jason's blog
The Renewable Energy Sources Act of Germany (Das Gesetz für den Vorrang Erneuerbarer Energien, or EEG for short), is a piece of legislation that has almost single-handedly catapulted Germany to one of the highest investors in renewable energy production, since its inception on 29 March 2000, all within a few short decades. It has created per capita revenue from renewable energies unseen in the rest of the first world, certainly in the United States.
Taking a step back from global warming politics and debate, I'm going to provide a simple, unbiased look at the relationship between CO2 and Temperature. Skeptics and believers alike will agree that CO2 and temperature have been strongly linked for the past half a million years. What they do not agree on, is whether CO2 has been the cause of those changes. This article will shed light on the relationships between CO2 and temperature, drawing on both recorded CO2 levels, and projections based on the EPICA ice coring effort.
Between the release of Apple's iPad and BP's big blunder, the scientific/technology news sector seems to have been too busy to focus on climate change. Something which only recently struck my attention is an April 15th article by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), which stated that:
Quote:
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for March 2010 was the warmest on record at 56.3°F (13.5°C), which is 1.39°F (0.77°C) above the 20th century average of 54.9°F (12.7°C).
This article is a broad description of the European Project for Ice Coring In Antarctica (EPICA), a multinational (European) deep ice core drilling project in Antarctica. The purpose of the project is comprehensively document the state of the atmosphere throughout recent earth history.
This article takes a step back from the usual global warming discussions I post on this website. I wanted to explore something as important to the theory of global warming as anything else - the history behind it, and the debates and controversy that got us to where we are today. Before writing this article I didn't know the answer to that question, so I looked it up. I got interested in this after reading an article titled Global warming is a hoax, invented in 1988.
Anyone who has been following the news over the past few months has probably heard of the global warming debates, or should I say scandals, that have flooded recent news outlets. Words like Glaciergate (a pun on the Nixon Watergate scandal) have been used to describe an erroneous assertion in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) from 2007 that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
I have previously written an article on why Cosmic ray levels do not directly affect climate change (ie. why the changes in radiative energy reaching earth do not directly affect the earth's temperature).
There are many reasons for the climate to change, but increases in the energy of cosmic rays warming up the atmosphere is not one of them. Yet for some reason, every debate on climate change at some stage gets onto the topic of cosmic rays and their role in global warming. I think it is important to address this because many people dismiss a lot of scientific evidence for other causes of global warming (such as changes in ice coverage or greenhouse gas concentrations) by simply attributing it to some spike in cosmic rays that may or may not have occurred at the same time.
One of the central battlefields of the global warming debate today, is the history of CO2 concentrations and their relationships to temperature. In my previous article on the climate change debate I illustrated that there are strong theoretical as well as empirical (ie. historical) indications that CO2 is in fact one of the drivers of past temperature cycles.
Let me start by explaining what radiative forcing actually is and why it is the subject of so much debate, for those not familiar with the term.
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