Taking a break from the technology that has allowed us to explore near outer space we turn to inner space, our marine environment. I remember when I was very young and looking at a globe and asking my teacher “why do we call this planet Earth when it is mostly covered by water?” I never
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A recent headline caught my eye, “Wind farms make climate change WORSE: Turbines actually heat up local areas.” This appeared in the London, England based Daily Mail. The article reported that air temperatures around four of the world’s largest wind farms had incresed over a decade by 0.72 degrees Celsius ( about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit).
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Urban Renewal and a Dash of White Paint A recent study published in the April 2012 edition of Environmental Research Letters, the Journal of the British Institute of Physics, and entitled The Long-Term Effect of Increasing the Albedo of Urban Areas, looks at proposals to make cities more sunlight reflective by painting roofs white and
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Today is Earth Day and it seems appropriate to include an article about climate change. Last week a study was published in Nature Geoscience showing that some areas of the Himalayas were gaining ice steadily. The study compared data collected on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2000 with the French SPOT5 satellite data collected in
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I couldn’t miss the opportunity to memorialize RMS Titanic in this blog on the 100th-year anniversary of it sinking. Could it happen again? Could a ship hit an ice berg and sink? In light of the Costa Concordia sinking in the Mediterranean, maritime safety is once more a front page headline. But ice bergs are
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With regular recurrence the Earth has endured 100,000 year cycles of continental glaciation throughout the Pleistocene Epoch starting approximately 2 million years ago give or take 500,000 years. What caused this disruptive climate change? Climatologists, geologists, oceanographers and astronomers believe that something happened to Earth’s axial inclination or tilt, or something happened to our orbit
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Malaria, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Dengue Fever, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Chagas, Chikungunya and many other diseases infect humans through insect carriers. Ticks and mosquitoes are the primary disease agents. Birds are secondary agents because they get bitten by insects, host the viruses, and then transmit them to uninfected insects who then bite us.
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If there is a canary in the coal mine of climate science, the temperature of the ocean is our best early warning system that something is amiss. As the atmosphere warms and intermixes with the ocean surface some of that heat is transferred to the water. That high heat capacity makes the ocean an ideal
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Does the recent warm spell over the eastern half of North America reflect climate change induced by increased greenhouse gases? When Europe experienced an extreme heat wave in 2003, two scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research began a study to see if that event could be related to global warming. Dim Coumou
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In a new study conducted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to be published in the journal Computers & Geosciences, in May 2012, , researchers announced a new method for assessing global water stress. The tool they developed integrates climate, population and freshwater statistics to provide future projections. The authors, Esther Parish, Evan Koda, Karsten
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