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.

As I mentioned before, I've spent almost 20 years forecasting the weather. That means I've spent WAY too much time looking at computer models. I'm enough of an old-timer to remember the baroclinic and the LFM, though of course I have had much more experience with the NGM, the ETA (NAM, WRF, whatever they're calling it this week) and the longer range models like the European and the GFS.

Those years of experience have taught me two things. First, computer models have glaring weaknesses. Some would say they stink. Some would say worse. There is just so much complexity in the atmosphere which has to be simplified for the sake of number-crunching time that they can't capture everything that happens. And sometimes that results in massive error. Second, meteorologists can't function without them. While I still think you get more accuracy in the first 6-12 hours of a forecast by looking at the NOW - satellites, radar, surface and upper level charts - the models are better than "classical methods" farther out. So it's sort of a love-hate relationship.

Climate models are really a different animal from weather forecasting models, but it's difficult for my forecaster brain to get away from my feeling that models are not entirely to be trusted. Nonetheless, models are one of the primary methods climate scientists use to predict climate change. Here's an excellent overview of what climate models are and how they work from Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Now if you really want to have fun.....and you have a half-way decent PC (or Mac) that can be pretty much dedicated to a project for a couple of days, you too can become a climate modeller! Columbia University has an educational Global Climate Model which uses NASA GISS' GCM II but can be run on a desktop. This software was developed for use with students from 9th grade through grad school. Any teachers reading this may be interested in using this tool in their classrooms.

Just a couple of notes on this model, I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago on a Friday and ran it on my rather elderly, 400 MHz processor Mac. It ran like a top - no problems with it even though I had to work a rare forecasting shift on Saturday and I had multiple applications running with the GCM in the background. However, it took from Friday evening to midday Monday to run a 50 year simulation. I would love to see what I could do running this on a newer system with something near 2 GHz processing speed. There are a bunch of simulations which can be run if you've got the speed to do it.

Let us put aside seriousness for a few minutes. This opinion piece, linking global warming and obesity, had me laughing out loud. Leave it to the Australians. Just the pseudo-science graphic at the top of the article is worth clicking the link. I'd include it here, but the legal department would not be happy with me!

I've been spending my morning reading comments and e-mails from readers and I want to thank you for your contributions. I have posted some and hope to post more and respond to e-mails that I have already received over the next couple of days. Just to clarify things a little, here are a couple of rules:

1) Anonymous comments will not be posted.

2) Generic comments which are clearly sent to every global warming site on the planet will not be posted. I've received some pretty interesting on-topic spam.

Blatantly political comments will or will not be posted based on my discretion. I'm not here to tell people how to vote. And while I will allow a fair amount of freedom, name-calling isn't welcome here.

I've got a big pile of reading to do this afternoon, but I'll have another post or two up in a bit.

Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD has suggested purposely shooting sulfur into the atmosphere to curb global warming.

Doing so would mimic a volcanic eruption, such as Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, which cooled the Earth by 1 degree Fahrenheit in the year following the eruption. Crutzen's plan calls for releasing the sulfur in the stratosphere, where it would remain for 1-2 years, at a cost of $25-$50 billion.

I'm confident Professor Crutzen knows far more than I do, but I don't know if more tinkering, especially by chemically altering the atmosphere, is something I feel very comfortable about.

Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard has changed his stand on global warming. After years of taking a pro-industry position on the issue, he is now willing to consider an international carbon trading system, according to MSNBC.

The article contains a brief discussion of the cap-and-trade system. For a somewhat more in-depth look, here's an article from the Bangor Daily News which summarizes how it works.

Boulder, Colorado has become the first city in the United States to adopt a carbon tax to fight global warming. The money collected through the tax is to be used to cut greenhouse gas emissions, mostly by improving the energy efficiency of homes and businesses.

I caught a little on climate change performance on the scroll on the bottom of the screen on one of the news channels Monday evening. I searched without success yesterday to see if I could find more about it, but today I hit the jackpot. A German policy group called Germanwatch prepares an annual Climate Change Performance Index. As you might expect, the USA doesn't look very good, coming in 53rd out of 56 countries.

