Tag: global warming

Global Warming and the War in Syria

Reds and oranges highlight lands around the Mediterranean that experienced significantly drier winters during 1971-2010 than the comparison period of 1902-2010. Credit NOAA.
Reds and oranges highlight lands around the Mediterranean that experienced significantly drier winters during 1971-2010 than the comparison period of 1902-2010. Credit NOAA.

A 2011 article from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration linked recent severe droughts in the Mediterranean to anthropogenic climate change. Now Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell assert that the drought (and agricultural mismanagement) lead to the displacement of a million and a half people in Syria, which helped spark the current civil war.

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Act Now: The Exponentially Increasing Costs of Not Acting on Climate Change

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology recently had to add two new colors to their temperature maps because the previous colors did not go high enough.

Andrew Sullivan pulls together commentary on a recent research paper that shows that the costs of waiting to act on climate change, far outweigh the costs of acting now. The longer we wait, the more it’s going to cost to prevent the most dangerous effects of climate change. Unfortunately, the costs of waiting will be paid in the future (as will the benefits), so there’s less motivation to act now.

Two degrees is the level that is currently supported by over 190 countries as a limit to avoid dangerous climate change …

“Ultimately, the geophysical laws of the Earth system and its uncertainties dictate what global temperature rise to expect,” said Rogelj. “If we delay for twenty years, the likelihood of limiting temperature rise to two degrees becomes so small that the geophysical uncertainties don’t play a role anymore.”

–Climate Progress (2013): Nature: Limiting Climate Change Will Become Much Harder ‘And More Expensive If Action Is Not Taken Soon’ on ThinkProgress.

On top of this, Fiona Harvey reports on an International Energy Agency report that suggests:

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

— Harvey (2011): World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns in The Guardian.

Climate by Proxy

Both [thermometer and proxy] records also show that the global warming in the last 15 years of the record (1980–1995) is significantly faster than that of the long-term trend (1880–1995).

— NOAA (2013): Independent Evidence Confirms Global Warming in Instrument Record.

To figure out what the weather and climate were like in the past, before things like thermometers were invented, scientists use proxies such as: the change in tree ring thickness; differences in the isotopic composition of shells and rocks; records of species change in the oceans; gases in bubbles trapped in glacial ice (as well as the character of the ice itself). Paleoclimatologists at NOAA have analyzed 173 different proxy records to provide a lot more evidence that the increase in temperature we’ve been measuring for the last 150 years (with thermometers) is real.

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Ski Trip (to Hidden Valley)

Approaching a change in slope.

We took a school trip to the ski slopes in Hidden Valley. It was the interim, and it was a day dedicated to taking a break. However, it would have been a great place to talk about gradients, changes in slopes, and first and second differentials. The physics of mass, acceleration, and friction would have been interesting topics as well.

Calculus student about to take the second differential.

This year has been cooler than last year, but they’ve still struggled a bit to keep snow on the slopes. They make the snow on colder nights, and hope it lasts during the warmer spells. The thermodynamics of ice formation would fit in nicely into physics and discussion of weather, while the impact of a warming climate on the economy is a topic we’ve broached in environmental science already.

The blue cannon launches water into the air, where, if it’s cold enough, it crystallizes into artificial snow. The water is pumped up from a lake at the bottom of the ski slopes.

Wiggle Matching: Sorting out the Global Warming Curve

To figure out if the climate is actually warming we need to extract from the global temperature curve all the wiggles caused by other things, like volcanic eruptions and El Nino/La Nina events. The resulting trend is quite striking.

I’m teaching pre-Calculus using a graphical approach, and my students’ latest project is to model the trends in the rising carbon dioxide record in a similar way. They’re matching curves (exponential, parabolic, sinusoidal) to the data and subtracting them till they get down to the background noise.

Carbon dioxide concentration (ppm) measured at the Mona Loa observatory in Hawaii shows exponential growth and a periodic annual variation.

A Global Warming Primer

The Discovery Channel has an interesting series of videos about the effects of global warming on: polar bears; the Antarctic Ice Sheets; the Amazon rainforest; and the Great Barrier Reef. They also have a nice bit on what goes into the average American carbon footprint.

Natural Selection and Polar vs. Grizzly Bears

What I end up seeing, in this quintessentially 21st century creature, is a glimpse of the future.

— Gamble (2012): One, two, three, er…many. in The Last Word on Nothing.

The effect of rapid Arctic warming on polar bears has been a theme this year in Environmental Science, so this article on the hybridization of polar bears and grizzly bears caught my eye.

As caribou migration routes have moved North, grizzlies have followed and started mating with polar bears. Not only have they produced hybrid young, but those young are fertile. Polar bears and grizzlies only diverged about 150,000 years ago and haven’t developed many genetic differences, despite quite dramatic visual dissimilarities. Second-generation hybrids have now been confirmed in the wild.

This article is also of note to my Middle School science class because we’ve talked about speciation — the divergent evolution of two populations into separate species — before when we looked at the phylogenetic tree and bison evolution in particular. This seems to be a re-convergence after separation. As the climate warms the grizzly bears are able to range further north, while the polar bears are more restricted to the shores by the melted sea ice, so the two populations encounter each other more and more. Thus polar bears, may eventually disappear as they are re-incorporated into the grizzly population.

The author, Jessa Gamble, thinks this is a glimpse of things to come.

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