winter

Fractured air

by Gareth February 8, 2009

The roots of the recent cold weather in Britain and eastern North America lie in unusual goings on high in the atmosphere above the North Pole, as this animation from NASA’s Earth Observatory demonstrates (full video here: 6MB .mov file). The left hand image shows vorticity (rotation, roughly) and the right the temperature at 20km. [...]

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Long hot summer

by Gareth February 5, 2009

There’s record heat in Australia and deep snow in England (with more to come, say Met men), and it’s all consistent with continuing global warming. Over at Wellington’s leading public transport blog, this is enough to inspire a remarkably ill-informed diatribe: Following the news as I do, it was delicious today to see the global [...]

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Celia of the seals

by Gareth August 13, 2008

It appears that my wish is someone’s command. Last month, blogging on the continuing break-up of the Wilkins ice shelf, I noted a reference to “seal hats” as data gathering devices and expressed a wish to see them. And here they are! Little devices glued to the heads of elephant seals that gather data as [...]

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Once upon a time there was an ocean

by Gareth August 10, 2008

The Arctic summer sea ice cover could be reduced by 2013 to “a few outcrops on islands near Greenland and Canada between mid-July and mid-September”, according to new research reported in The Observer [UK] today. The paper also suggests that this year could still see a new record minimum. Wieslaw Maslowski, the US Navy researcher [...]

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Santa’s blues

by Gareth June 28, 2008

What’s a Christmas icon to do, when all the ice at the North Pole disappears in summer? This startling question is posed by the latest flush of media attention to events in the Arctic. First there was a National Geographic story on June 20th speculating that the North Pole would be ice free this summer [...]

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It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I don’t feel fine)

by Gareth June 13, 2008

For REM, it “starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane“, for us, it looks like diminishing Arctic sea ice is the sign. Over at Open Mind, the blogger formerly known as Tamino looks in some detail at the sea ice/rapid warming paper I linked to yesterday. His post makes for sober reading. David [...]

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Sugar coated iceberg

by Gareth May 8, 2008

Prognostications on the fate of the Arctic sea ice this boreal summer are coming in thick and fast. The National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the US has updated its summer news page with the latest data and some projections of what might happen: Spring has arrived in the Arctic. After peaking at 15.21 [...]

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“The Arctic ice is back to normal.” Yeah, right. #2

by Gareth April 26, 2008

This latest New Scientist video accompanies a news item headlined “North Pole could be ice free in 2008“, and shows multi-year ice moving out of the Arctic over winter. “The set-up for this summer is disturbing,” says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this [...]

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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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