Meryn Stol

Can global warming be mitigated by a technological fix such as injecting light-blocking particles into the atmosphere or chemically “scrubbing” excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere? Department of Global Ecology scientist Ken Caldeira addressed this question in his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology in a hearing titled “Geoengineering: Assessing the Implications of Large-Scale Climate Intervention” on November 5, 2009. Caldeira testified that climate change poses a real risk to Americans and that the surest way to reduce this risk is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. But other options, such as geoengineering approaches, may also cost-effectively contribute to risk reduction in certain circumstances. - Meryn Stol

I think it's really difficult to overcome the notion that you need to have 20,000 followers to say anything meaningful, and you're not going to say anything meaningful until I have 20,000 followers. Because what's the point of that? The way you gain people and lead is to express yourself right now. No matter who is listening right now, if you start talking, people will eventually listen if it's something that resonates with them. - Meryn Stol

Evaluating multicomponent climate change mitigation strategies requires knowledge of the diverse direct and indirect effects of emissions. Methane, ozone, and aerosols are linked through atmospheric chemistry so that emissions of a single pollutant can affect several species. We calculated atmospheric composition changes, historical radiative forcing, and forcing per unit of emission due to aerosol and tropospheric ozone precursor emissions in a coupled composition-climate model. We found that gas-aerosol interactions substantially alter the relative importance of the various emissions. In particular, methane emissions have a larger impact than that used in current carbon-trading schemes or in the Kyoto Protocol. Thus, assessments of multigas mitigation policies, as well as any separate efforts to mitigate warming from short-lived pollutants, should include gas-aerosol interactions - Meryn Stol

PBWorks' new offerings are a clear sign the Enterprise 2.0 space is growing up and will change significantly with the advent of the real-time web. Documents are not going away but the messaging layer is widening in the enterprise, filling it with lightweight technologies that can be used instantly, without the hurdles that come with asynchronous notifications. - Meryn Stol

The regions of Earth that showed the strongest responses to aerosols in the model are the same regions that have witnessed the greatest real-world temperature increases since 1976. The Arctic region has seen its surface air temperatures increase by 1.5 C (2.7 F) since the mid-1970s. In the Antarctic, where aerosols play less of a role, the surface air temperature has increased about 0.35 C (0.6 F). That makes sense, Shindell explained, because of the Arctic's proximity to North America and Europe. The two highly industrialized regions have produced most of the world's aerosol emissions over the last century, and some of those aerosols drift northward and collect in the Arctic. Precipitation, which normally flushes aerosols out of the atmosphere, is minimal there, so the particles remain in the air longer and have a stronger impact than in other parts of the world. - Meryn Stol

The implication should not be that cleaning up the air causes warming, but that air pollution plays a substantial role in climate, and we can better understand regional climate changes during the past by taking this into account. Economists have argued that inclusion of a broader array of climate forcing agents leads to more cost-effective strategies to mitigate climate change (e.g. [O'Neill, 2003]), so that taking into account the large impact of air pollution and its ancillary effects on human and ecosystem health may also lead to better solutions for climate change. - Meryn Stol

Scientists say data from satellites and weather stations indicate a warming of about 0.6C over the last 50 years. Writing in the journal Nature, they say the trend is "difficult to explain" without the effect of rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, scientists in Antarctica say a major ice shelf is about to break away from the continent. The Wilkins Ice Shelf is said to be "hanging by a thread" from the Antarctic Peninsula, the strip of land pointing from the white continent towards the southern tip of South America. - Meryn Stol

five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled. [...] It’s a NASA decision following the directives from their political leaders. The money has been redirected into the manned space program, primarily. - Meryn Stol

Trimming smog and soot also represents an alternate and far more immediate global warming solution for regulators stymied by the complexities of other greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences and the lead author of the study. Tackling air pollution can buy 20 to 30 years worth of mitigation, he said – time that will be needed, if ongoing debates in Poznan, Brussells and Washington D.C. offer any indication – to cut the political and economic knots associated with carbon dioxide. The health benefits also make a strong case for action to countries that have so far resisted climate mitigation for its own sake. These pollutants – soot, ozone, and smog-causing volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides – have well-documented effects on human health. Trimming emissions produces easily quantifiable benefits. - Meryn Stol

Part of the reason the new calculations give a larger effect is that they include the sizeable impact of methane emissions on tropospheric ozone since the industrial revolution. Tropospheric ozone is not directly emitted, but is instead formed chemically from methane, other hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. The IPCC report includes the effects of tropospheric ozone increases on climate, but it is not attributed to particular sources. By categorizing the climate effects according to emissions, Shindell and colleagues found the total effects of methane emissions are substantially larger. In other words, the true source of some of the warming that is normally attributed to tropospheric ozone is really due to methane that leads to increased abundance of tropospheric ozone. According to the study, the effects of other pollutants were relatively minor. Nitrogen oxide emissions can even lead to cooling by fostering chemical reactions that destroy methane. - Meryn Stol

In the study, Shindell and colleagues added chemical interactions between aerosols and greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon monoxide to a century-long model of climate change. They wanted to see the effects on each gas's "Global Warming Potential," or individual contribution to global warming. Methane played a bigger role than expected, suggesting that climate treaties such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol need to consider it more carefully, the study says. - Meryn Stol

Drew Shindell, of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who led the study, said that the findings added to the importance of measures to contain methane emissions, as well as those of carbon dioxide, which will be discussed at the Copenhagen climate summit in December. As methane breaks down much more quickly than carbon dioxide, the impact of cuts on climate would also be faster. “For long-term climate change there’s no way around dealing with CO2 — it’s the biggest thing and it lasts hundreds of years,” Dr Shindell told The Times. “But if we were to have a concerted effort to deal with non-CO2 we could have a very large impact on the near term. “Substantial reductions in methane, carbon monoxide and black carbon: that’s the way to make a big difference. I think it should be more of a priority [for Copenhagen].” - Meryn Stol

