Departing Space Station Commander Sunita Williams Gives a Tour

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. The tour includes scenes of each of the station's modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.

Visualizing: The 2,299 Kepler Candidate Planets Around a Single Star

Animation by Alex Parker showing the 2299 high-quality (multiple transits), non-circumbinary transiting planet candidates found by NASA's Kepler mission so far. These candidates were detected around 1770 unique stars, but are animated in orbit around a single star. They are drawn to scale with accurate radii, orbital periods, and orbital distances. They range in size from 1/3 to 84 times the radius of Earth. Colors represent an estimate of equilibrium temperature, ranging from 4,586 C at the hottest to -110 C at the coldest - red indicates warmest, and blue/indigo indicates coldest candidates. Three white rings illustrate the average orbital distances of Mercury, Venus, and Earth on the same scale. (More to the story here)
The current list of planet candidates can be seen here.
Watching in full screen HD is recommended, so you can see even the smallest planets!
By Alex Parker - Postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Fossil-fuel Divestment Campaign

Bill McKibben and Christian Parenti discuss the Disinvestment Campaign and how best to confront the role of the fossil-fuel industry- what McKibben calls, "Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization."
And this:

R.I.P. Rebecca Tarbotton, Head of Rainforest Action Network

Rebecca Tarbotton, executive director of Rainforest Action Network,  tragically drowned in rough surf in San Pancho, north of Puerto Vallarta, on December 28, 2012. Above, she addresses the 2012 REVEL Conference in October.

Butterflies Drink Turtle Tears

In Ecuador's Yasuní National Park, butterflies sip a yellow-spotted river turtle's tears. The mineral-rich liquid helps the insects reproduce. In exchange, the reptile gets a good eye-cleaning. (ref) Photo by Pete Oxford/Minden Pictures

Doha COP18 Ending in Failure as Super-Typhoon Bopha Ravages the Philippines

 As hopes for progress fade at COP18 in Doha, in spite of much talk about the devastation of Hurricane Sandy a few weeks ago in the U.S. and it's impact on both scientists and the general public, another super-storm, Typhoon Bopha, is devastating the Philippines, with 1000 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless at last count. Bopha is the strongest typhoon ever to hit Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Phillipines.  Storms this strong do not usually occur this far south because the coriolis force, which helps storms spin up, is weak at such latitudes. 

 

Remember how Sandy, moving in a northeastern direction up the US coast, stopped opposite New Jersey, gained strength and wind-speed, and then punched directly west? As the projected storm track (above right) shows, after having battered the southern lands, Bopha is expected to do a similar jujitsu- after strengthening in the China sea again, it will spin down to the east and hit the northern island of Luzon, the most populous island of the Philippines.

The Phillipine's delegate to the Doha COP118 Conference broke down while pleading for action:

World Bank Now Warns of Climate Catastrophe

"A shocking new report commissioned by the World Bank is warning temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, causing devastating food shortages, rising sea levels, cyclones and drought — even if countries meet their current pledges to reduce emissions. If these promises are not met, the increase could happen even sooner." -DemocracyNow, Dec 4, 2012

New York City: Carbon Emissions Visualized

NYC carbon footprint:  At standard pressure and 59 °F a metric ton of carbon dioxide gas would fill a sphere 33 feet across (density of CO₂ = 1.87 kg/m³ (ref). If this is how New York's emissions actually emerged we would see one of these spheres emerge every 0.58 seconds.
54,349,650 tons a year = 148,903 tons a day = 6,204 tons an hour = 1.72 tons a second.
 Emissions in 2010 were 12% less than 2005 emissions. The City of New York is on track to reduce emissions by 30% by 2017 - an ambitious target. By Carbon Visuals and The Environmental Defense Fund.

