Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 1130

The Curious Case of the Hockey Stick that Didn't Disappear. Part 1: The Police Lineup - But who killed the Medieval Warm Period?

Before we begin the investigation into the usual suspects, some background for people who those who don't follow climate science closely, which certainly includes most of the disinformers and  apparently at least two statisticians.

There is a high probability that the recent warming is unprecedented for 1000 years and probably much longer (see "Sorry disinformers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years" and here and here).This conclusion is based on an...

What happened to greenhouse warming during mid-century cooling? - And could global brightening be causing global warming?

Physicist John Cook of Skeptical Science has two good pieces on global dimming and global brightening I'm combining and reposting here.

A few weeks back while researching global brightening, I came across a gem of a paper: Impact of Global brightening and dimming on global warming (Wild et al 2007). The paper examines temperature trends over the second half of the 20th Century, including the cooling period in the middle of the century. From the 1950s to early 1980s, while CO2 levels were...

Energy and Global Warming News for August 16th: Wind turbines in New York; A plug-and-play PV system; Are the Great Lakes are carbon sink?

Wind Turbines Are Coming to New York, and Not Just Offshore

For years, New York officials have envisioned powering the region from a set of huge wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. But well before an offshore wind farm would be up and running, giant turbines may soon be spinning much closer to the city.

Within three years, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey hopes to have five wind towers, each more than 280 feet tall, operating on the west side of New York Harbor...

The dangerous reality of climate change justifies global warming law — in California and nationwide

Texas oil giants Valero Energy and Tesoro Corp have mounted a fear campaign to thwart AB 32, California's Global Warming Law this November. Californians have always valued the environment first and foremost. It's time to take a stand, once and for all, and allow innovation to deliver a made-in-America green technologies energy solution.

That's Dr. Reese Halter, writing in Huffington Post piece, which I excerpt below. Halter is a Science Communicator and a conservation biologist at Cal...

TNR: "The Unnecessary Fall of Barack Obama" - Is progressive messaging a "massive botch"? Part 5

The president has also suffered from an inability to explain to the public why he sought such a large stimulus and what he thought it could accomplish. Obama's New Foundation speech at Georgetown was soon forgotten. Afterward, Obama, to the dismay of Democrats in Congress and some of his White House aides, pretty much dropped the jobs issue. From then to Labor Day, he devoted a July visit to Buffalo and an August stopover in southern Indiana to the issue–at a time when the right wing...

Oil-funded Pat Michaels admits solving global warming is a problem of "political acceptability"

Fareed Zakaria: Can I ask you what percentage of your work is funded by the petroleum industry?

Pat Michaels: I don't know. 40 percent? I don't know.

In a telling exchange with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, long-time polluter apologist Pat Michaels conceded that the real challenge of solving manmade global warming is simply the "political acceptability" of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels as climate catastrophes grow. Wonk Room's Brad Johnson has the story.

Michaels, aptly introduced as "a...

New York Times front-page story: In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming! - Trenberth: "It's not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there's always an element of bo

The floods battered New England, then Nashville, then Arkansas, then Oklahoma — and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the lives of 20 million people.

The summer's heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record.

Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global...

New York Times front-page story: In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming! - Trenberth: "It's not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there's always an element of bo

The floods battered New England, then Nashville, then Arkansas, then Oklahoma — and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the lives of 20 million people.

The summer's heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record.

Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global...

New York Times front-page story: In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming! - Trenberth: "It's not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there's always an element of bo

The floods battered New England, then Nashville, then Arkansas, then Oklahoma — and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the lives of 20 million people.

The summer's heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record.

Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global...

New York Times front-page story: In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming! - Trenberth: "It's not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there's always an element of bo

The floods battered New England, then Nashville, then Arkansas, then Oklahoma — and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the lives of 20 million people.

The summer's heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record.

Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global...