snow

“The Arctic ice is back to normal.” Yeah, right.

by Gareth April 25, 2008

This New Scientist video includes some rather spectacular images of a rapidly draining meltwater lake on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. The three kilometre wide lake drained down through 1 km of ice in an hour and a half, at a rate similar to that of the water flowing over the Niagara Falls. [...]

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I’ll drown in my own tears

by Gareth April 14, 2008

But tears of laughter or tears of frustration? I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry (but I’ve certainly got the blues) about a “Viewpoints” feature in this week’s Listener – here’s the intro that runs above two single page articles: The latest UN climate change conference canvassed many opinions. The Listener asked people [...]

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Winter wonderland

by Gareth April 8, 2008

Climate cranks are keen to paint the last northern hemisphere (boreal) winter as unusually cold – a clear sign, they say, that “global warming is over”, and that global cooling has begun. Every crank’s at it: Bob Carter at Muriel’s place, Gerrit van der Lingen in an article in a Christchurch magazine and Vincent Gray [...]

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Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.

by Gareth January 22, 2008

There’s another Hot Topic on the bookshelves – not in NZ, but in the UK. Sir David King, the sometimes controversial scientific adviser to Tony Blair has (with Gabrielle Walker) penned The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On. Reviews in The Times and The Guardian. It will no [...]

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Here come the warm jets

by Gareth January 16, 2008

Hot Topic has devoted a lot of posts to events in the Arctic over the last northern hemisphere summer. The loss of sea ice was dramatic – there was 25% less ice in September than the previous record, set in 2005. The little graph to the left shows just far off the trend line last [...]

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Ice in the sun

by Gareth January 15, 2008

Time for an ice update. There’s more bad news about the Arctic sea ice, some interesting video from Greenland, and confirmation that the Antarctic is losing significant amounts of ice. A team lead by James Maslanik of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center for Astrodynamics Research has tracked the age of perennial Arctic sea [...]

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Sharpening Antarctica’s image

by Gareth November 29, 2007

I like Google Earth. I like looking down on my neighbours to see what’s going on behind their shelter belts, and because I like monitoring what’s going on at the poles, I have the National Snow & Ice Data Centre’s overlay switched on most of the time. It shows current sea ice extent, snow cover [...]

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More ice/less ice

by Gareth September 18, 2007

More on the Arctic melt: the National Snow and Ice Data Centre updates its commentary on this year’s record ice minimum. As of yesterday, the five day moving average of ice was still moving downwards, but slowly. Their comment on the North West Passage is interesting. The main, deep channel of the Northwest Passage (Lancaster [...]

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Arctic carries on melting

by Gareth September 12, 2007

Compare this picture with the one accompanying my last post on this season’s record-breaking sea-ice melt in the Arctic Ocean. More ice has gone, and although the end of the melt season is fast approaching, this year’s low is already about one million square kilometres less than the previous minimum, set in 2005. The NSIDC’s [...]

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Back in harness

by Gareth September 11, 2007

I bought one of Martin’s pork pies today. After too much yak in Shangri-La, I found myself lusting after something a little more in my own cultural tradition… But as I try to catch up with climate news, I find that Xian Ge Li La is in the news for all the wrong reasons: KUNMING, [...]

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