You know, climate isn't just about temperature. It's also about rainfall, weather patterns, stuff like that. There's a new study from the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research out of the UK's Met Office which warns that drought could double or more by the end of the century. And that's the figure for moderate drought. Extreme drought could increase 10-fold, from 3 percent to 30 percent of the Earth's land surface, and severe drought could increase from 8 percent to 40 percent of land. Moderate drought currently affects 25 percent of Earth's land surface, and that is forecast to increase to 50 percent. If you are a subscriber to the American Meteorological Society's Journals Online, you can read about this study here.

Increased drought will mean increased wildfires, and this fire season has been the most severe on record in the western states. If that trend continues, we can expect to see changes in the ecology of the West with the potential for extinction of plant and animal species. In addition, wildfires emit tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, adding yet another layer of feedback into the climate picture.

A geologist from the northern reaches of Alberta changed his mind on global warming after building a "Kyoto house" which he says uses less than 10% of the natural gas used in a regular home. Bruno Wiskel's research resulted in a new book titled The Emperor's New Climate.

Wiskel, who teaches an extension course at the University of Alberta called "Building an Energy Efficient Home for Less" does not seem to be cut from the same cloth as most global warming skeptics. I'd be interested in reading his book, but I can't find it for sale in any of the typical book-selling venues. His other books, Woodlot Management and Pond Raising Rainbow Trout are available. There seems to be irony in that.

Tomorrow is the last day of a 12-day U.N. conference on climate change in Nairobi, Kenya. As seems fitting for the location, much of the conference seems to have dealt with how global warming has and will impact the world's poorest nations, particularly those in Africa. Here's a summary of the agreements reached so far and also of the unresolved issues.

Poor countries want rich countries to take more action on reducing GHGs. Many of the nations who signed Kyoto are not on track to meet their goals. And rich nations don't want to hamstring themselves economically by setting their own goals dramatically higher than other industrial nations. I especially liked this quote from a Reuters article:

"Sometimes it's not easy to solve problems among the three parties in government (in Germany)," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said. "Here you have 189 (nations) and its difficult to find solutions."

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan put the blame for global warming on a "frightening lack of leadership" but later insisted he was not singling out the United States, according to the New York Times.

Perhaps poor nations should also take action to reduce their impacts on climate change, not through GHG emissions, but through land use changes. I should have more on that later!

Over the past couple of weeks, an entertaining debate has been popping up across the Web. First, Christopher Monckton attacked the Stern Report in the Sunday Telegraph, including a downloadable, 40 page paper on global warming as hoax. Monckton's paper was put under the microscope by sources like RealClimate and trashed by another UK paper, the Guardian.

So how has Monckton responded? Mostly by admitting that his science was bad and so what his history. So now the point isn't that global warming isn't occurring, it's that what is being done about it is laughable. Well, at least someone is laughing.

Many U.S. cities are taking a fresh, green approach to their rooftop spaces. These roof systems have many benefits, according to the EPA, including mitigating rainwater runoff, prolonging the life of the underlying roof material, reducing noise transfer, insulating a building from extreme temperatures, particularly during the summer months, and by absorbing air pollution and storing carbon. The City of Chicago currently has 43 green roof projects, while Portland has 42 such projects.

Another article on this subject appeared two years ago in National Geographic News.

The American Meteorological Society has drafted a statement on Climate Change. The statement can be found by following the link halfway down the page. Members of the AMS are welcome to submit their comments to the AMS Council. The statement is a fairly complete overview of the AMS' opinion.

A thought-provoking piece from a think tank called Foreign Policy in Focus caught my eye today. Cap and trade, to summarize again, is the policy in which a GHG emitter is "capped" at a set value of emissions and that if they exceed that value, they must trade with an emitter who is under their set value. This value can be gradually decreased in order to ease back on overall emissions. This method worked effectively in reducing sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution from existing power plants in the United States, which helped to curb acid rain. However, trying to manage a cap-and-trade system on a global scale would be nightmarish in it's complexity.

This article argues that a better solution is to set performance standards, not on existing emitters but on new sources. Save the expensive retrofits on coal-fired power plants, but any new coal burners (and there will be a LOT of them!) would have to meet stringent CO2 emission requirements. I'll be writing more later on how coal plants can almost eliminate emissions. The same idea would work for automobiles, appliances, etc. Performance standards set in the 1970s vastly improved air quality, both by reducing emissions from power plants and from autos. The Montreal Protocol set global standards for phasing out the production of CFCs and is solving the global ozone-layer problem.

