Real Climate Science

Earth to Arctic : What part of “death spiral” don’t you understand?

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php

How dare those Republicans have an agenda during my autocracy.

Obama: GOP tried to “sneak” agenda into budget

The oceanic crust is about six miles thick, and floats on top of gigantic convective cells originating over a thousand miles down in the mantle. The movement of these convective cells is what causes plate tectonics and earthquakes like the Japanese quake last month. Relative to the size of the sphere it sits on, the crust is thinner than an apple skin.

By some amazing new climate science principle, an increase of 0.0001 atmospheric CO2 concentration over the crust is affecting the speed of convection in the mantle thousands of miles below it.

(And they wonder why we think that climate science is the chosen profession among morons.)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

The connection between greenhouse gasses (GHG) and global warming is a difficult one for many Americans to grasp. The connection may be obvious for 3p readers but for folks that may be global warming naysayers, the connection between human induced emissions and a global heat wave is tenuous. Why should folks and companies reduce their GHG output if they do not even believe in global warming connection? How can we put this argument to bed for once and for all?

At the Navigating the American Carbon World 2011 conference, both of California’s most recent governors, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Governor Gray Davis, spoke on how to terminate the GHG debate. One would think, since the governors come from different political parties that their political positions and responses to global warming would be very different. Yet, there seemed to be agreement between the former governors.

http://www.triplepundit.com

Evil ice doesn’t understand that it reached its peak over a month ago.

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGFXGwHsD_A]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-t9k7epIk]

Greenland is getting greener

In the heyday of the Vikings, before 1300 A.D., the populous republic of Iceland lived largely by agriculture; the Norse raised sheep in Greenland, where no sheep graze today. After 1300, the cold crept down and the Icelanders gave up farming

– Time Magazine 1947

Tasiilaq East Greenland

http://www.andreassen.gl/andreassen/webcam.htm

Continue reading →

No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you’ve heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry–a Category 4 storm with wind bursts that reached 125 m.p.h.–exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast–when the emergency becomes commonplace–something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.

http://www.time.com/

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: “I don’t believe that the world’s present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row.”

http://www.time.com/

Greenland is getting greener and Iceland’s ice is shrinking. The Arctic is losing its chill. According to Dr. Hans Ahlmann, professor of geography at Stockholm University, all the cold lands around the northernmost Atlantic are entering a balmier climatological era.

Dr. Ahlmann has been collecting evidence from a variety of sources: temperature records, glaciers, trees, fish. In the Scandinavian countries, he says, the winters have been getting milder since the 19th Century.

In the heyday of the Vikings, before 1300 A.D., the populous republic of Iceland lived largely by agriculture; the Norse raised sheep in Greenland, where no sheep graze today. After 1300, the cold crept down and the Icelanders gave up farming. The Greenlanders were exterminated, perhaps by starvation, perhaps by glacier-fleeing Eskimos. Now that the tide has turned, Dr. Ahlmann, a good Norseman, hopes the warm cycle will last for at least a few centuries.

http://www.time.com/

h/t to Jimbo