climate change
revere | August 18, 2008Tropical Storm Fay is bearing down on Cuba and the Florida Keys as I write this and is on the cusp of hurricane strength winds. A new study from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science just published in Geophysical Research Letters looks again at the contentious issue of whether a warmer globe means more or worse hurricanes. The proposition that global warming mean more and fiercer hurricanes is derived from large computer simulations that have relatively low resolution for local weather events like hurricanes. The computing power needed to get better…
hrynyshyn | August 15, 2008Jim Hansen wants to see all coal-fired plants shut down by 2030. Except for any plants that employ carbon-capture and sequestration. Al Gore wants to see the United States generate all its electricity from renewable sources by 2018, which means shutting down all the coal-fired plants. Except for any plants that employ carbon-capture and sequestration. Princeton University's Pacala and Socolow of the "wedge" strategy make CCS an integral part of their future clean energy portfolio. Everybody who's crunched the emissions numbers pretty much agrees that coal has got to go. Unless we can capture…
sciencewoman | August 13, 2008One of the joys of being on Scienceblogs is getting to watch the ever-changing banner and sidebar ads that are placed by the marketing folks at Seed. Unfortunately, the people making the advertising decisions are not scientists, nor do they vet their ad choices with us before running them. So, sometimes we bloggers aren't so thrilled with what pops up alongside our writing.
And right now, I'm not so thrilled with the ad for Bjorn Lomborg's book, Cool It! showing up in the side bar. Now, I'll admit that I haven't read the book, but what I've heard of it tells me that Lomborg has cherry-picked…
hrynyshyn | August 8, 2008So the other day I found myself on a conference call with James Hansen, who is just back from a European trip during which he tried to convince environment ministers that we should stop burning coal. I was given the opportunity to put one question to the guy. So, referring to his many public letters that deal with the need to focus on coal, I asked if that means all the squabbling over whether the U.S. should lift the moratorium on offshore drilling is missing the point?
Before I get to his response, a little background. Hansen has been writing to heads of state and state governors for months…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, animal migration, ecology, conservation, habitat destruction, global warming, overexploitation
Image: Makoa Farm Horseback Riding Safaris in Tanzania [larger view].
What do salmon, passenger pigeons, American bison and wildebeest have in common? They all are (or were) migratory, and their populations either are declining or have become extinct. In fact, the populations of nearly all migratory animals, from insects to fishes, birds to mammals, are suffering disproportionate population declines that sedentary species are not experiencing. This is hardly…
hrynyshyn | July 29, 2008Andy Revkin demonstrates once again why he's among the best science journalists around in his latest exploration of the challenges facing climatologists frustrated with the way their science is portrayed in the popular media. No real answer emerges from his analysis, but if every researcher and reporter involved in the subject read this piece, maybe we'd be closer to one.
The problem, in short:
Discordant findings have come in quick succession. How fast is Greenland shedding ice? Did human-caused warming wipe out frogs in the American tropics? Has warming strengthened hurricanes? Have the…
grrlscientist | July 14, 2008tags: Sizzle, global warming, climate change, documentary, polar bears, hurricane Katrina, Randy Olson, film review
The new film, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy by Randy Olson that will be released in a few days, explores a topic that concerns me greatly, so when asked if I would review it, I was pleased to do so. Sizzle is advertized as a combination of a documentary, mockumentary and reality about global warming, and therein lies its problem : it has no idea what it is supposed to be, and as a result, the audience (me, in this case), doesn't either.
I wanted to like this film, really, I…
hrynyshyn | July 14, 2008I wanted to like Sizzle. I really did. I like Randy Olson's contributions here on ScienceBlogs to Shifting Baselines. Randy is a former marine biologist and I have a degree in marine biology. He thinks the climate crisis is one of if not the most important public policy challenge of our time. So do I. Global warming pseudoskeptics drive him crazy. Me, too. If anyone should appreciate what Randy's trying to do with his latest documentary, it's me. The problem is, I wasn't quite sure what it is he's trying to do until the last section of the film. I think I figured it out, but I must report…
edyong | July 11, 2008
If you've never had the pleasure of swimming among a coral reef, you might want to get your chance sooner rather than later. Yesterday, the journal Science published the first comprehensive global assessment of the status of the world's reef-building corals, and it's results don't make for comforting reading. Almost a third of the 700-plus species surveyed face extinction; no group of land-living species, except possibly for the amphibians, are this threatened.
A team of 39 scientists led by Ken Carpenter, director of the Global Marine Species Assessment gauged the extinction risk faced by…
grrlscientist | July 2, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate variation, climate change, penguins, El Nino, marine zoning, P. Dee Boersma
Adélie penguins, Pygoscelis adeliae, and chicks.
