Climate change

Here is a model of the top 15 “countries” across the span from the Agricultural Revolution onwards: Food for thought on trends and implications. Notice, the principle that trends (like pie-crusts) are made to be broken. To truly predict, we need dynamics and some reasonable idea of contingencies. Don’t forget to take reconstructions of the deep unrecorded past and future projections with a grain of salt. END

From a PNAS article: The conditions of methane (CH4) formation in olivine-hosted secondary fluid inclusions and their prevalence in peridotite and gabbroic rocks from a wide range of geological settings were assessed using confocal Raman spectroscopy, optical and scanning electron microscopy, electron microprobe analysis, and thermodynamic modeling. Detailed examination of 160 samples from ultraslow- to fast-spreading midocean ridges, subduction zones, and ophiolites revealed that hydrogen (H2) and CH4 formation linked to serpentinization within olivine-hosted secondary fluid inclusions is a widespread process. And this from a paper in Nature: Methane (CH4) is an important greenhouse gas because it has 25 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2) by mass over a century. Recent calculations suggest that atmospheric CH4 emissions Read More ›

Scientistsdiscover the biggest seaweed bloom in the world: From Phys.Org:(https://phys.org/news/2019-07-scientists-biggest-seaweed-bloom-world.html) [N.B. I find the newest version of WordPress almost impossible to work with. There is no correlation between the commands they tell you to use and what actually happens. This might be the last post I post here. There’s no way I can set up a link. Impossible. ] Scientists led by the USF College of Marine Science used NASA satellite observations to discover the largest bloom of macroalgae in the world called the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB), as reported in Science. They confirmed that the belt of brown macroalgae called Sargassum forms its shape in response to ocean currents, based on numerical simulations. It can grow so large Read More ›

In St. Louis earlier this month: What do you do if you’re a climate activist and a geoscientist speaks at a meeting near you offering scientific evidence against your point of view? Well, of course—you do what any rational person would do. You attend and listen carefully and weigh the arguments and consider whether you should change your views. Maybe you ask some questions during the Q&A at the end of the talk, challenging some of his evidence or reasoning. Maybe, if you’re really confident of your views, you contact the event organizers in advance and offer to debate the speaker, making the event all the more valuable to people of all persuasions. Or maybe not. Maybe, instead, you just Read More ›

Further to kairosfocus’s thoughts yesterday on the digital empire suppressing the free flow of ideas: Buzzfeed reported August 7 that “YouTube Is Fighting Back Against Climate Misinformation.” As of July 9, “YouTube is now adding fact checks to videos that question climate change … as a part of its ongoing effort to combat the rampant misinformation and conspiratorial fodder on its platform.” … YouTube’s decision might be defensible if it were evenhanded. If, on all videos addressing climate change, from any perspective, YouTube placed a notice that climate change is the subject of vigorous ongoing debate and that equally qualified scientists hold a variety of views on the magnitude, causes, and consequences of human-induced climate change and on the best Read More ›