One of the few things that I have not covered before in depth is the carbon cycle. That is the path that carbon takes in and out of the atmosphere. For example, plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, but eventually that carbon will make it’s way back into the atmosphere. The flow of carbon from [...]
There has been one new paper about climate in the past week that caught my attention (the Gleick story did catch my attention, but I am passing on it). The collapse of the Mayan civilization 1000 years ago is now being tied to climate change. Most news isn’t making the direct argument that global warming, but there is at least one newspaper that raises the speculation that global warming caused the downfall of the Mayans. Normally silly things like this get ignored, but I found a couple of genuinely interesting things buried under the propaganda.
One of the most frustrating for me personally about the book is the limited options that were available for the illustrations. A full color version of the book would have been too expensive and B&W Illustrations are so limited. One solution that was given by a reader was to put the Illustrations on the website. [...]
2011 was an interesting year for the Earth’s oceans. The relative sea level (RSL) in 2011 was not only lower than 2010, it was also lower than 2009. All of the different satellite measurements agree with that, but perhaps even more interesting is that the European RSL measurement shows that the sea level in 2011 was even lower than it was back in 2005. That particular satellite shows that there has been almost no net change in the Earth’s sea level over the past 8 years.
Part 2 is going provide some seasonal and regional detail that was not covered in Part 1 in the discussion of the NH snow coverage. One of the things I am trying to show in these articles is how normal it is for certain parts of the world to experience a mild (low snow) winter while others are experiencing a harsh (more snow) winter. This year has made headlines by being unusually mild in the United States, but that is one of the only regions that is experiencing a mild winter this year, but the discussion of 2012 remains an article for the future.
The back and forth in the global warming debate about snow coverage is always amusing. The debate has stated both that snow will increase or decrease because of global warming. Both news stories get coverage almost simultaneously because every year there are some places that get more snow than average, while others get less than average. All a person needs to do is Google global warming, snow and let the conflicting stories and news articles paint the funny picture.
Over the past week I have seen news articles all over the place that 2011 was the 9th hottest year ever recorded. Not only that, but 9 of the 10 hottest years are since the year 2000. The NASA news release (GISS) is the main source for this statement, but it has been everywhere. Press releases like this are really good examples of irrelevant arguments, while being misleading at the same time.
In part 1 I focused on the temperature of the Boise area. In the year 2011 the average temperature was 0.07 °C below average, or it had a temperature anomaly of -0.07 °C. That is a meaninglessly small deviation from the average temperature. That most years are so close to average is an important clue to how stable the Earth’s climate really is. Any reader will know that I am not a fan of using temperature anomaly as a measure of climate and today I am going to demonstrate why it is a generally a worthless measure of the Earth’s climate.
I got a request from a reader to put all of the charts from the book up on the webpage. This is a really good idea and I would like to thank Lawrence for making the request. I have been spending the past couple of days thinking about the best way to do this and have decided to use the Data page of the website for this purpose. This will also allow me to link the data sources I used for their generation directly from the charts themselves. I consider it unlikely that I will be able to get it up all at once, but I will try to get a few chapters up at a time. I will have the first revision up by Monday, but it might be a work in progress for a while. I think it will be a nice feature for everyone.
Now that 2011 is over it is time to start looking closer look at the year. I am going to start off at the regional level. That is the area that I happen to live in. Most places in the world will have experienced a different year climate-wise than the one I did, but the type of analysis that I am going to provide for my region can be done by anyone with enough patience to find, collect and then analyze the data.
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