Antarctic Ice 'Cork' Melting Could Lead to Unstoppable Sea Rise. If a relatively small chunk of ice currently plugging the edge of an ice sheet in Antarctica were to melt, it could release massive amounts of ice into the ocean that would significantly increase global sea level for the next 10,000 years, according to a new report. The ice plug sits on a ridge beneath the East Antarctic Ice Shelf in a region called the Wilkes Basin that has previously been overlooked in sea level projections, because it has appeared to be stable compared to regions of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which sits closer to sea level.
These new findings, however, suggest the Wilkes Basin region could, indeed, play a major role in future sea level rise, contributing as much as 9.8 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) across the world's oceans if even just half of the cork were unplugged, the researchers found. [Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice] The team studied the shape of the land beneath the ice sheet and created computer simulations of ice dynamics. El carbón, gas y petróleo que nadie podrá quemar. “Si queremos evitar sobrepasar el límite de 2 °C de la manera más costo-efectiva, más del 80% del carbón, la mitad del gas y un tercio del petróleo necesita ser clasificado como incombustible”.
Esa es la noticia que le dio al mundo Christophe McGlade, investigador asociado del Institute for Sustainable Resources en la Universidad London, al presentar los resultados de un trabajo publicado en la revista Nature. Es un dato crucial que insinúa muchos de los cambios económicos y políticos que podrían avecinarse en las próximas décadas. Lo que están advirtiendo McGlade y sus colegas es que el único camino a la vista para evitar un escenario climático que sobrepase los famosos 2 °C es dejar bajo tierra, intactas, gran parte de las reservas de combustibles fósiles.
Pero el trabajo aporta algo más: hace un cálculo por continentes de esas reservas que no podrían explotarse. Hallan cuatro nuevos gases artificiales que dañan la capa de ozono - BBC Mundo - Noticias. Rebecca Solnit: The politics of pretending are killing us. TD usually runs Sunday evenings, Tuesday mornings and Thursday mornings; Tom will email you when a piece goes up. There have undoubtedly been stable periods in human history, but you and your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents never lived through one, and neither will any children or grandchildren you may have or come to have.
Everything has been changing continuously, profoundly — from the role of women to the nature of agriculture. For the past couple of hundred years, change has been accelerating in both magnificent and nightmarish ways. Yet when we argue for change, notably changing our ways in response to climate change, we’re arguing against people who claim we’re disrupting a stable system. They insist that we’re rocking the boat unnecessarily. I say: rock that boat.
As you probably know, the actual oceans are rising – almost eight inches since 1880, and that’s only going to accelerate. The oceans are changing fast, and for the worse. New and Renewable Energies. Scientists now know why global warming has slowed down and it’s not good news for us. It’s been called the “hiatus,” “pause,” or “slowdown” and has been a favored meme of climate skeptics for years. Despite the continued increase of greenhouse gas emissions from us, rise of global surface temperatures has been easing since 1998. Two new studies published this week examine the origins of the“pause,” and, surprisingly, suggest that it may persist for years even in our notably warming world. The first study, published on Feb. 26 in the journal Science, looked into likely causes. “It appears as though internal variability has offset warming over the last 15 or so years,” Byron A. Steinman, lead author of the paper and assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told Quartz.
That internal variability is found in the natural cycles of temperature change that occur over years or even decades in the oceans, like El Niño and La Niña. The paper, which was co-authored by Michael E. Chris D. But sinking heat is just one side of a seesaw. Michael E. The twisted morality of climate denial: How religion and American exceptionalism are undermining our future. James Inhofe, the senior Republican senator from Oklahoma and author of “The Great Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” has recently become chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. As a result, we can expect his committee, and perhaps the Senate as a whole, to proceed on the basis that human-induced climate change is nothing but a twisted fantasy concocted by misguided intellectuals. As conspiracy theories go, this one is a dilly. The overwhelming majority of American earth and weather scientists, working in hundreds of private universities and in public universities funded and supervised by all 50 states (red as well as blue), have apparently decided to risk their personal credibility and endanger their careers to tell a complex, well-coordinated lie for no apparent reason.
Climate change challenges people’s traditional beliefs about God Climate change contradicts America’s heroic image of itself Where do we go from here? Edward L. Will a warmer climate mean more kidney stones? - MSN Healthy Living. (HealthDay News) -- Add another possible woe to the growing list of consequences of climate change: Kidney stones. A new study of American cities suggests that rising temperatures may increase the number of people who develop the painful urinary obstructions.
"These findings point to potential public health effects associated with global climate change," study leader Dr. Gregory Tasian, a pediatric urologist and epidemiologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said in a hospital news release. His team examined the medical records of more than 60,000 adults and children who were diagnosed with kidney stones between 2005 and 2011, and compared that information with daily temperature data.
The patients lived in cities with various types of climates: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. As average annual daily temperatures rose above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, the risk of people developing kidney stones within 20 days increased in all cities except Los Angeles. “There are no silver bullets”: Humanity’s incredible run of luck might be coming to an end. Here’s the long view of human history, as Ruth DeFries sees it: An ingenious species, we keep finding new ways to “hijack nature” and better feed ourselves. Each newfound system for producing food is a game changer, allowing our numbers to grow, only to be halted in our upward trajectory by some new problem that we must innovate our way out of again. Europe adopts the potato, people live longer and have more children, then the Great Irish Famine hits. A million people die, but humanity perseveres, developing new potato varieties and agriculture practices that keep the blight from causing another disaster.
DeFries, a MacArthur fellow and chairwoman of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University, calls those new innovations “pivots.” They lead to boom periods — “ratchets” — along with inevitable problems — “hatchets” — for which we require new pivots. The stakes, as they currently stand, are greater than they’ve ever been before. Yes. Yeah.