Oceans
illconsidered | April 15, 2014So, the bad news is that it is looking increasingly likely that the world will experience a very strong El Nino event this 2014-2015 winter (winter in the N. hemisphere, summer down under). There is even talk of a super-El Nino, one to rival 1998's phenomenal event. Lots of good information on that here at P3. Some forecasters are now putting the odds at 70%.
Model ensemble predictions showing a coming El Nino
The repercussions for global and regional weather are very large, there will be winners and losers, though as with climate change impacts in general, the wins are no match for the…
cevans | July 7, 2013Discovery, by nature, has a ripple effect. When one thing is found to be plausible, testable, or true, a suite of potential other truths and plausibilities tend to follow suit. This is the nature of inductive reasoning, the foundation of the scientific method, and the reason why science–as a human project–is generational. We discover something unexpected, and we celebrate twofold, threefold, and morefold, because its nuances and implications can ebb outwards, often lending hope to scientists working in entirely different fields.
Take the recent discovery of life in Lake Vostok, for instance:…
illconsidered | March 26, 2013Jeff Masters reports on these studies:
Grinsted, A., J. C. Moore, and S. Jevrejeva, 2012, "A homogeneous record of Atlantic hurricane surge threat since 1923," PNAS 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1209542109
Grinsted, A., J. C. Moore, and S. Jevrejeva, 2012, "Projected Atlantic hurricane surge threat from rising temperatures" PNAS March 18, 2013 201209980, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1209980110
There is a press release here.
And apparently this is on top of the effects from sea level rise, of which rises measured by metres are not out of the question. I believe that a 1 cm rise in sea level equates to a…
illconsidered | October 15, 2012Here is a pretty awesome video from NASA showing a 3D earth view of global ocean currents as they were from June 2005 to December 2007. It is fascinating to watch the behavior of both large and small features and how they interact. Notable for neighbors of the Atlantic ocean is the Gulf Stream bringing warm water from the Gulf of Mexico area north and east to keep the Queen warm in winter, and notable for the Antarctic ice sheets is the relative isolation, in terms of mixing, of the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic climate in general.
It is constructed with a combination of observed and…
illconsidered | September 10, 2012Further to my mention of Ken Caldiera's recent Scientific American article "The Great Climate Experiment" the other day, I wanted to call attention to this passages as well:
the vast oceans resist change, but change they will. At no time in Earth’s past—with the possible exception of mass-extinction events—has ocean chemistry changed as much and as rapidly as scientists expect it to over the coming decades. When CO2 enters the oceans, it reacts with seawater to become carbonic acid. In high enough concentrations, this carbonic acid can cause the shells and skeletons of many marine organisms…
illconsidered | September 6, 2012
August sea ice extent in the Arctic this year was 640,000 square kilometers below the previous record set in 2007. It is also already a record monthly low for any month, though that record will not last as it is going to be broken this September when the lowest extent of the year is normally reached. In less than the last two months, multi-year ice declined by 33% and the oldest ice (over 5 years) declined by 54% (and that ice ain't coming back). While the unusual Arctic Cyclone probably had a noticeable impact on the evolution of this year's (still deepening) record ice loss, it must be…
esiegel | June 4, 2012"Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties." -James Jeans
Here on Earth, every living thing is based around four fundamental, elemental building blocks of life: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and, perhaps most importantly, carbon.
Image Credit: Robert Johnson / University of Pennsylvania.
From diamonds to nanotubes to DNA, carbon is indispensable for constructing practically all of the most intricate structures we know of. Most of the carbon in our world comes from long-dead stars, in the form of Carbon-12: carbon atoms containing six…
illconsidered | May 21, 2012This image has been going around the intertubes recently, I saw it first on Planet 3.0 and again on APOD. It is one of those interesting illustrations of large quantities that seems surprising or anti-intuitive either because you never thought about it carefully before or just because it is hard to get your head around sizes that are so far outside the realm of everyday experience.
Anyway, I am posting it because my wife insisted (a very unusual turn of events, considering the usual frown upon spending my non-work time on the computer!). When she saw it she became quite alarmed and thought…
cevans | March 31, 2012Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography?
Read Rimbaud!
- Phillipe Diolé
I've written many times, although not recently, about the ocean.
When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship's log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson, and adolescent screeds on the perils of the Mariana trench. At some point in my career, I ported my energies outward to the cosmos, reasoning, as the ancient alchemists did, that "As Above, So Below."
