Month: July 2016

Weather Network:

Wednesday, July 6, 2016, 12:19 PM – The heat is ON. Not only are parts of eastern Canada in the midst of potential heat wave new record high temperatures have been smashed in the north. Way north.

On Tuesday, Kugluktuk, Nunavut, which is located in the Arctic Circle, nearly cracked the 30 degree mark.

The area hit a high of 29.2°C, (84.5° F) smashing the previous record of 28.1°C (82.5° F) set back in 1994.

“Simply put, an area of high pressure and an unusually warm air mass is hovering over the region,” says Weather Network meteorologist Kelly Sonnenburg. “That combined with southerly winds is what helped to contribute to these record high temperatures.”

Although temperatures won’t be as hot for the rest of the week, they’ll still remain above seasonal.

“The seasonal average for this time of year in Kugluktuk is only 15°C, (59° F)” Sonnenburg says.

University of Sheffield:

Greenland is one of the fastest-warming regions of the world, according to climate change experts at the University of Sheffield.

New research, led by Professor Edward Hanna from the University’s Department of Geography, has identified changes in weather systems over Greenland that have dragged unusually warm air up over the western flank of Greenland’s Ice Sheet.

These weather systems are also linked to extreme weather patterns over northwest Europe, such as the unusually wet conditions in the UK in the summers of 2007 and 2012. Continue reading “Record Temps in Arctic Circle, New Jet Stream research”

New around yesterday was that Polar bear wandered far inland and was hanging around the East Grip Ice Core research camp – had to be put down.   Sad for all involved, – so posting the video above.  Bears need a win.

East Grip:

Update July 7th 23:45(L): We have had a polar bear wandering round the camp at EGRIP. To ensure the safety of the team and following approval from the Greenland authorities, we had to shoot the bear. The bear is dead and everybody is safe in the dome. The team in camp needs rest now and more news will be issued tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a new science team has shown up in Kangerlussuaq, the Black and Bloom team from the UK is following the ice albedo, black carbon, ice microbiology line of inquiry.  I had chatted with team leader Jim McQuaid before coming, and did some running around for the team prior to their arrival, so weather permitting, hope to hitch a ride on the Sikorsky when they do their put-in this week.

Just finished a new video featuring Greenland footage from this week, hopefully Yale will go for it and it can be posted very soon.

Working on interviews this weekend, as the weather has closed in somewhat. More on this soon.

Climate change hard to deny when it’s sloshing up around your ankles.
Problem for climate deniers like Donald Trump in the key electoral state of Florida.  There is effectively no path to the White House for Republicans that does not include a win in this state.

Guardian:

Miami Beach is one of the world’s most vulnerable cities to sea floods, but much of Florida’s coastline is facing similar problems. The Everglades wetlands is at risk from invading seawater and the Florida Keys are regularly flooded at extreme high tides.

Nasa is facing floods from Atlantic storms at the Kennedy Space Centre and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the Florida coast. But the most urgent threat is to drinking water as saltwater, and the pollution it flushes out, invades underground, and is now moving close to drinking water supplies for 6 million residents.

So it’s no surprise that 81% of people in Florida polled recently said they believe that climate change is happening now – an increase on the 63% in 2012. And yet climate change has been drowned out in the US presidential primary elections – apart from political debates in Miami.

New York Times:

If demographics are destiny, Donald Trump’s political fate could very well be sealed in Florida.

The big demographic threat to the Republican Party isn’t a “blue” Texas or Arizona or Georgia, but the possibility that Florida will follow Nevada and New Mexico to the left. It’s extremely hard for a Republican to win the presidency without Florida’s 29 electoral votes.

The polls suggest that Hillary Clinton might capitalize on huge demographic shifts to an extent that Barack Obama never did. She might even lead by the same margin in Florida that she does nationally — about five percentage points — even though the state has been more Republican than the country in every presidential election since 1976.

Continue reading “Florida Waking Up to Climate Change is Bad News for Trump”

Sondrestrom Fiord is a broad fluvial plain near Kangerlussuaq, then deepens dramatically further down.   I’ve been told it’s the longest Fiord in the world.

In the first Dark Snow field trip, three years ago today, Jason Box saved the mission by booking a hail mary chopper flight from  Nuuk, at the bottom of this map, to Kanger, and then further, to the center of the ice sheet, where we obtained useful samples of the previous year’s melt layer.

One very mind blowing geography lesson.

Video below: Continue reading “Sondrestrom Fiord: A Mind Blowing Geography Lesson”

Lauren Kurtz in The Guardian:

Today’s climate scientists have a lot more to worry about than peer review. Organizations with perverse financial incentives harass scientists with lawsuit after lawsuit, obstructing research and seeking to embarrass them with disclosures of private information.

On June 14th, an Arizona court ruled that thousands of emails from two prominent climate scientists must be turned over to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E), a group that disputes the 97% expert consensus on human-caused climate change and argues against action to confront it. E&E and its attorneys are funded by Peabody Coal, Arch Coal, and Alpha Natural Resources, coal corporations with billions of dollars in revenue.

Formerly named the American Tradition Institute, E&E has been described as “filing nuisance suits to disrupt important academic research.”

E&E originally attacked Dr. Michael Mann, whose research shows a dramatic increase in recent temperatures in a graph popularly known as the “hockey stick.” In 2011, the group sued under Virginia open records laws to obtain six years of Dr. Mann’s emails from the University of Virginia—over 10,000 messages in total. The Virginia Supreme Court denied E&E’s claims and ruled that academic research correspondence should be protected because release would cause “harm to university-wide research efforts, damage to faculty recruitment and retention, undermining of faculty expectations of privacy and confidentiality, and impairment of free thought and expression.”

E&E did not relent. Despite losing in Virginia, the group brought another open records case in Arizona to demand the same six years of emails—this time from Dr. Mann’s coauthor, University of Arizona professor Dr. Malcolm Hughes. Additionally, E&E sued for thirteen years of emails from UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead author Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, also at the University of Arizona.

Continue reading “Climate Science Legal Defense: Science Under Attack”

In peak of summer, nights are unending in Greenland.
This one happened at Point 660 near Russell Glacier, June 30-July1, 2016.
Had to change batteries on the camera, so there is also a Part 2, below. Continue reading “Greenland’s Long Good Night”

The Watson River drains a portion of the Southwest Greenland Ice Sheet.

How water moves here between the surface of the ice, and eventually, the ocean, is a significant question for scientists to explore, in order to understand accelerating sea level rise.

My guide Dr. Asa Rennermalm, of Rutgers, showed me the way from Ocean to ice sheet.

Dr. Larry Smith and Dr. Asa Rennermalm greet visitors to their ice camp with a safety chat and pro-tips.

My great good fortune thus far in Dark Snow 2016’s Fieldwork has been to bump, literally into Dr. Asa Rennermalm of Rutgers, who has been working as a part of the very important  ice melt assessment project helmed by Larry Smith of UCLA.

Asa (pronounced Oh-sa, she’s Swedish) is someone I met and interviewed a year ago in Ilulissat, turns out she is an avid reader of the blog and watcher of these videos.   One thing lead to another, and I’ve spent a good part of the first week in the field, camping at the edge of the ice sheet, hiking onto the ice, and in the surrounding area, shooting video and stills, and interviewing Asa and her colleagues.

Continue reading “Dark Snow 2016 Photo Gallery 1”

If this season’s spiky surface melt pattern continues in Greenland, we may be on the verge of another peak soon.

I’m hoping to get a chance to fly in and take a look, either this week or next. (maybe today, in fact)
In any case, the Watson River nearby will be a good indicator of what’s happening.