Climate Change

Reliability of the Forest

Wed, 1 Jul 2009 19:42:00 GMT

Reliability of the Forest This is the third in a series of blogs on forests taking up the carbon dioxide that comes from the burning of fossil fuels. I started with a discussion of the pine beetle infestation that is currently killing many trees in the western U.S. and Canada. An important point is that disruptions to forests are often a major source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Therefore, whether or not the pine beetle infestation is exacerbated by clim...
Read More

Climate and the Beetle

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:08:00 GMT

Climate and the Beetle This is the second in a series of blogs on the pine beetle, western forests in the U.S. and Canada, and their relation to climate change. There have been many discussions on the relationship of the pine beetle infestation and climate change. The analysis of the relationship of infestations of this type to climate change is very difficult. I give a set of links to primary references below. Logan and Powell (2001) describe a model that repr...
Read More

Beetles and the Climate

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:40:00 GMT

Climate Change and the Forest This week I am at the Community Climate System Model Annual Workshop . It is in Breckenridge, Colorado. In Colorado there has been a lot of discussion in the past few years about the pine beetle or the pine bark beetle. ( Archive Article in Denver Post ). These beetles are attacking lodgepole pines throughout the western United States and Canada. Some have even predicted that all of the lodgepole pine forests could be killed on m...
Read More

Removing Carbon Dioxide

Fri, 5 Jun 2009 16:03:00 GMT

Stabilization of Carbon Dioxide (4) See below more new policy on comments on this blog.This series of blogs (links below) has been exploring the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They have been leading to the conclusion that we cannot afford to let too much carbon dioxide accumulate in the atmosphere. We are fast approaching 400 parts per million (ppm), compared with about 280 ppm before the industrial revolution. Jim Hansen has made cogent argu...
Read More

Extinction

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:48:00 GMT

Stabilization of Carbon Dioxide (3) See below new policy on comments on this blog.In the previous two blogs I have been talking about the need for stabilization of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Take away messages are that we are committed to warming, that warming will be with us for a long time, and that if we were to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 70% or more over the next 100 years, then it would make a difference to the amount of warming that we wou...
Read More