7. What's the Controversy About? Non-chronological links:
Ecological Impacts of Climate Change. Free
booklet, with powerpoints on current effects of climate changes for different parts of the country—from the National Academy Press. Each example is of a specific species. Articles from 2001–present 2021-04-19. The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof. By Julia Rosen, The New York Times. Excerpt: The science of climate change is more solid and widely agreed upon than you might think. But the scope of the topic, as well as rampant disinformation, can make it hard to separate fact from fiction. Here, we’ve done our best to present you with not only the most accurate scientific information, but also an explanation of how we know it. [Topics:]
________________________ 2021-03-15. Building a Better Model to View Earth’s Interacting Processes. By Gokhan Danabasoglu and Jean-François Lamarque, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Earth’s climate is the result of a complex network of interacting systems: air currents, ocean biogeochemistry, mountain ranges, and ice sheets, to name a few. Understanding how our climate evolves and predicting what it will look like under various scenarios require comparing and combining multiple models and simulations, each with its own strengths and focus areas. Earth science researchers are currently putting the most recent release of one such modeling system through its paces. The open-source Community Earth System Model (CESM) modeling framework is used for many purposes, including investigations of past and current climate, projections of future climate change, and subseasonal-to-decadal Earth system predictions. Its latest version, CESM2, was released in June 2018, followed by several incremental releases that included additional, readily available model configurations. Compared with its predecessor, CESM2 offers researchers new capabilities, including more realistic representations of changes in Greenland’s ice sheet and interactions of agricultural crops with the Earth system, as well as detailed models of clouds and wind-driven ocean waves. ...The equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and the transient climate response (TCR) are two properties that emerge from the coupled simulations. ECS represents the equilibrium change in global mean surface temperature after a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), and TCR represents the change in global mean surface temperature around the time of CO2 doubling when CO2 increases by 1% per year. CESM2 ECS values of 5.1°C–5.3°C are considerably higher than those produced by its previous versions, which had ECS values of about 4.0°C.... [https://eos.org/opinions/building-a-better-model-to-view-earths-interacting-processes] 2021-01-12. A Late Burst of Climate Denial Extends the Era of Trump Disinformation. By Lisa Friedman and Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times. Excerpt: The White House science office on Tuesday reassigned two administration officials who posted a series of debunked scientific reports denying the existence and significance of man-made climate change, purportedly on behalf of the United States government. ...David Legates, who served as the head of the United States Global Change Research Program, and Ryan Maue, a senior official at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, ... worked together to post the reports on a climate denial website without the knowledge of the director of the White House science office, Kelvin Droegemeier, two administration officials confirmed.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/climate/trump-disinformation-climate-change.html] 2020-11-25. A 50-Year-Old Global Warming Forecast That Still Holds Up. By Andrei Lapenis, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: In 1972, Mikhail Ivanovich Budyko used a simple methodology to make climate predictions that remain surprisingly accurate today and that could serve as a new “business-as-usual” scenario. ...He predicted that Earth’s mean global temperature would increase about 2.25°C by 2070 and that the Arctic would no longer be covered by ice year-round by 2050 [Budyko, 1972]. (Budyko briefly discussed the part of his forecast dealing with Arctic ice in a 1972 Eos article cited more than 100 times since.) Despite his confidence in his work, he cautioned that his estimates were made under assumptions of a significantly simplified climate system and should be viewed accordingly [Budyko, 1972], so it might have surprised him to see how closely actual events aligned with his predictions. Comparing 2019 to 1970, Budyko predicted an increase in the global mean temperature of 1°C and the disappearance of about 50% of Arctic multiyear ice. Observations have borne out these trends, demonstrating that mean global temperature increased by 0.98°C over this period and that the extent of multiyear Arctic sea ice in September 2019 was about 46% smaller than in 1970... [https://eos.org/features/a-50-year-old-global-warming-forecast-that-still-holds-up] 2020-08-06. 'Extremely active' hurricane season possible for Atlantic Basin. By NOAA. Excerpt: Atmospheric and oceanic conditions are primed to fuel storm development in the Atlantic, leading to what could be an “extremely active” season, according to forecasters with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, a division of the National Weather Service. ...Historically, only two named storms form on average by early August, and the ninth named storm typically does not form until October 4. An average season produces 12 named storms, including six hurricanes of which three become major hurricanes (Category 3, 4, or 5). “This is one of the most active seasonal forecasts that NOAA has produced in its 22-year history of hurricane outlooks. ...The updated outlook calls for 19-25 named storms (winds of 39 mph or greater), of which 7-11 will become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or greater), including 3-6 major hurricanes (winds of 111 mph or greater). This update covers the entire six-month hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30, and includes the nine named storms to date.... [https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/extremely-active-hurricane-season-possible-for-atlantic-basin] 2020-07-14. June 2020: third-hottest June on record. By Tom Di Liberto, NOAA. Excerpt: After five consecutive months to start the year that were either the warmest or second warmest on record, June 2020 finally broke the streak by becoming only the [drumroll] third-warmest June on record. 2020’s heat has been relentless. The blazing first half of 2020 has made it incredibly likely that 2020 will finish the year as one of the five warmest years on record. There’s even around a 35% chance 2020 will dethrone 2016 as the warmest on record. For more information on global temperatures and precipitation in June 2020, check out the June 2020 global climate summary [https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202006] by the National Centers for Environmental Information.... [https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/june-2020-third-hottest-june-record]. 2020-07-22. After 40 years, researchers finally see Earth’s climate destiny more clearly. By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. Excerpt: It seems like such a simple question: How hot is Earth going to get? Yet for 40 years, climate scientists have repeated the same unsatisfying answer: If humans double atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from preindustrial levels, the planet will eventually warm between 1.5°C and 4.5°C—a temperature range that encompasses everything from a merely troubling rise to a catastrophic one. Now, in a landmark effort, a team of 25 scientists has significantly narrowed the bounds on this critical factor, known as climate sensitivity. The assessment [see the assessment], conducted under the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and publishing this week in Reviews of Geophysics, relies on three strands of evidence: trends indicated by contemporary warming, the latest understanding of the feedback effects that can slow or accelerate climate change, and lessons from ancient climates. They support a likely warming range of between 2.6°C and 3.9°C, says Steven Sherwood, one of the study’s lead authors and a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales. “This is the number that really controls how bad global warming is going to be.”... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/after-40-years-researchers-finally-see-earths-climate-destiny-more-clearly] See also "Major new climate study rules out less severe global warming scenarios" by Andrew Freedman and Chris Mooney, The Washington Post [https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/07/22/climate-sensitivity-co2/] and similar New York Times article [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/climate/global-warming-temperature-range.html] 2020-06. Michael Mann Fought Climate Denial. Now He’s Fighting Climate Doom. By Bryan Schatz, California Magazine. Excerpt: The climatologist is taking on both the fossil fuel lobby and those who think the climate fight is futile. ONE AUGUST AFTERNOON IN 2010, Michael Mann was opening mail in his office at Penn State University when a dusting of white powder emerged from an envelope. ...Death threats weren’t exactly the kind of thing Mann ’89 had imagined as an undergrad at Cal, when he was first thinking about a life in academia. But his career as a climate scientist had attracted some very powerful and determined enemies. Over the years, he’d gotten used to verbal attacks and idle threats, but this was on a different level. He began to worry about his family’s safety. In the end, the powder proved to be cornstarch, but police gave Mann a hotline number just in case. He and his wife put it on the refrigerator. Mann’s troubles started a decade earlier. It was 1998 and the young scientist, then a postdoc at UMass Amherst, co-authored a study with the innocuous title, “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries.” [https://www.nature.com/articles/33859] Published in the journal Nature that April, the paper aimed to reconstruct Earth’s temperatures going back six centuries. ...Mann and his collaborators relied on “proxy records”.... To climatologist Jerry D. Mahlman, the graph of the data looked like an upturned hockey stick—the long period of relatively stable temperatures formed the shaft, the last century’s spike was the blade. The image stuck, and it has been known ever since as the “hockey stick graph,” .... When Mann received the powder-filled envelope, he was in the thick of another hyped-up scandal dubbed “Climategate,” in which contrarians heisted more than 1,000 emails from Mann and other prominent climate scientists, took them out of context, and claimed they revealed an unparalleled level of scientific wrongdoing. (They didn’t.) ...MANN WAS FURTHER VINDICATED in October 2007 when he was one of hundreds of scientists who shared in the Nobel Peace Prize, along with former Vice President Al Gore. Mann was one of two scientists the IPCC singled out for their personal sacrifices.... [https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer-2020/michael-mann-on-climate-denial-and-doom] For GSS Climate Change chapter 7. 2020-05-14. A Revised View of Australia’s Future Climate. By David Shultz, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Efforts to understand how climate change will unfold under various emissions scenarios rely on the sophisticated computer models of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which combines dozens of models to create as complete a picture of Earth’s climate as possible. ... limiting global warming to less than 2°C—the goal established in the Paris Agreement—will require larger emissions reductions than previously thought. (Earth’s Future, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019EF001469, 2020).... [https://eos.org/research-spotlights/a-revised-view-of-australias-future-climate] 2020-05-12. Aircraft spies gravity waves being sucked into Antarctica’s polar vortex. By Eric Hand, Science Magazine. Excerpt: The Southern Ocean is famously stormy, home to waves taller than telephone poles. Yet 50 kilometers overhead, the weather is just as tempestuous, if less obviously so. Powerful waves in the air break and crash, dumping energy into the stratosphere and disrupting winds that help control the climate. ...Around the world, gravity waves often arise when winds shove air over a mountain range, although storms and jet streams can also touch them off. In each case, a parcel of air gets pushed up, and gravity pulls it down. It overshoots and bobs back up. When confined by overhead winds, the train of undulating air parcels plows ahead horizontally, leading to so-called lee waves that can shake up commercial flights. ... Some gravity waves crash in the upper stratosphere, about 50 kilometers up, but most keep rising into the mesosphere, where they can be seen causing ripples in the fluorescent glow of air molecules 90 kilometers up. They are even thought to create giant bubbles of plasma in the ionosphere more than 200 kilometers up, halfway to the International Space Station, causing trouble for radio communications. ...climate modelers struggle to take the waves into account. That’s not only because their sources are so variable, but also because their wavelengths of tens of kilometers can be smaller than the size of the grids that modelers break up Earth’s atmosphere into.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/aircraft-spies-gravity-waves-being-sucked-antarctica-s-polar-vortex]
2020-03-26. Ancient warming threw this crucial Atlantic current into chaos. It could happen again. By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. Excerpt: The Atlantic Ocean’s “conveyor belt,” a powerful current that drags warm water north before submerging it in the North Atlantic, has been humankind’s constant companion. For 8000 years, it has held steady, nourishing Western Europe with tropical warmth. But a new study of the current’s strength over the past half-million years suggests global warming may not shut down the current any time soon, as some scientists fear. Instead, it could trigger a replay of ancient events, when multiple bouts of warming caused rapid, centurylong swings in the current’s strength, sowing climate chaos that may have alternately chilled and warmed Europe.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/ancient-warming-threw-crucial-atlantic-current-chaos-it-could-happen-again#]
2020-03-17. Prominent U.S. climate denial group fires president amid financial crisis. By Scott Waldman, E&E News. Excerpt: The Heartland Institute is undergoing its second leadership change in less than a year. The group, which rejects climate science, is ousting its president, Frank Lasée, after being buffeted by financial turbulence that led to significant layoffs, according to two sources close to Heartland.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/prominent-us-climate-denial-group-fires-president-amid-financial-crisis] ________________________ 2019-12-04. Early climate modelers got global warming right, new report finds. By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News.2019-10-01. Human Activity Outpaces Volcanoes, Asteroids in Releasing Deep Carbon. By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. 2019-09-16. A New Proxy for Past Precipitation. By Kate Wheeling, Eos/AGU. 2019-05-23. Humans held responsible for twists and turns of climate change since 1900. By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. 2019-05-22. A 500-million-year survey of Earth's climate reveals dire warning for humanity. By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. 2019-04-11. Very Warm Water Observed Along West Antarctic Ice Shelf. By Terri Cook, Eos/AGU. 2019-04-05. What Climate Models Get Wrong About Future Water Availability. By Emily Underwood, Eos/AGU. 2019-03-05. Improving Estimates of Long-Term Climate Sensitivity. By Terri Cook, Eos/AGU. 2018-10-24. How Scientists Cracked the Climate Change Case. By Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. 2018-09-21. This ice-covered Icelandic volcano may emit more carbon dioxide than all of the country’s other volcanoes combined. By Sid Perkins, Science Magazine. 2018-09-04. Better Data for Modeling the Sun’s Influence on Climate. By T. Dudok de Wit, B. Funke, M. Haberreiter, and K. Matthes, Eos/AGU. 2018-08-20. Ecosystems Are Getting Greener in the Arctic. By Theresa Duque, Berkeley Lab. 2018-07-26. Why Are Siberian Temperatures Plummeting While the Arctic Warms? By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. 2018-03-30. Five Weird Archives That Scientists Use to Study Past Climates. By JoAnna Wendel and Mohi Kumar, AGU-Eos. 2018-03-09. The E.P.A. Chief Wanted a Climate Science Debate. Trump’s Chief of Staff Stopped Him. By Lisa Friedman and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, The New York Times. 2018-01-19. Global Average Temperatures in 2017 Continued Upward Trend. By JoAnna Wendel, Eos/AGU. 2017-12-26. Humans to Blame for Higher Drought Risk in Some Regions. By Sarah Stanley, Eos/AGU. 2017-09-13. Taking the Pulse of the Planet. By Lijing Cheng, Kevin E. Trenberth, John Fasullo, John Abraham, Tim P. Boyer, Karina von Schuckmann, and Jiang Zhu, Eos (AGU). 2017-06-06. Report Heartland Institute sent to influence US teachers on climate change earns an “F” from scientists. By climatefeedback.org. 2016-12-30. With enough evidence, even skepticism will thaw. By Washington Post. 2016-12-27. Notorious Ocean Current Is Far Stronger Than Previously Thought. By Emily Underwood, EoS Earth & Space news, AGU. 2016-08-11. Does Water Vapor from Volcanic Eruptions Cause Climate Warming? By Alexandra Branscombe, Earth & Space News EoS (AGU). 2016-06-30. Crippled Atlantic currents triggered ice age climate change. By Eric Hand, Science. 2016-05-25. Earth’s climate may not warm as quickly as expected, suggest new cloud studies. By Tim Wogan, Science. 2016-04-07. Climate Models May Overstate Clouds’ Cooling Power, Research Says. By John Schwartz, The New York Times. 2016 Simplified Climate Models. by Scott Denning et al, Colorado State University BioCycle. 2016-01-20. NASA, NOAA Analyses Reveal Record-Shattering Global Warm Temperatures in 2015. NASA Release 16-008. 2016-01-11. Growth rings on rocks give up North American climate secrets. By Sarah Yang, UC Berkeley News. 2015-12-07. Model of Solar Cycle's Impact on Climate Gets Upgrade. By Mark Zastrow, EoS Earth & Space Science News. 2015-09-17. Global warming ‘pause’ never happened, scientists say. By Chelsea Harvey, Washington Post. 2015-07-15. Journalists link solar science news to climate—and to the climate controversy. By Steven T. Corneliussen, Physics Today. 2015-04-07. Yale Climate Opinion Maps. Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. 2015-02-27. Climate Change: Evidence and Causes. U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society (United Kingdom). 2015-02-26. Cold Pacific Ocean is offsetting global warming. By Carolyn Gramling, Science. 2014-07-23. A pause in global warming? Studies try to better explain what's happened. Excerpt: Any pause in global warming, such as it may have been during the first decade of the 21st century, might seem to be on its way out. Global average temperatures for May and June 2014 reached record levels of warmth. Last year ranked as somewhere between the second and sixth warmest on record globally, depending on the temperature records you pick. But if history is any guide, expect more pauses in the thermometer's climb toward a warmer world, thanks to the climate's natural variability. That's one implication of two recent studies exploring the pause with an eye toward testing the notions that global warming has ended, as some skeptics have asserted, and that fundamental problems with climate models prevented them from projecting the sudden slowdown in the rate of warming. ...For the skeptic community, "this is proof that global warming stopped and it's no longer a problem, so we don't need to worry about it," ...For scientists seeking to better understand how the climate system works, "it's a really compelling science problem," ...Modeling studies over the past several years have converged on natural variability as the most likely explanation for the hiatus in warming, with a decades-long cycle of warming and cooling of surface waters in the Pacific as the prime mover. ...Shaun Lovejoy, a physicist at McGill University in Montreal, looked at the question model-free by conducting a statistical analysis of measured temperatures going back to the 1880s as well as records reconstructed from natural stand-ins for thermometers going back as far as the 1500s. The goal was to answer a basic question: How unexpected are such hiatuses? Modelers were concluding that a hiatus "doesn't look that unlikely; it looks totally possible that it's natural," Dr. Lovejoy says. "But I actually tried to put a number on it, and the number in the end is that we expect such an event every 20 to 50 years.".... http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2014/0723/A-pause-in-global-warming-Studies-try-to-better-explain-what-s-happened. By Pete Spotts, The Christian Science Monitor. 2014-02-26. Smell of forest pine can limit climate change. Excerpt: One of the biggest holes in scientific knowledge about climate change relates to the scale of the impact of atmospheric aerosols on temperatures. ...New research suggests a strong link between the powerful smell of pine trees and climate change. ...these scented vapours turn into aerosols above boreal forests. These particles promote cooling by reflecting sunlight back into space and helping clouds to form. ...The research, published in the journal Nature, fills in a major gap in our understanding, researchers say. ...the smell of pine, made up of volatile organic compounds, reacts with oxygen in the forest canopy to form these aerosols. ...They've discovered ultra-low volatility organic vapours in the air that irreversibly condense onto any surface or particle that they meet. ... this level of craziness is what gives them the special properties to stick to those smallest particles and help grow them up in size to become aerosols." ...The authors believe that this is playing a significant role in reducing the impact of rising temperatures. ..."In a warmer world, photosynthesis will become faster with rising CO2, which will lead to more vegetation and more emissions of these vapours," said lead author, Dr Mikael Ehn, now based at the University of Helsinki. "This should produce more cloud droplets and this should then have a cooling impact, it should be a damping effect." ...The scientists stress that the new understanding is not a panacea for climate change as forests will stop emitting vapours if they become too stressed from heat or lack of water.... http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26340038. Matt McGrath, BBC News. 2013-11-13. Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows. Excerpt: A new paper published in The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society fills in the gaps in the UK Met Office HadCRUT4 surface temperature data set, and finds that the global surface warming since 1997 has happened more than twice as fast as the HadCRUT4 estimate. [see short video summarizing the study's approach and results] ...HadCRUT4 missing accelerated Arctic warming, especially since 1997. ...NASA data fails to include corrections for a change in the way sea surface temperatures are measured - a challenging problem that has so far only been addressed by the Met Office. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project used a similar approach as NASA, but with a statistical method known as "kriging" to fill in the gaps by interpolating and extrapolating with existing measurements. However, BEST only applied this method to temperatures over land, not oceans.... http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/nov/13/global-warming-underestimated-by-half. John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli, The Guardian. 2013-08-20. Climate Panel Cites Near Certainty on Warming. Excerpt: A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that the authors are now 95 percent to 100 percent confident that human activity is the primary influence on planetary warming. ...warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century if emissions continue at a runaway pace. The scientists, whose findings are reported in a draft summary of the next big United Nations climate report [published every five or six years by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], largely dismiss a recent slowdown in the pace of warming, which is often cited by climate change doubters, attributing it most likely to short-term factors. .... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/science/earth/extremely-likely-that-human-activity-is-driving-climate-change-panel-finds.html. Justin Gillis, New York Times. 2013-08-13. Timing a Rise in Sea Level. Excerpt: Thirty-five years ago, ...John H. Mercer... paper, in the journal Nature, was titled “West Antarctic Ice Sheet and CO2 Greenhouse Effect: A Threat of Disaster.” ...Mercer pointed out the unusual topography of the ice sheet sitting over the western part of Antarctica. Much of it is below sea level, in a sort of bowl, and he said that a climatic warming could cause the whole thing to degrade rapidly on a geologic time scale, leading to a possible rise in sea level of 16 feet. While it is clear by now that we are in the early stages of what is likely to be a substantial rise in sea level, we still do not know if Dr. Mercer was right about a dangerous instability that could cause that rise to happen rapidly, in geologic time. We may be getting closer to figuring that out. An intriguing new paper comes from Michael J. O’Leary of Curtin University in Australia and five colleagues scattered around the world ..., published July 28 in Nature Geoscience, ...confirmed something we pretty much already knew. In the warmer world of the Eemian, sea level stabilized for several thousand years at about 10 to 12 feet above modern sea level. ...near the end of the Eemian, sea level jumped by another 17 feet or so, to settle at close to 30 feet above the modern level...in less than a thousand years...a geologic instant.... That, of course, augurs poorly for humans. Scientists at Stanford calculated recently that human emissions are causing the climate to change many times faster than at any point since the dinosaurs died out. We are pushing the climate system so hard that, if the ice sheets do have a threshold of some kind, we stand a good chance of exceeding it.... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/science/timing-a-rise-in-sea-level.html. Justin Gillis, New York Times. 2013-06-06. Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets. Excerpt: ...Stacy Carolin..., a PhD student at Georgia Tech, is breaking ground in the field of paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climates, using an unconventional but increasingly prevalent tool: “speleothems,” a catch-all term for cave formations that includes stalagmites.... In a study released today in the journal Science, Carolin and her colleagues outline 100,000-year-old rainfall conditions in Borneo, mapped from chemical clues in cave formations there. ...Researchers look for formations that have already fallen over or broken off, so as not to damage the cave,...and study the ancient atoms within to discover how old they are and how much rainfall there was at different points in their past (speleothems form when rainwater drips through the limestone, picking up acid and minerals that pile up in the cave). ...Stalagmites are “the next generation of climate records,” says Larry Edwards, an earth scientist at the University of Minnesota. ...Edwards pioneered the isotope dating technique that catalyzed a boom in speleothem studies over the last decade. Until recently, dating speleothems...Scientists needed to track down thorium and uranium isotopes that existed in absurdly small quantities, around one part per trillion, and their tools could only locate one out of ten million of those… like finding a needle in a haystack in a cave on a different planet. In the late eighties, Edwards began experimenting with different ways to use a mass spectrometer to improve the search, and today ...he says, “of all the climate records, [speleothems] are among the best dated.” ...benefits to stalagmites abound: They reach deep into history, up to 500,000 years in some cases, longer than most ice cores and far longer than tree rings. ...Where in the past paleoclimatologists had been mostly limited to ice at high altitudes and the poles, trees in temperate zones, and lakes with ancient sediment, once reading speleothems became easier “all of a sudden the rest of the world was opened for climate records,” Edwards says.... http://climatedesk.org/2013/06/slicing-open-stalagmites-to-reveal-climate-secrets/. Tim McDonnell, Climate Desk. 2013-05-15. Climate research nearly unanimous on human causes, survey finds. Suzanne Goldenberg, TheGuardian. Excerpt: ...Of more than 4,000 academic papers published over 20 years, 97.1% agreed that climate change is anthropogenic. ...The survey considered the work of some 29,000 scientists published in 11,994 academic papers. Of the 4,000-plus papers that took a position on the causes of climate change only 0.7% or 83 of those thousands of academic articles, disputed the scientific consensus that climate change is the result of human activity, with the view of the remaining 2.2% unclear. The study described the dissent as a "vanishingly small proportion" of published research. .... http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/16/climate-research-nearly-unanimous-humans-causes 2013-05-14. For Insurers, No Doubts on Climate Change. Eduardo Porter, New York Times. Excerpt: If there were one American industry that would be particularly worried about climate change it would have to be insurance, right? ...From Hurricane Sandy’s devastating blow to the Northeast to the protracted drought that hit the Midwest Corn Belt, natural catastrophes across the United States pounded insurers last year, generating $35 billion in privately insured property losses, $11 billion more than the average over the last decade. And the industry expects the situation will get worse. “Numerous studies assume a rise in summer drought periods in North America in the future and an increasing probability of severe cyclones relatively far north along the U.S. East Coast in the long term,” said Peter Höppe, who heads Geo Risks Research at the reinsurance giant Munich Re. “The rise in sea level caused by climate change will further increase the risk of storm surge.” Most insurers, including the reinsurance companies that bear much of the ultimate risk in the industry, have little time for the arguments heard in some right-wing circles that climate change isn’t happening, and are quite comfortable with the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the main culprit of global warming. “Insurance is heavily dependent on scientific thought,” Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, told me last week. “It is not as amenable to politicized scientific thought.” ...the industry’s analysis of the risks it faces is evolving. One sign of that is how some top American insurers responded to a billboard taken out by the conservative Heartland Institute, a prominent climate change denier that has received support from the insurance industry. The billboard had a picture of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who asked: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” Concerned about global warming and angry to be equated with a murderous psychopath, insurance companies like Allied World, Renaissance Re, State Farm and XL Group dropped their support for Heartland. ...Eli Lehrer, a Heartland vice president who at the time led an insurance-financed project, left the group and helped start the R Street Institute, a standard conservative organization in all respects but one: it believes in climate change and supports a carbon tax to combat it. And it is financed largely with insurance industry money. Mr. Lehrer points out that a carbon tax fits conservative orthodoxy. It is a broad and flat tax, whose revenue can be used to do away with the corporate income tax — a favorite target of the right. It provides a market-friendly signal, forcing polluters to bear the cost imposed on the rest of us and encouraging them to pollute less. And it is much preferable to a parade of new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency. ...“We are having a debate on the right about a carbon tax for the first time in a long time,” Mr. Lehrer said. ...global warming isn’t just devastating for society, but also bad for business.... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/insurers-stray-from-the-conservative-line-on-climate-change.html. 2013-02-07. With a grain of salt -- Ocean surface layer captures influence of human activity. | Rachel Berkowitz, Physics Today. Excerpt: ...In a warming world, increased temperature means that the atmosphere can hold and transport more water vapor—a 7% increase in atmospheric moisture content for every degree Celsius of warming in Earth's lower troposphere. This affinity for moisture affects the entire water cycle, throughout the global climate system. Change is especially reflected in increased patterns of evaporation and precipitation, and a corresponding increase in ocean surface salinity, since surface salinity patterns respond to water cycle changes. ...In the past 50 years, salinity differences—the marker of the oceanic water cycle—have intensified in the upper 700 m of the ocean. “Think of the ocean as a big rain gauge,” says John Toole, physical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Salty regions become saltier because more water is exported through evaporation, and fresh regions become fresher because increased rainfall dilutes those regions more. ...Changing the ocean's salinity and temperature also affects its water density, which in turn plays a key role in how water circulates. ...it takes a long time for surface effects to change deep ocean circulation patterns.... See full article at http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/down_to_earth/with_a_grain_of_salt?type=PTFAVE. 2013 March 03. Wash. state politician says bicycles bad for environment, need to be taxed. Mikael Thalen, examiner.com. Excerpt: Washington state Senate Democrats recently produced a $10 billion transportation package which supports a raise on gas taxes, car tabs, and even a $25 tax on bicycles that cost more than $500. ...Washington Rep. Ed Orcutt (R), a member of the State Transportation Committee, defended the idea of a bike tax by saying, "Sorry, but I do think that bicyclists need to start paying for the roads they ride on rather than make motorists pay. When you are riding your bicycle, tell me what taxes are being generated by the act of riding your bicycle,” Orcutt said to the Seattle Bike Blog. Yet Orcutt's main support for the tax comes from his belief that riding a bicycle is worse than driving a car for the environment. "A cyclists [sic] has an increased heart rate and respiration. That means that the act of riding a bike results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider. Since CO2 is deemed to be a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride," he said.... [Note to GSS teachers: have your students write or verbalize what's wrong with Rep. Orcutt's argument that bicyclists are polluters.] 2013 Jan 08. Solar Variability and Terrestrial Climate | NASA Science News. Excerpt: ...In the galactic scheme of things, the Sun is a remarkably constant star. While some stars exhibit dramatic pulsations, wildly yo-yoing in size and brightness, and sometimes even exploding, the luminosity of our own sun varies a measly 0.1% over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. A new report issued by the National Research Council (NRC), "The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth's Climate" [at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13519] lays out some of the surprisingly complex ways that solar activity can make itself felt on our planet. ...Greg Kopp of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, pointed out that ... "Even typical short term variations of 0.1% in incident irradiance exceed all other energy sources (such as natural radioactivity in Earth's core) combined," he says. Of particular importance is the sun's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation, which ...varies not by a minuscule 0.1%, but by whopping factors of 10 or more. This can strongly affect the chemistry and thermal structure of the upper atmosphere. ...In recent years, researchers have considered the possibility that the sun plays a role in global warming. After all, the sun is the main source of heat for our planet. The NRC report suggests, however, that the influence of solar variability is more regional than global…. Read the full article: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/ 2012-12-23. Scientists Report Faster Warming in Antarctica | Justin Gillis, The New York Times. Excerpt: West Antarctica has warmed much more than scientists had thought over the last half century, new research suggests, an ominous finding given that the huge ice sheet there may be vulnerable to long-term collapse, with potentially drastic effects on sea levels. A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth …. Read the full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/science/earth/west-antarctica-warming-faster-than-thought-study-finds.html?ref=science 2012-12-19. An Odometer Moment on a Warming Planet | By Justin Gillis, New York Times. Excerpt: For those who might be keeping score, we just passed the 333rd consecutive month of global temperatures above the 20th-century average. November 2012 was the fifth-warmest November since records began in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its monthly climate report. The agency calculated that the 10 warmest Novembers on record have all occurred within the past 12 years. …NOAA will not make this official until early January, but it is now virtually certain that 2012 will set a high-temperature record for the contiguous 48 states. …La Niña years are usually cooler than average globally, so scientists say that to have such years coming in among the top 10 warmest in the historical record is a testament to how much the climate is changing. …The World Meteorological Organization …secretary general… Michel Jarraud, put it plainly. “Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” he said. …. Read the full article: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/an-odometer-moment-on-a-warming-planet/?ref=science 2012 Nov 27. Grappling With the Permafrost Problem. By Justin Gillis, The NY Times. Excerpt: The greatest single uncertainty about climate change is how much the warming of the planet will feed on itself. As the temperature increases because of human emissions, feedbacks could cause new pools of carbon to be released into the atmosphere, magnifying the trend. Other types of feedbacks could potentially slow the warming. Over all, climate scientists have only best guesses about how these conflicting tendencies will balance out, though most of them think the net result is likely to be a substantial rise in the planet’s average temperature…one of the most worrisome potential feedbacks involves the permafrost that underlies a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. Buried in that frozen ground is a lot of ancient organic material, containing twice as much carbon as now exists in the atmosphere. The permafrost is starting to warm and the carbon to escape…In essence, the permafrost feedback is a big new emissions source that makes the math of controlling climate change harder than ever.…. 2012 October. Cloud simulations improving in climate models. By Stephen G. Benka, Physics Today. Excerpt: ...Currently there are about 20 climate models in use around the world that generate the indicators—including temperature, precipitation, clouds, and water vapor—on which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change bases its projections. The largest uncertainties in the IPCC assessments—the most recent was in 2007—arise from how the models handle the complex feedback mechanisms of clouds and water vapor. Until recently, the “ground-truth” data for the simulations were sparse and provided climate scientists with incomplete knowledge. But that has changed with data from the A-Train constellation of satellites during 2006–09.... 2012-08-06. Climate change is here — and worse than we thought. Excerpt: When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988, I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels. But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic. My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather. In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.... http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-08-03/opinions/35491435_1_climate-change-climate-model-normal-climate. James Hansen, in Washington Post. 2012 July 02. A Climate Scientist Battles Time and Mortality. By Justin Gillis, The NY Times. Excerpt: Dr. Thompson, who has taught earth sciences at Ohio State University… routinely spent up to two months a year camped in dangerous conditions atop mountains…Hauling six tons of equipment to South America, Africa, Asia and Europe, he and his small team raced to recover long cylinders of ice from glaciers that had built up over thousands of years. The layers in those cylinders contained dust, volcanic ash, subtle variations in water chemistry, even the occasional frozen insect — a record of climatic and geologic changes that could be retrieved, preserved and interpreted like a series of tree rings. Dr. Thompson became one of the first scientists to witness and record a broad global melting of land ice. And his ice cores proved that this sudden, coordinated melting had no parallel, at least not in the last several thousand years. To some climate scientists, the Thompson ice core record became the most convincing piece of evidence that the rapid planetary warming now going on was a result of a rise in greenhouse gases caused by human activity…. 2012 April 30. Clouds’ Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters | by Justin Gillis, NY Times. Excerpt: IFor decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk. …They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends. …“Clouds really are the biggest uncertainty,” said Andrew E. Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M. “If you listen to the credible climate skeptics, they’ve really pushed all their chips onto clouds.”…. 2012-04-12. A Tour of the New Geopolitics of Global Warming | By Joshua Zaffos and Daily Climate, Scientific American. Excerpt: Energy security and climate change present massive threats to global security, military planners say, with connections and consequences spanning the world…. 2012 Feb 23. Heartland's president once believed in climate change, but now says it's a 'myth. By Evan Lehmann, E&E reporter. Greenwire / ClimateWire Excerpt: For Joe Bast [president of the Heartland Institute] the public's fascination with climate change is just about over, amounting to a fad perhaps as temporary as a former hippie phase in his life when he experimented with "deep ecology" and lived in a geodesic dome in the woods. "I'm confident that the scientific basis behind the threat has pretty much melted away…." "It's like any other apocalyptic movement. These things crest, and then they start to retreat, until the next apocalyptic movement comes along and gives us something to get all worried about." …Large scientific bodies, after synthesizing the world's collection of individual research findings into international reports, have concluded that human activities are largely responsible for Earth's warming over the past 50 years. 2011 Nov 21. What Are Climate Change Skeptics Still Skeptical About? by Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer. Summary of common points from climate change skeptics and deniers: It's urban warming; It's actually getting cooler; It's natural; It's an error; It's unknowable. 2011 Nov 9. World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns. By Fiona Harvey, The Guardian. Excerpt: The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure. 2011 October 22. The heat is on. The Economist. Excerpt: …There are three compilations of mean global temperatures, each one based on readings from thousands of thermometers, kept in weather stations and aboard ships, going back over 150 years… And all suggest a similar pattern of warming: amounting to about 0.9°C over land in the past half century…. 2011 Oct. Science controversies past and present. By Steven Sherwood, Physics Today / Vol 64 / Issue 10. Excerpt: Science—especially the science behind climate change—is under fire. "This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation."
