Climate260
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Climate News Roundup — Week of 6/14
Bill Gates funds cloud-whitening effort to reduce global warming. USA Today Bill Gates is funding research into whether or not it is effective and feasible to increase the albedo of atmospheric clouds by spray sea mist high into the atmosphere. The plan, spearheaded by Silicon Valley inventor Armand Neukermans, is a relatively benign method of…
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Energy, Agriculture, and the Environment: Dead Zones and the Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
Catastrophic, tragic, disastrous: these are all words that have been used to describe the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It is impossible to deny that these words apply – thick, goopy crude has already coated the beaches and estuaries of the Gulf, contaminating more than 120 miles of coastline. The spill is…
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The Policy Buffet (Part 1): Making Sense of the Senate’s Climate and Energy Proposals
Advocates for energy policy reform and legislative action on climate change have long anticipated their opportunity to effect change. This summer may be the turning point they have awaited. In recent weeks, energy and climate policy have taken over the political limelight. The devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has forced Americans to…
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Decline and Fall of a Glacier
The glaciers around Puncak Jaya have long been in visible decline. From 1936 to 2006, they lost nearly 80 percent of their area–two-thirds of that since 1970, according to a new paper by glaciologist Michael Prentice of the Indiana Geological Survey, who has long been interested in the area. Satellite images show that from 2002 to 2006…
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The Ice Cores
Maybe the most difficult thing about ice cores comes after the actual drilling: then you then have to get them out and transport them long distances, and make sure they don’t melt. Otherwise, all that work was for nothing. Here are some images showing how we handle them initially. (Courtesy David Christenson/Freeport McMoRan)
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Images of Ice Drilling
Here are some photos of the ice drilling, and the site where we are working. All come courtesy of David Christenson, Greg Chmura and Ario Samudro, the video/photography team from Freeport McMoRan, which has been helping us with all phases of logistics.
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Dazed but Mostly Confused: Why Americans don’t know what to think about climate change
A string of recent polls have heralded the decline of American interest in climate change: fewer people believe in it, fewer people see it as a serious problem, and more people think scientists don’t agree about it. Coupled with recent scandals over hacked emails and allegations of inaccuracy in the IPCC, these polls seem to…
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Dust and its Impact on Earth’s Climate System
Last month, Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory hosted a conference on dust in the climate system as part of the NOAA funded Abrupt Climate Change in a Warming World (ACCWW) project. Most often, we think of dust simply as the stuff that accumulates on our windowsills, but those fine particles floating in the air play an…
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The Landscape We Are Up Against
We have drilled a second core through the ice to bedrock, and are done at our first site. Unfortunately, the helicopter that we need to move the heavy pieces to our second planned spot is down for regular maintenance until next Monday, June 21. That means the team must wait it out at the relatively sheltered “saddle…
