Climate science
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Climatologists know that the most likely place to first see the impacts of a warmer world is in the Arctic, where feedbacks due to snow and sea ice and their effect on the albedo make climate very sensitive to small temperature variations. Albedo is the reflectivity of the earth’s surface, and snow and ice are…
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On the EarthSky blog today the authors posted a short video of a spacecraft destroying a sundog. You’ve probably seen sundogs or parhelia before–they are optical phenenoma caused by sunlight refracting through ice crystals which show up as spots of light to the left or right of the sun, usually near sunrise or sunset.…
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The latest WunderBlog post updates us on the status of Arctic sea ice. The bad news is that it is at a new record low for this time of year, even though it’s winter in the Arctic now. Temperatures there this winter have been incredibly warm, which has helped lead to the low ice coverage. (See…
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I gave a talk on projections of future climate today to a group of farmers and other interested folk in LaGrange, GA. One of the things we discussed in the talk is how weather and climate forecasts are similar and how they are different, because they are really designed to do different things even though…
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Earlier this month NASA published a study showing that 1/3 of big groundwater basins across the earth were in distress. One of them was what they list as the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains aquifer, which provides irrigation and drinking water to a large area of south Georgia, Alabama, Florida and other states around the Gulf…
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Atlas Obscura had a fascinating story last year about some centuries-old trees found in the most unexpected place: growing out of cliffs along the Niagara escarpment. Because these trees don’t get very large due to their extreme exposure and difficult growing conditions, no one knew how old the trees were until a Canadian researcher collected tree cores…
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I hear a lot of discussion among my climatologist friends as well as many other non-climate folk about the veracity of NOAA’s published global climate data set. Folks who don’t understand the types of data that are used in building the data set don’t understand all of the steps needed to make a homogeneous record,…