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Can game theory predict what will happen at the U.N. climate negotiations?

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Climate change will destroy the planet’s circulatory system

by MathiasArndt Posted on September 9, 2015

Spoiler Alert

Climate change will destroy the planet’s circulatory system

By Clayton Aldernon 8 Sep 2015comments Share

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.

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New studies deepen concerns about a climate-change ‘wild card’

, The Washington Post.

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The State Department Just Released a New Batch of Hillary Clinton Emails. Read Them Here.

by ElvisMonash Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Friday afternoon, the State Department released a new batch of 1,356 emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The emails are part of over 55,000 pages of correspondence that had been stored on Clinton’s private email server and were subsequently turned over to the State Department. Clinton’s emails have provided a revealing glimpse at her State Department tenure, including her team’s aggressive efforts to manage the media and her image and some humorous moments that could have been ripped from the HBO comedy series Veep. You can read the latest round of Clinton emails below. If something catches your eye, flag it in the comments.

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Hillary Clinton Emails 7/31/15 (PDF)

Hillary Clinton Emails 7/31/15 (Text)

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The State Department Just Released a New Batch of Hillary Clinton Emails. Read Them Here.

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The RealAge (R) Makeover – Michael F. Roizen

by Myrna Posted on May 29, 2015

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The RealAge (R) Makeover

Michael F. Roizen

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $0.99

Publish Date: March 17, 2009

Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Seller: HarperCollins

Why not live at 60 feeling like you did at 35? Thousands of Americans are younger today than they were five years ago. How is that possible? By following the specific recommendations that reverse aging in Dr. Michael Roizen's bestselling book RealAge®: Are You As Young As You Can Be?, people who were previously much older than their chronological age have now taken up to twentynine years off their biological ages. Since that first publication, more than 10 million people have taken the RealAge® test in one form or another, and thousands of people have thanked Dr. Roizen for helping them make simple changes in their lives — changes that have made them healthier, younger, and more vibrant. In the last several years, Dr. Roizen and his team have learned much more about the aging process. The RealAge® Makeover makes sense of recent critical medical findings — mportant new research on inflammation in your arteries, stress reduction, chronic disease management, hormone replacement therapy, and other choices you can make to keep aging at a distance. You’ll also find the latest on vitamins and other supplements, which are age-reducing, which are aging, and which ones to avoid if you are taking certain medications. Roizen then offers more than seventy ways to reduce or even prevent 80 percent of the diseases that make you feel older. For example, coffee or the right kind of chocolate in moderate amounts can help reduce inflammation, preserving your arteries, joints, and memory. But the wrong choice can lead to needless aging and loss of energy, such as taking too much Vitamin A. And The RealAge® Makeover tells you how much (in years) each choice is worth so you can make the choices that are meaningful to you. More potent than any statistic or finding are the personal stories interwoven throughout — success stories from readers who followed the RealAge program, became biologically younger, and are living happier, healthier lives. With this book, readers have more opportunity than ever to turn back their biological clock to look, feel, and actually be many years younger. Join the RealAge® Revolution and give yourself a RealAge® Makeover!

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The RealAge (R) Makeover – Michael F. Roizen

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All the best science experiments involve dynamite

by ColetteUKM Posted on February 19, 2015

All the best science experiments involve dynamite

By Suzanne Jacobson 18 Feb 2015comments Share

Picture a scientist. Good. Now make that scientist a geologist who studies tectonic plate movement. Are you picturing a total badass? Well, you should be, because from 20th century Arctic expeditions to modern day explosives, badassery abounds in the study of plate tectonics.

Let’s start with Alfred Wegener, the German scientist who first proposed the concept of continental drift way back at the start of the 20th century. Yesterday, the New York Times published this beautiful cartoon about Wegener’s work:

To recap: Wegener flew around in hot air balloons to study the atmosphere, hunted seals, fended off polar bears, traveled around on dogsleds, rigged up scientific equipment to box kites, and — perhaps most impressively — endured wicked backlash from the scientific community for what was then a radical new concept. (Lest you forget, this all happened in the early 1900s, which makes these expeditions about a thousand times more impressive.)

Okay. I promised you explosives.

While continental drift is now common knowledge, scientists still don’t entirely understand how the continents move, which is why some of them recently decided to detonate a bunch of dynamite 50 m below the ocean floor off the coast of New Zealand.

No, this was not the move of a bunch of mad scientists, but an attempt to create some harmless seismic waves. Seismic waves like those generated by earthquakes have long been a useful tool for geologists to explore the earth’s underbelly because they pass through (or bounce off of) different surfaces differently. By measuring how these waves travel, scientists can effectively see the different layers of whatever the waves are moving through.

The problem is, seismic waves from earthquakes are too big to get a very precise picture. Seismic waves generated with carefully placed explosives, on the other hand, provide a much more fine-grained view of whatever they’re traveling through.

And so, equipped with plenty of dynamite and hundreds of seismometers, this international crew of researchers continued the tradition of badassery in their field and blew up the ocean (they didn’t really, but it sounds cool when I say it like that). More importantly, the team came away with some valuable new information about how the plate under New Zealand moves around. Turns out, there’s a thin, lubricating layer of rock between the plate and the mantle that allows for some slippage. Scientists have suspected layers like this to exist under other plates, so this is further evidence that this may be a common feature of tectonic plates around the world.

Our big takeaway? Scientists should probably use dynamite more often.

Source:
Geophysicists blast their way to the bottom of tectonic plates

, Physics World.

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We need to talk about your old basement TV

by AdriennLeCouteu Posted on February 9, 2015

We need to talk about your old basement TV

By Suzanne Jacobson 9 Feb 2015comments Share

In the latest episode of “So You Think You’re Doing a Good Thing?” we discuss what to do with outdated yet still perfectly useful electronics. Spoiler: You’re going to feel guilty no matter what because that’s what it means to be environmentally conscious in a consumerist society.

The good news is our electronics have become more energy-efficient over time thanks to things like Energy Star standards. The bad news is our feel-good energy-efficient purchases are meaningless because we’re a bunch of packrats who keep old devices instead of actually replacing them.

At least that’s the takeaway from a new study out of the Rochester Institute of Technology on the purchasing habits and use of electronics in the average U.S. household between 1992 and 2007.

To set the stage, let’s recall what technology looked like during those 15 years. In 1992, we had desktop computers, box-set TVs, early cellphones and laptops. By 1997, we had digital cameras and camcorders. By 2002, we had MP3 players, smartphones, DVD players, and LCD TVs, and by 2007, we had tablets, e-readers, and plasma TVs.

(Requisite pause for nostalgia basking.)

OK. That’s enough.

In their study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, the Rochester crew compared a household’s collection of devices, or “product community,” to a community of organisms. Like organisms, our devices stick around for a certain period of time, consuming resources (electricity, fuel, plastic, glass, metal, etc.) and excreting waste (e-waste).

What the team found was that while individual devices in these communities consumed less energy over time, the communities themselves kept growing and consequently guzzling more and more energy. The average household had 13 devices in 2007, compared to only four in 1992, the reported.

“There are a lot of products in U.S. households that do the same thing, but we still own 20 of them,” Callie Babbitt, one of the study’s researchers, told Science.

Babbitt and her co-authors found that in 2007, the average U.S. household had three box-set television sets and a total “product community” with an energy impact equal to 30 percent of the annual fuel consumption of the average 2007 passenger vehicle.

They also found that over those 15 years, box-set TV and desktop computer use grew by 20 and 100 percent, respectively, so not only were we accumulating devices, but we were also using them more often.

Apparently, the evolution of technology isn’t quite as ruthless as the evolution of living organisms. The rise of plasma TVs, for example, didn’t drive the old box-sets to extinction, but rather into basements and bedrooms. It might feel wasteful to get rid of a perfectly good TV, but perhaps it’s better to donate or recycle it than to keep it around as a secondary set. See? I told you you’d feel bad no matter what.

Fortunately, the researchers do see a glimmer of hope in post-2007 technology. New multi-purpose devices like tablets and laptops that also act as TVs and MP3s could be the “invasive species” that totally wrecks current device ecosystems, they say, and in this environment, that would be a good thing.

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Warmer seas make for a transoceanic fish party

by ElmerGrasser Posted on February 4, 2015

Warmer seas make for a transoceanic fish party

By Liz Coreon 4 Feb 2015comments Share

Here’s a thing you may not have considered before: Climate change could make fish more mobile, upwardly and otherwise. Most marine species in the North Atlantic and North Pacific have been traversing the same ocean highways and byways for a while now (ahem, 2.6 million years), largely because the northern passage between the two is just too darn cold. But according to a study published Jan. 26 in Nature Climate Change, by the end of this century some fish in these formerly frigid climes may be able to swim in the Arctic, and beyond. Which can only mean one thing: Global fish mixer!

Led by Loïc Pellissier of the University of Fribourg, the team of Swiss scientists looked at how 515 fish species in the northern oceans were likely to react to climate change over the next hundred years. They found up to 41 species likely to move into the Pacific, and 44 into the Atlantic, by 2100.

For coastal-dwelling humans, this could mean an expanded menu at the crab shack, since ten of the species predicted to take advantage of the move also happen to be fish-and-chip favorites, according to Science News:

They include Atlantic cod, American plaice (a type of flounder) and yellowfin sole. Fishing opportunities have already opened up off of Greenland because of climate change, and more could develop as the Arctic region warms.

While an abundance of tasty new species opens up the danger of exploitation and overfishing, the bigger dark side of this delicious twist is the disaster it could spell for ecosystems. Species migrations can sometimes create major shifts in ecosystems:

… The arrival of apex predator species, such as Atlantic cod and lingcod, could have particularly large effects, as their meal choices ripple through the food web. The researchers say that predicting those effects is “the next modeling challenge,” but there may be effects similar to what’s been seen when invasive species enter ecosystems. Invaders often upend food webs, causing some species to decline and even become extinct.

But, y’know, if you’re a fish, warmer temperatures could mean greener pastures, bigger adventures, and new exotic friends! Just, other than the whole “getting snarfed by giant apex predators” thing — you’re gonna have to learn some stream-smarts if you want to make it the other side of the ocean tracks, little fishes.

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Warming Arctic will let Atlantic and Pacific fish mix

, Science News.

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Climate change could be happening 2,400 feet under Antarctic ice

by PaulettKen Posted on January 19, 2015

Climate change could be happening 2,400 feet under Antarctic ice

By Liz Coreon 19 Jan 2015comments Share

In case you missed out on the bad news du jour, let me both enlighten and disturb you (the primary job description here at Grist): The world is now experiencing skyrocketing temperatures and ocean death spirals, all while humans are sucking the living daylights out of the planet. And now, scientists have uncovered data that suggests climate change could be affecting a place where humans have never even set foot: 2,400 feet below Antarctic ice.

We’ve known for a while that the warming planet is causing massive, irreparable collapse of glaciers in Western Antarctica. What’s new here is that even the muddy floor beneath these glaciers, which was previously thought to be resistant to ocean-driven changes, now shows evidence of instability.

On a massive ice sheet on coast of West Antarctica, there’s currently a camp of 40 scientists, ice drillers, and technicians. The team was reportedly successful in their attempt to reach one of the most isolated areas in the ocean when, at 3:55 P.M. PST on Jan. 7, their drill hit the bottom of the ice sheet. With the help of a video camera, the researchers are able to observe life (or, lack thereof) on the Arctic seafloor.

Scientific American reported on the scientists’ first look and (nerd alert), it gives me full-body goosebumps.

Through nearly a kilometer of slow descent the camera showed the undulating, mirrorlike walls of the ice borehole scrolling past. Then, 715 meters down, the image suddenly want black, clouded by thick wisps of silt and clay that had been liberated from the ice as the drill melted its way through. The bottom few feet of ice is probably cluttered with such debris, picked up by the glacier as it slid over the hidden face of Antarctica for thousands of years.

The camera soon emerged from this “black zone” (as people at camp are calling it) into an open expanse of crystal clear seawater beneath the ice. This thin sliver of ocean reaching under the ice turned out to be 10 meters deep, and the camera came to rest on the bottom beneath it, revealing it to be muddy and strewn with pebbles — a flat, barren tract, devoid of any obvious signs of large marine life such as brittle stars, sponges or worms.

Science, guys. It’s awesome.

But here’s where a mysterious and beautiful scene turns towards a dubious discovery: The pebbles the scientists found scattered on the seafloor aren’t normal to find at that depth. It would be more normal to see just very fine material, like silt or dust, that could be carried far beneath the ice by wind or currents. The pebbles would only be there if the ice underbelly were melting at an unprecedented rate, leaving them to drop from the glacier as it melts.

Something’s moving things around under the ice. It’s either deep-sea poltergeists, or traces of possibly human-caused “environmental change.” (Guess which we’re voting?) We should note that this change could have happened two years ago or hundreds, as these findings are — the researchers emphasize — preliminary and inconclusive. Nonetheless, trip co-leader Russ Powell and his team believe that change may be well underway underneath the ice — and if so, it will impact how quickly ice sheets melt, and how rapidly global sea levels will continue to tick higher.

If further study turns up more bad news, humanity may be forced to fall back on its last-ditch effort to escape a changing climate: Burrow somewhere deep underground in the most remote place on Earth, and — oh, wait. Nvm.

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These reefs actually stand a chance of surviving climate change

by DoraVSOCejgk Posted on January 16, 2015

survivor: polyp edition

These reefs actually stand a chance of surviving climate change

By Amelia Urryon 16 Jan 2015 6:22 amcomments Share

Coral reefs, along with polar bears, are basically the sad, rained-on mascots of climate change doom-and-gloom: Every bit of news from them seems worse and worse.

But here’s some good news! Some reefs in some parts of the world actually stand a pretty good chance of rebounding from the bleaching events that are expected to become more and more common with global warming, according to a study out in Nature this Wednesday.

By looking the results of a massive bleaching event that wiped out corals in the Seychelles in 1998, scientists were able to determine what factors may have contributed to the subsequent recovery of 12 out of 21 sites surveyed. From that, they can make pretty good predictions about which reefs will be able to muscle through some of the worst of our climate-ravaged future. From the Guardian:

Looking at just two of 11 factors — water depth and the physical complexity of the coral — the team were able to use modeling to 98% of the time correctly predict whether a reef would recover or not. Deeper water and a more complex structure made a recovery more likely.

This means that northern and offshore parts of the Great Barrier Reef, where the coral is still relatively pristine and protected from human activity, actually seem pretty robust. If conservationists can focus their efforts on those survivor reefs — protecting them from further damage from boat anchors, fishing gear, or sediment dumping — they may be able to stave off some of the worst damage from warming water, as the study’s lead author James Graham told the Guardian:

“If emissions continue as they are, the longer term future is likely to still be bleak, even for those recovering at the moment [from bleaching], because the projections are coral bleaching will become more and more frequent. In a way it’s [the study’s findings] buying us time to keep as many reefs in good shape as we can, while we tackle some of these global, bigger issues.”

Right now, parts of the Pacific are in the grips of a mass coral bleaching that could be the worst seen in 20 years. So let’s do us all a favor and not make things worse than they already are.

Source:
Scientists reveal which coral reefs can survive global warming

, Guardian.

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