Hidden in Old Paintings, A Clue to Past Climate
By Lindsey Konkel and The Daily Climate
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German artist Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 painting "Woman in Front of the Setting Sun" places the silhouette of a woman with outstretched hands under a deep ochre sky – a likely scene, the researchers say, given the 1815 eruption of Indonesia's Tambora volcano. That eruption scattered particles high into the atmosphere that produced bright red and orange sunsets throughout Europe for three years.
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They also found that depictions of sunsets have gotten redder from the Industrial Revolution onwards, even during periods of no volcanic activity. Artists, they suggest, are inadvertently capturing increases in pollution during the past 150 years.
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"Early artists created an inadvertent record of climate change. That began to change around the mid-20th century when artists deliberately started picturing the explosion of the human footprint," said William L. Fox, director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.
While brilliant sunsets may be one potential "upside" to smog, the harms clearly outweigh the benefits, added Ravishankara. "Do you want vibrant colors or better quality of air to breathe?"
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The most common fallacy in discussing extreme weather events
By stefan
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Does global warming make extreme weather events worse? Here is the #1 flawed reasoning you will have seen about this question: it is the classic confusion between absence of evidence and evidence for absence of an effect of global warming on extreme weather events. . .
If an increase in extreme weather events due to global warming is hard to prove by statistics amongst all the noise, how much harder is it to demonstrate an increase in damage cost due to global warming? Very much harder! A number of confounding socio-economic factors clouds this issue which are very hard to quantify and disentangle. Some factors act to increase the damage, like larger property values in harm’s way. Some act to decrease it, like more solid buildings (whether from better building codes or simply as a result of increased wealth) and better early warnings. Thus it is not surprising that the literature on this subject overall gives inconclusive results. Some studies find significant damage trends after adjusting for GDP, some don’t, tempting some pundits to play cite-what-I-like. The fact that the increase in damage cost is about as large as the increase in GDP (as recently argued at FiveThirtyEight) is certainly no strong evidence against an effect of global warming on damage cost. Like the stranger’s dozen rolls of dice in the pub, one simply cannot tell from these data.
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While statistical studies on extremes are plagued by signal-to-noise issues and only give unequivocal results in a few cases with good data (like for temperature extremes), we have another, more useful source of information: physics. For example, basic physics means that rising temperatures will drive sea levels up, as is in fact observed. Higher sea level to start from will clearly make a storm surge (like that of the storms Sandy and Haiyan) run up higher. By adding 1+1 we therefore know that sea-level rise is increasing the damage from storm surges – probably decades before this can be statistically proven with observational data.
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With good physical reasons to expect the dice are loaded, we should not fool ourselves with reassuring-looking but uninformative statistics. Some statistics show significant changes – but many are simply too noisy to show anything. It would be foolish to just play on until the loading of the dice finally becomes evident even in highly noisy statistics. By then we will have paid a high price for our complacency.
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Offshore windfarms vital amid tensions with Russia, says energy secretary
By Terry Macalister
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Britain's growing fleet of offshore windfarms provides a vital national security role as the western world engages in a stand-off with Moscow over Ukraine, Ed Davey has said.
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The move, which has been talked about for years but not acted on, has particular significance because it comes just after the cancellation of new projects such as the Atlantic Array, off England and the Argyll Array, off Scotland. This caused nervousness around the renewable sector at a time when some Conservative politicians were arguing that Britain could not afford expensive windfarms amid austerity measures and rising domestic energy bills.
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Davey said the new turbine factory in Hull, which will create 1,000 new jobs, was also a vote of confidence in the cost of wind dropping fast in the future as new technology brings savings.
The government had previously said it wanted to see wind developers find ways of reducing costs by 30% by the end of the decade. But Siemens, developer Dong Energy and Statkraft of Norway believe costs can be cut by 40%, according to Davey.
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Wait, why are we dunking so many of our seeds in neonic poison?
By John Upton
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In the same way that America’s fast-food industry fooled us into accepting that a burger must come with a pile of fries and a colossal Coke, the agricultural industry has convinced farmers that seeds must come coated with a side of pesticides.
And research suggests that, just like supersized meals, neonicotinoid seed treatments are a form of dangerous overkill – harming bees and other wildlife but providing limited agricultural benefits. The routine use of seed treatments is especially useless in fields where pest numbers are low, or where insects, such as soybean aphids, chomp down on the crops after the plant has grown and lost much of its insecticidal potency.
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The lack of solid science on the actual benefits of neonic-coated seeds is a major problem. Cornell University scientists noted in a 2011 paper published in the Agronomy Journal that “there have been few peer-reviewed studies on seed-applied insecticide/fungicides” — something the scientists speculated was “because of the recent commercialization of these products.” Three years later, we still don’t know much about seed-coating benefits.
And what ever happened to the precautionary principle? The EPA has the power to regulate these poisons under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. Yet, the report notes, “Although not all records are public, to date, no indication exists that EPA has ever formally denied a full registration for any proposed neonicotinoid product because its foreseeable costs exceeded its benefits.”
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How Global Warming Is Dissolving Sea Life (And What We Can Do About It)
By Andrew Tarantola
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The last time Earth's oceans were this acidic, a six mile-wide sulphur-rich space rock had just smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula, unleashing a deluge of acid rain that exterminated all sea life in the the top 400 meters of the water column. Now, some 65 million years after the Cretaceous extinction, human activity is threatening to similarly decimate the ocean's ecosystem—this time, from the bottom up.
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Normally, there's a supersaturation of carbonate ions, which these animals process into aragonite for use in their shells. However, as the pH decreases, calcium carbonate becomes more soluble which reduces the concentration of available carbonate ions. And not only does this reduce the rate at which organisms can build their protective structures, it also increases the rate at which existing shells dissolve. They're literally being melted away by increasingly corrosive seawater.
And it's not just shellfish that are at risk. Decreased pH levels have been linked to a number of other adverse effects—both direct and indirect—such as the CO2-induced acidification of body fluids, known as hypercapnia, the reduced metabolism in jumbo squid, slowed embryonic development in Atlantic longfin squid, the inability of juvenile clownfish (poor Nemo!) to hear and smell approaching predators, and the diminished echolocation capacity of dolphins and whales.
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One obvious answer is to simply reduce the amount of CO2 we're discharging into the air, though that is far easier said than done. While the world's governments continue t0 work towards a political solution (see: the Kyoto Protocol) and coastal fisheries simultaneously strive to both slow the rate of acidification and adapt to changing water chemistry, there are a number of steps individuals can take to reduce their carbon footprint. And while reducing your personal carbon emissions may not make a very big impact, the actions of 6 billion individuals taken together could very well save the world.
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