Have you seen Comet Lulin. I spotted it tonight here in Huntsville Alabama.

Dim and green, just next to Saturn. Sky and Telescope magazine has an excellent article with charts to help you find it. Do use binoculars. It will be hard to see with the naked eye except in very dark locations.

www.skyandtelescope.com

A viewer here in the Huntsville area sent this pic. Thanks to Bryan Shirkey of Madison Alabama.

 

The second “THING”

A new study by an MIT group is getting some real notice this morning. The Climate Progress blog has a nice summary here:

http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/23/mit-doubles-global-warming-projections

The quick and dirty of it is this. Updated model runs (using more realistic assumptions and forecasts of emissions, and of the Carbon cycle) show the possibilities of a catastrophic rise in temperature have increased. The median rise in temperature, by 2100, of the model runs is 5.1C. That may not sound like much, but trust me, we would be living on a different planet. I have asked a couple of very bright Climate experts to comment on it. Stay tuned.

You can read the entire publication HERE. Be warned you will need a graduate level understanding of statistics. Still you can get the basics if you take the time. Climate Progress has done an excellent job of summarizing it for non scientists, and I see no reason to attempt to do better. I’d probably fail!