Our Aussie friends start the summer with a conversation about climate, how humans are driving changes and what we can do about it. After a short introduction, they move on to describing what the greenhouse effect is and how science relates to policy. More to come
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
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9 comments:
I believe it is the winter that they are starting up there.
You do notice that Eli has turned the world upside down.. .
Eli, that is not upside down.
Aussie Mouse
Purely hypothetical question of course. How would the planet respond to doubling CO2 if the land masses and oceans were configured as shown in Eli's figure?
ML
If the world were turned upside down (See Figure 1), New Yorkers were be overrun by kangaroos hopping down Sixth Avenue.
Aussies would be overrun by New Yorkers, fleeing the kangaroos.
ML, why would you expect the planet to respond any differently than it has, other than for the recurring glaciations to have happened in the southern hemisphere?
Jim,
IIRC, the Arctic is warming faster than the Antarctic, in part, because of the current land/sea configuration. Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land, and the Antarctic is an ice sheet surrounded by oceans and strong westerlies. The ocean circulation would probably also be quite different. Right now, the N. hemisphere appear to be responding differently, with greatest warming in the north, probably b/c of the greater land mass there and absence of a huge ice sheet. Anyhow, I know that you know all this, I'm just prattling.
As to how the planet might respond, I can't say I know for sure. Anyways, I don't want to spend to much time debating hypotheticals, but it might make for an interesting/quirky experiment if come one has some time and computing time to burn ;)
ML
But ML, the photo shows no change at all in land/sea configuration, it merely flips everything 180 degrees.
greenhouse effect
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