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Posts

May 13, 2013

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1:01 PM | Humans Bring On Many Changes, Most Are Far From Painless
From atmospheric changes, to timelapse imagery from Google Earth…our planetary presence is hard to miss. This past week has seen the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere reach a level of 400 parts-per-million, a value the planet hasn’t seen since several million years ago. To put this into some kind of context let’s [...]
Life, Unbounded
Astronomy | Physics

April 29, 2013

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1:07 PM | NYC Ecology Symposium
On Saturday April 20th, scientists from a diverse set of fields – ranging from paleoclimate to landscape genetics to microbial ecology – met at Columbia University to share their research. [...]
NYC Ecology
Conservation | Science Communication

April 13, 2013

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11:22 AM | Alternate histories back unique modern warmth claims
Creating and averaging thousands of slightly different historic temperature records shows that Northern hemisphere 21st century temperatures are almost certainly unique in the last 600 years, according to Harvard University’s Martin Tingley.

Tingley, M. & Huybers, P. (2013). Recent temperature extremes at high northern latitudes unprecedented in the past 600 years, Nature, 496 (7444) 201-205. DOI:

Simple Climate
Climate Science
Citation

April 11, 2013

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12:08 AM | What is paleoclimatology?
By Claire When I meet new people, the conversation invariably gets on to what I do for a living. “Oh, you’re doing a PhD! That’s so cool! What are you doing it on?” “Paleoclimatology.” “Oh… Cool… What?” Paleoclimatology (or palaeoclimatology … Continue reading →
OnCirculation
Climate Science | Geosciences

April 03, 2013

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5:00 PM | Temperature patterns produce perplexing Pliocene puzzle
Failure to model a climate fingerprint from 5 million years ago thought to be similar to what we can expect in the warmer future must be resolved, say Lafayette College’s Kira Lawrence and University College London’s Chris Brierley

Fedorov, A., Brierley, C., Lawrence, K., Liu, Z., Dekens, P. & Ravelo, A. (2013). Patterns and mechanisms of early Pliocene warmth, Nature, 496 (7443) 43-49. DOI:

Simple Climate
Climate Science
Citation

March 29, 2013

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12:01 AM | Dr. Michael Mann visits Wooster
WOOSTER, OHIO–We were honored this week when Dr. Michael E. Mann, one of the world’s foremost climate-change experts and a leader in the efforts to educate the public about anthropogenic effects on the atmosphere, came to Wooster as part of our Richard G. Osgood, Jr., Memorial Lecture series. He gave a public lecture in the [...]
Wooster Geologists
Evolution | Paleontology

March 08, 2013

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2:14 PM | What Happened the Last Time the Climate Changed
Smithsonian scientists investigate a sudden warming of the Earth 55 million years ago to understand how climate change will affect future ecosystems
Around the Mall
General Science

March 07, 2013

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7:00 PM | Projected warming set to exceed civilisation’s experience
11,000 years during which human civilisation has emerged have not seen temperatures ‘even close’ to what model forecasts predict, a record built by Shaun Marcott from Oregon State University and his teammates shows.

Shaun A. Marcott, Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, Alan C. Mix (2013). A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years, Science, 339 1198-1201. Other: Link

Simple Climate
Climate Science
Citation

February 28, 2013

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7:00 PM | Evidence rethink puts CO2 and ancient warming back in sync
A rise in temperatures that caused the last major global defrost has now been placed in the same 150-year window as an accompanying CO2 increase by Frédéric Parrenin from the French National Centre for Scientific Research and his teammates, rather than happening 800 years before the CO2 change as previously thought.

F. Parrenin, V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Köhler, D. Raynaud, D. Paillard, J. Schwander, C. Barbante, A. Landais, A. Wegner, J. Jouze (2013). Synchronous Change of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature During the Last Deglacial Warming, Science, 339 1060-1063. Other: Link

E. Brook (2012). Leads and Lags at the End of the Last Ice Age, Science, 339 1042-1043. Other: Link

Simple Climate
Climate Science
Citation

February 21, 2013

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7:00 PM | Cave deposits reveal permafrost concern
Greenhouse gases currently trapped in the frozen soil risk release past a 1.5°C temperature threshold for melting at the permafrost boundary, found in a 500,000 year record collected by Anton Vaks from the University of Oxford, and his colleagues.

