Climate 411

This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

How do we plan for climate change? Unfortunately, many groups don’t even ask that question, much less begin to answer it.

I’m happy to report that there are exceptions. Yesterday, I testified before the New York City Council’s Infrastructure Task Force, which held a forum on how climate change and flooding will affect the city’s infrastructure. It was an interesting experience. I left feeling cautiously optimistic that the city really is trying to tackle the problem.

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This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

An article in this week’s Nature predicts that Europe and North America will cool slightly over the next decade. No, this doesn’t mean that global warming has stopped.

The new paper describes a climate model that makes short-term (decadal) predictions based on ocean dynamics. The decade-long cooling is just a temporary offset to warming from human activity. After it passes, temperatures will begin climbing again. By 2030, the model forecasts the same global temperatures as the IPCC.

This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

Last week, NOAA released some disheartening numbers: both CO₂ and methane increased sharply last year. Growth rates are increasing (see graph to the right).

The CO₂ numbers weren’t a surprise. A paper with similar findings was published last November by a team that included a NOAA scientist. I wrote a blog post summarizing the study, which analyzed the reasons behind the trend (see Rise of Atmospheric Carbon is Accelerating).

The methane numbers, however, were disturbing. Until this year, methane levels have been essentially unchanged since 1998.

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This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

There’s an email making the rounds lately – an invitation to take a Global Warming Test. It starts off reasonably enough (yes, global warming is real), but then quickly devolves into ridiculousness – ridiculousness presented in a way that looks misleadingly "scientific".

For those interested in truth, here are the real answers to the Global Warming Test.

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This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, this past winter was the coolest since 2001. A single season can’t determine a long-term trend any more than a single month can (see my previous post, "Did Global Warming Stop in January?"). But the recent cooler temperatures do offer an opportunity to talk about La Niña – a climate pattern that causes short-term cooling.

This winter’s La Niña is the strongest (coldest) since 1989, so we’d expect the weather to be cooler than usual. But even so, the cooling didn’t come close to offsetting the warming of the past 50-100 years. As you can see in the graph below, the cooling barely takes us back to 2001.

Data source: NASA. Each dot is a three-month period (season).

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