Tag Archives: wiley

Meat giant, Tyson Foods, is betting on meat alternatives going big.

by BrittanyPascal9 Posted on October 11, 2016

Al Gore and Hillary Clinton appeared side-by-side in a Miami campaign stop that framed the climate-change challenge in an unusually optimistic light.

“Climate change is real. It’s urgent. And America can take the lead in the world in addressing it,” Clinton said. She focused on the U.S.’s capacity to lead the world in a climate deal and as a clean energy superpower in a speech that mostly rehashed familiar policy territory.

Clinton ran down her existing proposals on infrastructure, rooftop solar, energy efficiency, and more, though she omitted the more controversial subjects, like what to do about pipeline permits, that have dogged her campaign.

Though Clinton and Gore largely framed climate change as a challenge Americans must rise to, they didn’t miss an opportunity to jab at climate deniers.

“Our next president will either step up our efforts … or we will be dragged backwards and our whole future will be put at risk,” Clinton said.

Besides Donald Trump, Florida’s resident climate deniers Marco Rubio and Rick Scott got special shoutouts.

“The world is on the cusp of either building on the progress of solving the climate crisis or stepping back … and letting the big polluters call the shots,” Gore said.

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Meat giant, Tyson Foods, is betting on meat alternatives going big.

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Your Olive Oil Is Almost Certainly Fake

by charitys21 Posted on August 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bite is Mother Jones‘ new food politics podcast. Listen to all our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS.

Walk into your kitchen and pick up your bottle of olive oil. You know, that health-promoting nectar of Mediterranean age-defying prowess, lubricant of pasta, the only thing that makes your kale salad palatable? Yeah, that stuff is almost certainly not what you think it is.

That’s because unless you’ve plucked your own olives from your own backyard grove and crushed the fruit and pressed the oil yourself, that slippery substance was likely cut, adulterated, and deceptively labeled before it reached the bottle in your hands. “It’s amazing how many people there are in America who don’t even know what the real thing tastes like,” laments Larry Olmsted, author of the new book Real Food, Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It and our guest on this week’s episode of Bite. “Most oils sold in the United States are fake,” he writes.

Food fraud—or the act of deceiving consumers about a food or ingredient for the sake of profit—affects as much as 10 percent of the global food supply. Of all the instances of food fraud in the United States, according to a scholarly database tracking this very thing, olive oil leads the way, making up 16 percent of cases (followed by milk, honey, saffron, and orange juice). This type of deception has been around for basically as long as we’ve packaged food: Researchers have excavated mislabeled Roman jars containing counterfeit samples of oil.

One of the reasons oil is so often faked is that it’s bottled before you use it, and it travels far before it lands on grocery store shelves. “If it’s something you can’t look at and easily recognize, it’s more likely to be defrauded,” Olmsted explains. The United States imports more olive oil than any other country, and yet regulations on the labeling of said oil are voluntary. The Agriculture Appropriations Bill for fiscal year 2017 urged the Food and Drug Administration to take a harder look at the issue; in an earlier draft report accompanying the bill, the Appropriations Committee stated it was “concerned with reports that consistently describe the prevalence of adulterated and fraudulently labeled olive oil imported into the US.”

Since extra-virgin olive oil is the most valuable oil category in the United States, shady producers and dealers have plenty of incentive to mess with it in hopes of reaping more profit. They defraud consumers in three main ways: by (1) diluting real extra-virgin olive oil with less expensive oils, like soybean or sunflower oil; (2) diluting high-quality olive oil with low-quality olive oil; or (3) making low-quality extra-virgin olive oil, “typically incorporating older—and often rancid—stocks of oil held over from bumper crops of previous seasons,” writes Olmsted. When the University of California–Davis researchers tested olive oil bought off the shelf in 2010, they found that 69 percent of imported “extra-virgin” samples failed to meet international standards.

Aside from imparting rotten flavors and ripping people off, this fraud deprives people of the health benefits that may have prompted them to buy the oil in the first place: Fresh extra-virgin olive oil is high in the omega-3 fatty acids that may reduce the risk of heart disease. It’s also low in saturated fat and contains antioxidants. “Bad oil isn’t just a deception, it’s a crime against public health,” one Italian olive oil trade association president told Olmsted.

