Climate Articles
Oregon Dead Zone Blamed on Climate Change
CORVALLIS, Oregon, October 8, 2009 (ENS) - Climate change is likely responsible for the formation of a large dead zone that has formed off the coast of Oregon and Washington for the past eight years, researchers from Oregon State University said today.
Dead zones are ocean expanses that lose most of their marine life during the summer due to a lack of oxygen, called hypoxia. The Pacific Northwest dead zones, which have appeared every summer since 2002, are located in one of the nation's most important fisheries.
Jack Barth, a professor of oceanography at OSU, says, "I wouldn't be surprised if coastal dead zones appear every summer from now on because oceanic and atmospheric conditions are now primed for their regular, repeated formation."
Connections between climate change and the recent formation of dead zones in Pacific Northwest coastal waters are being studied by a research team that is funded by the National Science Foundation and co-led by Barth and Francis Chan of Oregon State University. Jane Lubchenco, now on leave from the university while serving as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, previously co-led the team.
Read More...
Climate change causing havoc to coffee and tea farmers, says Cafedirect
Climate change is already wreaking havoc on the livelihoods of small-scale tea and coffee farmers in some of the world's poorest countries, according to a three-year research project by Fairtrade drinks producer Cafedirect.
Research across four countries - Kenya, Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua - carried out with the state-funded German Technical Corporation, showed that growers are already being forced uphill to higher altitudes, at a rate of three to four metres a year on average, as temperatures rise. "A huge number of growers are now experiencing increased instances of pestilence and disease from rises in temperature. They are also facing prolonged drought and changing weather patterns," said Cafedirect chief executive, Anne MacCaig.
Read More...
'Scary' climate message from past
A new historical record of carbon dioxide levels suggests current political targets on climate may be "playing with fire", scientists say.
Researchers used ocean sediments to plot CO2 levels back 20 million years.
Levels similar to those now commonly regarded as adequate to tackle climate change were associated with sea levels 25-40m (80-130 ft) higher than today.
Scientists write in the journal Science that this extends knowledge of the link between CO2 and climate back in time.
The last 800,000 years have been mapped relatively well from ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where historical temperatures and atmospheric content have left a series of chemical clues in the layers of ice.
But looking back further has been more problematic; and the new record contains much more precise estimates of historical records than have been available before for the 20 million year timeframe.
Read More...
Yemen water crisis builds
The resource's scarcity in rural areas sends migrants to swell the capital, which may run out by 2025.
Reporting from Sana, Yemen - Aisha Sufi, a woman with tired eyes and nine children, waits for a water truck in a nation of drought.
She is one of an estimated 150,000 Yemenis who have left their villages this year bound for Sana, Yemen's capital, in search of basic needs. Water and jobs, for example, are increasingly scarce in rural regions where many populations have quadrupled since the 1980s.
"It's not good here or there, but it's better to be here," said Sufi, who lives in the Hoshaishiya neighborhood of Sana. "There, in the village, is nothing. No rain, no modern facilities, nothing to help you at all."
The migration wave -- Sana's population of 2 million is growing about 8% a year -- has overwhelmed job markets and overstretched services. The unrelenting pressure is likely to make Sana the first capital in the world to run out of drinking water -- as early as 2025, according to a recent projection by the Sana Water Basin Management Project, which is funded by the World Bank.
The water crisis, which officials say requires additional wells and water mains to service the growing city, has for the most part been lost among this nation's many other problems. Yemen has been battling Shiite Muslim rebels in the north and a separatist movement in the south and is contending with a resurgence of Al Qaeda and the scourge of piracy in the Gulf of Aden. It is the poorest Arab country, yet remains a strategic ally in the U.S. fight against terrorism.
Read More...
Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It's the oceans, stupid!
The empirical data has spoken. Cancel the global cooling party. Global warming is still happening.
The planet is heating up, thanks to human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases. But as a new NOAA-led study, "An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950" (subs. req'd, release here) concluded:
[S]ince 1950, the planet released about 20 percent of the warming influence of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to outer space as infrared energy. Volcanic emissions lingering in the stratosphere offset about 20 percent of the heating by bouncing solar radiation back to space before it reached the surface. Cooling from the lower-atmosphere aerosols produced by humans balanced 50 percent of the heating. Only the remaining 10 percent of greenhouse-gas warming actually went into heating the Earth, and almost all of it went into the ocean.
Read More...
Climate Cover-Up: A (Brief) Review
We often allude to the industry-funded attacks against climate change science, and the dubious cast of characters involved, here at RealClimate. In recent years, for example, we've commented on disinformation efforts by industry front groups such as the "Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and a personal favorite, The Heartland Institute, and by industry-friendly institutions such as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and other media outlets that assist in the manufacture and distribution of climate change disinformation.
When it comes to the climate change disinformation campaign, we have choosen to focus on the intellectually bankrupt nature of the scientific arguments, rather than the political motivations and the sometimes intriguing money trail. We leave it to others, including organizations such as SourceWatch.org, the sleuths at DeSmogBlog, authors such as Ross Gelbspan (author of The Heat is On, and The Boiling Point), and edited works such as Rescuing Science from Politics to deal with such issues.
One problem with books on this topic is that they quickly grow out of date. Just over the past few years, there have been many significant events in the ‘climate wars' as we have reported on this site. Fortunately, there is a book out now by our friends at DeSmogBlog (co-founder James Hoggan, and regular contributor Richard Littlemore) entitled Climate Cover Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming that discusses the details of the contrarian attacks on climate science up through the present, and in painstaking detail. They have done their research, and have fully documented their findings, summarized by the publisher thusly:
Read More...
Himalayan sherpas bugged by the sight of house flies at 5,000m
House flies at Everest basecamp are another sign of climate change that is melting glaciers with worrying speed
Earlier this year Dawa Steven Sherpa was resting at Everest base camp when he and his companions heard something buzzing. "What the heck is that?" asked the young Nepali climber. They searched and found a big black house fly, something unimaginable just a few years ago when no insect could have survived at 5,360 metres.
"It's happened twice this year - the Himalayas are warming up and changing fast," says Dawa, who only took up climbing seriously in 2006, but in a few years has climbed Everest twice as well as two 8,000m peaks in Tibet.
"What I do is climb. It's a family business. And what we see is the Himalayan glaciers melting. It's not a seasonal thing any more. It's rapid. It's so apparent.
"Look at the walls and slopes of the Khumbu glacier [which flows 1.5 miles down from an icefall on the southern flanks of Everest]. "You can see a clear line where the black rock becomes white. That's where it's been exposed to the sun. That means metres of thick ice have melted in just a few decades," he says.
Read More...
Why Americans Stopped Believing in Global Warming
Columnists expected a robust debate over the climate change bill in the Senate. What they did not foresee, however, was that Americans would begin to doubt the existence of climate change altogether. According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans believed that the earth was warming in 2006. Only 57 percent of Americans do so in 2009. Slightly mystified, commentators think the poll bodes poorly for the cap and trade bill and climate change legislation. Why did the public come to doubt global warming?
Read More...
Marine plant life holds the secret to preventing global warming
Life in the ocean has the potential to help to prevent global warming, according to a report published today.
Marine plant life sucks 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, but most of the plankton responsible never reaches the seabed to become a permanent carbon store.
Mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass beds are a different matter. Although together they cover less than 1 per cent of the world's seabed, they lock away well over half of all carbon to be buried in the ocean floor. They are estimated to store 1,650 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year - nearly half of global transport emissions - making them one of the most intense carbon sinks on Earth.
Read More...
Climate Change May Mean Slower Winds
This summer scientists published the first study that comprehensively explored the effect of climate change on wind speeds in the U.S. The report was not encouraging. Three decades' worth of data seemed to point to a future where global warming lowers wind speeds enough to handicap the nascent wind industry. But the real story, like so much in climate science, is far more complex.
The study of decreased wind speeds came from a team led by Sara Pryor, professor and chair of the atmospheric science program at Indiana University. It examined wind speed data from hundreds of locations across the U.S. The team attempted to correct for any change in instrument position (such as what would happen if an airport places its anemometer atop a new control tower) and calculated for each site the average annual wind speed. Pryor and her colleagues found that in most of the U.S. wind speeds appear to be waning, in many locations by more than 1 percent a year.
