Saturday Pick Points

Saturday night means another quick trip around the Climate Change sites to see what has been exciting them this past week – apart that is from the 2008 Weblog Awards where, in the Science category, there are three of the sites, Climate Audit, Real Climate and Watt’s Up With That, all competing for the title. At the moment Watt’s Up is leading with 7.833 votes, Climate Audi has 2,774 and Real Climate has 851 (with no disrespect meant to the other 7 candidates) out of a total of 21,004 votes cast.

All three sites have comments on the voting, but other than that Real Climate returns to a debate on the causes of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, given that there is a new paper out in which the sudden temperature transitions of the Younger Dryas was caused by cometary impact. The story relates back to an earlier one in which the post describes the detective work required to time align cores taken from the Greenland ice cap with those from Antarctica, and that, when this was done it was found that

Antarctica gradually warms while Greenland is cold. But as soon as Greenland temperatures jump up in a DO event, Antarctic temperatures start to fall (see graph). This happens for every DO event, and it is a peculiar and tell-tale pattern

Interesting that one might conjecture that the pattern is currently repeating. The post goes on to discuss that this might be due to oceanic convection shifts, but ends with this comment

But the field is wide open for other ideas – the cause of the 1470-year regularity is one mystery waiting to be solved.

And still pertinent since the cycle is apparently still continuing and we are in the throes of the warming part of the cycle.



Moving over to Climate Audit there is an interesting pair of articles on a Finnish attempt at developing a 7500 year chronology of temperature, based on logs recovered from some Finnish lakes. Reminds me of the work done by Scott Stine on the drowned trees of Owens Lake.

At the Gristmill they are continuing their campaign against coal, arguing that the investment would be better in more efficient uses of power and throw in some negative comments on ethanol along the way. It does highlight a comment by the incoming Secretary of Labor about green jobs, and a note that Senator Barbara Boxer is planning to move climate legislation.

Watt’s Up With That does some interesting detective work on an anomalous hot spot in temperature recording in Arizona which was also picked up at Climate Audit. He also comments on the predictions made by the Climate Prediction Center about the weather this winter (they seem to have got it wrong) and a piece on the potential for a Yellowstone earthquake. It seems that I remember writing about a similar series of miniquakes about three years ago, and concluding there wasn’t much to worry about. And the excellent work the site is doing on encouraging weather stations to be adequately located and monitored, seems to be being picked up in the UK.
.