Atmospheric

While it is well-known that Americans conserve electricity more than, for example, Canadians, and that CO2 emissions from energy productions have plummeted to 20 year lows without raising prices, an environmental group and scholars from UC Irvine and Stanford University are saying that won't last - they believe that unless people can't afford electricity generated by fossil fuels, expansion of cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar, will be harmed. Bereft of expensive subsidies and mandates, solar is not ready and wind never will be. Solar clearly needs more basic research and natural…

Carbon dioxide emissions, the greenhouse gas that has been most strongly implicated in global warming, will reach a record high of 40 billion tons. The new report has been released by the Global Carbon Project just prior to the New York Climate Summit, where advocates will seek new action on climate change. Unfortunately, the protesters in New York City are complaining in the wrong place; American greenhouse gas emissions have plummeted back to early 1990s levels and coal emissions are are at early 1980s levels. The 2.5 percent emissions increases have instead been due to countries that are…

Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel and cement production. Source: CDIAC, Friedlingstein et al. 2014, Global Carbon Project 2014 By Pep Canadell, CSIRO and Michael Raupach, Australian National University As heads of state gather in New York for tomorrow’s United Nations climate summit, a new report on the state of the world’s carbon budget tells them that greenhouse emissions hit a new record last year, and are still growing. The Global Carbon Project has released its annual report card on the global and national trends in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. It shows that global…

Hurricane Polo still appears rounded in imagery from NOAA's GOES-West satellite today at 10:15 a.m. EDT  but forecasters expect that to change. The image showed thunderstorms wrapping tightly around the center of the storm while one broken band of thunderstorms extended to the northwest, while the other appeared on the eastern side of the center and paralleled the southern Mexican coastline. Polo presents a threat to the coast of southwestern Mexico's coastline. A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for Punta San Telmo to Playa Perula and a Tropical Storm Watch is in effect for west…

A recent study of the global carbon cycle offers a new perspective of Earth's climate records through time. One of the current methods for interpreting ancient changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans may need to be re-evaluated. A measurement of the abundance of carbon-12 and carbon-13 isotopes in both the organic matter and carbonate sediments found in a nearly 700-meter marine sediment core from the Great Bahama Bank. The analyses showed a change to lower amounts of the rare isotope of carbon (carbon-13) in both the organic and inorganic materials as a…

The Asian monsoon was believed to have begun about 25 million years ago  as a result of the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalaya Mountains but a new study finds it existed 40 million years ago - a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide was 4X what it is now. The monsoon then weakened 34 million years ago when atmospheric CO2 then decreased by 50 percent and an ice age occurred.  The monsoon, the largest climate system in the world, governs the climate in much of mainland Asia, bringing torrential summer rains and dry winters.  The authors make the surprising claim…

There hasn't been a lot of progress made on greenhouse gas emissions policies - while America and the EU have made efforts to curb emissions, three countries that account for 3X the emissions of the US are exempt from treaties under an umbrella of developing nation status. And neither policy makers nor the public trusts climate science the way they do other fields. What the world needs is globally consistent, independent emissions assessments - and a lot less self-reporting, errors and lack of verification.  Researchers are trying a new approach to estimating CO2 emissions from burning…

The seasons are about to change and that means a new round of projections, prognostications, sooth-saying and doomsday forecasts. If you think you know which of those are done by the civilized world and which of those are done by pagan Wildlings, you know nothing about modern climate science and culture. In George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire", a wall separates two very different people - think England and Scotland. South of The Wall, the people of Winterfell are always preparing for the worst. North of The Wall, they are just living their lives and rolling with the punches. And…

The public has long suffered from green fatigue, where constant doomsday prophecies by environmental groups have become background noise, but there is good news too. It just has to come from the world of science instead. After the detection of the ozone-depleting properties of  chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the 1970s, data from satellite measurements in 1985 were startling; a huge hole had been discovered over the Antarctic in the ozone layer that protects the Earth from dangerous, carcinogenic UV rays and it was unclear how much was natural and what had been caused by man. Stefan…

The most compelling argument for genetic modification is not accepting science or progressive ideals, it is that it has caused food production to dematerialize in dramatic fashion. Scientific optimization of plants, superior to all genetic modification schemes of the last 12,000 years, have allowed American farmers to raise more food on less land than was dreamed possible.  There is a cultural tug of war happening in the developing world. Experts and policy makers want to embrace science but environmental groups promoting fear and doubt manage to scare the public. Yet there is a…