British physicist Stephen Hawking delved into the mysteries of the solar system and beyond in a Discovery Channel series titled “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.” (Credit: Discovery Channel)
An open letter from 375 scientists is voicing concern about GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s views on climate change – and urging the United States not to cancel its commitment to last year’s Paris climate agreement, as Trump has said he would do.
Among the signers of the letter published today are British physicist Stephen Hawking, billionaire philanthropist James Simons, 30 Nobel laureates and nine University of Washington professors.
The Paris pact was adopted by the United States and more than 190 other nations last December, and formally ratified by President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping this month. It lays out commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and keep average global temperatures from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).
A polar bear tests the strength of thin Arctic sea ice. (Credit: Mario Hoppmann via Imaggeo.EGU.eu)
Scientists have long known that Arctic climate change is bad news for bears, but University of Washington researchers quantify just how bad it is in a study published today.
The study in The Cryosphere, a journal of the European Geosciences Union, is said to be the first to assess the impact of sea ice changes for 19 different populations of polar bears across the entire Arctic region, using the metrics that are most relevant to polar bear biology.
“This study shows declining sea ice for all subpopulations of polar bears,” Harry Stern, a researcher with UW’s Polar Science Center, said in an EGU news release.
The analysis draws upon 35 years’ worth of satellite data showing daily sea-ice concentration in the Arctic. There’s a consistent trend toward earlier thawing in the spring, and later freezing in the winter. Between 1979 and 2014, the total number of ice-covered days declined at the rate of 7 to 19 days per decade. Over the course of 35 years, seven weeks of good sea-ice habitat were lost.
NASA’s figures on global temperatures show that last month was the warmest August in 136 years of record-keeping. This color-coded chart tracks the temperature anomalies. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have sharp differences over policies to address climate change.(Credit: NASA)
If you think something absolutely has to be done about climate change and other environmental worries, Donald Trump isn’t the presidential candidate for you.
You probably knew that already, but the deeo differences in the presidential campaign come through loud and clear in three candidates’ responses to a 20-question policy quiz drawn up by Science Debate.
The questions address topics ranging from biodiversity to space exploration, and touch on hot-button issues such as vaccination and opioid abuse. Trump, the GOP candidate, provided statements addressing all the questions, as did Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Libertarian Gary Johnson hasn’t responded as of this week.
For the most part, the responses track what you’d expect from the candidates (or, more likely, from their campaigns): Clinton provided the longest answers, Trump gave one-paragraph replies, and Stein furnished point-by-point policy proposals.
Environmental issues revealed the most divergence.
NASA’s GLOBE Observer app lets anyone become a citizen scientist by collecting observations of clouds. (Credit: NASA GLOBE Observer)
One of NASA’s longest-running citizen science programs isn’t just for kids anymore: A newly released app called GLOBE Observer can turn any smartphone user into a cloud researcher.
And we don’t mean “cloud” in the computing sense. A program called Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment, or GLOBE, is looking for a wide range of cloud imagery that can feed into climate research.
“Clouds are one of the most important factors in understanding how climate is changing now, and how it’s going to change in the future,” Holli Riebeek Kohl, NASA lead for the GLOBE Observer project, explained today in a news release.
A visualization shows the likely routes that would be taken by mammals (pink), birds (blue) and amphibians (yellow) as they move northward in response to climate change. (Credit: Mapbox / OpenStreetMap / Migrations in Motion / Nature Conservancy)
A University of Washington professor’s research into climate-caused migrations has been transformed into a hypnotic map of the Americas that gets the message across.
The animated map, titled “Migrations in Motion,” shows the trajectories that species are expected to take in response to the warming trend that’s likely to unfold over the course of the coming decades.
“One of the nice things about the map is that it gives you a look at the main effects of climate change for animals: that species are going to move around,” UW ecologist Joshua Lawler told GeekWire.
Three years ago, Lawler and his colleagues published a study in Ecology Letters that laid out the likely impact of rising temperatures on migration patterns for nearly 3,000 species.
The study suggested that species in North America would tend to shift toward more northerly habitats, following routes that went through higher elevations and less developed terrain. In the eastern United States, the Appalachian Mountains stuck out as a superhighway for species shifts.
