Comments for Head in a Cloud

Comment on Dangerous Assumptions by Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:05:20 +0000

Seriously bad linkspamming above. Don’t click on those links.

Hosts — if you just put the website behind the posting into Google you can sort’em out and throw out the garbage links.

google eighthsin — you’ll see the spam all over the place for that one for example.

Comment on Dangerous Assumptions by Tanya Phillips

Tanya Phillips — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:44:20 +0000

Response to Really Good Blog:
I think anyone in academia, science or liberal arts, has to be careful about interpreting evidence in a way that gives you the conclusions you want instead of the conclusions that exists. I can understand the difficulty since everyone wants to produce something ground breaking. However, that isn’t the moral foundation on which research is built and should be held to.

Comment on Climate Change Timeline by Tanya Phillips

Tanya Phillips — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:39:33 +0000

Kitty 1980, thank you for you comment and information. I am also concerned for the global implications of climate change and hope the new Administration in the US emulates what the EU is doing to mitigate the environmental consequences. Also, I hope the US, in general, looks at what other countries are doing to see what works and what doesn’t work.

Thanks,
Tanya

Comment on Global Warming and Radiative Forcing by tanya

tanya — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:35:31 +0000

To A Simple Student,

I can answer #3 right now, the other two I’d have to think about for a second.
Water Vapor isn’t mentioned much because humans are not directly changing the about H2O in the atmosphere. Yes it is variable and yes it is not negligible, but any changes that occur are due to natural forcing not human forcings. So the total amount of water is constant, now how much is in the atmosphere can change with a change in temperature, along with how much fresh water is available in certain areas. Thus it is indirectly affected by an increase in CO2, but not directly. This is why it isn’t discussed that much. CO2 is the source, the reason why many other things in on the plant, like H2O, may and/or are changing.
Hope this helps. I’ll try to get to the other two questions later.

Tanya

Comment on Dangerous Assumptions by Jim Prall

Jim Prall — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:03:08 +0000

Thanks to Bob for the pointer to the excellent van Vuuren article. The full text PDF is open access on the web at http://www.springerlink.com/content/l4tr788110577886/fulltext.pdf

I’m a big fan of the Kaya Identity (see wikipedia article) and van Vuuren does a great job of teasing out the different trends in the separate components of the equation, as well as regional differences.

P.S. I’m afraid most of the “I agree with the author” follow-ups are simply “link spam” – you might have to think about enabling comment moderation!

Comment on Global Warming and Radiative Forcing by A Simple Student

A Simple Student — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:17:00 +0000

I have a few fairly simple questions:

1. What initiated the current warming trend that started around 1600-1700s (little ice age) which is before the 1750’s industrial revolution?

2. Once the temperature started to rise during the little ice age, how did that affect the atmospheric H20 in turn, now did/would that affect global temperature?

3. How come the effects of the 1% of atmospheric water vapor is omitted in most reports? Since it is the most abundant green house gas at 10,000 ppm (I understand it is a variable gas but this does not mean negligible) compared to CO2 at 385 ppm and CH4’s 1.7ppm wouldn’t it be an important part of the global warming papers?

I look forward to your answers.

Comment on Wait, the Earth is cooling? by Tanya Phillips

Tanya Phillips — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:28:47 +0000

Colette, thanks for the comment. I agree with all of your statements except the last one. I do not think that it is ‘completely unknown exactly what kind of reaction will occur’ due to carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere. Scientists in their respective fields agree in the recorded temperature increases due to human influences on our atmosphere and the potential consequences, such has rainfall change and drought. Disagreement arises when deciding the how much the global temperature will increase over the next century and the degree to which this will change local/regional weather patterns. Maybe I have misunderstood what you mean by ‘completely unknown’. Again thanks for the comment and hopefully entertaining my response.

Comment on Dangerous Assumptions by BOB

BOB — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:36:22 +0000

Perhaps you guys should read”

Do recent emission trends imply higher emissions forever. D.P van Vuuren.

it argues that “dangerous asumptions” has made some assumptions of its own….

if any one needs a copy, i’ll supply a copy.

Comment on Climate Change Timeline by Tanya Phillips

Tanya Phillips — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:51:24 +0000

To Membaca – sorry for note responding sooner. Here’s the website for this blog: http://atoc.colorado.edu/~seand/headinacloud/

To everyone else – As always, thanks for the comments, love, love that people are enjoy the blog and what I post. Haven’t posted for a while, I hope to post soon. COMPS II, graduate school stuff, is keeping me busy.

Comment on Global Warming and Radiative Forcing by podo

podo — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:58:54 +0000

Here’s something I don’t understand: The average emission from the earth’s surface that escapes to space is about 250 W/m2, while the blackbody radiation expected for a surface at 15C is about 390 W/m2. Thus, greenhouse gases prevent the escape of about 140 W/m2, producing a temperature rise of 30C. Changes in CO2 to date account for only about 1% of 140, so we might expect the delta-CO2 to have produced a 0.3 degree change in average climate. This is simplistic, but is it wrong???