So what’s the best way to avoid getting punked? Olmsted offers up some handy advice:

Don’t trust most labels: Be wary of words like “pure,” “natural,” “virgin olive oil,” “premium,” “light,” “made in Italy,” and just “olive oil.” They suggest a low-quality substance, and one potentially made from refining the remainders of the skin and pits of olives rather than the olives themselves. “First cold pressed,” while sounding legit, doesn’t actually mean much these days since extra-virgin olive oil is typically spun out of olives with centrifuges rather than pressed. Even the term “extra-virgin olive oil” gets slapped on bottles of low-grade oil illegally—and enforcement is very sparse—so terminology isn’t necessarily your safeguard.

Stamp of approval: Here in the United States, look for the seal denoting approval by the California Olive Oil Council: “COOC Certified Extra Virgin.” (And here’s its list of 2015 certified oils). Olmsted also recommends Extra Virgin Alliance (EVA) and UNAPROL, the respected Italian olive growers’ association. Concern over olive oil fraud in the United States sparked the Department of Agriculture to add olive oil to its voluntary quality monitoring program in 2012, but so far only two companies participate. (Look for the label “USDA Quality Monitored.”)

Judge the country of origin: “If you have to purchase blindly with no other clue besides where it was made, choose Chile or Australia,” writes Olmsted. The two countries received the highest marks from the US International Trade Commission’s report on average quality of extra-virgin olive oil.

Buy in season and in the dark: Look for bottles with dates listed on them, and buy the oil that was bottled most recently. The end of the year is the worst time to buy oils from the Northern Hemisphere, because they will likely be leftovers from last season; likewise, avoid oils from Chile, Australia, and South Africa during our spring and summer. Olive oil’s quality degrades in the light, so don’t purchase clear bottles that have been sitting by a window; opt for dark glass bottles or cans instead.

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Your Olive Oil Is Almost Certainly Fake

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Antarctica is melting and shows no sign of slowing down

by WendellHJJ Posted on June 3, 2016

Antarctica is melting and shows no sign of slowing down

By on Jun 3, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Over the past few years, the evidence has piled up that glaciers in parts of Antarctica have been melting and retreating at an increasingly worrying — and potentially unstoppable — pace.

Now, new research shows that glaciers in a region of West Antarctica that has received relatively little attention to date have lost a considerable amount of ice. And that ice melt and retreat has been going on for decades, longer than previously thought.

The Bellingshausen Coast in West Antarctica.Robert Bingham

The findings, detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, have implications for understanding the potential sea-level rise that the vast icy expanse of Antarctica could unleash as the Earth’s temperature continues to rise.

“I think this study just underscores that West Antarctica, in general, is not only exceptionally vulnerable to retreat triggered by ocean melting at the coastline, but that it is happening now and it is showing no sign of slowing down,” study coauthor Robert Bingham of the University of Edinburgh said in an email. “This whole process is pretty pervasive.”

West Antarctica ice loss

Since satellites first began looking down on Antarctica in the 1990s, polar scientists have noticed rapid changes in the ice of West Antarctica, particularly along its coastlines. It is here that the massive glaciers — essentially rivers of ice — that flow from the continent’s interior meet the sea and the ice begins to float.

The floating sections, known as ice shelves, help regulate the flow of the glaciers behind them. As those ice shelves shrink or collapse, the flow of the glaciers speeds up, increasing the amount of previously land-bound ice that is added to the world’s oceans, like ice cubes to a glass of water.

Warm ocean water is circulating under these ice shelves, eating away at them and causing them to thin, as well as pushing back the grounding line, or the point where land-bound ice begins to float. As the grounding line retreats, it exposes thicker and thicker portions of the glacier, increasing its flow.

Several major ice shelves have collapsed in the last two decades, and the speeds of several crucial glaciers, such as Pine Island Glacier, have accelerated. Recent studies suggest some have even reached a point of no return.

All told, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough ice to add 10 to 13 feet to global sea-level rise were it all to melt; even an incomplete melt would imperil low-lying coastal areas around the planet. One sector, the Amundsen Sea Embayment, contains several of the most worrisome glaciers. It alone currently accounts for about 10 percent of sea-level rise.

But close behind it is a neighboring area, called the Bellingshausen Sea or the South Antarctica Peninsula. It accounts for about one-third of the ice loss from the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (the Amundsen accounts for nearly half), and a study last year showed its glaciers have sped up considerably since 2009. But it has been relatively little studied, especially compared to the more attention-grabbing parts of the Amundsen.

Unmonitored melt

During a 2009-2010 field mission, Bingham looked to shed more light on the region by scanning the ground below one of the fastest-moving Bellingshausen glaciers, the Ferrigno Ice Stream. He found a huge canyon underneath that is likely funneling warm ocean water under the ice.

“This only served to highlight to me that there is so much about the Bellingshausen Sea sector of West Antarctica that has gone unmonitored while most of the world’s eyes (glaciologically speaking) were looking beyond to Pine Island Glacier,” Bingham said.

To get a better picture of the overall ice loss in the area, Bingham and his Ph.D. student, Frazer Christie, analyzed hundreds of satellite images of the area going back to 1975 and tracked the position of the grounding line along 1,240 miles of coast.

They found that 65 percent of the coastline had seen grounding line retreat since 1990, while only 7 percent had seen an advance. The total amount of ice lost over the last 40 years is about 390 square miles, an area about the size of Dallas.

The results “show that this whole coastline has been in a state of retreat since records began in the early 1970s,” Bingham said. That contrasts with previous thinking that only certain glaciers, like the Ferrigno Ice Stream, were seeing significant ice loss while the rest were fairly stable.

“The study illustrates that Antarctica is not immune to changes and that some of what we are seeing today started decades ago,” Eric Rignot, a NASA glaciologist who was not involved with the work, said in an email.

One notable oddity was the Venable Ice Shelf, which has thinned, but hasn’t retreated much. The researchers think it is pinned to a ridge on the seafloor that is keeping it stable for now. Scientists think the same was true of Pine Island Glacier — for a while.

Exactly what the pervasive ice loss in the Bellingshausen Sea area means for future global sea-level rise isn’t entirely clear, in part because of the paucity of data from the area. Bingham says that researchers need a better idea of the topography underlying the ice so they can better model how it will change in the future.

“The Bellingshausen Sea region of West Antarctica stands as one of the least surveyed regions of ice and ocean on the planet,” he said.

Also needed is a clearer picture of ocean circulation there and in the entire West Antarctic region.

“The Antarctic Peninsula certainly does not receive as much attention as it should,” Rignot said. “I would recommend more work in this area, which is illustrative of what will happen farther south as climate gets warmer.”

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Antarctica is melting and shows no sign of slowing down

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Coral reefs are straight-up dissolving now

by AlfredoCormier Posted on May 4, 2016

Coral reefs are straight-up dissolving now

By on May 4, 2016Share

Florida’s coral reefs are disintegrating much faster than expected. And who’s to blame? Oh, you know, just the ENTIRE OCEAN.

Ocean water is growing increasingly acidic as it absorbs the extra CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere, and now that water is eating away at the limestone foundations of coral reefs. A new study found that in the northern section of the Florida Keys’ reef — the third largest barrier reef ecosystem in the world — 6 million tons of limestone have disappeared over the past six years.

This wasn’t unexpected. It’s just that scientists had predicted the reef’s “tipping point,” where coral development is so severely limited by ocean acidification that reefs erode, was a good 40 years off — not today.

Ocean acidification is different from coral bleaching, another threat to reefs, though both have a common cause (climate change) and a common effect (dying corals). We’re looking to our most resilient corals to survive the challenges of living in today’s oceans.

We hope we never have to hold a farewell party for Florida’s coral reef, but ocean acidification is spurring along that unsavory outcome. Here’s to hoping we can usher this uninvited guest out of our coral reefs before it’s too late.

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Oceans won’t have enough oxygen in as little as 15 years

by KarryRohr0004 Posted on April 29, 2016

Oceans won’t have enough oxygen in as little as 15 years

By on Apr 29, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It should come as no surprise that human activity is causing the world’s oceans to warm, rise, and acidify.

