Here are some resources on the internet to check out ...An enormous amount of scientific research has established that during the Earth's 4.5 billion-year history, the climate has varied and changed on a wide range of time scales, due to natural causes and without human activities impacting. The data I use is from a range of science publications like Science and Nature as well as more specialist science journals and websites – all publically available data. Some produce continuous data streams like the NASA and WMO cluster of research groups – dedicated science websites like NASA ( http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/), NOAA (http://www.noaa.gov/), the NASA millenium program (http://www.osd.noaa.gov/goes_R/goesrsounder.htm), the WMO (http://www.wmo.ch/). The Australian Academy of Science says the world is warming, that carbon emissions are driving change, that these emissions arise from human activity, and that if we do not reduce emissions, significant impacts on our society and environment will result. http://www.science.org.au/reports/climatechange2010.pdf Climate Commission has released its summary - The Critical Decade: Climate Science Risks and Responses - and the risks have never been clearer and the case for action has never been more urgent. Garnaut Climate Change Review-Update 2011. In November 2010, Ross Garnaut was commissioned by the Australian Government to provide an independent update to his 2008 Climate Change Review. The Royal Society "Climate change: a summary of the science" says that there is strong evidence that over the last half century, the earth's warming has been caused largely by human activity. The report restates a previous firm position, yes, conceding there is more to know, but reaffirming we already know enough to act. http://royalsociety.org/climate-change-summary-of-science/ American Physical Society website And of course the IPCC (www.ipcc.ch including ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html). Temps are still rising: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ in atmosphere from humans important - statements from every major Academy of Science including examples above. But lets go straight to the physics of the atmosphere from the American Institute of Physicists http://www.aip.org/gov/policy12.html CO2 is a greenhouse gas and is important - climate skeptics often say "Carbon dioxide is a colourless, odourless, non-toxic gas" This is a nonsense unscientific argument in relation to its role as a greenhouse gas – the basic physics that the ‘colourless’ part is only relevant to the human eye – it does not describe the response to the infrared spectrum which is where its properties contribute to CO2 being a potent greenhouse gas. CO2 has not been higher in human history - it has been higher in geological history: http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/historical-trends-in-carbon-dioxide-concentrations-and-temperature-on-a-geological-and-recent-time-scale When CO2 was much higher in geological history, average global temperature on the planet was up to 5 deg C higher than today. In terms of regional variations - these are outlined by the IPCC in detail in 2001, the updates yet to be released in the most recent analysis from IPCC in 2007. In terms of pollution, particulates act in global dimming, so the pollution over India for example slows the impact of warming (but also interferes with the monsoon, as it does in Indonesia). One impact as we actully clean up air pollution is that it frees up the expression of warming in thos places (as it did in Europe and North America in the 1980s as we acted to reduce acid rain caused from SO2 from motor vehicles which led to increased warming in those areas).
Lots of this information is now really well documented via wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), including the main page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warminghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming. There are some great animations of plate tectonics on-line - these are just a few of the options http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/geology/tectonics.html http://www.scotese.com/newpage13.htm http://www2.nature.nps.gov/geology/usgsnps/animate/pltecan.html Locally in Western Australia IOCI (http://www.ioci.org.au/) are coordinating a lot of work between in particular CSIRO (http://www.dar.csiro.au/information/climatechange.html)and Australian Bureau of Meterology (http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/) A numeric counter system at http://www.worldometers.info/ but this just uses a simple algorithm on annual stats to consider accumulated change over the year based on the date on your computer. The shareware Earthbrowser software which interrogates global earth servers for a raft of environmental info including the US locations. Earthbrowser is great – much simpler than GoogleEarth - a smaller footprint tho’ as a consequence less detailed maps - but even that's getting better with recent releases - well worth paying the shareware fee and supporting the author! The University of Alaska at Anchorage has produced a report, "Estimating Future Costs for Alaska Public Infrastructure At Risk from Climate Change." The full report is at http://www.iser.uaa.alaska.edu/Publications/JuneICICLE.pdf. An executive summary is at http://www.iser.uaa.alaska.edu/Publications/Juneclimatefinal.pdf. We need to work on Estimating Future Costs for Western Australia from Climate Change. A brilliant site with an array of inspiring talks by people working on solutions to many things including climate change can be found at http://www.ted.com And in 2012 - check out this interview on "Global Warming: What We Knew in '82" with Mike MacCracken from the University of Michigan - interviewed by Peter Sinclair. OTHER REFERENCES www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/publications/nbccap-brochure/pubs/nbccap-brochure.pdf eied.deh.gov.au/biodiversity/publications/nbccap/background.html http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/impacts/overview/ www.greenhouse.gov.au/impacts/overview/pubs/overview3.pdf www.soe.wa.gov.au/report/fundamental-pressures/climate-change.html http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/index.html See Climate politics in actionWe must respond to climate changeScitech website item
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Created: May 5, 2007 |
Last updated: March 14, 2011 |