Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

It seems that every few months I appreciate a new environmental benefit to green roofs. Two that have recently impressed me are: (i) the realization that green roofs are ideal new locations for urban weather stations (as opposed to traditional asphalt roofs with their extreme temperature biases); and (ii) a burgeoning urban beekeeping movement may be a new synergy to tap into with green roofs.

Siting weather stations in urban areas has always been a tricky endeavor. Issues like security and extreme localized heat sources (e.g. asphalt, vehicles, heating and air conditioning sources) are primary concerns. For these reasons, the National Weather Service stations are usually sited in urban parks or airports. Nevertheless many urban weather stations are still located on rooftops, but they can be suspect because of the temperature biases of dark roof membranes which can easily reach 176 degrees F (80 C). Green roofs completely remove the temperature biases of rooftops as they are essentially meadows in the sky! You can look at some of the comparative temperature data at my station ‘dashboards’ (see research stations on right-hand side).

If the number of such green roof weather station locations grow, this will improve data on true micro-climate variations within cities. A recent publication of mine about this is at this link. 

And then there is the growing interest in urban beekeeping that is perhaps part of the urban agriculture movement here and here. A number of city-dwellers love the idea of keeping hives and harvesting honey, etc.

The worrisome bee colony collapse syndrome, makes this interest in urban beekeeping even more important. I’m pretty sure that any urban beekeepers and their bees would prefer to have a green roof near their hive. The ones we have installed in New York City look to me like pretty strong oases of bee activity.

The recent photo (right) shows one of our native grassland green roofs that was just brimming with bees recently. Top left is a wider shot of the native roof planting.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Understanding the ice age cycles that have occurred on the Earth during the past million years is — without question — one of the great scientific puzzles of all time.

By ‘great’ I mean not only the importance for many current environmental issues, like climate change and the massive greenhouse gas increases, but great in the sense that solving the mysteries of their occurrence requires breakthroughs from so many different fields of science.

I did post-graduate research on ice ages with a climatologist, Barry Saltzman, who was a co-discoverer of chaos (with Ed Lorenz) and who spent much of his later career on ice age science. I remember marveling with him over the almost ridiculous number of disciplines ice-age science involves: geology, glaciology, climatology, atmospheric physics and chemistry, oceanography, astronomy, geochemistry, biology, geomagnetism, meteorology, nonlinear mathematics and probably other fields I’m not listing!

It’s like we are riding on the back of some kind of Moby Dick of science, learning incredible things about the Earth along the way. Not only that, but the ice ages obviously have shaped us as a species as well since we evolved during the waxing and waning of the enormous ice sheets, influencing our harnessing of technologies (tools, clothing, shelter) and minds. Children are intrinsically fascinated by the ice ages and scientists have been attacking the problem since 1800.

Against this venerable background, I am humbly publishing a paper that tries to paint a new picture of the ice ages. I am linking it here (and publisher here) for those of you want to see the details of my case.

There is a more-or-less standard model of the recent ice ages that says they have resulted from a gradual long-term cooling of the Earth since the time of the dinosaurs, when no glaciers are known, towards the present. At some point, around 34 million years ago, the Earth became cool enough for large scale glaciers to form on Antarctica and later elsewhere, culminating in the great 100-thousand year cycles that have dominated recent times.

My paper does not question this model — indeed it is essential for my case that it is largely correct. Rather I focus on the 100-thousand year cycle mystery and what caused that. The essence of my paper is that this mystery of the cycles may be related to another cycle in geology that is also unexplained – sedimentary cycles on the margins of continents during warm geologic epochs.

These coastal cycles were discovered by oil geologists (most notably at Exxon) during the 1960s and 1970s.  In my paper I try to show that there are a mind-bending number of parallels between these two cycles that cannot be accidental. The one common link that explains these parallels is that both ice sheets and continental margin systems are sedimentary systems.

You can read my paper if interested but among other things I conclude that continental margin sediments may oscillate almost automatically. Another conclusion, relevant to current global warming, is that my paper bolsters the case that Antarctica did not support any glaciation during very high greenhouse gas periods of geologic history. I think we are just at the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in understanding the mysteries of ice ages and their relation to other systems on Earth.

