Category: Environment & Weather

Chilly Willy

My question is why conservatives think it advances their purpose to continue this demonstrably wrong adherence to climate change denialism. This isn’t like, say, evolution. Scientific evidence of evolution is quite strong and will only continue to get stronger, but that growing evidence won’t be ever more obvious to the layperson. Birds, for instance, won’t start evolving faster and faster until it’s frighteningly clear that evolution is real and all those deniers were, in fact, cranks.

But the planet is getting warmer, and people are going to notice. Will can talk about global cooling all he wants, but arctic ice is actually disappearing. Snowpacks are shrinking. Droughts are intensifying. Sea-levels are rising. And this isn’t going to stop.

Climate change denialism is like arguing at three that in two hours it won’t be five. However convincing you think you are, you will ultimately be revealed as a fool and a charlatan.

The Bellows

Link via Grasping Reality with Both Hands.

Best line of the day

“My children’s school was canceled today, because of what? Some ice,” Obama said, and all at the table started laughing.

“As my children pointed out, in Chicago school is never canceled,” he continued. He said that in their old hometown, “you’d go outside for recess in weather like this. You wouldn’t even stay indoors.”

The Huffington Post

The Milky Way

Have you ever seen the Milky Way? Here’s what it looks like at 16,500 feet on a dry, dark night.

The Milky Way

Click image for larger version and to learn more.

Reposted from one year ago because it’s so cool.

‘Earthquake swarm’ continues to rock Yellowstone

The Denver Post reported yesterday on the activity at Yellowstone:

“It’s not business as usual,” said [Utah University professor] Smith. “This is a large earthquake swarm, and we’ve recorded several hundred. We are paying careful attention. This is an important sequence.”

Smith noted that beginning in 2004, there was “accelerated uplift of the Yellowstone Caldera” that covered the entire caldera.

In 2007, Smith and his University of Utah colleagues said the current rise in the caldera was “unprecedented” but concluded that because there were no major earthquakes or “earthquake swarms” accompanying the uplift, they found “little indication that the volcano is moving toward an eruption.”

The last major earthquake swarm was in 1985 and lasted three months, Smith told The Denver Post.
The Yellowstone Plateau, which comprises Yellowstone National Park, is one of the largest super-volcanoes in the world and has gone through three volcanic cycles spanning two million years that included some of the world’s largest-known eruptions.

Through 5 p.m. Dec. 31, the swarm had included 12 events of magnitude 3.0 to 3.9 and approximately 20 of 2.5 to 2.9, with a total of 400 quakes large enough to be located.

The observatory said similar swarms have occurred in the past without triggering steam explosions or volcanic activity. However, the observatory said there is some potential for explosions and that earthquakes may continue and increase in intensity.

So uplift with no earthquakes, no problem. Now we have the uplift and earthquakes, problem?

Happy Birthday, ‘Earthrise’

Forty years ago today, the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first humans to orbit the Moon, were taken by surprise. After three orbits spent photographing the lunar surface, Frank Borman shifted the orientation of the capsule to see the horizon. Suddenly, Bill Anders realized he was seeing the home planet hovering over the lunar horizon in what was, in essence, the first human-witnessed “Earthrise.”

“Oh my God,” Anders exclaimed. “Look at that picture over there. Here’s the Earth coming up!” . . .

I assembled the video above to memorialize that moment. (Make sure to click the “watch in high quality” button.) It includes extraordinary footage showing an “earthrise” and “earthset” videotaped during a Japanese lunar mission in 2007. The footage is probably old hat to space buffs but new to me.

Reflecting on Apollo 8, it’s notable to me that, with all the meticulous planning that goes into space missions, no one had anticipated the emotional and aesthetic power that came with seeing the marbled white, blue, and green home planet rise above the sterile gray lunar horizon. They had to grab for film packs to take the resulting photographs, one of which has become one of the most widely published images in history.

Dot Earth Blog – NYTimes.com

Those of you too young to remember that Christmas Eve 40 years may not appreciate fully the awe and wonder felt by many of us earthlings.

Best thoughts of the day, so far

While it is currently 5 degrees out — so cold the dogs prefer barking at squirrels through thermopane glass rather than going outside and actually chasing them — I’d like to point out that as of yesterday, the days are getting longer. Ah, yes, the Winter Solstice, something I didn’t fully appreciate until I moved back to the lower midwest from blandly sunny California. Now, I’m totally on-board the pagan train, and when the sun starts moving back north I’m lighting fires and painting myself blue in the hope that godless ritual will bring spring more quickly. And if the cold isn’t enough to do it my recent gas bill is.

I note as well that every day brings us one day closer to the opening of spring training, when the simple knowledge that grown men have gone south to practice a boy’s game warms me to my marrow. There are only 52 days until pitchers and catchers report. …

Funtional Ambivalent has more you should read.