A. Vaks, O. S. Gutareva, S. F. M. Breitenbach, E. Avirmed, A. J. Mason, A. L. Thomas, A. V. Osinzev,5 A. M. Kononov, G. M. Henderson (2013). Speleothems Reveal 500,000-Year History of Siberian Permafrost, Science,

Simple Climate
Climate Science
Citation

February 14, 2013

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4:15 PM | Hints of cosmic ray-climate link in sediment core from Japan
But the correlation only holds during some of the times examined..
Scientific Method
General Science

February 10, 2013

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4:00 PM | Conference Posters: My Pride and Joy
By Nick I’m in a sleep deprived state of tense nervousness. I’m about six hours in to my seven and a half hour layover in Kuala Lumpar airport, after a three hour bus ride from Canberra to Sydney and then … Continue reading →
OnCirculation
Climate Science | Geosciences

January 22, 2013

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7:26 AM | Best reply-to-comment ever...
That is all.
Paleowave
Climate Science | Oceanography

January 17, 2013

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6:36 PM | Jumping on the #1000words bandwagon...
Chris Rowan and Anne Jefferson at Highly Allochthonous, inspired by Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) decided to try and explain their geoscience research using only the 1000 most common English words (find the list here). I think they both did fantastic jobs. Inspired by them, I give it a shot:I study the bodies of small, water-animals that lived in the past (~several hundred years ago) and use them as keys to understand how the water they grew in was like: was it hotter or colder back […]
Paleowave
Climate Science | Oceanography

January 16, 2013

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1:02 AM | Generation Anthropocene
Generation Anthropocene (or GenAnthro) is a new podcast that a good friend of mine, Michael Osborne, started along with a bunch of other Stanford students about a year ago. I've been meaning to write a post on their fantastic podcast, but alas, time and laziness took their toll. In any case, I've never particularly been 'into' podcasts (though I've been an avid listener of the radio) - especially for science communication and journalism. GenAnthro is a near-perfect amalgamation […]
Paleowave
Climate Science | Oceanography

October 18, 2012

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7:21 PM | A New Radiocarbon Yardstick from Japan
A long core of sediment from a Japanese lake is a Rosetta Stone for ice-age climate research.
QUEST Community Science Blog
General Science

October 06, 2012

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12:17 PM | Warming weakens deep freeze on Arctic islands
Current Svalbard temperatures are the warmest in 1,800 years say William D’Andrea from Columbia University in New York and his teammates

William J. D’Andrea, David A. Vaillencourt, Nicholas L. Balascio, Al Werner, Steven R. Roof, Michael Retelle and Raymond S. Bradley (2012). Mild Little Ice Age and unprecedented recent warmth in an 1800 year lake sediment record from Svalbard, Geology, DOI:

Simple Climate
Climate Science
Citation

September 11, 2012

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8:02 PM | I’ll Have The Man-Made Lava … On The Rocks
In this week’s issue of C&EN, I wrote a Newscripts column about the Lava Project going on at Syracuse University. The earth scientists who help run the program in upstate New York weren’t satisfied with studying lava by traveling to volcanoes in parts unknown. These geologists make their own lava, right on campus, in half-ton [...]
Newscripts
Chemistry

July 18, 2012

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3:02 AM | Of Geese and Ganders
“Show me the code!” This is the rallying cry of climate “skeptics” everywhere and the foundation of the numerous climate conspiracy insinuations hurled around the blogosphere. Well, apparently what is good for the goose, the infamous Hockeystick, is not so good for the gander, the Wegman Report. Please see John Mashey’s article on Desmog Blog.…
A Few Things Ill Considered
Geosciences

July 09, 2012

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7:15 PM | You wanted to know: who are these scientists? Introducing: Marco Coolen
There are two really cool things about this research cruise: time and scale. The researchers are going from satellite images taken from far above the Earth, all the way down to the lipids and proteins found within individual Ehux cells, bridging a huge range of scales. They’re also using today’s observations to tell them about [...]
Scientific American - Expeditions
Environment | General Science

May 07, 2012

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1:32 PM | Buuurp! Methane-emitting dinosaurs could have warmed the earth
Some scientific findings are just too good to leave alone, even if you don't know if they can ever be confirmed: Such is the case for a study saying that plant-eating dinosaurs could have emitted enough digestive methane to warm Earth's climate 150 million years ago. "It is known …
Cosmic Log
Astronomy | General Science

