Climate Articles
Drought in Texas
It may not be sudden and dramatic like most natural disasters, but drought is just as devastating. Drought withers crops and shrinks rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, affecting agriculture, transportation, recreation and tourism, forestry, and energy production. The National Drought Mitigation Center estimates that damage inflicted by drought amounts to $6-8 billion per year in the United States. It is the most costly natural hazard.
In the summer of 2009, the region of the United States most affected by drought was southern and central Texas. The U.S. Drought Monitor classified the drought in Texas as exceptional or extreme, the two highest classifications for drought intensity. According to the Wall Street Journal, the drought had caused $3.6 billion in crop and livestock losses as of July 28.
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Relative Amounts of Bad Ozone Ingredients Across the U.S.
When ozone forms at ground level, it can cause respiratory illness and can damage crops and other plants. At the Earth's surface, the ingredients for making ozone are nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (organic chemicals that vaporize easily). Both of these ingredients are found in the air pollution from vehicles (and gasoline vapors), power plants, and industrial activities, but volatile organics are also released naturally from trees and other vegetation.
Because both kinds of chemicals-plus summertime sunlight and heat-are needed to make ground-level ozone, regulators could control ozone production by reducing only one ingredient. But which one? These maps show a satellite-based approach to deciding when it would be more effective to reduce nitrogen oxides and when it would be more effective to reduce volatile organic compounds. Based on data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite, the maps show the relative amounts of the volatile organic compound formaldehyde and nitrogen dioxide in July and September 2005.
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Millennium Project Report Issued on the Future of the World
A major report issued by the United Nations Millenium Project has just been released. It finds that half the world appears vulnerable to social instability and violence due to increasing and potentially prolonged unemployment from the recession as well as several longer-term issues: decreasing water, food, and energy supplies
per person; the cumulative effects of climate change; and increasing migrations due to political, environmental, and economic conditions. It also finds some good in the global financial crisis, which may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centered adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood.
After 13 years of the Millennium Project's global futures research, it is increasingly clear that the world has the resources to address its challenges. Coherence and direction has been lacking. But recent meetings of the U.S. and China, as well as of NATO and Russia, and the birth of the G-20 plus the continued work of the G-8 promise to improve global strategic collaboration. It remains to be seen if this spirit of cooperation can continue and if decisions will be made on the scale necessary to really address the global challenges discussed in this report.
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Sick Fish May Get Sicker Due To Climate Change And Other Stresses
ScienceDaily (Aug. 5, 2009) - Entire populations of North American fish already are being affected by several emerging diseases, a problem that threatens to increase in the future with climate change and other stresses on aquatic ecosystems, according to a noted U.S. Geological Survey researcher giving an invited talk on this subject August 3 at the Wildlife Disease Association conference in Blaine, Wash.
"A generation ago, we couldn't have imaged the explosive growth in disease issues facing many of our wild fish populations," said Dr. Jim Winton, a fish disease specialist at the USGS Western Fisheries Research Center. "Most fish health research at that time was directed toward diseases of farmed fish."
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New El Nino threatens world with weather woe
Forecasters say this one is brewing up to be the second-strongest on record
A new El Nino has begun. The sporadic Pacific Ocean warming, which can disrupt weather patterns across the world, is intensifying, say meteorologists.
So, over the next few months, there may be increased drought in Africa, India and Australia, heavier rainfall in South America and increased extremes in Britain, of warm and cold. It may make 2010 one of the hottest years on record.
The cyclical phenomenon, which happens every two to seven years, is a major determinant of global weather systems. The 1997-98 El Nino combined with global warming to push 1998 into being the world's hottest year, and caused major droughts and catastrophic forest fires in South-east Asia which sent a pall of smoke right across the region.
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Climate change causing oceans to become more acidic, endangering sea life
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are a major contributor to climate change, and now a new study has confirmed that atmospheric CO2 is also affecting the ocean chemistry, potentially threatening marine life.
Montana State University scientist Robert Dore has been taking samples of water in the Pacific Ocean for almost two decades.
"We're sailing out of Honolulu harbor. We're in the harbor right now and just about to break away from the dock."
I reached Prof. Dore on board the research vessel Kilo Moana, about to leave for a point in the Pacific known as Station Aloha, where he has been studying the ocean water since the late 1980s.
"We've been going to the same spot in the Pacific Ocean, and we've been measuring a whole suite of different chemical, biological, physical measurements to try and characterize long-term change in the open ocean environment. And one of the key things that we measure is CO2 levels. And we've been able to document this progressive invasion of atmospheric CO2 into the ocean."
