Millions of...
Category: sea level rise
Millions of US beach residents better put taller foundations on their houses no matter whether they see sunrises or sunsets beyond the surf. Two reports put sea level rise in the news. One addresses the US Atlantic coast, the other the Pacific. Both see long stretches of shoreline where the rise appears destined to exceed a global average that itself is sizeable. One of the extrapolative analyses is from a report published Friday directly by the National Research Council on request of West Coast state agencies. It reports not only that California's rise will be above par, but that the global forecast that the IPCC issued five years ago is short of the present scientific consensus...
After North...
After North Carolina collected hardly any laughs and a heap of scorn (plus, yes and alas in our fractious nation, noddings in agreement) for outlawing marriage of couples that don't comprise a man and a woman, soon it may do something equally brick-headed but at least it has a giggle factor. This one more directly concerns and defies science. It thus may give those of us heading to Research Triangle in October for the NASW and CASW conjoined ScienceWriters2012 meeting something more on which to commiserate with the fact-influenced residents who richly...
A letter to Nature published today a letter from a few...
A letter to Nature published today a letter from a few cryosphere experts (they know their ice) in Boulder at the Univ. of Colorado and the Nat'l Center for Atmosphere Research. It's mainly a celebration of the growing ability to measure with great precision the integrated impacts of small changes scattered around the globe. Most important, the two GRACE satellites (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) give continuously-updated snapshots of how much ice is locked in glaciers at mid-latitudes, in big ice caps and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic, and so on. The result: melting ice is raising sea level just like we thought. But more of it is from the big ice sheets and less from mountain glaciers including on the Tibetan...
The Miller-...
The Miller-McCune magazine (its about page) has out today from writer Jim Morrison an enterprising long account from the Alligator River Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. Some of us have read about this place before because of its program to save red wolves, and also because the low-lying area is vulnerable to erosion and to its main enabler, sea level rise. One learns here a further discouraging word from a grand old man of coastal erosion science, Orrin Pilkey of Duke U - in just...
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A look this morning at the Associated Press feed revealed two breaking stories on oceans and their environmental status - and led to much more.
Seth Borenstein is writing on a new report for the UN that adds glum, urgent detail to an already...
To digress. I recently...
To digress. I recently met a friendly bunch of people who won't believe a word of the news that is behind this post. Moved to keep up on things, and expressly on what people in the science communication biz are saying, yours truly recently attended a meeting of Tea Party Patriots. The speaker was of interest - he was to describe tools for recognizing the difference between politically-driven science and real science. For my dashed-off report on that meeting, read this. By its lights, all that follows below reflects mere politically-driven science. It is...
And the icemelt goes on.
In...
And the icemelt goes on.
In Geophysical Research Letters a man who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and at UC Irvine (and his colleagues at NCAR and in the Netherlands) report that satellite and other observations, gathered by two separate techniques of measurement over the last few decades, reveal a markedly quickening loss of mass by the ice sheets of Greenland and of Antarctica. Their shrinking is about to overtake what had been the primary source of cryosphere contribution to rising sea levels, the melting of smaller mountain glaciers and ice caps elsewhere in the world and mostly at lower latitudes. Ergo, they conclude, sea level rise in this century is likely to be at or beyond the top end of the...
The big...
The big climate meetings are underway in Cancun, Mexico. Not as big as Copenhagen - perhaps they'll do better merely because expectations are lower? - but big enough. I've been meaning to do an opening roundup, but the morning's seem to go by faster and faster. Soon.
In the meantime, here's related news to discuss. It has seemed to me that US, and UK, climate change reporting has been a bit muted lately, stunned by the vociferous campaign by the contrarian wing of politically-loaded and generally conservative science to declare global warming's imminent peril an overheated creation of liberal imagination. But that could be me, feeling blue over recent turns of events.
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