Friday, January 04, 2008

Two sentences ... yeah, that's pretty much his limit.


Blogging Tory "Gay and Depressingly Stupid" once again stops reading a little too soon:

We previously blogged on the NASA studies that showed that reduced ice in the arctic was due to wind patterns....now, more evidence that natural causes are to blame..

A new study's found a natural cause may account for much of the recent dramatic thawing of the Arctic region in addition to man-made global warming.

New research published in the journal Nature indicates a natural and cyclical increase in the amount of energy in the atmosphere that moves from south to north around the Arctic Circle.


Hey, I know ... let's keep reading. Uh oh ...

But scientists say that energy transfer, which comes with storms that head north because of ocean currents isn't acting alone.

Another upcoming study concludes that the combination of that natural energy transfer increase and man-made global warming serves as a one-two punch that's pushing the Arctic over the edge with melting sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers.

Scientists are trying to figure out why the Arctic is warming and melting faster than computer models predict.

And for those of us with actual attention spans, well, there's always a wealth of information out there:

Rune Graversen, the Nature study co-author and a meteorology researcher at Stockholm University in Sweden, said a shift in energy transfer explains the thawing more, including what's happening in the atmosphere, but does not contradict consensus global warming science.

Oceanographer James Overland, who reviewed Graversen's study for Nature, said the research dovetails with an upcoming article of his which concludes that the Arctic thawing is a combination of the two.

"If we didn't have the little extra kick from global warming then we wouldn't have gone past the threshold for the change in sea ice," said Overland, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's lab in Seattle.

Other researchers said Graversen's study underestimates the effect of global warming because it relied on older data that stopped at 2001 and wasn't the most accurate.

Overland and scientist Mark Serreze disagree over which effect -- man-made or natural -- was the big shove that pushed the Arctic over the edge, but they agreed that overall it's a combined effort.

"Think of it as a boxer that's almost going down for the count ... and that one blow to the noggin comes and he's down for the count," said Serreze, a senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo

The Blogging Tories: When you can handle two paragraphs but anything beyond that is always a crapshoot.

1 comment:

Paladiea said...

"Natural Causes" Because nothing on earth is interconnected in any way shape or form. Now if he was saying that aliens were doing it, then he might have a point...