SeaMonster blog
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The state’s sea level retreat
This op-ed piece about the politics and reality of sea level rise in North Carolina was published on February 23, 2012 in the News&Observer. The author, Dr. Orrin H. Pilkey, is James B. Duke professor emeritus of earth sciences at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He is one of the regions most respected coastal…
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The human fingerprint on ocean warming
New research published in Nature Climate Change (Gleckler et al. 2012) increases our certainty about the patterns and causes of ocean warming. Abstract: Large-scale increases in upper-ocean temperatures are evident in observational records1. Several studies have used well-established detection and attribution methods to demonstrate that the observed basin-scale temperature changes are consistent with model responses to anthropogenic…
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Oceans at Rio +20
Next week sees the start of Rio +20. It’s the follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and hopes are high among some conservationists and scientists that this time positive change will be made for the oceans. You can keep up to date with the blue issues as they unfold at the…
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Virginia legislature also in denial about “left-wing” sea level rise
Back at you Emmett. (You really wanna debate who lives in the state more unfriendly to climate science?) From Climate Progress: Virginia’s legislature commissioned a $50,000 study to determine the impacts of climate change on the state’s shores.To greenlight the project, they omitted words like “climate change” and “sea level rise” from the study’s description itself. According to…
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Giant bull shark surprises team Hammerschlag
Check out the piece by Andrea Mustain for Our Amazing Planet about my colleague, shark expert Dr. Neil Hammerschlag’s encounter with a big bull shark. Funny, but I was SUPing at the Cape Hatteras lighthouse yesterday and a fishing boat pulled up and the captain yelled “look out – we just saw a ten foot bull shark”. I…
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Epic swell hits Cloudbreak
An epic code-red swell hit Cloudbreak, Fiji yesterday right in the middle of the Volcom Fiji Pro surf contest. After two heats, contest organizers called it quits and opened up one of the world’s great reef breaks for the free surfers to shred. Read more about it here and here and here to watch footage of…
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How biodiversity loss is like LeBron James and Miami Heat
This is a repost from Climate Central by Michael D. Lemonick. Ecologists have been saying for decades now that the world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. Hundreds of species are vanishing every year, thanks to assaults to the environment that include deforestation, overfishing, toxic pollution and, increasingly, climate change — the lethal icing…
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Giant headbutting fish
The world’s biggest parrotfish – the bumphead parrotfish Bolbomepoton muricatum – have been caught on camera for the first time headbutting each other. [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/43626409#[/vimeo] The finding was published in the open access PlosOne (so go have a read) and as Roldan Muñoz and his colleagues point out, the only way they got to observe this crazy behaviour…
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Sea level rise, one more frontier for climate dialogue controversy
Below is a repost of a piece by my UNC colleague Sarah Peach from the Yale Forum. It provides a bit of context about the struggles among scientists, developers, policy makers, and communities over formulating plans for dealing with climate change and sea level rise in a state blessed with so much wonderful shoreline. …
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Colbert’s take on the North Carolina sea level rise (isn’t happening) bill
The Colbert Report Get More: href=”http://www.colbertnation.com/video”>Video Archive
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