DAILY QUICK READ - JULY 5, 2016

Slow Motion Disaster

One third of Adélie penguin habitat unfit by 2030. 

Though Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) call Antarctica their home since 45,000 years ago, time in which they’ve seen several drastic changes in the climate, anthropogenic climate change might put populations to the ultimate test. After studying how colonies fared over a 30-year-period, researchers believe as much as 60 percent of the current Adélie penguin habitats might become unfit by the end of the century.

Megan Cimino, one of the lead authors of the study published in the journal Scientific Reports, says the current trends suggest 30 percent of the animal’s colonies will be in jeopardy by 2030, and 60 percent will be impacted by 2099. Near the U.S. research facility at Palmer Station on the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP), a penguin colony has already dropped by 80 percent since the 1970s.

Voter Frustration

Republican insistence that climate change isn’t real and the media’s unwillingness to do their collective job result in the most important issue of the 21st century being ignored.

As the primary election season turns toward a head-to-head between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there is increasing anger and frustration over the nature of the contest. A Guardian call-out to online readers in the US asking them to reflect on the race so far was met by a barrage of criticism on the tone and substance of the world’s most important election – with the two main parties, individual candidates and the media all coming under heavy fire.

Of the 1,385 who responded to the call-out – from all 50 states – one in five expressed discontent at the relative silence from candidates around a subject that they believed to be of supreme and epochal importance. They noted that much of the Republican debate has either focused on blatant denial that climate change even exists or on how to unpick Barack Obama’s attempts to fight global warming, while on the Democratic side both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have raised the issue but have rarely pushed it to the top of the political agenda.

This ideological gap also plays out in public opinion research which uses a nationally representative sample of respondents. Last year, Pew Research Center found that 76% of liberal Democrats said that “global warming is a very serious problem” compared to 14% of conservative Republicans.

That is perhaps a reflection of a fundamental disagreement among Americans about the reasons for, and even existence of, climate change. Pew found that 64% of Democrats believed global warming was caused by human activity while only 22% of Republicans agreed.

Koch, Exxon and the Rest of the Liars

Antarctic ice is not a contrary indicator.  It is predictable and there are complex systems and reasons for the lack of Antarctic ice reduction.

For a number of years now, climate change skeptics have argued that there’s a key part of the Earth’s climate system that upends our expectations about global warming, and that is showing trends that actually cut in the opposite direction.

This supposed contrary indicator is the sea ice that rings the Antarctic continent, and that reached a new all-time record extent of  7.78 million square miles in September 2014 (see above). As that record suggests, this vast field of ice has been expanding in recent years, rather than shrinking. That means it’s doing the opposite of what is happening in the Arctic, where sea ice is declining rapidly — and also that it’s doing the opposite of what we might expect in a warming world.

Scientists don’t fully understand why Antarctic sea ice is growing — suggested explanations have posited more glacial melt dumping cold fresh water into the surrounding seas, or the way the Antarctic ozone hole has changed the circulation of winds around the continent. In a new study in Nature Geoscience, though, researchers with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., along with colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle and Australia, suggest that the phenomenon is simply the result of natural variability of the climate system — driven, in this case, by changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean that reverberate globally.

…the new study finds that in the small minority of climate change simulations that do happen to correctly capture these natural changes in the Pacific, and the global warming “slowdown” to boot, there is also growth in Antarctic sea ice. These are the models, it appears, that happened to get the role of natural variability in the Pacific right — or more specifically, to get the timing right for a phase shift in this ocean.

Not So Black and White After All

If an octopus can only see in black and white, how does it manage to change colors to blend into a wide variety of backgrounds?

Despite having a single type of visual pigment in their retinas, cephalopods can blend with their multi-coloured surroundings easily fooling both prey and predators. This has stricken many scientists as a paradox. Christopher Stubbs, a Harvard professor of physics and astronomy, thinks he has some clues as to how the creatures manage this feat. His research suggests cephalopods might be able to detect colour after all, but in a very unusual way akin to how a digital camera dithers back and forth to create a crisp image.

…octopuses, squids or cuttlefish might be exploiting a physical phenomenon called chromatic aberration. Also known as “color fringing” or “purple fringing”, this common optical pattern occurs when a lens is unable to bring all the wavelengths of colour to the same focal plane or when the colour wavelengths are focused at different positions in the focal plane. What happens is the various colour wavelengths travel at different speeds passing through the lens, resulting in an image that is blurred or has coloured edges (red, green, blue, yellow, purple, magenta).