Climate Change and Design Strategies
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic - the New York Times
12/11/2017 The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic - The New York Times https://nyti.ms/Ouq7Yv Opinion | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic By RICHARD A. MULLER JULY 28, 2012 Berkeley, Calif. CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases. These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. -
Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy, Hearing
CLIMATE CHANGE: EXAMINING THE PROCESSES USED TO CREATE SCIENCE AND POLICY HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2011 Serial No. 112–09 Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology ( Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 65–306PDF WASHINGTON : 2011 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800 Fax: (202) 512–2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402–0001 COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY HON. RALPH M. HALL, Texas, Chair F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, JR., EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas Wisconsin JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas LYNN C. WOOLSEY, California DANA ROHRABACHER, California ZOE LOFGREN, California ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland DAVID WU, Oregon FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma BRAD MILLER, North Carolina JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois W. TODD AKIN, Missouri GABRIELLE GIFFORDS, Arizona RANDY NEUGEBAUER, Texas DONNA F. EDWARDS, Maryland MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas MARCIA L. FUDGE, Ohio PAUL C. BROUN, Georgia BEN R. LUJA´ N, New Mexico SANDY ADAMS, Florida PAUL D. TONKO, New York BENJAMIN QUAYLE, Arizona JERRY MCNERNEY, California CHARLES J. ‘‘CHUCK’’ FLEISCHMANN, JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland Tennessee TERRI A. SEWELL, Alabama E. SCOTT RIGELL, Virginia FREDERICA S. WILSON, Florida STEVEN M. PALAZZO, Mississippi HANSEN CLARKE, Michigan MO BROOKS, Alabama ANDY HARRIS, Maryland RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois CHIP CRAVAACK, Minnesota LARRY BUCSHON, Indiana DAN BENISHEK, Michigan VACANCY (II) C O N T E N T S Thursday, March 31, 2011 Page Witness List ............................................................................................................ -
Red Lines & Hockey Sticks
Red Lines & Hockey Sticks A discourse analysis of the IPCC’s visual culture and climate science (mis)communication Thomas Henderson Dawson Department of ALM Theses within Digital Humanities Master’s thesis (two years), 30 credits, 2021, no. 5 Author Thomas Henderson Dawson Title Red Lines & Hockey Sticks: A discourse analysis of the IPCC’s visual culture and climate science (mis)communication. Supervisor Matts Lindström Abstract Within the climate science research community there exists an overwhelming consensus on the question of climate change. The scientific literature supports the broad conclusion that the Earth’s climate is changing, that this change is driven by human factors (anthropogenic), and that the environmental consequences could be severe. While a strong consensus exists in the climate science community, this is not reflected in the wider public or among poli- cymakers, where sceptical attitudes towards anthropogenic climate change is much more prevalent. This discrep- ancy in the perception of the urgency of the problem of climate change is an alarming trend and likely a result of a failure of science communication, which is the topic of this thesis. This paper analyses the visual culture of climate change, with specific focus on the data visualisations com- prised within the IPCC assessment reports. The visual aspects of the reports were chosen because of the prioriti- sation images often receive within scientific communication and for their quality as immutable mobiles that can transition between different media more easily than text. The IPCC is the central institutional authority in the climate science visual discourse, and its assessment reports, therefore, are the site of this discourse analysis. -
A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011
Rohde et al., Geoinfor Geostat: An Overview 2013, 1:1 http://dx.doi.org/10.4172/2327-4581.1000101 Geoinformatics & Geostatistics: An Overview Research Article a SciTechnol journal only mean temperatures; however, the three groups reported changes A New Estimate of the Average that ranged from 0.81 to 0.93°C when estimating the increase in land temperatures during the 2000s decade relative to the 1950s decade. Earth Surface Land Temperature As described below, we estimate this change as 0.90 ± 0.05°C (95% Spanning 1753 to 2011 con"dence). Robert Rohde1, Richard A. Muller1,2,3*, Robert Jacobsen2,3, Methods and Materials 1 2,3 2,3 Elizabeth Muller , Saul Perlmutter , Arthur Rosenfeld , In this paper we present results for the Earth’s land surface 2,3 3 4 Jonathan Wurtele , Donald Groom and Charlotte Wickham temperature only, based on analysis of