A century's worth of records suggests that hurricanes are on the rise and a warming Atlantic is to blame

Using records dating back to 1855, hurricane researchers say they have uncovered an ongoing rise in the number of Atlantic hurricanes that tracks the increase in sea surface temperature related to climate change. Critics of such a link argue that this trend is merely because of better observations since the dawn of the satellite era in the 1970s. But the authors of the new study say the conclusion is hard to dodge.

"Even if we take the extreme of these error estimates, we are left with a significant trend since 1890 and a significant trend in major hurricanes starting anytime before 1920," say atmospheric scientists Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Update: You can read Holland and Webster's full paper here. [.pdf]. Chris Landsea (specialist with the National Hurricane Center) post a rebuttle here [.pdf] (interestinly enough, prior to the paper's release). Further discussion on both items can be found at Chris Mooney's blog, The Intersection.

More on this news item at National Geographic and New Scientist (UK). For further information, please see the links to the researchers' pages included above. Also, see Chris Mooney's recent book Storm World for more on the history of hurricane study, meteorology and climate science (my current reading).

[I'm going to be very strict in whatever I post here in the future. The public discussion for this seed is for related links and discussion of the science only. Non-related items, friendly or not, will be deleted unless relegated to a separate discussion. In other words, if you feel a need to comment on me or deny otherwise sound science, then clip this to some other group and start a new, private thread. Otherwise, your comment will be deleted. You have been warned. If you are in doubt, then don't post your comment.]

Forests, after all, cool the atmosphere by drinking in carbon dioxide from the air. A new study, however, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that forests' other climatic effects can cancel out their carbon cleaning advantage in some parts of the world. Using a three-dimensional climate model, the research team mimicked full global deforestation and also studied the effects of clear-cutting in different regions of latitude, such as the tropics and boreal zones. Apparently, these natural carbon sinks only do their job effectively in tropical regions; in other areas, they have either no impact or actually contribute to warming the planet. In fact, according to this model, by the year 2100, if all the forests were cut and left to rot, the annual global mean temperature would decrease by more than 0.5 degree Fahrenheit.

Africa, the continent most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, is not acting urgently enough to stem the dire economic and environmental damage of greenhouse gas emissions, the UN cautioned Tuesday.

The warning came after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report Friday detailing the impacts of global warming, which, it said, will wreak the most havoc on the world's poor.

"This report is a drastic message about the impact of climate change on the economic development of this continent," UN Environment Programme chief Achim Steiner told a press conference in Nairobi.

"Africa is on the frontlines of having to cope with the reality of climate change – not in the future, but today," Steiner added.

So how simple can you make a model that contains the basic greenhouse physics? Pretty simple actually. You need to account for the solar radiation coming in (including the impact of albedo), the longwave radiation coming from the surface (which depends on the temperature) and some absorption/radiation (the 'emissivity') of longwave radiation in the atmosphere (the basic greenhouse effect). Optionally, you can increase the realism by adding feedbacks (allowing the absorption or albedo to depend on temperature), and other processes - like convection - that link the surface and atmosphere more closely than radiation does. You can skip directly to the bottom-line points if you don't want to see the gory details.

The second report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reveals that global warming impacts are already advancing, and will get worse

From space, climate change is obvious. For more than 20 years satellite images have shown springtime greenery bursting forth earlier and earlier in that season. Thanks to global warming, the growing season is lengthening in many parts of the world. And though this may boost crop yields in some areas, it will have a host of other, less benign impacts, such as transforming the eastern Amazon from rain forest to savanna, according to the second report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Spring is coming early to the western slope of Colorado's Rocky Mountains, providing continuing signs of a warming world, according to a conservation biologist.

"I'm anticipating there'll be some flowering again in April this year, which is something that never used to happen," said David Inouye, a professor at the University of Maryland in College Park.

This will be Inouye's 37th season at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic, outside the resort town of Crested Butte.

Dozens of scientists make the annual trek to a meadow at RMBL about 9,500 feet (2,900 meters) above sea level to study everything from wildflowers to marmots.

Many of the studies indicate a warming planet.

In addition to the early flowers, robins return earlier from their wintering grounds, and marmots, chipmunks, and ground squirrels emerge earlier from hibernation than they once did, the scientists say.

How might U.S. national security be threatened by mega-droughts, coastal flooding, killer hurricanes, food scarcity and the other ecological calamities scientists widely predict will occur if global warming continues apace?

No one knows, but Sens. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., think it's time to find out. Two weeks ago, the bipartisan duo introduced a bill that would require federal intelligence agencies to collaborate on a National Intelligence Estimate to evaluate the security challenges presented by climate change.

UK fungi season now longer in autumn, with an extra fruiting in spring.

Climate change could turn the autumnal fungus foray in Britain into a year-round event, say researchers who have recorded changes in fruiting patterns over the past half-century.

In the autumn, the UK mushroom season has doubled in length, from about 33 days in the 1950s, to nearly 75 days now, they say. Fungi are starting to fruit earlier, and finishing later.

And some species are fruiting in both spring and autumn — a unique development in response to rising temperatures, says Alan Gange of Royal Holloway, University of London. Although it has been shown that climate change is making birds nest and flowers bloom earlier, he knows of nothing else that has added a complete extra breeding season to its life cycle.

Global warming threatens to extinguish hundreds of millions of human lives and nearly a third of the planet's wildlife, an international panel of climate scientists said in a report issued today.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the world's poorer nations face spiraling rates of death and disease due to increased risk of droughts, floods, storms and other severe climate effects spurred by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Up to 30 percent of animal and plant species could be wiped out by a global temperature rise of 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius), experts said.

The IPCC forecasts a rise of between 3.2 and 7.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.8 and 4 degrees Celsius) by the end of this century.

The new findings, based on the work of some 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries, follow an IPCC statement in February that global warming is "unequivocal" and that human activity is almost certainly the cause.

Climate change is not a future problem but a present one that must be tackled now, concludes the latest chapter of a major climate report.

The report details how different amounts of global warming, ranging from 0°C to 5°C will impact on human society. It also underlines that those who will be most affected are the poor people who are least responsible for increasing levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. Read the summary for policy makers (PDF).

The warming of other solar bodies has been seized upon by climate sceptics; but oh how wrong they are, says Oliver Morton.

If the shooting of fish in barrels offends you, look away. The publication this week of a Nature paper on global warming on Mars offers a fantastic opportunity to kill off one of the silliest climate-sceptic arguments, and I'm more than happy to be pointing the gun at the water.

The sceptical 'argument' — using the word loosely — in question is that global warming on Earth should be seen as a natural, as opposed to anthropogenic, phenomenon because other planets and moons in the Solar System are getting warmer, too (which, indeed, they are). Since what the planets have in common is the Sun, they say, it must thus be the Sun that is driving the warming.

But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world's most vulnerable regions — most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.

But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world's most vulnerable regions — most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.

There is evidence that the world is already feeling the effects of climate change and has been for the past decade. This is what hundreds of UN-backed scientists and politicians will say on Friday 6 April, a source involved in last-minute discussions taking place in Brussels, Belgium, told New Scientist.

The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the first to be based on observations of recent changes in weather, rather than computer-model-based forecasts of future climate.

Dust storms and dark rocks are making the red planet hotter.

Mars is getting hotter. Measurements of the brightness of the planet's surface over the show that the thermometer has ratcheted up some 0.65 °C over a few decades.

Lori Fenton at the Carl Sagan Center, Mountain View, California, and colleagues looked at maps of Mars's 'albedo', a measure of how much light reflects off a surface. By comparing a map from 1976-78 with one from 1999-2000, they found "some pretty dramatic changes", says Fenton. In particular, the southern highlands region of Mars had darkened significantly.

Darkness and heat feed on each other in new simulations that predict a 20-year warming trend on the Red Planet

A darkening of the Martian surface may have slowly warmed the planet over the past 20 years. Based on a model of the Red Planet's climate, researchers report that the brightness or darkness of its sands have a strong effect on its atmospheric temperature. They found that the heat absorbed by dark rock kicks up winds that blow away shiny dust, leaving behind even darker rock. But the predicted warming is hard to confirm, researchers say, and could shift with the sands at any time.

Snapshots over the past three decades have shown vast regions of the Red Planet's surface have brightened or darkened by 10 percent or more, reflecting between 10 and 30 percent of incoming sunlight in total. To determine if albedo or reflectivity changes affect the climate, researchers compared Viking orbiter photos from 1976 to 1978, which mapped the planet's bright and dark spots, to those from 1999 to 2000, when the Mars Global Surveyor discovered a darker Mars.

The Arctic is melting. But is it really the result of global warming? And if global warming is happening, how do we know humans have had anything to do with it? How can we be sure?

Here are ten of the questions most frequently posed by people who are skeptical about whether or not global warming is happening. Some of the answers may surprise you.

The dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice in recent years is the result of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions combined with natural cycles, according to a new study.

The loss of ice will likely change water temperatures and affect the circulation of ocean currents, which may alter climates around the world, the study suggests.

The study reviewed previous research of Arctic sea ice, which showed that the ice has been steadily disappearing since 1979.

In September 2005 satellite images revealed that the Arctic ice was at its lowest level in some 50 years of observation.

"If we compare how much ice we had in September 2005 with a typical September, we've lost an amount of ice about twice the size of Texas," said lead author Mark Serreze, senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"So we're talking about a lot of real estate."

There have been previous periods of Arctic warmth not attributed to human causes, Serreze said, and ice cover grows each winter only to shrink in summer.

But the current loss probably can't be ascribed to natural cycles alone, Serreze believes.

In the March 16 issue of the journal Science, Serreze and colleagues report that the evidence "strongly suggests" the ice loss is caused by human-induced global warming.

Mediterranean corals could strip, but not die, in response to climate change.

