Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
We often read stories about the ice in the Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland melting, but how can we know if this is really true, can we ever be sure? One rather robust and quite irrefutable bit of evidence would be sea level. If indeed there was an on-going trend of a warming Arctic then there should also be an … Read more
There are some things we do know. For example we know that if all the ice in the Antarctic melted then sea level will rise by about 200 feet (60 meters). So how far above sea level is your house? Actually no, you don’t need to personally worry about waking up tomorrow and finding a super-high … Read more
The formation of Arctic Sea ice has started to deviate from its normal seasonal pattern. About this time of year the sea ice should be rather obviously rapidly building up towards the seasonal winter maximum, and that was indeed happening as expected during the latter half of September. However, the past two weeks have seen that normal accumulation of … Read more
The September numbers are out, it is now official. Starting in October 2015, every single month except one has been a record shattering month. October 2015 was the warmest October since monthly record keeping began in 1880, November 2015 was the warmest ever November, and so on for almost every single month. There was just … Read more
Back in December 2015 as many as 174 nations signed what is now known as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, but that is simply ink on paper and is quite frankly meaningless in that it did not commit anybody to do anything. The far more important aspect is that it marked a beginning of a … Read more
September 2016 now marks the point at which the carbon dioxide levels failed to drop below the 400 parts per million (ppm) measurement for the first time ever. The Mauna Loa Observatory has been the official recorder of the the levels of carbon dioxide because they are located far out in the Pacific on Hawaii far from the … Read more