Climate Articles

Stop Global Warming Virtual March
In December, leaders from more than 180 nations will meet in Copenhagen to ratify a new international global climate treaty. Show your support by joining Hopenhagen, an international movement to drive action at the United Nation's Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen. We need a climate treaty that is "ambitious, fair and effective in reducing emissions."
Visit hopenhagen.org and sign their "Climate Change" petition in support of the UN.
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Test your global IQ with our 10 questions today:
Take my Global IQ Test, then challenge your friends. For every person who completes the 10-question quiz, $1 will be donated to my Foundation by a generous supporter.
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Ship Trails over the Pacific Ocean
A bank of clouds off North America's west coast featured a series of white trails in early October 2009. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this true-color image on October 5, 2009. Although the white trails look vaguely like contrails left behind by airplanes, they actually result from ship exhaust.
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Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining
During the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of forest and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. This week at Yale Environment 360, we present an exclusive video report, Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining, that we produced in collaboration with MediaStorm. The powerful 20-minute video focuses on the environmental and social impacts of this coal-mining practice and examines the long-term effects on the region's forests and waterways.
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Mighty caribou herds dwindle, warming blamed
ON THE PORCUPINE RIVER TUNDRA, Yukon Territory -- Here on the endlessly rolling and tussocky terrain of northwest Canada, where man has hunted caribou since the Stone Age, the vast antlered herds are fast growing thin. And it's not just here. Across the tundra 1,500 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the east, Canada's Beverly herd, numbering more than 200,000 a decade ago, can barely be found today.
Halfway around the world in Siberia, the biggest aggregation of these migratory animals, of the dun-colored herds whose sweep across the Arctic's white canvas is one of nature's matchless wonders, has shrunk by hundreds of thousands in a few short years. From wildlife spectacle to wildlife mystery, the decline of the caribou - called reindeer in the Eurasian Arctic - has biologists searching for clues, and finding them.
They believe the insidious impact of climate change, its tipping of natural balances and disruption of feeding habits, is decimating a species that has long numbered in the millions and supported human life in Earth's most inhuman climate.
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Weather Channel expert on Georgia's record-smashing global-warming-type deluge
Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist at the Weather Channel, has written a must-read post on the recent record Georgia deluges, "Off the chain without a 'cane" (reprinted below). He makes a key point that had not occurred to me about the devastating September rainstorms:
Usually during that month when there's wild weather, including precipitation extremes, it's as a result of a hurricane or tropical storm. Not in 2009.
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Just How Sensitive Is Earth's Climate to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide?
Carbon dioxide levels climbing toward a doubling of the 280 parts per million (ppm) concentration found in the preindustrial atmosphere pose the question: What impact will this increased greenhouse gas load have on the climate? If relatively small changes in CO2 levels have big effects�meaning that we live in a more sensitive climate system�the planet could warm by as much as 6 degrees Celsius on average with attendant results such as changed weather patterns and sea-level rise. A less sensitive climate system would mean average warming of less than 2 degrees C and, therefore, fewer ramifications from global warming.
Human civilization is now running an experiment (and without a control) that will definitively determine the answer. Scientists, however, have also realized that history can be a guide: Two new papers published in Science this week examine the historical record preserved in a stalagmite and microscopic seashells, respectively, to offer some clues.
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