Night and Day

I read an article yesterday about the impact of global warming of night-time temperatures. They are significant. The article also talked about night temperatures generally warming faster than daytime temperatures. That made me wonder … where and how is this happening in the U.S. — especially in recent decades?

Fortunately, both high and low temperatures are reported for all 344 climate divisions in the lower 48 states of the U.S. I decided to look just at the data since 1985, in order to focus on what’s been happening recently (a bit more than the last three decades). The process is actually pretty simple: for each climate division, I fit a straight line to the post-1985 diurnal temperature range, that being the high temperature minus the low temperature.

Kids’ Climate March

Earther has an excellent article on the upcoming climate march on Washington D.C., organized by teenagers.

The article also profiles one of the founders and leaders, Jamie Margolin. It states:

“With renewable energy, we could create an amazing world,” Jamie Margolin, a 16-year old sophomore from Seattle, told Earther. “We could create this beautiful world, but we’re letting the world burn.”

Margolin is a plaintiff in a lawsuit suing the Washington state government for not doing enough about climate change (one of a handful of similar suits across the U.S.) and the founder of the Zero Hour, a new youth-driven movement for climate action starting with the July march. She said in her work advocating for climate solutions, policymakers and other adults she’s met with have told her they feel her plight but don’t feel compelled to act. Rather than take no for an answer, Margolin and her crew are forcing the issue.

“I decided it was unfair that I can’t vote, I don’t get to choose who is in power, I’m too young to be in power, but I get to pay the price for the decisions that politicians make today,” Margolin said. “It’s not fair that I’m being left with this world that is falling apart.”

You can help. Please publicize this. On twitter, facebook, instagram, blogs, everywhere online — and offline too. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Talk to your friends about it.

You can also visit their website and find other ways to help. You can make an immense difference.

After all, it’s their generation. It should be their choice.

Zero Hour

We talk about climate change, about how necessary it is to do something about it. That’s important, and I commend all of us who do.

But there’s a group of kids who are going to march on Washington to press the issue. They need our help. Anything you can do will go a lot further than you might expect.

Because this is zero hour. They need our help. Let’s not fail them.

One thing you can do is publicize. If you have a blog, post about it. If you’re on twitter, tweet about it. I suggest the hashtag “#zerohour”

Don’t just do it today. That will make people think “good for ’em!” Then they’ll forget. Tweet about it every day. The march is set for July 21st, so tweet about it at least 10 times — at least once every day. Get your twitter friends to do the same. Let everyone know that this is important, and that the kids need our help.

They are shouldering the burden of taking to the streets. We can make it easier for them, we can make them more successful, we can get them the notice they need, the notice we all need.

Now is not the time to sit back on your hands. Now is the time to push this like there’s no tomorrow. Because this is zero hour.

Much Ado About Blogging

The steady stream of nonsense in the comments by “Victor” (most definitely not Victor Venema) at the RealClimate blog makes me wonder once again, what is our purpose, and how do we best accomplish it?

Climate Denier Bullshit Rap from “MC Bullshit”

But this time, they got caught … and not just by me.

The forecast about global warming from James Hansen thirty years so starkly demonstrates that he’s been right all along about the effect of greenhouse gases on our climate, that there’s yet another attempt to make it look bad. The authors, Ross McKitrick and John Christy (“MC”), are so desperate that they resort to making a persuasive argument the only way possible: with bullshit. Shameless bullshit.

Fight Global Warming: Youth Edition

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Sea Level Stations with a Long Record

Tide gauges measure local sea level, the difference between sea surface height (SSH) and the height of the land. If the sea surface gets higher — what we usually think of as “sea level rise” — local sea level won’t necessarily go up because the land itself might also be getting higher. Although tide gauges are generally fixed to solid rock (the more solid the better), the land itself can still move up or down, a process called vertical land movement (VLM).

Suckers

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Weak Sauce from Climate Deniers

Over at RealClimate, in a post about Jim Hansen’s forecasts from the 1980s, a commenter calling himself “Victor” has bent over backwards to argue that the climate change we’ve seen already is just “natural.” He recently went so far as to say this:

Who will Suffer Most from Global Warming?

Kids.

Youngsters. Youth. Young adults, teens, tweens, even younger. My generation will suffer too, but as bad as it gets for us it’ll be far worse for them. And they’ll suffer the consequences longer than we will.