The leviathan lives on!

(Credits: top right: an image of Cro Magnon Man, Photo by Roderick Mickens, copyright by American Museum of Natural History. Map centre: Ice sheet extent during ice age: Hannes Grobe/AWI)

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”; this is a reply to a blog by Holman Jenkins, a Wall Street Journal columnist and member of the WSJ editorial board. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Mr. Jenkins replies that the clarification of his perplexing column is reiteration of his original sentence “…We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability…”

He still doesn’t say where his ‘most plausible indication’ comes from except for his reference to some unnamed : “ … many scientists who have pursued empirical results [that] show the human contribution [has] been …maddeningly elusive or indeterminate.”

By contrast, I have no hesitation to say I was referring to IPCC when quoting the 90% confidence attribution of warming to human activities.

With regard to the first part of his dismissal of the present impact of CO2 on our climate, this has been the focus of core IPCC studies for many years and is called the ‘radiative forcing’ of the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial times (e.g. 1750). This is the energy imbalance created in the atmosphere by a factor such as greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar energy, clouds, land use. The resulting bar chart (see figure below) is famous. CO2 dominates the chart and is estimated in 2005 to be contributing a +1.66 Watts/square meter positive imbalance, greater than any other forcing, including solar by five times.

The point is Mr. Jenkins says I misread his statement about science not knowing “…how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate …” But I responded directly to this claim when I wrote he is effectively saying we know nothing about how “CO2 affects … Earth’s energy balance” — I was referring to the energy imbalance chart shown above and the +1.66 Watts/square meter forcing.

Also, current warming from CO2 isn’t the only thing we ‘actually care’ about.

Here are at least three other scientific issues and facts about CO2 that will have major implications for society and the environment, even if Mr. Jenkins does not care about them: (i) how high will CO2 levels go if Mr. Jenkins had his way ? 700 ppm ? 1000 ppm ?; (ii) the atmospheric CO2 excess we are creating will last 100’s to 1000’s of years into the future; (iii) as excess CO2 dissolves in the oceans it is acidifying them and will adversely impact marine life worldwide.

Since Mr. Jenkins raises the ‘global warming has stopped’ claim, 2008 was the ninth warmest year on record since 1880 and the 10 warmest years on record have occurred between 1997-2008.

Moreover right now we are in a cool phase of both the 11-year sunspot cycle and also the cool phase of the powerful oceanic El Nino cycle so it’s not surprising that the last few years haven’t broken all-time records. The sunspot and El Nino cycles will turn around and warm again. Meanwhile CO2 and other greenhouse gases continue to grow unabated.

Mr. Jenkins seems strangely unaware that the warming of the 20th century has coincided with 20th century increases in CO2. Also the current rate of CO2 and other greenhouse gases increases are extraordinarily unprecedented during the last 2000 years of human civilization (see figure below), which is no doubt the most important period to consider for modern society.

I called attention to Mr. Jenkins use of “contribution” because it is a peculiar word to use to describe something that is wholly due to human activities, unless you want to leave the door open in reader’s minds that natural emissions are playing a significant role in the observed increases. Skeptics try to confuse the public about this by saying that since natural fluxes of CO2 from the ocean and biosphere are larger than human emissions, our emissions can’t be significant. But these fluxes have been tightly in balance over the last few thousand years as seen from ice core data for example (below). More importantly, Mr. Jenkins still doesn’t fully acknowledge this fact about the cause of today’s CO2 rise.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial page occupies a uniquely obnoxious place in commentary on global warming. Over the many years that I have read with trepidation what they write, I have yet to see accurate presentation of the science issues.

They have fed their readers so much misinformation and confusion one can only conclude they consider complete fabrication fair play in the discussion.

The Director of the Columbia University Earth Institute, Jeff Sachs, has in the past invited the WSJ editorial board, along with any scientists they wish to bring, to discuss the science at the University — an invitation they assuredly have not accepted even though it’s a short subway ride away.

