I was recently introduced to Jonathon Dursi’s blog No More Shall I Roam. While his posts are always worth reading, his piece on the greenhouse effect is first-rate.
He starts with a discussion of recent new findings on temperature trends in large bodies of water:
Two of the new pieces of work recent work looking for warming not in the atmosphere, or on the surface of the Earth, where most look, but in oceans and lakes. The one which got the most press — a continuation of earlier work — looked at heating of the upper layers of the Earths oceans over the last 50 years, and found that the ocean surface had heated up by 0.5oC over that time. If this seems like a modest change, consider that El Ni?±o, which plays havoc with weather patterns on the western coast of the Americas, results from a temporary surface temperature increase of 2oC or 3oC in a very localized area — and that the ocean heating isn’t slowing down. Consider, too, that they examined two different climate models and changed several parameters to try to account for this heating — and no natural forcings they could come up with could describe the observed heating very well, whereas the standard models for human-powered climate change matched their observations very nicely….
I’ve written previously about climate change more generally; here I’ll be a bit more specific, and try to give a brief explanation of the greenhouse effect, and how human activities are enhancing it.
Even if you already understand the basics of how the effect works (“cow farts trap heat in the atmosphere… right?”), you’ll come away from the article feeling tons smarter… and a lot more worried.
