I thought this summary of the latest climate facts at the end of 2011 is useful. Peter Gleick is a specialist in water and climate change, and is a MacArthur fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in the US. He reminds us here of the key facts of the climate issue, which is useful in the face of having to listen to the endless ideological banter of non-experts with dodgy datasets.
Peter Gleick, CEO Pacific Institute, MacArthur Fellow, National Academy of Sciences
Published in Forbes magazine, Jan 21, 2012
For readers of Forbes, the debate over climate change often takes the form of “tit-for-tat” blogs, conflicting commentary, and dogmatic ideological statements. Lost in this verbal debate are often the simple facts and data of climate change and the immense and definitive global observations of the ways in which our climate is actually changing around us.
So, without much commentary, here are just a few simple and clear pictures (and links) showing how the planet continued to warm and change around us in 2011. And these facts are just part of why all national academies of science on the planet and every major geophysical scientific society agree that humans are fundamentally changing the climate.
Continue reading »
Dr Selina Ward, University of Queensland, Jan 20, 2012
The literature on the effects of ocean acidification on the biology of marine organisms continues to grow and now covers a wide range of taxa, regions and ecosystems and is reaching the consciousness of the larger community. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Matthew Ridley suggesting that ocean acidification isn’t a big problem has elicited a strong response from many scientists, especially those discovering the many ways that OA will negatively affect our future oceans.
Continue reading »
Peter Gleick, Contributor
CEO Pacific Institute, MacArthur Fellow, National Academy of Sciences
The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011 – a year in which unprecedented combinations of extreme weather events killed people and damaged property around the world. The scientific evidence for the accelerating human influence on climate further strengthened, as it has for decades now. Yet on the policy front, once again, national leaders did little to stem the growing emissions of greenhouse gases or to help societies prepare for increasingly severe consequences of climate changes, including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea-levels, loss of snowpack and glaciers, disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and much more.
Continue reading »
John Cook, ABC Religion and Ethics, Nov 17 2011
In a much publicised recent speech, Cardinal George Pell strongly endorsed the importance of evidence in public debate. He argues that “the debates about anthropogenic global warming can only be conducted by the accurate recognition and interpretation of scientific evidence.”
It would be hard to find anyone who would disagree with his sentiment – a proper understanding of climate must be built on a foundation of empirical observations. There’s just one problem: Cardinal Pell fails to practise what he preaches.
Continue reading »
While some ecologists worry about whether or not life can evolve fast enough to keep up with the current rate of rapid anthropogenic climate change, another ‘evolutionary’ event is in progress. Prof John Abraham has updated a graph from a few years ago which shows an upward trend in climate skeptic Dr John Christy‘s published conclusions about the rate of climate change. Like global temperature itself, the rate of change in average global temperature that Dr Christy has been reporting appears to be increasing.
‘Evolution’ or just a slow learner?
Continue reading »
Shawn Lawrence Otto, Huffington Post, 11/1/11
A hearing today has implications for academic freedom across the country. A Virginia judge grantedclimate scientist Michael Mann the right to intervene on his own behalf in a lawsuit filed by a climate change denial group seeking to get his private papers and emails from the University of Virginia. While this is an important victory for American-style freedom and privacy, its background is a story of just the opposite – attempts at authoritarian repression of science for political purposes.
In 2010 newly-elected Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a climate change denier, sued the University of Virginia to get Mann’s private papers. Cuccinelli wanted to sift through them in the wake of “climategate” to see if he could find anything he could spin into a case under the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, arguing that while an employee of UVA, Mann’s work on climate change may have used public money to perpetrate a fraud.
Continue reading »
I thought these responses to the BEST study from the leading experts are worth posting (comments collected by our friends at the UK Science Media Centre). A far cry from the response of ideologues such as Anthony Watts and Andrew Bolt:
Prof Sir John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government, said:
“Clearly this study needs peer review, but if correct it is pleasing to hear that this new analysis conforms with US work at NASA and NOAA and that of Phil Jones and his colleagues at the UK Hadley Center-UEA Climatic Research Unit. This work adds to the evidence about how climate change is
Others have also commented:
Continue reading »
Global warming is real, according to a major study released today. Despite a issues raised by climate denialists, the Berkeley Earth’s Surface Temperatures study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world temperature of approximately 1°C since 1950.
Professor Richard A Muller, who led the study, is UC Berkeley physicist, and long-time climate skeptic has publicly admitted that he was wrong about the IPCC and the evidence for global warming. See press release here. One wonders why Muller was motivated to repeat what the IPCC has been doing that much greater scales of rigor. Whatever the reasons, the conclusions that Muller has come to has thrown a ‘cat among the pigeons’ with respect to climate deniers like Anthony Watts and Fred Singer.
UPDATE: Here is Kelly Rigg in the Huffington Post - is climate denial unraveling?
Continue reading »
As a result of an extensive research and monitoring program funded by the Queensland and Australian Governments over the last 5 years a greatly better understanding of the risks to Great Barrier Reef ecosystems from pesticide residues is now available and in the process of being published in the scientific literature. Most of the papers are or will be published in special issues of Marine Pollution Bulletin and Agriculture Ecosystems and the Environment. Some of the MPB papers are already published online and the rest from both issues will follow over the next few months. While the complete set is still uncertain (due to reviewing still in progress) the following are already out:
AFP: September 11, 2011
PARIS — The area covered by Arctic sea ice reached it lowest point this week since the start of satellite observations in 1972, German researchers announced on Saturday.
“The extent of the Arctic sea ice has reached on September 8, with 4.240 million square kilometres (1.637 million square miles), a new historic minimum,” the University of Bremen’s Institute of Environmental Physics said in a press release.
The new mark was about half-a-percent under the previous record low set in September 2007, it said.
Continue reading »
