Articles by Joseph Romm

In nontechnical terms

For those wondering why the planet hasn't yet exceeded the 1998 El Niño-fueled temperature record, a new Science magazine article ($ub. req'd) explains why. Basically, in addition to the steady increase in anthropogenic warming from greenhouse gases, you have to add a smaller variation from climate oscillations linked to the oceans. Those oscillations have been tamping down temperatures a tad, and will keep doing so for the next couple of years, but the decade of the 2010s is going to bring a return to record-smashing temperatures:

Our system predicts that internal variability will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.

Yet another one

As a physicist, I have never been a big fan of Freeman Dyson. He was, after all, one of the "geniuses" pushing Project Orion -- the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs -- I kid you not!

Dyson has written a new book, A Many Colored Glass, that you shouldn't waste your time and money on -- as this extract on global warming makes clear. Dyson has basically joined the famous-crackpot camp with Michael Crichton and Bill Gray. You can read a good debunking of Dyson here. I'll add my two cents.

To solving our global warming problem

Geo-engineering is "the intentional large scale manipulation of the global environment" (PDF) to counteract the effects of global warming, which itself was unintentional geo-engineering -- although today you'd have to say global warming is intentional, since everybody now knows what we're doing to the planet.

But I digress. We're screwing up the planet with unrestricted greenhouse-gas emissions, and the question is, do we want to try to fix that problem by gambling on some other large-scale effort to manipulate the climate, or should we just try to restrict emissions? It's as if the doctor says you have a disease that can definitely be cured by diet and exercise, but you opt for expensive chemotherapy -- even though the doctor can't guarantee the results but is pretty certain the side effects would be as bad as the disease.

A match made in heaven?

Energy efficiency and renewable power together are better than either alone, according to a recent report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the American Council on Renewable Energy. Not a shocking conclusion, but an important one, especially in a world where it seems that all types of zero-carbon power are competing against each other for funding.

The report finds that synergies between renewables and efficiency would cut greenhouse-gas emissions more effectively than either alone. What kind of synergies?