see for yourself

RECENT POSTS

February 3, 2012 | 9:27 PM | By

A warming world? See for yourself

A few months back, I posted a slideshow of heat maps (in the most literal sense of the phrase) showing the change in 10-year average temperatures over the past 130 years. Well, NASA has taken that one step further, creating an animated 30-second video using annual average temperatures that dramatically demonstrates the accelerated warming we’ve experienced since about 1970.

If watching that a few times has got you thinking, and you’d like to see more of what climate change looks like … well, see for yourself.

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, see for yourself
July 8, 2011 | 11:19 AM | By

Who’s most vulnerable to climate change? See for yourself.

Center for Global Development

The U.S. ranks 149 out of 169 - pretty low - in terms of overall vulnerability to the combined impacts of extreme weather, sea level rise, and loss of agricultural productivity. Africa and Southeast Asia top the rankings, in large part because of their lack of ability to cope with potential impacts.

Thanks to Humanosphere‘s Tom Paulson for pointing out this interactive map of climate impacts worldwide, produced by the Center for Global Development. While it’s tempting to look at the above map and say “Hey, we’re in pretty good shape,” it might be more accurate to say “Wow, they’re really $#@!-ed.” In other words, just because we rank low on the vulnerability scale, that doesn’t mean we won’t be impacted by climate change. It just means that impacts will be even more severe elsewhere, and that we have more means to cope with the impacts.

Extreme weather is one possible exception to our apparent invincibility, and a stark example of the benefits of living in the wealthiest nation on Earth. The Center for Global Development actually ranks the U.S. as the 25th most impacted country when it comes to extreme weather (FYI, China takes the top spot). In contrast, while our vulnerability ranking is still firmly in the top half, we drop to 63rd place because of our capacity for handling the impacts of extreme weather events.

FILED UNDER: Human Impacts, extreme weather, sea level rise, see for yourself
July 7, 2011 | 12:42 PM | By

See for yourself: A brief history of climate science


There are a lot of statistics that get thrown around when talking about the scientific consensus supporting human-caused climate change. For example, more than 98% of climate scientists are convinced humans are largely responsible for global warming. And those who are
Skeptical Science has produced a great interactive visual demonstration of not only the weight of published scientific support for human-caused climate change, but also its evolution. I picked five years along the way to highlight the history of published climate science. There’s a circle for each year, and the size of the circle reflects the number of scientific studies published in that year.
I highly recommend checking out the real deal on the Skeptical Science website . With it’s slider and flying circles, the original version is far more fun to experience. Plus, there’s a description of how Skeptical Science determines what’ss pro- and con-AGW (anthropogenic global warming), as well as listings of the studies published each year.

FILED UNDER: Straight talk, see for yourself
June 7, 2011 | 10:48 AM | By

The impact of industrial fishing? See for yourself.

As a total science geek, I love the Guardian’s DataBlog. But what’s really great about DataBlog is the fact that they find and create visualizations of data that you don’t have to be a geek to appreciate. Case in point:

David McCandless/guardian.co.uk

This image shows the biomass of popularly-eaten fish in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1900 and in 2000.

David McCandless used data from a study by Dr. Villy Christensen and colleagues at the University Of British Columbia to show how the biomass (tonnage) of popular food fish, like bluefin tuna, cod, salmon, herring, and striped bass (to name a few), changed between 1900 and 2000. The result is pretty dramatic, and really drives home why New England’s fishermen often seem to be hanging on by a shoestring. But McCandless says the images drove home another point for him:

They also help counter the phenomenon of “shifting environment baselines”. This is when each generation views the environment they remember from their youth as “natural” and normal. Today that means our fishing policies and environmental activism is geared to restoring the oceans to the state we remember they were. That’s considered the environmental baseline.

The problem is, the sea was already heavily exploited when we were young.

So this is a kind of collective social amnesia that allows over-exploitation to creep up and increase decade-by-decade without anyone truly questioning it. Today’s fishing quotas and policies for example are attempting to reset fish stocks to the levels of ten or twenty years ago. But as you can see from the visualization, we were already plenty screwed back then.

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, overfishing, see for yourself
May 20, 2011 | 2:30 PM | By

Melting ice caps? See for yourself [updated]

Time for another dose of NASA Earth Observatory’s World of Change. Up today: Arctic sea ice.

The ice that covers the North Pole grows and shrinks with the seasons each year. It typically reaches its maximum extent, or area, in March after a winter of freezing. It then shrinks throughout the spring and summer, until it reaches its minimum in September. As these images from satellite data show, Arctic sea ice has been shrinking more and growing less in recent years.

What’s really striking about these images is the fact that, in the entire twelve-year series, the ice almost never reaches the yellow line. Why is that important?

The yellow line shows the median extent of sea ice observed by satellites in that month each year between 1979 and 2000. The median is the middle value, the 50th percentile; ice extended beyond that area in half the years between 1979 and 2000, and stayed inside the line the other half. Notably, since 2000, far fewer than half the years have hit that mark.

While it’s true that there are natural multi-year – even multi-decade – fluctuations in many aspects of the globe’s complex climate systems, most scientists believe this is something altogether different.

UPDATE: This chart from the Arctic Sea Ice Blog is making the rounds of the blogosphere, for obvious reasons. This is one picture worth at least a thousand words:

FrankD via Arctic Sea Ice Blog

Arctic sea ice volume (extent x thickness) has declined steadily since 1979.

The slide show at the top shows the extent, or area covered by sea ice. Some have argued that’s not the best indicator because the thickness of ice also varies.
Well, this graph shows dramatic declines in sea ice volume (multiply area by thickness, and voila) for every month of the year since 1979. If the trend continues – as most scientists expect it to – we could see an Arctic completely free of ice for at least one month of the year as soon as 2016 … just five years from now.
This is something shippers, miners, and governments are taking very seriously. An ice-free Arctic would mean the fabled Northwest Passage – long sought as a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific – would be open for business. The Arctic seafloor also holds riches, literally. About two years ago, I attended a workshop on deep-sea mining organized by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; one of the biggest topics of conversation was who owns the land and mineral rights to the increasingly accessible Arctic seafloor.
These aren’t theoretical discussions. This is an imminent issue, as you can see for yourself.

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, see for yourself
May 10, 2011 | 1:58 PM | By

Global warming? See for yourself

There are many lines of evidence to support the fact that our climate is changing – temperatures are rising, sea ice is melting, weather is getting more extreme, and oceans are getting more acidic. But these changes can be hard to see, and there’s nothing like being able to see something for yourself. After all, seeing is believing.
NASA’s Earth Observatory group has produced some fabulous sets of images that allow you to do just that. I’ve taken the liberty of pulling the global temperature images into a slideshow so you can watch a century of warming in a matter of seconds.
A quick note before we get started: these maps show temperature anomalies, or changes, not absolute temperature. They show how much warmer (+2°C = dark red) or colder (-2°C = dark blue) a region was during a given decade compared to the norm – the global average air temperature – for that region from 1951-1980.


According to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the global average temperature on Earth has risen by about 1.4°F since 1880. While that might not seem like much, one degree of global warming is significant because it takes a truly vast amount of heat to warm all the land, air, and particularly water on Earth. What’s more, two-thirds of that warming has occurred since 1975, and the past decade was the hottest on record. But, as the maps above clearly demonstrate, global warming doesn’t mean all spots on the globe warm equally.

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, see for yourself