One method for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that is often mentioned is the planting of millions of trees, which help soak up CO2 as they grow, trapping it in the tree instead of allowing it to remain in the atmosphere. While planting of trees has many benefits to…
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You know from previous blog posts that tree rings contain a lot of climate information encoded in the thickness of each annual ring, including information about temperature and precipitation as well as some occasional information about fires, floods and other impactful events. But you might not know that tree rings…
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While the rapid disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic has been big news as the poles get warmer (especially the North Pole, which has ocean beneath it rather than a big chunk of ice like the South Pole does), another important story is just starting to be recognized. That…
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While carbon dioxide and methane are the two most common greenhouse gases, nitrous oxide is also a potent contributor to our warming climate. Overuse of fertilizers containing nitrogen in farming has been identified as one of agriculture’s contributions because it can contribute to the addition of nitrous oxide to the…
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How do we determine what “normal” weather is? Climatologists use a 30-year average to calculate normal temperature and precipitation for stations around the US. The last averaging period was 1981-2010, which means that we have less than a year to go before the next averaging period begins (1991-2020). How are…
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A journal article released today in Science Advances shows that when springlike temperatures occur earlier in the year, plants green up earlier and draw more moisture out of the soil, changing the water balance by increasing evapotranspiration and drying out the soil earlier in the growing season. It could also…
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This week I ran across a story about Antarctic ice sheets and how a collapse of one of the sheets in the Western Antarctic could result in rapidly rising sea levels. While this story is about a year old, it was new to me and provided more context about how…
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