Welcome to the Rhubarb talks website
The 'Rhubarb Talks' are a series of seminars by PhD students for PhD students at NOCS.
Upcoming seminars are posted below and cover a whole range of scientific exploits. Talks are held every other Monday afternoon at 4.30pm in the postgrad lounge (node 086) and are accompanied by nibbles and refreshments.
For more info or to volunteer for a talk, please contact The Rhubarb Team: Liz (E.Sargent@noc.soton.ac.uk), Rosanna (R.Greenop@noc.soton.ac.uk), Maike (mjsp106@soton.ac.uk) or Sara (Sara.Cregeen@noc.soton.ac.uk)
Upcoming seminars are posted below and cover a whole range of scientific exploits. Talks are held every other Monday afternoon at 4.30pm in the postgrad lounge (node 086) and are accompanied by nibbles and refreshments.
For more info or to volunteer for a talk, please contact The Rhubarb Team: Liz (E.Sargent@noc.soton.ac.uk), Rosanna (R.Greenop@noc.soton.ac.uk), Maike (mjsp106@soton.ac.uk) or Sara (Sara.Cregeen@noc.soton.ac.uk)
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
March 12th 2012 Cathy Cole and Carolyn Graves
Methane Hydrates: A greehouse gas time bomb?
It¹s getting harder and harder to disagree that climate
change is really happening. Since the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric
concentrations of carbon dioxide have soared as a result of human activities,
and current levels are the highest in 650,000 years (IPCC, 2007). But what
about other gases in our atmosphere? Methane, for example, is over 60 times
more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. There is far less of it
in our atmosphere, just 0.5% compared with CO2, but that has not always been
the case. Methane hydrates are a type of mineral made up of methane gas locked
into a crystal lattice of frozen water, a bit like ice. Deep sea sediments hold
an estimated 3000 Giga tons of carbon in the form of methane hydrates, and
these rocks are extremely sensitive to small changes in temperature and
pressure. On dissociation, the release of methane can lead to a runaway global
warming effect.
March 5th 2012
Climate change science: how does the science work, what
are its strengths and limitations?
Michael Henehen
Abstract:
Unfortunately, even as a scientist, it is often difficult
to differentiate the chaff from the wheat with regards climate change science.
Too often, climate change is viewed from within a political, or religious
frame: a dogma that one may choose to identify oneself with, rather than an
empirical fact. Even among those who are comfortable that man-made climate
change is a reality, there is a worrying lack of understanding about the
fundamentals of climate change: how it happens, how we know it is happening,
etc. Here I'll be presenting a talk that I gave at the Art House earlier this
month that attempts to cut through a lot of this and get down to the basics-
how does climate change happen, has it happened before, and what has happened
since we've started burning fossil fuels.
I'll then go through and discuss some of the most common
arguments thrown out by contrarians.
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