Reef-building corals may be more resilient against climate change than scientists had previously thought. Researchers have discovered that some species are able to survive an increase in seawater acidity, even though it strips the individual coral polyps of their protective calcium carbonate skeletons. This may be good news for individual polyps, but it doesn't change the gloomy outlook for reef ecosystems.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, so do the levels of dissolved carbon dioxide in sea water. This leads to an increase in ocean-borne carbonic acid, which is capable of dissolving calcium carbonate. "This is a major problem for corals," says Maoz Fine, a marine zoologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. "Essentially, acidification leads to naked coral."

In what can only be considered a tidal wave of public opinion, a new Yale research survey reveals a significant shift in public attitudes toward the environment and global warming. Fully 83 percent of Americans now say global warming is a "serious" problem, up from 70 percent in 2004. More Americans than ever say they have serious concerns about environmental threats, such as toxic soil and water (92 percent, up from 85 percent in 2004), deforestation (89 percent, up from 78 percent), air pollution (93 percent, up from 87 percent) and the extinction of wildlife (83 percent, up from 72 percent in 2005).

One person in 10 worldwide, including one in eight city-dwellers, live less than 10 metres above sea-level and near the coast – an "at-risk zone" for flooding and stronger storms exacerbated by climate change, a new study reveals.

The research, led by Gordon McGranahan at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, UK, is the first ever to map the location of low, coastal urban centres around the world. "These are areas where the risk of sea-level rise and stronger storms needs to be taken seriously," says McGranahan.

Worst-case warming scenario may bring totally new kinds of tropical climate and cause others to disappear

If global warming continues unabated, many of the world's climate zones may disappear by 2100, leaving new ones in their place unlike any that exist today, according to a new study. Researchers compared existing patterns of temperature and precipitation with those that may exist at the turn of the century, based on scenarios put forth in the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue rising at the same rate, up to 39 percent of Earth's continental surface may experience totally new climates, primarily in the tropics and adjacent latitudes as warmer temperatures spread toward the poles.

"Today at 2:30 EST, at the behest of Barbara Boxer (D-California), the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Gore got 30 minutes to speak before a packed house."

Here is my summary (okay, cut & paste) of the former Vice President's 9 point plan for immediately addressing carbon emissions:

1. An immediate freeze on CO₂ reductions and start from there.
2. Cut taxes on employment and make up the difference with pollution taxes - principally CO₂ taxes.
3. Ratify a cap and trade system [like Kyoto] so the market will work for us rather than against us.
4. A moratorium on new coal plants that are not fixed with carbon capture and sequestration technology.
5. Congress should fix a date beyond which incadescent lightbulbs are banned.
6. Encourage widely distributed power generation. We ought to take off the caps and let individuals sell back as much as they want on the grid.
7. Raise the CAFE standards.
8. Pass a carbon-neutral mortgage association.
9. Require corporate disclosure of carbon emissions.

Embarking on a whirlwind tour of Congress, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore testified before several Senate and House of Representatives committees today, insisting on decisive action to curb global warming. Speaking to overflow crowds, Gore urged lawmakers to solve the climate crisis--a message that drew praise, and some skepticism, from members of Congress.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today released documents edited by political appointees in the Bush Administration that "appear to portray a systematic White House effort to minimize the significance of climate change," according to committee staff. Current and former appointees who made the changes appeared today before the panel and testified that they were trying to introduce scientific uncertainty in the reports.

So has Pacific Northwest snowpack declined? Emphatically yes. I say "emphatically yes" for three reasons. First, because Albright illustrates the supposed lack of a trend by comparing specific periods (e.g. 1940-1946 vs. 1997-2006), in which snowpack has increased in some locations. This is not very informative, because both the spatial and temporal variability is large, and any question of decline can only be correctly addressed using all the data together, and over a statistically significant time period (30 years or more would be preferred). According to a summary statement prepared by Dennis Hartman to try to clarify the situation for the media and government, the decline is quite evident when the analysis is done correctly. (Hartmann is currently Chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at the University of Washington).

The Bush administration has again been charged with interfering with federal climate science, in order to underplay the significance of global warming.

In a continuing investigation, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held its second hearing on the issue on Monday. Documents "appear to portray a systematic White House effort to minimise the significance of climate change", said a memo released by the committee.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, scientists have counted on the ground beneath our feet to soak up some of this greenhouse gas. But fungi living in the soil could throw a wrench into that plan, according to a new study, which finds that the microbes could actually cause soil to lose carbon to the atmosphere.

Pollution from industrialized countries is heating the Arctic atmosphere faster than any region on Earth, a new study warns.

European researchers writing in today's issue of the journal Science report that temperature spikes in the Arctic are mainly caused by "human-induced emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases."

Ship emissions, smoke from summer forest fires, and air pollutants such as aerosols and ozone coming from the lower latitudes are contributing to "significant warming trends," the report authors say.

Surface air temperatures in the region have risen faster than the global average over the past few decades and "are predicted to warm by 5 degrees Celsius [9 degrees Fahrenheit] over a large part of the Arctic by the end of the 21st century," the authors note in their study.

Previous climate models have suggested that the Arctic's summer sea ice may completely disappear by 2040 if warming continues unabated.

"The Arctic is at risk because global warming is proceeding fastest there," said study co-author Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research.

"This is mainly a consequence of the increasing trends of long-lived greenhouse gases and feedbacks in the climate system, which are strongest in the Arctic."

Ice shed from the giant sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland is responsible for just 12% of the current rate of global sea level rise, according to a new review.

The authors emphasise that it is now clear that the ice caps are losing ice faster than it is being replenished by snowfall. But exactly why this is happening remains unknown, making it difficult to predict the extent of future sea level rises.

The remaining 88% of the current rise is due to the expansion of water as it warms, and melting from mountain glaciers and ice caps outside Greenland and Antarctica. Yet the shrinking of Greenland and Antarctica remains crucial because together they hold enough water to make sea levels rise by 70 metres, submerging vast swathes of land and displacing millions.

There's no doubt that the term is useful. A consensus view in any field of science represents humanity's best guess as to what's going on. The guess might well be wrong, but what else is there to go on? It's not as though there are answers in the back of the book to look at. People often say that science isn't a democracy; scientific questions aren't decided by majority rule. Well, then, what are they decided by? Experiments and observations, surely. But who runs the experiments and makes the observations? Who interprets the outcome? Who double-checks them? It is a social process.

…

n an attempt to emulate this natural process, Goettmann and colleagues Arne Thomas and Markus Antonietti developed their own nitrogen-based catalyst that can produce carbamates. The graphite-like compound is made from flat layers of carbon and nitrogen atoms arranged in hexagons.

…

So while I think there's a role for mentioning scientific consensus, it should be used very sparingly. Telling people that there is a consensus cannot substitute for explaining why there is a consensus. As much as climate scientists may be wearying of debate, they need to press onward and treat each question as though it was the first time they had ever heard it.

UK politicians aim to lead the world on long-term carbon cuts.

The British government today revealed its draft climate bill, which sets out plans for a 60% cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. The bill makes Britain the first major economy to lay out a comprehensive scheme for making wholesale greenhouse-gas reductions.

The legislation, like the international Kyoto Protocol, will measure emissions against their 1990 levels. But the new plan will go far beyond the scope of Kyoto, which seeks to ensure an average 5.2% cut among developed-world nations by 2012.

Unveiling the new policy in London and in an online video address, British environment minister David Miliband said: "This will constrain every future UK government to ensure that carbon emissions do not exceed certain levels."

A new report confirms that coal has a large role to play in meeting the world's energy demands, but to avoid runaway climate change, technologies to sequester its carbon need to advance quickly

The world emitted 25 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2003—more than one third, 9.3 billion metric tons, came from burning coal. The dirty rock provides half of the electricity in the U.S. and its role (or the nation's dependence on it) is likely to grow, according to a new report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's cheap, there's lots of it and there's lots of it in places with high demand, namely the U.S., China and India," says co-author and M.I.T. physicist Ernest Moniz. "Sequestration," he adds, "is a key enabling technology for coal use in a carbon-constrained world."

Sequestration, as envisioned in the report, involves capturing the CO2 from coal-fired power plants, compressing it into a liquid and injecting it deep beneath the earth into old oil fields or saline aquifers. There, according to geologists, the CO2 would be trapped by sealing cap rock to prevent it from seeping back to the surface and into the air. It is relatively cheap to get it there, the report says. The difficulty is capturing it at the power plant without sapping too much energy or pushing electric costs up too high. For example, one 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant (there are the equivalent of 500 of these in the U.S. and China is building the equivalent of two of them each week) produces three million tons of CO2 annually. Adding carbon capture technology to that plant sucks up 40 percent of the power it can produce and adds at least 2.7 cents to the retail price of that electricity.

We criticized William Broad previously for a piece that misrepresented the scientific understanding of the factors that drive climate change over millions of years, systematically understating the scientifically-established role of greenhouse gases, and over-stating the role of natural factors including those as speculative as cosmic rays (see our recent discussion here). In this piece, Broad attempts to discredit Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" by exaggerating the legitimate, but minor, criticisms of his treatment of the science by experts on climate science, and presenting specious or unsubstantiated criticisms by a small number of the usual, well-known contrarians who wouldn't agree even if Gore read aloud from the latest IPCC report.

The combination of polar bears and melting ice is a heady mix - so much so that the animal's plight has become a rallying cry in the fight against climate change. Simon Garfield reveals how activists have used dramatic pictures of the Arctic's most fearsome predator to give their cause real bite and to ignite an emotive PR campaign.

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One photograph in particular has captured the imagination. In a neat piece of marketing, the Canadian Ice Service made available a stunning image to coincide with the IPCC report. Two bears, probably a mother and her cub, are pictured on a spectacular ice block off northern Alaska that might have been modelled by Henry Moore. They appear to be howling against injustice. The drama is clear: this is truly the tip of an iceberg, the bears are desperately stranded as the water swells around them. The first thought among viewers is surely one of pity and concern, but this is to misjudge the situation: polar bears are reasonable swimmers, and certainly climbed upon such sculptures centuries before we climbed into our 4x4s.

A long-term strategy on energy policy, aimed at leading the world in the fight against global warming, was agreed by European Union heads of state on Friday.

The deal sets binding targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, developing renewable energy sources, promoting energy efficiency and using biofuels. It also lays down a challenge to the US and other major industrialised nations to follow suit.

The beginning of a new international trading platform for bioethanol is expected to be announced on Friday, when US president George W Bush meets with Brazilian president Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva.

The announcement is in line with Bush's State of the Union address on 24 January 2007, when he announced that the US will cut its gasoline use by 20% over the coming decade, largely by requiring the use of 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels – including ethanol and hydrogen.

What's good for the ozone layer has been even better for Earth's climate. According to a new study, a 20-year-old ban on ozone-depleting chemicals has been extremely effective at curbing greenhouse gases as well. In fact, it has already had more impact than a fully implemented Kyoto Protocol would have accomplished, even though the protocol was specifically designed to target atmospheric warming. The findings, say the authors, emphasize the importance of ridding the planet of these powerful greenhouse substances.

Also in New Scientist

Far more than previously acknowledged, the battle against global warming will be won or lost in China, even more so than in the West, new data show.

A report released last week by Beijing authorities indicated that as its economy continues to expand at a red-hot pace, China is highly likely to overtake the United States this year or in 2008 as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

This information, along with data from the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based alliance of oil importing nations, also revealed that China's greenhouse gas emissions have recently been growing by a total amount much greater than that of all industrialized nations put together.

"The magnitude of what's happening in China threatens to wipe out what's happening internationally," said David Fridley, leader of the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Scientists are using gene chips to monitor the effects of global warming on marine life. It's time to get worried.

Using novel genomic technology, marine biologists have found troubling clues that marine life could be extremely vulnerable to climate change. By mimicking future ocean climes and using gene chips to detect how marine organisms respond, the researchers can evaluate how well different organisms deal with environmental stress. The findings, while still preliminary and incomplete, are worrisome.

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.

Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

…

The conventional theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet's orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun.

"Wobbles in the orbit of Mars are the main cause of its climate change in the current era," [planetary physicist at Oxford University, Colin] Wilson explained.

"Mars has no moon, which makes its wobbles much larger, and hence the swings in climate are greater too," Wilson said.

The technical potential exists for the U.S. electricity sector to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions substantially below the emissions forecast for the sector by the U.S. Energy Information Adminstration [sic], says a report from the Electric Power Research Institute. The assessment of seven aggressive technology targets found the industry could achieve the reductions via measures already available or under development. Environmental advocates agree with EPRI's assessment but contend that the targets are not ambitious enough.

Jeffrey Sterba, chairman of Palo Alto, Calif.-based EPRI, presented the findings to the CERAWeek Conference in Houston, a weeklong gathering of energy industry leaders sponsored by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Cambridge, Mass. Sterba noted that the U.S. produces one-quarter of the world's CO2 emissions, and the electricity sector produces one-third of U.S. emissions. Last summer, EPRI's board asked the institute to estimate the technical potential for CO2 emission reductions from the U.S. electricity sector.

Texan takeover may signal changes in the way America generates electricity.

Controversial plans for eight new coal-fired power plants in Texas look likely to be scrapped as part of a proposed buyout of Dallas-based electricity generator TXU Corporation.

The US$45-billion deal that has been announced between TXU and investors led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Texas Pacific Group goes along with a change in the company's stance on green issues. As well as revising its plans for new power stations, the company will commit itself to cut carbon-dioxide emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020 and adopt strict environmental rules.

If the deal goes ahead it will be the biggest such leveraged buyout — a corporate acquisition financed with loans — in the history of the United States. The team that set it up sought the help of some of the same environmental groups that had previously sued TXU over the company's environmental policies and aggressive expansion plans, which involved 11 new coal-fired power stations.

"This is a watershed moment in America's fight against global warming," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, a New York-based environmental group involved in the negotiations.

Back in Tennessee on Tuesday, Gore told a crowd of about 50 people at the U.S. Media Ethics Summit II that the presentation's single most provocative slide was one that contrasts results of two long-term studies. A 10-year University of California study found that essentially zero percent of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles disagreed that global warming exists, whereas, another study found that 53 percent of mainstream newspaper articles disagreed the global warming premise.

He noted that recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth unanimous report calling on world leaders to take action on global warming.

"I believe that is one of the principal reasons why political leaders around the world have not yet taken action," Gore said. "There are many reasons, but one of the principal reasons in my view is more than half of the mainstream media have rejected the scientific consensus implicitly — and I say 'rejected,' perhaps it's the wrong word. They have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen … balance as bias.

California agriculture may provide more than just avocados, artichokes, and grapes. Crops could also be keeping the state cooler, according to a new climate modeling study.

Most discussion to date about how land use can influence climate has focused on urban heat islands. Pavement and buildings trap the sun's warmth and block evaporation, raising the local temperature. But other land uses may also have an impact. California is by far the U.S.'s largest agricultural producer: 13.5% of the state, or more than 34,000 square kilometers, is agricultural land, and the majority of that land is irrigated. A team of climate scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led by ecosystems scientist Lara Kueppers, now at the University of California, Merced, wondered if all this water being sprayed around could have a measurable effect on climate.

Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus in his 25 years working the frigid waters of Prince William Sound.

The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the Gulf of Mexico. Alaska was way too cold.

But the sound was gradually warming. By summer 2004, the temperature had risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark. Cruise ship passengers who had eaten local oysters were soon coming down with diarrhea, cramping and vomiting — the first cases of Vibrio food poisoning in Alaska that anyone could remember.

"We were slapped from left field," said Aguiar, who shut down his oyster farm that year along with a few others.

As scientists later determined, the culprit was not just the bacterium, but the warming that allowed it to proliferate.

It isn't just the polar bears that are having the ice pulled out from under their feet.

Arctic melting due to global warming is also undermining the human way of life in the far north, says a team about to embark on a 1,200-mile (1,930-kilometer) dogsled expedition.

The Global Warming 101 project, led by U.S. polar explorer Will Steger, aims to highlight how the traditional world of native Inuit communities is quite literally breaking apart.

The four-month expedition is due to set off tomorrow across Baffin Island in the Canadian province of Nunavut.

Among Steger's team will be U.K. business tycoon Sir Richard Branson and three Inuit hunters, who will guide the sleds.

Human Events hopes to undermine climate science by spreading their own myths. Color me shocked. No actual science publication supports these claims but of course that doesn't stop a conservative political magazine from publishing them. However, since someone has to set the record straight, I might as well try.

1. The U.S. is going it alone on Kyoto and global warming. – So far, the US isn't doing really anything on the issue of climate change. The notion that Kyoto is a "European Treaty" is false, as there are many non-European who have signed and ratified the agreement (something they forgot to tell you when they mentioned we signed it in this article). As for the claim that it's not working because in Europe, the statistic quoted doesn't really present the whole picture, unless it's already 2012.
2. Global-warming proposals are about the environment. – I'm not sure who is demanding energy rations, but it's not the people proposing solutions to climate change. The key is alternate energy and reducing energy needs. Being more efficient has nothing to do with going without. Of course, if you're "lifestyle" is all about throwing your own money down the toilet, then by all means don't let me tell you have to save money while helping the environment.
3. Climate change is the greatest threat to the world's poor. – Anyone who tells you that climate chang is "more accurately" described as weather is simply mistaken or lying to you; it's that simple. The only "adaption" we need in the way of technological advancements is in the form of alternate energy and more efficient energy uses. It's much harder to adapt to worsening drought or flooding.
4. Global warming means more frequent, more severe storms. – It certainly may, as is pointed out in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment. From the SPM:
   

   Based on a range of models, it is likely [greater than 66% confidence] that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical SSTs.

   Oh, did I just quote that from where they said I couldn't? That's odd.

5. Global warming has doomed the polar bears! – Polar bears can swim, just not forever. Arctic ice is melting and that's where polar bears live. The melting ice has been driving them further south. As for the Arctic cooling, the Arctic is the fastest warming region on the entire planet and any local, short term annomolies will be just that.
6. Climate change is raising the sea levels. – The lie that somehow the IPCC report is distorted just doesn't hold water, especially when the level's rising. This remains a conservative and highly reviewed document, possibly the most peer-reviewed science document ever written. The fact that some opinion editors with no background in science would tell you otherwise means very little.
7. The glaciers are melting! – The global ice mass held is glaciers is receding. Period. You simply cannot point to a few outliers and claim that is science. Of course, there's really no science in this article, anyway.
8. Climate was stable until man came along. – Who even says that? Of course climate changes. The problem is that is currently changing at a rate an entire order of magnitude faster than previously known. Further, we are now most likely warmer than any time in the previous 1,300 years. Oh, the so-called "hockey stick" graph? It's still in the IPCC report, just in written format (sorry, but you have to read and not just look at pretty pictures):
   

   Paleoclimatic studies use changes in climatically sensitive indicators to infer past changes in global climate on time scales ranging from decades to millions of years. Such proxy data (e.g., tree ring width) may be influenced by both local temperature and other factors such as precipitation, and are often representative of particular seasons rather than full years. Studies since the TAR draw increased confidence from additional data showing coherent behaviour across multiple indicators in different parts of the world. However, uncertainties generally increase with time into the past due to increasingly limited spatial coverage. Paleoclimate information supports the interpretation that the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1300 years. … Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1300 years.