2011 September 24. Scientists Want Publisher to Refreeze Greenland. By Felicity Barringer, The NY Times. Excerpt: The news release promoting the latest edition of Britain’s influential Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World hailed it as “the Greatest Book on Earth.”…. 2010 November 16. Dire messages about global warming can backfire, new study shows. By Yasmin Anwar, UC Berkeley News [The Berkeleyan]. Excerpt:
"Our study indicates that the potentially devastating consequences of
global warming threaten people's fundamental tendency to see the world
as safe, stable and fair. As a result, people may respond by
discounting evidence for global warming," said Robb Willer, UC Berkeley
social psychologist and coauthor of a study to be published in the
January issue of the journal Psychological Science. 2010 September 3. How Warm Was This Summer? By Adam Volland, NASA Earth Science News Team. Excerpt:…But,
from a global perspective, how warm was the summer exactly? How did the
summer's temperatures compare with previous years? And was global
warming the "cause" of the unusual heat waves? Scientists at NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, led by
GISS's director, James Hansen, have analyzed summer temperatures and
released an update on the GISS website that addresses all of these
questions…. 2009 November 30. E-Mail Fracas Shows Peril of Trying to Spin Science. By John Tierney, NY Times. Excerpt:
If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files
hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give
you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file
slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is the log of a computer expert’s long
struggle to make sense of a database of historical temperatures. Here
is Harry’s summary of the situation: 2009 May 4. Sun Oddly Quiet -- Hints at Next "Little Ice Age"? By Anne Minard for National Geographic News. Excerpt: A prolonged lull in solar activity has astrophysicists glued to their telescopes waiting to see what the sun will do next—and how Earth's climate might respond. The sun is the least active it's been in decades and the dimmest in a hundred years. The lull is causing some scientists to recall the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850. The coldest period of the Little Ice Age, between 1645 and 1715, has been linked to a deep dip in solar storms known as the Maunder Minimum. During that time, access to Greenland was largely cut off by ice, and canals in Holland routinely froze solid. Glaciers in the Alps engulfed whole villages, and sea ice increased so much that no open water flowed around Iceland in the year 1695. But researchers are on guard against their concerns about a new cold snap being misinterpreted.... 2009 March 8. Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other. By Andrew C. Revkin, NY Times. Excerpt:
More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times
Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific
and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices,
humans will dangerously heat up the planet. 2009 January 29. New data show much of Antarctica is warming more than previously thought. EurekAlert. Excerpt:
Scientists studying climate change have long believed that while most
of the rest of the globe has been getting steadily warmer, a large part
of Antarctica – the East Antarctic Ice Sheet – has actually been
getting colder. 2008 October 27. Climate
change 'making seas more salty'. By
David Adam, The Guardian. Excerpt:
Global warming is making the sea more salty,
according to new research that demonstrates
the massive shifts in natural systems triggered
by climate change. 2008 October 13. Rising
Temperatures May Dry Up Peat Bogs, Causing
Carbon Release. By Henry Fountain, The
New York Times. Excerpt:
...A study in Nature Geoscience suggests
that northern bogs may lose a significant
portion of their peat as global temperatures
rise. Organic matter in the peat will decompose,
releasing carbon into the atmosphere. 2008 September 15. Weather
History Offers Insight Into Global Warming. By
Anthony DePalma, The New York Times. Excerpt:
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — It is probably a
good thing that the Mohonk Mountain House,
the 19th-century resort, was built on Shawangunk
conglomerate, a concrete-hard quartz rock.
Otherwise, the path to the National Weather
Service’s cooperative station here
surely would have turned to dust by now. 2008 August 8. The
Coming Arctic Invasion. By Geerat J.
Vermeij and Peter D. Roopnarine, Science. Excerpt:
The current episode of climate warming is
having drastic consequences for animal and
plant life worldwide. ...North Pacific lineages
will resume spreading through the Bering
Strait into a warmer Arctic Ocean and eventually
into the temperate North Atlantic. 2008 August 7. Pacific
shellfish ready to invade Atlantic. Eureka
Alert. Excerpt:
As the Arctic Ocean warms this century,
shellfish, snails and other animals from
the Pacific Ocean will resume an invasion
of the northern Atlantic that was interrupted
by cooling conditions three million years
ago, predict Geerat Vermeij, professor of
geology at the University of California,
Davis, and Peter Roopnarine at the California
Academy of Sciences. 2008 August 6. Aphids
are sentinels of climate change. Biotechnology
and Biological Sciences Research Council. Ecxerpt:
Aphids are emerging as sentinels of climate
change, researchers at BBSRC-supported Rothamsted
Research have shown. One of the UK's most
damaging aphids - the peach-potato aphid
(Myzus persicae) - has been found to be
flying two weeks earlier for every 1°C
rise in mean temperature for January and
February combined. This year, the first
aphid was caught on 25 April, which is almost
four weeks ahead of the 42-year average.
This work is reported in BBSRC Business,
the quarterly research highlights magazine
of BBSRC (the Biotechnology and Biological
Sciences Research Council). 2008 July 16. Eighth
Warmest June on Record for Globe. NOAA. Excerpt:
he combined average global land and ocean
surface temperatures for June 2008 ranked
eighth warmest for June since worldwide
records began in 1880, according to an analysis
by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center
in Asheville, N.C. Also, globally it was
the ninth warmest January – June period
on record. 2008 July. Heat
Wave in Northern Europe. By Holli Riebeek
and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory. Excerpt:
On the calendar, Scandinavian summer starts
on June 21 in 2008, but summer temperatures
had already settled over much of northern
Europe by early June. This
image shows land surface temperatures—how
hot the ground is to the touch, a measure
that is different than the air temperatures
reported in the news—as observed by
the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer
(MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite between
June 2 and June 8, 2008. 2008 July 1. A
New Twist in Penguins’ Already Uncertain
Future. By Cornelia Dean, The New York
Times. Excerpt:
P. Dee Boersma, a biologist at the University
of Washington, has been watching the Magellanic
penguins of Punta Tombo, in Argentina, for
almost 30 years. For most of that time,
their numbers have been declining: breeding
pairs are down 22 percent there since 1987,
she writes in Tuesday’s issue of BioScience. 2008 June 27. Exclusive:
No ice at the North Pole. By Steve Connor,
The Independent. Excerpt:
It seems unthinkable, but for the first
time in human history, ice is on course
to disappear entirely from the North Pole
this year. 2008 June 10. Permafrost
Threatened by Rapid Retreat of Arctic Sea
Ice, NCAR Study Finds. Excerpt:
BOULDER—The rate of climate warming
over northern Alaska, Canada, and Russia
could more than triple during periods of
rapid sea ice loss, according to a new study
led by the National Center for Atmospheric
Research (NCAR). The findings raise concerns
about the thawing of permafrost, or permanently
frozen soil, and the potential consequences
for sensitive ecosystems, human infrastructure,
and the release of additional greenhouse
gases. 2008 May-June. Ecological Responses to Climate Change on the Antarctic Peninsula. Warming threatens a rich but delicate biological community. by James McClintock, Hugh Ducklow and William Fraser. The western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula is home to a thriving biological community that includes bottom-dwelling and free-swimming animals, giant algae much like the kelp of temperate latitudes, marine organisms that shelter under or within sea ice, as well as familiar avian and mammalian predators: penguins, seals and whales. But the authors of this article outline various ways in which the peninsular ecosystem is on the threshold of rapid change. Midwinter temperatures have increased by 6 degrees Celsius since the 1950s, sea ice has diminished in extent and longevity, and sea water temperatures are climbing. The loss of ice is detrimental to krill and other organisms at the base of the food chain. A once-common penguin species is in decline on the peninsula, whereas other species are expanding their range. Further warming could allow large predatory crabs to invade the bottom-dwelling community and greatly alter its composition. McClintock is University Professor of Polar and Marine Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Ducklow is co-director of the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole; and Fraser is president of the non-profit Polar Oceans Research Group in Sheridan, Montana. 2008 May. The
Carbon Hoofprint. Lauren Wilcox, The
WorldArk. Excerpt:
A recent report from the United Nations
contained a stunning statistic: One industry
is responsible for nearly 20% of the greenhouse
gases released int the atmosphere worldwide.
It isn't long-haul trucking, or air travel,
or stell-smelting vactories, or any of the
other exhaust-belching suspects ususally
associated wtih environmental woes. 2008 May 28. The
Gathering Storm. By George Black, OnEarth
(NRDC). Excerpt:
What Happens When Global Warming Turns Millions
of Destitute Muslims Into Environmental
Refugees? 2008 Apr 24. Sediment
cores reveal Antarctica's warmer past. Quirin
Schiermeier, Nature. Excerpt:
A unique drilling project in the western
Ross Sea has revealed that Antarctica had
a much more eventful climate history than
previously assumed. A new sediment core
hints that the western part of the now-frozen
continent went through prolonged ice-free
phases - presumably offering a glimpse of
where our warming world might be heading. 2008 Apr 30. CU-Boulder
researchers forecast 3-in-5 chance of record
low Arctic sea ice in 2008. EurekAlert
(30.4.08) New
University of Colorado at Boulder calculations
indicate the record low minimum extent of
sea ice across the Arctic last September
has a three-in-five chance of being shattered
again in 2008 because of continued warming
temperatures and a preponderance of younger,
thinner ice. 2008 April 3, Are
Carbon Cuts Just a Fantasy? By JOHN
TIERNEY Excerpt:
What if there's no way to cut greenhouse
emissions enough to make a real difference? 2008 Mar 11. Sea Levels Are Falling Over the Long Term Because of Lower Basins. By Henry Fountain, NY Times. Excerpt: The idea of sea level changes in this era of environmental concern and all the discussion is about the effect of melting glaciers and shrinking ice caps over the coming decades or centuries. But sea levels have fluctuated greatly over much longer time scales, and glaciers and ice caps have had little to do with it. Instead, the changing size and depth of the ocean basins is responsible. A study looked at factors that affect the size and depth of the basins, including the spreading of new crust at midocean ridges, the subsidence of this crust as it ages and the changes in area as the continents drift. The study, published in Science, suggests that in the late Cretaceous period, 80 million years ago, the oceans were shallow, and thus the sea level was high — about 550 feet higher than it is now. Since then, though, as the ocean floors have aged, they have become deeper and the sea level has fallen. Although in the near future sea levels may rise, the researchers say that in the long term the downward trend will continue. Over the next 80 million years, the sea level will fall by as much as 390 feet. 2008 Mar 4. REPORTER'S
NOTEBOOK - Cool View of Science at Meeting
on Warming.By ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt:
Several hundred people sat in a fifth-floor
ballroom at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in
Times Square on Monday eating pasta and
trying hard to prove that they had unraveled
the established science showing that humans
are warming the world in potentially disruptive
ways. ...One challenge they faced was that
even within their own ranks, the group -
among them government and university scientists,
antiregulatory campaigners and Congressional
staff members - displayed a dizzying range
of ideas on what was, or was not, influencing
climate. 2008 February 20. Meltdown
in your wineglass? A
conference in Barcelona looks at the effects
of global climate change on the world of
wine. By Corie Brown, Los Angeles Times
Staff Writer. Excerpt: BARCELONA, SPAIN
-- THE "post-classic" era of winemaking
is dawning, according to experts at the
second Climate Change & Wine conference
in Barcelona, Spain, at the end of last
week. ...Scientists told winemakers and
other industry professionals at the gathering
to expect natural acidity to drop, colors
to fade and alcohol levels to rise. Aromas
could vanish. In short, wine may gradually
lose the complexity wine lovers appreciate.
