Arctic sea ice

Nutted by reality

by Gareth March 15, 2009

Gerrit van der Lingen, a local crank, NZ CSC member and self-styled “climate change consultant” who comprehensively lost a magazine “debate” with a local scientist last year, was mightily exercised by a recent article in my local paper, The Press (one of New Zealand’s big four dailies), covering Lovelock’s latest ruminations. So incensed, in fact, [...]

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Reelin’ in the year

by Gareth February 25, 2009

The International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-8 formally draws to a close today, and when today arrives in Geneva there will be a press conference to mark the release of a summary report, The State of Polar Research [PDF], which covers some of the preliminary findings. [BBC report here]. In the run up to this event, [...]

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Tear-stained letter #2

by Gareth December 22, 2008

Some summer reading for NZ prime minister John Key: Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (“I’m no potty peer”) has penned another of his dippy epistles — an “open letter” in the next issue of Free Radical, an NZ libertarian publication. His last, to John McCain, was a triumph of hilariously overblown climate crank nonsense. This [...]

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Cold moments

by Gareth December 20, 2008

More data on the state of the methane hydrates on the Siberian shelf emerged during the American Geophysical Union’s Fall meeting in San Francisco this week. At a press conference covering recent work in the Arctic, Igor Semiletov, the leader of the team working on the Yakov Smirnitsky last (Arctic) summer, told reporters: “The concentrations [...]

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Six Degrees

by Bryan Walker December 15, 2008

This posting is based on a Waikato Times column written in July. The Royal Society in the UK awarded its 2008 science writing prize to Mark Lynas for his global warming book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Warming Planet. I found the book telling when I read it last year, and it was good [...]

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Going, going, gone (by 2015)

by Gareth December 7, 2008

One for the furry blogger with sharp teeth: the Winnipeg Free Press reports that University of Manitoba geoscientist David Barber is predicting that the Arctic will be ice free in summer in the next seven years. “We’ll always have ice in the winter time in the Arctic, but it will always be first-year ice,” Barber [...]

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The cracks are showing #2 (polar notes)

by Gareth December 5, 2008

Summer’s arriving on the Wilkins ice shelf, and its disintegration continues. New cracks are threatening to destroy the ice “bridge” that’s been holding the ice shelf pinned between Charcot Island (top left) and the Antarctic peninsula. This picture, captured by the European Space Agency’s ENVISAT satellite on November 26, shows the new cracks (coloured lines) [...]

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The tracks of my tears

by Gareth November 30, 2008

NASA was 50 years old last July, and the Earth Observatory has been celebrating by reviewing some of the classic images they’ve captured over the years. The image of the Earth at left was captured by Apollo 8 astronauts on December 22nd 1968 – one of the first “blue marble” pictures. Forty years on, it’s [...]

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In the heat of the (Arctic) night

by Gareth November 2, 2008

Time for an Arctic update and a bit of “original” research. There’s been quite a bit of polar news around, and a rapid freeze-up is underway in the Arctic – so rapid that some are declaring that the sea ice is “back to normal” for the time of year, based on this graph from the [...]

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(The Village) Greenland Preservation Society

by Gareth October 18, 2008

The latest satellite data shows that this summer’s snowmelt in northern Greenland was “extreme”, according to Marco Tedesco, assistant professor of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at The City College of New York. From the press release: “Having such extreme melting so far north, where it is usually colder than the southern regions is extremely interesting,” [...]

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