Monday, August 06, 2012

Climate change hits shellfish: scientists
"Where it gets colder and the calcium carbonate is harder to get out of the seawater the animals have thinner skeletons," Professor Lloyd Peck of the BAS told Reuters TV in an interview.
World Bank buys carbon credits from PH hog raisers
When fully implemented, the program is expected to produce over 100,000 tons of carbon credits per year from dozens of pig farms across the country, the lender said.
Greenland Melt Spawns Iceberg Threat in Search for Offshore Oil - Bloomberg
While the exact relationship between warmer temperatures and iceberg formation remains unclear, Ruth Mottram, an ice specialist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, said “there’s certainly a link” and that “more melt usually means more icebergs.” 
Flashback: A Titanic mystery: Why were icebergs so far south? - Philly.com
What was different in 1912?

The disaster occurred in a period of worldwide cooling. Looking at the National Climate Data Center database dating to 1880, for 15 consecutive years before the sinking, annual global temperatures finished below long-term averages.

One intriguing theory is that the cooling got an extra kick from the 11-year sunspot cycle. NASA data show a tremendous lull in sunspots - violent solar storms that eject powerful energy into space - from late 1910 through mid-1914. Lulls have been associated with global cooling, and the activity hit rock bottom in 1913, which saw 314 days without a single sunspot.

In a paper published in 2000, British meteorologist Edward N. Lawrence opined that right before a sunspot activity reaches its lowest level, cooling reaches a peak.
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However, the iceberg landscape in April 1912 evidently was extreme. The Titantic ran into one as high as 200 feet. The general cooling would have bulked up the ice supply, and a warm interval off western Greenland could have caused some of that icy mass to break off. Sosnowksi thinks its possible that the icebergs got caught in an eddy and were driven southward.

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