Month: January 2018

After a long and arduous path to publication, results of Marek Stibal’s observations of ice algae, which I documented in the 2014 Dark Snow field work, have been published.
I plan to interview co-authors Marek Stibal and Jason Box next week.

Scientific American:

Algae growth as a result of climate change is making the Greenland ice sheet, a primary contributor to sea-level rise, melt faster, according to a new study.

Algae grows naturally on the ice sheet, but it thrives under a warmer climate. It makes the Greenland ice sheet, which is the second-largest ice sheet on Earth, less reflective of the sun, which means the ice absorbs more of the sun’s heat. This, in turn, drives more rapid melting, according to the paper published yesterday in Geophysical Research Letters.

Researchers found that algae accounts for about 5 to 10 percent of total ice sheet melt each summer. That means algae plays a greater role in melting than previously believed, said Marek Stibal, a cryosphere ecologist at Charles University in the Czech Republic and one of the lead authors of the new study.

“As the climate warms, the area that the algae can grow in will expand, so they’ll colonize more of the ice sheet,” he said in a statement. “Additionally, the growing season will lengthen, so the contribution of algae to melting of the ice will probably increase over time.”

Black carbon and dust have been tracked by researchers as contributors to melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Like algae, the dark particles cut down on the albedo, or reflectivity, of the otherwise white surface. The particles absorb the sun’s rays and warm the Earth underneath. Stibal said typically researchers have only looked at inorganic materials when studying ice sheet behavior, but the new research suggests that biological factors also play a significant role.

“Our analysis reveals that the impact of algae on bare (snow-free) ice darkening was greater than that of other impurities and, therefore, that algal growth was a crucial control of bare ice darkening in the study area,” the authors wrote. “Incorporating the darkening effect of algal growth is expected to improve future projections of the Greenland ice sheet melting.”

Continue reading “Dark Snow Project Fieldwork Findings Published”

Above, recent video on best approaches for climate communication in the age of fake news and the war on science.  Much of the insight we have from the last decade come from neuroscientists like George Lakoff, and climate comms practitioners like John Cook.

George Lakoff is a neuroscientist specializing in the study of how human beings are persuaded, or not, by factual discourse.
He had a significant twitter thread the other day with implications for climate communication, and general survival in the age of Toxic Trumpian Authoritarians.

George Lakoff on Twitter:

Trump uses social media as a weapon to control the news cycle. It works like a charm. His tweets are tactical rather than substantive. They mostly fall into one of these four categories.

The tweets either get his framing established first, knowing that whoever frames first tends to win. Or when things look bad for him, he diverts attention or attacks the messenger. And when he wants to test public opinion, he puts out an outrageous trial balloon.
Each tweet gets his message retweeted so he dominates social media. Reporters, social media influencers, and many others fall for it hook, line, and sinker. Every time. They retweet, share, and repeat his messages ad infinitum. This helps Trump tremendously.

They may think they’re negating or undermining him, but that’s not how human brains work. As a cognitive scientist, I can tell you: repeating his messages only helps him.

First, it focuses all attention on Trump’s antics. This makes his nonsense seem like the most important thing in the world. It’s called the “focusing illusion” – and it’s a large part of why he got elected in the first place. It makes him larger than life. Continue reading “How, and Why, Not to be Triggered by Trump”

Climate change makes the initial conditions all the more favorable for storms like these — higher sea level, more water vapor, intense temperature differentials.

For context on the tweet above, the strongest tropical cyclone recorded worldwide, as measured by minimum central pressure, was Typhoon Tip, which reached a pressure of 870 hPa (25.69 inHg) on October 12, 1979.
At 940 millibars — 27.76 inches — Hurricane Sandy was the lowest barometric reading ever recorded for an Atlantic storm to make landfall north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

UPDATE:

NYTimes:

When discussing the storm, some weather forecasters have referred to a “bomb cyclone.” Calling it a “bomb” sounds dire, but those kinds of storms are not exceedingly rare — there was one in New England recently. Continue reading “Why This Cyclone is the Bomb”

Above, Katharine Hayhoe on why the Arctic Matters.
Below – Arctic Science all-stars make the same point. Continue reading “Katharine Hayhoe: What Happens in the Arctic Matters”

Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Anchorage, Alaska, was warmer Tuesday than Jacksonville, Florida. The weather in the U.S. is that upside down.

That’s because the Arctic’s deeply frigid weather escaped its regular atmospheric jail that traps the worst cold. It then meandered south to the central and eastern United States.

And this has been happening more often in recent times, scientists say.

___

WHY IS IT SO COLD?

Super cold air is normally locked up in the Arctic in the polar vortex , which is a gigantic circular weather pattern around the North Pole. A strong polar vortex keeps that cold air hemmed in.

“Then when it weakens, it causes like a dam to burst,” and the cold air heads south, said Judah Cohen, a winter storm expert for Atmospheric Environmental Research, a private firm outside Boston.

“This is not record-breaking for Canada or Alaska or northern Siberia, it’s just misplaced,” said Cohen, who had forecast a colder than normal winter for much of the U.S.

IS THIS UNUSUAL?

Yes, but more for how long — about 10 days — the cold has lasted, than how cold it has been. On Tuesday, Boston tied its seven-day record for the most consecutive days at or below 20 degrees that was set exactly 100 years ago.

More than 1,600 daily records for cold were tied or broken in the last week of December, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For Greg Carbin of the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center, the most meaningful statistics are how last week’s average temperature was the second coldest in more than a century of record-keeping for Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit and Kansas City, third coldest in Pittsburgh and fifth coldest in New York City.

Continue reading “In Climate: Up the Down Escalator”

New chapter in history of climate science denial and cover-up.

Guardian:

Over 300 government officials, economists, historians, scientists, and industry executives were present for the Energy and Man symposium – organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business – and Dunlop was to address the entire congregation on the “prime mover” of the last century – energy – and its major source: oil. As President of the Sun OilCompany, he knew the business well, and as a director of the American Petroleum Institute – the industry’s largest and oldest trade association in the land of Uncle Sam – he was responsible for representing the interests of all those many oilmen gathered around him.

Four others joined Dunlop at the podium that day, one of whom had made the journey from California – and Hungary before that. The nuclear weapons physicist Edward Teller had, by 1959, become ostracized by the scientific community for betraying his colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he retained the embrace of industry and government. Teller’s task that November fourth was to address the crowd on “energy patterns of the future,” and his words carried an unexpected warning:

Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would […] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [….] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [….] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?

Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [….] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.

Continue reading “We Knew #ExxonKnew. Now We Know that #APIKnew, too.”