Book contents
- Drought, Flood, Fire
- Drought, Flood, Fire
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Climate Extremes, Climate Attribution, Extreme Event Attribution
- 2 Welcome to an Awesome Planet
- 3 The Earth Is a Negentropic System, or “the Bright Side of Empty”
- 4 Do-It-Yourself Climate Change Science
- 5 Temperature Extremes – Impacts and Attribution
- 6 Precipitation Extremes
- 7 Hurricanes, Cyclones, and Typhoons
- 8 Conceptual Models of Climate Change and Prediction, and How They Relate to Floods and Fires
- 9 Climate Change Made the 2015–2016 El Niño More Extreme
- 10 Bigger La Niñas and the East African Climate Paradox
- 11 Fire and Drought in the Western United States
- 12 Fire and Australia’s Black Summer
- 13 Driving toward +4°C on a Dixie® Cup Planet
- 14 We Can Afford to Wear a White Hat
- Appendix A Few Resources for Further Reading and Research
- Index
4 - Do-It-Yourself Climate Change Science
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2021
- Drought, Flood, Fire
- Drought, Flood, Fire
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Climate Extremes, Climate Attribution, Extreme Event Attribution
- 2 Welcome to an Awesome Planet
- 3 The Earth Is a Negentropic System, or “the Bright Side of Empty”
- 4 Do-It-Yourself Climate Change Science
- 5 Temperature Extremes – Impacts and Attribution
- 6 Precipitation Extremes
- 7 Hurricanes, Cyclones, and Typhoons
- 8 Conceptual Models of Climate Change and Prediction, and How They Relate to Floods and Fires
- 9 Climate Change Made the 2015–2016 El Niño More Extreme
- 10 Bigger La Niñas and the East African Climate Paradox
- 11 Fire and Drought in the Western United States
- 12 Fire and Australia’s Black Summer
- 13 Driving toward +4°C on a Dixie® Cup Planet
- 14 We Can Afford to Wear a White Hat
- Appendix A Few Resources for Further Reading and Research
- Index
Summary
The most important mechanism of climate change can be understood by everyone: Why do greenhouse gasses have such a direct warming effect on our planet? This chapter approaches this question with a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) attitude.First, the humorous tale of Stinky, Dinxie, Bif, and Moo teaches us how the greenhouse effect really works. It's a straightforward matter of balancing energy, not a matter for belief. Also, it turns out that the atmosphere is really thin, and has a lot less actual mass than we might at first think. Then, this understanding is augmented by lots and lots of data. Multiple independent data sources hammer home convergent evidence identifying very rapid levels of observed warming. Looking at air temperatures, ocean temperatures, and global sea levels, we see extremely rapid rates of warming, rates that have increased dramatically in the last decade. 2015–2019 stand out as exceptionally warm. Global temperatures are modeled extremely well by climate models, while the observed warming doesn’t track at all with changes in incoming solar radiation, and these changes are very small energetically. We don’t need to believe in climate change; we can understand and observe it. The chapter introduction and a sidebar use the devastating Thomas Fire to set this warming in context.
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- Information
- Drought, Flood, FireHow Climate Change Contributes to Catastrophes, pp. 59 - 91Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021