Quote of the Day — 20 February 2011

2010 was an exceptional year for Greenland’s ice cap. Melting started early and stretched later in the year than usual. Little snow fell to replenish the losses. By the end of the season, much of southern Greenland had set a new record, with melting that lasted 50 days longer than average. …

… The long melt season primarily affected southern and western Greenland, where communities experienced their warmest year on record. After a warm, dry winter, temperatures were particularly high in the spring, getting the melt season off to a strong start. The early melting set the tone for the rest of the season, leading to more melting all the way into mid-September. …

— Record Melting in Greenland during 2010
— Earth Observatory
— NASA

earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=49338&src=eorss-iotd
earthobservatory.nasa.gov

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM

Quote of the Day — 16 February 2011

” … Forbes Magazine was allowing an architect, Larry Bell, to make false statements about climate science. Even more disturbing, Forbes magazine is allowing Bell and others to smear well-respected scientists such as Drs. Ben Santer and Michael Mann by making demonstrably false statements.

A pattern has emerged over the past two months where Forbes.com publishes errors in fact, corrections to these errors are sent to Forbes, but Forbes chooses not to issue corrections… “

— Scott Mandia
— “Forbes Magazine: Wrong is Right?
— Global Warming: Man or Myth

http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/forbes-magazine-wrong-is-right/
profmandia.wordpress.com

Quote of the Day — 14 February 2011 (Valentine’s Day)

“I remember when I was 7 and my dad showed me the front page article of the Miami Herald about climate change. And it said something about how in 75 years … the world was going to end. Now I’m sure the Miami Herald didn’t print that, but as a 7-year-old, that’s what I understood and I just remember crying about it.”

… “I think it’s important to recognize that you didn’t always have the knowledge in the past generations that we do today … And I like to think that if they did have the knowledge, then maybe they would have made different choices.”

— Kelly Greenman
— “A Climate ‘Policy Wonk’ in the Making“
— by Richard Harris
— NPR Morning Edition

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89567328
www.npr.org

Quote of the Day — 13 February 2011

It turns out, to get on a trajectory to hit 450 ppm, we’re going to need to turn off most of our fossil fuel energy, end deforestation, and build about 11.5 new terawatts of clean energy capacity by 2033 (30 years out from the 2003 baseline). Woo!

That’s a lot of sh*t to build! As I said, it’s “the equivalent of America’s massive industrial build-up for WWII, only across the entire globe, for 40 years straight (at least), against a faceless enemy.”

Of course we have no idea what the actual mix will end up being. There’s no predicting innovation, much less politics. But the one thing we do know is that the task ahead is enormous, so gobsmackingly big that the smart money is almost certainly on failure. If we want a chance at success we’re going to have to rethink a lot of our assumptions about consumption, economic analysis, policy design, and political strategy.

In a situation where doing too little is so likely and doing too much is virtually impossible, we’re going to have to be climate hawks. That means leaning forward, biased ever toward action, choosing opportunism over optimization and the resilient over the efficient. Every second we dither, the climb gets steeper.

— David Roberts
— “The gobsmackingly gargantuan challenge of shifting to clean energy “
— Grist

www.grist.org/article/2011-02-11-gobsmackingly-gargantuan-challenge-of-shifting-to-clean-energy
www.grist.org

Quote of the Day — 10 February 2011

” Lake size is sensitive to both climate change and human activities, and therefore serves as an excellent indicator to assess environmental changes. Using a large volume of various datasets, we provide a first complete picture of changes in China’s lakes between 1960s–1980s and 2005–2006. Dramatic changes are found in both lake number and lake size; of these, 243 lakes vanished mainly in the northern provinces (and autonomous regions) and also in some southern provinces while 60 new lakes appeared mainly on the Tibetan Plateau and neighboring provinces. Limited evidence suggested that these geographically unbalanced changes might be associated primarily with climate change in North China and human activities in South China, yet targeted regional studies are required to confirm this preliminary observation. … ”

— ” Hundreds of lakes dry-up and vanish in China ”
— climatesignals.org, 08 Feb 2011

climatesignals.org/2011/02/hundreds-of-lakes-dry-up-and-vanish-in-china
climatesignals.org

Quote of the Day — 7 January 2011

” As the climate science continues to strengthen, and as the observational data around the world continue to accumulate, those who deny the reality or severity of human-induced climate change are getting increasingly desperate. As evidence piles up and as our weather worsens, their positions get weaker and weaker and their claims that the climate isn’t changing, or isn’t changing because of human actions get harder to support, their voices get more strident, and their language and vitriol get uglier.

Climate deniers cannot make a case against human-caused climate change without desperately manipulating, misrepresenting, or simply misunderstanding the science. …

…the Heartland Institute tried a trick, called “cherry picking” – where someone carefully selects one piece of data to prove a point while ignoring or hiding all of the other data points that refute it. That’s a bad, dishonest no-no. Scientists destroy their reputations when they do this (since inevitably other scientists find out)… ”

— Peter Gleick
— “Misrepresenting Climate Science: Cherry-Picking Data to Hide the Disappearance of Arctic Ice“
— The Huffington Post

www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/misrepresenting-climate-s_b_819367.html
www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick
www.huffingtonpost.com

www.youtube.com/watch?&v=76BgKe1naFc
un.ukycc.org
UK Youth Delegation to COP16