The movement from the deep to the distant, from sea to space, seemed like a sensible evolution. I saw…
milhayser | October 13, 2011
Meteorology still depends on a bit of clairvoyance, but in the 19th century many sailors, fishermen, and farmers "had to rely on storm glass, an inexpensive and profoundly inaccurate divining tool." The mixture of "camphor crystals, potassium nitrate, ammonium chloride, water and alcohol" transitions from "solid to crystalline under circumstances that still aren't full understood." Frank Swain has details and pictures on SciencePunk, along with an account of the origin of forecasting in the British Isles. On Class M, James Hrynyshyn considers the complicated effects of clouds on world…
illconsidered | September 10, 2011What Exxon says, through its various mouthpeices, that global warming is not happening or is happening but reversing or what have you, is apparently not what it believes.
Once seen as a useless, ice-clogged backwater, the Kara Sea now has the attention of oil companies. That is partly because the sea ice is apparently receding.
Two billion is alot of money to put where your mouth is not!
illconsidered | June 24, 2011The natural world is complicated. Therefore, so is the science that tries to understand it.
Complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity are all a part of the story that describes processes that are as extraordinary as they are mundane. While these are the very characteristics of scientific study that motivate professional and amateur alike, they are also the characteristics that give delayers, doubters and liars in the climate debates ample material for confusing and misrepresenting reality.
One such complexity is the interaction of infra-red or long wave radiation (IR or LW), the ocean surface…
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 | November 10, 2010A great and substantive post up at Skeptical Science on La Nina and what we should expect (and not expect) in terms of its impact on global temperatures.
Read it all!
(image borrowed from Skeptical Science)
La Ninas typically redistribute the global heat budget in such a way as average surface temperatures are depressed from where they might otherwise have been, and we are several months into a strong one now.
(image borrowed from Skeptical Science)
Be on the lookout for lots more "global warming stopped!" bull.
illconsidered | October 26, 2010Like rumours of Mark Twain's death, the claims of the disappearance of BP's oil spill have been greatly exagerated.
From the Times-Picyune of New Orleans. Additional photos here. These pictures are only a few days old.
Watch/Listen/Read this interview from DemocracyNow! as well:
we hear that five million barrels of oil were released from the Macondo well. We know that [ 362] miles were oiled in four states, 400 species of animals threatened from this, 400 controlled burns that killed hundreds of sea turtles and untold numbers of dolphins and sea mammals. We're told that it's over, that…
illconsidered | October 18, 2010Okay, so this one is a bit of a tear-jerker and I usually like to avoid mixing sentimentality with environmentalism, but it is very informative and interesting if sad. It is greenman3610's Climate Crock of the Week from about three weeks ago and as usual well worth watching.
I tend to be skeptical about anthropomorphizing our fellow earthlings, but I'll be damned if that wasn't a very affectionate mama walrus hugging her baby! If walruses weren't so ugly they just might top polar bears in terms of public concern...
illconsidered | October 4, 2010For any fellow Vancouverites out there, you can catch a free screening of "A Sea Change" (a movie about ocean acidification) at UBC. It's at the Norm Theatre in the Student Union Building this Tuesday, Oct 5, at 6:00 pm. It's being put on by the Student Environment Centre.
illconsidered | July 13, 2010Corexit was a big news topic at the beginning of this tragic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the gulf of Mexico but it seems little talked about now.
There is no question that BP's calculation in its decision to use so much of this toxic chemical prioritizes the cosmetics of the situation over ecological impact and the health of cleanup crews. So much more important is PR that BP has not just refused to provide respirators to displaced fisherman labour crews, they threaten them with firing if they use their own!.
They don't care where the oil-dispersant mixture goes or what it harms as long…
jjacquet | June 27, 2010Almost every hour I receive some new piece of information that I want to write about on this blog. And yet, as you'll notice, the posts are spotty. The truth is, there is simply too much to criticize. Just consider the oceans this week.
The IWC met to discuss whether to reopen commercial whaling, which, in terms of ethics, is a return to the Middle Ages. Reporters are still calling Daniel Pauly to get him to address the debate (there is no debate) that whales eat all of our seafood (of course they don't; we do). Apparently, the IWC did not reach an agreement so things remain the same.…
cwilcox | June 20, 2010Wave breaking in Alabama (Photographer Dave Martin/AP) versus wave in Hawaii (Photographer Clark Little)
Which do you prefer?