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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Thirty-five years after the United States banned the pesticide DDT because it was toxic to both humans and the environment, the chemical is still polluting the Antarctic thanks to global warming.
Antarctica’s Adelie penguins have shown traces of DDT since scientists started tracking the data in the 1970s. But alarmingly, the DDT concentration has remained about the same, even as the world has cut its DDT use by 80 to 90 percent since the 1960s. Although DDT persists in the environment—as famously documented in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—its presence should decrease over time unless a new source is leaching DDT into the ecosystem, according to a study led by Heidi Geisz at the College of William and Mary. And Geisz’s team thinks they’ve figured out what the new source is: Glaciers.
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Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at a record-breaking rate—but it’s not all tumbling straight into the sea. A significant portion of Greenland’s meltwater—which forms on the surface during the summertime and can pool into lakes—finds its way straight through the ice sheet to the bedrock. There, it disperses and lubes up the ice-bedrock interface, substantially accelerating the flow of ice to the sea which, theoretically, causes the sea level to rise and exposes more ice to melting.
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Keren Blankfeld Schultz at Scientific American has an interesting report on the effects of severe weather on the length of a single day, or the total time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis. As it turns out, the speed of the planet’s rotation is determined by the amount of mass across its surface, which is made up of the “roiling aggregation of gases that comprise the atmosphere, the solid earth itself, its fluid core, and the sloshing ocean.”
So when an event that has the power to move a huge amount of mass—such as, say, an earthquake and/or tsunami—occurs, it can alter the earth’s rotation speed enough to lengthen or shorten a day by as much as several thousandths of a second.
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• The hottest country code on teh Internets [sic]: .su—as in, the Soviet Union. Which, in case you somehow forgot, doesn’t exist anymore.
• Big prizes are spurring a new age in (and at least one blog about) space exploration. Now PETA hopes to do the same with a $1 million prize to the first mad scientists who can “produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012,” thereby sparing real animals from becoming meat. Note the stipulation about “commercially viable,” you home molecular gastronomists.
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• Are stars secretly zombie cannibals? A new study suggests that “dead” stars may consume their healthy neighbors, thus creating a large and mysterious cloud of antimatter in the center of the galaxy. Look for George Romero’s take, coming soon to a theater near you.
• A Bosnian man claims his home has been targeted by aliens, after the house was hit by meteorites five times. But before you write him off, consider this: Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that the rocks are genuine. (more…)
If you feel immobilized by the latest bump in gas prices, just follow these five simple steps:
- scour through the rotting dregs of your kitchen’s garbage cans, collect all animal and plant products (the fouler the better)
- toss a few billion garbage-loving bacteria into the decaying sludge
- give the microbes a few days to breed and ferment
- discard gelatinous muck, save all gases emitted
- enjoy your environmentally friendly energy!
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The Friends-inspired rumor that urine can relieve a jellyfish sting provided more comedic value than useful first-aid advice, but there are actually many practical applications for that yellow waste product. Ancient Egyptians and Aztecs rubbed urine on their skin to treat cuts and burns, while the Romans used it as a bleaching agent for cleaning clothes and teeth. And now, it may help fight global warming.
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The climate blog Celsias offers some intriguing insight into geoengineering. Recently spotlighted on DISCOVER’s website, geoengineering involves drastic, planet-scale alterations to the climate so Earth remains habitable for humans, despite our impressive negligence. The geoengineering schemes highlighted in the DISCOVER slideshow include blocking the sun with trillions of space-based shields and shading ourselves with stratospheric sulfur injections—but these are not the only innovative ways to help our climate.
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On Wednesday I trekked to the 12th monthly meeting of the Secret Science Club, an informal lecture series in the basement of Union Hall, a bar in Brooklyn. The speaker this month was William Schlesinger, a biogeochemist and the new president of a think tank called the Institute of Ecosystem Studies. (The special drink was a “climate cooler,” which was a pleasant if mild rum punch.) Schlesinger gave a good introductory-level talk on the basics of global warming: where the carbon dioxide’s coming from, what it does in the atmosphere (with the requisite inside-a-car-on-a-hot-day slide), how we might decrease our CO2 production, etc. Due to time constraints, he only got to briefly mention his recent research, which focuses on how trees and soil affect CO2 levels, and vice versa.
After the talk I had a couple of questions, and I posed one to him, but I don’t think he exactly got what I was getting at. During the talk, Schlesinger showed one graph that showed a fairly close correlation between GDP growth and the change in CO2 output from the U.S. for a few decades in the 20th century. Then he showed another graph that showed a very tight correlation between atmospheric CO2 and global population over the 20th century, if I recall.
So how do you reconcile these? I realize that these two constraints don’t inherently and necessarily conflict—what happens in the U.S. could be independent of what’s happening across the globe. But the spirit of the two graphs did seem to clash: one implicitly argued that CO2 output tracked with economic growth, and the other implicitly argued that CO2 in the atmosphere tracked with population.
The distinction seems important to me because most median population projections (whose accuracy is another question) for the 21st century say that population growth will flatten out around 10 billion people around 2050. And if atmospheric CO2 really does track closely with global population, does that mean that even if we continue on our current pathetic regulatory course, CO2 levels will also level off in 2050?
That level would still be high enough to cook us all silly, but if we want to respond appropriately to the problem we should pin down the projection as much as possible.
Any DiscoBlog readers know how to forecast the atmospheric conditions for our li’l planet 50 years out?
