Author Archive for audreyl

From Tim De Chant, ars technica

Ask any second grader what you can do with the rings on a tree, and they’ll respond, “Learn the age of the tree!” They’re not wrong, but dendrochronology—the dating of trees based on patterns in their rings—is more than just counting rings. The hundred year-old discipline has given scientists access to extraordinarily detailed records of climate and environmental conditions hundreds, even thousands of years ago.

The ancient Greeks were the first people known to realize the link between a tree’s rings and its age but, for most of history, that was the limit of our knowledge. It wasn’t until 1901 that an astronomer at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory was hit with a very terrestrial idea—that climatic variations affected the size of a tree’s rings. The idea would change the way scientists study the climate, providing them with over 10,000 years of continuous data that is an important part of modern climate models.

A. E. Douglass, the astronomer in question, is revered as the father of dendrochronology even though one of the field’s basic concepts—crossdating, or the matching of ring patterns between trees—was independently discovered on four earlier occasions. (Pioneering computer scientist Charles Babbage was among that group.) Douglass was the first to apply truly scientific rigor to the study of tree rings, using a quantitative approach to tie variations in ring width to available climate records.

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From Andrew Leonard, Salon.com

Back in March 2009, when Nancy Pelosi ruled the House of Representatives with an iron fist, one could chuckle at Republicans who came to committee hearings quoting scripture as the rationale for their positions on energy policy.

But now, when one of those very same Republicans is in the running for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce committee, it just doesn’t seem so funny.

Juan Cole does us the unpleasant service of bringing back to life the comments of John Shimkus, R-Ill., a year and a half ago.

Shimkus starts by quoting Genesis 8, Verses 21 and 22, in which God makes Noah a promise.

Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though all inclinations of his heart are evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.

As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.

Shimkus continues: “I believe that is the infallible word of god, and that’s the way it is going to be for his creation… The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”

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From The Economist,

This column, emblematically, comes to you from a bus. In the annals of UN climate diplomacy, the Cancún meeting—the 16th conference of the parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is also the 6th meeting of the parties to the Kyoto protocol—will be remembered, more succinctly, as the conference of the buses. To all but a few, they are the inescapable essence of the Cancún experience.

This particular bus is headed from the Moon Palace to the Cancún Messe, a journey of about 20 minutes. The Moon Palace, a vast resort on the Gulf coast some way to the south of both Cancún proper and its separate hotel zone, is hosting the negotiations. It is large enough that it itself requires internal shuttle buses to connect its various parts, such as the halls where negotiations are taking place with those in which the journalists would be sequestered. Would be, because journalists want to be where the action is. The isolated press centre is largely deserted; the few in the press room are as likely as not filing pieces about how empty it is, or indeed interviewing each other on the subject.

The Moon Palace also contains the offices for the delegations to the conference, and many of the delegates themselves in some 2000 suites. It has a multiplicity of swimming pools and other attractions, lawns, palms and lazy iguanas. It probably looks a lot less like a car park with set dressing by someone who couldn’t get a job at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas when these various attractions are being enjoyed by a throng of happy honeymooners, as they are intended to be. At the moment they are mostly empty. Whether the same is true of the jacuzzis provided in every suite, who can say. Those in suites your correspondent has visited on business are being treated as embarrassments, but the press is not always present. (Full disclosure: some journalists, including this one, have simply through the nature of the accommodation Cancún has to offer been forced to accept jacuzzis of our own.)

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From Times Higher Education,

“Earth is at a critical crossroads,” announced the aptly named Earth Institute at Columbia University last year. The august research body warned the world solemnly that human activity was “threatening the health of the environment and potentially posing risks of unprecedented magnitude to our shared future”.

Fast forward to 2010, and with the dirty stain of oil spreading inexorably over the clear blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to choke the delicate wetlands of Louisiana and Florida, you can’t help but make a link between the warning and the business model of BP. But there is an even better reason to “Think BP” when you hear the Earth Institute’s warnings: a key member of its advisory board is none other than Carl-Henric Svanberg, chairman of BP and now perhaps persona non grata.

In June 2009, when the beleaguered oil multinational chose Svanberg for the top job, it explained that this was because, in addition to his dynamic business track record, he was personally committed to and an advocate of many corporate-responsibility issues, including human rights and climate change. Naturally, he is at home at the Earth Institute, where, as its website informs us, everyone is deeply worried that “today, approximately one in six people on the planet subsist on less than $1 a day. The world’s population is expected to increase to 9 billion people by 2050, further straining Earth’s resources and humanity’s ability to thrive.”

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From Lauren Morello and ClimateWire in Scientific American, 3 Quarks Daily

The microscopic plants that form the foundation of the ocean’s food web are declining, reports a study published July 29 in Nature.

The tiny organisms, known as phytoplankton, also gobble up carbon dioxide to produce half the world’s oxygen output—equaling that of trees and plants on land.

But their numbers have dwindled since the dawn of the 20th century, with unknown consequences for ocean ecosystems and the planet’s carbon cycle.

Researchers at Canada’s Dalhousie University say the global population of phytoplankton has fallen about 40 percent since 1950. That translates to an annual drop of about 1 percent of the average plankton population between 1899 and 2008.

The scientists believe that rising sea surface temperatures are to blame.

“It’s very disturbing to think about the potential implications of a century-long decline of the base of the food chain,” said lead author Daniel Boyce, a marine ecologist.

They include disruption to the marine food web and effects on the world’s carbon cycle. In addition to consuming CO2, phytoplankton can influence how much heat is absorbed by the world’s oceans, and some species emit sulfate molecules that promote cloud formation.

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