Mr. Carson Has A Christmas Message For You

YouTube | Gawker

A dirty, bedraggled and beaten down Santa Claus — played by everyone’s favorite butler, Jim Carter of Downton Abbey fame — announces the end of Christmas due to global warming and oil drilling in the Arctic.

National Geographic | If All The Ice Melted

Click HERE to access the interactive map.

... you're not going to see this happen. What you'll see will be more subtle: wetter storms, hotter and drier summers, more flooding as we saw from Hurricane Sandy. But somewhere down the line, assuming our use of fossil fuels isn't checked, we could very well see ocean levels that are 216 feet higher than today. And that may just be a way station before even higher increases to come.

The Atlantic

Allan Savory | How To Green The Deserts And Reverse Climate Change

YouTube

If Sea Levels Rise, 'What Could Disappear?'

Ocean Drive, Miami FL

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Washington Monument

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Harvard University

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Climate change and global warming may cause sea levels to rise and flood coastal cities across the world. Over the past century, the Global Mean Sea Level has risen by 4 to 8 inches. And according to estimates by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it will keep rising between 8 inches and 6.6 feet by 2100. 

How will the world look if that happens? In November of 2012, The New York Times published interactive maps displaying the effects of the sea level rising, in a series titled "What Could Disappear?" The maps show how much land the sea will claim in the future, if it rises by 5, 12, and 25 feet. 

Nickolay Lamm, a 24-year-old researcher and artist saw the interactive maps and wondered: "What would this actually look like in real life?" Lamm told Mashable in an email interview that "the only imagery I had of sea level rise came from Hollywood." So he decided to put his skills to work. "I felt that if I could bring these maps to life, it would force people to look at sea level rise in a new way," he said. 

On February 8 he got in touch with Remik Ziemlinski, from Climate Central, who had helped the Times create the maps and he received the high-resolution maps from him. Lamm then chose different U.S. landmarks to illustrate the potential floods and found stock photos of the landmarks (he initially wanted to use screenshots of Apple 3D Maps but couldn't get permission from Apple to use them). He decided to use the same levels the Times had. To "figure out the depth of flooding for each sea level rise," he used Google Earth and topography maps.

Mashable via Brooklyn Mutt

Antarctica's 19-Mile Ice Crack

In mid-October 2011, NASA scientists working in Antarctica discovered a massive crack across the Pine Island Glacier, a major ice stream that drains the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Extending for 19 miles (30 kilometers), the crack was 260 feet (80 meters) wide and 195 feet (60 meters) deep. Eventually, the crack will extend all the way across the glacier, and calve a giant iceberg that will cover about 350 square miles (900 square kilometers).

The size of the expected iceberg will likely exceed the combined area of New York City's five boroughs.

Via TPM

2010 Likely To Be Warmest Year Ever Recorded

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More fuel was added to the climate-change talks in Cancún this week with the announcement that 2010 is very likely to be the warmest year yet. On December 2nd Britain's Met Office reported that from January to October the world was 0.55°C warmer than the average between 1961 and 1990, the benchmark. At that rate, it forecasts that 2010 will probably end up being the hottest year since records began in 1850, surpassing the previous high recorded in 1998. Data gathered by the two other main research institutes that monitor global temperatures indicate a similar outcome. A ranking of the hottest years shows minor variation in the data gathered by each institute (the other two reckon 2005 was hotter than 1998, for instance). Each of the last ten years features in the top 11 warmest years recorded in all datasets.

The Economist

Archinode Studios | Pig Meat Houses, Fab Tree Habs, And Ecotariums

The Pig Meat House

This is an architectural proposal for the fabrication of 3D printed extruded pig cells to form real organic dwellings. It is intended to be a "victimless shelter", because no sentient being was harmed in the laboratory growth of the skin. We used sodium benzoate as a preservative to kill yeasts, bacteria and fungi. Other materials in the model matrix are collagen powder, xanthan gum, mannitol, cochineal, sodium pyrophosphate, and recycled PET plastic scaffold.

The Fab Tree Hab Village

The Fab Tree Hab presents a sophisticated methodology to grow homes from living native trees. This 100% living habitat is prefabricated using Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) reusable scaffolding, manufactured off-site in advance. These scaffold sections can be readily shipped and assembled to fit local tree and woody plant species. Therefore, we enable dwellings to be a fully integrated part of an ecological community.

The North Pole Ecotarium

The Future North Ecotarium propaganda project is based on the premise that within the next hundred years our climate will be irreversible altered. Massive migrations of urban populations will need to move north to escape severe flooding and increased temperatures.

Much more at Archinode Studio

Via io9