Continue reading “Driving the car forward while looking in the rear view mirror”
The sobering science
Yesterday’s stunning news about sea level rise means that Florida can no longer enjoy the beach with its head in the sand. Continue reading “Facing the rising tide in Florida”
The pace of ecological change is quickening and I see little sense of urgency to address the negative consequences that are unfolding. The increasing speed of change is a direct consequence of two interacting drivers – resource use and climate change. The long standing processes of human use of natural resources and resulting habitat degradation have increased in scale and impact as our population has continued to explode. Adding to this, as defense analysts have argued, climate change is both a primary driver and amplifier of change. Collectively these factors are driving worldwide ecosystem change at a pace and scale far exceeding any previous period of change in the history of our planet at least since the demise of the dinosaurs. Continue reading “Sleepwalking toward a new ecology”
Originally posted on Intermountain Climate:
When I speak about climate change I always remind my audiences to not conflate climate with weather. For example, Katrina is best seen as an extreme weather event that cannot be mechanistically linked to anthropogenic climate change. Even scientists, including me, can lapse into sloppy thinking about individual weather events and declare, as I did in the heat of the… Continue reading Linkage between extreme weather and climate change
Recently there has been a lot of chatter on various denier blogs about the notion that global warming stopped in 1998. Moreover, I am finding that thoughtful, well-read individuals who generally accept the concept of anthropogenic climate change are hoping that warming has peaked and that the planet will soon begin to cool. Usually some unspecified “natural cycle” is identified as the cause of this cooling. This meme seems to be gaining traction with a growing cross section of the public. This article in The Daily Mail is typical of the logic behind this idea, and the figure below from Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate provides what appears to be compelling evidence to support this claim. Continue reading “Warming has not stopped: Surface temperatures reflect multiple forcing factors”
There is compelling evidence that certain features of Sandy can be linked to climate change, and it is clear that scientific studies of this linkage will be undertaken over the next few months and years. That said, as a scientist I am increasingly impressed with the emphasis that many folks place on weather as an indicator of human caused climate disruption. Continue reading “Climate lessons from Sandy and the political economy of mitigation”
Jim Hansen has used the phrase “essentially game over” when referring to the greenhouse gas emissions that would ensue from the use of Tar Sands oil as an energy source. To be sure, there is one heck of a lot of carbon in this one source, and Bill McKibben has referred to the proposed pipeline as the “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” Continue reading “The case for leaving the carbon in the ground”
The Environmental Century 