But an equally troubling impact of climate change is that it is beginning to rob the oceans of oxygen.

While ocean deoxygenation is well established, a new study led by Matthew Long, an oceanographer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, finds that climate change-driven oxygen loss is already detectable in certain swaths of ocean and will likely be “widespread” by 2030 or 2040.

Ultimately, Long told The Huffington Post, oxygen-deprived oceans may have “significant impacts on marine ecosystems” and leave some areas of ocean all but uninhabitable for certain species.

While some ocean critters, like dolphins and whales, get their oxygen by surfacing, many, including fish and crabs, rely on oxygen that either enters the water from the atmosphere or is released by phytoplankton via photosynthesis.

But as the ocean surface warms, it absorbs less oxygen. And to make matters worse, oxygen in warmer water, which is less dense, has a tough time circulating to deeper waters.

For their study, published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Long and his team used simulations to predict ocean deoxygenation through 2100.

“Since oxygen concentrations in the ocean naturally vary depending on variations in winds and temperature at the surface, it’s been challenging to attribute any deoxygenation to climate change,” Long said in a statement. “This new study tells us when we can expect the impact from climate change to overwhelm the natural variability.”

And we don’t have long.

Matthew Long/NCAR

By 2030 or 2040, according to the study, deoxygenation due to climate change will be detectable in large swaths of the Pacific Ocean, including the areas surrounding Hawaii and off the West Coast of the U.S. mainland. Other areas have more time. In the seas near the east coasts of Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia, for example, deoxygenation caused by climate change still won’t be evident by 2100.

Long said the eventual suffocation may affect the ability of ocean ecosystems to sustain healthy fisheries. The concern among the scientific community, he said, is that “we’re conceivably pushing past tipping points” in being able to prevent the damage.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, shared these concerns, telling The Washington Post that the new study adds to the “list of insults we are inflicting on the ocean through our continued burning of fossil fuels.”

“Just a week after learning that 93 [percent] of the Great Barrier Reef has experienced bleaching in response to the unprecedented current warmth of the oceans, we have yet another reason to be gravely concerned about the health of our oceans, and yet another reason to prioritize the rapid decarbonization of our economy,” Mann said.

Unfortunately, this reason is unlikely to be the last.

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Consumerism plays a huge role in climate change

by LorieStruthers Posted on February 24, 2016

Consumerism plays a huge role in climate change

By on 24 Feb 2016commentsShare

It’s easy to hate on consumption. It turns otherwise intelligent people into manipulable drones, leads to rampant privacy violations, helps people like Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton get disgustingly rich and powerful, encourages advertisers to shove garbage like this in our faces, and culminates every year in a tradition so degrading and horrific that it forces us to question whether we all really did die after Y2K and this is actually hell.

But here’s one more thing: A new study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that the stuff we consume — from food to knick-knacks — is responsible for up to 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and between 50 and 80 percent of total land, material, and water use. So, you know, get that Amazon trigger finger ready, because you’re gonna want to do some comfort shopping after this.

“We all like to put the blame on someone else, the government, or businesses. … But between 60-80 percent of the impacts on the planet come from household consumption. If we change our consumption habits, this would have a drastic effect on our environmental footprint as well,” Diana Ivanova, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and lead author on the study, said in a press release.

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According to the study, about four-fifths of the environmental impact of consumerism comes not from direct behaviors like driving cars or taking long showers, but rather from sources further down our products’ supply chains. The amount of water that goes into a hamburger or frozen pizza, for example, proved much more significant than showering and dish washing habits. This is great news, of course, because everyone knows how easy it is to track products from the obscure mines that they sprang from to the local Bed Bath & Beyond (not).

To figure this all out, Ivanova and her colleagues used economic data from most of the world and looked at different product sectors, including supply chain information.

They found that consumerism was much higher in rich countries than in poor countries (surprise!) and that those with the highest rates of consumerism had up to 5.5 times the environmental impact as the world average. The U.S., they reported, had the highest per capita emissions with 18.6 tonnes CO2 equivalent (“CO2 equivalent” is a metric that rolls multiple types greenhouse gas emissions into one). Luxembourg had 18.5 tonnes, and Australia came in third with 17.7 tonnes. The world average, for comparison, was 3.4 tonnes, and China had just 1.8 tonnes.

