2022-12-05. In 2019 the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published a special report on the ocean and cryosphere in a changing climate, aka SROCC. This allowed the IPCC to update its AR5 (2013) projections of sea level rise on a global scale until 2100. The 195 member nations of the IPCC revised and approved SROCC’s summary for…
2022-11-21. Changes in relative sea level at a particular location depend not only on changes in absolute sea level, but also on changes in land elevation. In 2020, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) published a three-dimensional velocity grid for Canada’s Earth crust known as NAD83v70VG (Robin et al. 2020). This crucial piece of information permitted NRCan to publish…
2022-10-04. Hurricane Fiona made landfall September 24, 2022, shortly after 5 a.m. ADT in the eastern end of mainland Nova Scotia between the towns of Canso and Guysborough. A weather station in nearby Hart Island then measured an atmospheric pressure of 932.6 mb, establishing a new historical record for Canada. This was a warning of terrible things…
2022-08-01. Over a five-year period, my Chevy Volt 2015 plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) had an average gasoline consumption rate of 2.4 L/100 km, an electric driving share of 63%, and a gasoline driving share of 37%. Introduction I am a climate scientist, not a car specialist. In February 2015, after giving a seminar on…
2022-07-04. Before Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican Party’s presidential primaries, Shawn Otto authored a prescient book about the three-pronged war that is waged against science by industry, religion, and identity politics. The 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries were characterized by a contest in which it had become necessary to express antiscience and anti-expertise opinions…
2022-06-20. People like me who live at mid- and high latitudes experience substantial changes in the lengths of daylight and nighttime between winter and summer. We owe this seasonality in the lengths of day and night to the 23.44° inclination of the axis of rotation of the Earth relative to the ecliptic plane (the plane of Earth’s…
2021-05-25. All-electric vehicles emit less greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than any other vehicle type in 44 of 50 states in the USA. There remain only six states where dominance of coal burning to generate electricity makes all-electric vehicles more polluting than hybrid electric vehicles: Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Utah, West Virgina and Wyoming. Introduction One…
2021-05-02. I created a map of the carbon intensity of the power grid for Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Electrification of sectors of the economy such as transportation or industry can significantly decrease CO2 emissions in regions of North America that produce electricity from low carbon footprint sources. Canada The carbon intensity of electricity…
2019-08-28 In June 2019, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) launched a new Canadian climate data portal. Through this portal, decision makers in the private sector, municipalities, provincial and federal departments are now better equipped to make informed decisions about future development options across Canada, taking into account projections of future climate change. In this post, my…
2018-08-22. In May 2017, I ran across an intriguing Physics paper (Wang et al 2017) that claimed to explain the observed value of the cosmological constant using ingredients drawn from the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics. This paper garnered a large amount of public attention, and I thought it would be fun to read it…
