New Research Produces Energy From Coal Without Burning

Promising new research at Ohio State is using chemical reactions to produce energy from coal without burning it, capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the process. The system ran for 203 continuous hours in the recent test, and according to the researchers could have run longer. The reaction uses coal that has been ground into powder and mixed with iron oxide beads and heated. Details from the link:

The coal and iron oxide are heated to high temperatures, where the materials react with each other. Carbon from the coal binds with the oxygen from the iron oxide and creates carbon dioxide, which rises into a chamber where it is captured. Hot iron and coal ash are left behind. Because the iron beads are so much bigger than the coal ash, they are easily separated out of the ash, and delivered to a chamber where the heat energy would normally be harnessed for electricity. The coal ash is removed from the system.
The carbon dioxide is separated and can be recycled or sequestered for storage. The iron beads are exposed to air inside the reactor, so that they become re-oxidized be used again. The beads can be re-used almost indefinitely, or recycled.

The US Department of Energy is helping to fund this research and is building a pilot scale reactor set to go online later this year. While there are still environmental concerns with coal mining this technology could possibly remove the air quality issues involved with using coal for energy.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Calls Out Climate Change Deniers

I am just going to post this in its entirety - we need more politicians like this:

Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Mr. President, last week I spoke about our nation’s military and intelligence leaders acknowledging, along with our nation’s scientific leaders, the clear evidence that carbon pollution is changing our climate. Unfortunately, there is confusion among many Americans regarding this scientific consensus, confusion caused by deliberate and coordinated attempts to mislead the American people.

For more than two decades the climate denial movement has been well organized and funded by the fossil fuel industry and conservative ideologues and foundations. The mission of these paid-for deniers is to “manufacture uncertainty,” to manufacture doubt, so the polluters can keep polluting.

This isn’t new. We’ve seen self-serving strategies like this one before: they questioned the merits of requiring seatbelts; they questioned CFCs causing the deterioration of the ozone layer; they questioned the toxic effects of lead exposure; and they questioned whether tobacco was bad for you—same strategy to manufacture doubt; often the same cast of characters. While the Congress of the United State has been distracted and deceived by these ploys, climate change marches on. Precious time is wasting. In the balance hang lives and jobs. This nonsense has gone on long enough.

The public is being misled. Special interest dollars pull the strings of sophisticated campaigns to give the public the impression that there is a real scientific debate regarding whether or not climate change is happening. There isn’t. The scientific debate is about how bad the changes will be. To manufacture the doubt, skeptics with little training in climate science are promoted as “experts.” Front groups such as the Global Climate Coalition, Information Council for the Environment, Heartland Institute, Annapolis Center, and Cooler Heads Coalition are created or enlisted to propagate the message of doubt. They question the motives and engage in harassment of the real, credentialed climate scientists.

For the record, there has been scientific debate regarding climate change. Ideas have been tested, theories have been ventured, and the evidence keeps coming back to the same conclusion: increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human-related sources is strengthening the greenhouse effect, adding to recent warming, and acidifying the oceans. Actually, the evidence coming in tends to confirm the worst and most dangerous projections.
Claims that solar activity is causing recent global warming, and about whether the atmosphere is really warming, have been settled.

When the scientific research doesn’t work out for the skeptics, they turn to straw man arguments. One straw man is that extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and droughts, aren’t proof of climate change. Let’s be clear. No credible source is arguing that extreme events are proof that our climate is changing. But they are associated with what has been staring us in the face for years: the average global temperature is increasing; average sea level is rising; and average ocean acidity is increasing. When averages change extremes usually change with them; the warming climate “loads the dice” for extreme weather.

One gimmick they have reverted to is the observation that there has been no warming trend in the last ten years. In 2010 a Republican Senator said “I don’t think that anyone disagrees with the fact that we actually are in a cold period that started about nine years ago.” Let’s look at the facts. [Show chart with fitted trend] The green line is the global surface temperature data. The red line shows the trend. The trend line is the product of basic and undeniable mathematics, by the way. [Show chart with stepped line] But here’s how the deniers manipulate the same data: the last step is the cold period my Republican colleague mentioned.

