SCI-ART LAB

Science, Art, Litt, Science based Art & Science Communication

Recently we saw the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 5th report on climate change ( http://www.ipcc.ch/ ). While some agree with it - most scientists do (1) - others - like the industry lobby- completely rubbishes it like this one:

http://www.naturalnews.com/042304_UN_climate_change_report_selectiv...

Some scientists - supported by the industrial lobby too don't agree with it. They say: The UN-promoted theory about the missing warming being hidden somewhere in the ocean is really an admission that its climate models do not accurately simulate natural internal variability in the system.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/16643-top-scien... ( this report is definitely written by the Industry lobby and the Republican lobby).

It is known that 'dark money' supports climate change denial effort. A Drexel University study finds that a large slice of donations to organizations that deny global warming are funneled through third-party pass-through organizations that conceal the original funder. 

( http://drexel.edu/~/media/Files/now/pdfs/Institutionalizing%20Delay...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dark-money-funds-c... )

An interesting blog by a science communicator says scientists have been framed and global warming hasn't been slowed down like the skeptics and deniers say! Read it here: http://talkingscience.weebly.com/1/post/2013/12/you-have-been-frame...!

The author of this blog made some very good points.

And this blog on SA

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-risks-as-conclusi...

says:

Climate Risks as Conclusive as Link between Smoking and Lung Cancer

U.S. scientists say the evidence linking rising levels of greenhouse gases and global warming is as strong as the link between smoking and lung cancer.
And this one:

Climate Deniers Intimidate Journal into Retracting Paper that Finds They Believe Conspiracy Theories

The paper was sound but a libel threat apparently exerted pressure on management at Frontiers in Psychology, suggesting a blow to academic freedom
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-deniers-intimidat...
Are we in the 21st century or in the ancient times when people of science were attacked by everybody?

However, this topic really is all confusing to a layman with so much of contradictory news making the rounds.

Well, who should we believe when so many  reports and articles flooding the media with contradictory arguments?

The studies are still going on and nobody knows for sure the real causes for the climate change at the global level. But still local changes can effect you!

I will try to help you in coming to your own conclusion

Okay, imagine these two situations:

(1)You are on a holiday and go to a forest. You feel happy and relieved for getting out of the smoke you are inhaling in your city. You can breathe easily now,   feel relaxed and more energetic. Your young son and old mother get relief from their asthmatic conditions.  You can see the pollution markers - lichens- growing everywhere. You don't see them in your city! You see several unknown birds singing and chirping in a forest. The water tastes so different and sweet. This is a fact. I myself faced this situation and most of you must have been too. Now want to know the reason why? Because you get clean and fresh natural air in this place. You get pure water  in the forest. The Nature is untouched by human beings here. Well, almost!

(2) Now you return back from your holiday tour. You are in your home city. You definitely feel the heat difference, the air quality, and the resultant mood difference. You don't see several birds here. You will notice the smog, the thick black  water flowing down the road after a spell of rain  different as compared to the brown or transparent water you saw in the forest or a water fall you loved there. You feel breathless and you again start hearing the wheezing sound while your  mother  tries to breathe. Your water tastes rancid! Why? Because we are interfering with Nature and polluting it in the city! You can smell some chemicals in the air while rain starts coming down slowly? Acid rain? Exactly!

So?! Do you think I am lying when I say climate science is relevant or  scientists are lying when they say climate change is happening?

Climate change is not only happening at the global level, but also at the local level, effecting each and every living being on this planet.

It is happening alright and  the proof is before you! Forget about the IPCC report or what others say contradicting it. Feel the difference for yourself and come to your conclusions. And then help save the planet.

"Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."

- Cree proverb

What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true? - Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland ( On climate science predictions) - just because the models are not very accurate?


