Category: climate change

Geography professor and director of the UGA Atmospheric Sciences Program Marshall Shepherd is among the speakers in today's Tedx Atlanta Line up:

Even as we face seemingly insurmountable obstacles, humanity finds reasons to believe in a better world. On May 7th, from noon to six, TEDxAtlanta will celebrate a dozen ideas and innovations that provide reasons to be optimistic about the future. Together we'll explore big ideas surrounding the future of journalism, education, neuroscience, solar energy, disease control, climate change, water management, as well as creativity, collaboration, humility and the power of poetry. Join us, either in person or via Live Stream on May 7th from 12:20pm to 5:30pm — and add your "reasons to believe" to the conversation.

Kudos to Shepherd for being among this select group of speakers. His knowledge about climate and extreme weather is highly sought around the world, including leading-edge intellectual discussion forums that have grown out of the Ted Talks concept. Streaming should be enabled at the URL above.

The UGA Marine Institute on Sapelo Island was founded in 1953 and has been at the center of ecological research on salt-marsh coastal ecoystems ever since. That work, lead by our department of marine sciences, continues apace with the renewal of an important NSF grant:

A consortium of universities headed by the University of Georgia will continue ecological field research on the marshes and estuaries of the Georgia coast following the renewal of a six-year, $5.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The award will help scientists understand how these ecosystems function, track changes over time and predict how they might be affected by future variations in climate and human activities.

"Discerning long-term trends in natural systems requires careful scientific analysis over the course of many years," said Merryl Alber, Georgia Coastal Ecosystems Long-Term Ecological Research project manager and professor of marine sciences at UGA.

Congratulations to all involved in the consortium, whose work will take on added urgency in the coming years, as coastal areas become the focus of increased observation on the effects of climate change. 

Image: Sapelo Island, courtesy UGA Photography.

In widely reported findings, UGA climatologists and NASA independently confirm that during several days this month, nearly the entire ice sheet of Greenland experienced some degree of melting on its surface.

On average, about half of the surface of Greenland's ice sheet naturally melts in the summer. The new data—from three different satellites—show that an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July.

"This is the first time we have witnessed almost all of the ice sheet melt in the three decades of satellite data," said Thomas Mote, professor and head of the department of geography in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. "The last time this occurred was more than 100 years ago, long before satellite data were available."

And speaking of Dr. Shepherd, he was quoted on the New York Times Green blog this weekend, per how he answers questions related to the changing global climate:

Climate scientists, like the rest of us, have friends and relatives who wonder what is happening. So I asked the scientists: When you see your extended family over Thanksgiving or Christmas and they ask about the weather, what do you tell them?

“My answer on that has evolved,” replied one, J. Marshall Shepherd. He’s the head of atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia and the president-elect of the American Meteorological Society, the leading group for scientists seeking to understand and predict weather and climate.

“I used to say things like, ‘It’s really difficult to attribute any one single event to climate change, but some of these are certainly consistent with what our broad body of science says is occurring,’” Dr. Shepherd said. “More recently, I’ve been saying: ‘We may already be seeing examples of a new normal.’”

Lee Shearer of the Athens Banner Herald reports on research by Franklin faculty on the recent drought:

But measured by its impact on people in the four counties served by the Bear Creek Reservoir, and how much it depleted water in area rivers, it was the worst on record, they say in an article published this month in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association.

“The smoking gun is pointing at population increases,” said one of the paper’s authors, UGA geography professor John Knox.

I watched this NOVA presentation over the holidays, and while you might think that nothing could move as slow as a glacier, they are unfortunately not shifting all that slowly. The scientists on the program were able to measure movement that, while imperceptible to the naked eye, equaled about 130 feet per day. That is amazing. And alarming.