I blog about environmental and social justice issues because I am very concerned about the health of the interdependent web of life of which we are a part.

Melting Arctic ice.......beautiful and frightening!

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Tuesday, March 2, 2010

NASA and Climate Change

Pondering Syncrude's potential legal liability  for despoilation of the commons brought greenhouse gas emissions and climate change to mind.  I wondered what, if anything, NASA had to say about the nasty winter the east is suffering through.  Is is proof that climate change is not happening?  No such luck.
http://climate.nasa.gov/news/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=270
Hansen explains that the 5-year and 11-year temperature averages, i.e. the planet's annual average temperature, averaged over 5 or 11 years, are valuable because they place less emphasis on single-year variability. These running averages show a consistent rise in the Earth's temperature over the past 30 years.  Allowing for this variability, global warming theory does not posit a linear, year-to-year increase in temperatures. Nor does it say that harsh winter weather will simply end. What it does say is that increasing concentrations of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, with unchecked growth, will contribute a greater and greater warming influence on the world's climate.
Climate change is happening as I write.  Please send a letter to the Right Honorable Stephen Harper asking him to implement science based reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions.  Ask him to invest in clean energy and green technology a la Germany if  he wishes to stimulate the economy and get people back to work.
UPDATE:  NASA found water on the moon!
Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.  "The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon."

I wonder if climate change deniers will also deny that water exists on our moon....

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