Posts
May 06, 2013
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8:34 AM | Malaria in the UK and climate change
A couple of days ago I saw this tweet: Pests? maybe; #malaria? don’t think so! #Climatechange could bring malaria to the UK bit.ly/16GO3UO #fearmongering — Tim France (@francetim) 5. mai 2013 I agree with Tim France, but with the short tweet he also assumes UK will be a rich country with a good health system [...]
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Potty peer Chris Monckton’s complaint against VUW academics Jonathan Boston, David Frame and Jim Renwick has been roundly rejected by the university. An investigation carried out by a senior member of the academic staff found that Monckton’s allegations of fraud and libel were “not substantiated”. VUW vice chancellor Pat Walsh was unequivocal in his support [...]
[Get the full story at Hot Topic...]
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2:08 AM | 2013 SkS Weekly Digest #18
SkS Highlights
John Cook's Participate in a survey measuring consensus in climate research provides an opportunity for SkS readers to to rate the abstracts of the climate papers with the purpose of estimating the level of consensus regarding the proposition that humans are causing global warming. Dana's Roy Spencer's Catholic Online Climate Myths garnered the most comments of the articles posted during the past week.
Toon of the Week
H/T
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12:00 AM | Investigating the Investigator
By Kelly One of the major draw cards for the Earth Sciences comes from the tantalizing prospect of field work. And for marine scientists, this couldn’t be more exciting than when field work involves a trip on a research vessel; … Continue reading →
May 05, 2013
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This is a guest post by Dr Gavin Kenny1, a New Zealand scientist who has worked on agricultural adaptation to climate change in NZ and world wide. He has a very interesting and informed perspective on the sorts of things NZ agriculture should be doing to address climate change as it happens — exactly the [...]
[Get the full story at Hot Topic...]
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The following article is a reprint of a news release posted by the Finnish Meteorological Institute on Apr 29, 2013
The Finnish Meteorological Institute has updated its estimates concerning the impact of rising sea levels on the Finnish coast.
Photo: Eija Vallinheimo
Post-glacial rebound and changes in the Earth’s gravity field protect the Finnish coast against rising sea levels, especially in the Gulf of Bothnia. In the Gulf of Finland, the sea level is starting to rise.
The rise in
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Why not devote 15 minutes of your time to a good cause? John Cook of Skeptical Science, one of the regulars on The Climate Show, who just happens to be a research fellow in climate communication for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, is crowd-sourcing a survey of the climate literature to [...]
[Get the full story at Hot Topic...]
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3:48 AM | 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #18A
China taking the lead on climate change
Climate collision course: CO2 levels about to hit 400 PPM
Climate negotiations resume in Bonn
Global carbon dioxide levels set to surpass 400 ppm milestone
Hurricane Sandy dumped 11bn gallons of raw sewage
Scientists anxious as CO2 levels to cross 400 PPM
U.S. cities joining push to dump fossil fuel investments
Video of Arctic sea ice loss goes viral
Warmer seas may impact Antarctic clams’ reproduction
Where the sea has risen too high
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By Kelly There are few things as soothing to my ears as the philisophical physicist. I have listened to Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot (see below) more times than I can count, but I’m not a physicist so I can’t count very … Continue reading →
May 04, 2013
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7:14 PM | 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #18B
Australian farmers suffer through drought
Belief in biblical end-times stifling climate change action in U.S.
Drought and heat may fuel early fire season in West (US)
Fast-moving climate zones are speeding extinction
Global carbon dioxide levels near worrisome milestone
How climate scientists are being framed
Ocean thermal power will debut off China's coast
Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change
Rain will get more extreme
Time for Big Green to go fossil free
Unburnable fuel
White House
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A recent study linking cold winters in Europe to sunspots has updated bad science reaching back to the 19th century for the internet age, reveal Geert Jan van Oldenborgh from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and his colleagues, helped by an unholy alliance between Roger Pielke Sr and Stefan Rahmstorf.
Sirocko, F., Brunck, H. & Pfahl, S. (2012). Solar influence on winter severity in central Europe, Geophysical Research Letters, 39 (16) DOI: 10.1029/2012GL052412
Pittock, A. B. (1983). Solar variability, weather and climate: An update, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 109 (459) 23-55. DOI: 10.1002/qj.49710945903
van Oldenborgh, G., de Laat, A., Luterbacher, J., Ingram, W. & Osborn, T. (2013). Claim of solar influence is on thin ice: are 11-year cycle solar minima associated with severe winters in Europe?, Environmental Research Letters, 8 (2) 24014. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024014
Citation
May 03, 2013
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This article is a reprint of a press release posted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on May 2, 2013.
The World Meteorological Organization’s Statement on the Status of the Global Climate says that 2012 joined the ten previous years as one of the warmest — at ninth place — on record despite the cooling influence of a La Niña episode early in the year.
The 2012 global land and ocean surface temperature during January–December
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Bill McKibben — that most thoughtful and interesting of climate campaigners — is bringing his very successful Do The Maths campaign to New Zealand next month, and will be speaking in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin. Bill’s argument is straightforward: The maths are simple: we can burn less than 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide and [...]
[Get the full story at Hot Topic...]
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12:01 AM | The ugly side of modelling
By Claire When I decided that doing two separate projects within my PhD was a good idea, I must have recently eaten too many nerds. What was I thinking?? My PhD consists of two very separate sections. The first part, … Continue reading →
May 02, 2013
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The Skeptical Science team has a paper coming out within a few weeks in the high-impact journal Environmental Research Letters (ERL) (many thanks to all who donated money to help make the paper freely available to the public). In our paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, we analysed over 12,000 papers listed in the 'Web Of Science' between 1991 to 2011 matching the topic 'global warming' or 'global climate change'.
