Climate Change Articles
Warmer winter for southern scientists
Australia's Casey station during summer.
Scientists at Antarctica's Casey station have recorded the warmest July on record.
After weeks of blizzards, scientists at the station are now enjoying some relative warmth.
The maximum of 2.4 degrees and minimum of -3 are the warmest July temperatures since record keeping began at the station 20 years ago.
The Bureau of Meteorology's Steve Pendlebury says once-in-a-decade wind patterns are the likely cause.
"The air from the central Indian Ocean east of Africa somewhere, has moved all the way down right onto the Antarctic coast," he said.
The Station leader Graham Cook says it has started melting snow and is a welcome change.
He says scientists have been able to venture out into the field for the first time in a month.
Read More...
Cold, Wet Summer Doesn't Disprove Climate Change, Scientist Says
Record-breaking rainfall around the state might be letting up in the next two weeks, according to Todd Lericos, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Caribou.
"There is some hint that we might be in for a slight pattern change that will bring, you know, a little bit drier conditions to the Northeast," Lericos says. "But that's not to say we won't have at least some rain, but it'll be over the longer period slightly drier. And some of our extended range outlooks, you know essentially for the rest of the summer, are showing some above normal temperatures."
Bangor's 8.12 inches of rainfall in June beat out a previous record set in 2006. Rainfall in Portland, Lewiston and other parts of the state also rose above 8 inches last month and made for one of the wettest summers on the books.
Lericos says temperatures statewide will rise into the 70s and 80s, but no part of Maine will necessarily see better weather than another. "No place in Maine has a better or worse chance of seeing adverse weather as we move forward. It's all dependent on the patterns that happen within a week or week to week."
If the persistent rain and resulting landslides along the east coast have reminded anyone of global warming, it's Paul Mayewski of UMaine's Climate Change Institute. But Mayewski says it's important to understand the difference between weather and climate change.
"Weather is really the day to day change in what we experience and climate is really the long term averaging of that," he says. "So when we talk about climate we talk about the climate of, let's say, all of the winter seasons for the last few years, or the climate of the summer seasons for the last few years, put together."
Mayewski says there are three reasons for the wet weather. Two are natural cycles that are in their most extreme state: the low end of the solar cycle, and the phase of El Nino called La Nina.
Read More...
World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns
New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Nino southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming skeptics.
The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun's activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study.
The hottest year on record was 1998, and the relatively cool years since have led to some global warming skeptics claiming that temperatures have leveled off or started to decline. But new research firmly rejects that argument.
The research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO2 and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.
Read More...
Ah, the olive groves of balmy England
Subtropical crops such as dates, figs and rice could become staples of British agriculture within 20 years, according to government forecasts.
The assessment, produced by officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), outlines future possibilities for British food production based on recent climate data.
The forecasts highlight some of the unexpected benefits of a warmer climate. It means the British diet will in future be able to include produce currently imported from as far away as China and the Philippines, without incurring massive food miles.
However, some existing crops such as potatoes will struggle, as temperatures are predicted to rise by about 2C within 20 years.
Read More...
Winter Heat Threatens Calif. Fruit, Nut Crops
July 22, 2009 -- California's famously fertile Central Valley -- home to a $9 billion industry that provides much of the United States' supply of fruit and nut crops -- may be teetering on the edge of a climate-induced disaster, according to a new study.
A team lead by Eike Luedeling of University of California, Davis used a computer simulation of past and future climates in the 400-mile long valley to predict what impact future, human-induced global warming could have on fruit and nut tree farmers.
Read More...
Shrinking glaciers watched from afar
Satellite imagery is providing a clearer picture of the impact of climate change on a sub-Antarctic Heard Island.
Tasmanian scientists have been using the technology to monitor the island from afar.
Over the past few decades, glaciers have retreated and there have been extensive changes to vegetation on the World Heritage-listed island.
University of Tasmania Lecturer Arko Lucieer says the images show the changes are now rapid.
One of the main glaciers, Stephensons Glacier, retreated more than three kilometres in five years.
Read More...
Tiny particles with a huge environmental impact
Dust is a conundrum for climate scientists. No sooner do they think they're getting a handle on its environmental impact than researchers discover more of its unexpected tricks.
Every year, dust blows up from deserts to cover high alpine meadows in mountains. The dust burden in these mountains now is five times greater than it was before the mid-19th century. That's mainly because of increased human activity in desert areas, according to a joint announcement of research from the University of Utah and Colorado State University. This heat-absorbing dust makes the mountain snow pack melt earlier than it used to.
Read More...
The Migration of Trees ... With Some Help
On naked patches of land in western Canada and the United States, scientists are planting trees that don't belong there. It's a bold experiment to move trees threatened by global warming into places where they may thrive amid a changing climate.
Take the Western larch with its thick grooved bark and green needles. It grows in the valleys and lower mountain slopes in British Columbia's southern interior. Canadian foresters are testing how its seeds will fare when planted farther north - just below the Arctic Circle.
Something similar will be tried in the lower 48 U.S. states. Researchers will uproot moisture-loving Sitka spruce and Western red cedar that grace British Columbia's coastal rainforests and drop their seedlings in the dry ponderosa pine forests of Idaho.
