SoonersNSioux

At this point, I'd just like to see the entire relationship between the family and UND turned into an ESPN 30 for 30...

http://www.grandforksherald.com/news/education/4492546-resolution-details-aviation-facultys-complaints-about-und-provost Justifiable concerns IMHO coming from the perspective of another department. To the point above about shared services/efficiency, there is a reason Aerospace wants to keep some of these. They've seen what 'efficiency' means for the rest of campus. Degraded performance that harms the mission of the college/university. Think of the department's perspective. Surging enrollment numbers, and no decisions being made that help them cope with those numbers (hire open faculty positions, removal of services that help their students, etc.).

I can't stand the logo and nickname (too generic for me), but regardless of that outcome. It is in the best interest of the U to embrace a common marketing strategy. I don't see any issues with Kennedy's request, and his comments jive with the opinions of students/athletes I have had interactions with. Shame on the Herald for subpar reporting and providing a venue for the REA folks to spew garbage.

Parents fighting, neither getting their way so one goes to the kids to sway opinion. Not sure who I trust less in this case... either way the kids lose. Question is how much.

If you can look at any one measure that should make you go hmmm.... it's the Arctic sea ice extent which is in a rapid decline. Depending on what observational database you use, 2011 will go down as either the lowest or second lowest extent of Arctic sea ice extent in our record. http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20111004_Figure3.png (I'm not a big fan of of the blue line, but no matter how you slice it, sea ice extent is much lower now). The ramifications of this are pretty straight forward... less ice, and there is less area to reflect solar radiation = more warming at the pole. Of course the good news is shipping companies know this and are saving wads of cash by directing traffic through the Arctic ocean during the summer instead of down to the canals near the Equator.

Another year, and more change in the western landscape on my way to camping in the badlands. It's amazing how much things have changed in the last 5 years. I'm all for taking advantage of our natural resources, but holy crap are the roads a mess.

This blog posts sums up the CLOUD effort pretty well: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/08/the-cerncloud-results-are-surprisingly-interesting/ The main issue is the time-series of cosmic rays doesn't match our time-series of temperature.

They run some model simulations back to the year 1000 and generally, they fall within the uncertainty of the paleo-climate record. The largest difficulties with these simulations is providing the proper solar/volcanic forcing which has larger uncertainties as you go farther back in time. I know once you go back a few hundred years, we don't have the details of year-to-year sunspot activity (the forcing is smoothed out to longer periods). These runs provide the link between recent warming and the increase greenhouse gasses. If we assume greenhouse gasses have not changed in concentration and leave that forcing out, the models miss the recent warming. Of course this says nothing about what caused the increase in greenhouse gasses. In terms of the model, the impact of the sun is simply a number... the watts per meter square of energy incident on the Earth. This varies naturally due to variations in the Earth's orbit, and also by the sunspots as you mentioned. Volcanoes are treated the same way... additional aerosols are added into the stratosphere when we believe their was volcanic activity. As a result, the model should get the right year-to-year answer since we are constraining it to the observations for historical simulations. To my knowledge, sunspot cycles are only incorporated in the future by assuming a profile See: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/solar.irradiance/ Orbital fluctuations are taken care of. Future volcanic eruptions are added randomly in time dependent on their historical frequency. The sunspot issue brings up an interesting point considering solar physicists are now debating whether we're about to go into another minimum. The good news is we can change the solar forcing in the model to account for a minimum. One study has already done this... they put in a future solar minimum and investigated how temperature would change. As you would expect, temperatures decreased, but the magnitude was much less than that due to the change in greenhouse gasses. This is only one model simulation, so I look forward to seeing what else comes out in the near future.

Sadly, I'm late to the game (just graduated with my doctorate from UND in atmospheric science so I haven't been checking the board as often). I happened to work with a climate model for my dissertation so I am well versed in this "debate". Overall, I think wxman summed the topic up well. A couple of comments: Media/politicians love the extreme viewpoints (i.e. Al Gore). Usually when you hear about some doomsday scenario it's because the media cherry picked one model run out of an ensemble that does something bad... say for example melting all of the ice caps in 40 years or what not. I wonder where we would be if a left-winger wouldn't have made this his pet project. In the actual climate community, most of the debate surrounds the climate sensitivity,... in other words, how much does temperature change given a doubling in CO2. If you debate whether increased GHG causes warming, then you're a hopeless cause... this is one of the most basic concepts in atmospheric science. What the skeptics need to "root" for are feedbacks that balance out the warming. For example, if CO2 goes up, so does temperature. If T rises, then so does water vapor.... increased water vapor= more clouds and then those clouds reflect more incoming solar radiation = cooling. Of course some clouds actually cause warming and that's what makes the problem so difficult to solve. The other thing I'll point out is everyone focuses on our influence on the climate via GHG emissions. The fact of the matter is we also influence the climate in a variety of other ways. For example, our pollution tends to have a cooling effect and this actually offsets some of the warming via GHG emissions. Second of all, land-use change (agriculture, urbanization), influences the climate. That's what is all boils down to. I'm all for using local resources, but I'm not sure they are doing a good enough job in W. ND...

OT was INTENSE. I might not have a voice tomorrow. Way to pull the win out!

They looked rough the first two periods (other than the shortie), but they stepped it up in the 3rd. Decent crowd, but Purpur wasn't a full house

We're in a relatively wet period which raises the risk some. Another influence is the improved drainage off of fields. Once the thaw comes, water gets to the river faster.

My tickets were next to the penalty box for the subway classic. Anyone know who the two guys wearing suits were doing that stand near the back of the box (by the entrance into it)? They seemed to be pointing out individuals throughout the crowd to security. Not sure what they were looking for. While we did look up info on the players in the box and yelled some things at them, security didn't like us shouting between the breaks in the glass. Basically had to appear like we were yelling elsewhere. Too tame in my opinion. Didn't even swear.... just took info about people such as their sisters' names and ran with it

Sure... it's a very complex scenario. You could foreseeably get more moisture off the oceans/gulf. On the other hand, global warming primarily occurs at the poles. Well if temperatures warm more at the poles than at the tropics, then the temperature gradient is weaker... right? Well the strength of our jet stream is also a function of that gradient, so it's possible storms could be weaker or shifted N/S. Well I know I'd take a for us in ND... of course the big thing is how it causes regional climate change. Some places benefit, others don't (parts of Africa for example). I tell everyone that we can bicker all we want over who/what is causing climate change (I have my opinions based on what I know), but in the big scheme of things, does it really matter? We might as well try and develop alternative sources of energy and decrease pollution for health and our future generations and for US economic reasons anyway. The key is doing it without going broke or injuring the economy in the process.

Ay... time for the friendly neighborhood meteorologist to chime in: 2 degrees warmer when it's already below freezing = potentially more snow because now you have higher moisture content... these are the type of relationships that make climate modeling difficult.