A cracking issue (#93) of New Zealand Geographic has just hit the streets – a climate change special, complete with free map of both poles. Dave Hansford looks at impacts on NZ flora and fauna, Alan Knowles examines the energy alternatives being developed here, plus there’s a range of features from around the world – including an excellent article on climate change and winemaking. I’ve got a piece in there on the long-range forecast for NZ, but the knees are not mine. I’m biased by taking the NZGeo shilling, but even so the magazine is clearly an essential part of the intellectual landscape of this country and deserves support. Well worth $14.95 of anyone’s money.
Tag: ice
Hit somebody! (The hockey song)
Expect a renewed interest in the shape of hockey sticks, as a new paper in the Proceedings of National Academy Of Sciences (PNAS) by Michael Mann (et al) finds that the last decade was the warmest for at least 1,300 years. The BBC headlines the story “Climate “hockey stick” is revived”, which rather stretches the facts about the controversy (nicely covered in the piece). More coverage at Mongabay, which notes:
The results confirm that temperatures today in the Northern Hemisphere are higher than those of the Medieval warm period, a time when the Vikings colonized Greenland are are believed to have become the first Europeans to visit North America.
Sounds like a red rag to sceptic bulls to me. Expect much nit-picking and fulmination. The rest of us will get on with trying to sort out the problem.
Mann et al. (2008). Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. PNAS September 9, 2008 vol. 105 no. 36 (PDF available here)
You ain’t seen nothing yet
This year’s Arctic sea ice minimum is now officially the second lowest in the record according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center in the US. On August 26, the ice extent stood at 5.26m km2, dropping below 2005’s 5.32m km2. The melt season still has several weeks left to run, and there are now suggestions that this year’s final minimum could be close to – perhaps even beat – last year’s record.
The NSIDC announcement has attracted a flurry of attention, and the media has been out trawling the usual suspects for quotes. The BBC reports:
Researchers say the Arctic is now at a climatic “tipping point”. “We could very well be in that quick slide downwards in terms of passing a tipping point,” said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the Colorado-based NSIDC. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now,” he told the Associated Press news agency.
Adding to the interest, the European Space Agency released some interesting Envisat images of the state of the sea ice, and warned:
Following last summer’s record minimum ice cover in the Arctic, current observations from ESA’s Envisat satellite suggest that the extent of polar sea-ice may again shrink to a level very close to that of last year.
Meanwhile, Scientific American notes that the northwest passage is now open, and the Environment News Service does an admirable job of pulling all the info together – including recent work on possible rapid climate change around the Arctic. Earlier this month I was prepared to accept that I was going to lose my two bets on a new record minimum this year, so what’s been going on up north to change the outlook so dramatically?
Move on up
Sometime in the next day or so, Hot Topic will be moving to a new server and getting a spiffy new look. I’ll do my best to ensure that there’s little or no break in service, but given that my techno-competence is strictly limited there may be a hiatus – with luck only brief. There’s also the risk that some comments may get lost, especially any made after I’ve exported the blog to the new WordPress install. Tweaking the look will then take some time… so please bear with me in this, my hour of panic.
Celia of the seals
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 the seals as they go about their daily business. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science explains:
Here, we show that southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) equipped with oceanographic sensors can measure ocean structure and water mass changes in regions and seasons rarely observed with traditional oceanographic platforms. In particular, seals provided a 30-fold increase in hydrographic proï¬les from the sea-ice zone, allowing the major fronts to be mapped south of 60°S and sea-ice formation rates to be inferred from changes in upper ocean salinity. […] By measuring the high-latitude ocean during winter, elephant seals ï¬ll a ‘‘blind spot’’ in our sampling coverage, enabling the establishment of a truly global ocean-observing system.
Abstract here, full paper here[PDF]. More coverage at New Scientist, e! Science News.