References:
1. https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

--

Views: 1105

Replies to This Discussion

Mysterious Seafloor Methane Begins to Melt Off Washington Coast
Researchers probe the oceans off the West Coast and see signs of the meltdown of icy methane similar in size to the BP oil spill
Warming of the Pacific Ocean off Washington state could destabilize methane deposits on the seafloor and trigger a release of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

In the worst-case scenario, if oceans warm by up to 2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100, the volume of methane release every year by 2100 would quadruple the amount by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the study estimates.
www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mysterious-seafloor-metha...

Watch: Climate change explained in 60 second animation
Climate scientists at the Royal Society produce a 60 second guide addressing common assertions made by people who dismiss climate change

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/112...

A new study suggests that volcanic eruptions have actually been causing global warming to slow for more than a decade.

Small volcanic eruptions have been sending large quantities of ash and gases into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun’s rays and providing a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, according to Discovery News report.
Although scientists have always known that volcanoes cool the Earth’s atmosphere due to the sulfur dioxide ejected in eruptions, but the newest study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that even small volcanic eruptions can have a big impact in stopping the effects of greenhouse gases.

The effect happens when droplets of sulfuric acid which form when the gas combined with oxygen in the upper atmosphere blocks the sun’s rays, sending them back into space and helping lower temperatures on the surface of the Earth.
Small-scale ejections could be reducing the amount of global warming by as much as half, and could explain the recent slowdown in warming on Earth, which has not increased in temperature to the level scientists had expected based on carbon entering the atmosphere.

The study was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. It examined how aerosol particles that are dumped into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions affect the atmosphere, using balloons, laser radar, and ground-based measurements to make those determinations.
About a dozen small volcanic eruptions around the world in the last 15 years caused a cooling of 0.05 degrees to 0.12 degrees Celsius since 2000, according to the research. Global warming has slowed over about the same period.

It shows that despite the moderate size of the eruptions, they can have a big impact on our climate, according to one scientist who worked on the study. He noted that scientists would need to include the effects of such volcanic eruptions in future climate change models in order to be accurate.
http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/stunning-results-indicate-small...

http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/02/10/climate-denial-food-cha...
Climate Denial Food Chain: Conservative Media Run With Baseless Climate Science Conspiracy Theory

Public division about climate change rooted in conflicting socio-political identities
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2...
Of the climate science papers that take a position on the issue, 97% agree that climate change is caused by humans1, but less than half of the US population shares this belief2. This misalignment between scientific and public views has been attributed to a range of factors, including political attitudes, socio-economic status, moral values, levels of scientific understanding, and failure of scientific communication. The public is divided between climate change 'believers' (whose views align with those of the scientific community) and 'sceptics' (whose views are in disagreement with those of the scientific community). We propose that this division is best explained as a socio-political conflict between these opposing groups. Here we demonstrate that US believers and sceptics have distinct social identities, beliefs and emotional reactions that systematically predict their support for action to advance their respective positions. The key implication is that the divisions between sceptics and believers are unlikely to be overcome solely through communication and education strategies, and that interventions that increase angry opposition to action on climate change are especially problematic. Thus, strategies for building support for mitigation policies should go beyond attempts to improve the public’s understanding of science, to include approaches that transform intergroup relations.

--

In almost any other scientific context, scrutinizing the disparity between “believers” and “skeptics” would seem laughable. Imagine, for instance, a paper devoting rigorous study to the mores of a group that isn’t convinced of the reality of gravity.

That’s right. Gravity.

So take the headlines from outlets that covered the study, substitute “climate” for “gravity” and here’s what you have, ready for late night comedy:

Atlantic and Pacific multidecadal oscillations and Northern Hemisphere temperatures
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/988
The “Pause” in Global Warming Is Finally Explained
analysis, published online today in Science, suggests that the slowdown will end in the next few decades.

The temperature of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, particularly the upper layers, goes through natural cycles of warmer and cooler, driven by large circulations of water across these and the rest of the world’s seas. Warmer and cooler periods can last several decades. The analysis shows that usually, when the northern Pacific is warming, the northern Atlantic is cooling, and vice versa—offsetting one another in their impact on atmospheric temperatures in the northern hemisphere. But the cycles, and their magnitude, don’t match exactly. For the past decade, the magnitude of northern Pacific cooling has been greater than that of northern Atlantic warming, resulting in a net slowdown in temperature rise, according to an email sent to me by Byron A. Steinman, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, who led the new study.

