No ice

A new World Wildlife Fund has a new report out reporting that they expect summer sea ice to completely melt sometime between 2013 and 2040. Their reasoning is a logical one: positive feedback. The ice at the arctic circle, being very white, reflects back a larger proportion of the sun's radiation. Less of the heat is absorbed into the ground and everything stays cooler. However, as glaciers and polar ice melts, there is less ice to reflect back this radiation. Everything gets warmer faster. More ice melts. More radiation is absorbed into the ground. Everything gets warmer. More ice melts. Et cetera, Et cetera.

This type of positive feedback is a big problem, because it can be difficult to get back into a balance. We would need a really cold winter in the Northern Hemisphere to make up for the loss of ice, but it's harder to do that because more radiation is naturally being absorbed.

Of course, there's always another possibility, something that's been discussed in the past and a very strange result from global warming: the Northern Hemisphere is a deep freeze. You may have heard about this before if you like big summer movies. The article is an interesting read. According to the theory, fresh water melting and entering the salt water ocean will disrupt the North Atlantic current, shutting down the flow of warm water into northern reaches of the Atlantic, which in turn causes massive temperature drops in portions of North America and Europe.

This is why climate change is so complicated and the reason that people say "What global warming? It's snowing in Buffalo!" or "You could fry an egg out here! Because of global warming!" are both equally wrong. It's nuanced. It involves not only the the atmosphere in your home town, but the atmosphere and oceans in the entire world. There's a lot more to consider than the local 10-day forecast. The more people that realize this, the better.

Invest in sunblock

CFCs are pesky complex molecules and a serious problem for the ozone layer. Satellite data from the European Space Agency that monitors the ozone levels in Earth's atmosphere show that the hole in ozone layer as increased. This after an apparent rebound in the previous year. You can see more of the data from the ESA's website here.

The reason planes have those little bags

I've done a lot of turbulence forecasting in my time. It's a pretty big deal in the airline industry. Good turbulence forecasting can mean the a savings on fuel, a smoother ride, and nice experience all around. Relatively speaking, anyway.

Somebody did not get a good turbulence forecast". I'm guessing that the Quantas flight in question was surprised by the turbulence that they ran into. No flight is going to intentional fly into an area of turbulence that will lead to 30 injuries.

Of course, turbulence happens. It's inevitable. That's what the seat belts are for. You just have to hope that the flight attendants don't add to the problem.

1000 words

I haven't seen any of CNN's "Planet in Peril" stuff, but being a meteorologist, I do have a keen interest in one of the aspects that this covers. That of course is climate change. To be honest, most of what I've seen out of news agencies (and CNN is included in this) is the ridiculous he said/she said type journalism that lets two "experts" "debate" on a subject. It's rampant in politics. It's strangely rampant in the world of science as well. You have a climate scientist talking about global warming and the impact it could potentially have on the planet and you have, typically, a spokesperson for some organization that is trying to debunk global warming, or at the very least say that it isn't manmade. It's a strange dynamic, since such a majority of earth scientists actually think global warming is real and is a big deal that it makes the dabate format seem absurd.

One thing that always seems to be missing is pictures. People can only listen to "I'm right/No, you're wrong" for so long before they decide that neither side knows what they're talking about. That's changed now (danger: sound). With more pictures like this, people who aren't up on the science, but understand what their eyes tell them will see the impact of global warming.

Going back in time

So it looks like some very busy scientists decided to look a little deeper into the effect that En Nino has on hurricane development. How deep? Try 5000 years deep. It's some nice outside the box type of thinking but looking into soil records. I don't know much beyond what the article states in terms of their methodology, but it seems a viable way of looking into the past with hurricanes.

That's one of the difficult parts about meteorology in general and climatology in particular. We only have meteorological data going back some hundred years or so. Other than that, we have to rely on things like ice cores and fossils to deduce the likely meteorological setting of what took place. The Little Ice Age? We don't know the temps were cooler then because somebody was taking readings out at the airport. We know it from documentation at the time, signs of glacial advancement, and other oblique references to the weather conditions at the time.

That's one reason that climatology is such a difficult science to explain to the general public. You start talking about ice cores and glacial creep and you start losing your audience. Still, a lot of important stuff comes out of research like what these guys up in Mass. are doing. I hope we see a lot more of it so that we can continue to learn and understand our world a little more.