Helen Fields » climate

three more quizzes

Helen — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:16:24 +0000

I just remembered to go looking for my last batch of quizzes, and they were there! Wahoo! Here are three to entertain you for now, and I’ll post the last three later. Tell your friends.

A mosquito researcher once told me that the best way to feed mosquitoes in the lab is to stick your arm in the cage.

I learned some cool facts about electric vehicles while writing this quiz, but they’re all in the quiz, so I’m not telling you what they are.

Climate change is a very large topic to write a quiz about. Take the quiz and see how I did!

To see all my quizzes, click here.

bering sea ice

Helen — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:11:59 +0000

Check it out: I wrote about ice in the Bering Sea for the website of Deadliest Catch, the Discovery Channel show about crab fishing in the Bering Sea. There’s been a lot more ice than usual the last couple of years, which is weird, what with the whole global warming thing. I explained why for the benefit of the show’s fans.

In other Deadliest Catch news, check out this awesome knitting pattern for a crab, inspired by the show.

little poopers

Helen — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:01:04 +0000

Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey have a clever new way to find emperor penguins around Antarctica: look for their poop. From space. Read all about it! Note that I did manage to quote the guy calling poop “poo.”

icebreakers: they break ice

Helen — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:53:51 +0000

This would never have occurred to me, but now at least three people have asked it, with varying degrees of seriousness. Are icebreakers bad for the ice?

It’s not a completely nutty question. Icebreakers do, yknow, break the ice. And they leave water behind them. Open water is darker than ice, and while ice reflects heat, water absorbs it. That’s part of why it’s bad that sea ice is disappearing from the Arctic, particularly in summer – the ice helps keep the region cool, by reflecting the sun’s energy away from the Earth. (I say “particularly in summer” because that’s when the Arctic gets sun.)

Anyway, the answer is pretty much what you’d think – compared to the vast expanse of sea ice in the Arctic or Bering Sea, the tracks broken by an icebreaker are tiny. Not big enough to be interesting. So, don’t worry, I’m not ruining the planet by breaking the ice.

bad news, bared

Helen — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 05:46:38 +0000

Friday was a good news day at the AAAS conference, with the fisheries scientists putting on a happy face. Today was bad news day for climate change. Chris Field, a very smart guy who I worked for briefly in 2002, announced that carbon dioxide emissions have increased way faster than they figured at the time of the last big climate assessment. “We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we considered in climate models,” he said at a press conference this morning.

Here’s a Washington Post article about it. (Kari Lydersen was at the same press conference and got a different version of that quote. Hm. She’s probably right, but I’m sticking with the version in my notebook. Maybe he said it differently in his science talk.)

Then this afternoon I went to a session called “The Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice,” so I knew I was in for a good time. Jean-Claude Gascard summarized all the data. Guess what: There’s less ice. He had graph after graph showing that there’s less ice every year, and it’s thinner than it used to be, too. He’s from the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. His very nice French accent didn’t make the news sound any better.

The talk after his, by Paul Wassman of the University of Tromsø (yay Norway), was even more depressing. He was talking about how the Arctic may have reached a point of no return with warming. Someone asked if that’s it, if people have lost the battle. “Yes, it looks not good,” he said.

Maybe next year the climate people will follow the example of the fisheries people and start telling us good news about carbon.