Understanding these patterns matters because they can counteract or accelerate warming due to human activities. The paper concludes by noting that the two ocean oscillations have “offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.” However, the authors go on to say that, based on the natural cycles over the past 130 years, the offset trend “will likely reverse…adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.” The oscillations have slowed the warming due to human activities for a while, but when that effect inevitably ends the oscillations will instead add to human warming, raising the rate of increase.

Deforestation could shift monsoons, leaving India high and dry: IISC researchers
Large-scale deforestation could cause monsoon rains to shift south, cutting rainfall in India by nearly a fifth, scientists say.

Deforestation has long been known to cause temperature increases in local areas, but new research published on Tuesday shows a potentially wider impact on monsoon rains. While releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, deforestation also causes changes in how much light reflects off the earth's surface and the amount of moisture in the atmosphere from plants transpiring.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore used a model simulating atmosphere circulation, as well as photosynthesis, transpiration, warming of the ocean surface and ice melt.

"We wanted to get a basic understanding of the effects of large-scale deforestation at different locations on monsoon rainfall," the authors said in a statement.

They performed three deforestation experiments, removing all trees in tropical, temperate and high-latitude areas to look at the impacts.

Deforestation in temperate and high latitudes caused changes in atmospheric circulation resulting in a southward shift in the monsoon rains. This would translate to a significant fall in precipitation in the northern hemisphere monsoon regions of East Asia, North America, North Africa and South Asia, and moderate increases in rainfall in the southern hemisphere monsoon regions of South Africa, South America and Australia.

"Our study is showing that remote deforestation in mid- and high-latitudes can have a much larger effect on tropical rainfall than local tropical deforestation," the statement said.

The South Asian monsoon region would be affected the most, with an 18 percent decline in precipitation over India, the scientists wrote in the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The authors said that evaluations of the climate benefits of planting trees on bare or cultivated land or in deforested areas must include remote impacts such as rainfall. The study noted that land used for crops and pastures has increased globally from 620 million hectares in the 1700s - or about 7 percent of the global land surface - to 4,690 million hectares in 2000, about a third of the world's land surface.

Volcanic eruptions slow down global warming: Study
Volcanic eruptions may have slowed down global warming by injecting particulates into the atmosphere, according to a study.

Volcanic aerosols have acted during the last 10 years as a natural umbrella to slow down global temperature increase from greenhouse gases, researchers said.

Although global concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has continuously increased over the past decade, the mean global surface temperature has not followed the same path.

A team of international researchers, including Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) scientists, have now found an explanation for this slowing down in global warming.

The incoming solar radiation in the years 2008-2011 was twice as much reflected by volcanic aerosol particles in the lowest part of the stratosphere than previously thought, researchers found.

According to the study led by the University of Lund, Sweden, the cooling effect due to volcanic eruptions was clearly underestimated by climate models used for the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

Since more frequent volcanic eruptions and the subsequent cooling effect are only temporary, the rise of Earth's temperature will speed up again, researchers said.

The reason is the still continuously increasing greenhouse gas concentration, they said.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the average surface temperature over the northern mid-latitude continents did increase only slightly.

This effect can be now explained by the study on volcanic aerosol particles in the atmosphere.

The study uses data from the tropopause region up to 35 km altitude.

The tropopause region is a transition layer between the underlying wet weather layer with its clouds (troposphere) and the dry and cloud-free layer above (stratosphere).

"Overall our results emphasise that even smaller volcanic eruptions are more important for the Earth's climate than expected," researchers said.

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

NASA Study Finds Indian, Pacific Oceans Temporarily Hide Global Warming
A new NASA study of ocean temperature measurements shows in recent years extra heat from greenhouse gases has been trapped in the waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans. Researchers say this shifting pattern of ocean heat accounts for the slowdown in the global surface temperature trend observed during the past decade.