   The notion that the "hockey stick" graph is wrong was proven false last summer when the National Academy of the Sciences determined that it was in fact, correct. Too had Human Events doesn't bother to read the news. Then again, it's not like paleoclimate is the only reason that we know global warming is happening.

9. The science is settled -- CO2 causes global warming. – Man-made greenhouse gases have been determined to be the main cause of the recent changes in climate. The relation between the change in levels of CO₂ and global average temperature is complicated, not simply a one-to-one. However, a relationship has been clearly established and while there are certainly other sources for climate change, the world's body of climatologists are very confident (with greater than 90% certainty) that it is us (man) that is doing the major influencing on the climate.
10. It's hot in here! – It is most likely the warmest that it has been in over 1,300 years, based on paleoclimate proxies. Based on recorded temperatures, we are even more confident in the claim that it is hotter now than ever recorded. Playing shell games with what data you compare it to just doesn't change that. Pretending that being hot is so much better than an ice age is also a red-hearing; as is the case with saying that some problem you are not facing would be so much worse than the one you are doesn't make it go away.

Please consider this article to be on-going, as I'll add more information and links when I get the chance. For an even longer list of climate change myths, please see my previous article "25 Reasons Why You Should Understand Neil Boortz is Wrong."

Jason Coleman is a structural engineering who lives, practices, and writes in Richmond, VA, where he hope the truth wins out so his child will enjoy a better climate. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- Share Alike 3.0 License.

Residents of the western U.S. could be in for droughts worse than they have ever seen, a blue ribbon panel warned today. The severe, recurrent droughts that parched the region in past centuries could strike again--and could even be exacerbated by a regional warming trend.

Much of the western U.S. was gripped by drought from 2002 to 2005. During these years, water flow in the Colorado River--which supplies tens of millions of people in seven states--dropped to as low as a quarter of its usual value. That crisis spurred several federal and state water agencies to ask the National Academy of Science's National Research Council (NRC) to examine the state of science on the future of the river's water.

Moving satellites may have caused falling measurements of cloud cover.

Satellite evidence that cloud levels are decreasing could just be pie in the sky. The trend might simply be a result of where the satellites are positioned.

Data from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) have shown that cloud levels have decreased by up to 4% over the past 20 years. Clouds increase the Earth's ability to reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the planet. So reduced cloud cover has been linked to global warming.

But Amato Evan at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and his colleagues have taken a closer look at the ISCCP data. Cloud cover decreases abruptly when satellites are moved, the team reports in Geophysical Research Letters1.

As more satellites were launched from the mid 1980s through the 1990s, each satellite could narrow its field of view, looking straight down rather than at an angle. And when observed straight on, clouds appear less cloudy.

Heavyweight companies including General Electric and Citigroup joined forces in a high-profile campaign against global warming, demanding that governments mandate caps on greenhouse gases.

The three-year-old Global Roundtable on Climate Change launched a new strategy backed by over 85 companies and groups including Air France, metals giant Alcoa, German pharmaceuticals maker Bayer and insurer Allianz.

"Global businesses are assuming their just place as catalysts for action on climate change. But action by business alone is not enough," GE chairman and chief executive Jeffrey Immelt said at the campaign's launch.

Mountain glaciers are melting faster than ever, a leading climate expert announced yesterday, and eerie effects of the thaw are being seen from the summits of South America to the highest peak in Africa.

In Peru alone, ice fields are disappearing so quickly that giant lakes have formed where meadows recently stood.

And retreating glaciers are exposing ancient plants that haven't been seen in 5,000 years.

Lonnie Thompson, an expert in ancient climates at Ohio State University, announced his findings yesterday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, California.

Thompson's latest research has focused on measuring glaciers in the Andes mountain range, which spans seven South American countries, and on Mount Kilimanjaro in eastern Africa.

"One of the things that's very clear … is that the climate changes in those areas are unusual—unprecedented—in the thousands of years of history that we can look at in these places," Thompson said.

Greenhouse gases widely blamed for causing global warming have climbed to record highs in the atmosphere, an Arctic researcher has revealed.

"Levels are at a new high," said Kim Holmen, research director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, which oversees the Zeppelin measuring station on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, about 1200 kilometres (750 miles) from the North Pole.

He said that concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, emitted largely by burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, had risen to 390 parts per million from 388 ppm a year ago.

Levels have hit peaks almost every year in recent decades and are far above 270 ppm level seen before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century.

Leading politicians agree a new proposal to tackle climate change at US meeting.

Legislators from the world's wealthiest industrialized nations and from major developing countries have signed a non-binding agreement to reduce carbon emissions. The announcement came at the end of a two-day summit in Washington DC.

In a bid to influence the follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012, delegates from the G8 industrialized nations and five major emerging economies approved a proposal to establish a global 'cap and trade' market to limit carbon emissions.

The agreement proposes international caps for greenhouse-gas emissions, with both industrialized and developing countries accepting limits on emissions: under the Kyoto agreement, only developed nations are forced to do this. Countries that have signed up to Kyoto can reduce their emissions figures by participating in markets such as the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme.

The new agreement will be presented for consideration to the next G8 summit, where member nations — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — will once again discuss the issue of how to tackle climate change.

There's a climate of change on Capitol Hill. On 14 and 15 February more than 100 legislators and officials from 13 countries met within the walls of the US Senate to discuss the future of international climate policy.

At the close of the meeting they issued a statement setting out the components which they say will be essential for an international agreement on climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012.

The largest carbon burial experiment in the world began in earnest on Thursday when the drilling of a 2100-metre well began in the Otway Basin, on the coast of southern Australia. The project promised the most comprehensive monitoring for leaks to date.

If all goes well, researchers from the Canberra-based Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC) will start injecting carbon dioxide into the new well in July. They will start by extracting CO2 from a nearby natural geological reservoir and compressing it into a "supercritical fluid" – a gas-liquid hybrid. This will be injected via the new well into a sandstone reservoir.

The reservoir is shaped liked an upside-down saucer that is partially-filled with methane gas, and covered by a series of impermeable rock layers. Over the following six to nine months, 100,000 tonnes of supercritical CO2 will be injected.

The biggest general science conference in the world is shaping up to be unusually political this year, with an emphasis on global warming and sustainability. There's even a workshop on how scientists can fight anti-evolutionists on local school boards.

"It's a smorgasbord of all research in every field," said Ginger Pinholster, spokeswoman for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, which begins its annual meeting Thursday in San Francisco. "It helps to foster dialogue between scientists and the public and with policy makers."

Much of the research presented will look at the effects of global warming on glaciers, Antarctica and the ocean. In one speech, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who studies decision-making and public policy is expected to talk about how science can "induce urgent action" regarding climate change.

When Rep. Bart Gordon gavels the House Science and Technology Committee to order Thursday morning, it will mark Congress's first hearings on the latest United Nations-sponsored report on global warming.

But even before several authors of the prestigious report discuss its findings, other authors say the process is too slow.

The problem: Climate science is moving too quickly for the ponderous reporting system to keep up, they argue. Besides receiving a written consensus once every six years, policymakers need some form of interim report to keep abreast of the science of global warming and make important decisions, they add.

"Some of us believe that going to some updates, especially as the science is changing very rapidly, might be a very good tack to take," says Linda Mearns, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and one of 15 lead authors on the chapter dealing with projections of global warming's regional effects.

Updates could come from the UN-affiliated group itself, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), or some other organization, such as the World Climate Research Program.

Why bring this up here? Well it illustrates nicely how paleo-climate research fits in to our understanding of current changes. Let me explain....

For the last 30 years or so, the amount of information we have about the planet has gone up by a couple of orders of magnitude - mainly due to satellite information on atmospheric (radiation, temperature, humidty, rainfall, cloudiness, composition etc.), ocean surface (temperature, ice cover, windiness) and land properties (land cover, albedo) etc. Below the surface, we are now measuring much more of the ocean changes in heat content and carbon. This data, while still imperfect, has transformed our view of the climate such that the scientists studying it can seriously discuss details of problems that twenty years ago were not even thought of as issues. "CSI - Planet Earth" if you like.

Comparatively, the amount of information we have for any period in the past is less - hundreds (in some cases a few thousand) of records of climate 'proxy' data (i.e. records that are related to climate, such as tree rings ot isotope ratios, but that aren't direct thermometers or rain gauges) that are not necessarily optimally spaced, nor necessarily well-dated, nor uncontaminated by non-climate influences. However, there is the great advantage of a much longer time period to work with, as well as a greater variety of changes to investigate. Think of the people that work on that as the 'Cold Case' crew.

The Chinese government is preparing to adopt its first programme to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming. Although some reports suggest the plan will not include quantitative reduction targets, a senior official said on Tuesday that the country would seek to reduce carbon dioxide emissions "by 10% over the next five years".

Several recent government reports, however, have underlined China's poor performance in meeting its own environmental targets.

The government's climate plan, expected to seek final state approval by the end of February, will set out its intentions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop green technologies. Lu Xuedu, deputy director of the Office of Global Environment Affairs at the Chinese ministry of science, told SciDev.Net that setting quantitative emissions reduction targets was "hard and unrealistic".

Yet Zhang Guobao, vice-chairman of the energy-policy-setting National Development and Reform Commission, told an energy conference in Australia on 13 February that over the next five years, "assuming an average economic growth of 7.5% per year, China's carbon dioxide emissions will be reduced by 10%." Zhang did not specify whether the 10% goal would be per unit of national economic output or an absolute reduction compared to current emissions.

Studies show CO2 has reached the bottom of the ocean.

Human-generated carbon dioxide has sunk down to a great depth in the North Atlantic Ocean, a new study has shown. The work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, suggests that the oceans store CO2 for longer than expected — good news for reducing the risk of climate change, but bad news for marine life in the deep sea.

About half of the atmospheric CO2 produced by human activities since the beginning of the industrial revolution has ended up in the ocean2. The gas, along with oxygen and other compounds in the air, dissolves into the surface waters and is mixed around by the currents. Because the ocean is so huge, it has an enormous capacity to suck up gas.

