Climate Climate & Energy

An interview on planning for climate change

An interview I recently did has been published in the newsletter of Caisse des Depots, a state-owned financial institution that performs public-interest missions on behalf of the French government. Also quoted in the interview is Patrick Criqui, Director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Department of the Grenoble LEPII. You can get the full newsletter here (PDF). It's all about the problems posed by the long timescale climate change operates on, and is definitely worth reading.

Here is the interview:

‘Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect’ — No, it isn’t

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: The apparent rise of global average temperatures is actually an illusion due to the urbanization of land around weather stations, the Urban Heat Island effect.

Hard-knock New England city welcomes region’s largest solar installation

Brockton, Mass., is championing solar power. Photos: SCHOTT Solar This city was once the shoemaking capital of the Northeast, and over the years it was home to boxers Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler, earning it the nickname “City of Champions.” Today, however, Brockton, Mass., holds the dubious honor of being one of the region’s trash […]

Crazed, Greedy Drilling in Texas? You Don’t Say

Natural-gas drilling booms in Fort Worth Forth Worth, Texas, lies atop a huge natural-gas field, and thus is at the center of the biggest urban drilling boom in the U.S. today. The city has leased more than 2,400 acres of public land for natural-gas development; over 600 wells have cropped up in the last year […]

‘Mauna Loa is a volcano’ — CO2 rise is measured on top of a volcano!

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: CO2 levels are recorded on top of Mauna Loa ... a volcano! No wonder the levels are so high.

(image courtesty of Global Warming Art)

‘There is no evidence’ — Yes, there is

(Part of the How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic guide)

Objection: Despite what the computer models tell us, there is actually no evidence of significant global warming.

Answer: Global warming is not an output of computer models; it is a conclusion based on observations of a great many global indicators. By far the most straightforward evidence is the actual surface temperature record. While there are places -- in England, for example -- that have records going back several centuries, the two major global temperature analyses can only go back around 150 years due to their requirements for both quantity and distribution of temperature recording stations.

These are the two most reputable globally and seasonally averaged temperature trend analyses:

A new series

We've all encountered them, shuffling across the cultural landscape like desiccated zombies: arguments about climate change that have been bludgeoned with a thousand rebuttals, but keep lurching to life, attacking again and again. Each time they appear, the search begins again for the same rebuttals, the same citations and resources. In the face of this kind of undead onslaught, even Buffy might lose her perk.

Coby Beck wants to help. Over the course of 2006, he's written a series of posts called "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic." He wanted to ...

... provide a layman's guide to defending against the assorted specious attacks that are out there, both by pointing out the basic logical fallacies they are based on and providing some appropriate reference material to avoid the typical "is too, is not" exchanges these things frequently devolve into.

Mission accomplished, as they say, almost 60 carefully argued posts and hundreds of citations later.

I'm very happy to report that Coby has agreed to join us here at Gristmill, and happier yet to report that he'll be bringing his series with him. Each entry will be updated, improved, or polished as necessary and then published on Gristmill, one per day.

How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic

A new series gives you the ammunition No matter how many times they are bludgeoned with informed rebuttals, the same skeptical arguments about climate change keep lurching back to life like zombies. It can get tiresome searching for the same counterarguments over and over again. A new series on Gristmill aims to put all those […]

Cleared up once and for all

The answer depends on the exact question you're asking. Here is my view of the scientific consensus on a range of questions:

1) Did global warming cause Katrina? Or Rita? Or any single storm?

As far as I know, there exists not a single peer-reviewed article that connects global warming with the increased ferocity of any single storm. The commonly used dice analogy provides a good explanation of why the case is so hard to make. Assume the weather is determined by rolling a six-sided die, with a six corresponding to a massive hurricane. Now assume that by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we've loaded the die to make six come up twice as frequently.

Now, we roll the die once, and it comes up six. Did it come up six because it was loaded? After all, a normal die has a 16% chance of coming up six, so it's absolutely possible that the die would have come up six even without the loading.

So the answer to this question is "maybe, maybe not, we just don't know," and I think it's likely to stay that way.

The shining promise of ethanol doesn’t add up for farmers

No one can begrudge corn farmers their share of euphoria over the recent ethanol boom. Until very recently, their plight could be summed up by a bit of gallows humor I once heard from a dairy farmer: “I lose money on every gallon, so I try to make up for it on volume.” Hopes are […]