Read More...
Aspen Trees Die Across the West
Mysterious Ailment, in Wake of Pine-Beetle Invasion, Diminishes Fall Foliage
DENVER -- This should be the golden season across the West, when aspen paint hillsides in shades of fall.
But a mysterious ailment -- or perhaps a combination of factors -- is killing hundreds of thousands of acres of the trees from Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona through Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and into Canada, according to the U.S. government and independent scientists.
The aspen die-off comes on the heels of a pine-beetle invasion that has destroyed millions of acres of evergreens. Foresters expect to lose virtually every mature lodgepole pine in Colorado -- five million acres of them.
Aspen and lodgepole pine intermingle across many Rocky Mountain slopes at elevations of 5,000 to 8,000 feet. Millions of the trees are now down or brown, transforming the landscape into a huge fire risk. To the dismay of hunters, the dying trees are decimating habitat crucial to elk, as well as to such smaller animals as wolverine, lynx and yellow-bellied marmot.
Read More...
Global warming: Four degrees of devastation
UXBRIDGE, CANADA - The prospect of a four-degree Celsius rise in global average temperatures in 50 years is alarming - but not alarmist, climate scientists now believe.
Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.
"Two degrees C is already gone as a target," said Chris West of the University of Oxford's UK Climate Impacts Program.
"Four degrees C is definitely possible...This is the biggest challenge in our history," West told participants at the "4 Degrees and Beyond, International Climate Science Conference" at the University of Oxford last week.
Read More...
NOAA: Second hottest September on record and virtual tie for hottest in lower troposphere from satellite data
NOAA's National Climatic Data Center has issued its latest monthly, "State of the Climate: Global Analysis," which found:
The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for September 2009 was 0.62oC (1.12oF) above the 20th Century average of 15.0oC (59.0oF). This was the second warmest September on record, behind 2005, and the 33rd consecutive September with a global temperature above the 20th Century average. The last below-average September occurred in 1976.
Read More...
UN update: climate change hitting sooner and stronger
The analysis incorporates results from more than 400 major studies published since 2007 and addresses impacts on Earth systems, glaciers and ice sheets, oceans, and ecosystems. Increasingly, scientists are framing some of these transformations as "commitments"—inevitabilities that will play out even after the climate stabilizes. Fundamentally, the centuries-long buildup in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases "has most likely committed the world to a warming of 1.4-4.3 oC [by 2100], above pre-industrial surface temperatures," the report says. The study points to the 21st-century expansion of the global economy and continued reliance on high-carbon-intensity fuels as obvious factors that contribute to warming. In addition, the report notes an increasing number of signs that carbon sinks in oceans and on land are becoming less capable of absorbing excess carbon. "All of these changes characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger-than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate forcing, including faster sea-level rise, ocean acidification, melting Arctic sea-ice cover, warming polar land masses, freshening ocean currents, and shifts in circulation patterns in the atmosphere and oceans," the analysis concludes.
Read More...
Arctic Ocean melting fast, researchers say
In less than two decades, the ocean could be virtually ice-free all summer, British group contends
In less than two decades, the Arctic Ocean could be all but ice-free all summer, every summer, and a swiftly melting North would have potentially devastating implications for the rest of the planet, British researchers say.
An on-the-ground observation sampling of ice thickness, the first of its kind, indicates the Arctic Ocean's frozen cover is rapidly thinning, according to the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge. The area will be open and navigable during the summer in a decade; in 20 years, summer ice will have all but disappeared.
Read More...
Freshwaters Hardest Hit by Extinctions
They urged the creation of a new partnership between governments and scientists to help stem extinctions caused by humans via pollution, a spread of cities and expanding farms to feed a rising population, climate change and invasive species. Governments globally had aimed to slow the losses of all species by 2010.
"Massive mismanagement and growing human needs for water are causing freshwater ecosystems to collapse, making freshwater species the most threatened on Earth," according to Diversitas, an international grouping of biodiversity experts.
Extinction rates for species living in freshwater were "four to six times higher than their terrestrial and marine cousins". Fish, frogs, crocodiles or turtles are among freshwater species.
Read More...