Scientists have long known that CO2 would eventually be transported to the deep sea. But previous studies have been unable to spot man-made carbon dioxide at depths of greater than 4,000 metres. How much was down deep was a great unknown.

The World Bank is hiring experts in 'adaptation' to a warming world. Coastal planners are starting to take it into account.

At least in the developed world, the idea that people should start figuring out how to deal with the projected effects of warming – changing temperature and rainfall, shifts in growing seasons, more bouts of severe weather, and rising sea levels – has been overshadowed by calls to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. Some environmentalists have viewed adaptation either as a white flag on the issue or as a refuge of contrarians who pooh-pooh the broad consensus that human activity is warming the climate.

But last week's release of a report on the science of global warming – with its projections of warming based on emissions already in the air, as well as on potential future emissions trends – has helped underscore the need. "Climate change is here and now," notes Ian Noble, a senior climate-change specialist at the World Bank. "We have to adapt."

Peru's "White Mountain Range" may soon have to change its name.

The ice atop Cordillera Blanca, the largest glacier chain in the tropics, is melting fast because of rising temperatures, and peaks are turning brown. The trend is highlighting fears of global warming and, scientists say, is endangering future water supplies to the arid coast where most Peruvians live.

Glaciologists consider the health of the world's glaciers an indicator of global warming and they warn that what is happening in the Andes signals trouble ahead.

"To me it's the rate of ice loss that's a real concern," because when melting accelerates, the ice cannot replenish itself, said Lonnie Thompson, a leading glacier expert at Ohio State University.

An emphatic and clear status report on global warming opens the way for action — presenting new risks.

The release of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last Friday marks an important milestone. Following the scientific consensus that has been apparent for some time, a solid political consensus that acknowledges the problem finally seems to be within reach. But achieving this outcome brings its own risks.

Until quite recently (perhaps even until last week), the general global narrative of the great climate-change debate has been deceptively straightforward. The climate-science community, together with the entire environmental movement and a broad alliance of opinion leaders ranging from Greenpeace and Ralph Nader to Senator John McCain and many US evangelical Christians, has been advocating meaningful action to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions. This requirement has been disputed by a collection of money-men and some isolated scientists, in alliance with the current president of the United States and a handful of like-minded ideologues such as Australia's prime minister John Howard.

The IPCC report, released in Paris, has served a useful purpose in removing the last ground from under the climate-change sceptics' feet, leaving them looking marooned and ridiculous. However, this predicament was already clear enough. Opinion in business circles, in particular, has moved on. A report released on 19 January by Citigroup, Climatic Consequences — the sort of eloquently written, big-picture stuff that the well-informed chief executive reads on a Sunday afternoon — states even more firmly than the IPCC that anthropogenic climate change is a fact that world governments are moving to confront. It leaves no question at all that large businesses need to get to grips with this situation — something that many of them are already doing.

Congress continued to probe allegations Wednesday that the Bush administration tried to muzzle government scientists on climate change and suppress scientific research, including a comprehensive report in 2000 on global warming's impact on the United States.

During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers weighed in with harsh words for an administration that has come under fire in the 110th Congress for its stance on climate change.

"One incidence of political tampering with science is too many," said Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the committee chairman, referring to a survey released last week by two advocacy groups that showed widespread political interference in research related to global warming.

Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy. If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.

While the rest of the world has basically accepted the conclusion of the latest IPCC report, one small village still holds out against the tide - the Wall Street Journal editorial board. This contrasts sharply with the news section of the paper which is actually pretty good. They had a front-page piece on business responses to global warming issues which not only pointed out that business was taking an interest in carbon reduction, but the article more or less took as a given that the problem was real. However, as we have pointed out before, the editorial pages operate in a universe all their own.

This would not be of much concern if the WSJ wasn't such an influential paper in the US. However, the extent of its isolation on this issue is evident from the amusing reliance on the error-prone Christopher Monckton. They quote him saying that the sea level rise predictions were much smaller than in IPCC TAR (no they weren't), that the human contribution to recent changes has been 'cut by a third' (no it hasn't), and that the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) was written by politicians (no it wasn't - the clue is in the name).

Even more wrong is the claim that "the upcoming report is also missing any reference to the infamous 'hockey stick' ". Not only are the three original "hockey stick" reconstructions from the IPCC (2001) report shown in the (draft) paleoclimate chapter of the new report, but they are now joined by 9 others. Which is why the SPM comes to the even stronger conclusion that recent large-scale warmth is likely to be anomalous in the context of at least the past 1300 years, and not just the past 1000 years.

Thus on any index of wrongness, this WSJ editorial scores pretty high. What puzzles us is why their readership, who presumably want to know about issues that might effect their bottom line, tolerate this rather feeble denialism. While we enjoy pointing out their obvious absurdities, their readers would probably be better off if the WSJ accepted Jeffery Sachs' challenge. For if they can't be trusted to get even the basic checkable facts right on this issue, why should any of their opinions be taken seriously?

This is an expanded copy of a comment I made in response to (a seed of) Neil Boortz' "Why Am I Skeptical About Man-Made Global Warming?" [Note: Good luck finding the article in the seeded link, you can find it here, tough]. That piece was so wrong as to be contemptible. Here are the facts with more links to back it up; something Boortz was incapable of providing. That's because he had to either make up stuff of just believe the lies of others to write that article.

Also, I've tried to point out which items are science and which items are policy (or political in nature), which are two different parts of the discussion. Simply because one disagrees with a proposed policy doesn't mean one need to reject the science; a concept which is sorely missing on the skeptic side of this 'debate.'

1. The U.N. is anti-American? What about NASA, NOAA, NIST, EPA etc.? These are American science institutions who clearly have our nations best interest in mind. The fact that the IPCC, which was established by the U.N. (who if they said the sky was blue, Boortz would claim was red). Then again, I imagine that Boortz hates all the federal government agencies, too. However, that hardly makes them un-American nor does it make the IPCC, which is made up of many American scientists un-American. [policy]
2. Communist rhetoric aside, there's nothing stopping a free-market approach to solving global warming right now. Sure, we may have to enact some regulation, but that's nothing new to U.S. policy, especially when it comes to energy policy, and it hardly makes us Communists. [policy]
3. Solar forcing is widely researched in climate science. The sun plays a key In fact, solar forcing is mentioned as a partial component of warming on Page 2 of the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (SPM, hereafter). [science]
4. There is no global warming on Mars (nor any other of our solar system's planets), at least not anything at all like what we have recorded on Earth. It's a tired myth that comes up all the time, and has yet to be true. [science]
5. I think this chart clearly shows that the 1930's were not warmer across the globe. Boortz is simply wrong here. [science]
6. Another tired old argument is the global cooling myth (more here). While some MSM publications did have some scary headlines, climate scientists were not the one's causing the alarm thirty years ago, and certainly not with any large consensus like we have now. This is just more reason to listen to what the scientists have to say instead of untrained journalist mouth-pieces (ex. - Neil Boortz). [science]
7. One degree doesn't sound like much, but it's an annual global mean. Just because we wouldn't notice (or even mind) in the short term doesn't mean it's not a huge deal. Remember, this is global warming and not just raising the thermostat in your house. Further, the arctic is rising at a much higher rate, melting arctic ice which proves problematic in the lower latitudes, even if the temperature here doesn't change as much. Otherwise, cute attempt at ignoring a problem. [science]
8. It's simply not true that the so-called "Hockey Stick" graph has been proven false. On the contrary, the National Academy of Sciences found that the so-called "Hockey Stick" graph was indeed accurate science, and the 4th Assessment from the IPCC appears to agree that the last 50 years were likely warmer than any in the previous thirteen centuries. Too bad for skeptics (and people who ignore the news). However, even if the graph was incorrect, which is highly doubtful, it wouldn't matter as it's far from the only evidence at hand. [science]
9. The policy of the Kyoto protocol has nothing to do with the cause of global warming. However, too many people are prematurely calling Kyoto failed (as in past tense) when we've not even finished the second phase yet. [policy]
10. However, the Kyoto protocols can also be seen as an initial attempt to curb greenhouse gases. One which clearly needs work and the support of the U.S. government. [policy]
11. One of the more recent argument's I've heard lately is with regards to climate scientists who lie or stretch facts in order to secure funds for future research. I think anyone who is familiar with the grant writing process would instantly recognize this is as ridiculous, but clearly this argument is for their benefit. First of all, research grants are not easy to come by, even for those who have secured them in the past. Secondly, are we then to distrust any research as a result of continued grant money? What about cancer research or quantum computing? Research in a multitude of fields is funded by federal (and some state) grant money and it is absurd to discount its validity based on that. Secondly, it is simply poor logic on one hand to demand more precise data and then on the other deny the people who seek to provide it. [policy]
12. I don't wish to "punish" anyone who disagrees with me, as Boortz and other militant skeptics might assert. I am trying to get them to see reason and understand the science. I just am astounded by some people's willingness to ignore sound science. Then again, I'm also astounded when people ignore the advice of their physicians, which is an appropriate analogy here. Neither is smart. However, that being said, I do wish to call out someone who is perpetuating myths and that is exactly what Neil Boortz is doing. He is either lying or mislead, but he is most definitely not right. [policy]
13. The Medieval Warm Period. Yet another popular myth. The short answer: it's global warming, not just European warming. [science]
14. One scientists said something that is taken out of context? This hardly proves anything other than someone's willingness to spin the comments of another. However, neither the so-called "Medieval Warm Period" nor the "Little Ice Age" disprove global warming. (Actually, nothing disproves global warming since it's clearly been observed.) Further, to accept those events as evidence, one must then accept our the science of paleoclimatology, as in "the Hockey stick." [science]
15. Portions of the Antarctic ice sheet are thickening, but yet loosing overall volume due to shrinking area. In short, global warming results in great air moisture which in turn results in more precipitation. Oh, what does it matter, Boortz didn't care about the science to begin with… This is cherry picking data at best and simply lieing at worst. Either way, we have a number of measurements (the most accurate is probably NASA's GRACE satellite measurements, which detect gravity changes) which point to a loss of Antarctic ice. [science]
16. Well, once again, It's global warming, not U.S. warming. The temperature difference isn't the same everywhere (particularly wrt latitude). However, the U.S. is definitely getting warmer along with the rest of the globe. [science]
17. Here's one of the Boortz' inconsistencies that a lot of people, myself included, picked up immediately. Interesting that in one sentence we can't know what's going on with the majority of the world's glaciers because we haven't visited them and in the next Boortz claims to know exactly what is happening with them. The fact is, most glaciers are losing volume (globally, glacial volume is decreasing) and we don't have to set foot on them to know this. We have satellites that take remarkably accurate measurements, in addition to other means of measurement. [science]
18. Again, a portion of the Antarctic ice increased. The author of this study has clearly stated that this cherry-picking of data represents nothing but a misleading use of science, which has happened before and at least one author has spoken out on. [science]
19. Yes. Sea levels change naturally as the Earth's climate changes. However, both are changing at a rapid and previously unrecorded rate. That's really kind of the concern here. A large part of climatology is to pick out what is natural, cyclic phenomena and what is not. In short, were the current global warming observations a result of natural cycles, we'd be able to see them in the paleoclimate data, which we do not. [science]
20. Like Antarctica, the total volume of ice is receding in Greenland. Further, it's doing so at nearly twice the pace previously though to be occuring. We recently discovered what was thought to be a peninsula was actually an island that had been connected by ice. It isn't anymore. [science]
21. While the margin of error in some studies may support the notion that there have been multiple ice ages in the past 3,000 years (most global temperature reconstructions are for only 2,000 years or less), the Earth is clearly warmer today than it has been in 400 years, and likely for more than 2,000 years (ref. item number 14 above). [science]
22. The Earth's temperature has decreased? Boortz has truly gone off the deep end. Global temperatures have most definitely not decreased. I honestly don't know of anyone who believes otherwise. If Boortz had provided any sort of reference, I might be able to address this one, but he didn't. Of course, he expects his readers (and listeners) to take everything he says as fact without bothering to check it out. All I can do is suppose this might be what he is talking about, which is shown to be incorrect. [science]
23. An NPR reported wouldn't interview a scientist is evidence of what? Much like Kyoto, the willingness of a journalist to interview a scientist has nothing to do with the science. If this is a crucial piece of evidence, why ever listen to a scientist in the first place? [policy, but that's even being kind]
24. More on grant money. Contrary to Boortz' claim, if these scientists are in it for the grant money, they are most certainly not saying it's settled. It can't be both. The fact is, most scientists are wanting to pin down the effects so we can back out a solution of what to do about it. This goes hand in hand with making sure the initial assumptions are right. This is science, and it's clearly something Boortz doesn't get. However, we do know enough about climate and what is happening to begin to enact some policy to try and curb the negative consequences. This goes directly to the common confusion about science versus policy. [policy]
25. More of that Ice Age stuff? Well, the point is, Time (and Newsweek) aren't peer-reviewed science journals and if you look at what those said at the time, there was not prediction of global cooling and most climatologists clearly said that there was no reason for alarm of cooling (ref. item number 6 above). Of course, as we see now, the mainstream press has a really hard time understanding what scientists are saying. The fact is, the greenhouse effect has been understood since the 1800's (yes, that's right) and climate science is a mature field which quite possibly has the most stringent review of any science in the world. The Fourth Assessment Report by the IPCC represents what may very well be the single most peer-reviewed science document in history. To ignore it with the psuedo-logic and poor understanding of science is nothing short of sad. [science]

