Climate 411

Climate Models: How Good Are They?

By Lisa Moore / Published: July 18, 2007

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

Stephen Colbert once quipped, "It’s not that I don’t believe in climate change, it’s that I don’t believe in climate. Have you ever heard anyone say, "How’s the climate?" No! They say, "How’s the weather?""

People often confuse climate and weather. They wonder how scientists can reliably predict climate 50 years from now when they can’t predict the weather a few weeks from now. The answer is that climate and weather are different, and it’s easier to predict climate than weather.

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Posted in News / Read 3 Responses

Extreme Weather: This Season's Norm?

By Bill Chameides / Published: July 17, 2007

With all that’s going on in the world, it’s easy to miss weather events. So you may not have noticed that U.S. weather patterns the last few months have been quite extreme and worrying.

From NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center

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Posted in Extreme Weather / Read 50 Responses

Quote of the Week

By Sheryl Canter / Published: July 13, 2007

What is needed now is a strong, sustained, and well-coordinated effort between governments at all levels, businesses, civic institutions, and individuals to adopt policies, programs, and practices that accelerate the adoption of clean, efficient energy choices. The costs of delay are high. For every year of delay in beginning significant emissions reductions, global concentrations of heat-trapping gases rise higher and the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change becomes more difficult and more costly to achieve.

From Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast [PDF 8MB], prepared by the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment Synthesis Team. July 2007.

For more on the toll of global warming in the Northeast, visit our New York City page.

Posted in What Others are Saying / Read 5 Responses

Part 5 of 5:  The Only Explanation Left

By Bill Chameides / Published: July 12, 2007

This is the final installment of a five-part series by Bill Chameides on How We Know Humans Cause Global Warming.

1. A 175-year-old Puzzle
2. What Chemistry Tells Us
3. Causes of Past Climate Change
4. The Medieval Warming Period
5. The Only Explanation Left

Compared to 100 years ago, the temperature of the atmosphere is warmer. No one disputes that. And no one disputes that an extra source of heat must be causing it – that’s a basic law of physics. But how do we know that the source of the heat is increasing levels of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and deforestation?

So far in this series I’ve described how the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and global warming was discovered, how carbon isotopes prove that rising CO2 concentrations are from the burning of fossil fuels, and how the orbital shifts that cause ice ages cannot explain our recent warming.

That certainly suggests that global warming is caused by increased CO2 from burning fossil fuels, but how can we be sure?

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Posted in Basic Science of Global Warming / Read 22 Responses

Swindles in the “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

By Lisa Moore / Published: July 11, 2007

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

In March of this year, British TV Channel 4 aired a 72-minute diatribe called "The Great Global Warming Swindle". The program is filled with old data, data taken out of context, data misattributed, and general misinformation, and at the time it aired we thought it not worth responding to.

But people keep mentioning it, so here are the program’s main arguments and why they’re wrong. Now the next time someone brings this up, you’ll have the facts to give them.

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Posted in News / Read 8 Responses

How much coal does the U.S. have?

By Jeffery Greenblatt / Published: July 10, 2007

The author of today’s post, Jeffery Greenblatt, Ph.D., is an expert on low-carbon energy technologies at Environmental Defense.

The U.S. may be short on oil and gas reserves, but the one energy source we thought we had in abundance was coal – enough to last 250 years at current consumption levels. Or so we thought.

A few weeks ago, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a new report saying that U.S. coal reserves may last only another 100 years, or even less. That’s a big difference. How did we get this so wrong, and what are the implications for U.S. energy policy going forward?

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Posted in Energy / Read 1 Response