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See the crazy visuals coming out of Greenland’s heat wave right now
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Boaty McBoatface makes huge discovery about sea-level rise on maiden voyage
In 2017, I couldn’t stop trying to identify corvids. It’s harder than you might think. My latest challenge: a photo of a black bird on the ground. It’s got the fluffy neck feathers of an adult raven and the blue eyes of a baby crow. I’m going with: Raven.
Turns out it’s an Australian raven, a species identifiable by their bright blue eyes. By the rules of #CrowOrNo, I win, because I correctly guessed it’s not a crow. (Though in fairness, I’d call it a draw.)
#CrowOrNo is a weekly Twitter challenge hosted by University of Washington crow scientist Kaeli Swift. Each week, she posts a picture of a bird, which always — to the untrained eye — looks an awful lot like a crow. For a few hours, the eager public submits guesses as to whether it’s a crow, or no. After the big reveal, she explains the clues to use to tell crows from their cousins.
The challenge helps illustrate the large and surprisingly complex world of corvids, a smart family of big-brained birds that includes crows, ravens, and jays. It also shines light on some great crow-themed mysteries, like why some crows have caramel-colored feathers.
For me, the more I learn about crows, the more I see the extraordinary in the most seemingly ordinary birds — like the fact they can recognize faces and might even give gifts.
That’s the value of taking science out of the lab to the social media sphere, like Swift is doing. And, crow or no, I think we could all use a little more science in our lives.
Jesse Nichols is a contributing assistant video producer at Grist.
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‘Climate gentrification’ is coming to Miami’s real estate market.
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The House says the military should be thinking about climate change.
By Katie Herzogon Jul 6, 2016Share
New York City is in trouble.
Location, population, and a massive underground infrastructure system: All this makes New York especially vulnerable to climate change. This was most starkly felt in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, when more than 88,000 buildings flooded, 250,000 vehicles were destroyed, and 44 people were killed. It’s cost $60 billion to rebuild damaged areas, much of which is being paid for by the federal government.
In an effort to stave off another Sandy, the city is prepared to wall off one of its wealthiest areas, Lower Manhattan, from massive storms and rising seas. Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell writes that New York will break ground later this year on the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, a 10-foot-high reinforced wall that will run two miles along the East River.
The plan, called the Big U, is the brain child of Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group, which won a $930 million competition sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2014. Based on a video from the design firm, the $3 billion project looks more like a park than a wall. There is space for gardening, recreation, walking, and dining, and indoor and outdoor markets.
It is not, however, without critics. Urban planners told Goodell they doubt the final design will include any of the recreational spaces. It’s just too expensive. “When it’s done, it’s just going to be a big dumb wall,” one architect said. Plus, there is the wall’s location. While Wall Street might be safe from the storm, the wall could actually make flooding in neighboring Brooklyn worse.
Regardless, it will take more than a wall around Lower Manhattan to save New York residents and businesses. As Goodell notes, New York might prevent another Sandy, but not the worsening storms expected from climate change. The solution requires more than just a big wall; it requires comprehensive rethinking of government policy and infrastructure spending, and a new approach to combatting long-term threats.
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New York City hopes a 10-foot wall can save it from rising seas
Spoiler Alert
By Clayton Aldernon 8 Sep 2015commentsShare
We can’t have the birds or the bees. We can’t have woolly mammoths. For the love of Gotye, even the red pandas are in danger. And if we keep releasing all these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, soon we won’t even have water that flows in the right direction: A pair of new studies suggests that warming temperatures and melting Arctic ice sheets could have drastic effects on global ocean currents. Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts, where climate change grayscales all the Nyan Cats.
Part of the problem with melting ice, argues the first study, is that it’s mostly freshwater. Don’t get me wrong, I love freshwater — can’t get enough of the stuff — but cold freshwater doesn’t sink the same way cold saltwater does (because it’s not as dense). And part of what helps the currents do their job is the fact that cold water tends to sink. Any disruptions in temperature and salinity are likely to toy with that system in a severely objectionable manner. The Washington Post reports:
“Previous studies have generally had to estimate the amount of melting and then insert the meltwater into the ocean simulation by hand, or haven’t included the feedback between ice sheet melting and ocean salinity at all,” lead scientist Paul Gierz said.
