Saturday, July 08, 2006
VAST CHUNK THREATENING
Gaia is in a stomping mood:
A vast chunk of Europe’s most ill-famed mountain threatens to break loose and crash down in the next few days, a geologist monitoring the situation told the Guardian on Friday.
Hans-Rudolf Keusen said 2m cubic metres of the Eiger in the Bernese Alps, Switzerland - twice the volume of the Empire State Building - was rapidly working its way loose. He said the mountain appeared to have cracked open as an indirect result of global warming.
Via Brian J. In other globey warmalising news, don’t miss Philip Stott’s ten final proofs of global warming. (Also, you may now download Philip’s ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ for B flat Clarinet from his online Music Box. Needs percussion, but you can still dance to it.)
UPDATE. According to an expert panel convened by the BBC, climate computer models are dodgy, climate science is immature, and nobody is certain of anything much:
There was acknowledgement that some areas of climate-related science remain substantially uncertain. The behaviour of forests and the impacts of rising greenhouse emissions on oceans were two fields picked out as needing further study.
Hans von Storch from the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, cautioned against making public statements on the basis of science that is not fully mature.
Early computer models of climate, he said, had predicted increases in storminess, which had not shown up in later, more sophisticated models.
"So as long as we simply play around with these models as toys and enjoy ourselves and develop our knowledge, that’s fine,” he said.
"But if we at the same time go out and speak to journalists and say ‘therefore we will have this and that disastrous event’, I think we are doing a disservice to the public."