monthly averages at each station. We gathered and merged monthly and daily thermometer measurements from 14 databases to arrive at a collection of 14.4 Abstract million mean monthly temperature observations from 44,455 sites. We report an estimate of the Earth’s average land surface During this process duplicate stations present in the 14 databases were temperature for the period 1753 to 2011. To address issues detected and eliminated. !ese data have now been posted online in of potential station selection bias, we used a larger sampling of a uniform format at www.BerkeleyEarth.org, along with a description stations than had prior studies. For the period post 1880, our estimate is similar to those previously reported by other groups, of the merging and duplicate removal method. -
Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process
Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process Robert Rohde, Richard Muller (chair), Robert Jacobsen, Saul Perlmutter, Arthur Rosenfeld, Jonathan Wurtele, Don Groom, Judith Curry, Charlotte Wickham Abstract A new mathematical framework is presented for producing maps and large-scale averages of temperature changes from weather station thermometer data for the purposes of climate analysis. The method allows the inclusion of short and discontinuous temperature records, so that nearly all digitally archived thermometer data can be used. The framework uses the statistical method known as Kriging to interpolate data from stations to arbitrary locations on the Earth. An iterative weighting process is used to reduce the influence of statistical outliers. Statistical uncertainties are calculated by subdividing the data and comparing the results from statistically independent subsamples using the Jackknife method. Spatial uncertainties from periods with sparse geographical sampling are estimated by calculating the error made when we analyze post-1960 data using similarly sparse spatial sampling. Rather than “homogenize” the raw data, an automated procedure identifies discontinuities in the data; the data is then broken into two parts at those times, and the parts treated as separate records. We apply this new framework to the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) monthly land temperature dataset, and obtain a new global land temperature reconstruction from 1800 to the present. In so doing, we find results in close agreement with prior estimates made by the groups at NOAA, NASA, and at the Hadley Center / Climate Research Unit in the UK. We find that the global land mean temperature increased by 0.89 ± 0.06 C in the difference of the Jan 2000-Dec 2009 average from the Jan 1950-Dec 1959 average (95% confidence for statistical and spatial uncertainties). -
Know the Facts a Skeptic’S Guide to Climate Change
Know the facts A skeptic’s guide to climate change Are you a climate change skeptic? You should be. With so many people ignoring the science, it’s important to distinguish facts from alarmist statements. Public exaggeration of the harms from global warming have made many of us skeptical of all reported climate science. And rightly so. Despite this, there are scientific facts about global warming that are not in dispute: Human emissions are responsible for the CO2 is a greenhouse increase in CO 2 gas, and more of it in the atmosphere leads to a warmer planet Be an informed skeptic... These scientific facts have been known for at least five decades. 1 Is the extreme weather we see today really caused by global warming? These days, climate change is being blamed for everything, from Hurricane Sandy to tornadoes in Missouri. Claims are made that push beyond what science can tell us. Attributing cause-and-effect to individual weather events is fiendishly difficult. This chart provides a quick assessment of which extreme weather events are not likely linked to global warming, which events might be linked, and which events have demonstrated (though often exaggerated) links. May change Evidence No global with global of some Extreme warming warming but global weather event link amount not warming established link Hurricanes X Tornadoes X Droughts X Forest fires X Heatwaves X Coastal floods X Earthquakes X Floods X 2 Is global warming real? As with any issue in science, there are some things that we know, and some things that are uncertain. -
Climate and Energy