The team’s computer models projected a drop in ocean salinity of about 7 percent in the areas near Greenland’s melting ice sheets, a decline that would alter deep-ocean circulation patterns over time, resulting in “less heat being transported to the high latitudes … which has implications for both North American as well as European weather and climate,” Gierz said.
Because the climate systems tend to respond slowly to environmental changes, the full impacts may not be felt for decades.
But we don’t have to wait for those impacts to kick in to get a feel for them: Another study suggests that there might be a gloomy historical case study for these kinds of ocean circulation changes. By examining ice core records and cave formations like stalagmites, researchers were able to salvage proxy temperature data from upwards of 12,000 years ago. Near the end of the last ice age, the authors write, rising temperatures led to rising sea levels and an influx of freshwater — the same kind of influx that today’s changing climate is expected to produce.
And the result wasn’t pretty: Changes in ocean circulation helped lead, for example, to an 18-degree Fahrenheit drop in Greenland over a period of less than ten years. Some of these changes “lingered for centuries,” writes The Washington Post. We’re talking 1,000-year droughts in the South Pacific.
A modest proposal, then: Start bottling that melting ice water and send it south. They’re going to need it in Vanuatu when the drought strikes. That is, of course, if the island isn’t first swallowed by the sea.
Source:
New studies deepen concerns about a climate-change ‘wild card’
, The Washington Post.
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By Suzanne Jacobson 11 May 2015commentsShare
Rising seas are about to engulf the oldest city in the U.S., and it doesn’t look like anyone’s going to do anything about it. That’s because the city of St. Augustine happens to be in Florida, where pythons roam free, Mickey Mouse is king, and climate change doesn’t exist.
St. Augustine is home to Spanish explorer Ponce de Lyon’s Fountain of Youth, an old military fortress, and — like any respectable historical site — plenty of brick roads and old-ass buildings. The 450-year-old national landmark also happens to be one of many cities along Florida’s coast getting increasingly worried about rising seas — a curious trend, given the state’s exemption from a certain global phenomenon.
To figure out what the state plans to do about these mysterious rising seas, Associated Press reporters sifted through thousands of state documents and emails. Here’s what they found:
Despite warnings from water experts and climate scientists about risks to cities and drinking water, skepticism over sea level projections and climate change science has hampered planning efforts at all levels of government, the records showed. Florida’s environmental agencies under [Gov. Rick] Scott have been downsized and retooled, making them less effective at coordinating sea level rise planning in the state, the documents showed.
“If I were governor, I’d be out there talking about it (sea level rise) every day,” said Eric Buermann, the former general counsel to the Republican Party of Florida who also served as a water district governing board member. “I think he’s really got to grab ahold of this, set a vision, a long-term vision, and rally the people behind it. Unless you’re going to build a sea wall around South Florida, what’s the plan?”
What’s the plan, indeed, Gov. Scott? The AP found that local officials in St. Augustine and elsewhere are trying to adapt to rising seas but are pretty much on their own:
Cities like St. Augustine have looked for help, but Scott’s disregard for climate change science has created a culture of fear among state employees, records show.
The administration has been adamant that employees, including scientists, not “assign cause” in public statements about global warming or sea level rise, internal government emails show.
For example, an April 28, 2014, email approving a DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] scientist’s request to participate in a National Geographic story came with a warning: “Approved. Make no claims as to cause … stay with the research you are doing, of course,” the DEP manager, Pamela Phillips, warned.
“I know the drill,” responded Mike Shirley, manager of the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve near St. Augustine.
Agency spokeswoman Engel said Phillips was a lower-level staffer whose views didn’t necessarily reflect the entire administration. When asked whether staffers are told not to assign cause, Scott’s office said “the allegations are not true.”
Bigger cities like Tampa and Miami are also up shit creek without a state-issued paddle. According to the AP, South Miami is so worried that it called for the southern half of Florida to secede from the rest of the state, leaving its northern brethren to their own self-destructive devices.
In a place like St. Augustine, rising sea levels will certainly wreak less economic havoc than in a big city like Miami, but wouldn’t the loss of America’s oldest city mean something? Is a band ever the same after losing its original lead?
Source:
Sea rise threatens Florida coast, but no statewide plan
, The Associated Press.
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The oldest city in the U.S. could be totally screwed by rising seas
By Suzanne Jacobson 11 Mar 2015commentsShare
Friction — can’t live with it; can’t live without it. One minute the fickle force is keeping you from sliding out of your chair; the next, it’s giving you a chafing situation that’ll bring tears to your eyes. And then all of a sudden it’s deciding the fate of humanity.
Fine, that last one might be a bit of an exaggeration, but that’s kind of what it feels like after reading this new study about friction’s role in the stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet — you know, the one that could raise sea levels up to 16 feet if it collapses? Which, by the way, scientists are pretty sure that it will? The study from researchers at Caltech, published this week in the Journal of Glaciology, indicates that the imperiled ice sheet could be in an even more precarious position than we thought.
Here’s the rub (sorry): Previous models of the ice sheet assumed that, wherever the sheet made contact with the ocean floor, there was a constant amount of stress keeping it in place. This new model, on the other hand, incorporates a frictional force that varies along the base of the ice sheet as growing water pressure counteracts the weight of the ice sheet.
This frictional force brings the grounding line of the ice sheet — the area where the ice sheet touches off the ocean floor and becomes a floating ice shelf — into shallower waters than researchers had expected. It also reduces the amount of stress the ice sheet feels at the grounding line. Together, these put the entire ice sheet in a more precarious position — previous studies have shown that the way the ocean bed slopes in these shallower waters is conducive to ice loss. Andrew Thompson, an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech and a coauthor on the study, said in a press release:
Our results show that the stability of the whole ice sheet and our ability to predict its future melting is extremely sensitive to what happens in a very small region right at the grounding line. It is crucial to accurately represent the physics here in numerical models.
And this isn’t just a computer model, but there’s still plenty to learn about what’s going on with this enormous slab of ice that has the power to completely change the world as we know it. Still, every time I read “extensional stress” in this paper — and the phrase comes up a lot — I accidentally read it as “existential stress.” That has to mean something.
Source:
Friction Means Antarctic Glaciers More Sensitive to Climate Change Than We Thought – See more at: http://www.caltech.edu/news/friction-means-antarctic-glaciers-more-sensitive-climate-change-we-thought-45903#sthash.1lDBITCl.dpuf
, Caltech.
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global worming
By Amelia Urryon 15 Jan 2015 6:46 amcommentsShare
You know what’s delicious? Shellfish. You know what’s definitely not? Parasitic worms. Unfortunately, that’s a pair that climate change might start bringing together more and more often.
Researchers at the University of Missouri looked at the fossilized remains of ancient clams around the Pearl River delta in China, and found that as sea level rose, infestations of parasitic worms called trematodes increased. It’s hard to say exactly what causes the population boom, except that it’s not related merely to an increase in the population of clams or an increase in salinity.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, bolsters similar findings from the Adriatic Sea, leading scientists to believe it might well be a more general effect of sea level rise everywhere. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“What we can say is there’s a strong relationship between the first 300 years of rise in sea level and prevalence,” [lead researcher John] Huntley said in an interview.
The fossil record could hold lessons as humans work to adapt to rising sea levels caused by climate change, Huntley said. If another significant flatworm uptick happens, it could affect fisheries and disrupt food systems or lead to higher infection rates among humans.
Here in the present day, I’m sorry to report, trematodes are alive and well. They still get into freshwater mollusks like clams and snails, which are then eaten by birds and other animals, including the very self-interested Homo sapiens. Just so you know, trematode infections are not fun: “Symptoms of infection in humans range from liver and gall bladder inflammation to chest pain, fever, and brain inflammation.”
So if you want to avoid a nasty case of worms AND keep snarfing tasty gastropods, maybe try a little harder on this whole don’t-ruin-the-planet-or-my-plate-of-clams thing?
Source:
Ancient Fossils Reveal Potential Risk of Rise in Parasitic Infections Due to Climate Change
, MU News.
Another reason to fear climate change: You may get worms
, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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