This is only a recent portion of the temperature record. When skeptics look deeper into the past, they find even more straw men: the earth’s climate always changes; it’s been warmer in the past. Yes, the earth has seen different climates in the past, not ones we’d want to live in necessarily! The reason we know about these climates is because of the excellent work done by scientists, the same scientists who tell us recent climate change can only be explained by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And then there is this classic: more carbon in the atmosphere is good because it provides more food for plants. Ah, the Plant Food Theory. The fact is that we have changed the composition of our atmosphere, pushing the concentration of carbon dioxide beyond where it has been for 8000 centuries. To give you a timescale of 8000 centuries: the practice of agriculture has been around for 100 centuries; modern humans began to migrate out of Africa about 600 centuries ago; Homo sapiens have been around about 2000 centuries. 8000 centuries. For all that time, we never reached carbon dioxide concentrations like what we’ve caused now, through human activity.

Deniers tend to ignore facts they can’t explain away. For example, the increasing acidification of the oceans is simple to measure and undeniably, chemically linked to carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. So we hear nothing about ocean acidification from the deniers. Ocean acidification is possibly the most disastrous consequence of carbon pollution. The rate of change in acidity of our oceans is already thought to be faster than any time in the past 50 million years. A paper published this March in Science concluded that the current rate of carbon dioxide emissions could drive chemical changes in the ocean unparalleled in the last 300 million years. When you consider the implications for food security, biodiversity, and ocean-based industries, we cannot ignore these changes in our oceans. Just last Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed listing 66 species of coral as endangered or threatened -- and cited climate change as driving three key threats: disease, warmer seas and more acidic seas.

Here’s what I think is worth reminding the deniers, in the words of NASA:
On global temperature rise: “All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years. Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.”
On ocean temperature and sea level rise: “The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 2,300 feet… showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969. Global sea level rose about 6.7 inches in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.”
On ocean acidification: “Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent. This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere... The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.”
NASA scientists put a man on moon and a rover on Mars. They’re not the quacks. Our nation’s best and brightest minds accept the evidence of climate change, and are urging us to act. Yet still for some in this body, the deniers carry the day.

Why? Well, in a weekend editorial titled Flight from Facts, my home-state Providence Journal said: “[The] GOP is winning the race to avoid evidence – some of this escapism based on a desire to hold on to what had been comforting, if error-based, traditional beliefs, and some of it to avoid policies that might be economically and otherwise inconvenient.” And the price of our folly will be very, very high for future generations.
When it is a question of putting the cost on our children and grandchildren of taking care of their grandparents, how the Republican crocodile tears of intergenerational equity flow! In one of their attacks on Medicare and Social Security, which the Republicans like to call “entitlements,” we heard this: “We have got a serious spending problem here… And we need to have an impact on entitlements...If we're going to have entitlements for our children and grandchildren when they reach retirement age, we have got to change the trajectory.”

The Minority Leader has also spoken about what appears to be the health care bill, and worried about it “creating a more precarious future for our children.”
He’s said about the stimulus effort to get our economy back on its feet: “This needs to stop for the future of our country and for our children and for our grandchildren.”
When it’s the deficit, he’s urged us “to make sure that we have the same kind of country for our children and our grandchildren that our parents left for us.” He’s even talked about, and I quote, “the Europeanization of America,” and as a result of that Europeanization of America “our children and grandchildren could no longer expect to have the same opportunities that we’ve had.”
On virtually every traditional anti-Obama Republican Tea Party bugbear – Medicare, Obamacare, the stimulus, the deficit – even this Europeanization of America – out come the children and grandchildren. Let’s assume they are sincere; let’s assume they have a sincere concern for what is left for our children and grandchildren.
So, when it comes to big corporate polluters of today leaving our children and grandchildren a damaged and more dangerous world, where then is the concern for those children and grandchildren? To have children and grandchildren pay for the care of their grandparents through Medicare and Social Security is a sin and an outrage. To force on them the untold costs and consequences of the harms done by today’s corporate polluters? For that, the future generations’ interests receive nothing from the Republicans but stony silence, or phony and calculated denial.

