Global warming confirmed by a skeptical scientist

'The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.

"Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.'

CO2 traps energy in atmosphere

FOX News doesn't get. Or are they paid not to get it? Are they willfully stupid?

From Media Matters for America: August 09, 2011 4:42 pm ET by Jocelyn Fong:

'Those who watched Fox News over the weekend were treated to a brief but ambitious science lesson on "Why CO2 Can't Cause Warming":

Oh boy. Let's take these one at a time.

During the segment Fox's global warming expert, Joe Bastardi, who is employed by the WeatherBELL meteorological consulting firm, declared that the theory of human-induced climate change "contradicts what we call the 1st law of thermodynamics. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. So to look for input of energy into the atmosphere, you have to come from a foreign source."

It's not clear what to conclude from this except that Fox and Bastardi are not familiar with the greenhouse effect. Climate scientists aren't claiming that humans are creating energy. They're saying that humans are trapping more energy by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Duke University scientist William Chameides, who called Fox's claims "utter nonsense," explained via email:

It is true that global warming requires a source of heat. In this case it comes from the sun. What CO2 does is trap a larger amount of the heat from the sun, preventing it from escaping and thus driving up temperatures. To argue otherwise is to argue that the greenhouse effect does not exist. In fact the existence of the greenhouse effect was established by scientists more than a century ago. It would be impossible to explain the temperatures of Mars and Venus, as well as the Earth, without invoking this effect.

Bastardi went on to claim Le Chatelier's Principle "says that any system in distress, physical or chemical in the atmosphere, tries to return toward normalcy. And that is why you're seeing temperatures level off."

In fact the notion of a system moving toward "normalcy," or more accurately, toward a new "equilibrium," explains why greenhouse gases do cause warming, rather than "Why CO2 Can't Cause Warming." By preventing infrared energy from efficiently escaping to space, increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere make it more difficult for the earth to maintain its previous energy balance, and thus its previous temperature.

Kevin Trenberth, Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explained via email that the system "re-creates equilibrium" by heating up, since the surface and atmosphere radiate more at a higher temperature. As a result, "it reaches a new equilibrium but at a higher temperature," he said, adding: "And of course we keep adding more CO2 so we have not reached that new state yet."

Though it appears that Bastardi cites Le Chatelier's Principle in a general sense and not in reference to any specific process, the principle does have implications for "the uptake of fossil fuel carbon by the ocean," according to David Archer of the University of Chicago's Department of Geophysical Sciences. He said, "Without Le Chatelier's principle, the climate crisis would be much worse than it is, but even with this buffering, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is rising and will continue to remain elevated for tens of thousands of years into the future. So to suggest that Le Chatelier's principle is going to save us is wrong." And the principle certainly doesn't establish that "CO2 Can't Cause Warming."

And that's not all Fox got wrong.'

Read more here. Why is FOX News trying so hard to disprove what 97% of scientists agree on?

I like Media Matters!

Who killed the electric car?

I always thought it was consumers who did not create the demand, until I saw this excellent documentary. Consumers are partially guilty, but so are the other major players, including the car companies. But this documentary was made in 2006, and a lot has happened since then. Today I saw a Nissan ad for its hybrids and all-electric. The Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid have been very successful. The end of the documentary, even though it's titled Who Killed the Electric Car, discusses the bright future of electric cars.



Since the federal government took over GM, the company has developed the Chevy Volt, which "is the most fuel-efficient car with an internal combustion engine sold in the United States."

No insurance policy on climate change

"These are the projections. Do you want insurance or not? What if we go there?...we have no insurance policy on all this."

Sea levels will rise

A reminder of where humans are headed with climate change. I wonder what kinds of problems humans will deal with over the next century because of rising sea levels. I worry for our children and their children.

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

EPA back to protecting the environment

'The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's formal declaration Monday that greenhouse gases jeopardize public health paves the way for federal regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from refineries, chemical facilities and power plants - even if Congress rejects climate change legislation.

The EPA's finding that carbon dioxide endangers the public also will give President Obama political ammunition when he goes before world leaders in Copenhagen next week to promise U.S. emissions cuts as part of international climate change negotiations that started Monday.'

Is global warming irreversible?

Listen to this very interesting interview with Professor Stephen Salter at his lab in the University of Edinburgh. Professor Salter invented a system by which wave energy is transferred to electricity.

