scientists
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Dust Bowl 2: Drought detective predicts drier future for American Southwest
If you’re one of the tens of millions of people who live in the southwestern United States, get ready for drier weather. That’s the message from Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observa
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Math whiz tackles the big carbon sink puzzle
Inez Fung is on a mission to find and account for every gram of heat-trapping carbon dioxide on the planet. And she knows where most of it is hiding.
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CSI: Climate scene investigator
How do we know that human activities are responsible for warming the planet? Because just like criminals, climate change culprits, such as smokestack or tailpipe emissions, leave behind distinctive signatures or patterns. All climate investigators have to do is look closely enough, and hardly anyone has been looking longer or more carefully than Benjamin Santer.
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BP launches effort to control scientific research of oil disaster
If BP has its way, important scientific research and data could be closed off to the public.Photo courtesy Greenpeace USA 2010 via FlickrCross-posted from Think Progress. Foreign oil giant BP is on a spending spree, buying Gulf Coast scientists for its private contractor army. Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University, and Texas A&M […]
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Paleoclimatologist studies sea levels in a desert
Exactly how much did the sea level rise three million years ago? Okay. Probably not a question you’ve asked yourself lately. But the question and, more importantly, its answer are significant. They will help scientists understand how fast and how high our current sea levels are likely to rise as today’s global warming trend melts […]
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The man behind the climate models
Warren Washington literally wrote the book on climate modeling. Introduction to Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling, which he co-authored with Claire L. Parkinson in 2005, is the classic graduate-level text in the field. A former head of the American Meteorological Society and an adviser to every president — Republican and Democrat alike — since Jimmy Carter, Washington […]
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Are butterflies the silent harbingers of global warming?
Camille Parmesan studies the effects of global warming by chasing butterflies. Sounds fanciful, but it is anything but. Her careful field observations of butterfly populations have produced compelling evidence of how climate change has already affected our living planet. In several landmark studies, she has helped pave the way for a body of eye-opening research […]
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Weighing Greenland
Scott Luthcke weighs Greenland — every 10 days. And the island has been losing weight, an average of 183 gigatons (or 200 cubic kilometers) — in ice — annually during the past six years. That’s one third the volume of water in Lake Erie every year. Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet offers some of the most […]
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Finding evidence of climate change in the caves of the American Southwest
Julia Cole finds evidence of the climate record in some fascinating places. Cole is a geologist at the University of Arizona. Most recently, her research has led her deep inside a limestone cave 50 miles southeast of Tucson. Preserved there, within stalagmites that have formed on the floor of the dark, perpetually humid cave, is […]