But the cost will be on them; and the shame will be on us.

I yield the floor.

from: http://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/sheldon-calls-out-climate-deniers-in-senate-speech

Perfect Storm 2?

The meteorological world is buzzing about the confluence of Hurricane Sandy with a strong cold front over the eastern seaboard next week, with headlines screaming "Superstorm" that could affect millions of people with high winds, storm surges, and power outages. There is an eerie similarity to 1991's "perfect storm" of movie fame, although this storm has the potential to cause much more damage because the 1991 storm did not make landfall.

Image from Climate Progress

According to The Weather Channel's Brian Norcross this storm is "unprecedented and bizzare" and has also been compared to the hurricane of 1938 which killed hundreds in New England. People are being warned to prepare for the worst and evacuation routes from the coast are already in place. If you have travel plans for the east coast next week I would suggest changing them since this is a very slow moving storm that has already killed dozens in the Caribbean.

One thing you will not hear mentioned much in the breathless reporting on the storm are the words "climate change". While no single weather event can be directly attributed to climate change, the odds become greater for storms like this as the world warms. Climate scientist James Hansen likens it to "loading the dice" where the likelihood of more powerful storms becomes greater. Another analogy would be to a baseball player taking steroids to increase their home run total. While no single home run could be attributed to steroids, the statistical increase in home runs would lead to the suspicion that something odd is going on. Extreme precipitation events have increased significantly since 1948, and this is in line with what climate scientists have predicted for a warmer world. Storms like this one may become commonplace during the latter half of the 21st century, and people will need to become more aware of potential weather hazards no matter where they live.

I think I had better tune up my chainsaw and generator.

UPDATE: For the third time this year alone floods have crippled a city in the Lake Superior basin

Coal Power

The Minnesota Legislature passed two bills that would lift the current regulation on carbon dioxide emissions at coal-fired plants. In Minnesota coal-fired plants are required to offset their carbon dioxide emissions. The plants must not contribute any additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The law regulating these emissions was passed four years ago as part of a package to increase alternative energy production in Minnesota. Some claim that the law is too restricting and that coal plant production cannot occur because the offset practices are too expensive. The House and Senate will vote on the bills in April.

The environmental impacts that occur from burning coal for energy are numerous, including more than emissions of carbon dioxide. We need to use alternative energy and clean up the current energy production. Coal is a fossil fuel, and there is only a limited amount of that coal in the earth. We are going to run out of these fossil fuels, and in the meantime, we are damaging the planet by burning them without the most effective clean burning methods. Americans use a great amount of energy and because we are unwilling to give up our current standard of living, we need to plan for the future and plan how to use our current resources in the most appropriate way.

If we are going to continue with burning coal, we need to use the best technology we have to produce the fewest emissions and cause the smallest environmental impact. We have only one planet and we are very dependent on that planet for survival.

Image from the Energy Bulletin.

Iceland Volcanic Ash Plume Snarls Air Traffic Over Europe

The continuing eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland is sending a plume of ash 4 to 5km (13 - 16,000ft) high that is drifting northwest over northern Europe and has halted air traffic in the region. Volcanic ash can destroy jet engines, and unfortunately for thousands of stranded passengers this particular eruption is right in the flight path for hundreds of air routes.

There is already speculation on how much this plume of ash and gas will affect global climate this year, but from what I have read about the relative size of this eruption such speculation is premature. Much depends on how much ash is released and how high in the atmosphere it stays. Despite the chaos it is causing for Europe this eruption is still rather small by historical standards and doesn't seem to be pushing ash into the high stratosphere where it can spread globally.

Unless this eruption continues for months like this I doubt there will be much cooling effect on global temperatures, but it may give our European friends some spectacular sunsets for the rest of the summer.

Looks Like a Very Early Spring

Well, March has definitely come in like a lamb. The sunshine last week started the melt, and the rain over the past few days has reduced the snow we have left into a a few dirty banks along the roads and slushy remnants in the forest shadows. Although I predicted a milder winter this year due to a moderate El Nino, this level of spring warmth in early March is unlike any I have ever seen.