I believe there are opportunities for vast improvements on our CO2 emissions, and that some people are going to get very, very wealthy due to their innovations.

About 100 icebergs drifting northward from Antarctica have created a new tourist trade in New Zealand. One iceberg was even visible from the coast of the island nation - the first time that has happened since June of 1931. Tourists are paying over $300 a piece for the chance to fly over the icebergs, MSNBC reports.

The icebergs probably have traveled over 8000 miles (13500 km) since breaking off one of Antarctica's ice shelves. An ice sample taken from one of the bergs will verify its location of origin.

So are these floating islands of ice related to global warming? Scientists are hesitant to speculate. They simply have not been monitoring the icebergs for long enough to know. Clearly, it is unusual for them to travel as far north as New Zealand.

The Wall Street Journal online has a free feature today on the state of California's lawsuit against the 6 largest auto manufacturers over the GHGs emitted by the cars. It gives a pretty concise definition of the sort of suit it is (public nuisance rather than manufacturer liability), then features a debate between Russell Jackson, a defense-side lawyer who has worked on class-action and public nuisance suits, and David Bookbinder, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club in Washington, D.C.

Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren, senior fellows at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. have contributed an article to the Nov. 20 edition of the National Review Online. Since I'm not an economist, and things like cost-benefit analyses give me a headache, I will not add much to the discussion here.

Ahhhhh.....methane. What could be a better topic for today? I wish I knew, because methane is one of the most difficult topics around when it comes to greenhouse gases. Well, first the good news. A new study, summarized here, finds that atmospheric methane has stabilized, possibly due to leak repairs at oil and gas pipelines and storage facilities and perhaps from reduced or slower growth of emissions from coal mining, natural gas production and rice paddies. Methane is also released into the atmosphere by a number of natural phenomena, such as biomass burning, volcanic eruptions and the melting of methane hydrates in permafrost. Oh, and it also results from cows - as Henry noted in a November 6th entry on his MeteoMadness blog.

The fact that methane is currently stable in the atmosphere is a good thing, but this entry at RealClimate.org makes it fairly clear that our understanding of methane variations is limited, to say the least. We simply can not use the data we have now to construct any sort of accurate forecast for future methane concentrations. Given that methane is a more potent (though shorter-lived) greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and given that methane in the atmosphere oxides into carbon dioxide, this is another area where more research is needed.

A Vermont advocacy organization called the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) has released a report titled Building Solutions: Energy Efficient Homes Save Money and Reduce Global Warming. While the group's home page makes their political leanings clear, and I don't advocate any political party or affiliation, I do appreciate some of what the report has to say about making homes more energy efficient. The report is too bold, in my opinion, in many of it's statements on global warming.

Vermont has many older (pre-1940) homes with poor insulation and older home heating equipment. New furnaces are as much as 40% more efficient than models which are over 15 years old. In addition, improving weatherization and insulation of a home - which can cost a couple of thousand dollars but will generally pay for itself within 4 years, according to the report - can also reduce the burden on the state, as lower-income families may require less assistance to pay their heating bills. Since the cost of heating oil - one of the most common sources of heat in the Northeast - has skyrocketed in the last 7 years, more families than ever before are requiring assistance to pay their heating bills.

I know from personal experience that upgrading a furnace in an older home can have a dramatic effect on fuel oil consumption. Our previous home was built in 1945, and when we moved in, it had the original furnace. The thing ran like a champ, but it was tremendously inefficient. When we upgraded, we found we used at least one third less fuel oil than we had used before. Some weatherization is expensive, such as replacement windows, and some, such as blocking drafts through electrical outlets on outside walls, is not. Lots of information on weatherizing your home can be found here.

Here's a headline you don't see every day - from Australia's Daily Telegraph - "Nukes 'would stop global warming.'" And to think I didn't even know Australia had the bomb! Oh wait, it's NOT the bomb they're talking about! It's nuclear energy!

"The only way you can justify adding nuclear into the mix is if you are determined to reduce greenhouse gases," Dr Switkowski told ABC TV tonight.

Just so you all know, I won't be posting on Thanksgiving Day. I know some of my readers are from outside of the United States and don't celebrate this holiday, or celebrate it on a different date, as our neighbors to the north do. I'll be spending my day with my family, reflecting on all of the things I'm thankful for. I hope you have that opportunity, too.

