The lawyers have gotten involved!

Yes, according to this article from the Toronto Daily News, governments and companies may face law suits for their role in global warming. I've already seen global warming skeptics compared with people who claimed cigarettes weren't harmful to health, but this is a new twist. Of course, California has already sued the "big 6" automakers over greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the things climate scientists worry about is feedback mechanisms. Some feedbacks are positive- they amplify warming, and some are negative - they suppress warming. Let's take a quick look at a graphic showing how cold air is made. Basically, what this graphic is showing us is that at this time of the year, when the Arctic is receiving little sunlight, the radiative input is less than the radiative output. In other words, more energy leaves the Earth than is added by the sun and cooling occurs.

In addition to that part of the equation, the radiative output (energy lost) is increased by the snow and ice on the ground. Anyone who has experienced snow knows how well it reflects light. It is possible to become "snowblind" from exposure to the bright sunlight and UV rays reflected by the snow. You see, it's not just the light that is reflected by snow, it is also the other portions of the sun's energy, including it's heat that is reflected away from the Earth's surface.

So what does this have to do with global warming? You have probably heard about concerns over the diminishing ice in Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic as well as in Antarctica. In areas where the ice melts, revealing land or ocean beneath it, less of the sun's heat is reflected back to space and more is absorbed. Since it is the sun's energy absorbed by the Earth that warms the atmosphere, the melting ice can become a positive feedback and cause the Earth to warm faster.

The primary purpose of this blog is to provide information on all sides of the global warming debate, but I will also provide other content as well. Many people are concerned about the impact that they are having on the environment. Perhaps they are interested in how to calculate their carbon footprint. (Note: This is not an endorsement of NativeEnergy.) And maybe they'd like to know what actions they can take to reduce their carbon footprint.

I've heard a statistic in a couple of places and found it here. If every household in the U.S. would replace one light bulb with an Energy Star qualified compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), it would prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of 800,000 cars. CFLs use 66% less energy than a standard incandescent bulb and last up to 10 times longer. Reminds me of that commercial with the guy who says, "It feels good to save the cash....er.....planet."

By the way, if you zip on over to the energystar.gov site, you can take an interesting quiz on energy star lighting. I got 8 out of 10 without reading all their supporting material first - go ahead and beat me.

Earlier this week, the Stern Review tackled the issue of the economics of global warming. Now, an article in The Independent Online questions whether the UK will be able to meet any sort of expectations on reduced emissions as airport expansions plan to treble the number of flights by 2030. The increases in air traffic will effectively eliminate Britain's ability to meet Kyoto targets.

So what is to be done? Eliminate growth to curb the potential for warming? That doesn't fly (pun intended) too well with the profit-driven West. Interestingly, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Group chairman, has proposed some efficiencies which could cut aviation carbon emissions by up to 25 percent globally. In addition, Branson announced back in September that he would take all the profits from his "dirty" businesses - such as Virgin Air - over the next ten years (estimated at 3 billion dollars) and invest them in the development of new fuels and renewable energy initiatives.

Sir Richard's not just being noble (oh! that was another pun) here. He's a businessman, and a shrewd one. He's fully expecting his energy initiatives to make even more money for the Virgin Group.

Sports fans, it's FRIDAY. The Friday before a college football Saturday. Followed by an NFL Sunday. Is there anything better? Oh, and it's my favorite Saturday of the year, when my beloved Badgers take on the Nittany Lions. This fan is hoping for some pay back from last year's beat down in Happy Valley.

Face it, our society is sports CRAZED. Even at AccuWeather.com, we regularly provide a sports forecast. And it's not just here in America. Much of the rest of the globe is as soccer-mad as we are for the guys on the gridiron. Then there's THE global sporting event, the Olympics. Beijing is expecting 1.5 million visitors to the 2008 games. That's a lot of visitors doing a lot of traveling. This column, from the UK Guardian, asks whether the carbon emissions produced directly and indirectly as a result of sports are worth it. Now, I'm no fan of auto racing, and would gladly see it go the way of the dinosaur. But the millions of NASCAR fans in the country would probably pillory me for that opinion. It's a question worth asking though. Should we be fueling global warming (if it is indeed caused by greenhouse gases) for our entertainment?

Just food for thought on this Football Friday.

We all know carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring chemical - the product of the respiration of every animal on earth - which is also produced by the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas. And some of us may have also heard about methane, another of the greenhouse gases, which may also have a significant role in global warming over the next few decades (I'll post more on methane another day - it gives me a headache). But today from Japan comes a report on yet another greenhouse gas. Dinitrogen oxide, which originates from nitrogen-based fertilizers used on farms. The chemical was measured through the use of ice cores taken from Antarctica and has been increasing slowly for the past 50+ years.

Little darlin' - oh, sorry. Beatles tangent. What if the sun and it's energy variations have more to do with climate change than any greenhouse gasses? Seem unlikely? Maybe, but there are certainly a number of scientists who are looking into these links. Elliot Abrams noted some in his blog in September. Here's a link to a lecture by Sallie Baliunas, Ph.D. from back in 2002. In the interest of being forthright, I will state here that some are critical of Dr. Baliunas' connections to the Marshall Institute, which receives a fraction of it's funding from oil companies (or at least from Exxon-Mobil).