As it turns out, the mild weather in northern Minnesota is only the tip of the iceberg (so to speak). This winter has been the warmest and driest on record in Canada.

I will let the article speak for itself:

From the balmy Arctic, to the open water of the St. Lawrence and snowless western fields, this winter has been the warmest and driest in Canadian record books.

Environment Canada scientists report that winter 2009/10 was 4 C above normal, making it the warmest since nationwide records were first kept in 1948. It was also the driest winter on the 63-year record, with precipitation 22 per cent below normal nationally, and down 60 per cent in parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.

"It's beyond shocking," David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada, told Canwest News Tuesday. Records have been shattered from "coast to coast to coast."

"It is truly a remarkable situation," says Phillips, noting that he's seen nothing like it in his 40 years of weather watching. He also warns that "the winter than wasn't" may have set the stage for potentially "horrific" water shortages, insect infestations and wildfires this summer.

As much of Asia, Europe and the U.S. shivered through and shovelled out of freak winter storms, Phillips says Canada was left on the sidelines.

"It's like winter was cancelled in this country," he says...

It says the long-term record shows Canada's climate has changed, most markedly in the winter, which has warmed 2.5 C over the last 63 years.

"The winter season shows the greatest warming of any season, but all seasons have shown a warming trend since 1948," says the summary. Of the 10 warmest winters, four have occurred within the last decade, and 11 of the last 20 winters are listed among the 20 warmest.

This winter was a standout, with records being shattered from B.C. to Baffin Island to the Great lakes. The North saw extraordinary temperatures, with three regions setting "a new high mark" — the Arctic tundra 5.4 C above normal, Arctic mountains and fiords 5.3 C above normal, and northwestern forest 4.2 C above normal.

Spring has now arrived in many parts of Canada with cherry trees in full bloom on the West Coast, and Phillips says, "crocuses already blossoming in Labrador."

The warm, dry winter could spell big trouble this summer. "One of the greatest things about our winter is it kills bugs and diseases and resets the clock for us," says Phillips. Or, it used to. He says many pests are sure to be thriving after this year's warm winter.

"Everything weird, wild and wacky that happens this summer people will trace back to the year without winter," says Phillips, noting that soil moisture in the western Prairies is very low.

What Do Lung Cancer and Climate Change Have in Common?

The answer is that both have powerful propaganda efforts working to deny any human caused link to them. In the case of lung cancer they deny links to smoking, in the case of climate change they deny any links to human-caused CO2 emissions. In both cases they bring out the same arguments from the same think tanks that try to find any small error to discredit researchers or even the scientific peer-review process itself.

From the Guardian:

The fact is that the critics — who are few in number but aggressive in their attacks — are deploying tactics that they have honed for more than 25 years. During their long campaign, they have greatly exaggerated scientific disagreements in order to stop action on climate change, with special interests like Exxon Mobil footing the bill.

Many books have recently documented the games played by the climate-change deniers. Merchants of Doubt, a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway set for release in mid-2010, will be an authoritative account of their misbehaviour. The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today's campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing "acid rain." Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don't want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls...

But then I recalled that this line of attack — charging a scientific conspiracy to drum up "business" for science — was almost identical to that used by The Wall Street Journal and others in the past, when they fought controls on tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion, second-hand smoke, and other dangerous pollutants. In other words, their arguments were systematic and contrived, not at all original to the circumstances.

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years — time after time — but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

Snowmageddon! Who Could Have Predicted? Climate Scientists, That's Who!

Apocalyptic headlines about the record snowfalls in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding states have saturated the media the last few days as a series of major storms has inundated the region under a two foot blanket of heavy, wet snow. As thousands struggle to dig out the chorus of climate change denial is braying how the existence of winter disproves any warming trend. Who could have predicted record snowfall events for the eastern seaboard? As it turns out, climate scientists have already predicted a greater frequency of more extreme precipitation events for that region as our climate continues to warm.

