Climate science
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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,…
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Last month NOAA’s Climate.gov posted a story following the release of the 2016 global average temperature, discussing how unusual this event was. Jessica Blunden, the author, discussed the impact of El Niño on temperature records in general and specifically on the record-setting global temperatures this year. She also provided an outlook for 2017. You can…
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Don Paul, a television meteorologist from Buffalo NY that I follow on Facebook, has an excellent description of why sea levels are rising and the consequences of both rising sea levels and subsidence of land on coastal cities and ecosystems. You can read it at https://buffalonews.com/2017/02/03/don-paul-ominous-duo-rising-seas-sinking-land/.