How Carbon Dioxide Melted the World

Published on May 13, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Sonja van Renssen from Nature

Rising levels of carbon dioxide really did bring about the end of the most recent ice age, say researchers. By compiling a global climate record, a team has shown that regions in which concentrations of greenhouse gases increased after the warming were exceptions to the big picture.

There are many ideas about what caused the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, but a lack of data has hindered testing of hypotheses. It has been known that changes in temperature and CO2 levels were closely correlated during this time, but no one has been able to prove that CO2 caused the warming.

Ice samples from Antarctica even suggested that temperatures rose a few centuries before CO2 levels, making it impossible for the gas to have been responsible. This provided ammunition for climate sceptics.

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Icelandic Volcanoes to Power British Homes

Published on May 9, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Grimsvotn volcano billows steam

By George Sargent from Sky News Online

Icelandic volcanoes could soon power British homes if the Government secures a new energy deal.

Energy minister Charles Hendry will visit Iceland in May to negotiate an agreement that would mean laying hundreds of miles of cables underwater to satisfy the UK’s energy needs.

The cables, known as interconnectors, would carry low carbon energy harvested from Iceland’s geothermal sources such as volcanoes and geysers.

The plan could supply a third of the nation’s average electricity demand.

Mr Hendry told Sky News Online: “We are looking to a low carbon economy. I think the best way is to get a number of different interconnectors first.”

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Climate Scepticism is Not Just American

Published on May 3, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

Chris Mooney has a new book out, “The Republican Mind” , that looks from a frankly liberal standpoint at evidence that conservatives and liberals tend to have different character types and different attitudinal approaches to reality. There’s plenty such evidence, and, before half the people who read this blog go ballistic, it really shouldn’t be considered offensive to point out the correlations between character types and political affiliation. Anyway, Mr Mooney thinks that in a broad variety of political clashes—and here I’m just describing Mr Mooney’s views so I can get to the main point—conservatives have a tendency to begin building alternate universes of fact that close off the possibility of debate. The most familiar and consequential example is the widespread conservative disbelief that the world is getting hotter, the sea level is rising, and it’s happening because humans burn fossil fuels. And the concomitant widespread belief that the scientific consensus on climate change is some form of conspiracy or hoax.

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Arctic’s Old Ice Vanishing Rapidly, NASA Study Finds

Published on April 30, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

The bright white central mass shows the perennial sea ice, which is just the multi-year ice that has survived at least one summer, while the larger light blue area shows the full extent of the winter sea ice including the average annual sea ice during the 2012 months of November, December and January. Photo by: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio.

From livescience.com

The oldest and thickest Arctic ice seems to be vanishing faster than the younger, thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean’s floating ice cap, a new NASA study finds.

Typically the thicker, older ice survives through the summer melt season (hence, it’s called multi-year ice), while the younger ice that forms over the winter melts as quickly as it formed. That’s what makes this new finding worrisome; if the ice that usually sticks around is rapidly disappearing, the Arctic sea ice is more vulnerable to further disappearance during the summer, said study researcher Joey Comiso, senior scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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NASA Perpetual Ocean: The Ocean Surface Currents around the World

Published on April 25, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From infosthetics.com

Sometimes, particle animations work, such as with Perpetual Ocean [nasa.gov], developed by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. This visualization shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through Decmeber 2007.

Interestingly, the visualization does not include any narration or annotations. Instead, the goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience. The data was based on a high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice, that is able to capture ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.

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Earth Warming Faster Than Expected

Published on April 20, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Results of climate simulations that best match observations since 1960 (those depicted in darker shades of blue) suggest that global average temperature in 2050 will be between 1.4°C and 3°C warmer than the global average measured between 1961 and 1990. Photo by: D. J. Rowlands et al., Nature Geoscience, Advanced Online Publication (25 March)

By Sid Perkins from sciencemag.org

By 2050, global average temperature could be between 1.4°C and 3°C warmer than it was just a couple of decades ago, according to a new study that seeks to address the largest sources of uncertainty in current climate models. That’s substantially higher than estimates produced by other climate analyses, suggesting that Earth’s climate could warm much more quickly than previously thought.

Many factors affect global and regional climate, including planet-warming “greenhouse” gases, solar activity, light-scattering atmospheric pollutants, and heat transfer among the land, sea, and air, to name just a few. There are so many influences to consider that it makes determining the effect of any one factor—despite years and sometimes decades of measurements—difficult.

