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Science Friday: Canadian "T-Rex of the sea" | Thomas Jefferson v Noah Webster on Climate Change | Climate Change Effect on Reefs

Submitted by Tjadendevries on Fri, 07/22/2011 - 3:12pm


Manitoba dig unearths 80-million-year old "T-Rex of the sea" skeletons, squid

    WINNIPEG — Manitoba paleontologists have unearthed the bones of a prehistoric sea creature some 80 million years old.

    Scientists from the Canadian Fossil museum in Morden have dug up two Mosasaurs -- a huge reptile known as the "T-Rex of the sea."

    The dig site also uncovered a prehistoric squid and bird fossils, giving scientists new insight into what Western Canada looked like 80 million years ago.

    [...]

http://winnipeg.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20110719/wpg_dinosaur_110719/20110719/?hub=WinnipegHome


America’s First Great Global Warming Debate

Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster argue over conventional wisdom that lasted thousands of years

By Joshua Kendall
Smithsonian.com, July 15, 2011

    As the tumultuous century was drawing to a close, the conservative Yale grad challenged the sitting vice president’s ideas about global warming. The vice president, a cerebral Southerner, was planning his own run for the presidency, and the fiery Connecticut native was eager to denounce the opposition party.

    The date was 1799, not 1999—and the opposing voices in America’s first great debate about the link between human activity and rising temperature readings were not Al Gore and George W. Bush, but Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster.

    As a gentleman farmer in Virginia, Jefferson had long been obsessed with the weather; in fact, on July 1, 1776, just as he was finishing his work on the Declaration of Independence, he began keeping a temperature diary. Jefferson would take two readings a day for the next 50 years. He would also crunch the numbers every which way, calculating various averages such as the mean temperature each month and each year.

    In his 1787 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson launched into a discussion of the climate of both his home state and America as a whole. Near the end of a brief chapter addressing wind currents, rain and temperature, he presented a series of tentative conclusions: “A change in our climate…is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep….The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now.” Concerned about the destructive effects of this warming trend, Jefferson noted how “an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold” in the spring has been “very fatal to fruits.”

    Jefferson was affirming the long-standing conventional wisdom of the day. For more than two millennia, people had lamented that deforestation had resulted in rising temperatures. A slew of prominent writers, from the great ancient naturalists Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder to such Enlightenment heavyweights as the Comte de Buffon and David Hume, had alluded to Europe’s warming trend.

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Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Americas-First-Great-Global-Warming-Debate.html#ixzz1SsFzsQmN


Climate will damage reefs at 'different rates'

    (PhysOrg.com) -- Climate change and acidifying ocean water are likely to have a highly variable impact on the world's coral reefs in space, time and diversity, according to an international team of coral scientists, including UQ researchers.

    The picture that is emerging from studies of past coral extinctions and present impacts on today's reef systems is complex and subtle.

    It will demand much more sophisticated management to preserve reefs intact, the team of scientists said in a paper in the international journal Science.

    “New research confirms that coral reefs…. are indeed threatened by climate change, but that some current projections of global-scale collapse of reefs within the next few decades probably overestimate the rapidity and uniformity of the decline,” the researchers said.

    “A considered view of all the most recent evidence suggests that some coral reef systems will decline more rapidly – especially those subject to other human pressures such as overfishing," said lead author Professor John Pandolfi of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and The University of Queensland..

    "However, others may change in composition, but manage to persist for longer.”

    The paper, “Projecting coral reef futures under global warming and ocean acidification” by John M. Pandolfi, Sean R. Connolly, Dustin J. Marshall and Anne L. Cohen appears in the latest issue of the journal Science.

    “Coral reefs occupy a small part of the world's oceans, yet harbor a hugely disproportionate amount of its biodiversity,” the researchers said.

    “More than 450 million people from 109 countries live close to coral reefs, which provide important sources of ecosystem goods and services for these communities.

    “But reefs have suffered degradation from human over-exploitation and pollution over centuries to millennia, degradation that has accelerated in the last 50 years.

    "Global warming and ocean acidification are now compounding these threats.”

    [...]

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-climate-reefs.html