Although individual weather events can not be directly attributed to climate change, the overall trend has been for more frequent incidents of extreme precipitation in the U.S. over the last hundred years. Physics has shown that warmer air can hold more water vapor. When you realize that overall global temperatures have only warmed by just over 1 degree C, the fact that it falls as snow in the middle of winter should not come as a surprise.

Climate realists have begun pushing back against the anti-science spin, with some help from Stephen Colbert.


Update: tried to embed the Colbert video - HTML fail - so click the link if you want a laugh. To the New York Times: this is not a deep freeze, precipitation is not the same as temperature.

Update 2: Want to vacation in a place with record-breaking warmth? Try Greenland!

Weather and Climate

There has been a lot of commentary on TV and the blogosphere lately about the recent cold snap in certain regions of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the southeastern United States. While this cold snap is very bad for some citrus and produce growers, events like this are not unusual during the winter and are not an indication of any global cooling trend. I have written before on the difference between weather and climate, and how you need to look at weather records of at least thirty years to see any kind of overall climate trend.

This does nothing to stop the defenders of the status quo from getting all worked up about how wrong all those climate scientists are. Meanwhile in the southern hemisphere Australia is suffering from heat waves and massive crop losses.

The changes that are happening to the global climate system will cause more extremes of both hot and cold, because adding more energy to the system will cause more disruptions in the normal jet stream patterns. This will allow cold air to flow down from the poles as well as warm air to move north. While the freeze in the southeast is grabbing all the headlines the west coast has been warming, and the Vancouver Olympic organizers may be starting to get nervous.

I will close this post with a graphic representation of record heat versus record cold since the 1950's from Dr. Joseph Romm's excellent blog Climate Progress: This is only for the U.S., but the change in ratio is striking.

I will bet that there are more record highs set in the U.S. in 2010 than record lows - anyone want to take me up on it?

Happy Solstice!

Happy solstice everyone! Today is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, so from now on we will be getting a few more minutes of daylight each day as we begin the long, slow climb towards summer. There was a nice light snowfall last night, enough to make the forest here look like a Christmas card. Many species of plants and animals that call Grand Portage home depend on having enough snow during the winter, so I welcome it. It also adds some insulation for the ground against the cold yet to come, so it will help keep wells and septic systems from freezing.

There has been a lot of news and analysis about the climate change summit last week in Copenhagen, and if President Obama has done enough to push deeper cuts in carbon emissions. I think it is a major step to get China and India and the other major emitters on board with a framework to cut emissions, but there needs to be a strong and binding agreement ready for next years summit in Mexico City. Sorry deniers but the existence of snow does not disprove global warming any more than night disproves the existence of the sun. In fact we can expect even heavier snow events in the future because warmer air can hold more water vapor. The desperation of the defenders of business as usual is clearly shown by the hacking of the CRU e-mails. There is nothing in those e-mails that undercuts the science of climate change, because it is a robust theory with thousands of scientific papers as a foundation. Scientists take great care to get the science right, since they know that a sloppy paper will get eviscerated by other scientists. I am sure most of them would love to be proved wrong about climate change since the consequences are so dire. Science is a powerful tool that can show us how our planetary systems operate, and while it is not perfect, it is still the best method our civilization has devised to understand our world.

Can Extreme Weather Events be Blamed on Climate Change?

This claim is often made, but it is very difficult to blame specific weather incidents to larger shifts in climate.

But I have just read a very convincing article from a Weather Channel meteorologist that makes exactly that argument about the recent floods in the American southeast. It is a bit technical, but if you know a little weather science you should be able to follow the argument.

One of the key points to remember about climate is that heat=energy, and the more energy we put into a chaotic system like our climate, the more extreme fluctuations we are going to get. This is similar to how adding a certain amount of energy to a wave tank can cause an even greater increase in wave height than you would expect if the system was linear.

See here for a global view of climate anomalies 2008-2009.

Humans are conducting a huge experiment on the only planet we have, and we are recklessly adding more and more energy to our climate system. Hang on for the ride, it's only going to get bumpier.

Dramatic Video Catches Glacial Retreat

This is amazing:



h/t Climate Progress

Please watch the entire video - the last few minutes capture the largest glacial calving event ever captured on camera. This massive disintegration of a glacier in Greenland is truly incredible.

