You are browsing the archive for February 2016 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
29 February 2016
23|5 Talks at the AMS Annual Meeting
I was honored to be master of ceremonies at the 23-5 session (23.5 degrees is the tilt of Earth respect to the ecliptic) at the AMS Annual Meeting in January, and the video from the session is now online. The talks were all fantastic, and the evening ended with the movie based on Dr. Oreskes’ book Merchants of Doubt. When someone who thinks climate change is a hoax made up by …
26 February 2016
Sea-Level Rising Faster Than Anytime in Last 27 Centuries
A new paper in PNAS this week (that looked at sea level over the last 2700 years) has gotten quite a bit of attention by the main-stream media this week. A good summary of this paper and the implications is here from WBOC TV Reporter Tyler Butler. I work with Tyler and he is an exc. reporter, and he’s proof that you can do a great story about climate change …
23 February 2016
Stunning One Minute Rapid-Scan GOES 14 Images
This is the current image from the GOES-14 satellite that is in storage. It is turned on for high impact weather events because it can send one minute images. The tornado outbreak expected on the Gulf Coast today certainly ranks as a high impact event, and we should have this data through the evening. When GOES R launches we will see even higher resolution images at 30 second intervals along …
19 February 2016
Why Some Teachers Are Teaching Climate Change Wrong
I mentioned this subject last week, and thanks to my friend Ed Maibach at George Mason Univ. for the tip about this op-ed piece in U.S. News and World Report. It’s well worth a read, and I agree with the authors that the likely reason for this is that teachers are unaware of the overwhelming consensus among scientists. There’s no greater science myth in America, than the stubborn belief that …
17 February 2016
Paper shows Significant Increase in Methane Emissions in U.S.
Despite the plentiful commercials on cable networks touting clean natural gas, there is more to the story. Methane emissions have noticeably increased in the U.S. according to research published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters. There has been a lot of talk recently about how much natural gas escapes from fracking wells and the huge leak in Southern California has been national news for over two months. Methane is …
NOAA Data Confirms NASA Data- January 2016 Hottest Month On Record
The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (formerly the Nat. Climate Data Center) posted their monthly global temperature data and it (like NASA) shows January to be the hottest month on their data base. The thermometer record goes back to 1880, but proxy data shows this was likely the hottest month on the planet in at least 2,000 years. This is the 9th month in a row with a new monthly …
16 February 2016
January 2016 Blows Away Global Temp. Records
NASA announced today that this past January was an amazing 1.13 degrees C. above the 1950-1980 average. It becomes only the 4th month ever to reach over 1 degree C above the average, with the other 3 months being in 2015. The record is mainly due to the increasing greenhouse gases, and the strong El Nino in the Pacific. Having now reached 1 degree C above the average, we are …
13 February 2016
Climate Change and Teachers
There is a very noteworthy paper out today in Science about the teaching of climate science in America’s classrooms, and it’s open source, so non-subscribers can read it. The piece is excellent, so if you know are (or know) a teacher, please share it with them. The short summary of the Science paper, is that some teachers are telling students things about science that the facts just do not support, chief among …
12 February 2016
Why The Discovery of Gravity Waves is BIG News
Today’s announcement about gravity waves is REALLY big news. Not because it confirmed Einstein, but because we can now detect something we could not before. When we learned to detect radio waves, the world changed. Detecting X rays lead to amazing advances in medicine and seeing Infrared light lead to cameras that can see at night, along with the ability to measure temperatures, and detect elements on stars and planets. …
11 February 2016
Einstein’s Gravity Waves Are Real
The American Physical Society has a good write up on the gravity wave discovery announced today here. AP Science writer Seth Borenstein has some background as well. The actual published paper is here: http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 More on how LIGO works here:
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.