Podcast: Download (Duration: 20:31 — 23.5MB)

Ken Mankoff is a PhD. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is studying the cryosphere, focusing on ice and ocean interactions nearby and underneath the Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf, Antarctica, using observational fieldwork, remote sensing, and modeling.

In the past he has worked with climate models at the Columbia University NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Earth and Mars observing spacecraft at the University of Colorado Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and competed in the astronaut selection process.

He speaks publicly about climate change and has been an invited speaker on all seven continents. Audiences have included scientists at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, business leaders at the United Nations, and students in New York City.

Ken helped develop the Educational Climate Modeling program for schools. High School and Undergraduate students can work with climate models to help develop a better understanding of Climate Science.

Ken has gone to Antarctica 3 times and had three different projects. The first project drilled into the sediments under the ice to study the climate back in time 40 million years. Second they deployed ocean sensors to study how the ocean next to the continent is changing in terms of temperature and salinity, and therefore how this ocean might melt the ice. Third time they studied the CO2 content of the water to try to find out if it is saturated… Is the ocean still uptaking atmospheric CO2, or is that sponge ‘full’? No answers yet on the third one, but some preliminary results on the first two.

Related Articles:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/national-research-council-calls-for-climate-action/

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/certainty-vs-uncertainty.html

How Certain is Climate Science? – Climate Science Update April 2010

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch1s1-6.html

Al Gore Op-Ed Piece

Perhaps we can relate the Gulf spill back to clean energy choices.  Below is a copy of Mr. Gore’s recent op-ed on the spill if you haven’t had a chance to read it.

The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.
Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, “Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life.” His reaction reminds me of the day Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, “This changes nothing.”
-Al Gore, The New Republic, May 21st, 2010