And as rising levels of carbon dioxide encourage
out-of-control vegetative growth, the green,
herbaceous flavors consumers deplore may
well increase. 2008 January 23. ANTARCTIC
ICE LOSS SPEEDS UP, NEARLY MATCHES GREENLAND
LOSS. Excerpt:
Ice loss in Antarctica increased by 75 percent
in the last 10 years due to a speed-up in
the flow of its glaciers and is now nearly
as great as that observed in Greenland,
according to a new, comprehensive study
by NASA and university scientists. In a
first-of-its-kind study, an international
team led by Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the University
of California, Irvine, estimated changes
in Antarctica's ice mass between 1996 and
2006 and mapped patterns of ice loss on
a glacier-by-glacier basis. They detected
a sharp jump in Antarctica's ice loss, from
enough ice to raise global sea level by
0.3 millimeters (.01 inches) a year in 1996,
to 0.5 millimeters (.02 inches) a year in
2006. ...The team found that the net loss
of ice mass from Antarctica increased from
112 (plus or minus 91) gigatonnes a year
in 1996 to 196 (plus or minus 92) gigatonnes
a year in 2006. A gigatonne is one billion
metric tons, or more than 2.2 trillion pounds.
These new 22 January 2008. New Antarctic Ice Core to Provide Clearest Climate Record Yet. Excerpt: After enduring months on the coldest, driest and windiest continent on Earth, researchers today closed out the inaugural season on an unprecedented, multi-year effort to retrieve the most detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere over the last 100,000 years. Working as part of the National Science Foundation's West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Ice Core Project, a team of scientists, engineers, technicians and students from multiple U.S. institutions have recovered a 580-meter (1,900-foot) ice core--the first section of what is hoped to be a 3,465-meter (11,360-foot) column of ice detailing 100,000 years of Earth's climate history, including a precise year-by-year record of the last 40,000 years. The dust, chemicals and air trapped in the two-mile-long ice core will provide critical information for scientists working to predict the extent to which human activity will alter Earth's climate, according to the chief scientist for the project, Kendrick Taylor of the Desert Research Institute of the Nevada System of Higher Education.... 13 January 2008. Antarctic ice loss. Excerpt: Increasing amounts of ice mass have been lost from West Antarctica and the Antarctic peninsula over the past ten years, according to research from the University of Bristol and published online this week in Nature Geoscience. Meanwhile the ice mass in East Antarctica has been roughly stable, with neither loss nor accumulation over the past decade....Over the 10 year time period of the survey, the ice sheet as a whole was certainly losing mass, and the mass loss increased by 75% during this time. Most of the mass loss is from the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica and the northern tip of the Peninsula where it is driven by ongoing, pronounced glacier acceleration. In East Antarctica, the mass balance is near zero, but the thinning of its potentially vulnerable marine sectors suggests this may change in the near future. 2007 Dec 2. Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate. Dian J. Seidel, Qiang Fu, William J. Randel & Thomas J. Reichler. Abstract: Some of the earliest unequivocal signs of climate change have been the warming of the air and ocean, thawing of land and melting of ice in the Arctic. But recent studies are showing that the tropics are also changing. Several lines of evidence show that over the past few decades the tropical belt has expanded. This expansion has potentially important implications for subtropical societies and may lead to profound changes in the global climate system. Most importantly, poleward movement of large-scale atmospheric circulation systems, such as jet streams and storm tracks, could result in shifts in precipitation patterns affecting natural ecosystems, agriculture, and water resources. The implications of the expansion for stratospheric circulation and the distribution of ozone in the atmosphere are as yet poorly understood. The observed recent rate of expansion is greater than climate model projections of expansion over the twenty-first century, which suggests that there is still much to be learned about this aspect of global climate change. 18 November 2007. A
world dying, but can we unite to save it? Excerpt:
Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid
through the same pollution that causes global
warming, .... The process - thought to be
the most profound change in the chemistry
of the oceans for 20 million years - is
expected both to disrupt the entire web
of life of the oceans and to make climate
change worse. 17 October 2007. Record
September Temperatures Extend Southeast
Drought. (ENS) Excerpt:
ASHEVILLE, North Carolina. Temperatures
in September 2007 were the eighth warmest
on record, hot enough to break 1,000 daily
high records across the United States, say
scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data
Center in Asheville. 5 October 2007. Is
Battered Arctic Sea Ice Down For the Count? Science
Vol. 318. no. 5847, pp. 33 - 34. Richard
A. Kerr. Excerpt:
A few years ago, researchers modeling the
fate of Arctic sea ice under global warming
saw a good chance that the ice could disappear,
in summertime at least, by the end of the
21st century. Then talk swung to summer
ice not making it past mid-century. Now,
after watching Arctic sea ice shrink back
last month to a startling record-low area,
scientists are worried that 2050 may be
overoptimistic. "This year has been
such a quantum leap downward, it has surprised
many scientists," says polar researcher
John Walsh of the University of Alaska,
Fairbanks. "This ice is more vulnerable
than we thought." And that vulnerability
seems to be growing from year to year, inspiring
concern that Arctic ice could be in an abrupt,
irreversible decline. "Maybe we are
reaching the tipping point," says Walsh. Bad
sign. Arctic
sea ice (gauged here using NASA's measurement
techniques) has been declining, but 2007's
unfavorable weather drove the increasingly
vulnerable ice to a new record low. CREDIT:
NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER SCIENTIFIC
VISUALIZATION STUDIO; (DATA) ROB GERSTON,
GSFC... last
month, "we completely blew 2005 out
of the water," says sea ice specialist
Mark Serreze of the University of Colorado,
Boulder. Ice area plummeted to 4.13 million
square kilometers, down 43% from 1979. That's
a loss equivalent to more than two Alaskas.
.... A plus. The
record-breaking loss of sea ice this summer
opened the Northwest Passage. 3 October 2007. An
interactive graphic from NY Times: Sea Ice
in Retreat. A
look at this summer's record-breaking loss
of Arctic sea ice. 2 October 2007. Arctic
Melt Unnerves the Experts 7 September 2007. Buzzing
about Climate Change. By Rebecca Lindsey. Excerpt:
...Biological oceanographer Wayne Esaias
... has made a career studying patterns
of plant growth in the world's oceans and
how they relate to climate and ecosystem
change, first from ships, then from aircraft,
and finally from satellites. But for the
past year, he's been preoccupied with his
bee hives, which started as a family project
around 1990 when his son was in the Boy
Scouts. According to his honeybees, big
changes are underway in Maryland forests.
The most important event in the life of
flowering plants and their pollinators-flowering
itself-is happening much earlier in the
year than it used to. 4 September 2007. Loss
of Arctic ice leaves experts stunned.
David Adam, environment correspondent. Guardian
Unlimited 6 August 2007 The
CO2 problem in 6 easy steps. 2007 July 17, Glaciers
in Retreat. By SOMINI SENGUPTA, NY Times. Excerpt:
ON CHORABARI GLACIER, India - This is how
a glacier retreats. At nearly 13,000 feet
above sea level, in the shadow of a sharp
Himalayan peak, a wall of black ice oozes
in the sunshine. A tumbling stone breaks
the silence of the mountains, or water gurgles
under the ground, a sign that the glacier
is melting from inside. Where it empties
out - scientists call it the snout - a noisy,
frothy stream rushes down to meet the river
Ganges. 2007 July 12. Conservation
Key as Climate Change Curtails Western Water.
SAN FRANCISCO, California (ENS) - The
drought now parching Western states is a
taste of things to come, finds a new report
by the Natural Resources Defense Council
that assesses the effects of global warming
on water supplies in the West. ..."Global
warming will make it harder for farms and
cities to find water," said Barry Nelson,
study co-author and co-director of NRDC's
western water project. "The latest
global warming science is clear - drought-like
conditions are likely to increase. This
means that conservation and water use efficiency
will become our most important sources of
new water supply," Nelson said. Over
the past eight years, the Colorado River,
which supplies water to parts of Arizona,
California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico,
Utah and Wyoming, has received just over
half its average flow. 2007 July 11. Balmy
Weather May Bench a Baseball Staple. By
Monica Davey, The New York Times. Excerpt:
RUSSELL, Pa. — Careers at stake with
each swing, baseball players leave little
to sport when it comes to their bats. They
weigh them. They count their grains. They
talk to them. 2007 July 8. Elevated Carbon Dioxide In Atmosphere Weakens Defenses Of Soybeans To Herbivores. Science Daily, July 8, 2007. Excerpt: Scientists have found that elevated carbon dioxide levels may negatively impact the relationship between some plants and insects. Elevated CO2 is considered to be a serious catalyst of global change. Its effects can be felt throughout the ecosystem, including the insect-plant food chain link... Many plants have inherent enzyme-based defenses that are released during insect attack. This study found that when soybeans were exposed to elevated amounts of CO2 the plants became more susceptible to attack by Japanese beetles... Dr. Jorge Zavala, Sr. of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, and his colleagues conducted tests in which they evaluated this herbivorous attack-defense cycle. They studied soybeans grown in traditional field conditions but with additional exposure to ambient CO2. 2007 July 2. Alaskan Wildlife-Rich Coastal Land Eroding Because of Disappearing Ice. By Yereth Rosen, Reuters, Excerpt: A swath of marshy, wildlife-rich coastal land in Arctic Alaska being eyed for oil drilling is eroding rapidly probably because of the disappearance of sea ice that used to protect it from the ocean waves, according to a study released on Monday. Using satellite data and maps compiled from aerial photographs, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, found that land lost to erosion north of Teshekpuk Lake, Arctic Alaska's largest lake, was twice as fast in 1985 to 2005 period than in the previous 30 years... In addition, salty sea water has contaminated formerly freshwater lakes, migratory birds, caribou and other wildlife populations has lost habitat and the sparse human infrastructure along the coastline has been damaged, the study said... 'The area (Teshekpuk Lake) is one of the most important areas in the entire Arctic, and I don't just mean in Arctic Alaska,' said Stan Senner, executive director of Audubon Alaska. 'It is simply the most important goose-molting area in the Arctic.' It is also believed to hold vast amounts of untapped oil. In recent years, the Bush administration lifted a decades-long ban on oil development and has tried to sell oil and gas exploration rights there. Environmentalists and the region's Inupiat Eskimos have cited global warming impacts as a reason to oppose drilling in land near Teshekpuk Lake. 2007 July 1. Penguins Struggle in a Warning World. By William Mullen, The Chicago Tribune. Excerpt: On a cloudy spring day, the first gray Adelie penguin chicks are hatching out in round pebble nests strewn across a bleak, rocky coastline, poking their heads from beneath the snowy-white shirt front of an adult for their first blinking look at the world... These days, however, Adelies are being stalked by a threat they cannot see and cannot fight off: the weather. The birds, which have adapted over millions of years to the most extreme climate on Earth, are beginning to die off by the tens of thousands as a result of global warming. The Adelie penguin is regarded as an 'indicator' species, an animal so delicately attuned to its environment that its survival is threatened as soon as something goes wrong. So as temperatures rise, Adelies are among the first to feel the effects, early victims of the devastating worldwide changes that scientists expect if the warming persists and intensifies... In this vulnerable area, entire colonies of Adelie penguins have died because, researchers believe, the ice no longer extends far enough into the sea to allow the birds to reach their winter feeding grounds. Biologist William Fraser monitors a 50-square-mile area where 56,000 Adelies have perished... For now, such deaths represent a small fraction of the world's estimated 8 million to 10 million Adelie penguins, which live only on Antarctica... But the die-offs scientists are seeing in the warmest areas of Antarctica are expected to spread as temperatures continue to rise... The reason is simple, he said: 'Penguins don't see well in the dark.' Below the Antarctic Circle, the hours of sunlight shrink during winter until it is dark 24 hours a day. That is one key reason Adelie penguins migrate: They must travel far enough north so there is enough sunlight for a successful daily hunt. Otherwise, they will starve. A warmer Antarctic climate may shrink the winter ice so much that it strands the birds too far south, in places where the sun doesn't rise, and the lights may go out permanently for the Adelies. 28 June 2007. Study
Sees Climate Change Impact on Alaska.
By William Yardley. New York Times. 27 May 2007. Victim of Climate Change, a Town Seeks a Lifeline. By WILLIAM YARDLEY. NY Times. Excerpt: NEWTOK, Alaska ..."I don't want to live in permafrost no more," said Frank Tommy, 47, ..."It's too muddy. Everything is crooked around here." The earth beneath much of Alaska ... permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which Newtok and so many other Native Alaskan villages rest, is melting, yielding to warming air temperatures and a warming ocean. ...The village is below sea level, and sinking. Boardwalks squish into the spring muck. ...Studies say Newtok could be washed away within a decade. Along with the villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina farther to the north, it has been the hardest hit of about 180 Alaska villages that suffer some degree of erosion.... 15 May 2007. Panel:
Climate Change Will Hurt Africa. By
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS - Seth Borenstein in
Washington and Michael Casey in Bangkok,
Thailand.. Excerpt:
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- Global
warming isn't just a matter of melting icebergs
and polar bears chasing after them. It's
also Lake Chad drying up, the glaciers of
Mt. Kilimanjaro disappearing, increasing
extreme weather, conflict and hungry people
throughout Africa. According to a landmark
effort to assess the risks of global warming,
Africa -- by far the lowest emitter of greenhouse
gases in the world -- is projected to be
among the regions hardest hit by environmental
change. ''We never used to have malaria
in the highlands where I'm from, now we
do,'' said Kenyan lawmaker Mwancha Okioma,
at a briefing on climate change at the Pan
African Parliament Monday. 15 May 2007. Scientists
Back Off Theory of a Colder Europe in a
Warming World. Associated Press...By
WALTER GIBBS. Excerpt:
OSLO - Mainstream climatologists who have
feared that global warming could have the
paradoxical effect of cooling northwestern
Europe or even plunging it into a small
ice age have stopped worrying about that
particular disaster, although it retains
a vivid hold on the public imagination. 11 April 2007. Sea's Rise in India Buries Islands and a Way of Life. By SOMINI SENGUPTA. New York Times. Excerpt: Shyamal Mandal lives at the edge of ruin. In front of his small mud house lies the wreckage of what was once his village on this fragile delta island near the Bay of Bengal. Half of it has sunk into the river. ...The sinking of Ghoramara can be attributed to a confluence of disasters, natural and human, not least the rising sea. The rivers that pour down from the Himalayas and empty into the bay have swelled and shifted in recent decades, placing this and the rest of the delicate islands known as the Sundarbans in the mouth of daily danger. Certainly nature would have forced these islands to shift size and shape, drowning some, giving rise to others. But there is little doubt, scientists say, that human-induced climate change has made them particularly vulnerable. A recent study by Sugata Hazra, an oceanographer at Jadavpur University in nearby Calcutta, found that in the last 30 years, nearly 31 square miles of the Sundarbans have vanished entirely. More than 600 families have been displaced, according to local government authorities. Fields and ponds have been submerged. Ghoramara alone has shrunk to less than two square miles, about half of its size in 1969, Mr. Hazra's study concluded. Two other islands have vanished entirely. .... 1 April 2007. 60
Minutes TV Program: The Age of Warming.
Includes the following movie segments (on
Yahoo site): April 2007 The Global Warming Survival Guide. Time Magazine website. Includes 51 Things We Can Do [to slow global warming] 29 March 2007. On the Front Lines Of Climate Change. By MARK HERTSGAARD, Time Magazine 29 March 2007. What Now For Our Feverish Planet? By JEFFREY KLUGER, Time Magazine. 27 March 2007. Cities at Risk of Rising Sea Levels. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Excerpt: LONDON (AP) -- More than two-thirds of the world's large cities are in areas vulnerable to global warming and rising sea levels, and millions of people are at risk of being swamped by flooding and intense storms, according to a new study released Wednesday. ...threatened coastal areas worldwide -- defined as those lying at less than 33 feet above sea level ...More than 180 countries have populations in low-elevation coastal zones, and about 70 percent of those have urban areas of more than 5 million people that are under threat. Among them: Tokyo; New York; Mumbai, India; Shanghai, China; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Dhaka, Bangladesh. ...''Migration away from the zone at risk will be necessary but costly and hard to implement, so coastal settlements will also need to be modified to protect residents,'' said Gordon McGranahan of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, a co-author of the study. ...the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...warned of sea-level rises of 7-23 inches by the end of the century due to global warming, making coastal populations vulnerable to flooding and more intense hurricanes and typhoons. ...The five nations with the largest total population living in endangered coastal areas are all in Asia: China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia. 23 March 2007. GRAVITY
MEASUREMENTS HELP MELT ICE MYSTERIES.
