| Heating Up The World A LOOK AT THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE FUSS THIS IS FOR THE INTERESTED NON-SCIENTIST, BUT ANYONE IS WELCOME |
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Glaciers in Alaska
A VIsit to Antarctica
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About Me - Who am I to
think anyone would
believe me on a subject
like this?
Glaciers in Alaska
A VIsit to Antarctica
Leave Feedback
About Me - Who am I to
think anyone would
believe me on a subject
like this?
| CLIMATE CHANGE IN PICTURES Something has been detected down the track. |
| We can watch it come closer, and although we may not know what it is down to the last detail.... |
| ...we can be pretty sure that we had better get off the track and stay off. And by the way, although the train looks like it is still far away, it is actually entering the other end of the station in the picture below. |
| Although warmer winters might seem like a good idea to some of us, there are also really dangerous effects coming at us when certain warming thresholds come close enough. We need very much to be off the track by then. |
| The trouble is we are stuck on the track, and getting off isn't going to be that easy. |
| Picture Source: I took the top four pictures of the westbound Southwest Chief arriving at Galesburg, IL on July 22, 2002. I don't remember where I took the picture of the track in the bottom picture, but I didn't really bury myself in it This is digital. After all, I think I am sane. But we really are stuck on the tracks. And that is insane. |
CLIMATE CHANGE IN A NUTSHELL
The train in the picture just to the left is coming,
definitely coming, but it is not obvious unless you look
carefully. Since climate warming is not immediately
obvious, then we have to look carefully for evidence.
The initial stages might require some careful
searching and comparing with what happened to
climate in ancient times.
In Chapter 1, the first slide show, called "Ancient
Ice Sheets And Climate Evidence" (There is also a
PDF version.) you can see a few examples of
evidence of ancient climates, some of which were cold
enough to cover whole continents with ice sheets.
(In these slide shows, you may want to explore the links to
references with more detail and then come back to the same
slide. You should right click on the link and then pick "Open in
New Window". Depending on circumstances, you may need to
hold down the Control (Ctrl) Key while you are doing this.
When you are ready to come back, just close or minimize the
new window.
In the PDF versions, the links may not work, but I have grouped
the web addresses for the references into several slides at the
end of the PDF versions. If it doesn't work to click on them,
just paste them into your browser.)
The funny thing is that the full extent of the ice ages
seems to have occurred with the global average
temperature not too much below the current one. It
may have been as little as about 6 or 8 degrees
Celsius (11 to 14 deg. Fahrenheit) below the current
temperatures. The ice age climate was substantially
different from now even when the temperature
difference was smaller, maybe 3 degrees C (5 deg.
F) or so lower. Our current warming could take us 2
or 3 degrees C higher than now without much effort
during the 21st century.
By the way, climate is average weather. We are not
going to get into trouble trying to predict the daily
weather here, just the average weather over large
pieces of the world.
One indication of average weather is average
temperature, and that is going up, at least around
this planet. There are direct records of this, using
thermometers of various types, going back about 150
years. However, it has been a big job to check the
quality of all this data and match one set of
measurements up against another. There is a look at
this problem in Chapter 2, the second slide show,
called "Increasing Global Temperature". (The PDF
Version is here.) Chapter 2 also shows you how much
the temperature is going up. If you don't want to go
through the whole slide show, you can see a global
temperature graph here and also, with more
explanation, down below in the pictures column.
But there are skeptics! And they have raised many
questions. In the years 2008 and 2009 there was a
lot of cold weather in North America leading many
skeptics to decide that global warming must be over.
I suppose that is the flip side. If we have some
warm weather we hear that global warming has been
proven, and a spell of cold weather seems to lead to
the opposite conclusion. Neither of these are true!
Actual science needs more than a cold day or a hot
day. I thought it was fun to look at the 2009 data
spread around the world so I could find out just
where the cool areas were and what areas were hot.
Here is what I found: A Look at the Year 2009
around the world (pdf version only).
