Dialogue

Salviati: That was delicious! Thank your wife for such a wonderful meal, and thanks again for having us over for the long weekend.

Simplicio: Yes indeed — your wife is such an excellent cook.

Sagredo: It’s my pleasure — I enjoy your company so much. I’m so glad you were both able to visit for a few days. It’s not easy to find such excellent conversationalists. And I have to agree about my wife’s cooking.

Shame on US

Debate REAL Issues

It’s time for presidential candidates — and especially, the moderators of debates — to stop avoiding real issues.

Oxygen

In addition to reporting atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, the Scripps Institute reports measurements of the concentration of oxygen (O₂) in the air. Since carbon dioxide increase comes mainly from burning fossil carbon using atmospheric oxygen, as CO₂ goes up, O₂ goes down.

CO2 Increase

CO₂ in our atmosphere is still increasing. Last year the annual average amount has passed 400 ppmv (part per million by volume) for the first time in a long time — at least a million years.

The reason: we’re burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, natural gas. When we do, it turns that long-buied carbon into carbon dioxide, which ends up in the atmosphere. It’s as simple as that.

Crazy Hot December: USA Edition

This December was crazy hot. And not just in England; it was in the eastern U.S. too.

Crazy Hot December

This December was crazy hot. Most readers are aware of how unusually warm it was last month in the eastern U.S., but it was just as crazy hot — maybe more so — in England.

As a new year arrives, organizations which track climate release complete data for the preceding year. One of the first to do so, and the first I acquired, was daily Central England Temperature. It reports daily mean temperature since 1772, nearly 250 years’ worth.

Crazy Weather

The weather has been crazy lately. Record-breaking warmth on Christmas day, astounding floods in the midwest of the U.S. and in the U.K., surprise tornadoes, it’s insane. People are taking notice. And it’s not just el Niño — it’s the deadly combination of el Niño and climate change. It even motivated MSNBC to do an actual (albeit brief) report on climate change, featuring Michael Mann.

Please watch. The quotes that struck me the most are “Climate change is no longer playing a subtle role” and “el Niño that has been supercharged by climate change.”

Richard Lindzen: limited understanding?

A recent WUWT post by Richard Lindzen is a rather lame attempt to defend an equally lame opinion piece by Freeman Dyson in the Boston Globe. Evidently, Lindzen felt the need to defend Dyson’s piece because it was rather roundly refuted in a response by 8 members of the faculty of MIT.

Nature’s Thermometer

One of the most common designs for a thermometer works by measuring the volume of a fluid — one which expands when it heats and shrinks when it cools. The classic example of such a “thermometric liquid” is mercury, a liquid metal. Usually the fluid is enclosed in a container (often, a glass tube) so that when it expands it climbs to a greater height. By the height of the fluid, we can deduce the temperature.