“The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.” A Koch-funded reanalysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports finds that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.” Via BEST.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) is poised to release its findings next week on the cause of recent global warming.

UPDATE (9 pm, 7/28): A NY Times op-ed by Richard Muller, BEST’s Founder and Scientific Director, has been published, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.”

Here is the money graf:

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Yes, yes, I know, the finding itself is “dog bites man.” What makes this “man bites dog” is that Muller has been a skeptic of climate science, and the single biggest funder of this study is the “Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation ($150,000).” The Kochs are the leading funder of climate disinformation in the world!

It gets better:

Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.

In short, a Koch-funded study has found that the IPCC “consensus” underestimated both the rate of surface warming and how much could be attributed to human emissions!

UPDATE (9 AM, 7/29): The UK Guardian has a good story up, “Climate change study forces sceptical scientists to change minds: Earth’s land shown to have warmed by 1.5C over past 250 years, with humans being almost entirely responsible.”

And here’s an amusing tweet from a top U.S. climatologist, Michael Mann:

Below is some background on BEST followed by a longer excerpt of the op-ed.

Read more

Photo Courtesy AP

According to the British government, the Ozone concentration in southern England on Thursday was nearly twice the World Health Organization’s guidelines and the highest its been since 2006, just in time for the start of the Summer 2012 London Olympics.

The increased pollution, coupled with a heat wave, is expected to make things much more difficult for athletes competing in the games:

According to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, [exercise-induced bronchoconstriction or EIB] affects an estimated 20% of top athletes and an estimated 1 in 6 of all Olympic athletes.

“It has been well documented that elite athletes in the Olympics have an increased prevalence of EIB. They may not have suspected it, since they don’t have chronic asthma but rather a narrowing of the airways that comes specifically with exercise,” explained William S. Silvers, MD, FAAAAI, of the AAAAI’s Sports Medicine Committee.

An added concern for athletes with asthma and EIB is the amount of pollution in London, which may cause symptoms to worsen. Ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide and other pollutants can inflame the airways of sensitive people and even cause an asthma attack.

Professor Frank Kelly, Director of King’s College London’s Environmental Research Group, said recently that athletes “won’t be able to get enough oxygen in the body to perform at the highest level. What that means is they probably won’t be breaking any records under these conditions.” He added that the condition are “not ideal for athletics and certainly not for long distance events.”

In addition to the ozone, London also has a “higher concentration of nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere than Beijing, China, had during the last summer Olympic games before the Chinese government banned half of all cars in an effort to reduce pollution.”

Though athletes, who breathe heavily during competition and training, will be the most vulnerable to air pollution, spectators will not be immune to the conditions:

“Probably about 20 percent of the healthy population will feel some tightening of the chest as they go about daily normal activities,” said Kelly…. Government officials said most people were not affected by short term peaks in ozone but those with existing heart or lung conditions may experience increased symptoms.”

Prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, there were concerns about severe effects that the air might have on the athletes, particularly distance runners. The concerns turned out to be unfounded as everything turned out alright but as pollution from anthropogenic sources continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, the air quality at future Olympic games will continue to deteriorate. Add that to the massive changes in sports we’ll see thanks to climate change, and the Olympics in 20 years might look nothing like the London Games.

– Max Frankel

by Brian Kahn, via Yale Climate Media Forum

What do astrophyscist Neil Degrasse Tyson, Congressman Daryl Issa (R-Calif.), and fomer Man Vs. Wild host Bear Grylls have in common?

They’ve all let strangers ask them anything on Reddit, a social news website. Climate scientist Tony Barnston of Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) also recently tested the “Ask Me Anything” waters and found them to his liking.

The experience turned out to be enlightening not only for the Reddit community, but also for Barnston, who discovered a new opportunity to talk shop about climate in an informal setting. His experience may provide lessons for other climate scientists looking to engage the public about their work.

What exactly is Reddit?

Reddit has been referred to as “an Internet firehose” because of the massive amount of information that regularly moves through the site. Users generate all of that information, as they do on Facebook and Twitter, but there are some big differences. For one, most users are anonymous. For another, rather than following specific users — though they can do that — most users manage that firehose of information through “subreddits,” in effect communities where users post on specific topics.

Nearly 1.5 million users post on Reddit daily in one of some 144,000 subreddits. Of those 144,000 subreddits, one of the most active is “IAmA.” That’s where users with interesting stories can share their insights and also participate in an “Ask Me Anything” or AMA. An AMA is basically what it sounds like: users pose questions, usually germane to the original poster’s background, and the original poster answers them.

To further turn the firehose of information into a manageable stream, users can up-vote or down-vote questions. As a result, for users sorting the queue of questions by popularity, the cream generally rises to the top and the most off-topic questions end up at the bottom.

Testing Crowd-Sourcing in the Reddit Waters

Having a climate scientist participate in an AMA came at the initiative of Arif Noori, the assistant Web director at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, which houses IRI.

Read more

A cyber-penny for you thoughts.

It’s a Little Late for That…

By Mike Luckovich, From the Cartoonist Group.