Climate 411

Many people have asked me whether global warming and the ozone hole are related. The short answer is "no". The long answer starts with "tangentially". Here’s the scoop.

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The author of today’s post, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.

This week’s scientific journals brought three interesting stories about climate change. The first is a sneak peek at an upcoming paper about global warming and the Sun. The second talks about an unexpected environmental benefit of hurricanes, and the third reports that climate change is drying up important biodiversity hotspots in the Arctic.

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Tomorrow’s Live Earth concert is expected to be quite the happening. Do you think it will help the fight against climate change? Are you planning to go? If you do go, post your experiences here!

Lisa Moore is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.

Of everything in climate science, what seems to spark the most skeptical questions is our use of computer models. In this post and another to follow, I’ll talk about exactly what these models do, and how they contribute to our understanding of global warming.

I’ll start with why we use models in the first place. We want to project what will happen to our climate in the future – will it be warmer? How much warmer? Will it change in different ways in different places? Climate models use our knowledge of how the climate system works to calculate what different emissions scenarios mean for the future. Here’s how the models are built.

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The author of today’s article, Derek Walker, is deputy director of the state climate initiative at Environmental Defense.

Last week, New Jersey’s House and Senate Budget Committees passed a landmark global warming bill called the "Global Warming Response Act". It sailed through the full House and Senate two days later and Governor Jon Corzine says he will sign it in July.

The bill will cap greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2020, and lower the cap to 80 percent below current levels by 2050 (see New York Times article). It is the first bill in the nation to legislate a 2050 target. This is important because 2050 targets are crucial to avoiding the global warming tipping point, and are a component of the bills currently before Congress. When forward-looking states pass legislation like this, it can force the federal government to do likewise.

I went to Trenton to testify before the Budget Committee, and left there inspired.

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Three stories caught my eye this week. The first study adjusts earlier estimates of carbon uptake by land plants. In the other two articles, scientists document the biological effects of Europe’s record-breaking temperatures, and estimate the risk of severe Mediterranean heat waves due to global warming.

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