Tag Archives: climate change

The reason why Earth’s climate creates destruction from a 1°C rise in temperature: It’s a mind-boggling amount of energy.

Since the Industrial Revolution the global average temperature has increased by nearly one degree, mostly in the last forty years. One degree is barely discernible. Yet it is blamed for widespread destruction! How can it be so? One degree adds the energy of maybe a million big hydrogen bombs to the upper ocean. It’s an […]

Capping Climate Change?

Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern. Frank Herbert Can we set a limit on how bad climate change can get? A new paper by ten European geoscientists seems to say so. […]

Global Warming Losing Heat?

The message of Dr. Bernard Forscher’s brick allegory is that data can obstruct the search for scientific explanation. Today we check a story about missing heat (recent fodder for climate-change denial). On the way to explanation we’ll see data being tweaked to say more than they should. (Data in my book is plural and datum […]

Does Physics Matter?

In previous posts I’ve quoted leading physicists as saying fundamental physics is in trouble. But why should you care how well (or how badly) physics goes? Here’s short answer #1: It supports a lot of paychecks. How this works may not be obvious so let me illustrate. In the late 1600s Isaac Newton kicked off […]