This is both my personal learning project and my contribution in the struggle to confront the ongoing Republican/ libertarian assault on rational science and constructive learning, as manifested in their malicious strategic Attacks on Science ~ A collection of articles, scientific resources, plus my own essays and indepth critique of various presentations from unidirectional-skeptics ~ Hopefully a resource for the busy, yet discerning, student who's concerned about the health of our Earth
Here is an article I wrote for November's Four Corners Free Press concerning last month's flooding in Colorado. Should anyone find anything of value in it feel free to lift and use as you see fit. Memes for the sharing.{I have added many links that offer authoritative support for my claims along with basic educational sources}.
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Colorado experienced its most extreme weather event in memory between September 9th to the 15th. Golden, Boulder and Larimer counties received the worst of it with rain accumulations of sixteen/seventeen inches and more, some areas receiving nine inches on Thursday alone, resulting in massive flooding compounded by destructive run-off from mountainsides of burned-out forests that could no longer hold water.
Predictably folks are asking: Is this related to manmade Global Warming? It's an easy and tough question to answer.
Consider please, our climate system is a global heat distribution engine and our land, atmosphere, and the oceans have indisputably warmed, not only that, our atmosphere's moisture content has been measurably increasing. Given such geophysical realities, it is self-evident that all extreme weather events contain elements of this newly energized climate system. And that much more of the same must be expected.
How is someone supposed to respond to that? A, you can't find any clear understanding by looking at one graph. You need to make the effort to understand how the entire global heat distribution engine is evolving.
Anonymous thinks there's a clear drop in extreme tornado activity, but experts who track weather full time, have a different story to share. Instead of just reaching for one handy-dandy looking graph to make your point, spend some time looking around that site and learn. This link will take you to the report for January 2012, quite the extreme month. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/tornadoes/2012/1
I'm sure you'd tell me that 2012 turned out to be a very quite year tornado wise... but that's only true if you stay south of the border, Canada had a very extreme year- Saskatchewan experienced three times the normal number of tornadoes. And then there was that wild June 2012 Derecho to remind us that there's more than tornadoes coming our way.
Here's an informative article by Seth Borenstein if you want an overview of what the scientists do and don't understand at this point:
I've come across this series of lectures and since they speak directly to teaching the reality of climate change.
I love these sorts of videoed lectures because I get to listen to actual scientists, people who are on the front lines doing the difficult work. They consistently impress and educate. And they bring home the point that uncertainly does not equal not knowing!
In my recent conversations at the JudithCurry discussion forum, I'm struck by their long winded grandiloquence, such as: “defenders of the IPCC consensus have expended considerable efforts in the ‘boundary work’ of distinguishing those qualified to contribute to the climate change consensus from those who are not [4]."
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Trying to inject distrust, simply by making claims, never appreciating or sharing that what we are talking about is dedicated people - researchers and scientists and support staff going out in the field to conducting studies and doing the research and trying to be as accurate as possible in recording their observations. No perfect at/in any part of this endeavor {like every other human enterprise} - but it works and it works well and they have learned a lot that does not deserve the contrived ridicule the "Free corporate Marketers" have orchestrated. There is a base dishonesty about folks like Curry and commenters at her website - when they are basing all their thinking on an assumption that the science has been inferior. They don't provide actual specifics regarding ~ our actual factual world full of knowledge and experience that climatologists and related field of researcher have been accumulated ~ but they sure do continue believing themselves.
I think we've reach the point it's obvious that this is all about desperately clinging to one's fictitious world view (Free Market, no Anthropogenic Global Warming, no need to change a thing about the way we lead our business and lives.) and not about the state of our knowledge. Fear, fear and anger overriding objectivity and reason. OK I'll get off my soapbox and invite you to listen to some very smart hard working scientists tell their own story:
This is a work in progress, right now I'm at step one getting it up here to share the links:
Weather and Climate Summit - Day 3, Session 6
Dr. Jennifer Francis, Rutger's University
Wacky Weather and Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice: Are They Connected?
