NASA - NASA Mission Takes Stock of Earth's Melting Land Ice

NASA - NASA Mission Takes Stock of Earth's Melting Land Ice

Remember GRACE from class? The latest from the mission. Short story: melting, melting, and more melting.

Deep Time and Climate Change

One of the interesting things about studying Earth's past is just how tremendous the changes have been, and how much we can learn about the earth system by studying them.  In many cases they provide our only insight into what we can expect from future climate changes.  We can look at past forcings and responses in the earth system and ask what happens when the oceans become acidified, or when CO2 exceeds 400 ppm, or even more.

We spent some time talking about past climate change, but most of what we looked at was in the last 65 million years (myr).  This sounds like a long time, but it is just a hair over 1% of Earth's history. Check out this report from the National Academy of Science about climate change in deep time.  You can read it online below, or download the PDF.

Global Change in the Southeast

The United States Global Change Research Program published its scientific assessment of Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States in 2009.  It has a good overview of predicted regional changes.

One of the staggering predictions is that Wake Forest University will go from experiencing somewhere around 45 or so days exceeding 90 degrees F in a year to more than 100 days a year.  When you start to look at places like northern Florida and Texas, the numbers become hard to imagine, with temperatures predicted to be over 90 degrees for six months of the year.