Boortz' article clearly shows that he knows nothing of the subject he's claiming to be a skeptic about. However, I have not doubt that like many other radio mouthpieces who know nothing about science, his listeners and readers take it without doubt. Further, he continues to provide mis-information to feed doubt, even on some of the most ridiculous subjects. Most recently (note: that link may be bad in a few days, given his poor site management system) he claims that a recent cold spell in Chicago is somehow evidence that global warming isn't happening (common skeptic tactic is to confuse weather with climate) and further he provides a link to a petition which supposes to have a mass of scientists against global warming. Never mind that it's six years old and has widely been criticized as misleading and a fraud.

I believe I've clearly demonstrated what a fraud Boortz is when it comes to global warming and really, science in general. He's wrong on every account and simply doesn't understand what he's writing or talking about. I think it's high time that we all started calling this stuff what it is instead of pretending it's just the other hand of an equal debate. It's not. It's a bunch of mis-leading information meant to cast hard science in a poor light out of some fear of possible policy actions (Boortz is an adamant anti-federalist). There is no significant debate over whether man is causing climate change in scientific circles and the sooner the mas media understands this, the sooner we can all get to solving the problem.

Anyone who would like to read more should check out some of the following (I'll add more as I find time):

• Real Climate - Archive of Climate Scientists' blog
• Grist - How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic
• New Scientist (UK) - Special Web section on Climate Change
• NERC Climate Challenge - Skeptics ask, climatologists respond
• Scientific American - George Musser replies to skeptic arguments against global warming and all the related blog posts by the editors.
• Pew Center - Climate Change 101
• NASA on the difference between Climate and Weather
• Live Science - The History of Climate Change Science
• National Geographic - Global Warming Fast Facts and "What is Global Warming?"
• BBC's Environment correspondent, Richard Black: "Climate science: Sceptical about bias"

Most importantly, everyone should read the Summary for Policy Makers [.pdf] from the Fourth Assessment by the IPCC, published online last Friday. It's really hard to overstate just how important this document is. This document contains the state of the art in climate science.

Jason Coleman is a structural engineering who lives, practices, and writes in Richmond, VA, where he enjoyed last month's Indian summer but despises the currently cold political climate towards science. This article also appeared on Jason Coleman.net under a Creative Commons 2.5 license which applies to this here as well.

This 2004 incident, reported by Steven Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey's Alaska Science Center, was the first report of polar bear cannibalism in two decades of study in the Beaufort Sea area of northern Alaska, and in 30 years of studies in northwestern Canada. Since then, Amstrup has documented two additional cases.

…

Some prominent researchers suspect that changes in the climate are a leading threat to polar bear survival. Polar bears are especially vulnerable to rising Arctic temperatures because they hunt, mate and usually make their dens on sea ice. "There is no evidence they can survive on land without sea ice," Williams said.

The IPCC hasn't rushed to judgment on climate change. It took 600 authors from 40 countries 6 years to produce hundreds of pages, which in turn were scanned by 600 reviewers. Then the wording--but not the science--of the 21-page "Summary for Policy Makers" got worked over by 300 delegates from 113 governments this week in Paris. The bottom line is that "there's an irrefutable consensus that [global warming] is real," says geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University in New Jersey. And "there's an irrefutable consensus that it will get worse" if greenhouse emissions are not reined in.

The IPCC's heightened confidence flows from several developments of the past few years. More observations of climate--from satellites to tree rings--have been analyzed. More computer models have grown more realistic and been run multiple times. And the natural world has continued to behave as if it is warming under a strengthening greenhouse. So IPCC upgraded its 2001 statement that "most of the observed warming ... is likely to have been due to" rising greenhouse gases to the warming being "very likely" human-caused.

The process of finalising the [Summary For Policymakers ] is something that can seem a little odd. Government representatives from all participating nations take the draft summary (as written by the lead authors of the individual chapters) and discuss whether the text truly reflects the underlying science in the main report. The key here is to note that what the lead authors originally came up with is not necessarily the clearest or least ambiguous language, and so the governments (for whom the report is being written) are perfectly entitled to insist that the language be modified so that the conclusions are correctly understood by them and the scientists. It is also key to note that the scientists have to be happy that the final language that is agreed conforms with the underlying science in the technical chapters. The advantage of this process is that everyone involved is absolutely clear what is meant by each sentence. Recall after the National Academies report on surface temperature reconstructions there was much discussion about the definition of 'plausible'. That kind of thing shouldn't happen with AR4 [IPCC Assessment Report 4].

The SPM process also serves a very useful political purpose. Specifically, it allows the governments involved to feel as though they 'own' part of the report. This makes it very difficult to later turn around and dismiss it on the basis that it was all written by someone else. This gives the governments a vested interest in making this report as good as it can be (given the uncertainties). There are in fact plenty of safeguards (not least the scientists present) to ensure that the report is not slanted in any one preferred direction. However, the downside is that it can mistakenly appear as if the whole summary is simply up for negotiation. That would be a false conclusion - the negotiations, such as they are, are in fact heavily constrained by the underlying science.

The world gets a wake-up call from Paris that climate change is man-made and likely will worsen without emissions curbs

For the first time, a panel of climate experts has confirmed that global warming is occurring and that it is "very likely"—90 percent certain—man-made. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a working group of some 3,000 delegates from 113 countries, today issued its final report here on the state of climate change -- and the findings were grim. "There can be no question that the increases in these greenhouse gases are dominated by human activity," says Susan Solomon, co-chair of the working group and an atmospheric scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "Warming of the climate system is now unequivocal. That is evident in observations of air and ocean temperature as well as rising global mean sea level."

Tomorrow the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release a major report with grim predictions about global warming for the coming decades, according to journalists who have seen draft versions of the paper.

If the IPCC's recent track record is any indication, the predictions will be no exaggeration, an analysis posted today on the Web site of the journal Science suggests.

The Science study compared actual climate measurements with the computer models from a 2001 IPCC report.

In recent years actual concentrations of carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas linked to global warming—have followed almost exactly the projections of the 2001 IPCC report.

