Posts by gardener21
10 posts • joined Tuesday 19th January 2010 12:37 GMT
Cherry picking
It is interesting that Nature Geoscience published two papers about Antarctica yesterday:
Recent climate and ice-sheet changes in West Antarctica compared with the past 2,000 years
Eric Steig, et al
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1778.html
Acceleration of snow melt in an Antarctic Peninsula ice core during the twentieth century
Nerilie J. Abram, et al
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1787.html
The first is the one referred to in the El Reg article. it reports that normal variation in West Antarctica is quite large, so the recent warming can't be confidently attributed to a long term warming trend. The latter article reports that recent levels of summer melt in the Antarctic Peninsula are unprecedented over the last 1000 years.
Curious that only one of these papers gets reported by El Reg.
Looks ok to me
The report lists the reasons Councils have given for conducting investigations. They seem pretty reasonable to me. I'm wondering how else a Council would deal with some of these problems if they couldn't conduct an investigation.
Posted in Mars trips could blind astronauts
Problem is more widespread...
I've spent all my life living on a planet with a surface gravity of about 1G. Yet I still have blurred vision and need to wear corrective glasses or contact lenses. I am by no means alone in this.
drunkeness
"Webster, who had a history of drunkeness ..."
So, was that unusual back then? How times change.
Secret laws
Surely you have to be served with an injunction before you can be bound by it. Only then will you know what it is you are not allowed to do.
Newspapers are informed by the courts when an injunction is issued, so they know what they cannot say. If twitterers are similarly bound, then the injunction should be issued to all on twitter - perhaps via a twitter acount.
Forgot the brakes?
An interesting idea. But when you arrive at Pluto after only five years travel, how do you stop?
Klaus Winter
The article quotes Klaus Winter as saying, "It is remarkable that there is so much concern about the effects of greenhouse conditions on tropical forests". However, the full original quote went on a bit further:
"It is remarkable that there is so much concern about the effects of greenhouse conditions on tropical forests. However, these horror scenarios probably have some validity if increased temperatures lead to more frequent or more severe drought as some of the current predictions for similar scenarios suggest."
Science journalism
I am by no means an expert in this area, but it is Intriguing to read more about the actual research. The existing picture is that temperatures cooled in most arctic regions for a long time, but they have begun to rise from around 1990 onwards. It is suspected that the post 1990 increase is related to man made climate change.
The tree ring data was drawn from 69 trees, from the treeline of the Khibiny Mountains on the Kola Peninsula in NW Russia. It showed a similar pattern of declining temperatures, until around 1970, and then a warming pattern since 1990.
The interesting bit being that the temperature variations from the tree ring data, up until about 1970, seem to closely match with solar activity. Since 1970, they no longer correlate with solar activity and other features seem to have come to dominate.
Can we have a Reg article about how new research into tree ring data confirms the recent warming trend in the arctic? It further shows that natural effects used to dominate temperature variations in the area studied, but now something else is dominating.
Extrapolation
Interesting. A research paper is published showing data drawn from tree rings which is believed to indicate the summer temperatures over 400 years in one place: the Kola peninsula in NW Russia.
Lewis Page then assumes that the whole of the arctic region had the same summer temperatures as this one place in NW Russia.
He then starts assuming this casts doubt on other evidence about average global temperatures.
Temperature records relating to one place, are extrapolated to a much larger area, then to the whole globe. Marvellous.
@My Alter Ego: Not the EU
The EU may well be trying to save us from our own government, but the European Court of Human Rights is not part of the EU.
There is more than one Europe.
