by D. Fernandez-Blanco, November 20, 2018 in EGU
What do you think are the biggest challenges right now in your field?
Some of the challenges are too hard for me even to pursue them. In the climate world, we don’t know about the role of clouds. And I don’t know how to pursue this, so I don’t pursue it. Do clouds have a cooling effect, and what is the response from clouds to warming? Will they slow or accelerate the warming? We don’t know. The role of clouds is certainly a big, big question. Although I do not work on this, I think about it, but I don’t see what to do.
One of the problems I do work on is what brought us Ice Ages. How did we go through 300 My years without much ice in the northern hemisphere and then suddenly, beginning 3My years ago or so, we had 5 big Ice Ages? Why? An easy answer is that now CO2 is higher. But it’s really hard to measure, determining CO2 in the past is a big question.
Another big question for me is how does the convection in the mantle connect with deformation in the lithosphere? How do these connect to one another?
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by Paul Berth, 22 novembre 2018, in ScienceClimatEnergie
Les microbulles de gaz emprisonnées dans les carottes de glace sont fréquemment utilisées pour estimer le taux de CO2 de l’atmosphère du passé. Il s’agit de méthodes de mesure indirectes. Par exemple la carotte de glace EPICA Dome C en Antarctique nous suggère que le CO2 de l’atmosphère a varié entre 180 et 300 ppmv pendant les derniers 650 000 ans (Brook 2005). Cependant, le taux de CO2 observé dans ces carottes de glace représente-il vraiment l’atmosphère du passé? Nous allons montrer ici qu’un paramètre est souvent négligé par les glaciologues, et que ce paramètre pourrait avoir un effet considérable sur le résultat des analyses : il s’agit de la présence de micro-organismes dans la glace et les microbulles.
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by K. Richard, November 22, 2018 in NoTricksZone
The evidence that “global” warming has not been global in scale continues to accumulate. Two more new reconstructions from the Western Pacific (He et al., 2018) and subpolar North Atlantic (Orme et al., 2018) indicate that modern temperatures have continued to decline since the onset of the Little Ice Age.
These add to the nearly 300 graphs published in the scientific literature since 2017 showing that there is nothing unusual, unprecedented, or remarkable about the temperatures changes in the last 150 years.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse