ocean

Bloomin’ marvellous

by Gareth December 11, 2010

A stunning image of a massive bloom of phytoplankton off the Chatham Islands (to the east of NZ — that’s Wellington and the Wairarapa in the top left corner), snapped by NASA’s Aqua satellite on December 5th and featured this week at NASA’s excellent Earth Observatory. Click on the image to see the full (4MB) [...]

21 comments Read the full article →

Every little bit hurts

by Bryan Walker December 8, 2010

“Coral reefs… once survived in a world where CO2 from volcanoes and methane was much higher than anything predicted today.”  That sounds like good news from John Veron, a world authority on coral. Not if you read on: “But that was over 40 million years ago, and the increase took place over millions of years, [...]

8 comments Read the full article →

Warm oceans killing coral

by Bryan Walker December 1, 2010

This has not only been a bad year for the Amazon rainforest, it has also been a year in which coral reefs, the rainforests of the ocean as they are sometimes called, have suffered severe bleaching because of raised ocean temperatures. Not a matter likely to strike the public consciousness. A recent Yale University survey [...]

14 comments Read the full article →

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 [...]

20 comments Read the full article →

The thing we need to fix is ourselves

by Gareth May 20, 2010

If you have 18 minutes to spare, spend them watching coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson’s recent TED talk about the ways in which humanity is wrecking the world’s oceans. Climate change is only one of the factors driving the massive changes being seen in the global ocean, and if we’re to have any hope of [...]

5 comments Read the full article →

Such ignorance must not be allowed to go uncontradicted (*)

by Gareth June 5, 2009

Last week an essay — Why I Am A Climate Realist — by NZ CSC “science advisor” Dr Willem de Lange started popping up all over the crank web. I first spotted it at Muriel Newman’s NZ CPR site, and it has since appeared at Monckton’s US lair (complete with a pretty cover). De Lange, [...]

18 comments Read the full article →

Do you feel lucky?

by Gareth May 30, 2009

Once again, Ian Wishart is working himself up into a fine frenzy over at his blog, responding to a perceptive post by Bomber Bradbury at Tumeke! In the comments there he claimed to have “pointed out numerous mistakes in Gareth’s snide and out of context ‘review’”, and — funnily enough — I didn’t feel inclined [...]

17 comments Read the full article →

This year’s model

by Gareth May 28, 2009

Take MIT’s global ocean model, assimilate data from NASA’s fleet of satellites, and run the whole thing through two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers on a much more detailed grid than used before, and you get this stunning animation of ocean currents from 1994 to 2002. It makes fascinating viewing: look for the complex [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

What’s a few tears to the ocean?

by Gareth May 12, 2009

New Zealand could be amongst the first places in the world to feel the effects of ocean acidification, according to a new “emerging issues” paper released today by the Royal Society of New Zealand. Surrounded by cold oceans which absorb CO2 faster than warm waters, and with a $300 million shellfish industry based on mussels, [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

A very public own goal…

by Gareth May 6, 2009

It didn’t take long for my last post to draw a reply from Ian Wishart, and — no surprises — it’s another lengthy diatribe. Unfortunately for Ian, it is also a very public own goal –demonstrating very nicely one of my central contentions: he doesn’t understand the stuff he’s writing about. Here’s the relevant passage [...]

10 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →