NASA, NOAA and the Met Office 2016 warmest year to date
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3RWTTtPg8E
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Forty-year-old spy satellite images are beginning to provide the first consistent look at how glaciers across the Himalayas are changing and what future water supplies might look like for millions of people who rely on their seasonal melt.
Until now, knowledge about glacier mass change in the region has been spotty, with inconsistent measurements from glacier to glacier. Public satellite images could reveal changes in a glacier’s area but not its height or mass, so scientists made physical measurements by putting stakes in the ice and checking back year to year. Many glaciers are too remote or too dangerous to reach, though, making field data scarce.
When the U.S. government began declassifying spy satellite data, scientists figured out how to manually build 3D elevation models by matching landmarks between images and calculating the satellite camera’s angle, but the process was still time consuming and inconsistent.
Josh Maurer, a graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, developed a better way.
Picture a stereoscope, like the View-Master with its cardboard reels of tiny photos. The stereoscope takes two photos of the same scene, shot from slightly different angles, and puts them together so your eyes see a 3D image through the viewer. Maurer took that concept and used computer vision techniques to design an automated process that creates consistent 3D models of glaciers across a wide region as they appeared in the past using declassified spy satellite images.
By automating the process, Maurer was able to start creating the first consistent look at glacier change over the past 40 years across Asia’s entire high-mountain region, from the greater Himalaya, including Bhutan and Nepal, through the Karakorum and into the Hindu Kush. This week, he is presenting his early results at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
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Knowing how glaciers are changing is critical for communities and governments across the region today as they plan for water changes in the future. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s population relies on the Himalayan glaciers’ seasonal meltwater, in addition to monsoonal rain and snowfall, for drinking water, to grow crops and to produce energy. Bhutan’s economy, for example, relies heavily on the production and sale of hydropower, and parts of India rely on that energy source to power their homes and businesses.
“Life depends on water, so changing the amount or timing of how that water reaches a community or an ecosystem is going to have an impact,” Maurer said.
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global record minimum
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Global Warming Arguments You'll Hear for the Next Four Years
1. “There’s no proof that global warming is real.”
This statement, while popular among science deniers, couldn’t be much further from reality. There is overwhelming evidence that not only is the earth warming, but that humans are causing it.
2. “The jury is still out.”
Although many media outlets often present “both sides” of this issue, there is no real debate among those actually studying the science. The peer-reviewed literature speaks for itself. Here are some facts:
At least 97 percent of climate researchers agree that humans are the cause of global warming Those that do not agree are significantly less qualified than those that do. The agreement spans nearly 200 international scientific organizations.
3. “Global warming is motivated by the politics of money-grabbing scientists.”
Svante Arhennius, a Nobel Prize winner, first calculated the potential of CO2 as a greenhouse gas over 100 years ago. Surely he did not have any political motive.
4. “Temperature changes are a natural, cyclical process.”
It is true that tiny variations in the earth’s orbit may contribute to ice ages… but over periods of hundreds of thousands of years! The rate of the current temperature increase is roughly 10x faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming and unprecedented in recorded history.