So if you’re like me and occasionally use the individual-action-doesn’t-matter rationale to, say, buy cheap home furnishings from Target, then it’s time to face the music: Consumerism is killing the planet (and our souls).

So skip the mall this weekend, and go buy a bus pass instead. Then, if you really want to challenge yourself, see how long you can go without buying something off of Amazon. If you need some motivation, try turning it into a competition with your friends: Whoever caves first has to go work for Amazon.

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This Bee-Killing Pesticide Is Terrible at Protecting Crops

by RFDPenny790770 Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2011, agrichemical giants Monsanto and Bayer CropScience joined forces to sell soybean seeds coated with (among other things) an insecticide of the neonicotinoid family. Neonics are so-called systematic pesticides—when the coated seeds sprout and grow, the resulting plants take up the bug-killing chemical, making them poisonous to crop-chomping pests like aphids. Monsanto rivals Syngenta and DuPont also market neonic-treated soybean seeds.

These products—buoyed by claims that the chemical protects soybean crops from early-season insect pests—have enjoyed great success in the marketplace. Soybeans are the second-most-planted US crop, covering about a quarter of US farmland—and at least a third of US soybean acres are grown with neonic-treated seeds. But two problems haunt this highly lucrative market: 1) The neonic soybean seeds might not do much at all to fight off pests, and 2) they appear to be harming bees and may also hurt other pollinators, birds, butterflies, and water-borne invertebrates.

Doubts about neonic-treated soybean seeds’ effectiveness aren’t new. In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency released a blunt preliminary report finding that “neonicotinoid seed treatments likely provide $0 in benefits” to soybean growers. But the agrichemical industry likes to portray the EPA as an overzealous regulator that relies on questionable data, and it quickly issued a report vigorously disagreeing with the EPA’s assessment.

Now the seed/agrichemical giants will have to open a new front in their battle to convince farmers to continue paying up for neonic-treated soybean seeds. In a recent publication directed to farmers, a coalition of the nation’s most important Midwestern ag-research universities—Iowa State, Kansas State, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, North Dakota State, Michigan State, the University of Minnesota, the University of Missouri, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, South Dakota State, and the University of Wisconsin—argued plainly that “for typical field situations, independent research demonstrates that neonicotinoid seed treatments for soybeans do not provide a consistent return on investment.”

The reason is that neonic-treated soybeans wield the great bulk of their bug-killing power for the first three weeks after the seeds sprout; the major pest that attacks soybean plants, the aphid, doesn’t arrive until much later, when the soybean plants are full-grown. “In other words,” the report states, aphid populations “increase to threshold levels weeks after the short window that neonicotinoid seed treatments protect plants.”

And not only are neonics useless against soybeans’ major field pest, aphids; they may actually boost the fortunes of another important one, the slug, which is “emerging as a key pest” in the soybean belt, according to the report. Pointing to a 2015 study from Penn State researchers, the report notes that slugs aren’t affected by neonics, so they can gobble neonic-treated soy sprouts at will, accumulating the chemical. But when insects called the ground beetle—which has a taste for slugs but not soybean plants—eat the neonic-containing slugs, they tend to die. So slugs transfer the poison from the crops to their natural predator, the ground beetle, and throw the predator balance out of whack, allowing slugs to proliferate. As a result, the Penn State researchers found, neonic seed treatments actually reduce yields in slug-infested fields.

Of course, the most celebrated “non-target” insect potentially affected by neonics is the honeybee. As I reported last week, the EPA recently released an assessment finding that one particular neonic that’s widely used on soybean seeds, imidacloprid, likely harms individual bees and whole bee colonies at levels commonly found in farm fields. That’s because plants from neonic-treated seeds don’t just carry the poison in their leaves and stalks; they also deliver it in bee-attracting nectar and pollen.

While cotton is the imidacloprid-treated crop most likely to hit bees hard, soybeans, too, may pose a threat, the EPA found. The agency couldn’t say for sure, because data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans’ pollen and nectar are “unavailable,” both from Bayer and from independent researchers.

