earth science
gregladen | January 2, 2010One of the world's oldest plants turns out to be a 13,000 year-old scrub oak (Quercus palmeri, or Palmer's Oak) in Southern California. Apparently this tree has survived for so long, despite the fact that it was born in the ice age and there have been numerous climate changes since then, by cloning itself, hiding in a crevice, being small, and growing slowly. Luck was involved as well, almost certainly.
The plant was actually discovered more than ten years ago during a survey of plant diversity in the Jurupa Hills of Riverside County, and it was noted at the time that this tree was utterly…
gregladen | December 23, 2009Why Greenhouses have nothing to do with the Greenhouse Effect, and more importantly, why CAN'T I microwave toast?
A greenhouse is a glass house sealed to keep air in but made of glass allow sunlight in. This sunlight contributes to the heat in the greenhouse by warming the ground or other material in the greenhouse, and of course the light energy is used by the plants. But the point of a greenhouse is to keep air that is warmed, by the sun and/or heaters that may be required in the greenhouse, from wafting away.
This is not how the so-called "greenhouse" effect works. There is no thing out…
gregladen | December 21, 2009Every now and then I get out my old Blog Epic on Global Warming and dust it off. I'm thinking it is time to do it again. This is a seven part series of Global Warming that covers much of the basics. Enjoy. Or get mad at me. Whatever.
About two years ago, a sea change occurred in the way that climate change news is reported, much to the annoyance of the Right Wing. It is an axiom that in reporting science, there are two (not one, not three or four, just two) sides to every issue, and one side is the plank nailed to the Democratic Party Platform, and the other side is the plank nailed to…
gregladen | December 16, 2009Yesterday, James Randi put up a blog post in which he questioned the validity of anthropogenic global warming. He has subsequently made the statement that he probably has more thinking to do about global warming, and he admits that he really knows nothing about it. So Randi's blog post is, essentially, a non-starter as an issue, although there are some interesting things to think about.
James Hrynyshyn has an excellent blog post about this, in which he reports a conversation he had with Randi about Randi's post.
Randi's original post displays a rather embarrassing ignorance of earth…
gregladen | December 5, 2009Subtitled "The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity," this might be a book you should read.
James Hansen is probably the world's best known climate scientist, partly because of his own work and his testimony before Congress, and partly because he has become a target of Global Warming denialists who seem to revel in every opportunity to accuse him of fraud, deceit, or incompetence.
In Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, Hansen provides a message that is much more severe…
gregladen | December 1, 2009 It has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that stuff has been made up and foisted on the American Public.
Tim Lambert has nailed it. He shows the code that was used to adjust climate data, he shows how the adjustment was made, what it was used for, and does an excellent job of explaining the whole thing.
Lies are being spread about climate change, and Lambert has nailed it. Have a look.
gregladen | October 20, 2009To answer that question briefly, it is really really old if you mean "how old are the oldest rocks that are exposed by the Grand Canyon," and it is probably just a few million years old (5 or 6 by some estimates) if you mean "how long did the canyon itself take to form."An African peneplain elevated by doming along the Eastern Rift Valley. The original surface, once flat but now raised as "mountains" in the distance, is shown by the dotted line.
A repost
But Creationists, of course, have a different story, especially young earth creationists. I'm not going to recount it here. If you want to…
gregladen | October 4, 2009This is a continuation of a discussion on the role of Global Warming in the decline of moose populations in Minnesota. It is also a discussion of Global Warming denialism.
When I started to write Part II of this post, I realized that one aspect of the argument would probably distract from all the others, could be dealt with quickly and summarily, and makes a nice pithy post all by itself. This aspect is the claim made by commenter Gerard on an earlier post regarding global warming (or lack thereof) in Minnesota.
Gerard made this claim:
The average monthly high/low temperatures for January…
gregladen | September 28, 2009We have had a cool summer here in Minnesota, and this has brought out the miscreants who for their own reasons do not want to get on board with the simple, well demonstrated scientific fact that global temperatures have risen, that we humans are the primary cause, and that this climate change has negative consequences.
There are probably different reasons people do not want to get on board with this reality. The main reason especially for younger individuals is that they have been told by their political mentors to not accept global warming. The political mentors, in turn, reject global…
gregladen | September 26, 2009
What they are referring to is a paper by Mojib Latif in which he notes that the media often misrepresent global warming as a continuous, year by year increase in temperature. The truth, of course, is that annual temperature varies up and down but the baseline for this variation has been going continuously up.
