Here is a novel way for responding to sealevel rise. Just in legislate it out of existence! This article by Bruce Henderson appeared in the News Observer on May 28. If you look at the lobby group behind all of this, NC20, you will see that they also claim that internationally renowned researchers such as Stefan Rahmstorf has been fabricating stories about sea level rise so that big companies such as Munich Re can raise their insurance rates! This is nutty! Continue reading
ABC Environment 8 AUG 2012; Michael Mann
THE FIRST SCIENTIST to alert Americans to the prospect that human-caused climate change and global warming was already upon us was NASA climatologist James Hansen. In a sweltering US Senate hall during the hot, dry summer of 1988, Hansen announced “it is time to stop waffling… The evidence is pretty strong that the [human-amplified] greenhouse effect is here.”
At the time, many scientists felt his announcement to be premature. I was among them.
I was a young graduate student researching the importance of natural — rather than human-caused — variations in temperature, and I felt that the ‘signal’ of human-caused climate change had not yet emerged from the ‘noise’ of natural, long-term climate variation. As I discuss in my book,The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, scientists by their very nature tend to be conservative, even reticent, when it comes to discussing findings and observations that lie at the forefront of our understanding and that aren’t yet part of the ‘accepted’ body of scientific knowledge. Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal, Aug 7, 2012
It’s time for conservatives to compete with liberals to devise the best, most cost-effective climate solutions.
One scorching summer doesn’t confirm that climate change is real any more than a white Christmas proves it’s a hoax. What matters is the trend—a decades-long march toward hotter and wilder weather. But with more than 26,000 heat records broken in the last 12 months and pervasive drought turning nearly half of all U.S. counties into federal disaster areas, many data-driven climate skeptics are reassessing the issue. Continue reading
ABC News. July 25, 2012 16:02:54
So far this month, 27.8 millimetres of rain has fallen in the metropolitan area.
The average for July is 169.6 millimetres.
The previous low was when recording first began in 1876 and the city received 61.5 millimetres. Continue reading
On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically. According to satellite data, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July.
Sydney Morning Herald, Opinion, July 15 2012.
EVERY so often a discovery is made which piques the public’s interest in science once more. A single proof captures the imagination by the significance and the scale of the advance. This week’s news that physicists had proved with near certainty the existence of the Higgs boson is such a point in the history of science.
The scale of the experiment matches the scale of the intellectual leap achieved. A huge apparatus, 27 kilometres in circumference, buried 100 metres below the French-Swiss border near Geneva, accelerated particles in a near-perfect vacuum to speeds just below that of light and measured the effect of their collisions. Minute variations in energy released prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which had been postulated in theory by Peter Higgs in 1964 to explain the mass of elementary particles. Continue reading
From the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (June 2012).
After reaching near-average levels in late April, sea ice extent declined rapidly during the early part of May. The rest of the month saw a slower rate of decline. Ice extent in the Bering Sea remained above average throughout the month.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland
I must say, that’s quite a quote from the new Queensland Premier. Premier Newman was responding to the UNESCO report which has brought the spotlight on the coastal Queensland and Australia’s management of the World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef. I guess what we had all been suspecting is now true. Queensland equals coal not coral! Continue reading
Contact: Katy Human, 303-497-4747
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Barrow, Alaska, reached 400 parts per million (ppm) this spring, according to NOAA measurements, the first time a monthly average measurement for the greenhouse gas attained the 400 ppm mark in a remote location.
Carbon dioxide (CO2), emitted by fossil fuel combustion and other human activities, is the most significant greenhouse gas contributing to climate change.
“The northern sites in our monitoring network tell us what is coming soon to the globe as a whole,” said Pieter Tans, an atmospheric scientist with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colo. “We will likely see global average CO2 concentrations reach 400 ppm about 2016.”