures.  In fact any discussion of global temperatures should be about the biosphere , i.e., both atmospheric and ocean temperatures.  In my earlier discussion, more heat was being absorbed by the ocean effectively slowing down the absorption in the atmosphere.  As described here , new  results  are now showing that: Using temperature readings going back to the 1880s and IPCC climate models, the researchers determined that...

Update:   Science News reports on a study with additional confirmation of the effects of anthropocentric CO2. It is customary for global warming denialists to claim there is no basis for the greenhouse effect. However , The impacts of CO2 on radiative transfer have been studied since the 1860s, and modern spectroscopic databases date to Air Force calculations for heat seeking missiles in the 1950s and have been validated by an enormous number of observations, both in situ and via remote sensing. The vertical fingerprint of the impact of increasing CO2 (warming troposphere, cooling stratosphere) was calculated in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald  decades before it was observed. This fact must give us pause.  There are a variety of factors affecting the global climate, but one of them, the concentration of CO2 in the biosphere has an inevitable implication, dire consequences if the concentration continues to rise, which it will if nothing is done.  There is a lot a ...

A new report published in Nature  delineates the threat from ocean acidification described  here .  I've posted about the threat to Maine , and here and here about the Pacific Northwest where I live.  As I described  We have an historical event showing us what happens when the CO2 concentration accelerates, the PETM boundary, the  Paleoeocene-Eocene Boundary ,  where 55.8 million years ago, the oceans and atmosphere were filled with greenhouse gases over a very short period of time.  The ocean acidification at that time caused the largest loss of sea life in the history of the planet.  We are heading for something even worse.

Update:  In addition to the conflict of interest issue, RealClimate shows  how wrong Soon is about our climate being driven mostly by the sun. One of the favorite denialist arguments is that the climate scientists who accept the evidence for catastrophic global warming have a conflict of interest, that they are raking in large amounts of money from the government for their research.  They are arguing that the true motive of these scientists is to make money and that they have to believe in global warming to make that happen, to get that government largesse. To believe that argument, they have to misunderstand how the process works.  These researchers are getting money for assistantships, computer time, and equipment for data gathering.  Their university salaries are often replaced in part by the government grants, but they aren't making any more personal money than if they were to pursue some other line of enquiry.  Bottom line: they aren't getting ric...

Jan and I have been serious cooks for 40 years, going back to our encounters with James Beard's, Irma Rombauer's, Madhur Jaffrey's, and Julia Child's cookbooks.  My signature dish is beef short ribs, simmered for hours in wine, stock and vegetables, and for Christmas day dinner, a beef Wellington, a filet mignon smothered in duxelles, pate, and baked in a puff pastry shell.  At our dinner parties we always loved to show off our skill with vegetables, but the meat was the star.  Unfortunately for our grand and great-grand children this type of fare will only be a distant memory.  It takes a lot of grain to produce a pound of meat, but the real problem is that the grain for animals, not really grain humans want to eat, competes with acreage required for grain for human consumption.  As global warming eradicates land used for agriculture, a choice will have to be made between producing grain for humans or for animals.  The problem is that animals will f...

The greenhouse effect has been known for 190 years. The existence of the greenhouse effect was argued for by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The argument and the evidence was further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838, and reasoned from experimental observations by John Tyndall in 1859, and more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.  In 1917 Alexander Graham Bell wrote “[The unchecked burning of fossil fuels] would have a sort of greenhouse effect”, and “The net result is the greenhouse becomes a sort of hot-house.” [  Bell went on to also advocate for the use of alternate energy sources, such as solar energy . An important issue though is what the sensitivity of global temperatures is to the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that is, what temperature can we expect given a certain amount of atmospheric CO2.  A study has just been published that provides some evidence.   In non-technical terms [I]t comes, of all places, from ...