Superstorm Sandy and Climate Change

Dumbo District  Flooded Oct 29, 2012

From Tom Zeller on HuffPo: "Hurricane Sandy's Storm Surge Wreaks Havoc As Its Energy And Trajectory Stun Experts":
"As Andrew Freeman at the website Climate Central noted last week -- even as Hurricane Sandy was still gathering strength in the Caribbean -- it is rather uncommon for hurricanes with Sandy's origins to move inland into the U.S. this late in the year. 'Normally, hurricanes that form in Sandy's location do head seaward, particularly in October, when strong cold fronts moving off the East Coast tend to sweep tropical weather systems away from the mainland,' Freeman said. 'In fact, there may only have been a couple of cases in the historical record dating back to the 19th century when a hurricane took a track in October similar to the one Sandy may ultimately follow.'
"Sandy followed the path it did in part because an unusual high pressure system has been parked over Greenland. That system is acting like a block, preventing anything from pushing northward through it, including Sandy, which instead took a devastating westward turn into New Jersey and onward into Pennsylvania.
"Meanwhile, the jet stream -- the steady, eastward-moving air current that undulates around the Northern Hemisphere, including across Canada and the U.S., and which would normally sweep storms along -- has been losing speed. In some areas, the drop-off has been as much as 14 percent, according to Jennifer Francis, a research professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. That loss of speed, Francis recently noted, could lead to storms in the East appearing to get stuck, not unlike what is now happening to Sandy over Pennsylvania.
One theory for the drop-off in jet stream speed? The steady loss of Arctic sea ice as a result of global warming.
"'There is evidence that Arctic sea ice loss might be responsible for that sort of behavior of the jet stream,' Masters said. 'Whether it was the case for this particular block, we don't know. Our sea ice losses are a relatively new phenomenon, and we don't have a lot of years of data to study. But there certainly is a lot of potential for climate change to affect a storm like this.'" (full article here)

2012: Hottest Year Ever for the US, Arctic Sea-ice at Record Low

Some effects of sea-ice loss in the Arctic:

Heating of the arctic ocean and contiguous land masses:
-Release of methane and CO2 from permafrost areas
- Increased melt of the Greenland ice-cap. In terms of sea-level rise, this is the big one- the Greenland ice-cap, in some places 3 kilometers thick, is melting rapidly. If all that ice melts and drops into the ocean, sea-levels will rise by 7 meters.
- Reduced salinity in the North Atlantic is weakening  the Atlantic conveyor circulation at the northern end, destabilizing climate in Northern Europe
- Open seas in the arctic have oil and gas exploiters planning major drilling and extraction, the burning of this additional carbon will itself  increase atmospheric CO2 and global heating

-Reduced heat differential between Arctic and mid-latitudes: reduced strength of jet stream;
    - which allows arctic air to pour down into mid-latitudes and remain there for a longer time (extreme winter cold snaps, US and Europe 2010, 2011)
    - and allows very warm air to pour into arctic areas and remain for longer (2012 flash melt of greenland ice surface)

Update, Oct 26. One of those above-mentioned arctic outpourings is underway, with our local daytime temperatures dropping 30 degrees in 2 days. This arctic blast will collide in a few days with Hurricane Sandy,  a huge storm moving up the coast toward New York City. Sandy  is  blocked from a normal northeasterly trajectory by a high pressure mass sitting over Greenland, and is expected to lurch westward directly into the most heavily populated area of North America; the resulting hybrid storm could produce severe damages and flooding. The penetration of the arctic air mass, the late season hurricane, and the high pressure mass stuck over Greenland are examples of weather effects expected to accompany climate change, and here they may hybridize and produce a real mess on the East Coast.
At the same time, the last debates of the presidential campaign of 2012 are over, and for the first time since 1988, the subject of climate change was not even broached. Instead both candidates competed in promising more drilling and oil production. 

Designer Slugs- The Beautiful Nudibranch

Extreme Skydive Felix Baumgartner Oct 8 2012

Felix Baumgartner will skydive from 120,000 feet over New Mexico on October 8th (postponed due to high winds- see Stratos website for updates).
 Felix's skydive will be broadcast live online at the RedBull Stratos site.

Update: He did it! Videos and info at the website-