Now, here is the thing about skeptics - we need
them. Scientists themselves are champion skeptics,
and their questions to one another have strengthened
science immeasurably. There have been intense
debates about efforts to extend our knowledge of
average global temperature to the time before
thermometer-based records. Most of this work,
however, has said that the current global temperature
is the highest in at least the last 1000 years. You
can also find a look at this debate in Chapter 2 (PDF
Version).
Here is another thing about skeptics, whether they
are scientists or not - sometimes they are right,
sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes they are
silly. Chapter 3, "Scientists Must Be Skeptics" (PDF
Version), is a little essay on such ideas. It does not
deal directly with global warming, just skepticism.
For example, "They laughed at Galileo," we always
say. But was he always right?
It is well known that the building materials in cities
absorb more sunlight than the green areas of the
countryside, so cities are warmer. Critics have
claimed that this accounts for the observed warming -
too many weather stations are in cities. But this is
not true; the critics are wrong. Both urban and rural
temperatures are increasing, and you can find the
details in Chapter 4, "City Heat" (PDF Version).
There are methods of looking at the Earth's
temperature by Earth satellite, and for a while the
satellite records seemed to contradict the
ground-based measurements. Critics have jumped on
this, but the satellites themselves had problems at
first. They have been straightened out, as described
in Chapter 5, "The Satellite Story", (PDF Version)
and there is no longer any conflict between these two
measurement methods.
Everyone talks about glaciers and how the world's
glaciers are shrinking. But not all glaciers do shrink.
Some are doing just fine, and this includes most of
the glaciers that tourists see from cruise ships.
There is a good reason for this: you can't even find
most of the shrinking ones from cruise ships these
days. However, many skeptics have used the
advancing glaciers to suggest that the shrinking ones
do not really imply anything special. I heard this
idea repeatedly on a recent cruise. We saw Alaska's
Hubbard Glacier, for example, which is advancing so
fast that it threatens to cut off some important
fishing areas. Some people on the ship thought that
global warming was thereby disproved. You can check
out many of my glacier pictures from this cruise here.
Unfortunately, glacier behavior actually supports
global warming. There have been detailed scientific
surveys of glacier mass loss, and the enormous scale
of this loss is clear as are the special circumstances
that cause some glaciers to continue to advance. You
can check this out in some detail in Chapter 6, "Solid
Flowing Rivers" (PDF Version), which gives some
background information about glaciers, and in Chapter
7, "Where Did Those Glaciers Go?" (PDF Version).
Chapter 7 uses the information from Chapter 6 to
check out the current state of glacier science. It
does not find anything to contradict global warming.
As of 2010, the old dream of a Northwest Passage (a
natural water route between the Atlantic and the
Pacific) seems close to reality, thanks to the dramatic
summer melting of the floating ice around the North
Pole. In Chapter 8, "The Melting Pole" (PDF
Version), you can discover just how rapidly this
floating ice is deserting us. In fact its rate of
decrease is greater than any single theory of global
warming mechanisms, such as greenhouse gas (PDF
Version) can explain. So researchers are studying it
intensely, but this melting does seem associated with
the warming of the rest of the world.
The ice sheet in Greenland is sitting on land and is up
to two miles thick. But it is draining around the
edges through outlet glaciers that have been speeding
up. Chapter 9, "Greenland Becoming Greener" (PDF
Version) shows some of this as well as the increased
melting on top of this ice sheet.
By far the largest reservoir of ice on earth is located
around the South Pole in the Antarctic Ice Sheet. In
Chapter 10, "Poles Apart, The Antarctic", you can
see that most of Antarctica is effectively isolated
from the climate of the rest of the world. Therefore
any warming that is taking place over most of the
Earth is not penetrating into Antarctica. But there
are some areas along the coastline where that is not
true, and ice is being lost through speeding outlet
glaciers and collapsing ice shelves (floating ice just
off the coast).
Now, if you dump a lot of ice into the ocean, the
water level will rise. That is not true when floating
ice melts, but Greenland ice, most Antarctic ice, and
mountain glaciers are not floating - they are sitting on
land. So there has been a continuing rise in the level
of the worlds oceans, about 20 centimeters (7.9
inches) since 1880, something that is also fed by
thermal expansion of the water itself. It turns out
that the oceans, on the average, have been warming
too, and generally warm things expand. The likely
prospect is for another 2 to 3 feet of ocean rise in
the 21st century. This may not seem like much, but
some island nations are already seeing trouble. You
can read about this in Chapter 11, "Rising Sea, and
the consequences will be explored some more in later
chapters.
