Slide Show: What Does Climate Change Science Look Like?
A new book pictures the science of climate change
Slide Show: What Does Climate Change Science Look Like?
- GOVERNMENT POWER The Capitol Power Plant in southeast Washington, D.C., used to supply heat to building, is the only coal-fired plant in the nation's capital and is responsible for a large part of the city's air pollution and carbon emissions. Efforts to reduce the amount of coal burning have been stalled by lawmakers from coal-producing states, underscoring the difficulties in organizing federal action to curb emissions. Joshua Wolfe
- MAIN FRAME In the early years of climate modeling, all instructions were input into the mainframe using punch cards. Each card was good for one line of code, and a whole program would take hundreds to thousands of cards in exactly the right order. Gary Russell is holding output that he saved from an Amdahl V/6 machine used by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
- SCIENTIFIC SURVEY Mount Schrankogl, Austria. Daniela Hohenwallner is counting bryophytes (mosses) and other high-altitude flora, in systematically measured out 10 square foot (one square meter) quadrants. These results will be compared with similar surveys in decades past (and future) to track the climate change impacts on alpine ecosystems. Peter Essick
- RUNAWAY GROWTH Kudzu growth in Melville, N.Y. An invasive species, kudzu was initially imported from Japan for ornamental gardening and agricultural purposes in the southern U.S. but rapidly became a pest due to its lack of predators and fast growth. In the past 10 years, it has moved inexorably farther north as temperatures have warmed, allowing it to reproduce in previously inhospitable areas. Joshua Wolfe
- ARCTIC SOIL Arctic soils are generally kept together by ice and permafrost. As the permafrost melts, the soils become sandy and erode easily. On the coast, sea ice retreat also exposes them to increased ocean wave activity. When both effects combine, as in the town of Shishmaref on the Bering Sea, coastal erosion rates can reach more than (60 feet, or 20 meters) a year, and, in this case, have led to abandonment of the town. Gary Braasch
- GLACIER RETREAT The Mendenhall Glacier in Tongass National Forest near Juneau, Alaska, photographed in 1894 and again in 2004. Like almost all Alaskan glaciers, and indeed, most glaciers globally, there has been a dramatic retreat of the front the glacier as a function of warmer temperatures during summer and reduced snowfall in winter. Courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center Collection, NOAA; 2004 Photo By Gary Braasch
- SPACE SHOT A second wave of infernos occurred in August as seen in this satellite image. A combination of little precipitation and multiple heat waves left Greece particularly vulnerable. By the end of summer 2007 there had been 120 major fires and 469,000 acres (190,000 hectares) of forest land had been burned. Courtesy of NASA