Social License to Operate – Challenges & Opportunities for the Fossil Fuels Industry Dag Nummedal Department of Petroleum Engineering (ret.) Colorado School of Mines 1. Evidence for global warming: overwhelming 2. Switch to natural gas from coal – then accelerate renewables 3. An even better step: utilize NG’s combustion product: CO2 University of Houston Tuesday, September 24th, 2019 The Key Problem: Global Temperatures are Going Up! Data from post “Little Ice Age” through global industrialization Global land surface temperatures, shown as 10-year running averages. The new estimate made by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project is shown in black, with shaded areas representing uncertainties of one and two standard deviations. Levi, Physics Today, April 2013 Growth In Global Carbon Emissions From Bowden et al. 2017 Two Possible Futures for how the climate might change and how those changes are likely to affect humanity, based on recent empirical findings Tamma A. Carleton, and Solomon M. Hsiang Science 2016;353:aad9837. Sept. 2016 Published by AAAS Broad Economic Consequences Jones and Olken, 2010 (Northwestern U and MIT study). • At the aggregate level, Melissa Dell, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A.Olken (2008) (hereafter, DJO) have demonstrated that higher temperatures in a given year reduce the growth rate of GDP per capita, mostly in poor countries. • We find that an additional one degree Celsius reduces the growth rate of a poor country’s exports by between 2.0 and 5.7 percentage points. We find that the impacts are concentrated in exports of agricultural products and light manufactures. The issue is worker productivity in response to temperature increases. -
Development and Validation of the CHIRTS-Daily Quasi-Global High
www.nature.com/scientificdata opEN Development and validation of the Data DescriptoR CHIRTS-daily quasi-global high- resolution daily temperature data set Andrew Verdin 1 ✉ , Chris Funk2,3 ✉ , Pete Peterson3, Martin Landsfeld3, Cascade Tuholske 3,4 & Kathryn Grace5 We present a high-resolution daily temperature data set, CHIRTS-daily, which is derived by merging the monthly Climate Hazards center InfraRed Temperature with Stations climate record with daily temperatures from version 5 of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Re- Analysis. We demonstrate that remotely sensed temperature estimates may more closely represent true conditions than those that rely on interpolation, especially in regions with sparse in situ data. By leveraging remotely sensed infrared temperature observations, CHIRTS-daily provides estimates of 2-meter air temperature for 1983–2016 with a footprint covering 60°S-70°N. We describe this data set and perform a series of validations using station observations from two prominent climate data sources. The validations indicate high levels of accuracy, with CHIRTS-daily correlations with observations ranging from 0.7 to 0.9, and very good representation of heat wave trends. Background & Summary Tis manuscript is focused on the development and validation of CHIRTS-daily: a high-resolution (0.05° × 0.05°) daily maximum and minimum temperature data series spanning 60°S–70°N. Te CHIRTS-daily data set builds on 1 the Climate Hazards center InfraRed Temperature with Stations Tmax data set (CHIRTSmax ) (Fig. 1a), which lev- erages remotely sensed infrared land surface emission temperatures and a dense global network of approximately 15,000 Berkeley Earth in situ station observations to provide robust high-resolution (0.05° × 0.05°) estimates of monthly mean maximum 2-meter air temperature (Tmax). -
Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process
Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process Robert Rohde1, Judith Curry2, Donald Groom3, Robert Jacobsen3,4, Richard A. Muller1,3,4, Saul Perlmutter3,4, Arthur Rosenfeld3,4, Charlotte Wickham5, Jonathan Wurtele3,4 1Novim Group, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project; 2Georgia Institute of Technology; 3Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; 4 University of California, Berkeley; 5Now at Oregon State University 1 Abstract A new mathematical framework is presented for producing maps and large-scale averages of temperature changes from weather station data for the purposes of climate analysis. This allows one to include short and discontinuous temperature records, so that nearly all temperature data can be used. The framework contains a weighting process that assesses the quality and consistency of a spatial network of temperature stations as an integral part of the averaging process. This permits data with varying levels of quality to be used without compromising the accuracy of the resulting reconstructions. Lastly, the process presented here is extensible to spatial networks of arbitrary density (or locally varying density) while maintaining the expected spatial relationships. In this paper, this framework is applied to the Global Historical Climatology Network land temperature dataset to present a new global land temperature reconstruction from 1800 to present with error uncertainties that include many key effects. In so doing, we find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ± 0.042 C since the 1950s (95% confidence for statistical and spatial uncertainties). This change is consistent with global land-surface warming results previously reported, but with reduced uncertainty. 2 1. Introduction While there are many indicators of climate change, the long-term evolution of global surface temperatures is perhaps the metric that is both the easiest to understand and most closely linked to the quantitative predictions of climate models. -
Relationships Between Forests and Weather
