Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
The National Snow and Ice Data Centre have issued their early March update for Arctic sea ice news. The content is not exactly a surprise. Below I’ve laid out some of the details. Highlights Temperatures over the Arctic have been unseasonably high and have been approaching melting point – in February – a time when … Read more
Words such as “Agast” or “stunned” don’t perhaps fully capture it, yet nevertheless we are in the midst of something quite unusual in the Arctic. Via Zack Labe, a researcher at the University of California at Irvine, and others, we have a series of tweets and graphs that illustrate just how weird things are in … Read more
It is distinctly possible that after Salman Rushdie published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, back in 1988, you would normally have never heard of it. Can you for example name any other novel he has written? Everything changed when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran at that time, issued a formal fatwā calling … Read more
We know that the rate that sea level rise is happening is accelerating, and we also understand exactly why this is happening. The cause is human generated fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases. We have precise measurements of what the levels of CO2 have been over the past 800,000 years from ice core samples and … Read more
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due to issue a Special Report the spells out the impact Global Warming of 1.5 °C or above. It will be formally issued next October, but there is a public draft already available for comment, hence we can get a look to see what it will tell us. Warning: … Read more
There has been a sudden and very dramatic loss of sea ice in the Bering sea. Within an 8 day period one third of the sea ice has gone. It’s not spring, we are in the middle of February. So what exactly has happened? Basically this … Weather (e.g., wind) has a significant role in … Read more