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Weather and Climate Summit - Day 5, Session 9
The Arctic Paradox
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Weather and Climate Summit - Day 5, Session
Jim White, University of Colorado
Climate Change Impacts Are Happening Faster and Faster-
Greenland, Sea Level Rise and Some Atmospheric Chemistry
The Weather and Climate Summit was established in 1985 to bring together television weathercasters and meteorologists from top U.S. and Canadian markets with leading scientists and researchers. This summit allows for dynamic and frequent interchange between the media and scientists in order to foster improved communication and collaboration between these diverse professions.
The Weather and Climate Summit enables television meteorologists to learn more about upcoming technologies and research findings that will lead to improved public awareness. The Weather and Climate Summit also helps the attendees and scientists understand how each one operates, produces information, conducts research and communicates. The ultimate outcome of this summit is the establishment of improved media-scientist relationships that fosters continued dialogue for improved scientific communication to the public.
Goal of Summit Participants
To learn about advanced technologies that can help improve weather forecasting and warning dissemination;
To understand the latest on the state of the climate and climate science research;
To better understand how extreme weather and climate change may impact their viewers;
Foster improved relationships with the speakers, scientists and subject matter experts.
Abstract: While the Arctic region has been warming strongly in recent decades, anomalously large snowfall in recent winters has affected large parts of North America, Europe, and east Asia.
Here we demonstrate that the decrease in autumn Arctic sea ice area is linked to changes in the winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation that have some resemblance to the negative phase of the winter Arctic oscillation.
However, the atmospheric circulation change linked to the reduction of sea ice shows much broader meridional meanders in midlatitudes and clearly different interannual variability than the classical Arctic oscillation.
This circulation change results in more frequent episodes of blocking patterns that lead to increased cold surges over large parts of northern continents.
Moreover, the increase in atmospheric water vapor content in the Arctic region during late autumn and winter driven locally by the reduction of sea ice provides enhanced moisture sources, supporting increased heavy snowfall in Europe during early winter and the northeastern and midwestern United States during winter. We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.
And then she writes a dressed up op-ed like "No consensus on consensus" that totally skirts what is known, instead getting lost in a wormhole of rhetoric and misdirection.
Here you can find a lecture by Jennifer Francis another scientist who has studied this area extensively. It's talks like her's that offer a chance to better appreciate how our planet operates and to come to grips with all that is known by climatologist, instead of allowing politically motivated folks to distract us with flimflam.
The Weekend Wonk: Jennifer Francis on Arctic Sea Ice
September 22, 2012
Here's how Peter Sinclair introduces it:
Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutger’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences is featured in my sea ice wrap video, which should be out early in the week.
Here is a lecture she gave in January of 2012. Longish, but worth dipping into, as she summarizes some of the most recent research in regard to the effects of shrinking arctic ice on weather and climate in the temperate latitudes – the so-called “arctic paradox” so beloved by Fox News – “if there’s global warming, why are we having this record snow storm?”.
What she told me in a recent interview was that the sea ice record is not something that we just pay attention to in September – there will, in fact, be reverberations that will make fall and winter “very interesting” around the globe.
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Interestingly Dr. Francis wrote an op-ed of her own in the Washington Post. I found it much more enlightening that the jibber-jabber in "No consensus on consensus."
Washington Post ~ 09/21/2012
Shrinking Arctic ice and the wicked backlash on our weather
By Jennifer Francis
Guest Op-ed
Heat waves. Drought. Flooding. Cold spells. Wildfires. The climate system is changing before our very eyes, and there is no more glaring proof than the record-shattering loss of Arctic sea ice this summer.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center announced Wednesday that the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean has smashed the previous record minimum extent set in 2007 by a staggering 18 percent. The impacts of rising temperatures and melting ice extend beyond the far north to us in the United States, as we are poised to feel the weather-related backlash.
The ice cover, only half of what it was only a few decades ago, is a stunning visual demonstration of the effects that increasing greenhouse gases, and resulting warming of the Earth, are having on the climate system...