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Forests fall to beetle outbreak
MEDICINE BOW NATIONAL FOREST, Wyoming (Reuters) - From the vantage point of an 80-foot (25 meter) tower rising above the trees, the Wyoming vista seems idyllic: snow-capped peaks in the distance give way to shimmering green spruce.
But this is a forest under siege. Among the green foliage of the healthy spruce are the orange-red needles of the sick and the dead, victims of a beetle infestation closely related to one that has already laid waste to millions of acres (hectares) of pine forest in North America.
"The gravity of the situation is very real," said Rolf Skar, a forest campaigner with Greenpeace.
The plague has cost billions of dollars in lost timber and land values and may thwart efforts to combat climate change, as forests are major storing houses of carbon, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.
The beetle outbreak, which has taken a lesser, but mounting, toll on spruce trees, could make it that much tougher to meet the ambitious target to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050.
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Study predicts hotter summers
But not all experts warm to climate report's forecast
If you think it's hot in Georgia now, just wait.
In a few decades, summer highs will climb consistently into the 90s, often hitting the 100 degree-mark - and that's in Athens.
Deep South Georgia temperatures will hit 90 on 165 days per year by 2080 as global warming progresses - nearly half the days in the year, according to a report recently released by the United States Global Change Research Program.
The report, compiled from ongoing research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a dozen other federal agencies, is the first federal report to look at regional impacts of global change caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases humans pump into the atmosphere.
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Wobbling Earth Triggers Climate Change
Aug. 14, 2009 -- Regular wobbles in the Earth's tilt were responsible for the global warming episodes that interspersed prehistoric ice ages, according to new evidence.
The finding is the result of research led by Russell Drysdale of the University of Newcastle that has been able to accurately date the end of the penultimate ice age for the first time.
The new dates, which appear in the today's edition of Science, show the end of the second last ice age occurring 141,000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
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Arctic Ocean may be polluted soup by 2070
WITHIN 60 years the Arctic Ocean could be a stagnant, polluted soup. Without drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, the Transpolar Drift, one of the Arctic's most powerful currents and a key disperser of pollutants, is likely to disappear because of global warming.
The Transpolar Drift is a cold surface current that travels right across the Arctic Ocean from central Siberia to Greenland, and eventually out into the Atlantic. It was first discovered in 1893 by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who tried unsuccessfully to use the current to sail to the North Pole. Together with the Beaufort Gyre, the Transpolar Drift keeps Arctic waters well mixed and ensures that pollution never lingers there for long.
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Benchmark glaciers' shrinking at faster rate, study finds
Climate change is shrinking three of the nation's most studied glaciers at an accelerated rate, and government scientists say that finding bolsters global concerns about rising sea levels and the availability of fresh drinking water.
Known as "benchmark glaciers," the South Cascade Glacier in Washington state, the Wolverine Glacier on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula and the Gulkana Glacier in interior Alaska all have shown a "rapid and sustained" retreat, according to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey that was released Thursday.
"They are living on the edge," Ed Josberger, a USGS scientist based in Tacoma, Wash., said of the three glaciers. "We've crossed a threshold, and these glaciers along with those globally are shrinking."
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Glaciers a canary in the coal mine of global warming
U.S. scientists monitoring shrinking glaciers in Washington and Alaska reported this week that a major meltdown is under way.
A 50-year government study found that the world's glaciers are melting at a rapid and alarming rate. The ongoing study is the latest in a series of reports that found glaciers worldwide are melting faster than anyone had predicted they would just a few years ago.
It offers a clear indication of an accelerating climate change and warming earth, according to the authors.
Since 1959, the U.S. Geological Survey, which published the study on its Web site, has been tracking the movements of the South Cascade glacier in Washington and the Wolverine and Gulkana glaciers in Alaska. The three glaciers are considered "benchmarks" for the conditions of thousands of other glaciers because they're in different climate zones and at various elevations.
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Spectacular Melting Of The Largest French Glacier
ScienceDaily (Aug. 10, 2009) - Located over 12 000 kilometers from the Alps, the Kerguelen Islands are home to the largest French glacier, the Cook ice cap (which had an area of around 500 km2 in 1963). By combining historical information with recent satellite data, the glaciologists at the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography (Université Paul Sabatier / CNRS / CNES / IRD) have observed increasingly rapid shrinkage of the ice.
Over the last 40 years, the Cook ice cap has thinned by around 1.5 meters per year, its area has decreased by 20%, and retreat has been twice as rapid since 1991. Their work has been just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
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