News – Page 16

What 95% Certainty of Warming Means to Scientists

Written on September 24, 2013.

Seth Borenstein, Yahoo! News Top scientists from a variety of fields say they are about as certain that global warming is a real, man-made threat as they are that cigarettes kill. They are as sure about climate change as they are about the age of the universe. They say they are more certain about climate change than they are that vitamins make you healthy or that dioxin in Superfund sites is dangerous. They’ll even put a number on how certain they are about climate change. But...

California’s Water House of Cards

Written on September 23, 2013.

Groundwater supplies at least a third of the state’s water. But it’s being depleted at a rapid pace, despite efforts to recharge it. Jay Famiglietti and Sasha Richey, Los Angeles Times Gov. Jerry Brown’s Office of Planning and Research convened a meeting this month of groundwater experts from the University of California to determine what is currently known about the state’s underground water reserves and how they may be changing in the future. This and other recent...

Sowing the seeds of sustainability

Written on August 20, 2013.

First-of-its-kind summer institute cultivates environmental activism – and leadership skills – among incoming students The sun will rise in the east and set in the west today, just as it always does. But 20 incoming freshmen and transfer students who participated this year in the inaugural Summer Institute for Sustainability Leadership are seeing that process – indeed the entire pulse of the planet – in a whole new light. “It may have been a little bleak for the students,” says Melissa...

Antarctica Melting From Below

Written on June 17, 2013.

Jennifer A. Kingson, The New York Times Early Antarctic explorers used all sorts of colorful words for icebergs — “growlers,” “bergy bits” — as well as the geological term “calved” for when a wall of ice would break noisily from the Antarctic coastline and start floating north. (Some wrote in their diaries that they could tell how recently an iceberg had calved by how degraded it looked). More recently, the calving of enormous icebergs, some the size of Delaware, has been blamed for the...

Rich Chinese Export Pollution to Poorer Regions

Written on June 17, 2013.

Limiting pollution in China’s richer provinces has shifted polluting facilities to less prosperous areas with fewer rules Tim Radford, Scientific American Just as rich nations have passed the responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions to the developing nations, so the rich provinces of China have exported the problem to the poorest regions, according to new research. The world’s biggest single emitter of the greenhouse gas – 10 billion tons in 2011 – has undertaken to reduce...

More than a weatherman

Written on June 17, 2013.

Public Impact Fellow Scott Sellars is developing a better way to predict precipitation Lori Brandt, Engineering Communications Scott Sellars was consulting with the South Carolina Ports Authority when he recognized just how important weather data is to the safety and efficiency of the agency’s operations. If the wind blew above 30 knots, the massive mobile cranes used to load and off-load the ships’ cargo would start to roll down the dock, jeopardizing workers, equipment and vessels. Because...

An Unexpected Lesson in Antarctic Ice Melt

Written on June 14, 2013.

Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times It’s called calving, and it occurs when enormous chunks of ice burst free from glaciers or floating ice shelves and drop into the sea with an explosive, heart-stopping crash. This process, which produces icebergs, has long been viewed as the primary mechanism for ice loss along the continent of Antarctica. Now however, scientists say calving is only half the story. In what is being described as the first comprehensive survey of all Antarctic ice...

Water in the Balance

Written on June 14, 2013.

James S. Famiglietti, Matthew RodellScience Magazine Earth’s climate is changing, and so is its hydrologic cycle. Recent decades have witnessed rising rates of global precipitation, evaporation, and freshwater discharge (1). Extreme flooding is occurring with greater intensity and frequency in some regions; in others, extreme drought is becoming more common (2). Most climate models indicate that by the end of this century, the dry regions of the world will become drier, whereas the wet...

Antarctica’s Ice Shelves Dissolve Thanks to Warm Water Below

Written on June 14, 2013.

Smithsonian Magazine In the past two decades, we’ve seen dramatic images of ice shelves and the floating tongues of glaciers crumble into the ocean. The summer of 2012 saw a huge chunk of ice–two times the size of Manhattan–snap off of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. Two years earlier, a piece of ice twice as big as that one split from the glacier’s front. In early 2002, ice covering an area the greater than the size of Rhode Island sloughed into the ocean from a lobe of the Antarctic Peninsula’s...

Antarctic’s Ice Shelves Melting From the Bottom Up

Written on June 13, 2013.

Ice shelves lose more mass where the ice meets the sea than previously thought. Jane J. Lee, National Geographic Antarctica’s ice shelves are losing it. Conventional wisdom holds that ice shelves—the seaward extension of glaciers on land—lose most of their mass by shedding icebergs. But new research finds that there’s another weight-loss program at work—many of Antarctica’s ice shelves are melting away from the bottom up. Glacier experts have known for years that...