If anything, the IPCC may have underestimated some climate threats in 2001. For example, actual temperatures were at the high end of the predicted range. And sea levels have actually risen faster than predicted.

"The real climate system is changing as fast or in some components even faster than expected by [the] IPCC," Stefan Rahmstorf, an ocean physicist at Potsdam University in Germany, said by email.

Punxsutawney Phil—the groundhog of Groundhog Day fame—emerged from his stump-shaped shelter this morning and didn't see his shadow, traditionally signaling an early spring.

Sun-worshipping humans might welcome the news, but for groundhogs and other hibernating animals, a longer winter could be a blessing.

A recent trend toward increasingly mild winters is disrupting normal hibernation patterns for many high-latitude and high-elevation species—and in some cases it may be a matter of life or death.

From marmots in the Rocky Mountains to bears in the Moscow Zoo, animals are spending less time napping. The change may be placing some species fatally out of synch with their environment.

When animals hibernate they're able to conserve the energy stored in their fat during periods when food is scarce. So when they are abnormally active, they risk using up their stored energy before they can replace it.

Climate-change figures since 1990 offer test of IPCC projections.

Climate factors such as sea-level rise may be changing more rapidly than predicted, according to a new survey of global trends since 1990. The figures suggest that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which publishes a fresh assessment of climate change tomorrow, may have previously underestimated the changes that lie ahead.

Researchers led by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany studied the most recent data for atmospheric carbon dioxide, global temperatures and sea level. They calculate that carbon dioxide levels are rising in line with predictions, but that temperatures are rising in line with the upper limit predicted by the IPCC, and that sea-level rises are on the very edge of the worst-case predictions of climate models.

Satellite data show that, since the early 1990s, sea levels have been rising by an average of 3.3 millimetres per year. The IPCC's Third Assessment Report, published in 2001, predicted that the annual rise was likely to be around 2 millimetres.

Scientists have spent the past six years combing the seas, skies, land and space for data on climate change

ix years is not a long time in science. Data may be collected, a paper or two published or a PhD earned. But in the six years since the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Charge (IPCC) report was released, the science and certainty of global warming has grown markedly. "In the first IPCC report in 1990 there were no real observations demonstrating that climate had changed, only a prognosis that it would change," says Herve Le Treut, atmospheric physicist at CNRS (France's National Center for Scientific Research) and a lead author of part of the fourth IPCC report set to be released on Friday. "By 2001, there were many signs that climate is changing and now we are already seeing the patterns described in the first IPCC report."

Simple observation confirms the basic science of climate change. "All six years since the last report (2001 to 2006) are among the seven warmest years on record," notes Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and another lead author. "Northern Hemisphere snow cover has decreased and Arctic Sea ice has been at record low levels in the past three years."

So when Larry King has MIT professor Richard Lindzen, noted climate change skeptic, on his show to discuss the topic of global warming, what equally famous scientist does he turn to to get the consensus perspective? NASA's James Hansen? Ohio State's Lonnie Thompson? Penn State's Michael Mann? Anyone in climate science at all?

None of the above. Try TV kid's show host Bill Nye.

Now, I think the world of Bill Nye, but is this really accurately reporting the consensus of science just two days before the IPCC report is expected to 180° disagree with essentially everything Prof. Linzden has ever said? Is this the "liberal media bias" that some would have you believe is why global warming ever makes the news (as opposed to it being a sincere worldwide concern)?

It's a pathetic attempt to portray the two "sides" of this "argument" as being remotely equal, or more likely, the skeptics as having more weight. It is poor journalism (or whatever Larry King passes for) on CNN's part and is entirely misleading to the viewing public. It would be like some science fiction author being a science consultant to the President. Oh, wait, that actually happened…

Predictions of how much sea-levels would rise due to climate change, made by a key UN report in 2001, were conservative, say researchers on the eve of the release of the new update of the report.

Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and colleagues, compared the predictions made in the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with the actual subsequent data. The factors they compared were temperature, sea-level rise and concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The researchers found that changes in CO2 concentrations between 1990 and 2005 followed the 2001 predictions of the computer models "almost exactly"

The growth of tiny plants at the base of the ocean food chain is tightly linked to changes in the climate, according to a recent study.

The finding shows that as temperatures warm, the growth of single-celled ocean plants called phytoplankton slows at Earth's mid and low latitudes. The plants' growth increases when the climate cools.

While the findings are related to short-term changes in climate, they help scientists predict how the ocean will respond to long-term climate change, according to Jorge Sarmiento, an atmospheric and ocean scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey.

"This is telling us we can expect reduced biological production [the ability to support life such as plants, fish, and wildlife] with global warming in many regions of the world," he said.

Sarmiento is a co-author of the study, which was published last month in the science journal Nature.

Michael Behrenfeld, a botanist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, was lead author of the study. He said the research demonstrates a solid link between climate change and marine life.

Members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are negotiating what many observers believe will be their most dire report yet

Climate change is real, it is already here and its consequences may be worse than anticipated, say early drafts of an upcoming report from an international group of climate scientists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is set to release a summary of the report—its fourth on the state of global warming since the group was formed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in 1988—on Friday, and the news is bleak.

The body of several thousand atmospheric scientists, climatologists, glaciologists, oceanographers and other scientists, hailing from 154 countries, are more certain than ever that humanity is to blame for global warming, which may be linked to odd events like trees blossoming in the Luxembourg Garden here in the middle of winter. The consensus stems from new evidence—among other things, proxies that extend the climate record back in time and six more years among the hottest ever recorded—brought forward since the last assessment in 2001. And it is unanimous, including the U.S. and other previously skeptical governments.

US scientists were pressured to tailor their reports on global warming to fit the Bush administration's climate change scepticism, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday 30 January. In some cases, this occurred at the request of a former oil-industry lobbyist.

"High-quality science [is] struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo, of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A UCS survey found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years in a total of at least 435 incidents.

"Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change', 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.

In an indication of Democratic eagerness to investigate whether the Bush administration has interfered with federal global warming research, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) today charged the White House with "an orchestrated effort to mislead the public." Waxman, who this month became chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, says his staff has found evidence that scientific reports were manipulated for political ends despite efforts by the Administration to block recent requests for information.

Mountain glaciers are retreating three times faster than they were in the 1980s, says the World Glacier Monitoring Service.

On average, they lost about 66 centimetres in depth in 2005, according to the latest report from the UN-affiliated body, released on 30 January. This loss rate is 1.6 times more than the annual average for the 1990s and three times the 1980s average.

While the rate of change is certainly alarming, it is not a surprise, says Michael Zemp of WGMS. He says it fits in with the accelerating trend of the past 25 years, and simply serves to "make it sharper".

The truly worrying observation, he says, comes when the past 150 years are analysed in the context of the past 10,000 years of glacial history. Mountain glaciers reached their maximum extent for 10,000 years in 1850. But since then they have lost 50% of their area and retreated to their minimum extent for 10,000 years.

America's addiction to gas-guzzlers is at last poised to receive some treatment. In his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday, President George W Bush announced a plan to cut US gasoline use by 20% over the coming decade.

"For too long our nation has been dependent on foreign oil," Bush told the US Congress. "It is in our vital interest to diversify America's energy supply, and the way forward is through technology."

Three quarters of the proposed cut would be achieved by requiring the use of 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels – including ethanol and hydrogen – by 2017. This is nearly five times larger than the current target, which must be met by 2012. The rest of the cut in gasoline use would be made by strengthening the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for new vehicles.

Glaciers are quickly disappearing from the Alps and will be all but gone by 2050, a climate expert said Monday. That's 50 years earlier than a July 2006 study predicted.

The loss would change the supply of drinking and irrigation water, lead to more falling rocks, and cripple the European ski industry.

On average about 3 percent of Alpine glacial ice is lost each year, said Roland Psenner, a fresh water scientist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. That corresponds to about 3.3 feet (1 meter) of ice thickness.

Ten percent was lost in the record-breaking heat of 2003. Seven percent was lost in 2006, Psenner said.

"If the melting goes on at this pace, glaciers will be gone by 2030 to 2050—except some high-altitude sites in the French, Swiss, and Italian Alps," he wrote in an email to National Geographic News.

Psenner's research was discussed Monday at an annual conference on the Alps in the Austrian mountain resort of Alpbach.

To seriously address the issue of global climate change, policymakers need to establish a framework that extends through the end of the century.

Late in 2006 several events moved the U.S. and other countries closer to serious global negotiations to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It is therefore timely to ask what a meaningful global agreement would entail. A solid starting point is the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that binds countries to act on the problem and under which specific measures, such as the Kyoto Protocol, are adopted. The signatories to the Framework Convention, including the U.S. and almost all other countries, declared the objective to be the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [man-made] interference with the climate system." The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997, did not implement this idea very well: it took a short-term view of a long-term objective and as a result lost clarity, credibility and support along the way. The key now is to move beyond it.

The massive glaciers of the Himalayas, which hold one of Earth's largest reserves of snow and ice, have dwindled by one-fifth in the past 4 decades. A team of Indian geologists and remote sensing experts published the alarming news this week--a grim warning that if the trend continues, it could jeopardize the fresh water supply of more than 500 million people in India.

In this essay, I'd like to explain the science in the paper and give my answers to the most often asked questions.

In our paper, we examined the September Arctic sea ice cover in the 20th and 21st centuries in climate models, and found occasional decades of very rapid retreat. The most extreme case was a decrease from 6 to 2 million square kilometers in a decade (see Fig 1). This is about 4 times faster than the decline that has been observed in the past decade.

Dr. Cecilia Bitz, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Univ. of Washington, provides some detailed answers to some of the questions she has been asked about a recent journal paper [.pdf] she co-authored in this guest commentary at Real Climate. This piece, as well as her univ. page, is a good place to learn about some of the techniques that go into the modeling of the planet's climate.