If all of this is going on, it is not a bad idea to ask,
"What is doing this?" And that is the title of
Chapter 12: What is doing this? (Here is the PDF
version.) It is also good to ask if the causes could be
natural, and in fact we ought to at least eliminate the
possibility of natural causes before we start to blame
people and their activities for it. This information in
this chapter shows it to be pretty unlikely that
changes in the sun could be doing it all, because the
patterns of change just don't match very well. That
is at least true in recent years, although solar
changes have probably had some effect in earlier
years. The chapter also takes a look at the El Nino /
La Nina effects and the effects of volcanic residue in
the atmosphere. They seem to be responsible for
many of the smaller wiggles in the temperature trend
but not for the overall increase in global temperature.
The train in the picture just to the left is coming,
definitely coming, but it is not obvious unless you look
carefully. Since climate warming is not immediately
obvious, then we have to look carefully for evidence.
The initial stages might require some careful
searching and comparing with what happened to
climate in ancient times.
In Chapter 1, the first slide show, called "Ancient
Ice Sheets And Climate Evidence" (There is also a
PDF version.) you can see a few examples of
evidence of ancient climates, some of which were cold
enough to cover whole continents with ice sheets.
(In these slide shows, you may want to explore the links to
references with more detail and then come back to the same
slide. You should right click on the link and then pick "Open in
New Window". Depending on circumstances, you may need to
hold down the Control (Ctrl) Key while you are doing this.
When you are ready to come back, just close or minimize the
new window.
In the PDF versions, the links may not work, but I have grouped
the web addresses for the references into several slides at the
end of the PDF versions. If it doesn't work to click on them,
just paste them into your browser.)
The funny thing is that the full extent of the ice ages
seems to have occurred with the global average
temperature not too much below the current one. It
may have been as little as about 6 or 8 degrees
Celsius (11 to 14 deg. Fahrenheit) below the current
temperatures. The ice age climate was substantially
different from now even when the temperature
difference was smaller, maybe 3 degrees C (5 deg.
F) or so lower. Our current warming could take us 2
or 3 degrees C higher than now without much effort
during the 21st century.
By the way, climate is average weather. We are not
going to get into trouble trying to predict the daily
weather here, just the average weather over large
pieces of the world.
One indication of average weather is average
temperature, and that is going up, at least around
this planet. There are direct records of this, using
thermometers of various types, going back about 150
years. However, it has been a big job to check the
quality of all this data and match one set of
measurements up against another. There is a look at
this problem in Chapter 2, the second slide show,
called "Increasing Global Temperature". (The PDF
Version is here.) Chapter 2 also shows you how much
the temperature is going up. If you don't want to go
through the whole slide show, you can see a global
temperature graph here and also, with more
explanation, down below in the pictures column.
But there are skeptics! And they have raised many
questions. In the years 2008 and 2009 there was a
lot of cold weather in North America leading many
skeptics to decide that global warming must be over.
I suppose that is the flip side. If we have some
warm weather we hear that global warming has been
proven, and a spell of cold weather seems to lead to
the opposite conclusion. Neither of these are true!
Actual science needs more than a cold day or a hot
day. I thought it was fun to look at the 2009 data
spread around the world so I could find out just
where the cool areas were and what areas were hot.
Here is what I found: A Look at the Year 2009
around the world (pdf version only).
Now, here is the thing about skeptics - we need
them. Scientists themselves are champion skeptics,
and their questions to one another have strengthened
science immeasurably. There have been intense
debates about efforts to extend our knowledge of
average global temperature to the time before
thermometer-based records. Most of this work,
however, has said that the current global temperature
is the highest in at least the last 1000 years. You
can also find a look at this debate in Chapter 2 (PDF
Version).