Daniel Rowlands, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and his colleagues took a stab at addressing the largest sources of short-term climate uncertainty by modifying a version of one climate model used by the United Kingdom’s meteorological agency. In their study, the researchers tweaked the parameters that influence three factors in the model: the sensitivity of climate to changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the rate at which oceans absorb heat from the atmosphere, and the amount of cooling from light-scattering aerosols in the atmosphere.

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Vast Tracts in Paraguay Forest Being Replaced by Ranches

Published on April 15, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

One of the indigenous Ayoreo who live in the Chaco forest. About 10 percent of the area has been cleared in recent years by ranchers, amid a rising global demand for beef. Photo by: Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times

By Simon Romero from The New York Times

The Chaco thorn forest, a domain with 118-degree temperatures so forbidding that Paraguayans call it their “green hell,” covers an expanse about the size of Poland. Hunter-gatherers still live in its vast mazes of quebracho trees.

But while the Chaco forest has remained hostile to most human endeavors for centuries, and jaguars, maned wolves and swarms of biting insects still inhabit its thickets, the region’s defiance may finally be coming to an end.

Huge tracts of the Chaco are being razed in a scramble into one of South America’s most remote corners by cattle ranchers from Brazil, Paraguay’s giant neighbor, and German-speaking Mennonites, descendants of colonists who arrived here nearly a century ago and work as farmers and ranchers.

So much land is being bulldozed and so many trees are being burned that the sky sometimes turns “twilight gray” at daytime, said Lucas Bessire, an American anthropologist who works here. “One wakes with the taste of ashes and a thin film of white on the tongue,” he said.

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90 Degrees in Winter: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like

Published on April 8, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

A view of the Runge reservoir in the town of Runge, some thirty-seven miles north of Santiago on February 3, 2012. Photo by: Reuters/Ivan Alvarado

By Bill McKibben from The Nation

The National Weather Service is kind of the anti–Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It’s collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.

Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. “There’s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,” Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro told the Daily Herald. “It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the office added in an official statement.

It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, Minnesota, the “icebox of the nation,” broke its old temperature records—by twenty-two degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin ever for any station with a century’s worth of records. Winner, South Dakota, reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That’s in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter. Jeff Masters, founder of WeatherUnderground, the web’s go-to site for meteorological information, watched an eerie early morning outside his Michigan home and wrote, “This is not the atmosphere I grew up with,” a fact confirmed later that day when the state recorded the earliest F-3 strength tornado in its history. Other weathermen were more… weathermanish. Veteran Minneapolis broadcaster Paul Douglas, after noting that Sunday’s low temperature in Rochester broke the previous record high, blogged “this is OFF THE SCALE WEIRD even for Minnesota.”

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Ocean Acidification Rapid Compared To Ancient Times

Published on April 2, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Redorbit.com

The world’s oceans may be acidifying more rapidly than they have at any time in the past 300 million years due to high levels of pollution, according to research published this week in the journal Science.

Researchers, led by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the University of Bristol, assessed a number of climate change events in Earth’s history, including an asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

They warn that too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the key factor that will make the oceans more acidic and imperil key parts of the marine food chain. It has happened before, and can happen again, they warn. In fact, ocean acidification appears to be occurring now at an unprecedented pace.

The study is the first of its kind to survey the geologic record for evidence of ocean acidification over such a large time period.

“What we’re doing today really stands out in the geologic record,” said study leader Bärbel Hönisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University. “We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out — new species evolved to replace those that died off. But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about — coral reefs, oysters, salmon.”

Conference Tour Announced: Service Project with Friends of the Cedar River Watershed

Published on March 30, 2012 in Conference, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

2012 Conference will feature a service project through the Friends of the Cedar River Watershed.

Participants will assist in restoring forested wetlands and re-vegetated shoreline at Madrona Park, an urban park on the shores of Lake Washington within the City of Seattle.  Madrona Park contains recreational areas, urban forests, beaches, and a restored shoreline and small creek mouth tributary to Lake Washington.  This urban refuge provides valuable rearing habitat for Juvenile Chinook salmon and other fish that congregate near small creek mouths along the lake’s shoreline.

The targeted areas for our project includes the 1.5 acre forested wetlands, a spring-fed creek, and Lake Washington’s shoreline.  Restoration tasks include removing invasive species and weeding and mulching existing restoration plantings.  Project tasks are organized for the adventurous and all skills levels.

Following the service project, participants will enjoy lunch in the Madrona Park picnic area, on the shores of Lake Washington, looking out at Mount Rainer if the Seattle weather cooperates.

This service project is free to all delegates but registration is required.

Project partners include: Seattle Parks and Recreation, Friends of Madrona Woods

For more information on the service project and about the Friends of the Cedar River Watershed please visit the following link.