I'll be joining the forecasting crew here at AccuWeather.com late this week and early next week, but I'll still be posting here as well. I'm also going to make every attempt to see An Inconvenient Truth now that it's available on DVD, and we're working hard to get the first of our videos posted. That may happen as early as next week.

I like to keep my eyes open for any documentaries on climate or climate change, so when I saw The History Channel had an episode of MegaDisasters titled Mega Freeze, I had to check it out. The title was actually a little misleading, as the only parts of the world heading for a Mega Freeze were the mid- to upper-latitudes. The rest of the world was dealing with Mega Heat, Mega Floods and Mega Droughts. I guess Mega Climate Meltdown was too cumbersome a name.

The point of the program was that global warming may cause too much ice melt which will cause too much "freshening" of the sea water which will shut down at least a portion of the Thermohaline circulation. The Thermohaline circulation is a broad ocean circulation which acts to transport heat from the equatorial region toward the poles. If it were to shut down, or at least if the northern extent of it were shut down, places like western Europe, eastern Canada and the northeastern part of the United States would turn sharply colder.

Here's a simple graphic of the Thermohaline circulation, from NOAA's web site:

This idea has been creeping into the media, with articles such as this one from the UK Guardian. However, at this point there seems to be little to be concerned about, and in fact RealClimate.org effectively argues that the article in the Guardian was groundless.

The program on the History Channel did make some fairly strong correlations between past climate change and periods of societal unrest which made for interesting viewing. If you've been reading this blog for any period of time though, you know I can do without the hyperbole. And that's the MegaTruth.

After reading articles that seem to blame global warming for.....well....for all of this stuff, it was nice to read an article from the Portsmouth Herald that discusses current weather and takes pains to mention that it's NOT warm because of global warming. Natural - and temporary - variations in the weather can't be used to "prove" global warming. The cold blast poised to move into the northern Rockies and northern Plains doesn't "prove" anything about the global climate, either.

University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan has summed up some 866 scientific studies in the December, 2006 issue of the journal Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics. You can read the abstract online for free, but to read the full study, you must be a subscriber.

Scientists are surprised at how quickly species are being forced to change to adapt to alterations in their environments, an article on CNN.com noted. I find it interesting to note that CNN.com, FoxNews.com and MSNBC.com all feature pictures of polar bears in their stories. People love polar bears.

Speaking of extinctions - here's an interesting article I found on MSNBC.com today about some new research on what happened in the oceans following a mass extinction 250 million years ago. It's not related to global warming, of course, but I include it to remind people that the Earth's biosphere is not a static thing. Changes, sometimes large, sudden, dramatic changes have occurred in the past and will occur again.

Oh, and another link from MSNBC.com while I'm at it. Seems California bird watchers had an extremely rare - as in "never before" rare - treat recently when a gull native to the Arctic was seen 100 miles east of San Diego. This was the first time this species has ever been seen in California, and to see it within 50 miles of the Mexican border is really amazing. I'm sure that's a sign that the new ice age is right around the corner, right?

Saturday we talked about how global warming may be negatively impacting species around the world. Here's a story from the New York Times (log in required - but free) about how regional cooling in Antarctica may be threatening a species of nematode. Since Antarctica is such a cold and barren place, it's fairly easy for scientists to study exactly how each species contributes to the carbon cycle in the region. Turns out this tiny little critter is responsible for 10 percent of the carbon processed in the Dry Valleys soil ecosystem.

So what in the world does this have to do with global warming? I guess I could see it one of two ways. The skeptic in me wants to point to this and say, "Aren't the most significant temperature changes supposed to occur in the Upper Latitudes? Why is it cooling in this part of Antarctica?" And the other part of me says "It's a regional effect, and it's impossible to infer anything about the global climate from a regional effect."

Interesting research is being done on Arctic clouds in Nunavut Territory in the far northern reaches of Canada. Turns out, the clouds contain more super-cooled liquid water in them than had been previously thought. That is important because it affects how much radiation is reflected, absorbed and transmitted by the clouds. Also, as Taneil Uttal, chief of the Clouds and Arctic Reasearch Group at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said:

"It's a new science, driven by the fact that everybody doing climate predictions says that clouds are perhaps the single greatest unknown factor in understanding global warming."

The article also describes the impact that warming which has already occurred is having in Nunavut and other Arctic regions.