Solstice at Newgrange

Tomorrow’s solstice marks the southernmost point of the Sun’s annual motion through planet Earth’s sky and the astronomical beginning of winter in the north. In celebration of the northern winter solstice and the International Year of Astronomy 2009, you can watch a live webcast of the the solstice sunrise from the megalithic tomb of Newgrange, in County Meath, Ireland. Newgrange dates to 5,000 years ago, much older than Stonehenge, but also with accurate alignments to the solstice Sun. In this view from within the burial mound’s inner chamber, the first rays of the solstice sunrise are passing through a box constructed above the entrance and shine down an 18 meter long tunnel to illuminate the floor at the foot of a decorated stone. The actual stone itself would have been directly illuminated by the solstice Sun 5,000 years ago. The long time exposure also captures the ghostly figure of a more modern astronomer in motion. To watch the live webcast follow the indicated link below. The webcast is planned to go live at 0830 coordinated Universal Time (for example, at 3:30am Eastern Time in the US) tomorrow, Sunday, the 21st.

Astronomy Picture of the Day has all the links and the photo described above.

Winter in the northern hemisphere begins at 5:04 AM Sunday Mountain Standard Time.

It’s always interesting to locate in relation to neighborhood landmarks where the sun rises and/or sets on the day of the December solstice and then compare those locations to the same events in June.

Final Days Fire Sale

Imagine if President Bush, on his last day in office, invited his friends to lift the Lincoln portrait from the White House Dining Room, take the 18th- century furniture from the Map Room and — for good measure — poison the Rose Garden on the way out.

In essence, he is doing the same thing this month with land that belongs to every American — the magical redrock country of the Southwest.

Timothy Egan continues.

Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West

The New York Times reports on something we in the Rocky Mountain states know all too well — the loss of our forests. An excerpt:

From New Mexico to British Columbia, the region’s signature pine forests are succumbing to a huge infestation of mountain pine beetles that are turning a blanket of green forest into a blanket of rust red. Montana has lost a million acres of trees to the beetles, and in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming the situation is worse.

. . .

In Wyoming and Colorado in 2006 there were a million acres of dead trees. Last year it was 1.5 million. This year it is expected to total over two million. In the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, the problem is most severe. It is the largest known insect infestation in the history of North America, officials said. British Columbia has lost 33 million acres of lodgepole pine forest, and a freak wind event last year blew mountain pine beetles, a species of bark beetle, over the Continental Divide to Alberta. Experts fear that the beetles could travel all the way to the Great Lakes.

In the next three to five years, Mr. Kyhl said, virtually all of Colorado’s lodgepole pine trees over five inches in diameter will be lost, about five million acres. “Already in many places, every lodgepole over five inches is dead as far as the eye can see,” he said.

Campgrounds closed, ski resorts deforested, views blighted in every direction by rust colored trees.

There’s a video with the article.

The Southwest in the Anthropocene

From the Dot Earth Blog:

In particular he is talking about the mountains and rangelands of New Mexico. Always shaped by fire, lately they have been shaped by fire suppression. Always modified by grazing elk and other animals, now they are threatened by overgrazing of livestock. Always vulnerable to drought, now they are stricken by drought and heat together. And the heat is not the heat of a normal warm year, it is the heat of human-induced climate change, he says.

“Say hello to the Anthropocene,” he writes, using a relatively recent coinage for the geological time we live in. Not the Holocene — the name earth scientists give to the era that began about 11,000 years ago, when the last glaciers of the last Ice Age made their last retreat — but the Anthropocene, the new era when people’s actions alter conditions on Earth.

Halloween Sky Show

On Oct. 31st, the crescent Moon will sneak up on Venus for a close encounter of startling beauty. The gathering is best seen just after sunset when the twilight is pumpkin-orange and Halloween doorbells are chiming in earnest. Venus hovers just above the southwestern horizon, the brightest light in the sky, while the exquisitely slender Moon approaches just a few degrees below…

NASA – Halloween Sky Show

The show continues Saturday. On Sunday Venus, the Moon and Jupiter will be in line. On Monday the 3rd the moon will appear very near Jupiter.

Turn on the lights, the summer’s over

Here in Albuquerque we have two minutes less daylight each day now in our headlong rush for the equinox in three weeks (September 22). There’s more than three minutes less light in Portland, Oregon, today than yesterday; two-and-a-half minutes less in Washington; about two minutes, 20 seconds, less each day in Louisville; and three minutes less daylight each day in Leland, Michigan.

Oh, and in Fairbanks, there’s six minutes, 44 seconds, less daylight today than yesterday.

Oh, and there’s no 90s in the forecast. Fall IS here. (Officially Albuquerque reached 97º four times during the summer, last on August 1st. In the past five years we’ve gotten to 100ºF just one time officially.)

Enjoying the sunset

A little anthropomorphism from Garret — or is he right?

I’ll go out to water between 7 and 8 o’clock, and all the trees are populated with birds.  Not flitting about, as you might imagine, calling to each other and busily making baby birds.  No, they’re sitting perched on the tops of the highest trees.  Sitting still.  Every one of them facing west, watching the sunset.  I only see them doing this on days when there’s a middling to spectacular sunset.  They never sit there for the cloudy, dull ones.  Nor the completely clear ones. 

Every so often, they’re accompanied by a rabbit or three.  Facing the same direction.  Never chewing grass or leaves.  Just sitting, watching.