Global Warming: Recent Reads

Here are a couple of recent items I recommend for those of you who have a scientific interest in global warming (the Earth's climate system's response to increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere):

1) If you think the whole global warming story is a sham invented by snake-oil-selling charlatans who are only pushing the story for their own ideological, political, or economic interests, then I urge you to pick up a copy of "Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal about the Current Threat -- and How to Counter It" by Wallace Broecker and Robert Kunzig.  Dr. Broecker is a well-respected climate scientist with a long history examining the effects of changes in the Earth's orbital characteristics, ocean circulation, and greenhouse gases on our ocean-atmosphere system.  He has been affiliated with the world-renowned Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, for nearly half a century.

In this book, Dr. Broecker, and science writer Robert Kunzig, give an interesting account of the science behind our current understanding of the Earth's climate system.  It is well-balanced and authoritative, and an easy read for scientists and non-scientists alike.  The authors then go beyond examining the effects of a doubling or tripling atmospheric CO₂ and propose some ideas for slowing or stopping the increase of anthropogenically-produced atmospheric CO₂.  They constrain their proposals by the physical scale of the problem, providing scientific rigor to their analysis -- an aspect often lacking in pop-science books about the greenhouse effect.

This book is well worth the read -- and is available both for purchase (online or at bookstores) and at libraries.

2) If you think that climate scientists have this whole global warming thing all figured out such that we now know exactly when and where the atmosphere and oceans will warm and by how much, and exactly what effects these changes will have on day-to-day weather, then you might want to skim through an article in this month's edition of the "Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society."  The article is entitled "The Consequences of Not Knowing Low- and High-Latitude Climate Sensitivity" and is by Dr. David Rind from The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).  As with the Lamont-Doherty lab mentioned above the scientists at GISS have been studying the Earth's climate system for a long time, in this case more than 50 years.  GISS has a world-renowned reputation as one of the leading centers for climate research.

Dr. Rind's paper is written by a meteorologist for meteorologists -- it assumes an extensive amount of meteorological expertise.  However, the gist of the paper describes how climate scientists don't know yet how sensitive the Earth's ocean-atmosphere system will be to warming associated with the increases of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  This is true despite the tremendous advances made by climate scientists over the last 40 years, and despite the tremendous increases in computer technology over the same period.  Even something seemingly as "basic" as how much the climate of the polar regions will change as compared to the tropics is uncertain.  The main causes for the uncertainty are associated with some of the most difficult problems climate scientists are working on today: the response of the tropical atmosphere to warming, how global cloud distribution will change with warming, how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will vary, the changes of low clouds in the Arctic, the response of global ocean circulations to warming, the variations in the El Nino pattern over the tropical Pacific.  With such significant gaps in our knowledge, there are still great uncertainties about how the Earth's ocean-atmosphere system will respond during a global warming induced by an increase in greenhouse gases.  In particular, because so much is yet to be learned, there are even greater uncertainties about how the Earth's climate will change regionally (such as, what will happen over the United States vs. over Europe).  The good news is that climate scientists are filling the knowledge gaps quickly.  The bad news is this will take time.  Dr. Rind summarizes this at the end of the paper by saying, "There is no guarantee that these issues will be resolved before a substantial global warming impact is upon us.  How we proceed to act in an environment of uncertainty will, perhaps, become as great a challenge as dealing with global warming itself."

Links:
Abstract
The complete paper

Bike to Work Day...via Wi-Fi Hotspots

Last Wednesday (25 June) for the 11^th year in a row (yes, that's right -- it's been 11 years!) I had the pleasure of participating in the Denver Area Bike to Work Day sponsored by the Denver Regional Council of Governments.  In order to keep it interesting, after all there's nothing worse than a boring 37-mile bike ride to get to work, I've tried to look for new and different ways to spruce up the event for me every year -- like searching out the free LaMar's donuts, or capturing the event as a photo essay from ground level.

Since last year's Bike to Work Day I have become a full-time work-from-home, or "Sun Open Work," employee. [An aside: Sun calls its flexible work program, "Open Work."  It is one of the best programs of its kind in the industry and makes it much easier for me to work with my globally-dispersed team.  Basically, as long as I have network access and a phone, I can work anytime, anywhere.]  Given my change of status -- now as a WFHer -- which meant I did not have to go all the way to Sun's Broomfield, CO campus on Bike to Work Day, I, instead, decided upon more of an Open Work alternative.  Rather than biking to my basement office (Rich Brown beat me to that idea -- see the photo in his "Life as a Telecommuter, Part 1" blog entry), I decided upon a slightly more ambitious adventure.  All I needed was a network link, this was to be my 11^th Bike to Work Day -- why not combine those two thoughts and create: "Bike to Work Day from 11 Different Wi-Fi Hotspots."  Crazy?  Well...