Let's talk about a couple of examples of major corporations taking significant steps to make their operations more ecologically friendly.

First is Sharp, which has a strategy in place to become a "Zero Impact" brand in terms of global warming by 2010. They are doing this through a variety of means, including operating Super Green factories, powered independently of the utility power grid through a combination of energy sources such as photovoltaics and fuel-cells. I find it ironic that Sharp has aggressive marketing plans for its Thin-Film solar modules in the Middle East. Not that it doesn't make sense, given the region's abundant sunshine.

Second is Google. Which announced in October that it would be using 9,200 solar cells to help power its one-million-square-foot office complex in Mountain View, California. The system should provide 30 percent of the office's electricity; on any day the system provides more power than it needs, that electricity would be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric.

One interesting quote from the article:

He said the solar power system, in addition to paying for itself over time, would be socially responsible and would help attract smart, high-level engineers who wanted to work for a company trying to diminish the damage it does to the environment.

This concurs with some other things I've read and heard recently about green companies. Being green is a big draw for employees - both for new hires and for maintaining employee loyalty.

Oh, and Google last week topped $500 a share, though it's dropped a bit now. That's not related, it's just mind-boggling to me.

As I mentioned last Wednesday, I was called in to help out the forecasting department over the extended holiday weekend. Now that I've finished those duties, I can refocus my attention back here. I tried to rent An Inconvenient Truth late last week and my local video store's ONE copy was out. I had better luck when I stopped yesterday afternoon. I am not sure I'll have time to watch it today, right now I have it on my to-do list for tomorrow.

Our video editor is out of the office today, so I can't promise that video will be up this week, but I am hopeful. It'll be good to catch up on some of the reading that's been piling up while I've been busy with the weather!

By the way, who's up for a trip to Montana? 9:00 am local time, it's -16 in Cut Bank, with a wind chill of 41 below zero.

I fret a lot over the politicization of the science of global warming. It's an issue that seems to be clearly cut down party lines. As someone who normally tries to stay out of politics, it's frustrating to be beaten over the head with the party line while simply trying to weigh the facts. Here's an interesting article from Roger Pielke, Jr. on how science is politicized and how scientists can best impact policy decisions.

Oh, and there's also a brief discussion here on the current debate on global warming and hurricanes.

The Supreme Court will hear its first global warming-related case today as environmental groups and a dozen states argue for federal regulations on GHG emissions. On the other side, the EPA - backed by 10 states, four motor vehicle trade associations and two coalitions of utility companies and other industries. At issue - whether the EPA has the authority to regulate the emissions of GHGs, especially carbon dioxide. The court will be asked to decide whether GHGs fit within the federal Clean Air Act's definition of a pollutant. Pretty hard, in my opinion, to label the product of the respiration of every person and animal on the planet pollution. But then again, I still don't understand how the court justified the whole eminent domain decision last year, so who knows what they will do.

The MSNBC synopsis of the Supreme Court case also includes a couple of other very interesting links, including this one, which teases the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. This is the second article I have read which has indicated the 2007 report will be more persuasive than the 2001 report. The first article I read, from back in September, described the upcoming report as "stunning."

The other VERY interesting MSNBC article is the first in what will be a daily series on a new project in Antarctica - using oil industry technology to drill 500 feet through the Ross Ice Shelf into the sea floor to take sediment samples to get a picture of the climate going back 15 million years. Head on over - there's even a place to enter your questions. I'm working on one or two of my own.

I'm not sure how many of the readers of this blog follow up and read comments, so I thought I would add this link to an entry on the main page. Thanks to Sarah Fortner for adding it to our discussion. This is an op-ed piece from Peter Doran, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was his research which discovered the regional cooling in portions of Antarctica. The op-ed addresses how this research has been mis-used by the media and others as "evidence" against global warming. It makes a very interesting read.

When I was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, I took my first atmospheric science class, on the 7th floor of the building then known as the Meteorology and Space Sciences building. I can remember vividly as my professor picked up a globe and set it on his desk. He said that if the dome of the Wisconsin State Capitol building - almost a mile away - were the sun, then the globe on his desk was approximately the correct size and distance from the sun to represent the Earth. He then took a single sheet of paper and laid it on the globe. "And this," he said, "is the atmosphere."

