New Teaching Resource: 100 Views of Climate Change
I have added a new site, 100 Views of Climate Change, to Teaching and Public Communication – Links.
Here is the description from the DISCCRS newsletter:
“100 Views of Climate Change (http://changingclimates.colostate.edu) is a website for climate-change education and outreach. This site was recently reorganized and includes annotations and links to videos, podcasts, books, articles, essays, and websites that convey high-quality information in clear and appealing ways to non-specialist adults, including college-level students, their teachers, and the interested public. The range is multidisciplinary, ranging from climate science to ecology, agriculture to ethics, communication to policy, economics to energy.”
While mainly focused on contemporary change, the site contains some useful resources for climate history as well.
Reflections from the PAGES Open Science Meeting in India.
Dagomar Degroot
Note: originally posted on The Otter, blog of the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE).
On February 10th I embarked on the first leg of a long voyage from Toronto to Goa, a former Portuguese enclave nestled among the beaches of western India. After enduring the concrete monolith that is Frankfurt’s international airport, I finally boarded my second flight and flew south through Turkey, past Syria, across Iran and down towards Mumbai. I left the plane at an hour past midnight. Mosquitos swarming through the airport quickly prompted me to take the malaria medication that would later give me incredibly vivid dreams. Hours later the shock of a violent landing in Goa was nothing compared to the culture shock that followed. As I left the airport and stepped onto the rust-coloured soil I saw signs promoting European luxury vehicles or American cologne towering over slums and endless trash amid lush tropical beauty. After three sunrises and two sunsets without sleep I finally arrived at my hotel, ignoring for the moment the hand-sized spider dangling near my door. Read more
New Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperatures for the Past 11,300 Years
A new global multiproxy reconstruction finds that while the first decade of the 20th century was among the cold 5% since the start of the Holocene, current temperatures are among the highest in 5000 years. The study by Shaun Marcott et al., published here in Science, largely confirms the earlier reconstructions of Mann et al. for the past two millennia. For the benefit of climate historians, the authors also find a distinct Medieval Warm and Little Ice Age in their reconstructions.
Audio Walk to Reveal the Climatic History of a British Beauty Spot
(Cross-posted from Meteohistory.org)
A new audio walk to help walkers at a Cumbrian beauty spot to unlock its rich history and learn about the dramatic climate and weather conditions that shape its landscape developed by University of Nottingham researchers.
The audio walk, which has been written by a team Georgina Endfield, Lucy Veale, Gary Priestnall, Sam Meek and Simon Naylor (Univeristy of Exeter) and will be narrated by legendary weather broadcaster and former Met Office stalwart John Kettley, who will guide visitors on a 10-mile walk up Great Dun Fell, the second highest hill in the English Pennines.
An experimental smartphone app to accompany the walk is also being developed by the team. The creation of the walk and app has been funded as part of an ongoing project funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Weather Walks and Weather Talks: Exploring Popular Climate Histories and Futures. The walk is part of the Royal Geographical Society’s (with the Institute of British Geographers) Discovering Britain project aimed at encouraging the public to explore the stories behind Britain’s landscapes.
The team is currently recruiting volunteers for testing the walk and associated app in the Spring and would be delighted to hear from people interested in participating.
For further information, please contact:
Danielle Moore-Chick, AHRC: 01793 416021 d.moore-chick@ahrc.ac.uk
Emma Thorne, University of Nottingham: 0115 951 5793emma.thorne@nottingham.ac.uk
1. More information is available on the web at:http://www.discoveringbritain.org/walks/region/north-west-england/great-dun-fell.html (opens in a new window)
International Congress of History of Science Technology and Medicine
The program and meeting details are now available for the upcoming International Congress of History of Science Technology and Medicine, to be held in Manchester 22-28 July 2013. The International Commission on the History of Meteorology will host several panels there, including “Climates of Conquest?”, “Narratives on Climate and Water”, and “Working Atmospheres: Histories of Climate, Technology and Economics” (draft program here).
Study: volcanic eruptions diminished recent warming
Average global temperatures fluctuate in response to many different influences, and while some of these “forcings” are now affected by humans, others are shaped entirely by natural causes. Articles on this website have considered whether sulfur released into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions stimulated the prolonged cooling of the so-called Little Ice Age in the centuries before 1850. Deposited in the stratosphere, volcanic sulfur dioxide interacts with other chemicals to form sulfuric acid and water, which in turn reflects solar radiation. Other articles on the site have introduced research revealing that the reflective properties of man made aerosol pollution in the twentieth century likely sheltered swaths of North America and, later, parts of China from the influence of global warming. Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a new study by lead author Ryan Neely explores how these very different influences have recently interacted with the most important forcing agent of our time: the rapid rise of atmospheric greenhouse gases caused by human activity. Read more.
New Study: Multiproxy Reconstruction Offers Independent Confirmation of Global Warming
The article D.M. Anderson et al., “Global Warming in an Independent Record of the Past 130 Years,” published here in Geophysical Research Letters, uses an index of 173 temperature-sensitive proxies to reconstruct global temperatures going back to 1880, and a smaller index of 67 proxies to extend the record back to 1730. The results strongly mirror those of the instrumental record, with clear indications of accelerating warming in the 20th century. The study notes that “The upward trend appears to begin in the early 19th century but the year-to-year variability is large and the 1730-1929 trend is small.”
Of course, for climate historians the study also serves as a nice confirmation of the validity of proxies in historical climate reconstruction. The broad Paleo Index used in the study actually shows much stronger correlation with the instrumental record than single, local proxies tend to do.
