Welcome to The CarbonFix Foundation: What does past climate change tell us about global warming? Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing. If there's one thing that all sides of the climate debate can agree on, it's that climate has changed naturally in the past. Long before industrial times, the planet underwent many warming and cooling periods. This has led some to conclude that if global temperatures changed naturally in the past, long before SUVs and plasma TVs, nature must be the cause of current global warming. This conclusion is the opposite of peer-reviewed science has found. Our climate is governed by the following principle: when you add more heat to our climate, global temperatures rise.
Conversely, when the climate loses heat, temperatures fall. How much does temperature change for a given radiative forcing? So when we talk about climate sensitivity to doubled CO2, we're talking about the change in global temperatures from a radiative forcing of 3.7 Wm-2. How much does it warm if CO2 is doubled? Welcome to The CarbonFix Foundation: 10 Indicators of a Human Fingerprint on Climate Change. The NOAA State of the Climate 2009 report is an excellent summary of the many lines of evidence that global warming is happening. Acknowledging the fact that the planet is warming leads to the all important question - what's causing global warming?
To answer this, here is a summary of the empirical evidence that answer this question. Many different observations find a distinct human fingerprint on climate change: To get a closer look, click on the pic above to get a high-rez 1024x768 version (you're all welcome to use this graphic in your Powerpoint presentations). Or to dig even deeper, here's more info on each indicator (including links to the original data or peer-reviewed research): Humans are currently emitting around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (CDIAC).
Science isn't a house of cards, ready to topple if you remove one line of evidence. CREDIT SOURCE : John Cook. Three-quarters of climate change is man-made. Natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years, reports a pair of Swiss climate modellers in a paper published online today. Most of the observed warming — at least 74 % — is almost certainly due to human activity, they write in Nature Geoscience1. Since 1950, the average global surface air temperature has increased by more than 0.5 °C. To separate human and natural causes of warming, the researchers analysed changes in the balance of heat energy entering and leaving Earth — a new ‘attribution' method for understanding the physical causes of climate change. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have contributed around 0.85 °C to global warming since the 1950s, Swiss researchers have found.
Knutti and his co-author Markus Huber, also at ETH Zurich, took a different approach. Welcome to NCEAS | NCEAS. A History of Climate Science. Skeptical Science takes a different approach to Naomi Oreskes' Science paper who sorted her papers into "explicit endorsement of the consensus position", "rejection of the consensus position" and everything else (neutral). In this case, the backbone of our site is our list of climate myths. Whenever a climate link is added to our database, it is matched to any relevant climate myths. Therefore, each link is assigned "skeptic", "neutral" or "proAGW" whether it confirms or refutes the climate myth. This means a skeptic paper doesn't necessarily "reject the consensus position" that humans are causing global warming.
It may address a more narrow issue like ocean acidification or the carbon cycle. For example, say a paper is published examining the impacts of ocean acidification on coral reefs. If the paper finds evidence that ocean acidification is serious, the paper is categorised as pro-AGW and added to the list of papers addressing the "ocean acidification isn't serious" myth. An Interactive History of Climate Science. By Climate Guest Contributor on June 12, 2011 at 7:33 am "An Interactive History of Climate Science" John Cook, in a Skeptical Science cross-post For years, I’ve been casually accumulating a database of peer-reviewed climate papers. A few months ago, some Skeptical Science contributors began brainstorming creative ways to visualise this database – a kind of visual sequel to Naomi Oreskes’ famous Science paper on consensus. Paul D decided to take it a step further and began programming a Javascript visualisation that very cleverly packs an incredible amount of information into a single, user-friendly graphic.
The visualisation displays the number of climate papers published each year, sorted into skeptic/neutral/pro-AGW categories (more on these categorisations shortly). What really blew me away is the slider at the bottom — drag it from left to right to observe the evolution of climate science research from Joseph Fourier in 1824 to the flood of research in 2011. . – John Cook John Mason agres. Accueil | Observatoire des Saisons. National Fossil Day - Home. Reporting Climate Science .Com.
Publications. Climate Change: The Scientific Debate. Climate Change | Ask Our Experts. Climate Change is a Geographic Problem The Geographic Approach to Climate Change Climate change is a geographic problem, and solving it takes a geographic solution. A GIS-based framework for climate science gives us hope. With it we can gain a scientific understanding of Earth’s systems at a truly global scale and make thoughtful, informed design decisions that ultimately allow humans and nature to coexist more harmoniously. Read the e-Book [PDF] "Geospatial initiatives must present compelling stories that distill their main points in ways that regularly create aha moments.
" GIS for Climate Change Case Studies in the Use of GIS for Climate Change GIS users represent a vast reservoir of knowledge, expertise, and best practices in applying this cornerstone technology to the science of climate change. Read the e-book [PDF] Climate Change | GIS for Climate Research & Global Warming | Carbon Management. Canal-U - Le réchauffement climatique - Valérie Masson Delmotte. Diviser par 4 nos émissions de CO2 d'ici 2050 : est-ce possible ? - François Moisan.
Stanford University - The Global Climate and Energy Project - energy research, climate change, global climate, global warming, greenhouse emissions, greenhouse gases, hydrogen economy, hydrogen power, renewable energy.