Global Warming
gregladen | May 8, 2008
In this May 1, 2008, visible image from NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft, Cyclone Nargis is ... a Category one hurricane located 370 miles west of Yangon, Myanmar, moving east-northeast at eight knots.... Fishermen are advised not to venture out to sea.
Based on information from MSNBC, CNN and BBC, certain things regarding Nargis seem to be coming to light.
1) The death toll will likely exceed 100,000 people.
2) The Myanmar Junta might be hiding bodies.
3) The Myanmar Junta is allowing aid material but not aid workers into affected regions.
4) Given…
gregladen | May 5, 2008This is in Myanmar, where a repressive military government has yet to allow relief workers mustering now in nearby Thailand to enter the country to lend assistance.
Cyclone Nargis made land fall Saturday in southern Myanmar in the vicinity of Labutta with sustained winds of up to 120 mph. It is only now being reported to any significant degree, even though it was clear that this would be a major disaster even before land fall.
"Reports are coming out of the delta coast, particularly the Irrawaddy region, that in some villages up to 95 percent of houses have been destroyed," said Matthew…
gregladen | April 18, 2008Good question ... what IS in the air?
The simple answer is that the air ... the Earth's atmosphere ... is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with a tiny amount of some other gases including water vapor. Then, there's dirt. I want to talk a little about the oxygen, one of the other gases (carbon dioxide to be exact), the water vapor, and the dirt.
Oxygen
The oxygen is one of the most important parts to us because we (and all the other animals) need it to breath. To me, what is most interesting about the oxygen is that in the old days ... before any animals or plants evolved but life…
gregladen | April 11, 2008In Al Gore's brand-new slideshow (premiering exclusively on TED.com), he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of "generational mission" -- the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement -- to set it right. Gore's stirring presentation is followed by a brief Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates' climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future.
gregladen | April 10, 2008A noted hurricane researcher predicted Wednesday that rising water temperatures in the Atlantic will bring a "well above average" storm season this year, including four major storms.
The updated forecast by William Gray's team at Colorado State University calls for 15 named storms in the Atlantic in 2008 and says there's a better than average chance that at least one major hurricane will hit the United States.
An average of 5.9 hurricanes form in the Atlantic each year.
"The Atlantic is a bit warmer than in the past couple of years," said Phil Klotzbach, a member of the forecast team. "That…
gregladen | March 26, 2008Welcome to Berry Go Round #3, the blog carnival deicated to all things botanical.
The previous installment, Berry Go Round #2, is located here, at Further Thoughts. If you would like to submit an item to the next Berry Go Round, you may use this handy submission form. The Berry Go Round Home Page is here.
Let us begin right away with the Artichokes. Seeds Aside has a piece on the relationship between the artichoke and the cardoon, both known in ADL (ancient dead language) as Cynara cardunculus. The phyloge relatinship between the two, and the story of domestication for each, is very…
gregladen | March 19, 2008During Earth Hour, you switch off the lights and other non-essential electronic devices. At 8:00 PM March 29th. You'll save electricity, but more importantly, you'll be making a point.
Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming.
This simple act has captured the hearts and minds of people all over the world. As a result, at 8pm March 29, 2008 millions of people in some of the world's major capital cities,…
gregladen | March 12, 2008The pending federal decision about whether to protect the polar bear as a threatened species is as much about climate science as it is about climate change.
The US Fish and Wildlife service is contemplating the listing of the obviusly endangered polar bear as a threatened species. Well, duh...
The problem for them (the US Federal Government, which has been converted over the last 7 years into a right wing think tank) is that the main threat to the polar bear is global warming, and there are still plenty of individuals in charge of the US that want to deny global warming.
But, with…
gregladen | January 31, 2008
Proposals to give the latter part of the present geological period (the Holocene) a new name ... the Anthropocene ... are misguided, scientifically invalid, and obnoxious. However, there is a use for a term that is closely related to "Anthropocene" and I propose that we adopt that term instead.
The pithy title of the paper making this proposal is "Are we now living in the Anthropocene" (sic: no question mark is included in this title, enigmatically).
It is not an entirely stupid idea. The paper argues that there are major changes of the type often used to distinguish between major…
gregladen | January 24, 2008The amount of ice lost to the sea from Antarctica has increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years. This is the result of an increase in glacial flow. It had previously been thought, and perhas was the case, that Greenland ice loss outpaced the Antarctica. This is no longer the case.
An article coming out in the next issue of Nature Geoscience, by Rignot et al ("Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling") is the most detailed study of this phenomenon to date.
There are two factors that affect the flow of ice into the sea at the edge of the…
gregladen | January 18, 2008"A University of Alberta Arctic ice researcher is closing in on some real understanding about the process that might be feeding rising sea levels."
Using satellite microwave data, Martin Sharp, a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has helped lead a team of researchers who remapped the summer melt extent and duration across Greenland for a five-year period stretching from 2000 to 2004.
"What we're interested in is the problem of explaining why the rates of global sea level rising have more or less doubled since the early 1990s compared with the early part of the…
gregladen | January 15, 2008
New York City underwater ? CNC Breaking News - Aug 2051Uploaded by CNCNews
This is a promo for a new National Geographic documentary.
"Six Degrees Could Change the World explores the potential impacts of global warming degree-by-degree--through six degrees over the next hundred years. Filmed on five continents, the program tracks the world's top climate researchers and follows ranchers, photographers and everyday people to uncover climate trends. From Greenland's ice sheet to tropical ocean coral reefs, from Himalayan glaciers to the Amazon rainforest, come chilling firsthand accounts 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 | January 3, 2008Analyze Everything keeps an eye on energy policy in Kansas, and is happily reporting the following:
Not only did the Kansas Department of Health and the Environment make Kansas the first state to deny the construction of a new power plant based solely on greenhouse emissions, it turns out Kansans are totally on-board.
This is based on a poll showing that 62% of Kansans agree with this policy decision.
In contrast, Republican State Senate President Ste Morris's reaction was "I just can't imagine that would be an accurate poll ... Virtually everyone I've talked to has been concerned about the…
gregladen | January 2, 2008In Stockholm, the heat will be sucked out of the bodies of the thousands of people who pass through the Central Railway station to heat the buildings.
"So many people go through the Central Station ... We want to harness some of the warmth they produce to help heat the new building," Karl Sundholm, of the Swedish state-held property administration company Jernhuset, told AFP.
[source]
A quarter of a million people pass through the station daily, which should provide a lot of heat. Normally, their body heat, and their body odor, is vented from the building. Once the new system is…
gregladen | December 19, 2007A SiCortex SC648 supercomputer and a Linux cluster of 648 CPU's and a TB of main memory woudl draw about 1,200 watts. That's gotta widen your Carbon Footprint!
Unless, of course, you are a bunch of crazy MIT students withe bicycles, and you've got generators attached to the bikes.
A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC).
...
An SC648 chip, with six processors on it, draws around 8 watts of power, which compares to a typical notebook computer CPU needing 100 watts,…
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 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…