climate change tagged posts

New work demonstrates the planet’s remaining fossil fuel resources would be sufficient to melt nearly all of Antarctica if burned, leading to a 160 to 200 ft rise in sea level. Because so many major cities are at or near sea level, this would put many highly populated areas where more than a billion people live under water, including NYC and DC.

“Our findings show that if we do not want to melt Antarctica, we can’t keep taking fossil fuel carbon out of the ground and just dumping it into the atmosphere as CO2 like we’ve been doing,” Caldeira said. “Most previous studies of Antarctic have focused on loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Our study demonstrates that burning coal, oil, and gas also risks loss of the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

Although Antarctica has already b...

A drawing of the Sun made by Galileo Galilei on 23 June 1613 showing the positions and sizes of a number of sunspots. Galileo was one of the first to observe and document sunspots. Credit: The Galileo Project/M. Kornmesser

The Sunspot Number is a crucial tool used to study the solar dynamo, space weather and climate change. It has now been recalibrated and shows a consistent history of solar activity over the past few centuries. The new record has no significant long-term upward trend in solar activity since 1700, as was previously indicated.

The Maunder Minimum, between 1645 and 1715, when sunspots were scarce and the winters harsh, strongly suggests a link between solar activity and climate change...

A new NASA study of ocean temperature measurements shows in recent years extra heat from greenhouse gases has been trapped in the waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans. Researchers say this shifting pattern of ocean heat accounts for the slowdown in the global surface temperature trend observed during the past decade. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), CA, found a specific layer of the Indian and Pacific oceans between 300 and 1,000 ft below the surface has been accumulating more heat than previously recognized. They also found warm water movt has affected surface temps.

“Greenhouse gases continued to trap extra heat (in the 20th century), but for about 10 years starting in the early 2000s, global average surface temperature stopped climbing, and even cooled a bit,” said Willis...