Nonono, not the policy statement, well there is that, but a bunch of resources that ACS has put out there a climate science tool kit for folks to learn from and use, put together by a top notch working group with support from ACS leadership. As part of the effort ACS held a meeting to brief staff about how to approach climate communication
When a conversation turns to climate change, do you know the basic science to take part? Do you understand the far-reaching impacts of climate change and how it's affecting you today? Learn the answers to these questions and more.
There are three professionally illustrated PowerPoint presentations which can be used in toto or from which slides can be select: One for the public, one for educators and one for industry professionals (Powerpoint downloads). And yes, a plug for Skeptical Science
This site is very helpful for a non-climate scientist who wants to stay current with the literature on global warming and climate change. As the description says, many of the posts take to task the published arguments of global warming skeptics and these rebuttals help to sharpen one’s climate science reasoning and logic. Sometimes the comments elicited by these posts also demonstrate the futility of getting into a “tis-taint” argument, if you are trying to engage someone or a group in a climate science conversation.Eli would encourage everybunny to rummage about the site a bit, but to get started here is the part analogies for the greenhouse effect, which starts with the usual that the mechanism is not the same as a greenhouse. Well, Eli has thought about this a bit, briefly put there are three methods of heat transfer, radiation, convection and conduction. The atmosphere is a lousy conductor and so is glass, so that plays no role. Greenhouses work by limiting convection, heat transfer by mass flow. The greenhouse effect works by limiting radiation, heat transfer by photon flow, so there really is a way in which they are the same, the both limit the rate of heat transfer from a hotter to a colder place, but they just affect different mechanisms of heat transfer. Be that as it may, it has become a bit of a distraction to make that analogy.
A different analogy is the atmosphere acting like a blanket. Think of yourself under a blanket in a cold room. You represent the Earth, a warm body giving off energy, what we usually call “heat”. The blanket represents the atmospheric layer of greenhouse gases. As the heat energy leaves your body it is absorbed by the innermost fibers of the blanket. As they give off some of that energy, they warm the next layer of fibers and so on and on until some energy leaves the outermost cold fiber layer and is lost to the room. Just as the sun continually warms the Earth, you continually produce energy through respiration. You will finally reach a balance where the energy leaving the blanket is equal to the energy you produce and your skin will remain at a constant temperature, just like the surface of the Earth.
Among the Earth’s blanket of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide is the one you probably hear about most often, because it is increasing in the atmosphere as we burn a great deal of coal, oil, and gas for energy. Besides carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases include water vapor, methane (natural gas), nitrous oxide (from fertilizer use), and chlorine- and fluorine-containing gases used in air conditioning units and as solvents. Adding more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere increases the amount of absorption and release of heat energy required for the energy from the surface to reach the top of the atmosphere and go off into space.
In our blanket analogy, this is like putting on another blanket, so there are more layers of blanket fibers for the energy to pass through to reach the top. The old energy balance is upset and after a time a new one takes its place with you feeling warmer than before. This is what is occurring for the Earth as well. The increased amounts of greenhouse gases our activities are adding to the atmosphere have upset the balance that was in place since the end of the last ice age and the Earth is getting warmer than it was before we started burning large amounts of fossil fuels.Eli had that discussion a long time ago. Atmoz is missed.