Researchers from Texas A & M University compiled results from a survey of over 1000 Americans on how much they knew about global warming and how they felt about it. Specifically, the research team looked at public informedness of the risks of global warming and the public confidence in climate scientists.

The goal of the study, posted in the Risk Analysis Journal, was to test the general assumption that the scientific assessment of the risks is both correct and objective, and that, by implication, the publics perceptions of the risks are both inaccurate and subjective.

According to the survey, more informed respondents and those with high confidence in scientists both feel less personally responsible for global warming and also show less concern for global warming.

From the New York Times article "Global Warming Paradox" by John Tierney............

But why would people who trust scientists not be as concerned when they hear so many scientists warning of the perils of global warming? “Though this effect differs from our expectations,” the researcher write, “it is consistent with the notion that people trust that scientists will be able, somehow, to devise technical solutions to any problems that arise because of global warming and climate change.” Dr. Kellstedt elaborated on this point by telling me:

More broadly, and again quite speculatively, I think that Americans have a great deal of faith in technology and technological solutions to problems. We have seen science do things (like send people into outer space, and to miraculously save them, Apollo-13 style, when things go badly) unimaginable for 99.9% of human history.

You can read about the study in depth right here.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

A group of climatologists say that greenhouse gas emissions will have to be eliminated completely in order to stabilize the earth's climate and prevent temperatures from rising. Current efforts/plans to just stabilize emissions will not be enough.

Damon Matthews, from Concordia University in Canada, and Ken Caldeira, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, USA, used a global climate model to study how greenhouse emissions would need to change in order to stabilize global temperatures over the next few hundred years. Previous studies have only looked at what happens when emissions are stabilised, according to the report in NewScientist.

So far industrial emissions total around 450 billion tonnes. "Even if we eliminated carbon dioxide today we are still committed to a global temperature rise of around 0.8 degrees Celsius lasting at least 500 years," says Caldeira.

Roger Pielke, a climate policy expert at the University of Colorado in Boulder, agrees with the findings. "This research makes the case that simply stabilising concentrations is insufficient to stabilize temperatures. Their argument, if widely accepted, raises the bar on what it means to mitigate climate change," he says.

The group says that current emissions targets for 2050 are not enough to avoid substantial future warming and that eliminating emissions or actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere is the only way to go.

"It is technologically challenging, but not impossible. The biggest challenge will be to get political consensus," says Caldeira.

You see, it always finds a way back to politics.

A follow-up to a post back in November that I thought was interesting......

John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, was a guest speaker at the International Conference for Climate Change (ICCC), which is currently going on in New York City. A few months ago, John wrote a piece detailing his views about global warming. This time, John gets to the conference podium and personally slams the company that he founded back in 1982. In his speech, John is also highly critical of global warming alarmism. Here is the link to the Business and Media Institute story, along with a video clip of him speaking from the conference. By the way, John Coleman no longer works at the Weather Channel and is employed at KUSI in San Diego.

******Update******

Here are some of the latest viewpoints of the conference, which ends today....

Day 1, courtesy of the Heartland institute which is hosting the conference.

Day 2, courtesy of the Heartland Institute.

Andrew Revkin's reporter's notebook from The New York Times.

Andrew Revkin, a science writer for the New York Times posted an interesting article titled "Skeptics of Human Climate Seize on Cold Spell". There is no doubt we have been hearing a lot of this discussion recently from people who challenge human-induced global warming thanks to the notable drop in the global monthly temperature anomaly over the past year, and especially this past January. Revkin also posts a few temperature charts here.

I have had several requests to do a post on this, so here it is...........

Anthony Watts, whose work in checking surface observing stations, that I blogged about not too long ago recently compiled the four global temperature anomaly sets and noted that each set showed a fairly sharp drop of the global temperature anomaly over the past 12 months. You can see the charts right here on his site.

Keep in mind, this is just a 12-month period and the final plot of two data sets were still above normal, but is it the start of a new trend? I think it is way too early to tell, twelve months is a very short time when you are talking climate change. There is just not enough data yet to support the idea from some skeptical sources that the earth is now going to go into a longer term cooling trend. There could be a few reasons for this......La Nina, solar minimum.....check out the sun image below, do you see any sunspots?, and changing atmospheric wind currents. I just do not know for sure, and I do not think anyone really has the definite answer right now, but Anthony's work is applauded. It will be interesting to see how the global temperatures trend over the next couple of years.

Also, Anthony just attended the ICCC conference in New York and blogged about each day he was there. The New York Times John Tierney also writes about the conference. Here is the day 3 report from the Heartland Institute.

The quiet sun

UPDATE.........................

Dr. James Hansen, the director of the NASA GISS program offers his take on the recent cooling trend. You can read it here.

A new study by NOAA and the University of Hawaii states the least biologically productive areas of the oceans are expanding much faster than predicted.

Between 1998-2007, ocean deserts (expanses of saltwater with low surface plant life in the Pacific and Atlantic) grew by 15% or 6.6 million sq/km.The study notes that this is happening at the same time that sea-surface temperatures are warming about 1% or 0.02-0.04 degrees celsius a year.

Global ocean temperature anomalies (purple lines) since 1880, courtesy of NASA GISS.

This warming, according to the study published in the Geophysical Research Papers, increases stratification of the ocean waters, preventing deep ocean nutrients from rising to the surface and creating plantlife.

