The Living Ghoen

by John Cook, in a Skeptical Science cross-post In 1859, physicist John Tyndall ran an experiment demonstrating the greenhouse effect. Visible sunlight easily passes through our atmosphere to warm the Earth. However, invisible heat rays rising from the Earth’s surface, otherwise known as infrared radiation, don’t easily escape back to space. What Tyndall showed by [...]

Aren’t we too puny to rival the great forces of nature that shape our planet? Certainly some prominent [skeptics] have said as much. But the facts show that we are fundamentally impacting planet Earth in unprecedented ways, and we’ve known about it for a century. “The radiative forcing of the CO2 we have already put [...]

The Onion has put out another piece of comedic gold. In this “In the Know” segment, pundits debate a new coal industry ad that claims wind turbines will blow the earth off orbit and solar energy will exhaust the sun’s resources. Unfortunately, with all the misinformation being spread about climate science and renewable energy, this [...]

Google, a leader of innovation in the digital economy, says that without a private and public focus on innovation in renewables, storage and electric vehicles, the cost of delaying the clean energy economy could be in the trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy. Google released an analysis of the economic impact of clean energy [...]

Upwelling seawater along parts of Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf has carved out caves in the ice. The news release by Columbia University’s Earth Institute explains: Stronger ocean currents beneath West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf are eroding the ice from below, speeding the melting of the glacier as a whole, according to a [...]

The UK Guardian explains how you can, “Discover the key people and organisations you should be following on Twitter if you’re interested in climate change and the environment.” They have broken down what they call the top 50 twitter climate accounts by category.  Blogging is inherently solipsistic, so we start with their recommendations for “Bloggers” [...]

Where will Earth’s climate go from here? The pace of extreme weather events has remained remarkably high during 2011, giving rise to the question–is the “Global Weirding” of 2010 and 2011 the new normal? Has human-caused climate change destabilized the climate, bringing these extreme, unprecedented weather events? Any one of the extreme weather events of [...]

So I’m reading the Washington Post today and come across a full-page ad for natural gas from the marketing geniuses at General Electric. Apparently nobody involved with the new ad campaign understands the unintentional irony, that natural gas is one of the most potent heat-trapping greenhouse gases.  This, as we’ve seen, is something a lot [...]

This Saturday, June 18, millions of people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom will join the solar power movement to push for energy reform and raise awareness of solar power’s benefits. SolarDay 2010 was the largest solar awareness program in U.S. history, and 2011 promises to be even bigger. America is [...]

The anti-science disinformers are ecstatic over an analysis that says by 2020 we might be entering a long period of anomalously low solar activity.  The headline at Fox Nation is: Not.  Not even close, actually. Yes, there is a credible prediction based on independent studies that we could possibly be entering a so-called “grand minimum” [...]