Tag: ocean

Thin Ice: what polar science is telling us about climate

This guest post is by professor Peter Barrett, executive producer, and Suze Keith, marketing advisor for Thin Ice.

Scientists can tell human stories about climate change, and a group of us have been working on just that for the last few years. We’ve produced a film — Thin Ice – the inside story of climate change — which follows a scientist, geologist and camera buff Simon Lamb, who is concerned at the flak his climate science colleagues have been taking.

Simon travels from the Antarctic to the Arctic. He listens to scientists talk about their work, hopes and fears, and discovers how the astonishing range of research really does fit together. By the end there are just two messages – that our ultimate goal should be zero carbon emissions (in line with the latest IPCC report), and that science really does work. As paleoclimatologist Dave Harwood says to young people at the end of the film:

Don’t be scared by this thing. Come and join in our effort. Be the best scientists and engineers you can, and we’ll deal with it.

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Something (early) for the weekend: grim forecast for oceans and the roots of denial

Something of a miscellany today, coupled with an open thread, to keep you going during a brief pause in posting. First up: a study published this week in PLOS Biology looks at changes in ocean chemistry, temperature and primary productivity over the next century under two emissions scenarios, and finds that no corner of the ocean escapes untouched. From Science Daily:

“When you look at the world ocean, there are few places that will be free of changes; most will suffer the simultaneous effects of warming, acidification, and reductions in oxygen and productivity,” said lead author Camilo Mora, assistant professor at the Department of Geography in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. “The consequences of these co-occurring changes are massive — everything from species survival, to abundance, to range size, to body size, to species richness, to ecosystem functioning are affected by changes in ocean biogeochemistry.”

It’s been a productive few weeks for Mora: he was lead author on a recent study1 published in Nature that estimated when climate in different parts of the world would move beyond anything experienced in the last 150 years — have a play with this interactive map to find out when your part of the world will move into the unknown. See also Climate Central, Science Daily, and a huge amount of press coverage.

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  1. Full text, free! [↩]

The Climate Show #26: All the news that fits

Aafter a busy month of harvesting (Gareth) and breakfast broadcasting (Glenn), the Climate Show returns with all the latest climate news: from the thinning of Antarctic ice shelves and the intensification of hydrological cycle (floods and drought, that is) to satellites capturing solar energy and beaming it down to earth, we’ve got it all. And if that weren’t enough, John Cook looks at a new paper that explains the apparent lag between warming and CO2 increase at the end of the last ice age, and tips us off about an excellent outtake from ABC’s recent I Can Change Your Mind about Climate documentary, featuring Naomi Oreskes.

Watch The Climate Show on our Youtube channel, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, listen to us via Stitcher on your smartphone or listen direct/download from the link below the fold.

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Shang a de Lange

Much exercised by the question of ocean warming, New Zealand’s most litigious temperature savant posts excerpts from an article on the subject, and thanks Waikato University’s Willem de Lange for introducing him to this “really clear treatment of ocean warming and ocean-atmosphere interaction”. Two things are interesting about Treadgold’s post, and neither has anything to do with the contents of that article1.

The piece, by oceanographer Robert E. Stevenson (deceased), was published in the summer 2000 edition of 21st Century Science & Technology magazine. This is interesting in and of itself, because 21st Century Science & Technology is is an organ of the Lyndon LaRouche movement, centred on an oddball and extremely fringe US politician. We last encountered LaRouche when exploring the footnotes in Ian Wishart’s remarkable climate book Air Con. Amongst many strange things, LaRouche believes that the President of the US and Prince Philip are conspiring to reduce the population of the world from 7 billion to 2 billion, and that financier George Soros is their henchman2. 21st Century Science & Technology espouses what might be charitably described as non-mainstream views on many science-related subjects, from the “swindle of special relativity” to global warming as “hoax“.

Which leads me to the second interesting thing: does Waikato University’s Willem de Lange, one of the tiny coterie of climate sceptics still active in New Zealand academic circles, listed by his university as an expert on “tsunami and storm surge prediction and mitigation; wave-induced sediment transport; dispersal studies; climate change; oceanography”, really regard Stevenson’s article as a credible reference? Would he be prepared to defend this 12 year old article’s interpretation of the physics of ocean warming against his peers? Or was he perhaps just digging around for a little chum to throw to the less well-educated hordes who congregate around Treadgold’s pulpit desperate for anything to support an oddball contention, that ocean warming somehow has nothing to do with the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? You be the judge…

You might think that de Lange, Treadgold and Lyndon LaRouche make for strange bedfellows, but when you have nothing better to turn to, I suppose — as Steven Stills so memorably sang — you have to love the one you’re with. Rather a pity for all their credibility, what little might be left of it.

[Bay City Rollers for the title, Steven Stills (& CSJT) for the close.]

  1. Life’s too short, basically, to debunk an article of dubious provenance now 12 years old. [↩]
  2. No, really. Check the link. [↩]

Cuckoo cocoon (Prat Watch #5.5)

Something stirred inside the carefully cultivated cocoon of ignorance at Richard Treadgold’s Climate “Conversation” blog, but I don’t think it was the butterfly of understanding preparing to inflate its wings. Something much more subterranean, I suspect. Needled by my post about said cocoon (namely, Treadgold’s insistence that “global warming has not happened for about 15 years, unless you take a micrometer to the thermometer“), RT issues a bold challenge: Well, where’s your evidence, Renowden?

He heads his post with a graph lifted from JunkScience (that well known purveyor of same), showing the HadCRUT3 monthly temperature series from 1978 to date. Amusingly, Treadgold makes an error before he even begins the meat of his diatribe. The caption he provides to the graph includes this:

The graph that proves no significant warming for about 15 years – since about 1996. Measured by satellite, not the unreliable hand of man.

The HadCRUT3 global series is most assuredly not a satellite generated temperature record. But we’ll let that pass, shall we, and take a quick canter through an answer to his challenge. I shall ignore Mark Twain’s advice just this once, in the hope that some light may shine in to the dark corners of his misunderstanding.

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