Climate change. Or not. You decide.

Global warming, climate change, and some key concepts and facts

• Weather versus climate (where is the temperature changing?)
• Global warming–average global increase in temperature
• Greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases (sources and sinks, climate vs weather), the atmosphere
• Glaciation (The Wallowas (to the right–East Fork of the Lostine River, carved by a glacier), a moulin in Greenland, diagram), cycles (precession, tilt, Eccentricity) explained
• from the plane over Greenland (glaciers, ice sheet, fjords):

• A Greenland glacier calving 
• Lakes, whirlpools, and moulins
• Dark snow (and reduced albedo, below)
• Laws of thermodynamics
  • First, energy can be neither created nor destroyed–it’s just transformed.
  • Second, transformation as suggested is usually from a ‘higher’ to ‘lower’ quality of energy (entropy). For instance, hydroelectricity is used to turn on a light bulb, which gives off heat–as well as light. The heat is often unusable, a ‘waste product.’ Where does it go??
• Some effects (see NASA’s page)
  • rise in sea levels (how would this affect human settlements?)
  • Maldives, Kiribati, Marshall Islands (hundreds of Marshallese live in Union County)
  • Ever heard of a moulin? Ice bridge? Been to Greenland lately? Arctic ice melt
  • severe weather (what’s happening where?)
  • coral bleaching (caused by warmer oceans)
  • Acidification of oceans, possible changes in ocean currents (AMOC)
  • Thawing permafrost (considerable land mass involved) releases methane (what’s happening in Siberia)
  • Altered climates (what will this to do plant and animal habitats, life?)
  • Spread of diseases

Key questions

• Is warming actually occurring? At what pace? Where? How fast?
• Is it caused by humans (CO2 concentrations and the famous Keeling Curve, 1000 years back, 24,000 years,  and much longer)?

• Is it a social problem (what are some trends?)
• What are some anthropogenic causes?
• What groups are harmed (human and non-human species)?
• Who benefits from the status quo? (fossil fuel industries, automotive industry, utilities, petrochemicals/oil and gas, transportation, advertising, American consumers (and others in industrial countries), media, etc.
  • ‘Framing‘ global warming as a social problem
    • Astroturf and corporate front groups (CEI ads, ‘skeptic organizations‘), ‘astroturf‘
    • Hiring scientists to discredit scientific consensus (Fred Singer, Stephen Milloy’s ‘junk science‘ website–one goal? Sow doubt)
    • Language–‘global warming’ versus ‘climate change‘–does how we talk about it affect public perceptions?
    • Scientific Community — Union of Concerned Scientists, AAAS, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
    • News media
    • Making warming seem cool
    • The effects of persuasion attempts–many Americans are indifferent
    • Framing the debate (Greg Craven’s video)–what if we ‘re-framed’ this as a choice among risks with different scales of consequence
      • Craven’s ‘false positive’–the planet stops warming, and we took no action (few harms result); we took action, and warming stopped (economic harms prevail)
      • Craven’s ‘false negative’–the planet continues warming, and we took action (possibly staving off serious climate change. Possibly); the planet warms, and we took no action (disasters on a global scale)
      • Which is an acceptable risk?
    • Skeptics’ claims