Just to note that the wonderful Dome C ice-core data that was premiered without a journalistic murmur in Nice a month and a half ago is now out in Nature. Gabrielle Walker has a feature story about the work on Nature's website. And here are a few dozen more, some of them not terribly good. For example, in the Globe and Mail the headline Human impact delaying ice age, study finds has no back-up whatsoever in the Bloomberg copy beneath it. And though Nature invited such comparisons by calling its press conference on the subject "The Day Before Yesterday", to say that this new research in some ways shows that the Emmerich movie isn't possible after all goes beyond over-egging the pudding to serving up an omelette instead. (FWIW, the kernel of truth in the movie is that warming could change the way heat flows from the equator to the poles in a way that would cool some northern regions, though it wouldn't cover them with ice, and which rather more importantly would change precipitation patterns in parts of the world where a lot of people rely on subsistence farming, which would be very bad. And this change could be abrupt, though that means a few years to a decade, rather than a very bad week.)
The news that's news in the Dome C stuff is that the record for which we now have gas and dust samples is about twice as long as the Vostok record, but the details of the gas and dust in the earlier parts of the core have not yet been fully analysed. So there's a great deal still to be done; as Richard Alley of Penn State replied, when the New York Times asked him about this "eagerly anticipated" data: "'The current publication is something akin to the first run on a new accelerator or the first look at a galaxy through the latest mega-telescope. The results are clearly of value in and of themselves, but are even more exciting for what they promise in the future.'"
However early analysis has already provided a carbon dioxide record covering all of Stage 11, which Vostok stops halfway through. Stage 11 is the previous interglacial that one would expect to be most like our own current interglacial, on the basis that the orbital parameters of the earth then and now are very similar. The Dome C data show the similarity in some detail, and in a way that seems to confirm recent predictions that left to itself the current interglacial should have a long time still to run.
The news that's not news, but that matters a lot, is summed up by Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey, the paper's co-ordinating author. From the body of that Bloomberg piece: "'If you're a greenhouse skeptic . . . then what you're looking for in the past is a time when carbon dioxide changed and temperature didn't change,' [Wolff] said. 'The bad news is, we can't find any of them. So our expectation is that if you go into the future and keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the climate will warm. [The carbon-dioxide level's] already 30 per cent higher than at any time in the last half-billion years.'"
Don't call people stuipd when you possess a dimmer intelligence, methane may be a greenhouse gas but methane hydrate has been trapped in lattices.Burning it won't release methane, it is BURNED therefore the byproducts are still carbon dioxide and water.It CAN power the planet and it's burning produces less monoxide and NO sulphur oxides compared to crude oil, making it burn cleaner.Go to wiki, type in methane hydrate and READ.
Posted by: Take | August 04, 2012 at 09:58 PM