Climate Change
gregladen | January 8, 2008Pumice is rock that is ejected from a volcano, and has so much gas trapped in it that it can float. So when a pumice-ejecting volcano (not all volcanoes produce pumice) goes off near a body of water, you can get a raft of rock floating around for quite some time. By and by, water replaces the gas within the rock and it sinks. Like a rock. So, you can get layers of pumice on the bed of lakes, seas and oceans. A forthcoming paper in Deep Sea Research I describes two such pumice deposits of "Drift Pumice" in the Indian Ocean.
The fact that the two deposits are more or less on the surface of…
gregladen | January 7, 2008Carbon is cycled from gas (C02) to solid (plant tissue) and and back (through fire, digestion, fermentation, etc.) again and again.
Some of that carbon is trapped over long periods in the form of "fossil fuels."
The earth has, in a sense, grown accustom to having a huge chunk of the available carbon stored away in coal and oil, so the recent (last century or so) release of large quantities of this carbon is a problem. This is why fuels made of plants (ethanol, diesel) are of interest. But those fuels require two steps: The carbon is captured by plants, then the plant matter is converted…
gregladen | December 21, 2007Plant and animal fossils recently discovered from an island in the Bahamas tell a story of habitat change and human involvement in local extinction.
These finds are reported in a paper by Steadman et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Most people with an interest in natural history know about one or more regions that were at one time covered by "a great inland sea." For instance, if you live in the American Midwest, you probably know that much of this region was covered by such a sea, evidenced by extensive limestone beds and other geological manifestations. As…
gregladen | December 19, 2007Popular Mechanics (one of those magazines that genteel people refuse to admit they read, but that is actually a blast) has published a thing called "Geek the Vote." According to an email from PM, this is:
...an online guide to all the candidates' stances on issues related to science and technology including energy policy and climate change, gun control, science education and infrastructure investment. The full chart, which can be navigated by candidate or issue, is [provided]
The site is here.
This is apparently in response to (maybe not, but there is evidence to suggest this) the Science…
gregladen | December 18, 2007I'm putting this bit of human biogeography under the "species coming and going" category:
Greenland DNA could hold key to migration mysteries: researchers from PhysOrg.com
Danish researchers are to sieve through human and skeletal remains on Greenland in a quest to explain an enduring enigma over the island's settlement over thousands of years, one of the scientists said Tuesday.
[...]
This is a very large change in diet over a very short period of time. I call Macro Evolution!
Study links success of invasive Argentine ants to diet shifts from PhysOrg.com
The ability of Argentine ants…
gregladen | December 17, 2007A small group of US experts stubbornly insist that, contrary to what the vast majority of their colleagues believe, humans may not be responsible for the warming of the planet Earth.
3,000 experts, including several renown US scientists, jointly won the award with former US vice president Al Gore for their work to raise awareness about the disastrous consequences of global warming.
In mid-November the IPCC adopted a landmark report stating that the evidence of a human role in the warming of the planet was now "unequivocal."
Retreating glaciers and loss of snow in Alpine regions, thinning…
gregladen | December 17, 2007The Cost of twenty years of Reagan and Bushes has been very high. In about 1991, I wrote an article for a monthly newspaper in which I summarized the available data for Global Warming, and was very easily able to conclude that it was a real phenomenon with consequences already felt in a number of areas, a reasonably well understood mechanism, and a tangible set of solutions to work on. In 1997, the Kyoto protocol was signed on to by a number of nations (the US not included because of congressional Republican opposition). This month, in Bali, a re-run of something like Kyoto happened, and…
gregladen | December 15, 2007... agreement was finally reached in Bali. After an hours-long public standoff Saturday in which the unthinkable happened -- boos and hisses at a treaty conference -- the world's nations adopted a common two-year "road map" leading to the first comprehensive update to the ailing 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The last update, the Kyoto Protocol, only binds three dozen industrialized countries to cut emissions, and many of the adherents are not on track to hit their targets by 2012, when its terms expire. The new agreement will likely lead to a future set of limits allowing Kyoto…
gregladen | December 14, 2007Despite the best efforts of the American and Chinese representatives, the Bali Climate conference may end up being something more than a huge waste of time.