Reading so many
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12:00 AM | Giant rose discovered on Saturn!
By Claire Now before we all resort to name calling, I realise that a giant rose wasn’t actually discovered on Saturn on Monday. What was discovered however, is a giant hurricane centred on the planet’s north pole – an equally … Continue reading →
May 01, 2013
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Roy Spencer was recently interviewed by the website Catholic Online, and unfortunately spent most of the interview repeating long-debunked climate myths. He could have simply answered the questions with factually correct information, and expressed his climate 'skepticism' where appropriate. Had he taken this approach, the Catholic Online readers could have become better informed on the subject of climate change, as well as potentially seeing where Roy Spencer's 'skepticism' comes
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9:30 AM | Assessing forecasts
This is actually part of pursuing whether ESMR was screwy, but I decided that to show that nothing was up my sleeve, it was time to talk some about assessing forecasts. That, and it's something I've been meaning to talk about for a while. The thing is, forecast assessment is not nearly as simple as we sometimes think. Having judged many a science fair project that is comparing weather forecasts, I've seen many of the same issues come up there, too. For precipitation forecasts, […]
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4:53 AM | Earthquakes: Magnitude and Intensity
The last days there have been many news about earthquakes at different locations. However, some of the news mix the concepts of magnitude and intensity. Magnitude and Intensity measure different characteristics of earthquakes. Thus, this post will just briefly explain the difference between an earthquake intensity and its magnitude.MagnitudeMagnitude measures the energy released at the source of the earthquake and is determined from measurements on seismographs. It is a quantitative measure of
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Any day now the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide measurement station is going to bump through 400 part per million, and stay there for a week or two. In my Daily Blog column this week I ruminate on what that means by taking a look at the last time CO2 stayed over 400 ppm for an [...]
[Get the full story at Hot Topic...]
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3:39 AM | Rage, rage against the dying of the ice
Yesterday morning I climbed up the short track on the Tasman Glacier terminal moraine to the lookout, and was amazed by how much the glacier’s calving front had retreated compared with my last visit to the same spot, back in February 2008 (below – click on either picture to see a bigger version). Across the [...]
[Get the full story at Hot Topic...]
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The following article is reprinted by permission of its author, Stephen Leahy, who writes for the Inter Press Service (IPS) News Agency. To access the article as posted on the IPS website, click here.
Mining tar sands bitumen in Canada. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS
XBRIDGE, Canada, Apr 28 2013 (IPS) - Nearly 70 percent of known reserves of oil, gas and coal must remain in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change. So why did the energy industry spend 674 billion
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12:00 AM | Learning more about SPICE
By Kelly As an apprentice scientist, and an apprentice science communicator I have learned a lot over the last few days about error in reporting, science miscommunication and some of the problems posed by the instantaneous global reach that social … Continue reading →
April 30, 2013
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6:17 PM | Big booms over the northland
by Ned Rozell Near a small village in Russia, Marina Ivanova stepped into cross-country skis and kicked toward a hole in the snow. The meteorite specialist with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and Vernadsky Institute in Moscow was hunting for fragments of the great Chelyabinsk Meteorite that exploded three days earlier. This search was different from others. Ivanova has looked for metallic stones on the world’s great deserts and in Antarctica, places where heavenly rocks stand out […]
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After growing up in a remote corner of Alaska, marine biologist Zach Brown wants to start a school to teach future scientists about environmental sciences and sustainability. Zach tells producers Mike and Leslie about his vision for the Inian Islands … Continue reading →
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By Claire and Nerilie Last week I posted about some new research carried out by Nerilie Abram, from the Research School of Earth Sciences at ANU. While the research itself is definitely worth a read (if you have access to … Continue reading →
April 29, 2013
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By Kelly We are back on the subject of geoengineering, prompted by an article in Nature Climate Change that reminded me I had to write on the feasibility of injecting foreign particles into our atmosphere, in an attempt to avoid the direst … Continue reading →
April 28, 2013
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8:13 AM | 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #17B
Antarctic nematodes and climate change
Carbon tax on the table in the Senate
Climate change inspires a new literary genre: cli-fi
Climate change may reduce Indian crop output
Connect the dots on climate change
Guy Stewart Callendar: Global warming discovery marked
Hope for US-China collaboration on climate change, clean energy
Industrialised nations' greenhouse gas emissions dipped in 2011
Shale mining under Great Barrier Reef 'likely to be banned'
Soils cannot lock away Black Carbon
Wild
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5:49 AM | 2013 SkS Weekly Digest #17
SkS Highlights
SkS's Dana Nuccitelli achieved another milestone when his article, Why is Reuters puzzled by global warming's acceleration? was posted on his new blog,Climate Consensus - The 97% hosted by The Guardian (UK). For additional details about this new blog, see Dana's Announcement: New Guardian Blog by Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham.
Dana and Anne-Marie Blackburn co-authored Hockey Stick Scores Another Point in Climate Study: Op-Ed posted on
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12:00 AM | Not-so-Serious Sunday 45: Imploding turbines
By Kelly In another tribute to the wonders of slow motion video I present Veritasium‘s detailed look at imploding metal drums, by condensing water from vapour inside a sealed vessel. But it’s more than just cool footage, it demonstrates the importance … Continue reading →