Read More...
Sun's Activity Cycle Linked to Earth Climate
When the sun's weather is most active, it can impact Earth's climate in a way that is similar to El Nino and La Nina events, a new study suggests.
The sun experiences a roughly 11-year cycle, during which the activities on its roiling surface intensify and then dissipate. (One noted sign of a highly active period is the number of sunspots dotting the solar surface).
The total energy reaching Earth from the sun varies by only 0.1 percent across the solar cycle.
Scientists have sought for decades to link these ups and downs to Earth's natural weather and climate variations, and to distinguish their subtle effects from the larger pattern of human-caused global warming. But that link has proven difficult to find.
Read More...
New Green Living Site Creates Online Community Dedicated To Stop Global Warming
A new website designed to be the biggest green search engine on the internet, www.climatarians.org, has been launched by a Dutch entrepreneur and is already creating pre-launch waves in the virtual world.
Read More...
Climate Change Could Have Negative Effects On Stream And Forest Ecosystems
ScienceDaily (July 23, 2009) - A rare April freeze in 2007 provided researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory with further evidence that climate change could have negative effects on stream and forest ecosystems.
As warm weather arrives sooner in many parts of the nation, forest plants and trees on the banks flourish, shading the stream from sunlight and causing an overall decrease in productivity in the late spring and summer. A new research paper describes how a small change in canopy cover can dramatically impact a stream.
Read More...
Why people don't act on climate change
It is now 44 years since US president Lyndon Johnson's scientific advisory council warned that our greenhouse gas emissions could generate "marked changes in climate". That's 44 years of research costing, by one estimate, $3 billion per year, symposia, conferences, documentaries, articles and now 80 million references on the internet. Despite all this information, opinion polls over the years have shown that 40 per cent of people in the UK and over 50 per cent in the US resolutely refuse to accept that our emissions are changing the climate. Scarcely 10 per cent of Britons regard climate change as a major problem.
Read More...
Climate Change 'Not Simply About Polar Bears'
WASHINGTON (CN) - Senators were urged to lead rather than follow in the battle against climate change, by experts stressing the national security implications of drought, famine, and disease that result in mass migrations and failed states - the explosive ingredients of war. "We can't follow the public, we've got to lead the public," former Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner said.
"Addressing the consequences of changes in the Earth's climate is not simply about saving polar bears or preserving the beauty of mountain glaciers," Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, President of the American Security Project, said in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday. "Climate change is a risk to our national security."
A 2007 report by the Center for Naval Analysis reported that climate change is a "threat multiplier" with "the potential to create sustained natural and humanitarian disasters on a scale far beyond those we see today."
Gunn warned of the national security consequences of climate change- migrations that create a new generation of "climate refugees," the spread already seen of tropical diseases like malaria, and failing states that incubate extremism.
Read More...
Canada's prairie drought: Back to a dusty future
Farmers fret as the rivers dwindle
DURING the Depression of the 1930s, drought turned much of Alberta and Saskatchewan, on Canada's western prairies, into a dust bowl. The combination of poor harvests and low grain prices drove thousands of farmers off the land. Now some prairie dwellers reckon history is repeating itself. The fall in oil and gas prices from their record highs a year ago has brought an abrupt halt to Alberta's energy-based boom. And while grain prices have picked up, drought has once again brought billions of dollars of losses to farms and ranches.
A huge swathe of farmland spanning central Saskatchewan and Alberta, and angling northwest into British Columbia's Peace River valley has suffered its driest winter and spring in at least 50 years (and 70 in some districts). Rainfall has been less than 40% of its normal level. Ranchers are staring at dry water holes and desiccated pasture, forcing them either to sell cattle or buy feed.
Farmers are kicking at shrivelled crops. Heavy rains in late June and early July may make some fields worth harvesting but many are already lost. Some 900 farmers around Kindersley, south-west of Saskatoon, have ploughed their crops under and claimed insurance, according to Stewart Wells, the president of Canada's National Farmers Union. He foresees losses of up to 30% in wheat, barley, rapeseed and hay, and more if the drought continues.
Read More...
Native Americans Lose Land To Climate Change
Over the next century, rising sea levels will change coastlines all over the world. But the impact might be most dramatic in South Louisiana. A study out last month predicts the state will lose up to 5000 square miles in the next century - a chunk of land the size of Connecticut. If the report's authors are right, that means a lot of people in Louisiana are going to have to relocate - become climate refugees.
Read More...
The top 10 bogus statements (BS) in the climate debate
If there is any doubt that Washington D.C. is where hyperbole, distortions and silly arguments come home to roost, that doubt disappears as we listen to congressional debate on climate and energy policy. Even some of the statements coming from the Obama team lately inspire a loud "Huh?"
Jon Stewart would win a Nobel Prize for Truth, if one were awarded for diligence in revealing how some members of Congress, not to mention the conservative chattering classes, regularly insult the American people's intelligence. Unfortunately, he's only on the air 30 minutes each day.
Also unfortunately – and here's an inconvenient truth — not all of the American people are informed enough about climate change to know their intelligence has been insulted. It's a complicated topic made even more complicated by bogus arguments.
Read More...