Earth Observatory. Excerpt:
Greenland is cold and hot. It's a deep freezer
storing 10 percent of Earth's ice and a
subject of fevered debate. If something
should melt all that ice, global sea level
could rise as much as 7 meters (23 feet).
Greenland and Antarctica - Earth's two biggest
icehouses - are important indicators of
climate change and a high priority for research,
as highlighted by the newly inaugurated
International Polar Year. Just a few years
ago, the world's climate scientists predicted
that Greenland wouldn't have much impact
at all on sea level in the coming decades.
But recent measurements show that Greenland's
ice cap is melting much faster than expected.
These new data come from the NASA/German
Aerospace Center's Gravity Recovery and
Climate Experiment (Grace). …Grace
measurements have revealed that in just
four years, from 2002 to 2006, Greenland
lost between 150 and 250 cubic kilometers
(36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year. …."Before
Grace, the change of Greenland's ice sheet
was inferred by a combination of more regional
radar and altimeter studies pieced together
over many years, but Grace can measure changes
in the weight of the ice directly and cover
the entire ice sheet of Greenland every
month," says Michael Watkins, Grace
project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif….."We
have to pay attention," Velicogna adds. "These
ice sheets are changing much faster than
we were expecting. Observations are the
most powerful tool we have to know what
is going on, especially when the changes
- and what's causing them - are not obvious." 25 February 2007. Global warming: enough to make you sick Rising temperatures are redistributing bacteria, insects and plants, exposing people to diseases they'd never encountered before. By Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer. EXCERPT: CORDOVA, ALASKA - Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus in his 25 years working the frigid waters of Prince William Sound…. By summer 2004, the temperature had risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark. Cruise ship passengers who had eaten local oysters were soon coming down with diarrhea, cramping and vomiting - the first cases of Vibrio food poisoning in Alaska that anyone could remember. As scientists later determined, the culprit was not just the bacterium, but the warming that allowed it to proliferate."This was probably the best example to date of how global climate change is changing the importation of infectious diseases," said Dr. Joe McLaughlin, acting chief of epidemiology at the Alaska Division of Public Health, who published a study on the outbreak…. Incremental temperature changes have begun to redraw the distribution of bacteria, insects and plants, exposing new populations to diseases that they have never seen before…...The temperature change has been small, about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 150 years, but it has been enough to alter disease patterns across the globe…….According to a landmark United Nations report released this month, global warming has reached a point where even if greenhouse gas emissions could be held stable, the trend would continue for centuries. The report painted a grim picture of the future - rising sea levels, more intense storms, widespread drought. Predicting the future of disease, however, has proven difficult because of myriad factors - many of which have little to do with global warming. Diseases move with people, they follow trade routes, they thrive in places with poor sanitation, they develop resistance to medicines, they can blossom during war or economic breakdowns….. 24 February 2007. VIDEO | Canaries in the Mine: Inuit Warn World of Human Cost of Climate Change - A Report by Sari Gelzer and Kelpie Wilson. "Global warming is a human rights issue," says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Inuit activist and Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. In her lifetime, Watt-Cloutier has witnessed the drastic effects of climate change that threaten her community's livelihood and cultural identity. Watt-Cloutier testified in a hearing on March 1, 2007 to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights which was set up to investigate the relationship between human rights and climate change in North and South America. The hearing was a result of a petition that she and 62 other Inuit in Alaska and Canada filed in 2005 in an attempt to hold the United States accountable for its failure to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. 17 February 2007. THE INSIDES OF CLOUDS MAY BE THE KEY TO CLIMATE CHANGE -- As scientists develop ever more sophisticated climate models to project an expected path of temperature change, it is becoming increasingly important to include the effects of aerosols on clouds. 16 February 2007. Warmest
January ever recorded worldwide in 2007:
US scientists. Excerpt:
NEW YORK (AFP) - World temperatures in January
were the highest ever recorded for that
month of the year, US government scientists
said. "The combined global land and
ocean surface temperature was the highest
for any January on record," according
to scientists from the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration's National
Climate Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The
combined global land and ocean surface temperature
was 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit (0.85 Celsius)
warmer than the 20th-century average of
53.6 degrees F (12 C) for January based
on preliminary data, NOAA said. ...Land
surface temperature was a record 3.40 F
(1.89 C) warmer than average, while global
ocean surface temperature was the fourth
warmest in 128 years, about 0.1 F (0.05
C) cooler than the record established during
the very strong El Nino climate phenomenon
in 1998. 12 February 2007. NASA STUDY FINDS WARMER FUTURE COULD BRING DROUGHTS. Excerpt: NASA scientists may have discovered how a warmer climate in the future could increase droughts in certain parts of the world, including the southwest United States. The researchers compared historical records of the climate impact of changes in the sun's output with model projections of how a warmer climate driven by greenhouse gases would change rainfall patterns. They found that a warmer future climate likely will produce droughts in the same areas as those observed in ancient times, but potentially with greater severity. ...said Drew Shindell, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York "There is some evidence that rainfall patterns already may be changing. Much of the Mediterranean area, North Africa and the Middle East rapidly are becoming drier. If the trend continues as expected, the consequences may be severe in only a couple of decades. These changes could pose significant water resource challenges to large segments of the population." ...Increases in solar output break up oxygen molecules, raising ozone concentrations in the upper atmosphere. This adds to upper atmospheric heating that leads to shifts in circulations down to the surface. In turn, surface temperatures warm, and the Earth's basic rainfall patterns are enhanced. For instance, in wet regions such as the tropics, precipitation usually increases, while dry areas become more prone to drought since rainfall decreases and warmer temperatures help remove the small amount of moisture in the soil. ...According to the researchers, the same processes identified by this new research very likely also affected past civilizations, such as the Pueblo people of New Mexico and Arizona who abandoned cities in the 1300s. 6 February 2007. On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty. By WILLIAM K. STEVENS. NY Times. Excerpt: ...it was said in the 1990s that while the available evidence of a serious human impact on the earth's climate might be preponderant enough to meet the legal test for liability in a civil suit, it fell short of the more stringent "beyond a reasonable doubt" test of guilt in a criminal case. ...I've been avidly watching from the sideline as the strengthening evidence of climate change has accumulated, not least the discovery that the Greenland ice cap is melting faster than had been thought. The implications of that are enormous, though the speed with which the melting may catastrophically raise sea levels is uncertain - as are many aspects of what a still hazily discerned climatic future may hold. Last week, in its first major report since 2001, the world's most authoritative group of climate scientists issued its strongest statement yet on the relationship between global warming and human activity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the likelihood was 90 percent to 99 percent that emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, spewed from tailpipes and smokestacks, were the dominant cause of the observed warming of the last 50 years. In the panel's parlance, this level of certainty is labeled "very likely." ...Some experts believe that no matter what humans do to try to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, a doubling is all but inevitable by 2100.... February 2007. The Sands of Time. By Kathleen Wong, ScienceMatters@Berkeley. Excerpt: Jere Lipps has an extraordinarily fine-grained view of history. As a professor of paleontology at UC Berkeley, Lipps examines records of the past written in layers of sediments and fossils. His work has shed light on ancient earthquakes and extinction patterns, the evolution of early life and even astrobiology, and taken him to more than 160 countries over the last 40 years. The common thread to Lipps's far-ranging research? Foraminifera: tiny marine creatures easily mistaken for sand. Single-celled and quite separate from animals, foraminifera live in virtually every marine habitat explored by man. Even among scientists, foraminifera are chiefly known by their shells. These come in a galaxy of forms-stars and coils, turbans and disks, bulbous cones and simple tubes-segmented into chambers and pierced by patterns of pores....foraminifera may have evolved into more than 80,000 species during their 545 million years on Earth. ...Recently, Lipps and his international team used foraminifera to analyze earthquake and tsunami frequency around the Pacific Rim. ..."We estimate that along our coast, from Alaska to Baja, we get a really big earthquake and tsunami every 200 to 300 years," Lipps says.... 16 January 2007. The
Warming of Greenland. By JOHN COLLINS
RUDOLF, The New York Times 30 December 2006. Arctic Ice Shelf Broke Off Canadian Island. NY Times. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. Excerpt: A 25-square-mile shelf of floating ice that jutted into the Arctic Ocean for 3,000 years from Canada's northernmost shore broke away abruptly in the summer of 2005, apparently freed by sharply warming temperatures and jostling wind and waves, scientists said yesterday. ...The Arctic sea ice has experienced sharp summertime retreats for several decades, adding to evidence of significant warming near the North Pole. (Neither melting ice shelves nor sea ice contribute to rising sea levels because they sit in the sea already, like ice cubes in a drink.) Ninety percent of the 3,900 square miles of ice shelves that existed in 1906 when the Arctic explorer Robert Peary first surveyed the region are gone, said Luke Copland, the director of the University of Ottawa's Laboratory for Cryospheric Research. ...He said that it waspremature to attribute the breakaway to human-caused climate change, although he said that it was a clear sign the warming in the region was producing significant and abrupt changes, and more were likely in coming years. ...The age of the Ayles ice shelf was estimated by using chemical means to date driftwood found behind it, said Derek Mueller, one of those who helped write the paper, from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. 27 December 2006. Agency Proposes to List Polar Bears as Threatened. By FELICITY BARRINGER and ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt: WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - The Interior Department proposed Wednesday to designate polar bears as a threatened species, saying that the accelerating loss of the Arctic ice that is the bears' hunting platform has led biologists to believe that bear populations will decline, perhaps sharply, in the coming decades. ... in a conference call with reporters, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said that although his decision to seek protection for polar bears acknowledged the melting of the Arctic ice, his department was not taking a position on why the ice was melting or what to do about it. ...[he said] it was not his department's job to assess causes or prescribe solutions. ...The scientific analysis in the proposal itself, however, did assess the cause of melting ice. ...buildup of heat-trapping gases was probably contributing to the loss of sea ice to date or that the continued buildup of these gases, left unchecked, could create ice-free Arctic summers ...possibly in as little as three decades. The Interior Department ...must also work out a recovery plan to control and reduce harmful impacts to the species, usually by controlling the activities that cause harm. It is unclear whether such a recovery plan could avoid addressing the link between manmade emissions of heat-trapping gases and the increase in Arctic temperatures. Kert Davies, the research director for Greenpeace U.S.A., one of three environmental groups that sued the Interior Department in 2005 to force it to add polar bears to the list of threatened species, said the administration was "clearly scrambling for credibility of any kind in this issue." Kassie Siegel, the lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, ...that took the lead in the lawsuit calling on the department to list the polar bear, added, "I don't see how even this administration can write this proposal without acknowledging that the primary threat to polar bears is global warming and without acknowledging the science of global warming." As a result of the lawsuit, the Interior Department had a court-ordered deadline of Wednesday to make a decision. The worldwide population of polar bears currently stands at 20,000 to 25,000, broken into 19 groups in Russia, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States. ...The most-studied bear population, in the Western Hudson Bay in Canada, has dropped 22 percent, to 935 from 1,194 from 1987 to 2004.... 19 December 2006. Global
Warming Skeptics: A Primer Guess who's funding
the global warming doubt shops? For
totally different view, see web page "GLOBAL
WARMING: MYTH VS. REALITY" http://www.look-to-the-skies.com/new_page_3.htm Caution:
please read this with especially mindful
critical reading skills. See also 16 December 2006. Global Warming Poses Threat to Ski Resorts in the Alps. By MARK LANDLER, The New York Times. KITZBYHEL, Austria. Excerpt: At the bottom of the Hahnenkamm, the famously treacherous downhill course in this Austrian ski resort, the slope peters out into a grassy field...Snow cannons are showering clouds of white crystals over the slopes, but by midmorning each day, the machines have to be turned off because the mercury has risen too far for the fake snow to stick.... The record warmth - in some places autumn temperatures were three degrees Celsius above average - has brought home the profound threat of climate change to Europe's ski industry.... The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsored the second study, stopped short of predicting ruin for Europe's ski industry. But Bruno Abegg, a researcher at the University of Zurich who was involved in it, said low-lying resorts faced an insuperable problem... He said, "I wouldn't invest in KitzbŸhel." Because KitzbŸhel sits in a low Tyrolean valley, at an altitude of only 2,624 feet, it is viewed as particularly vulnerable to the effects of global warming. For KitzbŸhel, a glamorous dowager among Alpine resorts, the only comfort in the warm spell is that it has afflicted rivals at all altitudes. Val d'Isare, in France, and St. Moritz, in Switzerland - which are twice as high - were forced to cancel recent World Cup races for lack of snow.... A few guests have canceled bookings for Christmas week, according to the local tourism office. But most are holding on to see if the weather changes; snow is forecast for Sunday. If it does not snow by New Year's Day, however, people here say the trickle of cancellations could turn into a flood. As for the broader threat of global warming, townspeople react with a mixture of fatalism and mild skepticism to studies like the one coordinated by Austria's Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, which says the Alps have not been this warm since the eighth century..... Climatologists, however, say the warming trend will become dramatic by 2020. The new studies are alarming, suggesting that the Alps are warming twice as fast as the average in the rest of the world. In 1980, 75 percent of Alpine glaciers were advancing; now, 90 percent are retreating. Reinhard Bšhm, a meteorologist who worked on the study of Alpine temperatures, said one explanation for the disparity was the region's location in the middle of the European continent, far from any oceans, which react more moderately to global warming trends...... 15 December 2006. OVERCONFIDENCE LEADS TO BIAS IN CLIMATE CHANGE ESTIMATIONS. NASA Earth Observatory News. - Overconfidence in projections of climate change may lead to inappropriate actions on the parts of governments, industries and individuals, according to an international team of climate researchers. "Climate researchers often use a scenario approach," says Dr. Klaus Keller, assistant professor of geosciences, Penn State. "Nevertheless, scenarios are typically silent on the question of probabilities." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is in its third round of climate assessment, uses models that scenarios of human climate forcing drive. These forcing scenarios are, the researchers say, overconfident. 12 December, 2006. NASA ICE IMAGES AID STUDY OF PACIFIC WALRUS ARCTIC HABITATS. NASA Earth Observatory News. - NASA recently collaborated with the Fish and Wildlife Service to determine the usefulness of satellite imagery for studying the effect of climate change on the Pacific walrus ice habitat in Alaska. 12 December 2006. By 2040, Greenhouse Gases Could Lead to an Open Arctic Sea in Summers. By ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt: New studies project that the Arctic Ocean could be mostly open water in summer by 2040 - several decades earlier than previously expected - partly as a result of global warming caused by emissions of greenhouse gases....The projections come from computer simulations of climate and ice and from direct measurements showing that the amount of ice coverage has been declining for 30 years. The latest modeling study, being published on Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, was led by Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo....In the simulations, the shift seems to occur when a pulse of warm Atlantic Ocean water combines with the thinning and retreat of ice under the influence of the global warming trend. ...Separately, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder found that the normal expansion of sea ice as the Arctic chilled in fall had been extraordinarily sluggish this year, .... The November average ice coverage was by far the lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979, said Walt Meier, a scientist at the ice center. "It's becoming increasingly unlikely that things will be able to turn around," he said. "It would take several very cold winters and cool summers, which seems unlikely under global warming conditions." Several experts not involved with the studies said they were significant for human affairs, as well as biology. Polar bears will struggle, these scientists said, and so will Arctic people who still go out on sea ice to hunt seals. By contrast, countries and businesses pursuing new shipping lanes, energy supplies and fishing grounds could profit.... 