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For the past two centuries, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising from 280ppm to over 390ppm in 2010. This is an incontrovertible fact. What has been called into question in recent years is the source of this carbon dioxide; it has been asserted by some…
Read More »To understand why climate change is occurring, it is first necessary to understand how carbon dioxide is naturally cycled by the biosphere and ocean. The figure below depicts this process, known as the carbon cycle. The carbon cycle is a relatively simple concept. There are natural processes that release carbon…
Read More »To call The Climate War “a riveting tale,” as the cover quotes Bill Clinton as saying, would be an understatement. There have been many books written about current events in the past few years that deserve a large amount of praise, but Eric Pooley’s is the first to talk about…
Read More »The media has been full of stories today about the press conference held by NASA to announce a paper published in Science. They haven’t done a very good job of explaining what scientists have found, so I’d like to try to clear some things up. I’d also like to use…
Read More »Veterans Day falls on November 11th to mark the anniversary of the armistice ending the First World War. Perhaps no other conflict in western history has generated more acknowledgement of the savageness of our species. The furnaces of the Holocaust represent the result of a society gone mad, led by…
Read More »For some reason, November 6th has been declared Carl Sagan Day, to honor the great communicator of science. I can’t find an explanation for why today was picked; perhaps it was the date of some major achievement in his career. Last year I believe I posted a passage from his…
Read More »The above graph is a screenshot taken from An Inconvenient Truth. There are many versions of this graph available; I chose this one because the image in the movie was on such a large scale that the last few decades are actually visible. The graph shows temperatures and concentrations of…
Read More »Today the yield on US Treasury 1-year bonds fell to 2.50%. Three months ago, it was above 3.25%. In April, it had actually peaked at 4%. A falling interest rate means that investors are worried about the long-term economic outlook of the United States. Many people have been arguing for…
Read More »In my previous post, I discussed the relationship between the orbit of the Earth around the Sun and fluctuations between periods of climate warming and cooling. In this post I’d like to explain how that works. I already pointed out that the Earth is currently defying all previous behavior by…
Read More »It is no secret that there is a massive disconnect between what the scientific community understands about climate change and what the general public understands. This has allowed our elected officials and those running for office (most recently the Republican candidate for Senate in Wisconsin) to get away with blatantly…
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