Thursday, January 14, 2016

UW science links Greenland melt to cloud cover

Breakthrough UW-Madison science advances our understanding of a changing climate and its implications, as reported by the College of Letters and Science:
“Over the next of 80 years, we could be dealing with another foot of sea level rise around the world,” says Tristan L’Ecuyer, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study. “Parts of Miami and New York City are less than two feet above sea level; another foot of sea level rise and suddenly you have water in the city.” 
The study, published today in Nature Communications and led by the University of Leuven in Belgium, shows that clouds are raising the temperature of the Greenland Ice Sheet by 2 to 3 degrees compared to cloudless skies and accounting for as much 30 percent of the ice sheet melt.
It's a big story in The Washington Post:
Clouds have the effect of trapping heat on Earth; they can cause local temperatures to be warmer, so one would imagine that clouds might increase the amount of ice that actually melts during the day. 
But it turns out that the influence of cloud cover is strongest after the sun goes down. At night, the clouds actually prevent temperatures from cooling as much as they would on clear nights and keep already-melted ice from refreezing. This liquid water then pools on the surface of the ice and can be lost as runoff.
How much more proof do we need that it was crazy for the state to severely cut UW budgets and drive away faculty with unprovoked attacks on tenure? 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

James.....we don't need any more proof of the damage Walker and his Republican legislators have done and are doing to severely damage Wisconsin. These anti-science, anti-people and anti-truth politicians must be sent packing in this year's elections. Wisconsin and its citizens cannot afford more "divide and conquer " and intimidation via lies governing. Give us our state back and give it to the people not the corporate special interests that are raping it for profit. Give us back our government that puts people before party and public need before political greed!

Anonymous said...

We can't take back our government -- they have cleverly distracted us with voter fraud that does not exist, disenfranchised huge blocks of voters, and gerrymandered the state so that dem candidates can win by more than 50,000 votes collectively; but lose the elections!

But this is not the worst of it -- our closed proprietary election system, un-verifiable and rotten to the core, can be scientifically proven to be fraudulent. They can't even gerrymander and suppress voters anymore -- they outright steal them.

Walker's 2012 recall can be proven to be stolen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Mm26ZBoWk

And so can the 2014 race
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc0eU-3cpAk

It will take historical turnouts that will never happen in an off year to get any change -- but even that assumes we had accurate verifiable elections. Watch the short videos above -- until we demand integrity in our elections, nothing changes.

And GAB, far from being a "watchdog" was in on the thefts and will not release ward-by-ward data that would provide even stronger proof to collaborate the valid analysis in videos above.

I will never understand why some made such a big deal about protecting GAB when they were neutered -- just another distraction that truly does not matter.