6 December, 2006. NASA RESEARCH REVEALS CLIMATE WARMING REDUCES OCEAN FOOD SUPPLY. NASA Earth Observatory News. - In a NASA study, scientists have concluded that when Earth's climate warms, there is a reduction in the ocean's primary food supply 2006 December [Winter 2007] Himalaya Melting By Broughton Coburn, OnEarth [NRDC] - Glacial lakes pose a new peril as ice turns to water....Glaciologists ... are seeing glacial lakes forming and filling faster than they can identify and catalog them. Ultimately, they fear, many will simply grow too large and burst through their moraines of unstable ice and rubble -- as happened in northern Bhutan in 1994. That year, a mile-long glacial lake named Luggye Tsho, near Bhutan's border with Tibet, ruptured catastrophically. Over a period of several hours, the entire lake -- more than a billion cubic feet of water -- emptied out, sending a rampaging torrent down valley that swept away an artisans' colony near the town of Punakha, killing 23 people. ...The Himalaya contains more than 18,000 glaciers covering an area of 13,000 square miles. Directly to the north on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau ...46,298 glaciers blanket nearly 60,000 square miles. ...Global warming has forced into retreat virtually all of these glaciers, which are shrinking at a rate of 100 to 230 feet per year ...Lama Dorje, ...says, ..."We heard a low, whirring rumble that gradually grew in volume, like an approaching helicopter. ...coming toward us -- a wall of gray and brown water with what looked like steam or dust swirling crazily around it and above it. The wave itself was filled with boulders, dirt, firewood, and whole trees. The trees would run into an obstacle, be forcefully upended, and be tossed downriver, over and over again, like a kid kicking a stick down a trail. "When the wall of water reached the bridge just downstream from here, it simply picked up the bridge and took it away. Then it carried away four of our livestock, then our neighbors' livestock. When it reached the houses located below ours, it swept those away too. We could only stand there helplessly." Over the next six hours, ...By the time it surged across the Indian border, 100 miles downstream, four people had drowned.... 24 November 2006. IMPACT
OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN AFRICA. From NASA
Earth Observatory. A
new study uncovers evidence for a drought
that coincided 14 November 2006. Climate Change Pushing Bird Species to Oblivion. Excerpt: NAIROBI, Kenya, Environment News Service (ENS) - Birds are suffering the escalating effects of climate change in every part of the planet, finds a new report released today by the global conservation group [World Wildlife Fund] WWF at the United Nations climate change conference in Nairobi. The report reveals a trend towards a major bird extinction due to global warming. The researchers found declines of up to 90 percent in some bird populations, as well as total and unprecedented reproductive failure in others. They estimate that bird extinction rates could be as high as 38 percent in Europe, and 72 percent in northeastern Australia, if global warming exceeds two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels - currently it is 0.8¼C above those levels. "Robust scientific evidence shows that climate change is now affecting birds' behavior," said Dr. Karl Mallon, scientific director at Climate Risk Pty. Ltd of Sydney, Australia, authors of the report. ..."We are seeing migratory birds failing to migrate, and climate change pushing increasing numbers of birds out of synchrony with key elements of their ecosystems," Mallon said. The report, "Bird Species and Climate Change: The Global Status Report," reviews more than 200 scientific articles on birds in every continent to build up a global picture of climate change impacts. "Birds have long been used as indicators of environmental change, and with this report we see they are the quintessential 'canaries in the coal mine' when it comes to climate change," said Hans Verolme, director of WWF's Global Climate Change Program. The report identifies groups of birds at high risk from climate change - migratory, mountain, island, and wetland birds, Arctic and Antarctic birds, and seabirds. ...Download the full report, "Bird Species and Climate Change: The Global Status Report" [75 pages], or a summary at: http://www.panda.org/climate/birds 14 November 2006. Global Warming Increases Species Extinctions Worldwide, University of Texas at Austin Researcher Finds AUSTIN, Texas-Global warming has already caused extinctions in the most sensitive habitats and will continue to cause more species to go extinct over the next 50 to 100 years, confirms the most comprehensive study since 2003 on the effects of climate change on wild species worldwide by a University of Texas at Austin biologist. Dr. Camille Parmesan's synthesis also shows that species are not evolving fast enough to prevent extinction. "This is absolutely the most comprehensive synthesis of the impact of climate change on species to date," said Parmesan, associate professor of integrative biology. "Earlier synthesis were hampered from drawing broad conclusions by the relative lack of studies. Because there are now so many papers on this subject, we can start pulling together some patterns that we weren't able to before." Parmesan reviewed over 800 scientific studies on the effects of human-induced climate change on thousands of species.... 13 November 2006. Climate Change Melting Fabled African Glaciers. By Tim Cocks. Planet Ark - World Environmental News. Excerpt: KAMPALA - Climate change is melting a legendary ice field in equatorial Africa and may soon thaw it out completely, threatening fresh water supplies to hundreds of thousands of people, a climate expert said on Thursday. The fabled, snow-capped Rwenzori mountains -- dubbed the "Mountains of the Moon" in travel brochures -- form part of the Uganda/Democratic Republic of the Congo border and are one of Uganda's top tourist destinations. But warmer temperatures are melting the glaciers sitting on their peaks, with some scientists predicting the ice could be gone within two to three decades. "Definitely, the glaciers are decreasing," James Magezi-Akiiki, a climate change specialist at Uganda's environment ministry told Reuters. "They have already decreased by 60 percent since 1910. If temperatures keep going up as they have, there's a high chance of them disappearing." ..."The same thing is happening to Kilimanjaro... It's gone from white to brown," Magezi-Akiiki said. A study in 2002 showed Kilimanjaro to have lost more than 80 percent of its ice cap in the past 100 years, reducing water supplies to people living around it. ...Glaciers are often a crucial store of fresh water. "The streams originating from the Rwenzori glaciers would disappear if they melt," said Magezi-Akiiki. "And during the dry season they are the only source of water." ... 13 November 2006. THE DARKENING SEA. By ELIZABETH KOLBERT, Issue of 2006-11-20. What carbon emissions are doing to the ocean. ...In the nineteen-nineties, researchers ... collected more than seventy thousand seawater samples ... analysis of ...which was completed in 2004, ... nearly half of all the carbon dioxide that humans have emitted ...has been absorbed by the sea. ...carbonic acid ...can change the water's pH. Already, humans have pumped enough carbon into the oceans...to produce a .1 decline in surface pH. Since pH ... is a logarithmic measure, a .1 drop represents a rise in acidity of about thirty per cent. The process is ... "ocean acidification," ... term coined in 2003 by two climate scientists, Ken Caldeira and Michael Wickett, ...at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. ...Caldeira ...to brief some members of Congress... was asked, 'What is the appropriate stabilization target for atmospheric CO2?' " ... "And I said, 'Well, I think it's inappropriate to think in terms of stabilization targets. I think we should think in terms of emissions targets.' And they said, 'O.K., what's the appropriate emissions target?' And I said, 'Zero.' "If you're talking about mugging little old ladies, you don't say, 'What's our target for the rate of mugging little old ladies?' You say, 'Mugging little old ladies is bad, and we're going to try to eliminate it.' ...Coral reefs are under threat.... When water temperatures rise too high, corals lose...the algae that nourish them. (The process is called "bleaching," because without their zooxanthellae corals appear white.) ...The seas have a built-in buffering capacity: if the water's pH starts to drop, shells and shell fragments that have been deposited on the ocean floor begin to dissolve, pushing the pH back up again. This buffering mechanism is highly effective, provided that acidification takes place on the same timescale as deep-ocean circulation. (One complete exchange of surface and bottom water takes thousands of years.) ...Currently, CO2 is being released into the air at least three times and perhaps as much as thirty times as quickly ...so fast that buffering by ocean sediments is not even a factor.... 12 November 2006. African nomads to be first people wiped out by climate change. Peter Beaumont, Foreign Affairs editor. Observer/Guardian. Kenya's herdsmen are facing extinction as global warming destroys their lands. They are dubbed the 'climate canaries' - the people destined to become the first victims of world climate change. ...Hundreds of thousands of these seasonal herders have already been forced to forsake their traditional culture and settle in Kenya's north eastern province following consecutive droughts that have decimated their livestock in recent years. á Incidence of drought has increased fourfold in the Mandera region in the past 25 years. á One-third of herders living there - around half a million people - have already been forced to abandon their pastoral way of life because of adverse climatic conditions. á During the last drought, so many cattle, camels and goats were lost that 60 per cent of the families who remain as herders need outside assistance to recover. Their surviving herds are too small to support them. The new findings follow recent warnings from the UK Met Office that if current trends continue one-third of the planet will be desert by the end of 2100. The scientists modelled how drought is likely to increase globally during the coming century because of predicted changes in rainfall and temperature around the world....
9 November 2006. Climate change: The south-north connection Eric J. Steig, News and Views Nature Abstract: A new ice-core record from Antarctica provides the best evidence yet of a link between climate in the northern and southern polar regions that operates through changes in ocean circulation. Excerpt: Over the past 20 years, the analysis of ice cores has been transforming our understanding of past climate. Most notably, the Vostok core from Antarctica provided remarkable evidence of the correspondence between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 420,000 years. And the GISP2, GRIP and NGRIP cores from Greenland offered a view in unprecedented detail of climate change over the past 100,000 years (including the revelation that abrupt warming events of 10 ¡C or more have taken place in Greenland). More recently, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) obtained the longest ice-core record yet, one spanning 800,000 years of climate history, from Dome C, in the same sector of Antarctica as Vostok. ...the Antarctic and Greenland ice-core records are meaningfully related, and on quite short timescales. ...comparison of the oxygen-isotope records shows that one can make a direct link between the distinctive temperature maxima in the Antarctic record (at least going back 60,000 years) and the unambiguous abrupt warmings in Greenland ... 8 November 2006. Australia
suffers worst drought in 1,000 years.
John Vidal, environment editor, The Guardian. Excerpt:
Depleted reservoirs, failed crops and arid
farmland spark global warming tussle. Australia's
blistering summer has only just begun but
reservoir levels are dropping fast, crop
forecasts have been slashed, and great swaths
of the continent are entering what scientists
yesterday called a "one in a thousand
years drought". With many regions in
their fifth year of drought, the government
yesterday called an emergency water summit
in Canberra. ...The drought is likely to
affect drinking water supplies to many areas.
...It is also expected to have a serious
impact on crops. Last week, the government
forecast its lowest wheat crop for 12 years,
a 62% decrease on last year. ...The drought
has set off a fierce political debate in
Australia about climate change. The country
has maintained, with the US, a sceptical
stance on the issue, and Mr Howard has refused
to sign Australia up to the Kyoto agreement.
However, polls suggest he is increasingly
out of step with public and scientific opinion
and the drought has forced him to demonstrate
concern. ...Australia now emits almost as
much carbon and other greenhouse gases as
France and Italy, which each have three
times its population. ...South Australia's
premier, Mike Rann, said yesterday: "What
we're seeing with this drought is a frightening
glimpse of the future with global warming." 31 October 2006. Building Resilience May Help Corals, Mangroves Survive. Excerpt: GENEVA, Switzerland, Environment News Service (ENS) - Survival strategies for coral reefs and mangroves threatened by climate change are outlined by scientists of IUCN-World Conservation Union and the Nature Conservancy in two new publications launched today. The strategies rely on managing stressors other than global warming so that corals and mangroves are more resilient and able to survive in a warming world. Climate change is destroying tropical marine ecosystems through sea temperature increase and ocean acidification. Scientists say 20 percent of the world's coral reefs have already been ruined and a further 50 percent are facing immediate or long term danger of collapse. Yet, one of the reports published today shows that saving the world's coral reefs may still be possible. By fighting other stress factors such as pollution or overfishing impacting coral reefs, the reefs will be able to better adapt to climate change impacts, according to the report, "Coral Reef Resilience and Resistance to Bleaching." ...Coral reefs only cover 0.2 percent of the ocean floor, but contain 25 percent of marine species globally. Coral reefs provide livelihoods to 100 million people and provide the basis for industries such as tourism and fishing, worth an annual net benefit of US$30 billion, the report states. One hectare of mangroves is estimated to deliver products and services worth up to $900,000. Examples of these products and services include timber and wood chips, an environment for fish spawning, and habitat for economically important species. ...View the publications online: "Coral Reef Resilience and Resistance to Bleaching," Gabriel D. Grimsditch and Rodney V. Salm and "Managing Mangroves for Resilience to Climate Change," Elizabeth Mcleod and Rodney V. Salm. 30 October 2006. Insect population growth likely accelerated by warmer climate. Contact: Vince Stricherz <vincesATu.washington.edu> EurekAlert! Excerpt: Insects have proven to be highly adaptable organisms, able through evolution to cope with a variety of environmental changes, including relatively recent changes in the world's climate. But like something out of a scary Halloween tale, new University of Washington research suggests insects' ability to adapt to warmer temperatures carries an unexpected consequence - more insects. It appears that insect species that adapt to warmer climates also will increase their maximum rates of population growth, which UW researchers say is likely to have widespread affects on agriculture, public health and conservation. ..."Enhanced population growth rates for butterflies might be a good thing, but enhanced growth rates for mosquito populations is much more dubious," said Frazier, who is lead author of the new research, published in the October edition of the journal The American Naturalist. Co-authors are Raymond Huey, a UW biology professor, and David Berrigan, a former UW biology researcher now with the National Cancer Institute. ...biochemical adaptation to warmer temperature is not the only possible insect response to climate warming. Some species might evade warmer temperatures by moving to cooler habitats, or they might alter their seasonal activity patterns. Others might not be able to adapt adequately and could become extinct. But those that do adapt should have elevated rates of population growth. "No matter which scenario plays out for a given species, local ecosystems will be profoundly altered," Frazier said. For more information, contact Frazier at (206) 543-4859 or mfrazierATu.washington.edu, or Huey at (206) 543-1505 or hueyrbATu.washington.edu 4 October 2006. The Century of Drought. Excerpt: Leading climatologists in Britain recently predicted that global warming would result in extensive drought over the next century. The droughts, which are predicted to affect one third of the earth's land mass, will likely devastate developing countries that already struggle to meet their populaces' needs for food, safe sanitation and water. Some say that this forecast may underestimate the severity of the drought as it does not take into account the effects of changes to the carbon cycle resulting from global warming. The full study, produced by the Hadley Centre, will be published later in October in the Journal of Hydrometeorology. 3 October 2006. Global
Warming on the Forest Floor. By HENRY
FOUNTAIN, NY Times. Excerpt:
Along with rising temperatures, global warming
is very likely to cause a shift toward more
extreme weather -- stronger storms with
more rainfall, and longer and more severe
droughts. Those changes are likely to have
large-scale, obvious effects on farmlands,
grasslands and forests and on the creatures
that inhabit them. ... Researchers at the
University of Kentucky looked at ...the
impact of climate change on the decomposition
of leaf litter on the forest floor. The
researchers, Janet R. Lensing and David
H. Wise, studied the process of leaf decay
in hardwood forests in central Kentucky.
The main instigator in leaf decay is fungi,
which get nutrients from the organic matter.
But fungi don't exist in a vacuum. They
are grazed upon by springtails, primitive
insects of the Collembola order. In turn,
springtails are the prey of wandering spiders.
