Global Day of Overshoot

August 13th was Earth Overshoot Day. The correct date, if calculated precisely, would come earlier and earlier each year, the current choice is just an approximation. This year, the year 2015, by sometime around August 13th, humanity had consumed as much of what we require from the lands and seas as our planet can sustainabley …

As alien as it gets

Humankind has touched the surface of the solar system's most alien of objects. Image taken from NAVCAM top 10 at 10 km – 10. There are no words...

Caltech: Robotic Ocean Gliders Discover Why Antarctic Polar Ice is Melting

Dear 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 …

TED – Gavin Schmidt on climate modeling

In the video below Gavin Schmidt gives a "TED Talk" on climate models, taking us from an overview of their construction to the resulting emergent processes and their skill at reproducing much more than a global average temperature trend. Gavin is an excellent communicator and a true hero in humanity's fight against itself over the …

Coal is Bad

Coal-fired electricity production is bad on so many levels. You'd think humans could learn from history, but sadly, no, and no.  The childhood asthma statistics alone should be enough.  Coal burning power plants are a leading producer of asthma causing pollution.  And then there's the mercury...and the mountain-top removal, and the waste products..and, well, when …

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor – Chapter 18

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 17 Table of Contents Chapter 19 Chapter 18 Amazon, Sept. 29, 2055 Have you ever wondered what is the logic of your life? Sometimes I feel like a piece of flotsam bouncing on the waves of a river whose depth and currents I cannot fathom, whose path I …

Inside an Antarctic Time Machine

Most of us interested in climate science understand the uniqueness and importance of deep ice cores. It is truly a remarkable record of many aspects of past climate including dust, methane, sea level proxies and carbon dioxide. The video below (a YouTubed TED Talk)is a very fascinating look at what it takes to retrieve one. …

Nicely said!

This, from adelady, is so well put I just had to highlight it. It is a response to the usual "we'll just deal with whatever climate change throws at us later" inactivist argument: The one thing we do have in our favour is our astounding intelligence - it's also astounding how we fail to use …

Regional climate response to solar-radiation management

Geoengineering is getting more and more attention in political discussions as well as research. I am by no means a proponent of any geoengineering scheme I have heard of and the majority of them try to address surface temperature only and therefore do nothing about "the other CO2 problem", aka ocean acidification. I must confess …

Putting out fire with gasoline?

Corexit 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 …