Here is another thing about skeptics, whether they
are scientists or not - sometimes they are right,
sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes they are
silly. Chapter 3, "Scientists Must Be Skeptics" (PDF
Version), is a little essay on such ideas. It does not
deal directly with global warming, just skepticism.
For example, "They laughed at Galileo," we always
say. But was he always right?
It is well known that the building materials in cities
absorb more sunlight than the green areas of the
countryside, so cities are warmer. Critics have
claimed that this accounts for the observed warming -
too many weather stations are in cities. But this is
not true; the critics are wrong. Both urban and rural
temperatures are increasing, and you can find the
details in Chapter 4, "City Heat" (PDF Version).
There are methods of looking at the Earth's
temperature by Earth satellite, and for a while the
satellite records seemed to contradict the
ground-based measurements. Critics have jumped on
this, but the satellites themselves had problems at
first. They have been straightened out, as described
in Chapter 5, "The Satellite Story", (PDF Version)
and there is no longer any conflict between these two
measurement methods.
Everyone talks about glaciers and how the world's
glaciers are shrinking. But not all glaciers do shrink.
Some are doing just fine, and this includes most of
the glaciers that tourists see from cruise ships.
There is a good reason for this: you can't even find
most of the shrinking ones from cruise ships these
days. However, many skeptics have used the
advancing glaciers to suggest that the shrinking ones
do not really imply anything special. I heard this
idea repeatedly on a recent cruise. We saw Alaska's
Hubbard Glacier, for example, which is advancing so
fast that it threatens to cut off some important
fishing areas. Some people on the ship thought that
global warming was thereby disproved. You can check
out many of my glacier pictures from this cruise here.
Unfortunately, glacier behavior actually supports
global warming. There have been detailed scientific
surveys of glacier mass loss, and the enormous scale
of this loss is clear as are the special circumstances
that cause some glaciers to continue to advance. You
can check this out in some detail in Chapter 6, "Solid
Flowing Rivers" (PDF Version), which gives some
background information about glaciers, and in Chapter
7, "Where Did Those Glaciers Go?" (PDF Version).
Chapter 7 uses the information from Chapter 6 to
check out the current state of glacier science. It
does not find anything to contradict global warming.
As of 2010, the old dream of a Northwest Passage (a
natural water route between the Atlantic and the
Pacific) seems close to reality, thanks to the dramatic
summer melting of the floating ice around the North
Pole. In Chapter 8, "The Melting Pole" (PDF
Version), you can discover just how rapidly this
floating ice is deserting us. In fact its rate of
decrease is greater than any single theory of global
warming mechanisms, such as greenhouse gas (PDF
Version) can explain. So researchers are studying it
intensely, but this melting does seem associated with
the warming of the rest of the world.
The ice sheet in Greenland is sitting on land and is up
to two miles thick. But it is draining around the
edges through outlet glaciers that have been speeding
up. Chapter 9, "Greenland Becoming Greener" (PDF
Version) shows some of this as well as the increased
melting on top of this ice sheet.
By far the largest reservoir of ice on earth is located
around the South Pole in the Antarctic Ice Sheet. In
Chapter 10, "Poles Apart, The Antarctic", you can
see that most of Antarctica is effectively isolated
from the climate of the rest of the world. Therefore
any warming that is taking place over most of the
Earth is not penetrating into Antarctica. But there
are some areas along the coastline where that is not
true, and ice is being lost through speeding outlet
glaciers and collapsing ice shelves (floating ice just
off the coast).
Now, if you dump a lot of ice into the ocean, the
water level will rise. That is not true when floating
ice melts, but Greenland ice, most Antarctic ice, and
mountain glaciers are not floating - they are sitting on
land. So there has been a continuing rise in the level
of the worlds oceans, about 20 centimeters (7.9
inches) since 1880, something that is also fed by
thermal expansion of the water itself. It turns out
that the oceans, on the average, have been warming
too, and generally warm things expand. The likely
prospect is for another 2 to 3 feet of ocean rise in
the 21st century. This may not seem like much, but
some island nations are already seeing trouble. You
can read about this in Chapter 11, "Rising Sea, and
the consequences will be explored some more in later
chapters.