To prepare, I found the locations of various restaurants, coffee shops, and bookstores I knew had free Wi-Fi in the area.  The Panera Bread chain was first on my list because they are seemingly everywhere and they have a good, reliable Wi-Fi setup.  Similar to Panera, next on my list was the Paradise Bakery and Cafe chain.  Not as ubiquitous as Panera, they have several locations here in the Denver area and they, too, have free Wi-Fi.  For coffee shops, I went with Peaberry Coffee -- a local chain with several stores in the south Denver area where I live.  Finally, there was the Tattered Cover -- Denver's premier independent book-seller.

After superimposing the locations of the Paneras, Paradises, Peaberrys, and Tattered Covers on a Denver Area Bicycle route map, I decided to ride east from my home through the communities south of Denver, head north through the Denver Technology Center (the area to the southeast of Denver), work my way into Denver along the Cherry Creek bikeway, then finally head back home down the South Platte River bike trail.  I mapped out a route that looked like this:

The blue pushpins mark the Wi-Fi hotspots I decided to visit.  The blue line signifies my route.  I started at the Panera at Aspen Grove in Littleton (the blue pushpin on the southwest side of the map), then traversed the marked locations cyclonically (or counter-clockwise here in the northern hemisphere) due east through Highlands Ranch (along the bottom of the map) then up to Tattered Cover's main store on Colfax Avenue in Denver before returning down the South Platte River (the western side of the map) and back home.

And just what did these hotspots look like?  Well, I took a digital pic of each as I went along.  The facades follow:

Stop #1: Panera Bread, Littleton (Aspen Grove)

Stop #2: Tattered Cover Bookstore, Highlands Ranch

Stop #2.5: Thundershowers Developing to the West, Highlands Ranch

Stop #3: Panera Bread, Highlands Ranch

Stop #4: Panera Bread, Highlands Ranch (near Park Meadows) -- with a dry thunderstorm overhead

Stop #5: Peaberry Coffee (north of Park Meadows)

Stop #6: Peaberry Coffee, Greenwood Village

Stop #7: Panera Bread, Greenwood Village (with a loud truck out front)

Stop #8: Panera Bread, Denver Tech Center

Stop #9: Paradise Bakery and Cafe, Cherry Creek North

Stop #10: Panera Bread, Cherry Creek North

Stop #11: Tattered Cover Bookstore, Main Store, Colfax Ave., Denver

In the end, I managed to travel a total of 57.5 miles, a bit less than what a round-trip ride to Broomfield would have been for me.  The total ride time was about 4 hours.  However, with the various con-calls I attended at some stops and email storms I responded to at other stops, my "Bike to Work Day from 11 Different Wi-Fi Hotspots" took about 12 hours to accomplish.  In addition, I learned a few things about the Wi-Fi services these establishments sponsor:

• The Panera Bread Wi-Fi network was robust and reliable.  It worked well with a laptop running OpenSolaris (by far the slickest operating system on the planet -- download your copy today!), the current Vista incarnation of Microsoft Windows, and with OSX on an iPod Touch.
• The Cherry Creek North merchants have set up and support a Wi-Fi network throughout the Cherry Creek North shopping district.  Like Panera's network it seemed reliable and robust and I could connect to it with the devices and OSes I had.  Kudos to Cherry Creek North.
• Peaberry Coffee's Wi-Fi network did not work with my iPod Touch (the authentication software tried to pop up two windows from the browser, but the second pop-up always failed).  It did, however, work just fine from a laptop.  On the other hand, Peaberry's had the best coffee on my trip and they had pretty decent burritos as well.
• I didn't actually use the Paradise Cafe network because I could link up nicely with the Cherry Creek North Wi-Fi when I was at the only Paradise Cafe I visited.
• Tattered Cover's Wi-Fi network is a bit flaky.  It seemed slower than the others I used on the trip and it dropped my connection more than once.  It connected with both the iPod Touch and my laptop.
  

Last, but never least, this year's artwork on the t-shirt was colorful, modern, and, depending on your preference, either cutely stylish or stylishly cute.  I have added it to my ever-growing collection of B2WD T-Shirts.

Eleven years, eleven mostly successful Bike to Work days.  I'm thinking next year I'll try really something different... :)