Climate Change

An Iceberg Triple The Size Of San Francisco Breaks Off Antarctica’s Most Endangered Glacier | Here & Now

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An Iceberg Triple The Size Of San Francisco Breaks Off Antarctica’s Most Endangered Glacier | Here & Now

This month, an iceberg nearly the size of Atlanta broke off in Antarctica.

The glacier, known as Pine Island, is considered one of the fastest retreating glaciers in Antarctica, where the climate is changing rapidly. Some parts of the content recently experienced record-high temperatures of nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

The loss of large ice chunks, known as calving, is a routine process that happens to every glacier. In the past, Pine Island would calve every four to six years, glaciologist Alison Banwell says. But now, calving events occur “almost annually” on Pine Island, she says.

Great Lakes, Not so Great Ice

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Great Lakes, Not so Great Ice

Each winter, at least part of North America’s Great Lakes freeze. But whether the year is a boom or a bust for ice cover comes down to air temperatures. This season, warmth has prevailed.

Blue-green open water was still widely visible on February 14, 2020, when the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite acquired the natural-color images above. Most of the white areas are snow and clouds, but a close look along parts of the shorelines—particularly Lake Superior—reveals small patches of ice.

Albany’s Changing Climate

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Many people think that the climate is warming generally in Albany or maybe that summer days are getting warmer in Albany. The opposite is actually true – in the past twenty years summers are colder then in the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast winters and especially springs are warmer than years past. 

Record Highs, 2000-2017 by Metrological Season

  • Winter (December – February), 16
  • Spring (March – May), 25
  • Summer (June – August), 3
  • Autumn (September – November) , 10

    Most Record Highs Set Per Year:

    • Since 1891: 1947 (9)
    • Since 1970: 1981/2012 (8 each)
    • Since 2000: 2012 (8)

    You just lived through the warmest January on record

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    You just lived through the warmest January on record

    For 421 straight months, Earth has been warmer than average.

    January 2020 continued where 2019 left off, as the planet's relentless, long-term heating trend — stoked by skyrocketing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations — resulted in the warmest global January on record, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

    January 2020 squeaked past January 2016 by just fractions of a degree (0.03 Celsius), but it's really the long-term heating trend that's important, not any individual month. Overall, 2019 was the second hottest year on record, 19 of the last 20 years are now the warmest on record, and high-temperature records now absolutely dominate low-temperature records.

    Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why – Bloomberg

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    Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why – Bloomberg

    There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.

    Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5C, a nightmare scenario.

    I am pretty sure it was the slogan of Bernie Sanders or maybe  Ron Paul "It's Happening [now]!" Or something like that. The future is now as they say.