I'd like to take a little time and space here to introduce myself. My name is Laura Hannon, and I've been a forecast meteorologist with Accu-Weather....er.... AccuWeather.....er.... AccuWeather.com for 19 years. Lots has changed in that time. Why, when I first walked in the door, I was greeted by the sound of about twenty clattering IBM Selectrics (that's typewriters for you young'uns). Now, a huge percentage of our business is online.

Unlike many of my colleagues, I am not an alumnae of Penn State. I attended the great State University of Wisconsin, and am a proud, vociferous Badger fan. Another fact that sets me apart from many of my coworkers is that I don't live or work in State College anymore. Like Ken Clark (the trailblazer), I am a telecommuter. I live on Harrisburg's West Shore with my husband and soon-to-be 5 year old twin daughters.

Although I've been in the weather business for a long time, I've mostly tried to stay out of the global warming debate. I'm not an expert on climate, nor will I pretend to be one. My opinion going back 15 years has always been not so much an opinion as a question. "Do we know enough?" Do we know enough to say that the changes that are occurring are exclusively as a result of human activity? Do we know enough to determine what actions need to be taken? Do we know enough about the interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere? Do we understand the atmosphere and climate change well enough to create accurate climate models? I've been doing a ton of reading since taking on this assignment for AccuWeather.com, and if anything I have more questions now than I did when I began. It is up to science, not politicians or special interest groups, to come up with the answers.

Many people, and most journalists, don't have a strong background in science, which adds a layer of complexity to the issue of global warming. People want simple answers, and this is quite honestly not a simple issue. My goal is to act as a bridge between hard science and ordinary people, to try to make the difficult issues easier to understand.

In our culture today, it's hard to have a civilized discourse on any even remotely controversial subject. And without question, global warming is a controversial subject. Nonetheless, the goal of this site is to present information on global warming from all sides. I will sift through the boatloads of information on global warming available on the Web and in the media and bring you information that will be useful and meaningful in your lives. Please, feel free to post comments and ask questions. It may take me some time to get to them, but it's my promise to you that I will read everything you bring to the table.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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'm titling this entry Off Topic because I want to make it clear - crystal clear - that I am not writing about any climate science. Instead, I'm writing about the stem cell "research" of a South Korean scientist named Hwang Woo-Suk, which was published in the prestigious journal Science in two separate articles, one in 2004, the other in 2005. Turned out Hwang's claims of a breakthrough in stem cell technology was completely bogus - a deliberate fraud.

In 2005, Science published about 8 percent of the 12,000 studies submitted; studies in subjects from microbiology to astronomy. The journal previously had based its procedures on the assumption that the papers it receives are "honestly conceived and written." Following the fraud of Hwang, new procedures are being implemented at the journal, although the editors of Science recognize the difficulty in evaluating papers which claim "major breakthroughs." The new procedures will include a required "risk assessment" for each paper and requiring more extensive information in the published supporting material.

An interesting quote from the report from the committee examining Science's peer review process is as follows:

Science (and Nature) have reached a special status. Publication in Science has a significance that goes beyond that of 'normal' publication. Consequently, the value to some authors of publishing in Science, including enhanced reputation, visibility, position or cash rewards, is sufficiently high that some may not adhere to the usual scientific standards in order to achieve publication. Thus, the cachet of publishing in Science can be an incentive not to follow the rules. This problem has a significant impact on all of science, since trust in the system is essential, and since Science and Nature are seen to speak for the best in science. Furthermore, false information in the literature leads to an enormous waste of time and money in an effort to correct and clarify the science.

The only reference to climate change is here (emphasis mine):

Papers in this class, particularly those that will receive public attention, can influence public policy or contribute to personal or institutional financial gain and thus warrant special scrutiny. In the immediate future, examples will likely come from the areas of climate change, human health, and particular issues in commercial biomedicine and nanotechnology.

My point in this entry is not to criticize Science or Nature, two of the finest journals we have. Rather it is to say that if fraud can occur, even with the added security layer of peer review, how easy is it to create a web site that looks legitimate, include equations and a few obscure references, call it science and fool the public?

I'll be called on more often than usual to help out in the forecasting department over the next couple of weeks. As a result, my posts here may be a little bit less frequent and more sporadic than usual and I may be slower than normal publishing and responding to comments and responding to email. I'll do my best to continue to provide something close to regular content.

In other news, our long-awaited video is coming Monday! I'm looking forward to seeing what our team will come up with. We've got some good ideas in the pipeline, including an interview with Michael Mann, which should be online in mid to late January.

We've run into a little snag on the video side of things. Looks like it won't be ready to post today. I'm hoping that we'll have it later this week.

I'm a little jealous. There. I said it. There's a raging blizzard in the High Plains and I wish I was there. You know how some meteorologists get all giddy about severe weather? Or hurricanes? That's not me. Me, I like a good winter storm. Like the storm back in the '70s when a big snowfall back home in Minnesota was followed by such brutal winds that the snow was left with a crust an inch thick, and on top of that was a dusting of fine brown powder, like cocoa powder sprinkled on whipped cream. That brown powder was top soil which had blown in from the Dakotas. Amazing. Or the blizzard of '93, when I spent 36 straight hours at AccuWeather, most of it forecasting, all the while watching over 27 inches of snow pile up. And then digging out my car with help from some of my coworkers, then helping others do the same. I love snow. I miss snow.

Two days ago, it was 66 degrees in my back yard. Yesterday it was 46. We're averaging 4 degrees above normal for the month, and temps are likely to remain above normal through the rest of this week and the start of next week. sigh. It's hard for a northern gal like me to get into the holiday spirit when I don't even need to put on my coat to go out for the mail.

Before anyone rips into me - yes, I know that winter storms are extremely dangerous. People can and do lose their lives, mostly in far more mundane circumstances than those that took the life of Kelly James on Mt. Hood. Lots of people are inconvenienced right now because Interstate 70 is closed from Denver to Kansas.

Nonetheless, I'm a little jealous of a friend of mine at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where the most recent observation tells me the visibility is zero in snow and blowing snow, it's 23 degrees and the winds are gusting to near 50 mph. That's some good bad weather.

I got a lot of comments on the story of the calving of the Ayles Ice Shelf, including a very informative one from Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College. I sent an e-mail to Dr. Luke Copland, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Copland was quoted in the article I linked and he was kind enough to respond. Here's the text of the e-mail:

Hi Laura,

Thanks for the good question - there have been many breakups of ice shelves across northern Ellesmere Island over the last century so. When these ice shelves were first discovered in about 1900, they were a total of about 10,000 sq km in area. Today they have reduced in size by about 90%, to about 1000 sq km in area. The Ayles Ice Shelf loss was the largest breakup in at least 25 years, but it is part of the long-term trend of loss over the last century.

The important point to note with all of these losses is that they are essentially permanent. There is no longer enough glacier ice flowing off the land to replace the ice that is being calved into the ocean. Hence these 3000+ year old shelves are now gone forever.

You might also be interested in looking at a media page that we've put together:
http://www.geomatics.uottawa.ca/copland/

Regards,
Luke

Perhaps the loss of these ice shelves is simply due to being in the midst of an interglacial period. Or maybe we're speeding up the process.