The U.S. and Europe headed toward a compromise solution Friday at the U.N. climate conference, breaking a deadlock over how ambitious the goal should be in negotiating future cutbacks in global warming gases, the German environment minister said.
"I think the situation is good and the climate in the climate conference is good, and we will have success in the end," Sigmar Gabriel told reporters, declining to give details of the talks.…
gregladen | December 13, 2007The University of East Anglia and the Met Office's Hadley Centre have released their global temperature estimates for the present year, in preliminary form.
IT turns out that this is the seventh warmest year since 1850. Furthermore, the eleven warmest years since 1850 have all occurred during the last 13 years.
In other words, it is now .. this year, this decade, this month, etc. ... the warmest it has been since we've started keeping direct temperature records.
Even conditions that tend to cool the atmosphere, such as the La Nina event we are currently experiencing, have not caused a…
gregladen | December 13, 2007The Central African Rainforest (as distinct from the West African Rain Forest) spans an area from the Atlantic coast to nearly Lake Victoria in Uganda and Tanzania. In fairly recent times (the mid Holocene) this forest was probably continuous all the way to Victoria, and probably extended farther north and south than one might imagine from looking at its current distribution.
Within the forest are major rivers, including the Congo. The Congo River is the only major river in the world that crosses the Equator twice. This trans-equatorial configuration guarantees that the rivers picks up…
gregladen | December 13, 2007Never mind the debate on science. We've got a new approach cooking up here. It's all about sin.
A RADICAL Christian group with the ear of prominent politicians has blamed "sinful" Australians for the nation's record drought.
Catch the Fires Ministries, which has links to several prominent politicians including Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, has hired Festival Hall so 5000 of its followers can pray for rain on Australia Day.
Leader Danny Nalliah said moral decline, not climate change, was responsible for the drought.
"Australia has turned away from Almighty God ... the sinful condition of…
gregladen | December 13, 2007To distract you from all that damn Christmas music..
Toronto Father Beats His Daughter To Death for Cultural-Religious Reasons
Pope Launches Surprise Attack Global Warming Non-Deniers
US Likely To Scuttle Climate Change Talks
Enjoy!
gregladen | December 10, 2007Sort of. The hurricane that the press ignored until it was impossible to ignore is now listed on Time's Top Ten Natural Disasters of 2007.
I don't like the sound of that at all: "Top Ten Natural Disasters." Maybe I'm used to "top ten" being good things. Maybe that's just me.
Packing winds of over 100 mph, the storm took out power lines and trees, and pulverized mud and thatch homes. The death toll was over 1,000, with more than half a million people forced to flee their homes. But by Bangladesh's sad standards, Sidr was nothing -- a cyclone in 1991 killed an astounding 140,000 people.…
gregladen | December 2, 2007A sizable fraction of the international business community launched an effort to press for mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions yesterday, on the eve of a major round of climate negotiations set to begin Monday in Bali.
In an unprecedented show of solidarity, leaders from 150 global companies endorsed the idea of a legally binding framework in a statement published in the Financial Times newspaper.
[source]
The idea is, of course, that these businesses recognize that this is gong to have to happen, but no one business can do it unilaterally. There are two reasons for that, which are…
gregladen | November 27, 2007Ohio State University geologists and their colleagues have uncovered evidence of when Earth may have first supported an oxygen-rich atmosphere similar to the one we breathe today.
The study suggests that upheavals in the earth's crust initiated a kind of reverse-greenhouse effect 500 million years ago that cooled the world's oceans, spawned giant plankton blooms, and sent a burst of oxygen into the atmosphere.
read the press release.
gregladen | November 27, 2007But not a lot worse. Just as we are hearing that the current hurricane season, just winding down, was not as bad as it could have been, we also have this:
More than four times the number of natural disasters are occurring now than did two decades ago, British charity Oxfam said in a study that largely blamed global warming.
[source]
gregladen | November 22, 2007This is the seventh in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.
This installment is about sea level rise and fall, in the past. Sea level change that results from the formation and melting of glaciers not only has an enormous impact on the physical nature of the landscape, but it also would not have gone unnoticed by people living ever pretty far from the sea!
With large amounts of the world's water trapped in glaciers (mainly continental glaciers), the sea level drops. When that ice melts, the sea level rises.
As you know, the earth is covered by two kinds of surface:…