And here's a link I got from Jesse Ferrell's blog back in September to an article about upcoming global COOLING, based on solar emission research.

By the way, Jesse's blog has some of the best weather pictures around. Check it out! And thanks to all our site visitors who have contributed pictures to our AccuWeather.com photo gallery. There's a lot of beautiful shots there, including this one which seems appropriate today.

So what happens if the trend toward higher global temperatures continues, and we find ourselves in a world being changed by rising sea levels, droughts, extinction of species - the whole pantheon of catastrophe that one could imagine? Not to worry! University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel has come up with a plan which would effectively block a large enough percentage of the sun's energy to counterbalance the warming.

When in read a summary of this article from the Denver Post, and it mentioned hurricane expert Dr. Bill Gray, I expected an explanation of Dr. Gray's well-known skepticism over global warming. What I got was a whole lot more. A very sound overview of the difficulties of modeling the climate, and an unbiased representation of both sides of the global warming issue. Read this one, folks. It's worth the time.

I've had some questions about the greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases, so I figured now would be as good a time as any to provide a little overview of the subject.

First of all, it's important to note that the greenhouse effect and global warming are NOT the same thing. Greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect have always been with us, and in fact makes the Earth habitable. If the Earth had no atmosphere, it would average about 30 degrees Celsius (about 50 degrees Farenheit) lower than it does at present.

(Image From Global Warming Art)

So how does the atmosphere help keep the Earth warm? Most of the sun's radiation has a short wavelength. It's mostly in and near the visible parts of the spectrum. The atmosphere is mostly transparent to visible light, which is absorbed by the Earth's surface. As the surface warms, it radiates longer wavelength radiation which warms the atmosphere. Those areas which receive more sunlight warm the most, and land warms much faster than water. And of course, some surfaces on the land absorb more of the sun's radiation and heat up faster, as anyone who has walked from a grassy park onto an asphalt parking lot on a hot July afternoon knows. The radiation absorbed by the atmosphere is then emitted in all directions, some going back to Earth, some going out to space. This whole process is complicated further by the presence of clouds, which can reflect some of the incoming solar radiation and can also prevent the day's heating from escaping back to space at night.

Greenhouse gases include water vapor (the most abundant by far), carbon dioxide and methane. The concern among many climate scientists is that increasing amounts of CO2 will increase the overall global temperature (global warming) and have a damaging effect on the Earth's climate.

Here's a good resource on bad greenhouse meteorology.

Do you remember a few years ago the media went wild about shark attacks? The whole summer, there was one story after another about people being attacked by sharks, how to avoid being attacked by a shark, where sharks are most common and on and on and on. You couldn't turn on cable news without hearing about sharks. Turned out there were actually FEWER shark attacks that summer than in previous years, but for whatever reason, sharks were the sexy story that summer and that's just the way it was.

That's one of my biggest fears with the news media today. The competition for your interest has gotten so intense that reporting facts, or just an evenhanded story, won't fly anymore. It has to be sexy. Maybe that's why the left-leaning British Institute for Public Policy Research issued a report in August, 2006 accusing media outlets of engaging in "climate porn" to attract the public's attention. And how else would you describe Vanity Fair's photo illustration of Manhattan drowned by an 80-foot sea-level rise, when scientific consensus would say that in the next hundred years, the sea level will rise somewhere between 3 and 34 inches? That's just one of many examples of the extreme positions the media puts out there to get your attention. Would you pick up a magazine that showed sea level at Manhattan increased by 3 inches? Could you tell?

A recent editorial by Mike Hulmne, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, addressed this same issue, but expanded it from just media coverage to include language used by politicians, environmental activists and even scientists. Has there ever been a time when rational discourse has been more necessary, and yet harder to find?

Reader Jim asked:

1) If human beings were extinct and not affecting climate change, would the
climate still change?

2) What should the global temperature be? What is the ideal temperature?
Should it ever change?

The response to question number 1, Jim, is absolutely! The entire history of the globe is a history of climate change. Ice ages, periods of near tropical conditions in the mid-latitudes. It's all happened before, for a variety of reasons. Many, but not all, climate scientists believe that much of the warming over the past few decades has been caused by human activity, both through emission of greenhouse gases and because of land-use changes.

As for your second question, I would think we're fairly close to that now, as far as humans are concerned. The warming of the past few decades has mostly been seen in a decrease in the diurnal (day to night) temperature range. That is, nights have not been as cool, which has resulted in a lengthened growing season in some areas. I think this is mostly the case in the mid-latitudes and people in other parts of the world may disagree.

The authors of Freakonomics have an interesting take on economics and global warming, explaining how the late 21st century may bring increased agricultural production (at least for some areas) but also the potential for increased mortality.

I found that interesting, but I also link the article because of the examples of the weather's ties to social issues like crime. Who knew nineteenth century Bavaria could be so interesting?

With the significant changes in leadership brought by Tuesday's election, expect a policy shift on global warming and other economic issues. Democrat Barbara Boxer of California takes over as chair of the Senate Environmental Public Works Committee and she is looking to California's aggressive response to the issue of global warming as a potential model for the nation.