Friday, July 27, 2007

The sky is falling

One seriously underreported impact -- and I do mean impact -- of Climate Change is the increase in the freqency of megacryometeors. From the linked Newsweek story:
David Travis, a professor of geography and geology and an associate dean at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, ... is part of a research team that has documented more than 50 possible megacryometeor cases during the past five years. Some involve ice chunks the size of microwave ovens.
...
Travis' research team speculates the phenomenon could be linked to global warming, suggesting that climate change might make the tropopause portion of the atmosphere colder, moister and more turbulent.


So, if you thought you'd be OK, with the flooded coastlines, icelessness, depleted soil moisure, increased cloudcover, greater storm intensity, and overall increased temperature, I'd love to hear your plan for dealing with giant falling hunks of ice.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Shaken, perhaps, with vodka and a splash of vermouth?

So I may be misguided, but I don't see tropopause temperatures as being all that important to a microwave sized body hurtling through a molecular medium. When heat shields fall of the space shuttle, do the astronauts figure they won't die as long as they can make it to the tropopause?

But maybe I have my Reynolds numbers all wrong..

Kapitano said...

Hello there. I just surfed in on your blog while trying to write something for mine.

Here's what I just wrote about climate change. Maybe interesting, maybe not.

"Blogs and newspapers are full of editorials about how climate change phophets of doom all forget one thing - that climate changes all the time. This is a little like saying murder happens all the time so the latest massacre was just an optical illusion, but anyway...

They point out that there was a flood in 1952, and a heatwave in 1976, and statistically tidal waves are bound to happen eventually. All of which is true, and completely misses the point.

Extraordinary events happen, by definition, only occasionally. When they happen all the time, they are no longer extraordinary.

Floods used to be rare, now they are quite common, and getting commoner. It doesn't make the slightest difference if there was one worse than any we've seen recently six decades ago - that's not the issue.

The issue is that we're seeing annual floods now, not that worse ones used to happen once in a lifetime."