'Thirty years after inventing a way to turn wave power into electricity, the professor fears it's now too late to rely on renewable energies to help cut global carbon emissions and prevent the melting of the arctic caps.

"We've wasted so much time not getting Ducks built when we could have been doing it properly that renewables are going to be too late," he says, looking out across the giant wave tank that dominates his university laboratory.

The first Salter Duck, created in 1973, was a rather simple teardrop design made from balsa wood. Today, the latest incarnation is a far more complex construction made from steel. But he warns, "I don't think we have time to get them working in big enough numbers in order to prevent something nasty happening to the arctic ice." '

Humans are not causing climate change?

Just when I thought that everybody - scientists and politicians - agree that humans are contributing to global warming, along comes somebody who believes that global warming is not caused by humans.  Today Al Gore urged the US and China, the world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, to do something about global warming, while a group of skeptical scientists, led by Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, urged the world to do NOTHING.

 

"Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing," Monckton told participants of the UN Global Warming Conference in Bali. 

 

Apparently Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma agrees that we should do nothing.  The Senate is putting together a bill that aims to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases in the US, but Inhofe has voted to fight it.  Inhofe has argued before that "much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science." How embarrassing for Infhofe and people who agree with him.  As the world's climate changes before our eyes, I cannot believe there are people who are still denying that humans are causing global warming and suggesting that we do nothing about it. 

 

There is a group on facebook called "Actually, global warming is a bigger problem than Iraq."  As much as I care about Iraq, I agree that global warming is more important to the long term health of our planet than Iraq. 

Global boom in coal power

This is insane.

Global boom in coal power – and emissions

A Monitor analysis shows the potential for an extra 1.2 billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere per year.

By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Forget the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Disregard rising public concern over global warming. Ignore the Kyoto Protocol.

The world certainly is – at least when it comes to building new electric-power plants. In the past five years, it has been on a coal-fired binge, bringing new generators online at a rate of better than two per week. That has added some 1 billion tons of new carbon-dioxide emissions that humans pump into the atmosphere each year. Coal-fired power now accounts for nearly a third of human-generated global CO2 emissions.

So what does the future hold? An acceleration of the buildup, according to a Monitor analysis of power-industry data. Despite Kyoto limits on greenhouse gases, the analysis shows that nations will add enough coal-fired capacity in the next five years to create an extra 1.2 billion tons of CO2 per year.

Those accelerating the buildup are not the usual suspects.

Take China, which is widely blamed for the rapid rise in greenhouse-gas emissions. Indeed, China accounted for two-thirds of the more than 560 coal-fired power units built in 26 nations between 2002 and 2006. The Chinese plants boosted annual world CO2 emissions by 740 million tons (see chart). But in the next five years, China is slated \to slow its buildup by half, according to industry estimates, adding 333 million tons of new CO2 emissions every year. That's still the largest increase of any nation. But other nations appear intent on catching up.

"Really, it's been the story of what China is doing," says Steve Piper, managing director of power forecasting at Platts, the energy information division of McGraw-Hill that provided country-by-country power-plant data to the Monitor. "But it's also a story of unabated global growth in coal-fired power. We're seeing diversification away from pricier natural gas and crude oil. Coal looks cheap and attractive - and countries with coal resources see an opportunity that wasn't there before."

For example, the United States is accelerating its buildup dramatically. In the past five years it built 2.7 gigawatts of new coal-fired generating capacity. But in the next five years, it is slated to add 37.7 gigawatts of capacity, enough to produce 247.8 million tons of CO2 per year, according to Platts. That would vault the US to second place –just ahead of India – in adding new capacity.

Even nations that have pledged to reduce global warming under the Kyoto treat are slated to accelerate their buildup of coal-fired plants. For example, eight EU nations – Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic – plan to add nearly 13 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity by 2012. That's up from about 2.5 gigawatts over the past five years.

Global Warming

This is interesting. The ski industry is moving away from the use of fossil fuels, because they recognize that emissions that result from the burning of fossil fuels causes global warming, which threatens their existence. In October an economist who works for the British government published a study which concluded that global warming 'could damage the global economy on the scale of the Great Depression or the world wars by spawning environmental devastation that could cost 5 to 20 percent of the world's annual gross domestic product.'

The oil industry and the oil men who comprise the Bush administration have been slow to react. It reminds me of the famous quote by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."