In response to President Obama’s revolutionary new efforts to cap CO2 emissions, WSJ editorial member Holman Jenkins Jr. tells us to “…Put away the global warming panic…” and writes an impressive number of fictions in two sentences:

“… Mankind’s contribution to rising CO2 levels raises serious questions, but the tens of billions poured into climate science have, by now, added up only to a negative finding. We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability…”

What does “… contribution to rising CO2 levels …” mean — implying as it does that natural sources are raising CO2 levels? Does not Mr. Jenkins know that mankind’s activities are wholly responsible for the increasing CO2 emissions? This can be seen in many ways such as looking at the ice core records of stable CO2 concentrations since the end of the last ice age or from carbon isotope data for fossil fuel carbon for example.

What does it mean to write all “ … climate science has added up to a negative finding …”? Even if you have never seen an IPCC report, do you really believe that all the news you have been hearing for decades about global warming and IPCC has been due to a single “negative finding”? What is this so-called bottom line negative finding among the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of findings?

What does it mean to write “ …We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in [atmospheric] CO2 is impacting our climate …” Really? Scientists studying atmospheric physics don’t have the slightest idea how CO2 affects heat radiation and the Earth’s energy balance, not to mention the gazillion other facts we know about CO2 and climate?

Then, remarkably, in the same sentence that claims science knows nothing about CO2, somehow he (or science?) knows enough about it to conclude that “ …the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability …” Which one is it? Science knows nothing or science has actually demonstrated something very technically precise: “…the impact [of CO2] is too small to untangle from natural variability …”

By the way, the last statement is a flat out contradiction to current research which concluded with 90%  confidence that current warming is due to human activities. But what the heck. This is the world of the Wall Street Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City is running a new exhibit on Climate Change. Prior to seeing the exhibit I had read one of the few reviews of it in the New York Times, which was very harsh and essentially described it as a version of ‘apocalypse now.’ Without having seen the exhibit, the review made me shake my head in disappointment that the Museum may have really overdone it and perhaps blown it.

However I just spent 3 hours going through the exhibit carefully and want to report that the NY Times review is incredibly misleading and even arrogant. It’s the kind of review I would have expected from the conservative Weekly Standard. The exhibit does not at all make one ” … feel like an agnostic attending church and listening to sermons about damnation …”

Instead, it was a vast compilation of basic science information and very well presented, with plenty of caveats. Although I know the subject matter intimately, I came away feeling anew the vastness of the “CO2 problem” which literally will impact every corner of the planet, from the depths of the oceans, to the top of the stratosphere to every living thing on Earth. On top of this of course are all the socio-economic and technological issues.

Contrary to the NY Times review, there was nothing wrong with showing historical CO2 concentrations, using a room-long red neon light — rising from “… a level below a child’s knees and end[ing] … far over an adult’s head.”

Indeed the CO2 data looks far more alarming when you compare it with the last few 100,000 years of data from ice core data (as Al Gore did and the exhibit does as well elsewhere). Then it looks to an atmospheric scientist like we have literally whacked the atmosphere with a greenhouse gas sledgehammer:

Similarly the museum graphic of month-by-month warming over the last century is absolutely fine, and interesting. The NY Times criticizes the exhibit’s use of 1951-1980 as the baseline for that graphic as ‘arbitrary,’ whereas in fact it is standard scientific practice for the data, as seen for example in the following NASA GISS graphic:

The exhibit also does a very good job at bringing in some of the relatively newer areas of research, such as on the acidic affects of CO2 in the oceans and the Princeton ‘wedge’ model for emissions control. The film explaining the basic physics of CO2 infrared absorption of surface heat is also very good and I saw little children watching it rather intently, which is remarkable in itself.

One serious shortcoming is that no mention is made of the major policy options of carbon taxes/prices or ‘cap and trade’ measures. After witnessing the rapid response of Americans to $4.00+ gasoline prices, I tend to agree with Yale economist William Nordhaus’ view that merely exhorting Americans to voluntarily reduce their consumption of carbon (via light-bulbs, choosing efficient technologies, etc) without mentioning raising the price of carbon is “largely fluff.”

