tingilinde

414

Maua Loa observatory CO2 readings are well over 400 .. well over 410ppm

The last time in human history they were this high was...   well  never... humans wouldn't evolve for a long time.

 

 

tropical storms since 1950

marking the beginning of the anthropocene

The notion of the anthropoecvne - a new period in natural history - has been gaining acceptance. Perhaps the beginning can be clearly marked. (it's controversial - my own instinct tells me there are too many ways to view the humanity has made to mark a well-defined point)

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

latest on climate models

New results from the latest round of improvements are disconcerting.  It's early though.  The lack of a serious attack on carbon emissions may turn out to be the greatest failure of humanity.

snip

...

In earlier models, doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) over preindustrial levels led models to predict somewhere between 2°C and 4.5°C of warming once the planet came into balance. But in at least eight of the next-generation models, produced by leading centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, that “equilibrium climate sensitivity” has come in at 5°C or warmer. Modelers are struggling to identify which of their refinements explain this heightened sensitivity before the next assessment from the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the trend “is definitely real. There’s no question,” says Reto Knutti, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “Is that realistic or not? At this point, we don’t know.”

That’s an urgent question: If the results are to be believed, the world has even less time than was thought to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C above preindustrial levels—a threshold many see as too dangerous to cross. With atmospheric CO2 already at 408 parts per million (ppm) and rising, up from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm, even previous scenarios suggested the world could warm 2°C within the next few decades. The new simulations are only now being discussed at meetings, and not all the numbers are in, so “it’s a bit too early to get wound up,” says John Fyfe, a climate scientist at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, whose model is among those running much hotter than in the past. “But maybe we have to face a reality in the future that’s more pessimistic than it was in the past.”

...

 

 

kathy hayhoe on dealing with polarization

Climate deniers won't change their minds when presented with science.  Kathy Hayhoe has been fighting the battles in Texas and notes some of the techniques sociology suggests.  

 

entanglement

A curious proxy for ocean-plastic pollution.

The paper in Nature Communications. (open)

 

The rise in ocean plastics evidenced from a 60-year time series

Clare Ostle 1, Richard C. Thompson2, Derek Broughton1, Lance Gregory 1, Marianne Wootton1 & David G. Johns1

Plastic production has increased exponentially since its use became widespread in the 1950s. This has led to increased concern as plastics have become prevalent in the oceanic environment, and evidence of their impacts on marine organisms and human health has been highlighted. Despite their prevalence, very few long-term (>40 years) records of the distribution and temporal trends of plastics in the world’s oceans exist. Here we present a new time series, from 1957 to 2016 and covering over 6.5 million nautical miles, based on records of when plastics have become entangled on a towed marine sampler. This consistent time series provides some of the earliest records of plastic entanglement, and is the first to confirm a significant increase in open ocean plastics in recent decades.

 

a modern day physicist channels leonardo

The artwork of Sergio Cittolin (via Symmetry)

 

extremely stupid

I've come across a few pieces - mostly op-eds - in the mainstream media that criticize the event horizon image as being "boring" and "not sharp enough" even going so far to say as it could be sharpened in Photoshop.  The physicist Wolfgang Pauli, dismissing a very naive paper as a complete waste  is said to have said:

Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!  

(That is not only not right; it is not even wrong)

The level is science illiteracy is high.  It is sad to see it propagated in the press.

 

 

 

 

for the science types out there

The first set of Event Horizon Telescope papers  appears outside the paywall in Astrophysical Journal Letters .  The first paper is a summary and the rest give details.    Papers II and III are engineering and computational .. they rest are astrophysics.

 

 

 

artificial aurora

when physicists do fireworks