Researchers Veronica Nieves, Josh Willis and Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, found a specific layer of the Indian and Pacific oceans between 300 and 1,000 feet (100 and 300 meters) below the surface has been accumulating more heat than previously recognized. They also found the movement of warm water has affected surface temperatures. The result was published Thursday in the journal Science.

A new NASA study of ocean temperature measurements shows in recent years extra heat from greenhouse gases has been trapped in the waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans. Researchers say this shifting pattern of ocean heat accounts for the slowdown in the global surface temperature trend observed during the past decade.

Researchers Veronica Nieves, Josh Willis and Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, found a specific layer of the Indian and Pacific oceans between 300 and 1,000 feet (100 and 300 meters) below the surface has been accumulating more heat than previously recognized. They also found the movement of warm water has affected surface temperatures. The result was published Thursday in the journal Science.

http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/nasa-pa...

'Carbon sink' detected underneath world's deserts
The world's deserts may be storing some of the climate-changing carbon dioxide emitted by human activities, a new study suggests. Massive aquifers underneath deserts could hold more carbon than all the plants on land, according to the new research. Humans add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere through fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. About 40 percent of this carbon stays in the atmosphere and roughly 30 percent enters the ocean, according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Scientists thought the remaining carbon was taken up by plants on land, but measurements show plants don't absorb all of the leftover carbon. Scientists have been searching for a place on land where the additional carbon is being stored--the so-called "missing carbon sink."

The new study suggests some of this carbon may be disappearing underneath the world's deserts - a process exacerbated by irrigation. Scientists examining the flow of water through a Chinese desert found that carbon from the atmosphere is being absorbed by crops, released into the soil and transported underground in groundwater--a process that picked up when farming entered the region 2,000 years ago.

Underground aquifers store the dissolved carbon deep below the desert where it can't escape back to the atmosphere, according to the new study.

The new study estimates that because of agriculture roughly 14 times more carbon than previously thought could be entering these underground desert aquifers every year. These underground pools that taken together cover an area the size of North America may account for at least a portion of the "missing carbon sink" for which scientists have been searching.

"The carbon is stored in these geological structures covered by thick layers of sand, and it may never return to the atmosphere," said Yan Li, a desert biogeochemist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Urumqi, Xinjiang, and lead author of the study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2015/07/28/carbon.sink.detected.un...

Over two-thirds of deaths due to outdoor air pollution occur in China, India: Study
According to a new study, outdoor air pollution results in over three million deaths every year. More than two-thirds of these deaths occur in China and India. Both these nations have been conducting very large-scale profit-driven industrial practices.

Study authors have estimated that if the government didn’t interfere in this matter than the mortality rate from air pollution will possible get double by 2050. They said almost all of the increase will occur in Asia.

Researchers have reported that particulate matter is key pollutant that has led to premature mortality. Particulate matter is a mixture of different materials released into the atmosphere, and are considered harmful for human health when exceeds 2.5 micrometers in diameter. The leading practices that have been contributing to the mass pollution differ slightly across the world.
The study suggested that in India and China emissions from residential heating and cooking alone result in huge quantities of unhealthy smoke, causing one-third of air pollution-related deaths worldwide. In China more than 70% of electricity is generated from coal.

Asthma is the main cause of hospitalization for children in China and deaths due to lung cancer have risen 465% in the last 3 decades.

In a conference call for journalists, study author Jos Lelieveld, Cyprus Institute professor, said, “It’s important to reduce emissions from residential energy use. You can’t ask people to stop eating and cooking, but you can provide better technologies”.

Agricultural emissions tend to be the main drivers of air pollution in highly regulated areas, including the United States, Europe, and Japan.
http://northerncalifornian.com/content/52786-over-two-thirds-deaths...

RSS

Badge

Loading…

© 2024   Created by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service