This is not cool: no slowdown in global warming

Peter Sinclair’s latest video in his This Is Not Cool series for the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media looks at why global warming — the steady accumulation of energy in the climate system — continues, despite media buying into the denier-promulgated myth of a hiatus, pause or slowdown in warming. Sinclair’s compiled interviews with real experts — Josh Willis, Kevin Trenberth, and James Hansen among them — and they explain what’s going on in a clear and compelling way. The next time someone claims that warming’s stopped, point them at this video.

Bad news but great pictures: dating NZ’s shrinking glaciers shows strong link between ice loss and CO2 increases

Here’s a superb video from the Department of Education at the American Museum of Natural History, showing how NZ and US scientists are examining the precise timing of glacier advances and retreats in the Mackenzie country around Lake Pukaki using surface exposure dating. Like all good geologists they use big hammers and small explosives to shatter rocks in order to sample “cosmogenic” Be-10 — a beryllium isotope formed when cosmic rays hit quartz in newly exposed rocks. See here for more on recent surface exposure dating work in the Pukaki area. Hat tip to Climate Crocks for spotting the video.

Welcome to the rest of our lives

Here’s an excellent new video from Peter Sinclair, contrasting the recent weather disasters in the USA with the “we’ll adapt” line recently run by ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson. It’s a powerful message, to which I would only add one thought: this is only the beginning.

The truth about wind energy

Shocking new revelations about the impact of excessive use of wind power on our planet — it could blow us out of our orbit around the sun! Oh, and coal is really, really, tasty…

[Courtesy of The Onion, hat tip to Climate Crocks].

A blast from the past (if we knew now what we knew then)

Peter Sinclair’s recent Climate Denial Crock of the Week is fascinating viewing. He has unearthed a video of a talk given by climate scientist Mike McCracken thirty years ago and asks him in a recent interview what he would say differently today.

Very little has changed. The younger McCracken:

“CO2 probably has been very high in past geologic terms but certainly not in past historic times, and so we’re really doing a giant experiment and the question is what is the outcome going to be?”

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