95% of glaciers outside Antarctica are in retreat, and even Antarctica is losing volume as major ice shelves collapse. Anyone who claims climate change is only based on models should watch this - because that is what the photographer admits was his view until a decade ago.

NOAA Global Climate Analysis For July: Fifth Warmest On Record

While much of central North America has been cooler than average this summer, NOAA keeps track of the world climate as a whole and guess what - cool weather in Minnesota is not indicative of global climate. Here are some of the highlights in case anyone claims that the global climate has stopped warming:

Global Highlights

• The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the fifth warmest on record, at 0.57°C (1.03°F) above the 20^th century average of 15.8°C (60.4°F).
• July 2009 was the 33^rd consecutive July with an average global land and ocean surface temperature above the 20^th century average. The last July with global temperatures below the 20^th century average occurred in 1976.
• The global ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the warmest on record, 0.59°C (1.06°F) above the 20^th century average of 16.4°C (61.5°F). This broke the previous July record set in 1998. The July ocean surface temperature departure from the long-term average equals June 2009 value, which was also a record.
• The global land surface temperature for July 2009 was 0.51°C (0.92°F) above the 20^th century average of 14.3°C (57.8°F), and tied with 2003 as the ninth-warmest July on record.
• For the year to date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 14.3°C (57.9°F) tied with 2004 for the sixth-warmest January-through-July period on record.
• El Niño persisted across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during July 2009. Related sea-surface temperature (SST) anomalies increased for the sixth consecutive month in this ENSO domain, where July SSTs were more than 0.5°C (0.9°F) above average. If El Niño conditions continue to mature, as now projected by NOAA, global temperatures are likely to exceed previous record highs.

---

The data presented in this report are preliminary. Ranks and anomalies may change as more complete data are received and processed. The most current data may be accessed via the Global Surface Temperature Anomalies page.

One of the interesting facts that will affect us here in northern Minnesota this winter is the return of El Nino conditions in the Pacific after two consecutive winters in a La Nina state. This should be good news for our heating bills but can also lead to erratic swings in temperatures bringing the possibility of mid-winter thaws and ice storms.

NOAA Paper Demolishes Argument Over U.S. Temperature Trends

One of the most stubborn arguments from the people who deny the reality of climate change is that the sharp upward trend in U.S. temperatures over the last fifty years is due to poor siting of the surface stations that gather the data and the urban heat island effect. This argument is particularly stupid since the trend over time would not be affected even if a station was located in a place where it might read a little high. Imagine two identical urban weather stations; one in an asphalt parking lot and one in a grassy field - the asphalt one would read a few degrees higher, but the temperature trends over time would be identical. It's like saying that if your home scale weighs you three pounds heavier than your doctors scale it is useless to show if you are gaining or losing weight - as long as the bias is consistent then the trend is not affected.

A new paper from NOAA neatly skewers these arguments, complete with a graph showing the lack of difference between the so-called "best sites" and the rest of the weather stations in the network. As you can see both the annual readings and the smoothed trend line match nearly perfectly.

The NOAA paper also points out that there are many ecological indicators that show temperatures are rising rapidly, so dwelling on the minutiae of individual stations while ignoring the preponderance of evidence for rising temperatures is intellectual dishonesty at its worst.

(thanks again to Climate Progress)

Climate Science And Honest Debate

The late spring we are having here in northern Minnesota is giving some of the local climate change skeptics more hope than ever that global warming is just some socialist plot to try and take away their pickup trucks and SUVs. Unfortunately for them local weather is not the same as global climate (as I tried to point out in this post). The skeptics are becoming more and more shrill in their arguments as the science that refutes them becomes more solid every day, and most of the arguments they make are full of holes and cherry-picked data that makes attempting to engage them in honest debate an exercise in futility. Coby Beck has gathered together a very nice page of links called "How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic" which has categorized the most commonly encountered denialist arguments.

