Long time since I commented on your site, but with you working where I started out as a paleoclimate researcher was too much of a temptation to stay away!

Glad you’re enjoying Sydney and the lorikeets!

I published a paper a bit over a year ago working with some paleoclimate modellers out of U Sydney and Purdue (USA) on Australian Miocene climate. It generated some discussion from the paleo folks at UNSW (Archer’s team).

Herold, N., Huber, M., Greenwood, D.R., Müller, D., and Seton, M. 2011. Early to middle Miocene monsoon climate in Australia. Geology, 39 (1): 3 – 6.

Greenwood, D.R., Herold, N., Huber, M., Müller, R.D. and Seton, M. 2012. Forum Reply. Early to middle Miocene monsoon climate in Australia. Geology, 40 (6): e274, doi:10.1130/G33384Y.1

Keep enjoying the Pacific ocean and that wonderful food!

Cheers
David Greenwood
Brandon U

How can people not notice? The sciencecan be complex, but really just basic Earth Science from High School. But not to notice?

I fear it is too late and the artic conveyer turnover will come to a stop in the next two to ten years and my children will have hell to pay and whoever survives, I hope they leand to trust in what they know and see.

Second Order Draft of AR5 (the next IPCC report), Working Group 1 (“The Scientific Basis”)

http://stopgreensuicide.com/

I think that’s a symptom of perverse journalist syndrome brought on by uncritical thinking disorder and possibly a touch of corrupt politicianese.

Glad to hear you’ve not (yet) been muzzled by your country’s misanthropic government, Kate.

http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2013/03/26/G34045.1.abstract?cited-by=yes&legid=geology;G34045.1v1

Another matter I’d like to ask your help on is rather closer to your own expertise. I’d really like to persuade you to do a recce on what looks to my lay calculations like an additional potentially large early feedback with a methane output, of which I’ve yet to find any public discussion . The germ of this notion came from assembling galleries of stunning pictures of thermokarst pool landscapes, and of the advance of deciduous shrubs and tree species across the tundra.

As a thought experiment, suppose that down the road the reportedly rapidly expanding areas of thermokarst pools and land-slip dam-lakes comprised an area of 500,000km2, and the reportedly rapidly advancing growth of deciduous species colonizes 1,000,000km2, there’d be quite a potential for their interaction across the windswept ‘cold desert’ of the tundra.

Here in Wales, unlike pine needles, the fallen leaves blow clear across the fields if they’re not rained on and mostly make drifts against the downwind hedges and stone walls, from which they’ll blow again if the wind changes. But those who find a bit of water, say a stream or a ditch to clog up, don’t get to fly any further. By contrast any long grasses that haven’t been grazed off don’t blow about, they mostly just fall over flat.

Some more numbers are needed here which I hope are in or at least somewhere near the ball park.
– Suppose tundra shrub/woodland drops only about 8Ts dry leaves per acre, or about 20Ts per hectare, that’s 2.0Kts/km2, which is 2Gts/Mkm2.
- If their carbon content is around 45%, that’s about 0.9GtsC on the move.
- If as much as 10% of that loose carbon flies far enough in the right directions to find a pool, lake or slow watercourse to sink into, that’s about 90MtsC rotting anaerobically, and outgassing up to 112.5Mts CH4.
- And over the critical 20-year time horizon that poses an annual addition of around 11.25Gts CO2e to the atmosphere.

It strikes me that this back-of-envelope outcome is closely akin to the report in GRL by an arctic scientist (in 2010 ?) of how the current cryosphere albedo loss feedback was imposing a forcing equivalent to about 30% of anthro-CO2 outputs. I’m thinking that if someone of your expertise didn’t bat it straight out of court (for one or more of umpteen possible reasons), and was intrigued to explore it further, then IF perchance it hangs together as a serious dynamic-interaction feedback, it could have exceptional public-education value on the hazards of the feedback threat.

There must be hundreds of millions of people, and their children, in wealthy countries who know all about just what masses of leaves come down in the fall and need sweeping up, who’d get some time each fall to think about it.
So it seems to me that exploring the issue just might be a very productive use of time for the right person.

On the other hand, there must be many scientists trudging around the tundra facing the changes there in the flesh, so it may well be that the issue has already attracted attention. If that were so, would there be any chance of getting and posting a discreet interim account of the issue’s likely potential ?

Well thanks for reading all this and my apologies for the length,

With kind regards,

Lewis