Airborne Fraction

Dave Andrews wonders:

Tamino,

For all your pretty graphs aren’t you missing something here?

The Mauna Loa, et al, figures show a roughly steady increase in atmospheric CO2 but there has been a massive increase in the burning of fossil fuels since 1990, especially, but not restricted to, India and China.

This huge increase is not being reflected by the Mauna Loa figures.

Hide the Incline

Many of you are familiar with the work of “Greenman3610” who creates outstanding videos to debunk denier talking points. Here’s the latest installment (a little under 18 minutes long) about the stolen emails:

http://climatecrocks.com/2011/04/28/unwinding-hide-the-decline/

Cherries Jubilee

There are a couple of recent posts on WUWT about sea level. It starts with this indulgence in conspiracy theorizing, then moves on to this look at some sea level data from NOAA.

Let me summarize for you, in graphical form, what this last post really reveals:

Jerk

In the last post I showed that not only is CO₂ increasing, its growth rate is also increasing. So, the growth rate of CO₂ is faster now than it was just a few decades ago. Significantly so.

CO2 shame

It’s a shame, really. We’ve been aware of the climate change effect of carbon dioxide for over 100 years. We’ve known for at least 30 years that human-caused increases in CO₂ and other greenhouse gases will have a powerful impact on climate within decades. We’ve seen it happen — already. We now know that its effect over the next century will be disastrous. But we haven’t moved an inch toward stopping what will bring disaster on our own heads.

It’s like knowing all about the tremendous harm from smoking cigarettes, but still inhaling three packs a day.

Northeast U.S. Snowfall

Here in Maine we had a lot of snowfall today. It wasn’t very cold — well within the normal range for this time of year as far as temperature is concerned — but the snowfall was very heavy, nearly a foot of snow on the 1st of April. No, this is not an “April fool’s” post.

There is an interesting post at Climate Central on snow in the northeast U.S. It touches briefly on the trends which might be present, and those we might expect in the future (over the next century). It also presents a nice graphical access to data for total winter season snowfall from 98 northeastern stations with complete or near-complete coverage from 1980 to 2010, with those few cases of missing data infilled by interpolating nearby stations. The data they use can be found here, and originate from the Northeast Regional Climate Center.

Richard Muller Love-Fest

Those who deny the reality, human causation, and/or danger of global warming absolutely love Dr. Richard Muller. He has been outspoken in his criticism of paleoclimate research (the “hockey stick”) and is a member of a team at Berkeley who intend to create a new, “definitive” estimate of global temperature based on meteorological station data. Those who don’t want global warming to be true, fully expected the Berkeley effort to refute the most oft-used global temperature data sets (NASA GISS, HadCRU, NOAA/NCDC), showing just how mistaken, misguided, even fraudulent, all those nasty climate scientists are.

Now that Muller has testified before a house committee, he has fulfilled their wildest dreams. The preliminary results from the Berkeley team completely refute the existing data sets. As a result, the so-called “skeptics” are delighted, thrilled, ecstatic even! And they love Richard Muller even more than they did before, heralding his praises from every corner of the internet.

April fool!

When it comes to Muller, the criticism has begun. It looks rather more like a pack of angry wolves on the attack, than a love-fest. How dare Muller imply that in all likelihood, GISS, HadCRU, and NOAA got it right?

Imagine that.

So What?

Those who deny the reality of global warming are, once again, overly excited about a recent paper by Houston & Dean. Why is it that they think every paper which strengthens the case for global warming is some kind of fraud, but every paper which they think weakens the case, is some kind of “bombshell”?

Food for Thought

Food prices worldwide have gone up over the last 8 or 9 months.

Eyjafjallajökull

It’s a volcano in Iceland which erupted in 2010. Please don’t ask me to pronounce the name.