Penguins are admirable birds, living as they do in extreme cold, working in partnership with their mate to be dedicated parents. Besides, just look at them! They’re adorable! So I thought it delightful that we’re now keeping tabs on these guys from space: [Read more…]
Ice floats. That’s fortunate, because if frozen water was denser than liquid, earth would be a very different world. Ice would build up at the bottom of the sea until only a thin surface ocean would be left, perhaps only seasonal at that, affecting climate in dramatic ways. But floating ice combined with warmer temperatures can also cause glaciers to speed up. Moulins form more often and earlier, lubricating the interface between ice and land below and buoying up the ice sheet. That now seems to be happening in Greenland: [Read more…]
When defense pork-loving lawmakers aren’t bashing climate science and pooh-poohing the idea of climate change as a scientific conspiracy, their corporate owners are eying potentially lucrative resources under the north polar ice cap: [Read more…]
Fresh cores taken from the bottom of the Dea Sea indicate it fluctuated wildly for tens of thousands of years and may have dried up once or twice along the way: [Read more…]
When you look at that NASA GISS graph of temperature stations, one features jumps out: the flat-line beginning around WW2 and extending through the 70s. For awhile climatologists have suspected that was caused by relatively short-lived particulates that block/reflect sunlight, produced en masse by a big jump in industrialization for war production at the end of the Great Depression, perhaps aided by lots of burning cities and countryside. A new study confirms this: [Read more…]
Given the current anti-science jubilee going on among wingnut foot soldiers on the orders of their ignorant field commanders, you wouldn’t think they’d make a fuss about science. But you’d be wrong. One bold, fearless, anonymous member of the Keyboard Komanndos is mad as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore! [Read more…]
A new study links the rejection of science with political party, and the correlation that turned up should surprise no one. Chris Mooney writing at DeSmogBlog looks at the results: [Read more…]
A huge, lingering ridge of high pressure over the eastern half of the United States brought summer-like temperatures to North America in March 2012. Image courtesy NASA/EO.
A spring heat wave shattered records across the US and Canada this month and some researchers worry it could be a symptom of sizzling summers and active hurricane seasons for the next few years. And that could be just the tip of the vanishing iceberg: [Read more…]
The primeval earth and smoggy sky with an enormous crescent moon at twilight as they may have appeared a mere billion years after formation.
Read an old astronomy text and you might see mention of a Goldilocks zone, the distance between the earth and sun, where the blessed earth is not too hot and not too cold. More recent work has shown this is a modern day fairy tale, the early earth was actually too far away. By rights the oceans should have been solid ice, the earth a lifeless, barren snowball. But it wasn’t. A new study confirms one big reason why the earth stayed so unseasonably warm early on: [Read more…]
Update 3/16/12: Joe Romm weighs in at Climate Progress
James Inhofe has a book to sell, and God-eh might be on the side of Big Oil, but Inhofe’s book will have to sell itself with no help from the Divine. So the deluded senator from Oklahoma will be making the media rounds in search of a few more shekels to pad his quarter million a year salary and luxury health-care plan courtesy of the US taxpayer. Which explains how he ended up behind enemy lines Thursday on MSNBC’s the Rachel Maddow show. [Read more…]