A land-ocean pattern like the one shown in this artist’s conception was used in a climate model to show how storm clouds could have shielded ancient Venus from strong sunlight. (Credit: NASA)
Today Venus is a hellish planet with a crushingly dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide, but billions of years ago, it could have had habitable surface temperatures and a watery ocean.
The computer modeling wound the clock back on Venus’ climate, using calculations similar to those employed to wind the clock forward for our own planet’s climate.
“Many of the same tools we use to model climate change on Earth can be adapted to study climates on other planets, both past and present,” lead study author Michael Way, a researcher at the Goddard Institute, said in a NASA news release. “These results show ancient Venus may have been a very different place than it is today.”
The layers on this 2.7 billion-year-old rock, a stromatolite from Western Australia, show evidence of single-celled, photosynthetic life on the shore of a large lake. The new result suggests that this microbial life thrived despite a thin atmosphere. (Credit: Roger Buick / UW)
Tiny bubbles that were trapped inside 2.7 billion-year-old rocks have led scientists to conclude that Earth’s atmosphere was less than half as dense as it is today – which runs counter to conventional wisdom.
Scientists had assumed that our planet’s atmosphere was thicker billions of years ago, in order to retain heat and keep the planet warm enough for life during an era when the sun shone less brightly than it does today.
“Our result is the opposite of what we were expecting,” Sanjoy Som, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, said in a news releasefrom the University of Washington.
Som is the principal author of a study reporting the findings, published today by Nature Geoscience. He conducted the research during his doctoral studies at the UW, and retains a Seattle connection as the CEO of a nonprofit space science outreach group called Blue Marble Space.
An artist’s impression shows a supernova explosion in its prime. (Credit: Greg Stewart / SLAC)
Researchers say they’ve found evidence of supernova explosions that spewed radioactive fallout over Earth during the age when humanity’s ancestors were evolving into upright-walking, big-brained creatures.
One of two studies published in the journal Nature identifies deposits of radioactive iron-60 in deep-sea cores extracted from the bottom of the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The deposits were traced back to one time frame ranging from 1.5 million to 3.2 million years ago, and another period 6.5 million to 8.7 million years ago.
The researchers behind that study, led by Anton Wallner of Australian National University, say the iron-60 was blasted toward us by “multiple supernova and massive-star events” that occurred within 325 light-years of Earth.
A color-coded map shows how hot temperatures got on June 29, 2012, with the reddest region indicating temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. A model based on Pacific sea surface temperatures could predict such a heat wave up to seven weeks in advance. (Credit: NWS Weather Prediction Center)
Meteorologists say they’ve found a pattern in Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures that could help authorities prepare for heat waves in the eastern United States up to 50 days in advance.
Now that the pattern has been found, forecasters will start keeping track of the heat wave indicators in May. But don’t expect the 50-day forecast to show up in the nightly weather report.
“Most seasonal predictions, including this one, are probabilistic rather than deterministic,” lead author Karen McKinnon, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, explained in an email. “For example, we can predict an increase in the odds in favor of having a hot day in the Eastern U.S. from about 1 in 6, to 1 in 2, at lead times of 40 days if the Pacific Extreme Pattern is particularly strong.”
She said the indicators are most likely to come into play during preparations for the peak of the summer.
“For example, city leaders could ensure they have sufficient cooling rooms for the elderly or those without air conditioning; farmers could alter their management tactics to prevent crop loss; businesses could be prepared for increased demand of air conditioners and fans; and utilities could ensure they have sufficient power options available to bring online quickly in case of a spike in demand,” she said.
The research was published today by Nature Geoscience. One of the authors, Andy Rhines, is a climate scientist at the University of Washington.
Sea star wasting disease can cause starfish to turn white, lose their limbs and disintegrate in a matter of days. (Credit: Kevin Lafferty / USGS)
The mass die-off of starfish off the West Coast is becoming a little less mysterious: Scientists say the starfish, also known as sea stars, fell prey to a one-two punch of virus infection plus unusually warm sea water.
The die-off started in 2013, reached a peak in 2014 and continued last year. Infected sea stars developed lesions that gradually dissolved the creatures from the outside, causing the arms to break away and leaving only whitened piles of starfish goop.
The outbreak has virtually wiped out ochre stars in the coastal waters of Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands and the Olympic Peninsula. More than 20 other species have suffered from Mexico all the way north to Alaska.
