Caught the thursday opener last night. This thing is seriously intense, transcends the genre, and will bear multiple viewings. Let me know what you think.
Meanwhile, good summary of Greenland Ice movement from University of Calgary post doc Kevin Whitehead.
Dr. Whitehead does a nice job of pointing out the various forces at work – note especially the attention given at the end to surface melt as the emerging major wild card in mass loss. It is this surface melt that is most affected by decreased whiteness, or albedo of the surface, as darkening agents from dust, to industrial smoke, to wildfire soot, increase on the glacier surface.
A new subject of investigation is the affects of biological communities on the ice, algae and like organisms that we may be helping to multiply by fertilization and continued greenhouse warming.
First of all, Greenland is big. At over two million square kilometers, it is roughly ten times the size of the United Kingdom. Approximately 82% of its surface is covered by the ice sheet, which has a volume of 2.38 million km3 and reaches a depth of 3,000 meters in places. However, to put its size into perspective, this volume is equivalent to only about 8% of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Greenland differs from Antarctica in another very important aspect. Antarctica has a number of mountain ranges buried underneath the ice. However in Greenland the mountainous areas are generally located at the coast and tend to ring the island. The center of Greenland is in effect a large bowl, occupied by the ice sheet. This topography means that ice from the interior can only drain to the ocean through a few large outlet glaciers, which occur wherever there are gaps in the coastal mountains. These glaciers are like major rivers, draining vast regions of the ice sheet.
Arctic sea ice extent for March 2014 averaged 14.80 million square kilometers (5.70 million square miles). This is 730,000 square kilometers (282,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average extent, and 330,000 square kilometers (127,000 square miles) above the record March monthly low, which happened in 2006. Extent remains slightly below average in the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, but is at near-average levels elsewhere. Extent hovered around two standard deviations below the long-term average through February and early March. The middle of March by contrast saw a period of fairly rapid expansion, temporarily bringing extent to within about one standard deviation of the long-term average.
Average ice extent for March 2014 was the fifth lowest for the month in the satellite record. Through 2014, the linear rate of decline for March ice extent is 2.6% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2010 average.
In the Arctic, the maximum extent for the year is reached on average around March 9. However, the timing varies considerably from year to year. This winter the ice cover continued to expand until March 21, reaching 14.91 million square kilometers (5.76 million square miles), making it both the fifth lowest maximum and the fifth latest timing of the maximum since 1979. The latest timing of the maximum extent was on March 31, 2010 and the lowest maximum extent occurred in 2011 (14.63 million square kilometers or 5.65 million square miles).
The late-season surge in extent came as the Arctic Oscillation turned strongly positive the second week of March. This was associated with unusually low sea level pressure in the eastern Arctic and the northern North Atlantic. The pattern of surface winds helped to spread out the ice pack in the Barents Sea where the ice cover had been anomalously low all winter. Northeasterly winds also helped push the ice pack southwards in the Bering Sea, another site of persistently low extent earlier in the 2013 to 2014 Arctic winter. Air temperatures however remained unusually high throughout the Arctic during the second half of March, at 2 to 6 degrees Celsius (4 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1981 to 2010 average.
Here, part of the interview we did with Dr Walt Meier, one of the world’s most respected experts on sea ice – formerly of NSIDC, now at NASA. We conducted this interview in December 2013.
NBC Nightly News Leads With Climate Report, Continuing Improved Coverage. On March 31, NBC Nightly News led with the IPCC report, featuring an interview with two climate scientists who contributed to the report. NBC devoted more time to the study than either ABC World News or CBS Evening News. This coverage was consistent with an improving trend in NBC’s climate coverage. In 2013, NBC Nightly News covered climate change four times more than it had in 2012 and gave greater time to scientists, according to an analysis byMedia Matters. [Media Matters, 1/17/14; NBC, NBC Nightly News, 3/31/14]
Al Jazeera And MSNBC Devote Far More Time To Climate Report Than CNN. CNN largely ignored the report in its daytime and primetime coverage. According to a search of internal TV archives, CNN devoted just 1 minute and 37 seconds to the report between 4 a.m. and 11 p.m. on March 31 and between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m. on April 1. In these news briefs, CNN did not host any guests on the topic. By contrast, MSNBC devoted nearly 27 minutes of coverage to the report, including a discussion with climate scientist Michael Mann onTheReid Report, and Al Jazeera devoted over 35 minutes to the report.
Will a warming world eventually kill off roe deer in France?
That question is being raised in light of new research indicating that the animals are having a hard time adapting to climate change.
In a study published Tuesday in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, researchers tracked the births and subsequent survival of roe deer fawns in France’s Champagne region.
They noted that spring vegetation on which the adult deer depend for food was starting to flourish two weeks earlier that it did nearly three decades ago, due to gradual warming. But although spring was arriving earlier, the animals’ birth season stayed the same, failing to keep pace with the changing temperatures.
On Wednesday, March 27th, the largest state in the contiguous United States got almost one-third of its electricity by harnessing the wind. According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the bulk of the Lone Star State’s power grid, a record-breaking 10,296 MW of electricity was whipped up by wind turbines. That’s enough to provide 29 percent of the state’s power, and to keep the lights on in over 5 million homes.
ERCOT notes in a statement issued today that “The new record beats the previous record set earlier this month by more than 600 MW, and the American Wind Energy Association reports it was a record for any US power system.”
The landmark is further evidence of one of the nation’s unlikeliest energy success stories. Conservative politicians have a renownedaversion to clean energy (thoughRepublican voters favor it overwhelmingly), and Texas is still deep red. Yet wind farms are cropping up in there faster than almost anywhere else. ERCOT points out as much, as it boasts of the sector’s recent growth:
Discovering a brilliant way to efficiently generate hydrogen is hard enough. Then there’s everything that comes after, such as getting consumers accustomed to what’s needed for it to work, such as fuel cells — which convert hydrogen into usable electricity.
This is comparable to what Elon Musk struggles with in selling Tesla’s electric cars. He has to persuade the public not only to buy a new kind of car, but all that goes with it: the infrastructure of batteries, charging stations, high-voltage home plugs and new kinds of auto mechanics.
“Whenever you make something that’s two steps removed from an infrastructure, that’s the big problem you have going to market: You have to change an entire infrastructure,” Mr. Nocera said. “If we had fuel cells in your house and your car, then everybody would be trying to implement the artificial leaf right now.”
America’s oil and gas rush is depleting water supplies in the driest and most drought-prone areas of the country, from Texas to California, new research has found.
Of the nearly 40,000 oil and gas wells drilled since 2011, three-quarters were located in areas where water is scarce, and 55% were in areas experiencing drought, the report by the Ceres investor network found.
Fracking those wells used 97bn gallons of water, raising new concerns about unforeseen costs of America’s energy rush.
“Hydraulic fracturing is increasing competitive pressures for water in some of the country’s most water-stressed and drought-ridden regions,” said Mindy Lubber, president of the Ceres green investors’ network.
Effectively 100% of California is experiencing abnormally dry to exceptional drought conditions, as reported by the U.S. Drought Monitor.(click here for larger)
Below – This map shows the extraordinary precipitation deficit since the start of California’s water year on October 1st from NOAA’s Climate Data Center through March 20th.
A key component of California’s water supply system is the winter storage of snowpack and its slow release during spring and summer months. Rains in the past week have slightly boosted snowpack, but as of March 30, the Sierra Nevada current snowpack remains near record lows and the water storage is only 29% of normal.
