Blogs / Discoblog

On Monday we brought you the story of the Russian scientists forced to evacuate their Arctic research station because their ice floe melted. Today, Nature has an interview with Jürgen Graeser, a German scientist who spent the winter with the Russians at North Pole 35.

So what did Graeser learn during his time up there?

1. Bring a flare gun. Graeser guesses that the team had 30 or so separate run-ins with polar bears, but none of them turned deadly because the flares scared off the bears.

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Earlier this month, we wrote that Santa Claus might have no home this summer as scientists speculate that the Earth could see an ice-free North Pole. Now Russian scientists trying to study Arctic warming have had to abandon their work to keep from ending up all wet.

In September, the Russian team set up North Pole 35, an Arctic headquarters where they could study pollution levels the how fast the ice was melting. Unfortunately for them, and the world in general, the ice melted faster than they anticipated: Their ice floe home, which was almost four miles wide in September, shrank to only one-third of a mile across this summer. Russia evacuated, and the last 20 scientists and their dogs climbed aboard a rescue ship yesterday.

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The Telegraph reports that earlier this week in Australia, doctors at Royal Children’s Hospital announced that they’d diagnosed the first case of so-called “climate change delusion.” Doctors Robert Salo and Josh Wolfe say a 17-year-old male had refused to drink any water out of eco-guilt—he believed his water consumption would cause the deaths of millions of people.

The story seems almost too outrageous to be true, but some blogs and newspapers have jumped on the “Al Gore is literally driving people crazy” angle, and blamed media coverage of global warming for this Australian’s mental condition. The scapegoating seems reminiscent of the story last month about the pregnancy pact at a Massachusetts high school (which was a hoax), when culture warriors were quick to blame films like Knocked Up and Juno for supposedly glamorizing pregnancy or single parenthood. So far, however, we haven’t heard anyone blame this young man’s affliction on the anti-consumption message of Wall-E.

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Some plants simply can’t handle their climate changing, and an increased temperature kills them off. Others, as DISCOVER recently covered, manage to migrate to a cooler climate when nature turns up the heat. But a grass found on a rocky hillside in Northern England has chosen a third option: Stay and tough it out.

Researchers from Syracuse and Sheffield universities had been toying with this particular ecosystem for 13 years. Herbs and shrubs abound in the rocky region; more than 50 species of plants per square meter can be found, and researchers decided to put them all to the test. They divided the area into smaller plots, and varied the climate of those plots wildly. One section was given 20 percent more water than its average yearly amount; another area had shelter built over it to simulate drought. The scientists even planted heating cables underneath one plot to simulate a warmer-than-average winter.

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Tuatara are often called living fossils—the ancestors of these New Zealand creatures roamed the Earth 200 million ago and survived the extinction event that took down the dinosaurs. But according to a study released today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the lizard-like animal’s long run might come to a sudden end if the planet warms as rapidly as some fear.

The problem is that tuatara, like a lot of reptiles, show what’s called temperature dependent sex determination, meaning that the sex of a baby animal depends on the temperature during its development. For the tuatara, scientists say, the critical temperature is close to 71 degrees Fahrenheit. If the mercury reads higher than that during a baby tuatara’s development, it is much more likely to be born a male. So, the researchers say, a warmer world could throw off the male-female balance.

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• Andrew Revkin reflects on his 1988 global warming cover story in DISCOVER.

• It’s too expensive to send humans up into space for repairs; let’s send robots.

• The “Pillars of Creation,” from the famous Hubble photo have already been destroyed. We just won’t see it on Earth for another millennium.

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Call it a happy accident: Phytoplankton in tropical areas of the Atlantic Ocean may be helping to break down greenhouse gases.

After analyzing data gathered by airplane and in a lab at Cape Verde, a chain of Atlantic islands not far from West Africa, a team of British researchers was pleased but puzzled to find that ozone in the atmosphere near the islands had decreased 50 percent more than climate modelers had predicted. The reason, they think, is that phytoplankton produce chemicals like bromine monoxide and iodine monoxide that get pulled up into the atmosphere by all the water vapor that evaporates in a hot climate like Cape Verde. Once aloft in the low atmosphere, these chemicals can break apart ozone molecules. Not only that, says Alastair Lewis, of the U.K.’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science, but the byproducts of that first chemical reaction then broke down methane, a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, into non-harmful components.

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Anote Tong has already accepted that his home could become the next Atlantis.

Tong is the president of the Republic of Kiribati, a chain of tiny Pacific islands near the equator, and he is alarmed about global warming for good reason. The highest point in Kiribati is only two meters above sea level; if the gravest scientific predictions are correct, Tong says, Kiribati will be underwater by the turn of the next century. Last week he spoke at a World Environment Day event in New Zealand, in an attempt to get the world’s attention.

Kiribati is at the heart of the mess of uncertainty about how to deal with global warming. Some global warming doubters have said that small drops in sea level measured in parts of the Pacific show that sea levels aren’t rising precipitously, and people like Tong are simply playing Chicken Little. Most scientists, on the other hand, agree that the seas are rising as glaciers melt.

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In 2000, British Petroleum shortened its name to BP and adopted the slogan “Beyond Petroleum,” complete with a new yellow and green earthy logo. Then Chevron rolled out their new slogan, “Human Energy,” and broadcast commercials promising to become part of the solution to the world’s energy and pollution problems. Now, the greening of oil companies’ public image has reached one of the environmentalist movement’s favorite punching bags: ExxonMobil.

ExxonMobil representatives announced they will stop funding nine think tanks and interest groups that have repeatedly denied that global warming is a serious threat. One group axed was the George C. Marshall Institute, which churns out books and lengthy reports challenging the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, particularly targeting the conclusion that a scientific consensus considers global warming a real—and human-caused—problem.

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The earth’s average temperature rose steadily throughout the 20th century, with only a few short blasts of cooling recorded in the climate data. But if a team of scientists led by David Thompson at Colorado State University is correct, one of the largest recorded cool-downs ever documented might have never happened. How did the mistake occur? According to Thompson, through a bucket blunder.

Scientists had always struggled to find a physical cause of the 0.3 °C drop in global temperature around 1945, right at the end of World War II. But according to Thompson, the measured cooling happened because of cross-cultural confusion. During the war, Americans sailors measured the sea surface temperatures by testing water their ship took in to cool its engines. But when the British retook most of the recording responsibility in 1945, they simply drew buckets of ocean water and tested them outside. The difference between the warm engine room where the Americans tested and the non-insulated British buckets accounts for temperature drop in the record, Thompson says.

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