That information gap may be cold comfort for beekeepers, but the agrichemical industry will no doubt seize upon it to argue that its blockbuster chemical is harmless to bees. The rest of us can savor the bitter irony that this widely used pesticide may be more effective at slaying beneficial pollinators than it is at halting crop-chomping pests.

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This Bee-Killing Pesticide Is Terrible at Protecting Crops

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Ghosts from the Nursery – Robin Karr-Morse

by Myrna Posted on December 24, 2015

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Ghosts from the Nursery

Tracing the Roots of Violence – New and Revised Edition

Robin Karr-Morse

Genre: Psychology

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: December 1, 2007

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Seller: The Perseus Books Group, LLC


This new, revised edition incorporates significant advances in neurobiological research over the past decade, and includes a new introduction by Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, a leading researcher in the field. When Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence was published in 1997, it was lauded for providing scientific evidence that violence can originate in the womb and become entrenched in a child&apos;s brain by preschool. The authors&apos; groundbreaking conclusions became even more relevant following the wave of school shootings across the nation including the tragedy at Columbine High School and the shocking subsequent shootings culminating most recently in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Following each of these media coverage and public debate turned yet again to the usual suspects concerning the causes of violence: widespread availability of guns and lack of mental health services for late-stage treatment. Discussion of the impact of trauma on human life—especially early in life during chemical and structural formation of the brain—is missing from the equation. Karr-Morse and Wiley continue to shift the conversation among parents and policy makers toward more fundamental preventative measures against violence.

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Ghosts from the Nursery – Robin Karr-Morse

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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 on 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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How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

by sseerss4tr Posted on August 10, 2015

How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

By on 10 Aug 2015commentsShare

What do glaciers have in common with my bank account?

They’re both slowly melting away — sometimes in big chunks, other times at a slow trickle — and both represent existential crises that end in either the demise of humanity or me moving back in with my parents. Which is why I’d like to ignore both of them — you know, ignorance is bliss, what you don’t know can’t hurt you, etc.

Except bliss doesn’t last, and what you don’t know can hurt you — and hurt you and hurt you. So as a grownup, I do, in fact, check my bank account — through scrunched eyes and gritted teeth, but still! — and I would like to know what’s going on with those glaciers, even if I’m making this face the entire time.

The problem is, there’s no online banking equivalent for monitoring melting glaciers. Even scientists don’t always know what’s going on with those giant hunks of world-altering ice. But according to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers have figured out a new way to use seismic vibrations to monitor the melting of tidewater glaciers — those that end in the ocean, rather than on land. Here’s more from a press release:

Meltwater moving through a glacier into the ocean is critically important because it can increase melting and destabilize the glacier in a number of ways: The water can speed the glacier’s flow downhill toward the sea; it can move rocks, boulders and other sediments toward the terminus of the glacier along its base; and it can churn and stir warm ocean water, bringing it in contact with the glacier.

“It’s like when you drop an ice cube into a pot of warm water. It will eventually melt, but it will melt a lot faster if you stir that water,” said Timothy Bartholomaus, a postdoctoral fellow at [The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics] and the study’s lead author. “Subglacial discharge provides that stirring.”

Bartholomaus and his colleagues realized that they could use seismic equipment to monitor such subglacial discharge when they were trying to study earthquakes — or “icequakes” — caused by glacier calving and kept detecting mysterious background vibrations. Those vibrations, it turned out, came from meltwater running through the ice.

Landlocked glaciers are easier to monitor because scientists can just measure the amount of runoff in glacial rivers. But if we only monitored landlocked glaciers, it would be like me only monitoring my grocery bill and ignoring rent, student loan payments, and health insurance.

“All of the biggest glaciers in Greenland, all of the biggest glaciers in Antarctica, they end in the ocean,” Bartholomaus said. “We need to understand how these glaciers are moving and how they are melting at their front. If we want to answer those questions, we need to know what’s occurring with the meltwater being discharged from the glacier.”

So while I go check my bank account, you grit your teeth and stare at this picture of the Yahtse Glacier in Alaska. All that brown water at the top is meltwater runoff.

Tony OneySource:
Scientists pioneer method to track water flowing through glaciers

, Eurekalert.

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How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

Posted in alo, Anchor, Eureka, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle