Climate Change Elucidated

According to official accounts, the new solar cycle 24 supposedly began this past January, but since then there has not been a peep of activity from #24, instead we continue to see a few spots every now and then from…

Paul Yeager, who is our western weather expert here at Accuweather.com has an interesting post which is titled “Global Warming Debate”. Paul takes a look at the people who enter the global warming debate, such as the ones who contribute…

Paul Yeager, who is our western weather expert here at Accuweather.com has an interesting post which is titled “Global Warming Debate”. Paul takes a look at the people who enter the global warming debate, such as the ones who contribute…

In a debate before an Institute of Medicine Panel on Global Health, top climate change scientists argued Tuesday whether or not there is concrete evidence linking global warming to the spread of infectious disease. In the Boston Globe article written…

I caught this story today from The Australian titled “El Nino shaped by Global Warming.” This is not the first time we have heard of this, but anyway, researchers from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and CISRO have determined that…

Steven Milloy of JunkScience.com just put out a follow up to the study I discussed yesterday about the strengthening link being established by a study between climate change and greenhouse gases using fossilized sea shells. In the second part of…

As many of you are already aware, Dr. James Hansen has released the source code for the NASA gistemps. A portion of the U.S. temperature data was correctly called into question a while back by Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit,…

“Hannity & Colmes” from Fox News just did an interview with author Bjorn Lomborg, who says we need to have middle of the road approach to global warming. I noticed the headline on the video picture of Lomborg saying he…

The Roger Pielke Sr. Research group has been trying without much success to obtain official photos of the U.S. Historical Climate Network (HCN) recording sites from NOAA since 2002. The HCN sites are used to diagnose the monthly and yearly…

Reader Jim asked:

1) If human beings were extinct and not affecting climate change, would the
climate still change?

2) What should the global temperature be? What is the ideal temperature?
Should it ever change?

The response to question number 1, Jim, is absolutely! The entire history of the globe is a history of climate change. Ice ages, periods of near tropical conditions in the mid-latitudes. It’s all happened before, for a variety of reasons. Many, but not all, climate scientists believe that much of the warming over the past few decades has been caused by human activity, both through emission of greenhouse gases and because of land-use changes.

As for your second question, I would think we’re fairly close to that now, as far as humans are concerned. The warming of the past few decades has mostly been seen in a decrease in the diurnal (day to night) temperature range. That is, nights have not been as cool, which has resulted in a lengthened growing season in some areas. I think this is mostly the case in the mid-latitudes and people in other parts of the world may disagree.

Original post by Laura