Nice Comment

Comment by Godless Poutine on October 1, 2012 at 10:00am

Thank you for the invite!  The climate change stuff concerns me deeply - even more so now that I have a child.  I know we don't have all the solutions now but wouldn't it help us immensely if people would wake up and realize the problem is real?

Comment by Chris on September 24, 2012 at 7:15pm

Collapse of Arctic Sea Ice Has Reached Tipping Point

By Ben Cubby, Brisbane Times AU

24 September 12

s Artic sea ice hits a record low, scientific focus is turning to climate "tipping points" - a threshold that, once crossed, cannot be reversed and will create fundamental changes to other areas.

"It's a trigger that leads to more warming at a regional level but also leads to flow-on effects through other systems," Will Steffen, the chief adviser on global warming science to Australia's Climate Commission, said.

There are about 14 known "tipping elements", according to a paper published by the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the case of the Arctic ice cap, less ice means less white surface to reflect heat and more dark water to soak it up. This leads to higher temperatures, which scientists say will unlock more ancient greenhouse gases frozen into ocean depths and permafrost, speeding climate change, interfering with ocean currents, rainfall patterns and weather.

Next to the Arctic ice cap, Greenland experienced melting across 97 per cent of its surface in June and July. It is unclear what the tipping point is for the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Melts similar to this year's seem to occur every century or so. What is known is that if temperatures keep rising as they are, the ice sheet will start to disintegrate on a massive scale some time in the second half of this century.

Tentative estimates from Australian and international studies say that another 1.5 degrees of warming would push Greenland across the threshold into irreversible melt, a process that would continue for centuries. There is enough ice in Greenland alone to raise sea levels off NSW and Victoria by four to nine metres.

Frozen methane trapped in pockets around the Arctic circle is also seen as a critical tipping element. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and as frozen earth thaws, more is leaking out. There are no exact measurements on the rate of leakage. Rough estimates suggest 30 to 60 billion tonnes of methane may leak by 2070.

Other potential tipping elements include monsoon patterns and the El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle, which scientists expect will start to shift quite suddenly in response to global warming.

Changes in tree cover, especially in giant forests like the Amazon, are also expected in response to changing rainfall and more heat - and this would have the effect of amplifying global warming because fewer trees would mean less carbon dioxide was being soaked up out of the air.

More here

Comment by Chris on September 24, 2012 at 7:10pm

Conservatives don't like uncertainty so they make their minds up before hearing enough facts. Their opinions are primarily determined by the propaganda they hear. Many make up their minds without hearing any facts and just agree with what their camp tells them. 

Comment by Michel on September 24, 2012 at 12:36pm

They use facts as decoration, not foundation.

Comment by Chris on September 24, 2012 at 12:09pm

I heard a historian talk about slavery. Among other things he said the Mason-Dixon line was the approximate demarkation line for mosquito borne illness. That contributed to slavery because, after all slaves were expendable. Mosquitos were abundant above the Mason-Dixon line but it wasn't warm long enough for the vectors to reproduce enough to be contagious. Mosquito born illness in Alaska shows how far the 'malaria line' shifted.

Facts don't matter once someone's mind is made up.

Comment by Neal on September 24, 2012 at 11:29am

Exactly. West Nile Virus spreading is not because of climate change. 

Comment by Michel on September 24, 2012 at 10:56am

@Chris - Here's what I'm expecting to hear: There's no such thing as climate change, so these findings cannot be evidence for it. And the science on biology is not settled. Scientists just discovered what had been there all along.

Comment by Chris on September 24, 2012 at 10:36am

Birds catching malaria in Alaska

Birds can catch malaria at least as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, a new study confirms. And at the rate climate is expected to change, the risk zone for avian malaria might stretch beyond the Arctic Circle by 2080.

Throughout much of continental North America, malaria-causingPlasmodium parasites have been hitchhiking inside mosquitoes from bird to bird for eons. But many long-exposed bird species don’t get particularly sick because they’ve developed some degree of tolerance over time. What’s worrisome about the northward creep of malaria risk is that parasites might reach bird populations that haven’t been exposed, explains disease ecologist Ravinder Sehgal of San Francisco State University.

People aren’t at risk: The 80-plus species of Plasmodium that cause avian malaria don’t infect humans, nor do the five that cause human malaria affect birds. Climate may also change transmission risk for the human form of the disease, but with its own pattern.

Genuine made-in-Alaska malaria transmission showed up in several Fairbanks birds, Sehgal and his colleagues report September 19 inPLOS ONE. The researchers could tell the parasites had attacked locally because one bird, an infected myrtle warbler, was too young to have migrated yet and the remainder, all black-capped chickadees, stay in Alaska year-round.

Previous studies in the region hadn’t distinguished between local transmission and infections picked up elsewhere. So the new paper gives the first evidence of avian malarial transmission in the upper reaches of North America, Sehgal says.

What that shift might do to bird populations will depend on the bird species, says conservation geneticist Robert Fleischer of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics in Washington, D.C. A species of malarial parasite that had appeared relatively benign elsewhere in the world has swept into Hawaii. Some birds may cope, but in others the parasite is “very virulent and deadly,” he says. Now some of the native birds can survive only high in the safety of mountain slopes, where it’s too chilly for the parasite-carrying mosquitoes to thrive.

Rising temperatures may already be pushing avian malaria upslope in Hawaii, says Carter T. Atkinson of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Kilauea Field Station in Hawaii National Park. On the island of Kauai, transmission has shifted to higher elevations as researchers have observed temperatures increasing.

The disease may expand its reach in Alaska too, Sehgal and his colleagues predict. With a climate model, they find that the temperatures and rainfall levels of places where Alaskan mosquitoes can transmit malarial parasites could arrive north of the Arctic Circle by 2080.

There’s also the other end of the Earth to worry about. Sehgal frets that as the Antarctic warms, penguins may have to cope with malaria.

Comment by Chris on September 20, 2012 at 8:00pm

Here's an advertisement from 1921 about clean coal. 

How Big Coal Keeps America Stupid

Comment by Michel on September 13, 2012 at 12:46pm

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