What is interesting is that many of the same debate techniques used to deny climate change are the same as those used by those who denied a link between smoking and cancer, or used by creationists to discredit evolution. One of the things they all have in common is the attempt to put "reasonable doubt" in the mind of the public that there is scientific agreement on these subjects. Mainstream journalists follow along by framing the subject as a two-sided debate with merit on both sides. The problem with this is that the general public does not see the peer-reviewed scientific journals where actual scientific debate takes place, and they don't realize that it is a small but vocal minority creating most of the controversey.

Please click on the links provided and the links under Climate Change in my list on the left. Often Google Scholar can provide abstracts to peer-reviewed science on climate change that you can find at a university library. Reading science is not easy, but it is nessecary if you want to know the real data and not just spin driven by ideology.

EPA Finds Greenhouse Gases Are A Threat To Public Health

Big news on the climate change front courtesy of Joe Romm and his excellent blog Climate Progress.

The EPA has ruled that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. This finding follows a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that ordered the EPA to review the science on greenhouse gases and determine if regulation is necessary under the Clean Air Act. This ruling should prod Congress into passing strict regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, because industry will realize that if Congress doesn't pass legislation then the EPA can regulate them by itself under the Clean Air Act.

Score one for those of us trying to maintain a habitable climate for future generations.

The Difference Between Weather and Climate

I am looking out my office window at a foot of fresh snow, and temperatures tonight are supposed to get down to fifteen below (F) - so do I still believe all the talk about climate change?

Short answer: yes

Why? Because it doesn't matter what I believe, or what the current weather is on my little corner of the globe, climate change is happening and science is showing this every day.

I keep seeing arguments saying "global warming stopped in 1998" - well that is nonsense. 1998 was an extremely strong El Nino year that was very warm worldwide, but to base a trend starting from that date to extrapolate climate is dishonest. In order to have a valid climate period you need to use at least thirty years, and going by that the clear trend is upward. Even the temperature in Lake Superior has increased dramatically in the last 30 years. Just because the Earth is heating up it doesn't mean everyplace on the planet is going to turn into Miami Beach. Increased heat in the atmosphere will increase the energy available for storms, as well as increase the amount of water vapor the air can hold, so more intense snow and rain events are one of the predicted outcomes of climate change.

The science is solid, and a little Minnesota cold snap will not invalidate it.

The Climes They Are A-Changin'...

How will our changing global climate affect Grand Portage?

This is a question that we in the Environmental and Natural Resources departments are trying to answer. Notice that it is no longer a question of if the climate is changing but how much and how fast. The people that know are the ones that are out in the woods and on the waters every day; hunters, fishermen, foresters, gatherers, resource professionals, and anyone else that enjoys being outside and can observe nature. Elders are a particularly good source of information on how plant and animal communities are changing.

I am only in my forties and I have seen major changes in the local climate and ecology. One example is the ice cover on Grand Portage Bay. Back in the 1970's I would watch as great blocks of ice were sawed from the bay, loaded onto trucks parked on the ice, and put up in sawdust to last the summer. The bay would freeze early in winter and stay frozen for weeks. Now the bay hardly freezes long enough to create ice safe enough to skate or snowmobile on, much less park a truck. Recent research at UMD has shown that Lake Superior is warming very rapidly and ice cover is decreasing. Another example is how more southern animals that were unheard of or uncommon here in previous decades are becoming regular sightings. Now we are seeing cardinals, raccoons, wood ticks, and more. I have even heard about opossums being found up near Bemidji and armadillos in Illinois. It is not so much higher daytime high temperatures that are allowing this northward migration as lack of cold enough low temperatures for long enough periods.

More worrying is the plight of our local moose population. Grand Portage is on the southern edge of moose range, and we are already seeing increases in moose mortality. Moose become stressed if summer temperatures get too high, which leaves them less time to forage and build up strength for winter, which leads to them being more vulnerable to winter ticks and predation by wolves. We are monitoring the health and numbers of our moose closely.

Climate change will be a recurring theme on this blog, since it is one of the biggest challenges we and our fellow species face right now. If you know of anyone, particularly elders, who have stories about how the climate is changing and how it used to be please send me an e-mail at soberg@boreal.org or call me at the Trust Lands office - 218-475-2415 ex 35.