Environment

Hug a Climate Scientist Day and Others Random Interesting News of the Week

June 20, 2014 — 1 Comment

These are the news of the week:

  1. Hug a Climate Scientist Day
  2. The Brazil World Cup’s Climate Wild Card
  3. Start Your Electric Engines and Welcome to the Formula E!
  4. A Look at the Sustainable Chicago Restaurant That Recycled and Composted Everything for 2 Years

 

Hug a Climate Scientist day

Climate scientists carry the biggest burden of all: they know our planet is going to turn into a reheated chicken nugget and no one has really been listening. Click in the picture and check the cartoon.

 

The Brazil World Cup’s Climate Wild Card

If you are watching World Cup games and predicting which teams will win matches, might I suggest that you take into account the climate where matches are played. Brazil is huge, spanning about 40 degrees of latitude, and includes ten different climates. Continue reading

Can We Really Count on Plants to Slow Down Global Warming?

June 15, 2014 — 4 Comments

The idea is simple. Fact 1:Plants reduce CO2 in the atmosphere trough photosynthesis. Fact 2: Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere stimulates plants growth. Thus fact 1 + fact 2 is the perfect scenario. If there is more CO2 in the atmosphere and plants are growing more because of that, the solution to global warming is to plant more trees right? Well not really. There is a missing piece called Carbon cycle.

Image credit: http://www.greenpeace.org

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The Climate Wars

May 26, 2014 — 5 Comments

Eric Pooley’s Book.

 

In 2008 the BBC released a documentary called Earth – The Climate Wars. In this 3 part television documentary the Scottish geologist Dr. Iain Stewart covers some aspects of the theory about global warming, the battle between the scientists who believe that climate change is caused by humans and the sceptics scientists, and challenge of predict the effects of global warming. It is a really good documentary. 

In the first episode Dr Iain Stewart traces the history of climate change from its very beginning and examines just how the scientific community managed to get it so very wrong back in the Seventies. Along the way he uncovers some of the great unsung heroes of climate change science, as for example the secret organisation of American government scientists, known as Jason, who wrote the first official report on global warming as far back as 1979. He shows how – by the late 1980s – global warming had already become a serious political issue. It looked as if the world was uniting to take action. But it turned out to be a false dawn. Because in the 1990s global warming would be transformed into one of the biggest scientific controversies of our age.
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Could climate change increase the price of airfare tickets (consequently tour costs)?

March 23, 2014 — 4 Comments

It is really funny how the things work on internet nowadays. You start looking for something and you end reading unexpected things. I was writing and reading about what is turbulence and how to avoid it (last two posts) when I found a recent (2013) interesting paper talking about the possible intensification of turbulence activity due climate change.

The paper is quite interesting. They define turbulence in an elegant way:

…turbulence when they encounter vertical airflow that varies on horizontal length scales greater than, but roughly equal to, the size of the plane.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), suggested that cases of turbulence had risen and incidents doubled over the three-month period between October and December last year, compared to the previous quarter. Also moderate-or-greater upper-level turbulence has been found to increase over the period 1994–2005 in pilot reports in the United States. Continue reading

Loss of Arctic Sea Ice Eliminates Major Barrier for Parasites in Marine Mammals

February 17, 2014 — Image — Leave a comment

There are two options for these mammals. Or they will adapt naturally to these parasites and survive or some of them will die.
http://ecowatch.com/2014/02/14/arctic-sea-ice-barrier-parasites-marine-mammals/