Diary Of The Last Age

I've posted before about global warming bringing us an invasion of virus-carrying mosquitoes in Florida. I've haven't been too worried about the Pacific Northwest, but recent events are showing that we might have as much or more to be worried about.  Last year I warned about brain-eating amoeba without being specific but it has happened in lakes near the Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming. A brain-eating amoeba that has killed an 11-year-old girl on Friday was detected in the Grand Teton National Park. According to reports, the parasitic amoeba is called the  Naegleria fowleri. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  states the Naegleria fowleri  can cause rare and devastating infection of the brain called primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) when it enters the body through the nose. Ninety-seven percent of people who contract the disease don't survive. Since 1962, 133 people in the U.S. have been infected with the disease and only three have...

I have posted before about the threat of serious sea level rise due to Greenland's ice melting.  New research is confirming the seriousness . A new study measures the loss of ice from one of world’s largest ice sheet s. They find an ice loss that has accelerated in the past few years, and their measurements confirm prior estimates. [bold face is my addition].  In total, they estimate approximately 270 gigatons of ice loss per year for 2011–2014. This result is almost a perfect match to independent measurements made by other researchers and builds our confidence in their conclusions. To put this in perspective, the Greenland Ice Sheet is losing approximately 110,000 Olympic size swimming pools worth of water each year. More data to support the contention that cities built on sea shores world wide are in serious danger.

Mapping global temperature change The visualisation technique of ‘small multiples’ is often used to communicate a simple message. The above example shows maps of temperature change from 1850-2016 – the overall warming trend is obvious even though the details are fuzzy. Technical details: The HadCRUT4.4 dataset is used with anomalies from a 1961-1990 baseline period. An annual average for a particular grid cell and year is only shown if 6 or more months have data, otherwise it is coloured grey. 2016 is for the year to date. The colour scale runs from around -2.5C to +2.5C.

John Fasullo and colleagues predict that satellites will detect accelerating sea level rise within the next decade.  I've written (a lot ) about the rise in sea levels .  And now there's some indication that these levels are increasing nonlinearly. As humans emit greenhouse gases, it’s causing the Earth to warm. That’s indisputable and proven. We can actually measure the amount of extra heat . Since most of it ends up in the oceans, we can also measure other changes in the oceans. For instance, the oceans are rising. We know that’s indisputable. Measurements taken from physical gauges and from satellites confirm sea level rise. The cause of the rise is more complex.  A very recent paper published in Nature has evaluated the history of sea level rise, and what they find is really interesting. The lead author ( John Fasullo from the National Center for Atmospheric Research) and his colleagues tried to determine if the rate of sea level rise is changing. That is, ...