climate change impacts

Some thoughts

Part of the confusion over Revkin’s article is that there isn’t one "climate debate." There are several. I’m going to taxonomize them in another post, but first I want to say something about the scientific one. This debate, as many folks have pointed out, is pretty much over. The denialists are wrong and they’ve been […]

It’s a disaster, not a catastrophe

A Guardian story suggests that we may have as much as eight degrees of global warming already locked in, in the form of stored heat in the ocean. But a substantial stored-heat backlog in the ocean has been well-known for some time. That it is greater than expected is bad news -- but (as I've confirmed in correspondence with Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate) this does not mean that all or most of that stored heat is going to "come back" and fry the planet, provided we take action in time.

I know James Lovelock, the brilliant inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, is spreading the "8 degree" misinterpretation, but most climate scientists do not agree with him.

Climate disruption is a serious crisis for the human race, but the reality is bad enough. No need to make solving it harder by exaggerating the threat. RealClimate has posted a number of articles debunking exaggerated panic-mongering:

Can industrial agriculture withstand climate change?

If the fossil fuels don’t getcha, the genetics will. Photo: iStockphoto In the United States, the clearest signs of climate change so far have been stern words from Al Gore and a few hotter-than-normal summers. In Greenland, by contrast, global warming has sparked a revolution — at least, when it comes to agriculture. A recent […]

Wildfires are raging — why isn’t concern about climate change?

Earlier this month, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert delivered a provocative Los Angeles Times op-ed explaining why the public is more scared of terrorism than global warming. Gilbert’s basic premise was that human beings are conditioned by evolution to react most strongly to situations that have certain characteristics: they must be personal (have a face or […]

Early warning system set up to detect global warming

This sounds cool:

MOUNT ALBION - University of Colorado biologists began installing an alarm system atop this craggy summit Friday, near the Continental Divide west of Boulder.

Like the alarm systems in your car or home, this one is designed to detect intruders.

But in this case, the invaders are tundra plants moving up from lower elevations in response to global warming. The alarm system is a cluster of mountaintop vegetation plots that will be monitored periodically for decades to come.

(Via Digg)

Funny

(from SFGate via Groovy Green)

Au revoir, Greenland

Meanwhile, over at the L.A. Times, we find that the Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than climate models predicted.

Hey, I figure, more freshwater for us! Our grandkids? Eff them.

A conversation with climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert. Over the past year, a perfect storm of scientific studies, dire weather events, and media coverage lifted global warming onto the mainstream national agenda. No writing had more impact than a series of closely observed pieces in The New Yorker by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, which have now been collected and expanded into a […]

Three new books put the spotlight on our warming world

Here at Grist, we tend to be good at detecting extremely subtle patterns. Like, say, the way certain politicians keep trying to drill in certain areas. Or the way love letters inevitably come after we publish a striking photo that might portray Umbra Fisk. Or the number of rainy days in a row outside our […]