"The fact that we are seeing an expansion of the ocean’s least productive areas as the subtropical gyres warm is consistent with our understanding of the impact of global warming. But with a nine-year time series, it is difficult to rule out decadal variation," said Jeffrey J. Polovina, lead author of the study.

Using a sensor on a spacecraft, the research showed that the areas of low productivity in the Pacific are expanding from the center toward Hawaii. In the Atlantic, the least productive areas of the subtropical gyre are expanding at a more rapid rate eastward across the Caribbean toward Africa.

The black areas are the least productive.

In part two of this Headline Earth segment, Charles Komanoff, co-founder of the Carbon Tax Center, discusses the advantages of a carbon tax to the average person with our own Katie Fehlinger. Komanoff believes that the tax will need to be inacted at the federal level in order for it to be fully effective and put more money back in your wallet.

Katie also has a short piece on the International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) that was just held in New York City.

Brett is going to be off for a few days, so that means that I'll temporarily be hosting the blog. I've followed Brett's blog fairly closely (I think he does a great job), but I haven't seen everything that he's posted lately, so I apologize if I post something that he's recently talked about.

One thing that I find disturbing about the debate related to global warming (or climate change) is the unfortunate marriage of global warming and politics. In some sense, it's difficult to separate the two since political decisions are often made based on beliefs related to global warming, and the concept of a carbon tax (discussed recently) is one such example. In that case, a discussion of politics is directly related to a discussion of global warming.

The part that I find disturbing is the fact that the global warming debate often becomes a political football, with the sides being largely divided along party lines. Democrats are supposed to believe certain things about global warming, and Republicans are supposed to believe other things. The result is that people, then, often use the discussion of global warming as an excuse to espouse their political views.

This is intented to be a blog about the global warming debate, not of political debate. So as I moderate the comments, I will not post any comments that are only about politics, and it goes without saying that I, like Brett, will also not post any comments that include name calling or hateful rhetoric.

Let me know what you think--but watch how you say it!

--Paul Yeager

Update from Indianapolis: I want to thank Paul for helping me out this week. My wife just gave birth to our third child and second daughter out in Indianapolis, Indiana early Saturday morning, while I was still in Pennsylvania with the blizzard stuck in between in Ohio. The baby came a lot earlier than expected, which explains why she was in Indiana for the Big ten tourney. I finally arrived in Indiana later Saturday afternoon. Mother and daughter are doing well. We may be here for a while, so I have no idea when I will return to this blog. I also wrote a more detailed summary of how it all unfolded Friday evening and early Saturday in my Accuweather.com Canadian blog.Thanks for your understanding. Brett

Back to the New York Times once again, but I suspect some of the skeptics will be pleasantly surprised by this piece from Science Times columnist John Tierney. In his article, John questions the critics of the recent International Conference on Climate Change, and their accusations that the sponser of the conference, the Heartland Institute, is just a front for the fossil fuel industry.

From Tierney's article..........

Here's a response from Joseph Bast, Heartland's president: "Donations from energy companies have never amounted to more than 5 percent of our budget in any year, and there is no corporate sponsor underwriting any of this conference. These criticisms are just a standard left-swing smear."

The skeptics in the minority start off with a disadvantage in getting their message heard simply because of the media's bias for bad news and horror stories. When there's a well-financed majority dominating the public debate, I find it odd to hear its members objecting to anyone else receiving money or attention, says Tierney.

Tierney is basically tired of this talk about the money and wants more focus on substance.What do you think?

AccuWeather.com's Elliot Abrams wrote a post recently about how global warming may be causing the tropics to expand--and the possible effects on weather and climate that this might have elsewhere across the globe. He notes that the "hypothetical effects and suppositions are subject to change as research continues."

Read his entire post here: Global Warming has Caused Expansion of Tropics.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, have developed a new way to estimate the thickness of sea ice (New Method to Estimate Sea Ice Thickness).

The method uses a new modeling approach--the only model based entirely on historical observations--"uses sea ice motion data to follow parcels of ice backward in time at monthly intervals for up to 3 years while accumulating a history of solar radiation and air temperature to which the ice was exposed."

The report shares information on Arctic sea ice data from 1982 to 2003 that was collected by this new method.

An article in the Environment Section of the New Scientist states that global warming might pose a threat to the hearing of tropical fish (Global warming poses deaf threat to tropical fish).

If you were like me, then you may not have known that fish actually hear; however, the coral reef fish, which are referred to in the article, need to "hone in on high frequency noises made by invertebrates like shrimp and sea urchins, and avoid the low-frequency noises made by crashing waves and adult fish."

Warming water is not the only concern, but it's also the increasingly acid nature of the water, which is also believed to be associated with global warming, that affects the development of the ear bones of the fish.

Roger Pielke, Jr. recently wrote a post on the Center For Science and Technology Policy Research Web site about what he calls "the deficit model of science communication." He refers to a research paper from the journal Risk Analysis, which states that says "the more information a person has about global warming, the less responsible he or she feel for it; and, indirectly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less concerned he or she is for it."

I certainly found that interesting--the more we know, the less we care. If this is something that you'd like to know more about, read Mr. Pielke's entire post (The Deficit Model Bites Back) or the Risk Analysis research, which is a PDF file that is linked to in Pielke's blog.