I’ve collected some links on global climate change. I haven’t read them all yet, but I thought I would post them to avoid losing them. Some of them look especially good for talking back to the “Joe Six Pack” critics who want to believe that it does not exist.
First, I recommend that everyone sees “An Inconvenient Truth”. It can be rented from any video venue. One of the things that struck me about the documentary is that it already addressed many of the common criticisms made of the documentary. In other words, people criticized what was said in the documentary without watching it first.
Okay, here are the links:
Gore responds to the critics
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9072307
How To Talk To A Global Climate Change Skeptic
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics
Consensus
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming
Climate Change: A Guide For The Perplexed
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed/
Union Of Concerned Scientists Global Climate Change FAQ
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/global-warming-faq
Scientific Opinion On Global Climate Change
( wikipeda……anyone can author an article…take with a grain of salt )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
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I think it’s horrible that conservatives have managed to get ‘climate change’ used as the term to describe global warming– ‘climate change’ sounds a lot less severe. While climates are changing, the trend is global warming…
Thank you for posting on this very important topic. I’ve followed news since 1998 on BBC online and more intensively in the last 6 or so years, and would like to nominate or add a few items to your list:
1) Realclimate.org is a blog by climate scientists. They are sometimes too ‘convervative’ (I’m happy to provide details of the example I have in mind their coverage Re: Flannery) but very good overall. They include de-bunking of “skeptics'” (a misnomer) arguments, e.g. Myth vs. Fact Regarding the “Hockey Stick”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11
2) Ocean acidification is a problem many, including even many environemntalists, haven’t even heard about. At the bottom Im including some links.
3) Where do we stand now? Kept up to date on the CO2 parts per million: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
As you can see it’s 385ppm at Mauna Loa and if you scroll down the world is at 384ppm (you still read articles to this day saying we are at 380 or even less, sadly)
4) You read articles tot this day saying CO2 is at a higher level today than it was at an;y time in the last 400,000 years. This is true, but in 2005 this was extended to 650,000 years and in 2006 this was extended to 800,000 years; CO2 is higher now that at any time in the last 800,000 years. The RATE of increase of CO2 in recent years is 200 times faster than the fastest it’s been in the previous 650,000 years and almost 60 times faster than any time in the last 800,000 years. Links:
CO2 ‘highest for 650,000 years'” At http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4467420.stm (24 November 2005)
Deep ice tells long climate story”(September 4, 2006) At http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm
The mis-representations by “skeptics” about how CO2 and other GHGs relate or don’t relate to the temperature record, they can be de-bunked, but take a long time to do. Meanwhile, a graph of just the CO2 levels even over the past 400,000 years is dramatic: http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/allco2.JPG
So much for the notion that humans are too small to make any “big change” on the Earth.
Dag and I were trying to post at the same time, no wonder I got “server timed out” and I was worried it would lose all my text, luckily it did not when I clicked to ‘try again’ :o)
Climate “Change” is a very unfortunate name, I totally agree. Global Warming is not much better unfortunately, ocean acification being just one of many reasons why. It would be more accurate to call it (Anthropogenic) Climate Destabilization. (By the way BBC and others used to refer to “Genetically Engineered” food now everyone even the critics call is Genetically Modified…THAT was probably deliberately word-smithed by the industry) A few points before the promised acification links:
* I don’t have the links at my fingertips but CO2 stays in the atmosphere for decades which means that even if all emissions went to ZERO starting tomorrow, the world would continue warming. Scientists think warming by 2 degrees C (by 3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels may very well cause dangerous climate change (whose definition is a whole ‘nother post) but very unpleasant stuff needless to say. We’re already at 0.8 degrees C above that pre-industrial level. So we have 1.2 degrees of further warming to go before we hit that danger zone, right?
But there’s that fact that even if emissions were zero starting tomorrow we’d have further warming for a while..how much further warming? I don’t have the link but found solid references: about another 0.5 degrees C. So we’ve already committed ourselves to 0.8 + 0.5 = 1.3 degrees C above preindustrial levels and have 0.7 to go..needless to say all emissions will not be zero starting tomorrow, so that margin will keep getting smaller. A good research project is to estimate how much smaller it would be in 15 years at the PRESENT level of emissions (even if we did not increase the level).
On top of that we don’t know exactly where the cliff is, so it’s insanely dangerous to try to stop at 1.95 degrees above preindustrial Earth…It may be possible to warm by 2.4 before danger nasty things happen, or it may be only 1.5 (so we have only 0.2 to go) for all we know..we need to rely on today’s best science plus a “Safety margin” to be on the safe side. would you get on an airplane which had a 10% chance of crashing? The change is much higher than 10% of 2 C being a very unpleasant world. Oh, and the arctic is warming by much more than the globe is, so a globe 2 degrees C warmer means an arctic many many degrees warmer (some parts have already warmed by 2 or 2.5 or mroe degrees C already, in the arctic..) which could cause a non-linear sudden tipping point affecting the globe..it would be wise to applythe Precautionary Principle (See wikipedia)
Politians want us to aim to stay under 450ppm or some even say that’s too unrealistic, let’s aim to stay under 500ppm or 550ppm. the jaw-dropping piece of information I found (again don’t have but could find the link) is that today’s best science says that to avoid that dangerous climate change of 2 degrees C or more, a level fo 450ppm gives us about a 50% chance of avoiding dangerous climate change..in other words what our politicians (the most “liberal” european ones) say we should “realitstically” aim for would give us a 50% change of going over the dangerous climate change mark, and other politicians think even that 450ppm is too ambitious! Depressing enough for you? Ok, watch this movie then, 10 minutes long only, great clip:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-686332343478383546
I think the Australian host is one PW and Dag and others so inclined might find ‘cute’ so that’s your incentive to watch this Australian show clip on ocean acidification. When watch this 3 min trailer on an upcoming documentary…listen all the way to the end when at a science conference the speaker is asked, “so are we screwed? It is too late..?” and hear the scientists’s reply: