ocean warming
gregladen | March 15, 2017A potpourri of miscellany:
Human Caused Climate Change and the Oceans
It is great to see our local political non-print non-TV news agency, MNPost, covering an important climate change story with local connections. I'll be writing John Abraham's research up myself shortly.
An intriguing and important-sounding new research paper caught my eye on Sunday, with its finding that the world’s oceans have been warming at a much faster pace than is generally recognized.
Because seawater holds more than 90 percent of the excess heat that arrives from the sun but, thanks to greenhouse gases, isn’t…
gregladen | July 20, 2015Every month NASA GISS comes out with the new data for the prior month's global surface temperature, and I generally grab that data set and make a graph or two. In a way this is a futile effort because the actual global surface temperature month by month is not as important as the long term trend. But at the same time it is a worthy exercise because it is news, and especially lately, we seem to be breaking records of one kind or another every month.
This month I was out of town and actually traveling sans computer, when the NASA GISS data became available. So, for me to produce the graphs…
illconsidered | November 12, 2014Dear Readers,
Find below an interesting press release I may as well share verbatim:
The rapidly melting ice sheets on the coast of West Antarctica are a potential major contributor to rising ocean levels worldwide. Although warm water near the coast is thought to be the main factor causing the ice to melt, the process by which this water ends up near the cold continent is not well understood.
Using robotic ocean gliders, Caltech researchers have now found that swirling ocean eddies, similar to atmospheric storms, play an important role in transporting these warm waters to the Antarctic coast—…
illconsidered | November 27, 2010Oh boy, get out the tinfoil. Here's one the conspiracy nuts will howl over.
The temperature record that has been showing the lowest anomaly in the recent decades, HadCRU, the dataset managed by the UK's Met Office and the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), is about to be revised upwards.
Met Office scientists have reviewed the whole sea surface temperature data set between 1850 and 2006 to take account of this bias. A paper has been submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research which looks in more detail at all the biases in sea-surface temperature measurements from…
illconsidered | June 1, 2010A new study came out in Nature a couple of weeks ago that assesses multiple records of ocean temperatures over the last couple of decades and finds that there is "a statistically significant linear warming trend for 1993-2008 of 0.64âWâm-2".
The challenge the paper took on was one of assessing the uncertainties and inconsistencies in the various records. The paper is Lyman, J.L., et al. 2010. Robust warming of the global upper ocean. Nature 465 and Real Climate had an article about it here.
Also in that issue of Nature is an article by Kevin Trenbreth [PDF] that discusses that paper and…
illconsidered | April 21, 2010A nice site about our blue planet's blueness, The Reef Tank, asked to repost a recent ocean related article of mine and did so here.
Always worth checking them out!
illconsidered | October 29, 2007Real Climate has a good post on geo-engineering and why it is only fitting as a final act of desperation, not a policy platform. It expresses very well all my own misgivings (it's a terribly dangerous one-chance-to-get-it-right experiment on the entire planet, it commits the human race to centuries of climatic meddling, it will ultimately be more expensive and harder to agree on than simply reducing CO2) so I won't enumerate them here, just go read it all there.
But I will emphasize one of the points Ray Pierrehumbert mentions that is too often overlooked.
As anyone who follows the science…