| | Clarke and dawe: news in the post election world, and the world at large.
The story was covered by the BBC, with Nigel Farage the prime example of the mainstream press reporting on the "big issues".
I thought about this the next day - I have spent the last couple of days writing a book about the EU, including the story I just mentioned on Brexit: The Unravelling of the European Union.
I know from other blogs that other articles have been read by a large audience as well - the Guardian ran a special piece on how the EU changed Britain and has been talked about in the US.
For me, that means lots of interest in the Brexit debate, which shows that readers are willing to take up the story even if they are not a fan of Boris Johnson and May.
I thought about that the day after I read these stories and I think if the story is good it will have been discussed in the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.
One reader even told me in emails that they had been talking to someone on the BBC and they did not know about the story.
This suggests that the media interest will continue to be good and that the story will be covered with coverage at the same level as the other stories mentioned above.
Is this a good news story?
I have been asked by other readers whether this article was in some sense news because it was written by a journalist and I believe the answer is "no".
On its face it was a short piece, but this was a long, complex story and some key questions remain unanswered.
There are three reasons why this is not good news.
First, although the story is short, there are many important questions about how the EU is doing business and the impact it is having on economic policy and migration.
Second, the UK is going through what some in the media call the Brexit cliff day. If the EU can't agree in principle on its future, there will be a two years countdown to UK departure.
Third, the paper does not offer a coherent narrative on how Brexit is changing Europe. In fact, there is very little about Brexit.
What could have been
This story, the most interesting part of the day in which I was reading the newspapers, does not give a satisfactory answer.
The most important question about the UK was: what could the EU and the UK do now to agree on a settlement to the remaining outstanding questions about the divorce, or at least to see how they are getting along on that?
That was the major question about the paper - was the deal we got too good? How did we get through that time without any sort of deal?
The solution appears to be to start talkin
Cold weather bites southern australia's most common arctic arctic fish.
The western Antarctic ice sheet (WAS) had lost about 4 inches of ice in the past century, according to new data from the ice-detection observatory's Antarctic Research station, the Ross Ice Shelf Experiment. That's a 30 percent decline in the rate of loss over that time. (See "Cold Cold Cold: The Great Antarctic Ice Sheet is Melt-Free"). But scientists can't yet explain why the ice sheet has been shrinking in the last few years, and why it has become so dense in some areas.
"It is likely that the decline in the WAS is connected to the increase in melt rate through the mid-latitudes, especially the polar regions," says Steve Sherry, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and a co-author on the new study. (The ice is melting faster from Antarctica than it would from Greenland, and as a result the ice is drifting further north into the Northern Hemisphere.)
There's another explanation, and it's pretty bad: the ice sheet may be melting at more or less the same rate it did 100 years ago (see "The Great Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Melt Free"). Sherry and his colleagues predict that the rate of loss of ice may continue to rise through the future in the WAS, and that as the ice retreats farther from the surface, more ice will melt, causing more surface ice to become lost and becoming more polar. The ice-albedo feedback theory of sea-level rise, Sherry says, is one explanation.
That's because as warmer temperatures, more precipitation and increased wind speeds all combine, ice-albedo feedbacks cause meltwater to push up the ice sheets. If that meltwater pool gets too close to the shoreline, ice on top will melt faster and faster until it collapses, leaving nothing behind but water that's even deeper than the current layer.
But that may not seem too bad. In the US and Western Europe, for example, the total amount of water that reaches the ocean's surface depends largely on precipitation rates and winds. The total amount of water that hits the top of every individual glacier could be as much as 40,000 cubic kilometers ” which is roughly the volume of the entire Mississippi River.
This volume of water is far too small to affect the size of any particular glacier. But it will also likely affect all the glaciers that flow into the Mississippi, says Marc Davis, a glaciologist at Arizona State University. "And even if the average streambed water is only 20 meters deep, if they've got 40 meters of stream water coming through it every year," Davis says, "then it will add up, and the rate a
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