Like a road going up a mountain. Often the road goes up and down and up and down cross the complex terrain of the mountain side. If, while driving up this hypothetical mountain, the road dips down for a moment, one does not say "Oh, we're going home now. This whole driving up the…
grrlscientist | September 8, 2009tags: South Pacific Islands, Indonesia, Sumatra, geology, nature, volcano, global warming, Lake Toba, PBS, NOVA, television
Sixty-two-mile-long Lake Toba, seen in the center of this satellite image,
was created by the largest explosive volcanic eruption of the past
100,000 years -- an eruption whose aftermath holds important clues for us
today about rapid climate change, Drew Shindell says.
Image: NASA.
Wow, there are days when I wish I had a television, and today is one of them. Why? Tonight, PBS is showing a really fascinating program; a NOVA show entitled Mystery of the Megavolcano that…
gregladen | August 4, 2009This has come up a couple of times recently, so I thought I'd summarize the information here.
The distribution of water on Earth in cubic kilometers
Salt water:
1,318,062,462
Glaciers:
28,005,430
Groundwater:
12,270,210
Lakes:
106,396
Swamps:
13,452
Rivers:
2,446
Vapor:
13,000
Biological:
1,120
(Biological means like your spit and guts and all the juicy parts of worms and tree saps and water in bacteria and stuff.)
USGS
Wikipedia
What happens if all that glacial ice melts and ends up in the ocean?
Play with this for a while to get an idea. The maximum rise in sea level in that…
gregladen | July 1, 2009Dear MSNBC,
I know it is appropriate to have a range of opinions among the talking heads representing a news agency, and MSNBC certainly does have a range. Pat Buchanan, regular commentator on two or three MSNBC news shows, probably serves at the most conservative individual in the MSNBC panoply.
But he has to go now.
This letter comes as a reaction to Buchanan's most recent column, which addresses Darwinian theory and evolution in an over the top intellectually dishonest, inaccurate, and offensive manner. I will not discuss the details of his absurd column; several of my colleagues on…
gregladen | June 18, 2009I just got this massive continental plate sized press release from JPL. Below the fold.
- - - - - the fold - - - -
NASA Gives California's San Andreas, Other Faults a 3-D Close-up
When a swarm of hundreds of small to moderate earthquakes erupted beneath California's Salton Sea in March, sending spasms rumbling across the desert floor, it set off more than just seismometers. It also raised the eyebrows of quite a few concerned scientists. The reason: lurking underground, just a few kilometers to the northeast, lays a sleeping giant: the 160 kilometer (100 mile) long southern segment…
gregladen | June 15, 2009This is one of those science stories that is on one hand fairly simple, and on the other hand fairly complex, where the interface between simplicity and complexity causes little balls of misunderstanding to come flying out of the mix like pieces of raw pizza dough if the guy making the pizza was the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons.
What is true: A scientist named Ryskin proposes that decadal or century scale minor wiggling in the measured Earth's magnetic field is influenced by changes in ocean currents. Plausible. Interesting. Could explain some things. Not earthshaking.
What is…
gregladen | June 9, 2009I had never felt airsick before, or since. But now I was a nauseated rag doll flopping around in the middle row of a six seater prop plane and I was ready to hurl at any moment.
BBC depiction of the path of Flight 447. I find it astonishing that the most important weather related feature on the planet is a "place where there are a lot of thunderstorms" or often not even identified at all. This is equivalent to a plane crashing into the Cascades and the news reporting that the aircraft went down in a "place with some hills" or not even noting the existence of the mountain range at all, as…
gregladen | May 23, 2009One item is just published in the Journal of Climate. Simply put, the use of some very sophisticated and probably quite trustworthy models suggests that extratropical cyclones (so this means winter storms and such, mainly) will have a good deal more precipitation in them.
In the model ...
... There is a small reduction in the number of cyclones but no significant changes in the extremes of wind and vorticity in both hemispheres. ... The largest changes are in the total precipitation, where a significant increase is seen. Cumulative precipitation along the tracks of the cyclones increases by…
gregladen | May 6, 2009It's just too much of a leap! But don't worry, Texas Educators have it under control.
I love the way she says Jump, like with two syllables. Good thing the slack jawed yokels are in charge down in Texas. We would not really want Texans to stop being as stoopid as they'all are, they would not be as cute!!!!