Tag Archives: Durban Conference of Parties

Climate clippings 60: 2011 review edition

The year in review

For me the year began with the post Climate crunch: the fierce urgency of now, wherein we were reminded that the time for significant action on climate change was now and that postponing such action would make things quite a lot harder.

This message was reinforced by the Climate Commission’s report The Critical Decade with the following message:

“This decade is critical. Unless effective action is taken, the global climate may be so irreversibly altered we will struggle to maintain our present way of life.” “Without strong and rapid action there is a significant risk that climate change will undermine our society’s prosperity, health, stability and way of life.

Continue reading Climate clippings 60: 2011 review edition

Climate clippings 53

GLOBAL warming is unusual

A common response to AGW warmists is that climate has always changed and always will. It’s natural and humans have nothing to do with it. Now via Climate Progress we learn from a study by Svante Björck of Lund University that apart from general moves into and out of ice ages the hemispheres do not warm or cool in sync. When one hemisphere changes the other stays the same or moves in the opposite direction. For example he found that during the Little Ice Age in Europe there were no corresponding changes in the southern hemisphere.

Last week I posted this graph to show that we are giving the system a helluva jerk. In fact we need to go back 15 million years to find CO2 levels as high as today. (if you are concerned about Antarctic thawing be very afraid.)

However, the following graph shows that the hemispheres are not perfectly in sync now:

Hemispheric land-ocean temperatures

The northern hemisphere is pulling away. The reason, presumably, it has more land, and at higher latitudes. Continue reading Climate clippings 53