Antarctica

Cracked PIG spawns big berg

by Gareth November 3, 2011

NASA’s IceBridge operation for this Antarctic summer has discovered that the Pine Island Glacier is in the process of calving a massive iceberg — 880 square kilometres of the floating glacier tongue is about to go floatabout, leaving the glacier snout shorter than any time since its position was first recorded in the 1940s. The [...]

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A lecture not to miss

by Bryan Walker September 17, 2011

Tim Naish’s lecture, of which we gave notice recently, is now recorded on the Climate Change Research Institute’s website. I warmly recommend it for viewing. Naish is one of the lead authors for the paleoclimate chapter for working group 1 of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report due in 2013. In this lecture he uses paleoclimate [...]

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No Penguin Café when the ice melts

by Bryan Walker June 30, 2011

At Yale Environment 360 Fen Montaigne provides a fascinating, if disturbing, report on the findings of scientists working on the effects of sea ice retreat on the polar marine food chain. Montaigne is the author of the book Fraser’s Penguins which I reviewed earlier this year and of an earlier article at Yale Environment about [...]

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The Climate Show #12: twisters, Olaf on ozone, and Google in the sun

by Gareth May 5, 2011

Ozone is the centrepiece of our show this week, with Dr Olaf Morgenstern of NIWA’s Central Otago atmospheric science lab (celebrating its 50th birthday at the moment) explaining the ins and outs of the ozone holes north and south, and their impacts on the climate system. Plus tornadoes, heatwaves, UN negotiations at an impasse, more [...]

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The Climate Show #9: Barry Brook, hot spots and melting ice

by Gareth March 18, 2011

With the terrible events in Japan uppermost in everyone’s mind, this week’s Climate Show goes nuclear, examining the prospects for the future of nuclear energy with Professor Barry Brook from the University of Adelaide. John Cook looks at what the tropical troposphere hot spot really means, and Gareth and Glenn look at mass loss from [...]

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Cambridge on ice

by Gareth March 17, 2011

From Cambridge University: the director of the Scott Polar Research Centre, Prof Julian Dowdeswell talks about his job. He has to visit Greenland and Antarctica to measure glaciers, so there are lots of pretty pictures to watch. Not a bad job, even if the implications of what he’s finding (Greenland outlet glaciers doubling in speed) [...]

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Something for the weekend: poles, podcasts and Chomsky

by Gareth February 12, 2011

Something for everyone this weekend: a few podcasts to grab, ice news from both ends of the planet, interesting reading, and a great interview with Noam Chomsky. Audio first: Radio NZ National’s Bryan Crump interviewed Prof Jean Palutikof, Director of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffith University in Queensland at the beginning [...]

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Fraser’s Penguins

by Bryan Walker January 10, 2011

I decided to read Fen Montaigne’s book Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica because of what I understood it would have to say about climate change. It does say very important things on that subject, but along the way it proved a fascinating account of the life of the Adélie penguins of [...]

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Warming at the walls of the “citadel of ice”

by Bryan Walker November 24, 2010

Australian-born writer Meredith  Hooper was looking for “a route into the complex business of the Earth’s changing climate” when she spent January to March 2002 at Palmer Station on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. She watched and chronicled the work of scientist Bill Fraser and his team who for years have studied the [...]

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World leaders pretend

by Bryan Walker November 15, 2010

Apparently the American Geophysical Union’s readiness to speak out on climate change which I reported in a recent post was not as the LA Times portrayed it.  Joseph Romm has written of his disappointment that the AGU is constrained by a determination to veer away from anything that could be construed as advocacy. They state [...]

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