Book Review: A World Without Ice
Three million years ago, during the mid-Pliocene epoch, sea levels were 100 feet higher than they are today. During this period, there was no ice in the Northern Hemisphere, no sea ice in the Arctic Ocean nor in Greenland. And global temperatures at that time? Only about four to six degrees warmer than today. Such figures gave me pause, as I was about 2/3 of the way through A World Without Ice by Henry Pollack a professor of geophysics at the University... Read More
Arctic Sea Ice Reaches Third Lowest Minimum in Satellite Record
Daily Arctic sea ice extent on September 10, 2010 was 4.76 million square kilometers (1.84 million square miles). The orange line shows the 1979 to 2000 median extent for that day. (Source NSIDC) Arctic sea ice has now reached its minimum extent (meaning that melting has stopped and the sea ice is now growing in size), and the numbers aren’t pretty. 2010 will go down as having the third lowest sea ice extent (behind 2007 and 2008) since satellite... Read More
Visualizing Climate Change at the Ventura Boardwalk
Do You Know How Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Will Impact YOU? As a surfer, I often think about how my local surf spots—as well as the world’s most famous surf breaks—may change completely in the future due to sea level rise. Last week, though, as I got out of the water at Surfer’s Point in Ventura, CA, climate change was the last thing on my mind—until I saw my first SLAP stick. A SLAP stick on the Boardwalk SLAP stands for the Sea... Read More
2009 Tied for 2nd Warmest Year on Record, According to NASA
Recent analysis by scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), shows 2009 to be tied for the 2nd warmest year in the instrumental record. The warmest year on record was 2005, and (statistically) tied for second place are the years 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2009. Source: Hansen et al. (2010) This is according to a draft article by James E. Hansen and colleagues, If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned... Read More
Weekly gRound-up: 12/12/09
The 2000s Decade the Warmest in Memory The World Meteorlogical Organization has announced that the first decade of the 2000s was warmer than the previous (1990-1999), which was warmer than the decade before that. This statement should put to rest claims resonating from skeptical media that we are in a period of global cooling. Oh, and 2009 had the third lowest Arctic sea ice area on record (after 2007 and 2008). On Polar Bears and Global Warming Richard... Read More
The Copenhagen Diagnosis
Hot off the press is a new global climate change synthesis report by some of the world’s leading scientists. The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science is a review of the hundreds of scientific papers published since the 2007 IPCC fourth assessment report (AR4), and presents a sobering update on the state of the global climate. What this report convincingly shows, is that AR4 was perhaps too conservative in its... Read More
Global Warming Reverses Long-Term Cooling Trend, Is “Overwhelming” Arctic Climate System
A recent study published in the September 4 issue of Science magazine is yet another indicator that the Arctic is in crisis. A team of scientists found that temperatures in the Earth’s vast northernmost region – which includes the Arctic Ocean and parts of Alaska, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and the Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe – have reversed a long-term cooling trend and are now the warmest they’ve been in at least 2,000 years. The... Read More