If all of this is going on, it is not a bad idea to ask,
"What is doing this?" And that is the title of
Chapter 12: What is doing this? (Here is the PDF
version.) It is also good to ask if the causes could be
natural, and in fact we ought to at least eliminate the
possibility of natural causes before we start to blame
people and their activities for it. This information in
this chapter shows it to be pretty unlikely that
changes in the sun could be doing it all, because the
patterns of change just don't match very well. That
is at least true in recent years, although solar
changes have probably had some effect in earlier
years. The chapter also takes a look at the El Nino /
La Nina effects and the effects of volcanic residue in
the atmosphere. They seem to be responsible for
many of the smaller wiggles in the temperature trend
but not for the overall increase in global temperature.
| Here are some actual results. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is one of the institutions recording global temperature data, from which I made the graph below. It shows differences from the 1951-1980 average temperature, which is arbitrarily called "zero". So this doesn't show actual temperatures, just the differences, which are called "temperature anamolies". The GISS data is here, and graphs drawn from it by the people at GISS are here. You can find a summary of recent global warming data here including some more information about this data. |
| The reason we are stuck is that burning conventional fuels is loading the atmosphere with the greenhouse gasses that are causing the warming. And we are really dependent on those fuels. |
| I took the picture below, and the one at the top of this page, from an airplane flying in the Denali (Mt. McKinley) area of Alaska. The ditch was once filled up with a flowing glacier, which has now shrunk to a small, pitiful remnant of itself. There are many such mass-losing glaciers in the world - most glaciers, in fact. Click the picture for a large version. |
| The Arctic sea ice is going away. Look at this NASA site and also at this one for some comparisons of previous years with recent ones. This NASA video shows the decline between 1979 and 2005. It shows the minimum sea ice extent in the summer for each year, but not the winter maximums. In this NASA video, you can see the winter maximum for 2007 and watch the ice go away until it reaches the summer minimum for the same year - the smallest ice pack on record. That is the picture you see below. |
| Among the many facets of climate change is drought. Prolonged drought in the western USA has lowered the levels of many lakes such as Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam in my 2005 picture below. The white walls are lime deposits created when the lake was as high as the upper white boundary. Although the current western drought has not been proven to be related to the global human-induced climate change, computer models do forecast a dryer west. Thus the future of this climate change is likely to intensify the drought in any case. |
| Where is this climate change coming from? Well, there is a lot of evidence that it is coming mostly from the action of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. I am going to detail much of that evidence over there in the right-hand column (and I am working steadily on that). The greenhouse gas causing the most worry is carbon dioxide. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas and a more powerful one. However, it is not building up. Other examples are methane, ozone, and Freon. Basically, these gasses trap heat that is radiated away from the earth toward space and throw some of it back thus warming the earth. The picture below illustrates this. Click on it for a larger version. Here is a better look at the greenhoiuse effect. And a PDF version. |
| CLIMATE CHANGE IN DETAIL Quick Links to the Chapters and More |
| A COUPLE OF RETREATING GLACIERS IN THE DENALI AREA OF ALASKA THAT USED TO COMBINE AND FILL UP THE DITCH. CLICK THE PICTURE FOR A LARGER VERSION. |
I PLAN TO CONTINUE WITH TOPICS SUCH
AS THESE:
More possible reasons
Whut's a greenhouse gas?
Other Evidence- Wildlife, Storms,
Permafrost, etc.
AS THESE:
More possible reasons
Whut's a greenhouse gas?
Other Evidence- Wildlife, Storms,
Permafrost, etc.
Why the fuss? Don't you like being stuck on
the Tracks?
Critics-Why Didn't I Reference More of
Them? (It is not that I am ignoring them, but
I just don't think that a lot of the criticism is
right, and I will outline why. And I'll point
you to some of the critical sites anyway.)
What to do? What to do?
the Tracks?
Critics-Why Didn't I Reference More of
Them? (It is not that I am ignoring them, but
I just don't think that a lot of the criticism is
right, and I will outline why. And I'll point
you to some of the critical sites anyway.)
What to do? What to do?
| List of Links about Climate and Climate Change |