Now that Bank of America is cutting back on lending to mountain top removal mining companies, citing the environmental costs, rival Citigroup is weighing its options.

“Bank of America’s announcement has just been released so Citi will study the content,” the bank said on Friday. Citi and Bank of America were prime targets of Rainforest Action Network and others for their support of mountaintop removal mining for coal in Appalachia. Cutting the top off a mountain is a cheap and efficient way to get coal — and environmental groups call it an ecological disaster.

“We are continuing to learn about this issue through engaging and listening to a variety of stakeholders, including our clients. Today we met with a number of industry, scientific, and community experts to listen and learn from their perspectives. Citi has a long history of engaging in dialogue with our stakeholders on this and other critical environmental issues,” the bank said.

Rainforest Action Network says the bank has a history of funding dirty coal and has called Citi’s steps to curb its carbon footprint small. The coal industry, on the other hand, says Bank of America is pandering to the the green movement at the expense of work in a place where jobs are few and far between.

(Photo: Reuters/Andrea Hopkins)

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone. 

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish political scientist who makes a semi-career (if not career) out of countering claims about global warming.  His brand of writing tends to throw major counter claims out there on quite big climate issues, in short pithy sound-bites, often without data, letting the reader try and figure it out.

A recent Lomborg editorial is an example and has many claims in it that one needs to take time to carefully analyze. Here I will just react to one of Lomborg’s deceptive suggestions that sea level has suddenly stopped rising:

Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2mm a year: spot on compared with the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the past two years, sea levels have not increased at all; actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?

Without seeing the actual data, readers of this passage will think sea level rise from 1992-2006 was smoothly monotonic and then suddenly this stopped and is reversing. Here’s a graph of the data Lomborg is referring to (I thank Gavin Schmidt for this graphic):

In fact the short term 2-year trends are all over the place. This is due to the short term variations in weather like pressure, winds, currents and so forth,  that cause small oscillations in sea level, just like they do in temperature.

Following Lomborg’s approach in 1998-2000 (or ’94-‘96 or in ’04-’06, etc) you might have concluded sea level had stopped rising (and things were therefore “much better than expected”), but this would have been meaningless for the long term, which is what counts.  The fact is nobody should be claiming anything at all about long-term sea level based just on two-year trends and that’s why it doesn’t make any headlines.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

I finally made it over to the Whitney Museum  retrospective on Buckminster Fuller before it closed (see my June 13th post about Fuller). Just before I did, however, I happened to come across a diatribe against him in the July 7 Weekly Standard , in response to the exhibit. This is a conservative commentary magazine that is a favorite of the Bush White House.

Highlights of the Weekly Standard piece include: “…Buckminster Fuller had been thankfully dormant for the past quarter century … one of the arch cranks of the sixties … You had to be either a drug-crazed hippie or a philosophical adherent of Flower Power to take Bucky seriously… a college dropout …Fuller was … the intellectual as confidence man …” (Wait didn’t they just mock him for being a college dropout?)

Try saying these things about Fuller to chemists Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. They won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering a new class of compounds now called “Fullerenes” or “Buckyballs” (see the picture above of Robert Curl holding one) because they have a 60-carbon geodesic structure that Fuller realized had to be fundamental in nature. This posthumous Nobel-winning discovery alone is a legacy that any scientist would envy.

I am sure none of the Weekly Standard folks went to the Whitney retrospective but if they had they would have seen it packed solid with families and children studying the exhibits intently and with clear pleasure.  There was not a single “drug-crazed hippie” in sight (although I’m sure plenty of ex-hippies did make it.)  Interesting how a “confidence man” is able to pack a museum 25 years after he died - must have something to do with the content of his work, since the ‘con’ man is no longer around.

That content was terrific and inspiring, moving from his early work on tension structures for homes, to the octet truss to the geodesic dome of course, then on to the amazing “tensegrity” structures discovered by Kenneth Snelson (a student of Fuller’s). The exhibit ends more or less with Fuller’s Dymaxion map which was a new type of triangular projection of the Earth’s surface that doesn’t distort land areas: 

One of the exhibit video’s shows Fuller talking indeed to a group of “hippies” (the TV correspondent described the audience as such) in an outdoor park on the West Coast during the late 60’s. I was moved by one scene where he gently picks up a little girl at his feet from the audience, holding her on his lap, to say how children are born inter-disciplinarians who naturally think across boundaries and how we lose this capacity when we grow up. 

