Greenland

What a waste(land)

by Bryan Walker October 27, 2010

I was pleased to catch sight of the first two words of the headline on the Eco Issues page of the Waikato Times this week — “The Arctic”, it said, and I assumed thankfully that they were going to focus on the alarming developments there. And so they were, but not in the sense I [...]

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Arctic report card 2010: a one-way trip to warming

by Gareth October 25, 2010

Last week NOAA released the 2010 update of its Arctic Report Card, covering the 2009/10 winter season and 2010 summer sea ice minimum. It makes for sobering reading. Greenland experienced record high temperatures, ice melt and glacier area loss, sea ice extent was the third lowest in the satellite record, and Arctic snow cover duration [...]

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Gone for good: Arctic Ocean ice free all year by the 2040s?

by Gareth October 18, 2010

A few days ago I used a combination of Arctic sea ice volume data from the University of Washington’s PIOMAS model and NSIDC sea ice extent numbers to project that the Arctic Ocean would be effectively ice-free in late summer within ten years. The key to that exercise was the rate at which the volume [...]

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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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Monday miscellany

by Gareth September 13, 2010

I‘m going to be away from my desk for a few days this week, so here’s a few interesting things to read and reflect on. First up: Wellington’s hosting this year’s New Zealand Soil Carbon Conference at Te Papa from Wednesday to Friday. Keynote speakers are Tim Flannery and Christine Jones, and topics to be [...]

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On fire inside a snowball

by Gareth August 15, 2010

Fire: NOAA’s National Climate Data Centre has posted its report on global climate for July (press release). The combined global land and sea surface temperature of 16.5ºC was the second warmest in the NOAA record, 0.66°C above the average for the last 100 years of 15.8°C. The January to July period was the warmest in [...]

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It breaks

by Gareth August 9, 2010

The Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland has calved a massive “ice island” from its floating tongue (the largest in northern hemisphere), as the MODIS image above demonstrates. The island is approximately 260 square kilometers in area, making it equivalent to (arbitrary choice of geographical comparison appropriate to blog) eleven Rangitoto Islands (or four Manhattans, or [...]

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It’s grim up North #2

by Gareth June 10, 2010

From NASA’s eyes in the sky, this is a view of the west coast of Greenland downloaded earlier today, looking down on the Ilulissat Icefjord — the outlet for the Jakobshavn Isbrae, the biggest outlet glacier in Greenland and the largest in the northern hemisphere. It’s the long tongue of white reaching up from right [...]

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Cooling-gate: the 100 years of warming Easterbrook wants you to ignore

by Gareth May 27, 2010

Evidence that Don Easterbrook did more than misrepresent and alter a graph in order to remove evidence of recent warming in his presentation to the recent Heartland “climate conference” is beginning to emerge. It now appears that he has been misusing one of the most important paleoclimate temperature data series, compiled from the GISP2 Greenland [...]

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Winter 2010: cold in places, exceptionally hot in others

by Gareth April 3, 2010

Northern hemisphere winter, that is — we’re still in a nice warm autumn down here. Before I disappear for a couple of days of hectic activity (vintage 2010 tomorrow, bottling the ‘09 on Monday), I just wanted to draw attention to a couple of articles I read over my Saturday morning toast (fine bread from [...]

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