(a) Adélie penguin chicks may get covered in snow during storms, but beneath the snow their down is warm and dry. (b) When rain falls, downy Adélie chicks can get wet and, when soaked, can become hypothermic and die.
Images: P. Dee Boersma.
According to an article that was just published in the journal BioScience, penguin populations are declining sharply due to the combined effects of overfishing and pollution…
edyong | June 24, 2008In 1994, a third of the lions in the Serengeti were killed off by a massive epidemic of canine distemper virus (CDV), an often fatal infection that affects a wide range of carnivorous mammals. Seven years later, a similar epidemic slashed the lion population in the nearby Ngorongoro Crater. While CDV was undoubtedly involved, the scale of the deaths was unprecedented. What was it about the 1994 and 2001 epidemics that claimed so many lives?
Now, a team of scientific detectives led by Linda Munson from the University of California Davis, have solved the mystery. It turns out that the lions'…
revere | June 19, 2008In the first post in this primer series we discussed the nature of electromagnetic radiation. It is via EM radiation that the sun's energy reaches the earth and since it is the balance between the energy that reaches the earth and the energy that is radiated away from the earth that is at the center of the global warming problem, we need to get this part straight. So far we have only talked generally (and very superficially) about what EM radiation is and pointed out that it can carry energy from one point to another (e.g., from the sun to the earth and from the earth back out to surrounding…
revere | June 18, 2008Objection to the scientific basis of greenhouse warming seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. That is, if you like getting the same gift over and over again and returning it because it's defective never works. Still, hope springs eternal that understanding something about it will make the disagreements clearer. So this will be the first post about the underlying science. There will be more. It's a primer, so if you know the science it's not for you. But understanding what's under the hood can be explained without requiring agreement on global warming. On the grounds that learning about…
revere | June 16, 2008Our post on what is behind the Right Wing attack on science drew a lot of attention and numerous comments. I'd like to emphasize some key points that may have gotten lost in the details (for the details, please see the original post). We'll use climate change skepticism as an example, but the principles hold for other kinds of assaults, for example, on public health concerns regarding bis phenol A.
The cardinal point is that the attacks aren't about science. Refuting false statements about whether CO2 is or is not a driver of global warming may seem (and be) necessary, but it is not the…
revere | June 13, 2008If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the US Senate couldn't even manage a paltry 60 votes to stop a filibuster of a bipartisan and none too strong global warming bill. This kind of failure isn't new. The US slow motion fall in environmental leadership has been going on for decades. In the Bush…
grrlscientist | June 5, 2008tags: arctic ice pack, global warming, climate change, environment, physics, streaming video
A stunning animation from WWF International Polar Programme, showing the progressive melting of Artice sea ice since 1979. The white is older ice -- five years or more old -- and the blues are progressively younger ice, with the shade closest to the ocean being fresh, or one year old, ice. The red dots are tracking buoys, showing how the ice is shifting further and faster as it melts. [0:34].
revere | May 30, 2008The big climate change news isn't that there is now a consensus that humans are mostly likely driving it. That's not news at all, at least to anyone who isn't paying attention or isn't just mouthing Bush administration talking points. The big news is that the denier group just got significantly smaller because the Bush administration has now acknowledged the obvious:
Burning fossil fuels in power plants and automobiles is most likely responsible for global warming, according to a Bush administration report that confirms climate risks already accepted by most of the world's scientists.
Carbon…
grrlscientist | May 19, 2008tags: surface temperature, global warming, climate change, weather, environment, streaming video
This streaming video reveals the temperatures of the Earth's surface since 1884. The video released by NASA and GISS. The only problem with this video is that I think it should run a little more slowly so it's easier to see the details. Note: Yellow = warmer than usual, Blue = cooler than usual, White = usual [0:32].
revere | May 14, 2008For all you climate change deniers out there dismayed at John McSame's apparent embrace of global warming, you have nothing to fear:
John McCain had the eager press lined up on this one for weeks. He was going to take a stand and differentiate himself from Bush by offering his solution to climate change. And today was the momentous day. McCain made his speech and no less than the New York Times dutifully trotted out an article titled McCain Differs With Bush on Climate Change. (Devilstower at Daily Kos)
The 71% of the electorate thinks the globe is warming and of these, human activity is…
grrlscientist | May 7, 2008tags: five easy ways to save the planet, environment, global warming, climate change, carbon footprint, streaming video
An amusing but instructive streaming video describing five easy ways that you can contribute to saving the planet. [3:42].