What a sight. Here was this dignified elderly man, impeccably dressed in a black suit, white shirt and tie, speaking nobly about human capacity to a vast audience of teenagers and young adults. Isn’t this the kind of thing Republicans at the Weekly Standard should have wanted to see more of in the Sixties ? You can be sure that they get misty-eyed when George W. Bush picks up a baby and says nothing. It’s nice to think that long after the Weekly Standard is gone and thankfully forgotten, ordinary people will be engaged by Fuller’s ideas just as intently as they were at this exhibit.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

I am not a Republican. However, early in John McCain’s campaign for the presidency, I would often say to friends and family-who know I am not a Republican-that if I did vote solely on the one issue I research most, climate change, I would probably vote for McCain.

He came across to me as the candidate who most respected the science and gravity of the issue (perhaps even as much as Al Gore I thought … why else take such a big political risk with his party?) and was prepared to lead America in a new direction. That was then, this is now.

The Republican political machine, in bringing new ‘discipline’ to the McCain campaign, has no doubt also shut him down on the global warming issue. I seem to hear little about it any more from him (”Drill here!  Drill Now!”). His new vice-presidential (VP) pick - Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, is just further evidence of this. 

Palin believes that current global warming is somehow unrelated to the massive greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere.  

 Her online climate change report  clearly implies that she thinks it is a natural cycle and that nothing except adaptation should be done about it. (See my last blog about the ‘first question’ I often would like to ask skeptics of global warming.)

These extreme positions are offered without a single piece of scientific evidence to support them. They obviously will only justify unmitigated fossil fuel combustion.

We’ve had eight years of an administration with a vice president who holds similar positions and who has demonstrated the stagnating power that VP’s can exert on U.S. climate policy and which only leads to accelerated greenhouse gas emissions. It would be true change to have a VP who understands that it there is a profound difference between an atmosphere with a carbon dioxide concentration of 1000 parts per million versus one with 400 or less.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Often when seeing anti-environmental commentary about global warming in the media, I feel like the first question I would like to ask these commentators is: “Why do you deny that carbon dioxide (CO₂), which is increasing in an unprecedented way in the atmosphere, is a greenhouse gas?”

If they were to start their answer: “I don’t deny it …” I would think “Good, we’ve made some progress.” However, as I think would often be the case, if they start their answer: “Because …” we should be ready to pounce on the ensuing nonsense.

Here’s a key example of such nonsense from a former weatherman:

“Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.

Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000, only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t”.

This might be funny if it weren’t for the fact that editorial pages like the Wall Street Journal and conservative news sources such as Fox News treat such individuals as scientific authorities on climate change.

Leaving aside the fact that it is the molecular structure of CO₂ that is the basis for its greenhouse effect with respect to absorbing heat radiation from the Earth’s surface and warming the climate, or that with no CO₂ in the atmosphere our planet would freeze over, the numbers argument above is just unforgivable. The current and future higher concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere are precisely accounted for in climate models that simulate present and future warming.A seemingly small concentration of a gas in the atmosphere is not a measure of its potential environmental or health impact. Indeed, if anything, the more trace level a gas is in the natural atmosphere, the more powerful its environmental impact is likely to be.

For example, I would ask any reader that accepts the above argument, with all its hubris (“…that’s all there is to it …” !!) to consider this: Would you mind if there were just 38 molecules of carbon monoxide (CO) out of 100,000 molecules of atmosphere in ‘front of your face’? If you don’t mind, you should know that, after a few hours of exposure, you would probably be dead.

Similarly weather reporters surely should know that dangerous air pollution levels of gases like ozone (O₃) are measured in very low concentrations of 100 molecules per billion molecules of atmosphere! After all, ozone levels are a routine part of weather forecasts today.