I tell this story for two reasons. First, Al Gore (seen here visiting Glacier National Park) tells a similar story in An Inconvenient Truth, paraphrasing Carl Sagan saying if you have an old globe, the layer of varnish on it is comparable in thickness to the Earth's atmosphere. Second, Mr. Gore clearly had a fairly similar experience sitting in geochemist Roger Revelle's classroom at Harvard in 1968. Dr. Revelle had started doing research on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and he had already seen the upward trend, year by year, and he was convinced that warming would follow. This clearly made a big impression on Mr. Gore and as he has seen evidence of warming since that time, is something he has become passionate about.

I thought the movie did a pretty good job of presenting the science in a way non-scientists can understand. There were a couple of things that were a little shaky - I thought he hit the hurricane/global warming connection a little too hard, as that's really still a topic being debated. Being that the movie was made in the wake of Katrina, it is understandable. Given the way the 2006 season turned out, it lacks some punch. His related points on how vulnerable society is and the impact of potentially many times as many refugees as those produced by Katrina were well made.

RealClimate addresses a couple of more minor scientific errors here.

I thought the movie made too much of the political side of the issue, and that in playing that up, it would be more divisive than it could/should have been. On the other hand, my husband watched the movie and said it was LESS political than he expected - by far - and he's a pretty conservative guy.

Bottom line - if you have a strong opinion on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth probably will not change your mind. But I believe it's worth watching, if only to continue to fuel discussion.

The federal Clean Air Act gives the EPA authority to regulate air pollutants. In the case of Massachusetts v. EPA, Massachusetts and several other states are attempting to force the EPA to regulate the greenhouse gases emitted by vehicles in the United States. Vehicles in the U.S. emit approximately 6 percent of global annual GHG emissions. The CAA does mention carbon dioxide specifically, but it does not in this portion of the statute (emphasis mine), give the EPA the right to regulate it.

(g) Pollution Prevention and Emissions Control.- In carrying
out subsection (a), the Administrator shall conduct a basic
engineering research and technology program to develop, evaluate,
and demonstrate non regulatory strategies and technologies for
air pollution prevention. Such strategies and technologies shall
be developed with priority on those pollutants which pose a
significant risk to human health and the environment, and with
opportunities for participation by industry, public interest
groups, scientists, and other interested persons in the
development of such strategies and technologies. Such program
shall include the following elements:
(1) Improvements in nonregulatory strategies and technolo-
gies for preventing or reducing multiple air pollutants,
including sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, heavy metals, PM-
10 (particulate matter), carbon monoxide, and carbon
dioxide, from stationary sources, including fossil fuel
power plants. Such strategies and technologies shall include
improvements in the relative cost effectiveness and
long-range implications of various air pollutant reduction
and nonregulatory control strategies such as energy
conservation, including end-use efficiency, and fuel-
switching to cleaner fuels. Such strategies and technologies
shall be considered for existing and new facilities.

There are other portions of the statute which make it relatively clear that if a substance is determined to be a pollutant which has an adverse effect on human health or the environment, then the EPA has the authority to regulate it. The sticking point here is that the EPA has done nothing toward that determination. This suit clearly is an attempt to push the EPA forward.

Have you ever wondered what goes on in the Supreme Court? Me neither. But here's the text of the oral arguments presented Wednesday before the Supreme Court. Of course, this is a mere 50-some pages of testimony. Not even close to the written materials provided the court, I'm sure. It's pretty clear that none of the participants are scientists, and it's equally clear that I am not a lawyer - some of the context is lost on me because I know nothing of the cases which each side cites in their support.

As I said in my last entry, the point of the case before the Supreme Court is to try to get the EPA to regulate GHG emissions from vehicles. The best they can hope for is to lower the emissions from the current 6 percent of the global total to 3.5 percent of the current global total emissions. Unfortunately, by the time the current fleet of vehicles would turnover, the amount of growth in emissions from other sectors and certainly from other nations would completely overwhelm that small amount of savings. And even if other emissions didn't change, it's not enough of an impact to make a difference.

Massachusetts is claiming that it's being damaged by global warming - that sea level rises will engulf a large portion of it's coastline (bye bye, Cape Cod) and that's the standing for their suit.

The point of the whole exercise, of course, is to set a precedent. There is a case currently on appeal in the D.C. Circuit court regarding EPA regulating GHGs from power plants, but it has been stayed pending the outcome of the case currently before the Supreme Court.