Hurricane Michael plowed into the Florida panhandle Wednesday, Oct. 10, as a major Category 4 storm — the strongest hurricane ever to hit that region. Many NASA instruments are keeping tabs on Michael from space, including the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR).
“If the rate of sea ice loss and warming continues unmitigated, what is going to happen to polar bear habitat will exceed anything documented over the last million years. The extremely rapid pace of this change makes it almost impossible for us to use history to predict the future,” said Kristin Laidre, a marine biologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center.
Jerry Brown, California’s governor, has accused Donald Trump of “gross ignorance” over climate change as he made his most sweeping actions yet to rid the world’s fifth largest economy of fossil fuels, calling for 100% of the state’s electricity to come from carbon-free sources by 2045. (more…)
There are thresholds, non-linear evolutions that are not yet incorporated into current climate models. Fifty-six million years ago, the Earth experienced an exceptional episode of global warming. In a very short time on a geological scale, within 10 to 20,000 years, the average temperature increased by five to eight degrees, only returning to its original level a few hundred thousand years later.
