Real Climate Science

Climate science is fun!

http://sify.com/

http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html

Chemistry and physics, not politics
In that class I first saw a remarkably simple diagram from decades of data gathered at the top of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano. The hockey stick diagram, as it has since become known, showed the rapid and relentless rise in carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere from the 1950s forward.

I also learned a basic truth about CO? — it works like a one-way mirror, allowing the sun’s heat in, but preventing it from leaving. If you increase the amount of CO? in the atmosphere, you increase the amount of heat trapped by the CO?.

I realized that the underlying driver of climate change is that basic. Add more carbon dioxide, trap more heat. It is chemistry and physics, not politics.

In 1988, after I’d returned to the newspaper, I read about the congressional testimony of NASA atmospheric scientist James Hansen. He testified, according to his recent recounting of the event, that “the Earth had entered a long-term warming trend and that human-made greenhouse gases almost surely were responsible.” Global warming, he said, “enhanced both extremes of the water cycle, meaning stronger droughts and forest fires, on the one hand, but also heavier rains and floods.”

http://www.minnpost.com/

In unrelated news, the forecast for International Falls, Minnesota looks lovely for the weekend.

http://www.wunderground.com/

With cold weather forecast in Philadelphia for the next two weeks, it looks like Philadelphia’s hottest year ever will end more than a degree cooler than the year 1828.

http://www.wunderground.com/

1828 averaged 59.6 F

http://books.google.com

http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html

In her Dec. 4 column, Bonnie Erbe displays the kind of fuzzy thinking that for too many people these days passes for logic.

She states that the United Nations says 25 million people have been forced to migrate because territory became uninhabitable because of climate change. She goes on to say that the UN predicts 200 million people will become refugees because of climate change by midcentury, when, she postulates, “it will become a problem even those who doubt the existence of man-made climate change can’t ignore.”

Apparently, her reasoning goes, there is climate change, therefore it is man-made.

Can she explain, I wonder, how ice ages came and went without man’s help?

Europe was covered with glaciers 10,000 years ago. What man-made activity caused that? The earth warmed and the ice retreated. What man-made activity caused that? Oil deposits exist in Arabia today because the area was a lush swamp millions of years ago. Did it become a desert because of man-made activity?

You cannot surmise effect proves cause. Else the rooster will be able to prove to all that the sun rising is a result of his crowing.

Facts are facts because they are facts, not because they are strongly believed, widely believed or conveniently believed. They are facts because they are true and provable.

Larry Viles

Knoxville

http://www.knoxnews.com/

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_16810241

She also forecast a mild winter in the UK last year.

Obama’s science advisor John Holdren forecast ice free winters in the future if we continue respirating CO2.

Looks like it probably won’t happen this winter, with temperatures averaging -30C and 181,086 Manhattans of ice in the Arctic.

We have plenty of ice here in Colorado, and we are fifty degrees south of the North Pole – so I think it may be at least another year or two before winters get ice free in the Arctic. A little more CO2 might push the Earth over a tipping point.

http://en.vivanews.com/

http://www.scotsman.com/

Sea level has been rising for 15,000 years, because we are no longer having an ice age. When we do have an ice age again, sea level will fall. It has nothing to do with CO2.