April 05, 2012

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4:26 AM | Correcting Wrong Assertions...
The other day, going through my RSS feeds on Google Reader, Inoticed that WattsUpWithThat (yes, I subscribe to climate-drama blogs too) hadfeatured an article entitled ‘Proxy Science & Proxy Pseudo-Science’.Obviously, my interest was stirred. Further, this was written by Mr. Pat Frank,a man who doesn’t believe in proxies. Browsing through it, I was flattered tonotice that my name and article were featured. It took Mr. Frank ≈1.5monthsto reply to my article and my name wasn’t the [...]
Paleowave
Climate Science | Oceanography

February 23, 2012

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10:48 PM | Maya doom teaches climate lesson
Scientists have long assumed that the Classic Maya civilization was done in more than a millennium ago by a series of droughts, but now they say natural records suggest those droughts were "modest," with no more than a 40 percent reduction in rainfall.
Cosmic Log
Astronomy | General Science

February 18, 2012

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10:50 PM | The Physical Basis of Proxy Development
BackgroundMichael Tobis (mt for short), a colleague of mine who worksat the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics runs a very interestingonline climate/energy/science magazine called Planet 3.0. Prior to this, heused to post on the science blog, Only in it for the Gold (which he has shifted under Planet 3.0). Mt was kind enough to feature my article refuting FredSinger’s claims (Proxy Evidence for Recent Warming) on Planet 3.0. A person bythe name of Pat Frank on WUWT responded to [...]
Paleowave
Climate Science | Oceanography

February 15, 2012

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12:00 AM | Proxy Evidence for Recent Warming
Dr. Fred Singer visited the UT campus last week and gave a talk containing the usual climate denial yarns and I hear, most artfully (not!) dodged scientific questions. I wish I could've attended but unfortunately, I had a class at the same time. This post was motivated by the following claim of his in a WUWT post (in retaliation to the BEST results being publicized and unfavorable to his interests) which he rehashed in the talk as well:And [...]
Paleowave
Climate Science | Oceanography

February 12, 2012

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7:20 PM | Paleo-CO2
Watch this video! It is an amazing display of atmospheric carbon dioxide trends. My favourite portion kicks in after 1:40mins - so, make sure to watch it till the end:Carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere is a crucial parameter that plays a major role in mediating the surface temperature of the Earth through radiative forcing. Its inherent molecular makeup traps the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) that the Earth emits. This balance of incoming solar radiation (the radiative budget, in heat [...]
Paleowave
Climate Science | Oceanography

February 07, 2012

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1:29 AM | Geologic Genealogy
Eversince I read Ian Stimpson’s blog post on his academic genealogy, I have beenfascinated in trying to figure out my own geologic lineage. Mycurrent advisor Terry Quinn and co-advisor Fred Taylor were both graduate studentsof Robley K. Matthews at Brown University (though Fred went on to do his PhDwith Art Bloom at Cornell). He also advised Richard Poore, Bill Curry &Rich Fairbanks amongst other paleoclimate/paleoceanography stalwarts. RKMatthews was a sedimentary geologist who [...]
Paleowave
Climate Science | Oceanography

February 01, 2012

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11:56 PM | A Short History of Forams
Foraminifera (or forams for short) are small, short-lived marine organisms. They are just one of million diverse species that call the ocean their home. In the paleoclimate realm, they are crucial tools in reconstructing past climatic parameters. How? Through the calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shells (or tests) that they secrete during their 2-4 week lifespan. The tests fall to the ocean floor after the forams die and are preserved in ocean  sediments as microfossils for years to [...]
Paleowave
Climate Science | Oceanography

January 08, 2012

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6:09 PM | The Next Ice Age and the Anthropocene
More work reinforces the idea that the human climate impact is staving off the next ice age.
Dot Earth
Environment

November 14, 2011

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7:56 PM | Behind the scenes at the Smithsonian
AGU’s hometown of Washington, DC, recently played host to Digital Capital Week, a week-long festival focused on bringing together designers, entrepreneurs, and social innovators of all kinds. As part of DC Week, the Smithsonian Institution offered the chance to go behind the scenes at the National Museum of Natural History for their first-ever tweetup, #SITweetup. A tweetup is when Twitter users meet face-to-face to discuss shared interests. For the #SITweetup, ten lucky people from a variety [...]
Geospace
Geosciences
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