Drew Shindell is an ozone specialist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. His research is concerned with global climate change, climate variability, and atmospheric chemistry. He uses climate models to investigate chemical changes such as the depletion of the ozone layer, climate changes such as global warming, and the connections between these two. - Meryn Stol

There are four rules for evaluating news, but some of them contradict each other. Google ranks a new article higher than an older one for example, but at the same time it takes the citation of an original piece into account. It gives local sources more weight, but it also prefers trusted sources. Ohye argues that in all this Google imitates the behaviour of users in choosing news brands. Google monitors the users and even classifies the sources after sections, just like newspapers are known for their very good sports or media sections. - Meryn Stol

According to a new survey, hundreds of government scientists say they have perceived or personally experienced pressure from the Bush administration to eliminate phrases such as “climate change” and “global warming” from their reports and public statements. One of those scientists—NASA climatologist Drew Shindell—testified Tuesday before the Committee on House Oversight and Government Reform. - Meryn Stol

Earlier this year Gore phoned two scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute, which is above the Manhattan coffee shop where the Seinfeld characters hung out. Drew Shindell, Schmidt, and colleagues run state-of-the-art computer calculations on how much various greenhouse gases contribute to global warming. The relative impact of each, they were finding, was different from what simpler models had suggested. As they reported last week in Science—findings that Gore got hold of last spring—methane accounts for about 27 percent of the man-made warming so far, largely because of how it interacts with atmospheric aerosols. Halocarbons have caused 8 percent of the warming; black carbon (sooty emissions from burning wood, dung, and diesel), 12 percent; carbon monoxide and volatile organics, 7 percent—and carbon dioxide, 43 percent. - Meryn Stol

Like some of our favorite news dashboard services, such as Lazyfeed and Guzzle.it, Google News has decided to allow users to create and save customizable news searches and consume that news in their own "sections." Part dashboard, part feed reader, and all user-friendly, this service promises to be both popular and useful. Users can create sections based on keywords and then publish their sections to directories for sharing with others. Multiple sections can be added to a user's Google News homepage, creating a customized, keyword-based digest. this feature is turning Google News into the infinitely segmented, infinitely remixable modern newspaper; and with all the sources Google indexes, it's just what users need. - Meryn Stol

Robert Socolow discusses his big idea: "Taking joy in our surroundings, being more demanding of the systems that mediate between our consumption and the environmental impact, and allocating a significant fraction of our intellectual energy toward solving the climate change problem." - Meryn Stol

The paper in Science sheds light on several key scientific questions, including how Earth's orbital pattern around the sun affects our climate, and the extent to which current computer climate models mirror real-world conditions. Some climate skeptics have argued that Earth's wobbling on its axis of rotation has helped determine recent warming, rather than human activities. But the new study shows that this wobble -- which affects how much sunlight Earth receives in the middle of the summer -- actually accounts for a long-term cooling trend in the Arctic that has been reversed only in the past half-century. - Meryn Stol

This blog is an exploration of science, technology, and society issues. The main focus will be science and technology policy, with an emphasis on U.S. federal policy. - Meryn Stol

The character assassination, the bullying, the psychological projection -- it all adds up to Climate McCarthyism, and Joe Romm is Climate McCarthyite-in-chief. Joe Romm's "Global Warming Deniers and Delayers" play the same role as Joe McCarthy's "Communists and Communist sympathizers." While Romm built a loyal liberal and environmentalist following for attacking right-wing "global warming deniers" -- a designation meant to invoke "Holocaust denier" -- he spends much of his time attacking well-meaning journalists [...] academics [...] and activists [...] who take the issue of global warming seriously, accept climate science, and support immediate action to address it. His aim is to intimidate and prevent increasing numbers of people from questioning climate policy orthodoxy, and especially Democratic efforts to pass cap and trade climate legislation. - Meryn Stol

Regardless of whether the numbers are 1, 2, 4, or some other sequence, we need to build the increasing amounts if we’re going to get a lot of plants built. But notice this: the three-year break-even times start to overlap and pile up as we build more and more plants. The net result is that we may not get much CO2 benefit from the solar plants until we are past the rapid-growth phase of building out new plants. If we go hell-bent for leather in building solar plants for the next 50 years or so, it is entirely possible that we won’t see much small benefit for 30 to 50 years. - Meryn Stol

Wherever it comes from, waste heat is not usually taken into account in global climate calculations for the simple reason that it is utterly trivial in comparison to the heat trapped by the carbon dioxide that is released when you burn fossil fuels to supply energy. For example, that 6 trillion Watts of waste heat from coal burning would amount to only 0.012 Watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface. Without even thinking very hard, you can realize that this is a tiny number compared to the heat-trapping effect of CO2. As a general point of reference, the extra heat trapped by CO2 at the point where you’ve burned enough coal to double the atmospheric CO2 concentration is about 4 Watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface — over 300 times the effect of the waste heat. - Meryn Stol

We have no time to solve this problem. The question isn't how much time we have; the question is how bad it's going to be, and whether our civilization will be able to survive it. Some people think it's already too late. That's what we have to fight against -- that we'll go from believing this isn't really a problem to believing it's a problem to great to do anything about. I think we have a chance to do it and I think we should be fighting for it. The way to do it is to get real about changing basis of our society in terms of energy. - Meryn Stol

I am a professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I also have appointments as an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford University's Said Business School and as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. Since 2008 I have also been a Senior Fellow of The Breakthrough Institute, a progressive think tank. - Meryn Stol