DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 25, 2016

Imagine All That Happened

Not the most attractive tree in Europe, but maybe the oldest.  A living thing that was growing and surviving without a thought to the history of war, plague and “progress” that was happening around it.

…in Europe, trees that reach 1,000-years-old are a rarity. So the discovery of a Bosnian pine tree (Pinus heldreichii) that is at least 1,075-years-old is a big deal. It stands in a grove in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece along with of a dozen other pines at or close to the millennia mark. The tree, dubbed Adonis, is believed to be the oldest living tree in Europe.

“It is quite remarkable that this large, complex and impressive organism has survived so long in such an inhospitable environment, in a land that has been civilized for over 3,000 years,” Paul Krusic a member of the expedition that found the tree says in a press release.

So Just Move!

This is a tragic story.  Shishmaref, Alaska has been occupied for more than 400 years (the oldest colonial city in the United States was founded 450 years ago) and now it is uninhabitable due to climate change.  But, the real tragedy of this piece is that the climate denying nut jobs are blaming the occupants of Shishmaref for having the ground literally washed from beneath their feet.

Because of complications due to climate change, Shishmaref is gradually being devoured by the Chukchi Sea. The island is eroding because the permafrost that was its fundamental foundation is disappearing and because the ocean doesn't freeze as long and as hard as it used to freeze.

Since the Chukchi Sea is where typhoons eventually go to die, and since they no longer can beat themselves to death over deep sea ice, the storms regularly tear great chunks out of the island. Houses have collapsed. You can see the legacy of the ongoing losing battle against the winds and tides in the hunks of the previous seawalls that are strewn around the rocky beach.

People have been living in Shishmaref for over 400 years. On Friday, the residents of Shishmaref voted (again) to abandon their village rather than try to save it from the merciless pounding that doesn't seem to promise to get better any time soon.

We Saw Ourselves

Fifty years ago this week mankind got its first look at Earth rise as seen from just above the surface of the Moon.   There have been more iconic photos of the Earth from space, but this was the first time that we could actually see this tiny speck as it might appear from another celestial body.  It’s a reminder that this remarkable place is the only planet we have.  And, this is the story of how that photo (and many more) have been preserved for mankind.  Not just preserved, but restored to their full resolution and quality.  Hopefully, we can preserve the planet with as much diligence.

On Aug. 23, 1966 — 50 years ago Tuesday — Lunar Orbiter 1 took the above photo: the first-ever of Earth rising up above the cold, bright dust of our planet's biggest satellite.

However iconic, it looks pretty crummy.

That's because 1960s technology couldn't access the full depth of the data NASA had on its tapes. So after printing out what it needed to select landing sites, the space agency mothballed the tapes in a Maryland storage unit.

The tapes were well-kept, but the refrigerator-size tape drives — the only devices capable of accessing the data — had sat in the barn of Nancy Evans, a former NASA employee who saved them from going into the garbage, for the better part of a few decades.

That is, until space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo found out about the situation through a web group in 2005.  Wingo immediately contacted Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and founder of NASAWatch.com, for help.

Climate Change – A Hoax

If only those kooks and nuts trying to sell this bogus theory of global warming (fat Al Gore included) would just produce peer reviewed science like Exxon and Koch Industries provide.  Oh wait, do I have that wrong?  What’s this – human influence on climate change as early as the 1830s?  Unpossible!

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, no one would have thought that their burning of fossil fuels would have an almost immediate effect on the climate. But our new study, published Wednesday in Nature, reveals that warming in some regions actually began as early as the 1830s.

That is much earlier than previously thought, so our discovery redefines our understanding of when human activity began to influence our climate.

By pinpointing the date when human-induced climate change started, we can then begin to work out when the warming trend broke through the boundaries of the climate's natural fluctuations, because it takes some decades for the global warming signal to "emerge" above the natural climate variability.

According to our evidence, in all regions except for Antarctica, we are now well and truly operating in a greenhouse-influenced world. We know this because the only climate models that can reproduce the results seen in our records of past climate are those models that factor in the effect of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by humans.