Two strong candidates for the 2008 US presidential elections have joined forces to address climate change.

On Friday, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama – plus independent senator Joe Lieberman - will present a bill in Congress calling for mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, industry and oil refineries.

The legislation would require that US greenhouse gas emissions be cut by 2% every year. The senators say that as a result of these cuts, emissions would drop back to 2004 levels by 2012, and to 1990 levels by 2020.

Now that California is on record as mandating a 25 percent cut in the state's greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 - a move that made headlines worldwide four months ago - leaders here are starting to lay out how they intend to hit that ambitious mark. First up: requiring transportation fuels sold in California to contain less carbon, a major greenhouse gas.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) announced Tuesday that he will issue, within weeks, an executive order that sets a new "low carbon fuel standard" in the state. Aimed at petroleum refiners and filling stations, the new standard will give them 13 years, until 2020, to cut the carbon content of the fuels they sell for passenger vehicles by 10 percent.

The intent is twofold: to stimulate investment in alternative low-carbon fuels, and to curtail actual carbon emissions from tailpipes, which the governor said account for about 40 percent of the state's total.

Skiers love white winters, but this year some of their favorite resorts are going "green."

Many ski areas nationwide are turning to wind power to reduce their environmental footprint.

Twenty-two resorts in seven states now use wind power credits to supply 100 percent of their electricity demands.

Together the areas purchase 305,074,498 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of clean electricity and keep about 372,383,234 pounds of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas believed to be causing global warming, from entering the atmosphere.

The emissions-reduction effort is equivalent to planting almost 15 million trees or eliminating nearly 150,000 round-trip flights between New York and San Francisco.

It makes sense for the ski business to turn to cleaner sources of power, since it may be among the first industries to feel the heat from global warming.

The warm weather that is already cutting deeply into ski profits is projected to further threaten many traditional winter sports hotbeds.

And retreating glaciers and unreliable snowfall, particularly at lower altitudes, could force many resorts to close or relocate within decades

[U]ntil yesterday, it appeared that no news release on annual climate trends out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Bush White House had said unequivocally that a buildup of greenhouse gases was helping warm the climate.

The statement came in a release that said 2006 was the warmest year for the 48 contiguous states since regular temperature records began in 1895. It surpassed the previous champion, 1998, a year heated up by a powerful episode of the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean by El Niño. Last year, another El Niño developed, but this time a long-term warming trend from human activities was said to be involved as well.

Seasonal plants, including possibly the world's important grains, can adapt relatively quickly to climate change

New research shows that seasonal plants can adapt quickly--even genetically--to changing climate conditions and reveals various mechanisms by which they control their growing response when the weather shifts. The studies suggest, however, that longer-lived plants have a tougher time going with the flow.

Plant evolutionary biologist Steven Franks of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues tested the weedy field mustard, introduced to California from the deserts of Mesopotamia by way of Mediterranean climes roughly 300 years ago. The plant is a survivor, thriving from marshes to near-deserts. The scientists gathered seeds from the plant in 1997, just before a five-year drought struck in 2000. They gathered seeds again, post-drought, in 2004 to see what changes had been wrought.

It has now become all too common. Peculiar weather precipitates immediate blame on global warming by some, and equally immediate pronouncements by others (curiously, quite often the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in recent years) that global warming can't possibly be to blame. The reality, as we've often remarked here before, is that absolute statements of neither sort are scientifically defensible. Meteorological anomalies cannot be purely attributed to deterministic factors, let alone any one specific such factor (e.g. either global warming or a hypothetical long-term climate oscillation).

Lets consider the latest such example. In an odd repeat of last year (the 'groundhog day' analogy growing ever more appropriate), we find ourselves well into the meteorological Northern Hemisphere winter (Dec-Feb) with little evidence over large parts of the country (most noteably the eastern and central U.S.) that it ever really began. Unsurprisingly, numerous news stories have popped up asking whether global warming might be to blame. Almost as if on queue, representatives from NOAA's National Weather Service have been dispatched to tell us that the event e.g. "has absolutely nothing to do with global warming", but instead is entirely due to the impact of the current El Nino event.

So what's really going on? The pattern so far this winter (admittedly after only 1 month) looks like a stronger version of what was observed last winter (note that these anomalies reflect differences relative to a relatively warm 1971-2000 base period, this tends to decrease the amplitude of positive anomalies relative to the more commonly used, cooler 1961-1990 base period). This poses the first obvious conundrum for the pure "El Nino" attribution of the current warmth: since we were actually in a (weak) La Nina (i.e., the opposite of 'El Nino') last winter, how is it that we can explain away the anomalous winter U.S. warmth so far this winter by 'El Nino' when anomalous winter warmth last year occured [sic.] in its absence?

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it left a trail of evidence in the skies that is helping scientists decipher the workings of the global climate

Earth's climate cannot be replicated in a lab. So to understand how this critical component of the planet's heat regulation works, scientists must rely on "natural experiments." Such natural experiments take apocalyptic form, such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in June 1991 that sent 10 cubic kilometers of ash, gas and other materials sky high. By tracking how this eruption affected the global climate--and determining how to trace its footprint in other records--scientists have turned the catastrophe into a tool for comprehension. "The big problem with climate--and trying to study it--is you can't play with it in the lab," says atmospheric scientist Joanna Futyan of Columbia University. "We were trying to use this abrupt event as a natural experiment: something dramatic happened and you can look at how the atmosphere responds to it."

Futyan and physicist John Harries of Imperial College London analyzed how the atmosphere's humidity and temperature responded to the eruption as well as the overall radiative balance of the planet--in other words, the difference between the energy in sunlight absorbed by Earth versus the amount radiated back to space. The spectrum of this energy sent back into space from the surface (measured via satellite) has changed in the past 30 years as part of global warming, but the rate and magnitude of this change remain difficult to measure and rely on a variety of atmospheric processes, such as the amount of water vapor.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel—theoretical chemist, head of state during Germany's upcoming EU presidency, and current leader of the G8—recently took a shot at the climate politicking of the United States. "To prevent global warming, the nations with the largest emissions of gases that are causing climate change will have to take part," she stated. "That's why we will make this an important issue again on the agenda during our G8 presidency."

It was a bold move, considering the US delegation's notorious avoidance of climate commitments during Tony Blair's G8 leadership two years ago. But Merkel, whose direct diplomatic style has been dubbed "the Merkel method," is capable of exploiting the potential of complex situations. Her political success has come as a result of both her analytical mind and her remarkable tenacity. Merkel is, in many ways, still a scientist, and Germany—the fifth-largest economy in the world—is her lab.

Climate change causes eelpout population to crash from suffocation.

The warming of the oceans is having a cruel effect on some fish: they can't breathe fast enough to survive in a hotter home.

Hans Pörtner and Rainer Knust from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, studied the viviparous eelpout (Zoarces viviparus), a fish that lives in the northern Wadden Sea. When summer water temperatures were about 20 degrees C the fish were fine, but after a hot summer of 25 degrees C, the fish population crashed to nearly zero.

The reason, the team concluded after lab studies of the fish, is that the animals' cardiovascular systems were working at the limits of their comfort zone. As the fishes' metabolism speeds up in higher temperatures, they need more oxygen, but their hearts can't pump fast enough to provide it.

Every species has a temperature range, or 'thermal window', within which it can breathe comfortably. The eelpout of the Wadden Sea are now butting up against the upper limits of their window, says Pörtner. The fish don't like to move too far from their natural habitat, so are unlikely to swim north to cooler waters. The alternative is suffocation.

Statements often appear in the media about suggesting that more extreme mid-latitude storms will result from global warming. For instance, western Norway was recently battered by an unusually strong storm which triggered many such speculations. But scientific papers on how global warming may affect the mid-latitude storms give a more mixed picture. In a recent paper by Bengtsson & Hodges (2006), simulations with the ECHAM5 Global Climate Model (GCM) were analysed, but they found no increase in the number of mid-latitude storms world-wide. Another study by Leckebusch et al. (2006) showed that the projection of storm characteristics was model-dependent. (Note that the dynamics of tropical and mid-latitude (often called 'extra-tropical') storms involve different processes, and tropical storms have been discussed in previous posts here on RC: here, here, here, and here).

The factors that control this are often confounding and so make this a tricky prediction. Simple arguments based on the expected 'polar amplification' and the fact that the surface temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles will likely decrease would reduce the scope for 'baroclinic instability' (the main generator of mid-latitudes storms). However, there are also increases in the upper troposphere/lower stratospheric gradients (due to the stratosphere cooling and the troposphere warming) and that has been shown to lead to increases in wind speeds at the surface. And finally, although latent heat release (from condensing water vapour) is not a fundamental driver of mid-latitude storms, it does play a role and that is likely to increase the intensity of the storms since there is generally more water vapour available in warmer world. It should also be clear that for any one locality, a shift in the storm tracks (associated with phenomena like the NAO or the sea ice edge) will often be more of an issue than the overall change in storm statistics.

Dr. Rasmus E. Benestad, a physicist and author at Real Climate, provides some detailed information on the complexities of climate change and how it affects tropical storms.

U.S. Government proposes steps to save conservation icon.

The United States has admitted what conservationists have been saying for years — that the polar bear is in danger of losing its battle with habitat loss. A new government proposal suggests that the species be listed as 'threatened' as a result of melting Arctic ice.

Under the plan, unveiled by Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne yesterday, the US Fish and Wildlife Service will spend a year evaluating the status of the polar bear. If it is listed as threatened, it will come under the protection of the US Endangered Species Act, which sets out recovery plans for endangered wildlife.

"Based on current analysis, there are concerns about the effect of receding sea ice on polar bear populations," Kempthorne said in his announcement. There are thought to be fewer than 25,000 polar bears (Ursus maritimus) remaining.