Antarctica

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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House by the sea (not a good idea)

by Gareth September 21, 2010

The Royal Society of New Zealand has just published an interesting paper on sea level rise [pdf], the latest in a series on “emerging issues” of public concern. It’s a very good overview of the current state of our understanding of the risk of future sea level rises, reviewing the evidence that’s accumulated since the [...]

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Down to the sea

by Bryan Walker May 6, 2010

An interview with climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson published yesterday in Yale Environment 360is a reminder that for those working with ice there’s not much doubt about where we’re heading. She spent six weeks of the summer on her ninth visit to Antarctica drilling ice cores on the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the fastest-warming places on earth. [...]

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Tipping and other points

by Gareth February 15, 2010

During the Copenhagen kerfuffle a lot of interesting stuff hit the web: here’s something that deserves a bit more air – a Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) special issue on tipping elements in the earth system, edited by John Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. [...]

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Antarctic science review: greening and melting

by Gareth December 5, 2009

The first comprehensive scientific review of our understanding of Antarctic climate and the way that it’s changing was published in the UK earlier this week [ScienceDaily]. The Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment report (a free download), prepared by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), points to ten key findings [PDF]: For the last [...]

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Marvellous distempered: the Copenhagen diagnosis

by Gareth November 25, 2009

The Copenhagen climate conference (COP15) opens its doors in a little under two weeks. To update participants on the science of climate a new assessment report, The Copenhagen Diagnosis, was released yesterday, and it makes grim reading. Designed to inform “a target readership of policy-makers, stakeholders, the media and the broader public” about the evidence [...]

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Deep time, deep water

by Gareth October 11, 2009

The last time CO2 hit a sustained level of 400 ppm 15-20 million years ago global average temperatures were 3 – 6ºC warmer than now, and sea level was 25 to 40 m higher, according to research released last week. That’s bad news, because the target for current international negotiations to find a successor to [...]

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More than a metre

by Bryan Walker September 10, 2009

Sea level will rise by more than a metre by 2100 according to the authors of the third chapter in the World Wide Fund for Nature’s new Arctic report, introduced by Gareth a few days ago. Eric Rignot, one of the two authors of the chapter, is principal scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering [...]

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