Relationships between forests and weather EC Directorate General of the Environment 13th January 2012 Michael Sanderson, Monia Santini, Riccardo Valentini and Edward Pope A1_D1_Lit_Review.doc - 1 – © Crown copyright 2008 Contents Executive Summary ........................................................................................................ 3 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 5 1.1 What is a Forest? .................................................................................................... 5 1.2 Types of Forest ........................................................................................................ 5 2. Mechanisms by which forests influence weather and climate ............................... 6 2.1 Overview .................................................................................................................. 6 2.2 Boreal Forests ......................................................................................................... 8 2.3 Temperate Forests .................................................................................................. 9 2.4 Tropical Forests ..................................................................................................... 11 2.5 Overview of the representation of forest-weather interactions and feedbacks in climate models ............................................................................................................. 12 3. Impacts -
Priestley Lecture Ecology of Climate and Climate Change
TOWARD AN ECOLOGY OF CLIMATE AND CLIMATE CHANGE Stephen E. Schwartz Upton, Long Island, NY, USA Priestley Lecture Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR) Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Australian Bureau of Meteorology Workshop on Atmospheric Composition Observations and Modelling The Cape Grim Annual Science Meeting Viewgraphs available at www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve CHARLES HENRY BRIAN (BILL) PRIESTLEY 1915-1998 It has never been the big or the little fleas which have intrigued me most, but the mechanisms of the biting process. ECOLOGY – THE STUDY OF THE HOUSE The scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their environment The scientific study of the relations among the components of the climate system that govern the overall climate THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH Identify key variables and adduce simple relations governing their evolution Variables: Number, mass age distribution, by species or classes of species Resource requirements per individual Resource availability Predation rate (species interactions) Approach: Identify rules Express in terms of differential equations Output: Predictive capability Ability to project with confidence the consequences of various external perturbations OVERVIEW ? ? ? Some simple questions about climate change First principles climate modeling Earth’s energy balance and perturbations Climate system response and the warming discrepancy Aerosol forcing – uncertainty and implications Global energy balance models -
Reliable Science: Overcoming Public Doubts in the Climate Change Debate
William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review Volume 37 (2012-2013) Issue 1 Article 6 November 2012 Reliable Science: Overcoming Public Doubts in the Climate Change Debate Michelle S. Simon William Pentland Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr Part of the Environmental Law Commons Repository Citation Michelle S. Simon and William Pentland, Reliable Science: Overcoming Public Doubts in the Climate Change Debate, 37 Wm. & Mary Envtl. L. & Pol'y Rev. 219 (2012), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr/vol37/iss1/6 Copyright c 2012 by the authors. This article is brought to you by the William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr RELIABLE SCIENCE: OVERCOMING PUBLIC DOUBTS IN THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE MICHELLE S. SIMON* & WILLIAM PENTLAND** INTRODUCTION ........................................... 219 I. THE DEBATE ABOUT CLIMATE SCIENCE: WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT EXISTS ..................................... 224 A. Uncertainties of the Science .................... 226 B. Judgments and Assumptions in the Analysis ...... 227 C. The Framing of the Issue ...................... 229 II. THE IPCC—WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT HAS NOT BEEN SUCCESSFUL ....................................... 232 A. What IPCC Is ............................... 232 B. Why the IPCC’s Assessments Have Not Been Effective Within the United States ............... 234 III. DAUBERT AND ITS PROGENY: A MODEL FOR EXAMINING SCIENCE .......................................... 237 A. History of the Legal Standard for the Admissibility of Evidence ................................. 237 B. Parallels Between the Issues Presented by the Frye Test and the IPCC’s Approach .................. 241 IV. A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR REVIEWING IPCC ASSESSMENTS ... 248 A. The Agency Structure and Role ................. 249 B. Applying the Framework to a Climate Change Model .....................................