The who-eats-whom makes for a complex web,
where changes at one level can have cascading
effects. Too much or too little grazing
by springtails, for example, can reduce
fungal activity and slow decay. ...They
didn't see much change in leaf decomposition
under higher-rainfall conditions. But under
drought conditions, they found, decay accelerated
significantly. ...''Our hypothesis is that
during drought conditions, the fungi are
already drought-stressed, and the Collembola
are overgrazing them, which slows down decay,''
Dr. Lensing said. Under these circumstances,
by preying on the springtails, the spiders
reduce the pressure on the fungi, thus allowing
for more leaf decay. Under wetter conditions
the fungi are not so stressed and so easily
overgrazed, so spider predation on springtails
has less effect. 25 September 2006. NASA STUDY FINDS WORLD WARMTH EDGING ANCIENT LEVELS. A new study by NASA climatologists finds that the world's temperature is reaching a level that has not been seen in thousands of years. NASA Earth Observatory. 21 September 2006. SHORT-TERM OCEAN COOLING SUGGESTS GLOBAL WARMING 'SPEED BUMP'. Excerpt: The average temperature of the water near the top of the Earth's oceans has significantly cooled since 2003. New research suggests global warming trends are not always steady in their effects on ocean temperatures. Although the average temperature of the upper oceans has significantly cooled since 2003, the decline is a fraction of the total ocean warming over the previous 48 years. "This research suggests global warming isn't always steady, but happens with occasional 'speed bumps'," said Josh Willis, a co-author of the study at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. ...Willis said the findings have significant implications for global sea-level rise. "Average sea level goes up partly due to warming and thermal expansion of the oceans and partly due to runoff from melting glaciers and ice sheets," Willis said. "The recent cooling episode suggests sea level should have actually decreased in the past two years. Despite this, sea level has continued to rise. This may mean that sea level rise has recently shifted from being mostly caused by warming to being dominated by melting. This idea is consistent with recent estimates of ice-mass loss in Antarctica and accelerating ice-mass loss on Greenland," he said. ...the cause of the recent cooling is not yet clear. Research suggests it may be due to a net loss of heat from the Earth. "Further work will be necessary to solve this cooling mystery...." NASA RELEASE: 06-318. 31 August 2006 Evolution
of Old World fruit flies on three continents
mirrors climate change. University
of Washington News. Fast-warming climate
appears to be triggering genetic changes
in a species of fruit fly that is native
to Europe and was introduced into North
and South America about 25 years ago. "This
is a clear signal on three different continents
that climate change is occurring, and that
genetic change is going along with it," said
Raymond Huey, a University of Washington
biology professor who is co-author of a
paper describing the findings, published
Aug. 31 in Science Express, the online edition
of the journal Science. The research deals
with an Old World fruit fly species called
Drosophila subobscura, which originally
ranged from the Mediterranean Sea to Scandinavia.
...The fruit flies were accidentally introduced
to the Pacific Coast of Chile in the late
1970s and to the North American West Coast
in the early 1980s, probably on cargo ships.
They spread rapidly, and in North America
they are now found from near Santa Barbara,
Calif., to northern Vancouver Island in
British Columbia. 8 July 2006. Readers
Respond to Philip M. Boffey's 'The Evidence
for Global Warming'. NY Times - TIMESSELECT
- Excerpt: Ralph
Deeds, Birmingham, Mich.: It appears to
me that the politics of global warming is
more difficult than the science. For example,
existing automobile technology could produce
a huge savings in oil if our Congress would
stop debating flag burning and pass legislation
to encourage more fuel-efficient motor vehicles.
This could easily be done by gradually increasing
the gasoline tax to bring pump prices up
to European levels. .... 20 June 2006. Next Victim of Warming: The Beaches. By CORNELIA DEAN - NY Times. Excerpt: NEW SMYRNA BEACH, Fla. When scientists consider the possible effects of global warming, there is a lot they don't know. But they can say one thing for sure: sea levels will rise. ...This rising water will be felt along the artificially maintained beaches of New Jersey, in the vanishing marshes of Louisiana, even on the ocean bluffs of California. According to a 2000 report by the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, at least a quarter of the houses within 500 feet of the United States coast may be lost to rising seas by 2060. There were 350,000 of these houses when the report was written, but today there are far more. ...Some of the rise - scientists argue over how much - is because of natural variation, like changes in atmospheric pressures and winds over the Southern Ocean. But much of it results from warming; as water warms, it expands, occupying more space. Also, warming melts inland glaciers and ice sheets, sending torrents of fresh water into the oceans. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened by the United Nations, said that the rise in sea levels was accelerating. Their mid-range projection for 2100 was a rise of just under 20 inches from a 1990 baseline, partly because of this melting. Evidence reported since then suggests that the rise may be even faster. (If ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica melt significantly, seas will rise by 20 feet or more, but few scientists expect that to happen in this century.) ...much of Florida is so low that a one-foot rise in sea level would send water 100 feet inland. Dr. Howd, 49, who lives in St. Petersburg, said that is one reason he does not expect to retire there. His house is about 600 feet from the beach, but only about 6 feet above sea level.... 4 June 2006. Climate
Change: The View From the Patio. By
HENRY FOUNTAIN. NY Times. Excerpt:
...It came from a North Carolina forest,
at an experimental plot where scientists
can precisely control the concentration
of carbon dioxide in the air. Duke researchers
discovered that when exposed to higher levels
of CO2, the greenhouse gas released in ever-increasing
quantities from human activity, poison ivy
goes haywire. 18 May 2006. New century of thirst for world's mountains. Bill Cannon, Pacific Northwest National laboratory (PNNL). Most detailed forecast to date shows sharp snowpack decline between now and year 2100; New Zealand, Latin America, Western U.S., European ranges hardest hit. Excerpt: RICHLAND, Wash. By the century's end, the Andes in South America will have less than half their current winter snowpack, mountain ranges in Europe and the U.S. West will have lost nearly half of their snow-bound water and snow on New Zealand's picturesque snowcapped peaks will all but have vanished. Such is the dramatic forecast from a new, full-century model that offers detail its authors call "an unprecedented picture of climate change." The decline in winter snowpack means less spring and summer runoff from snowmelt. That translates to unprecedented pressure on people worldwide who depend on summertime melting of the winter snowpack for irrigation and drinking water....Ghan cautioned about "significant limitations" to the model. For example, field observations in Africa suggest the famous snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro will be gone within decades, and on Greenland signs point to accelerated snow and ice melt. May 2006. While Washington Slept. Vanity Fair. BY MARK HERTSGAARD. If global warming isn't halted, rising sea levels could submerge coastal cities by 2100. So how did this virtual certainty get labeled a "liberal hoax"? Article has photo Illustrations by John Blackford and sea level rise simulations from National Environmental Trust animations See still images of Washington DC and New York City. 2 May 2006. China: Global Warming Is Melting Glaciers. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. BEIJING (AP) Excerpt: Glaciers in western China's Qinghai-Tibet plateau, known as the ''roof of the world,'' are melting at a rate of 7 percent annually due to global warming, the country's official Xinhua News Agency said. Xinhua said the figure is drawn from data from China's 681 weather stations over four decades. Statistics from the Tibet weather bureau show that average temperatures in Tibet have risen by 0.9 degree Celsius (2 Fahrenheit) since the 1980s, Xinhua reported, quoting Han Yongxiang of the National Meteorological Bureau. ...The melting glaciers will eventually lead to drought, more desertification and an increase in the number of sandstorms, Xinhua quoted researcher Dong Guangrong at the Chinese Academy of Sciences as saying. ...The severity of China's sandstorms was highlighted by the onslaught of 300,000 metric tons (330,000 short tons) of dust in capital Beijing two weeks ago. ...Workers have already planted thousands of acres of vegetation to stop the spread of deserts in China's north and west. 16 February 2006. Greenland Ice-Loss Doubles in Past Decade, Raising Sea Level Faster. NASA RELEASE: 06-066 (Revised) The loss of ice from Greenland doubled between 1996 and 2005, as its glaciers flowed faster into the ocean in response to a generally warmer climate, according to a NASA/University of Kansas study. ...The evolution of Greenland's ice sheet is being driven by ... accumulation of snow in its interior, which adds mass and lowers sea level; melting of ice along its edges, which decreases mass and raises sea level; and the flow of ice into the sea from outlet glaciers along its edges, which also decreases mass and raises sea level. ...From 1996 to 2000, widespread glacial acceleration was found at latitudes below 66 degrees north. This acceleration extended to 70 degrees north by 2005. The researchers estimated the ice mass loss resulting from enhanced glacier flow increased from 63 cubic kilometers in 1996 to 162 cubic kilometers in 2005. Combined with the increase in ice melt and in snow accumulation over that same time period, they determined the total ice loss from the ice sheet increased from 96 cubic kilometers in 1996 to 220 cubic kilometers in 2005. To put this into perspective, a cubic kilometer is one trillion liters (approximately 264 billion gallons of water), about a quarter more than Los Angeles uses in one year. ...For University of Kansas Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets information, visit: http://www.cresis.ku.edu/flashindex.htm 4 February 2006. NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. NY Times. Excerpt: A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency."It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff." The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming...In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times. And in December 2004, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory complained to the agency that he had been pressured to say in a news release that his oceanic research would help advance the administration's goal of space exploration... 29 January 2006. Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. Excerpt: The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists. Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said...In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet." See also related article of NY Times 31 January 2006. 27 December 2005. Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. Excerpt: Earth scientists with the longest frames of reference...often seem to be the least agitated about human-caused global warming ... even in 2005, a year that saw the biggest summer retreat of Arctic sea ice ever measured... and global temperatures continuing a sharp climb that began around 1990 and appears unmatched in 2,000 years. But these backward-looking experts have seen it all before. ... 49 million years ago the balmy Arctic Ocean, instead of being covered in ice, was matted with a cousin of the duckweed that cloaks suburban frog ponds. The forests on the continent now called Antarctica and on shores fringing the Arctic were once thick and lush. And through hundreds of millions of years, concentrations of carbon dioxide and the other trace gases that trap solar energy and prevent the planet from being an ice ball have mostly been far higher than those typical during humankind's short existence. ...the planet has nothing to worry about from global warming. A hot, steamy earth would be fine for most forms of life. Earth and its biological veneer are far more resilient than human societies, particularly those still mired in poverty or pushed to the margins of the livable... and species like polar bears that, like the poorest people, are pushed to an edge - in the bear's case the tenuous ecosystem built around coastal sea ice. ...Studies of the past also show that pace matters. The rise in temperature and greenhouse gases during the great heat wave 55 million years ago, while instantaneous on a geological time scale, took thousands of years to unfold. But the pace of the recent rise in carbon dioxide is as much as 200 times as fast as what has been estimated in past rapid climate transitions. ...Even for polar bears, there are reasons to think the end is not necessarily nigh. There was at least one significant period - the last gap between ice ages 120,000 years ago - when the global climate was several degrees warmer than it is today and they clearly squeaked through. So at least slowing or blunting the warming might allow them to squeak through once again... 11 December 2005. Record Drought Cripples Life Along the Amazon. By LARRY ROHTER. NY Times. Excerpt: MANAQUIRI, Brazil - The Amazon River basin, the world's largest rain forest, is grappling with a devastating drought that in some areas is the worst since record keeping began a century ago. It has evaporated whole lagoons and kindled forest fires, killed off fish and crops, stranded boats and the villagers who travel by them, brought disease and wreaked economic havoc. ..."There have been years before in which we've had a deficit of rainfall, but we've never experienced drops in the water levels of rivers like those we have seen in 2005," said Everaldo Souza, a meteorologist at the Amazon Protection System ...They also worry that if global warming is involved, as some of them suspect, it may be the beginning of a new era of more severe and frequent droughts in the region that accounts for nearly a quarter of the world's fresh water. "The Amazon is a kind of canary-in-a-coal-mine situation," said Daniel C. Nepstad, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and the Amazon Institute of Ecological Research in Belém. "We have no idea of the game we have played into by running this worldwide experiment of pumping so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere," Mr. Nepstad said....Even as the drought begins to subside, scientists are still debating what caused it. The explanation accepted most widely pins primary responsibility on higher water temperatures in tropical regions of the Atlantic Ocean, the same phenomenon being blamed for the increase in the number of hurricanes forming in the Northern Hemisphere this year. "A warmer Atlantic not only helps give more energy to hurricanes, it also aids in evaporating air," said Luiz Gylvan Meira, a climate specialist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of São Paulo. "But when that air rises over the oceans in one region, it eventually has to come down somewhere else, thousands of miles away. In this case, it came down in the western Amazon, blocking the formation of clouds that would bring rain to the headwaters of the rivers that feed the Amazon."...While scientists largely agree that higher temperatures in the Atlantic are responsible for the severity of this year's drought, they are still searching for an explanation for that phenomenon. It could be just a one-time disturbance, or it could be more permanent, perhaps brought on by greenhouse gas emissions. "Yes, a global warming effect would explain increases in ocean temperatures, but no one is saying that yet, because it is still very early, and we don't yet have enough data," said Carlos Nobre, director of Brazil's National Institute of Space Research, which monitors climatic patterns in the Amazon. "Droughts like this one are very rare, but one consequence of a warmer planet would be that they occur with more frequency, which is something we are going to have to be watching for." 25 October 2005. No Escape: Thaw Gains Momentum. By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times. Excerpt: In 1969 Roy Koerner, a Canadian government glaciologist, was one of four men (and 36 dogs) who completed the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean, from Alaska through the North Pole to Norway. Now, he said, such a trek would be impossible: there is just not enough ice. In September, the area covered by sea ice reached a record low. "I look on it as a different world," Dr. Koerner said. "I recently reviewed a proposal by one guy to go across by kayak."... Many scientists say it has taken a long time for them to accept that global warming, partly the result of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, could shrink the Arctic's summer cloak of ice. But many of those same scientists have concluded that the momentum behind human-caused warming, combined with the region's tendency to amplify change, has put the familiar Arctic past the point of no return. 10 October 2005. THE BIG MELT - As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound. By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, STEVEN LEE MYERS, ANDREW C. REVKIN and SIMON ROMERO. Excerpt: CHURCHILL, Manitoba - It seems harsh to say that bad news for polar bears is good for Pat Broe. Mr. Broe, a Denver entrepreneur, is no more to blame than anyone else for a meltdown at the top of the world that threatens Arctic mammals and ancient traditions and lends credibility to dark visions of global warming. ...Still, the newest study of the Arctic ice cap - finding that it faded this summer to its smallest size ever recorded - is beginning to make Mr. Broe look like a visionary for buying this derelict Hudson Bay port from the Canadian government in 1997. Especially at the price he paid: about $7. By Mr. Broe's calculations, Churchill could bring in as much as $100 million a year as a port on Arctic shipping lanes shorter by thousands of miles than routes to the south, and traffic would only increase as the retreat of ice in the region clears the way for a longer shipping season. With major companies and nations large and small adopting similar logic, the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. ... All told, one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey. The polar thaw is also starting to unlock other treasures: lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage; new cruise ship destinations; and important commercial fisheries. 29 September 2005. In a Melting Trend, Less Arctic Ice to Go Around. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. NY Times. Excerpt: The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in at least a century of record keeping... a team of climate experts reported yesterday. That shift is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, the team's members and other experts on the region said. The change also appears to be headed toward becoming self-sustaining: the increased open water absorbs solar energy that would otherwise be reflected back into space by bright white ice, said Ted A. Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. ...The data was released on the center's Web site, http://www.nsidc.org. ...One of the most important consequences of Arctic warming will be increased flows of meltwater and icebergs from glaciers and ice sheets, and thus an accelerated rise in sea levels, threatening coastal areas. The loss of sea ice could also hurt both polar bears and Eskimo seal hunters. ...Other experts on Arctic ice and climate disagreed on details. For example, Ignatius G. Rigor at the University of Washington said the change was probably linked to a mix of factors, including influences of the atmospheric cycle. But he agreed with Dr. Serreze that the influence from greenhouse gases had to be involved. ...Other experts expressed some caution. Claire L. Parkinson, a sea ice expert at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said a host of changes in the Arctic - including rising temperatures, melting permafrost and shrinking sea ice - were consistent with human-caused warming. But she emphasized that the complicated system was still far from completely understood. 22 September 2005. Hurricanes and Climate Change -- Fact sheet. In a distressing new development, scientific evidence now suggests a link between hurricane strength and duration and global warming. See also, Hurricane Destructiveness in a Warmer World (PDF version: with color graphics and science references) 15 September 2005. Study Attributes Stronger Storms to Warmer Seas. WASHINGTON, (ASSOCIATED PRESS) - Storms with the power of Hurricane Katrina are becoming more common, in part because of global warming, according to a report from a team of researchers that will be published Friday. The number of storms in the two most powerful categories, 4 and 5, rose to an average of 18 a year worldwide since 1990, up from 11 in the 1970's.... The researchers were led by Peter J. Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology. There was no increase in storms over all, the researchers said, just in their intensity. But the rise in intensity, they said, coincided with an increase of nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit in the surfaces of tropical seas around the world.... Not all scientists were convinced by the findings. Some said the changes in storms are part of natural variability. Christopher Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, questioned the data showing an increase in major storms, saying the estimates of the wind speeds in storms in the 1970's might not be accurate.... 12 August 2005. Global-Warming Discrepancy Solved. WASHINGTON -- A dispute over whether global warming is really happening may have been caused by the placement of sensors on weather balloons when studies were done in the 1970s, researchers said on Thursday. 11 August 2005. Scientists find errors in global warming data. By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY. Satellite and weather-balloon research released Friday removes a last bastion of scientific doubt about global warming, researchers say. Surface temperatures have shown small but steady increases since the 1970s, but the tropics had shown little atmospheric heating - and even some cooling. Now, after sleuthing reported in three papers released by the journal Science, revisions have been made to that atmospheric data. Climate expert Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, lead author of one of the papers, says that those fairly steady measurements in the tropics have been a key argument "among people asking, 'Why should I believe this global warming hocus-pocus?' " After examining the satellite data, collected since 1979 by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellites, Carl Mears and Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, Calif., found that the satellites had drifted in orbit, throwing off the timing of temperature measures. Essentially, the satellites were increasingly reporting nighttime temperatures as daytime ones, leading to a false cooling trend. 7 July 2005. NASA RELEASE: 05-175. NASA Satellites Measure and Monitor Sea Level. For the first time, NASA has the tools and expertise to understand the rate at which sea level is changing, some of the mechanisms that drive those changes and the effects that sea level change may have worldwide. "It's estimated that more than 100 million lives are potentially impacted by a one-meter increase in sea level," said Dr. Waleed Abdalati, head of the Cryospheric Sciences Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "When you consider this information, the importance of learning how and why these changes are occurring becomes clear," he added. 24 May 2005. Ocean Warmth Tied to African Drought. NY Times. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. Excerpt: Few places are more vulnerable to drought than Africa. From the Sahel south of the Sahara to the southern lobe of the turbulent continent, there is a simple calculus, said Dr. Richard Washington, an expert on the region's climate at Oxford: "When the rains fail, people die." ...One new study bodes particularly poorly for southern Africa, indicating that a 50-year-long drying trend there is likely to continue and appears tightly linked to substantial warming of the Indian Ocean. The authors of the study say that the heating of that ocean, which lacks the natural variability of the Pacific and Atlantic, is one of the clearest fingerprints pointing to human-caused climate change. "In our models, the Indian Ocean shows very clear and dramatic warming into the future, which means more and more drought for southern Africa," said Dr. James W. Hurrell, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and an author of the study. "It is consistent with what we would expect from an increase in greenhouse gases." 4 March 2005. Canada's Shrinking Ice Caps. Earth's ice-covered polar regions help to keep our climate cool and hold tremendous amounts of fresh water locked up in their glaciers, ice caps, and ice sheets. The ice contained in these vast freshwater reservoirs is the equivalent of nearly 220 feet of sea level. However, when most people think of polar ice, they usually do not think of Canada, the location of only a small percentage of the Arctic's polar land ice. Recent research conducted by NASA scientists has revealed that Canada's ice caps and glaciers have important connections to Earth's changing climate, and they have a strong potential for contributing to sea level rise. 23 March 2005. NASA RELEASE: 05-084. NASA Study Finds Soot May be Changing the Arctic Environment. NASA continues to explore the impact of black carbon or soot on the Earth's climate. ... New findings show soot may be contributing to changes happening near the North Pole, such as accelerating melting of sea ice and snow and changing atmospheric temperatures. Dorothy Koch of Columbia University, New York, and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York, and James Hansen of NASA GISS are co-authors of the study that appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. "This research offers additional evidence black carbon, generated through the process of incomplete combustion, may have a significant warming impact on the Arctic," Koch said. "Further, it means there may be immediate consequences for Arctic ecosystems, and potentially long-term implications on climate patterns for much of the globe," she added. The Arctic is especially susceptible to the impact of human-generated particles and other pollution. In recent years the Arctic has significantly warmed, and sea-ice cover and glacial snow have diminished. Likely causes for these trends include changing weather patterns and the effects of pollution. Black carbon has been implicated as playing a role in melting ice and snow. When soot falls on ice, it darkens the surface and accelerates melting by increasing absorbed sunlight. Airborne soot also warms the air and affects weather patterns and clouds. ...For more information and images related to this story on the Internet, visit the NASA site. 22 February 2005. Venice
Turns to Future to Rescue Its Past.
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, International Herald
Tribune. VENICE
- When Jane da Mosto scrambles from the
water taxi onto the front steps of her family's
ancient palazzo on the Grand Canal, her
gaze is tinged with mourning. The once glorious
Casa da Mosto is now little more than a
decaying, waterlogged shell of a building,
the rising and increasingly salty water
of Venice lapping at the door and eating
away at its walls. 18 February 2005. Experts: Global Warming Is Real. Reuters. A parcel of studies looking at the oceans and melting Arctic ice leave no room for doubt that it is getting warmer, people are to blame, and the weather is going to suffer, climate experts said on Thursday. New computer models that look at ocean temperatures instead of the atmosphere show the clearest signal yet that global warming is well underway, said Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. ...The report was published one day after the United Nations Kyoto Protocol took effect, a 141-nation environmental pact the United States government has spurned for several reasons, including stated doubts about whether global warming is occurring and is caused by people. Barnett urged U.S. officials to reconsider...."The debate is what are we going to do about it." ...Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that melting ice was changing the water cycle, which in turn affects ocean currents and, ultimately, climate. "As the Earth warms, its water cycle is changing, being pushed out of kilter," she said. "Ice is in decline everywhere on the planet." February 2005. Dealing with Cloudy Data. by David Pescovitz. Science Matters@Berkeley. Looking up, it's easy to spot the clouds. The white fluff is strikingly contrasted by the blue sky. It's not so easy from space, especially above the Earth's poles. The clouds blend in against the vast expanses of snow and ice. This is a problem for scientists who use satellites to study clouds and climate. Recently though, UC Berkeley statistician Bin Yu, her graduate student Tao Shi, and their collaborators have devised a new algorithm that detects clouds even when the poles play tricks on the satellites' electronic eyes. 23 December 2004. NASA RELEASE: 04-404. NASA Finds Polluted Clouds Hold Less Moisture & Cool Earth Less. A NASA study found some clouds that form on tiny haze particles are not cooling the Earth as much as previously thought. These findings have implications for the ability to predict changes in climate. Andrew Ackerman, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and his colleagues found, when the air over clouds is dry, polluted clouds hold less water and reflect less solar energy. ... Low clouds cool the planet by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth's surface, and more water makes a cloud more reflective. Previously, scientific consensus was, since polluted clouds precipitate less, they should contain more water and reflect more sunlight back into space. Most predictions of global climate change assume less precipitation will result in clouds holding more water, reflecting more sunlight and counteracting greenhouse warming. ... The measurements show cloud water decreases more often than it increases in polluted clouds. 3 December 2004. Study of climate change-related articles within scientific journals: "This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect." 1 December 2004. Fastest Glacier in Greenland Doubles Speed. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. When people talk about something moving at a glacial pace, they are referring to speeds that make a tortoise look like a hare. ... researchers who study Earth's ice and the flow of glaciers have been surprised to find the world's fastest glacier in Greenland doubled its speed between 1997 and 2003. ... The finding is important for many reasons. For starters, as more ice moves from glaciers on land into the ocean, it raises sea levels. Jakobshavn Isbrae is Greenland's largest outlet glacier, draining 6.5 percent of Greenland's ice sheet area. The ice stream's speed-up and near-doubling of ice flow from land into the ocean has increased the rate of sea level rise by about .06 millimeters (about .002 inches) per year, or roughly 4 percent of the 20th century rate of sea level increase. Also, the rapid movement of ice from land into the sea provides key evidence of newly discovered relationships between ice sheets, sea level rise and climate warming. The researchers found the glacier's sudden speed-up also coincides with very rapid thinning, indicating loss of ice of up to 15 meters (49 feet) in thickness per year after 1997. Along with increased rates of ice flow and thinning, the thick ice that extends from the mouth of the glacier into the ocean, called the ice tongue, began retreating in 2000, breaking up almost completely by May 2003. 12 October 2004. RESEARCHERS FIND FROZEN NORTH MAY ACCELERATE CLIMATE CHANGE. NASA News. NASA-funded researchers have found that despite their sub-zero temperatures, a warming north may add more carbon to the atmosphere from soil, accelerating climate warming further. "The 3 to 7 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature predicted by global climate computer models could cause the breakdown of the arctic tundra's vast store of soil carbon," said Michelle Mack, an ecologist at the University of Florida, Gainsville, Fla., and one of the lead researchers on a study published in last week's issue of Nature. It would release more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the air than plants are capable of taking in. 6 October 2004. STUDY SHOWS POTENTIAL FOR ANTARCTIC CLIMATE CHANGE. NASA News. While Antarctica has mostly cooled over the last 30 years, the trend is likely to rapidly reverse, according to a computer model study by NASA researchers. The study indicates the South Polar Region is expected to warm during the next 50 years. July 2004. Disastrous year for Scotland's seabirds Unexpected breeding failures make this year the worst on record for Shetland and Orkney's teaming seabird colonies. They have produced fewer young than in any previous year because of a severe shortage of food. Almost all seabirds breeding in Shetland's internationally important colonies feed on sandeels, a small silvery shoaling fish, which spends part of the time buried in the sandy seabed. Recently, however, these fish have become increasingly scarce....One possible explanation for shortages of sandeels may be that changes in climate have affected sea temperatures and currents. This may have affected the plankton on which the sandeels feed forcing these small fish to move out of reach for many of our seabirds. It's thought that many of the small fish are not surviving or growing to full size as a result too. 22 April 2004. NASA RELEASE: 04-132. NASA Arctic Sea Ice Study May Stir Up Climate Models. Contrary to historical observations, sea ice in the high Arctic undergoes very small, back and forth movements twice a day, even in the dead of winter. It was once believed ice deformation at such a scale was almost non-existent. According to a recent NASA-funded study, the finding is significant. Such movements may substantially increase the production of new ice and should be factored into Arctic climate models. The phenomenon of short-period Arctic sea ice motion was investigated in detail in 1967 and has been the subject of numerous research studies since. A 1978 study found short-period ice motions disappeared almost entirely during the winter once the Arctic Ocean froze. A subsequent investigation in 2002, conducted using measurements from ocean buoys spaced hundreds of kilometers apart, found sea ice movement occurs during all seasons. 8 March 2004. From science@NASA -- A Chilling Possibility. By disturbing a massive ocean current, melting Arctic sea ice might trigger colder weather in Europe and North America. February 2004. Physics Today, p. 24. Sea-Level Rise Exacerbates Coastal Erosion. A recent analysis of more than a century's worth of data forebodes severe losses of coastal land. December 2003. American Geophysical
Union's (AGU) policy statement on Climate Change: "Human
Impacts on Climate", AGU-- 13 December 2003. Heat, Pollution Changing Precipitation, by ANDREW BRIDGES, AP Science Writer. The massive amounts of heat and pollution that rise from the world's cities both delay and stimulate the fall of precipitation, cheating some areas of much-needed rain and snow while dousing others, scientists said. The findings support growing evidence that urbanization has a sharp and alarming effect on the climate, and those changes can wreak havoc with precipitation patterns that supply life's most precious resource: water. 30 September 2003. Observations of a "weekend effect" in diurnal temperature range, Piers M. de F. Forster and Susan Solomon , National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Aeronomy Laboratory, Boulder, CO 80305; and Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AH, United Kingdom. Using surface measurements of maximum and minimum temperatures from the Global Daily Climatological Network data set, we find evidence of a weekly cycle in diurnal temperature range (DTR) for many stations in the United States, Mexico, Japan, and China....We conclude that the weekend effect is a real short time scale and large spatial scale geophysical phenomenon, which is necessarily human in origin. We thus provide strong evidence of an anthropogenic link to DTR, an important climate indicator. Several possible anthropogenic mechanisms are discussed; we speculate that aerosol-cloud interactions are the most likely cause of this weekend effect, but we do not rule out others. PNAS | vol. 100 | no. 20 | 11225-11230. 24 June 2003. ScientificAmerican.com. Hot Words: A claim of nonhuman-induced global warming sparks debate. By David Appell. Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have concluded that "across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climate period of the last millennium." Petition and article, Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide; http://www.oism.org/pproject/. Opposes Kyoto treaty restricting emissions of greenhouse gases and doubts man-made warming trend. Agrees that CO2 levels have increased substantially since the Industrial Revolution, are expected to continue doing so, and that it is reasonable to believe that humans have been responsible for much of this increase. But the effect on the environment is likely to be benign. 2003. Forecasting the Future: Exploring Evidence of Global Climate Change Alibrandi, Marsha, GIS in the Classroom and CD-Rom. Heinemann Educational Books, Inc. Portsmouth, NH. ISBN 032500479X. Grade level: 9-12. Reviewed here (10/15/2003) by Eloise Farmer [GSS teacher leader and] Biology Teacher retiring in June after 37.5 years. The book would be useful with Life and Climate, since many suggested activities have students monitoring the effects of human activities on a variety of things on local bodies of water, or ecosystems in general. It also could be used with Ecosystem Change, or Changing Climate for the same reason. Students could use GIS to map changes in coastlines due to erosion, the effects of storms on an area, etc. It really emphasizes systems, so it could be used with any of the GSS books. This link tells how it has been used in a high school. 20 July 2001. EARTH LIKELY TO WARM 4-7 DEGREES BY 2100. There's a nine out of ten chance that global average temperatures will rise 3-9 degrees Fahrenheit over the coming century, with a 4-7 degree increase most likely, according to a new probability analysis by scientists in the United States and Europe. The most likely projected increase is five times the one-degree temperature rise observed over the past century. As early as 2030 the planet is likely to heat up 1-2 degrees, say the scientists. The study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) appears in the July 20 issue of the journal Science. 11 July 2001. CERTAIN KINDS OF AIR POLLUTION MAY PRODUCE COOLING EFFECT New NASA-funded research at Texas A&M University indicates that a limited amount of aerosol pollutants in the air could partially counteract global warming, at least on a local scale. 6 June 2001. Leading Climate Scientists Advise White House on Global Warming (NAS) |
07. Controversy
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