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.
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!
This is the fourth 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
In my previous article in this series, I talked about climate change patterns over geologic time. I showed how today’s spike in temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration breaks patterns and records going back 600,000 years.
This departure can be seen even more clearly when you look at just the last 1000 years (see graph in previous post). So what is this you hear about a Medieval Warming Period?
Today’s post is from Sam Parry, Environmental Defense’s manager of online membership.
As we prepare for July 4th festivities, I wanted to share an inspiring conversation we’ve had with our online supporters over the past several weeks. We asked the question, how do people who love this country approach the crisis of global warming? We must have struck a nerve because we got thousands of passionate responses.
We used these responses to craft a Declaration of New Patriotism. To date, almost 56,000 people have added their “John Hancock.” Last week, we delivered the message to Congress with an ad in Roll Call, one of the most widely read newspapers on Capitol Hill.
So before you head out to celebrate tomorrow, take a look at our Declaration of New Patriotism and add your signature. Happy Fourth of July!
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.
This is the third 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
An argument I hear frequently from climate change skeptics goes like this: "Climate has undergone warming and cooling cycles for millennia. This is no different. It’s just another naturally occurring warm cycle."
It’s true that climate has undergone warming and cooling cycles for millennia, but it’s not true that this is just another naturally occurring warm cycle. Here’s why.
