Climate Articles

Species' extinction threat grows
More than a third of species assessed in a major international biodiversity study are threatened with extinction, scientists have warned.
Out of the 47,677 species in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 17,291 were deemed to be at serious risk.
These included 21% of all known mammals, 30% of amphibians, 70% of plants and 35% of invertebrates.
Conservationists warned that not enough was being done to tackle the main threats, such as habitat loss.
"The scientific evidence of a serious extinction crisis is mounting," warned Jane Smart, director of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Biodiversity Conservation Group.
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Climate map shows human impacts
A map designed to show the predicted effects of a 4C rise in global average temperature has been unveiled by the UK government.
It shows a selection of the impacts of climate change on human activity.
These include extreme temperatures, drought, effects on water availability, agricultural productivity, the risk of forest fire and sea level rise. The map is based on peer-reviewed science from the Met Office's Hadley Centre and other scientific groups.
It was launched at the Science Museum by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Climate and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and the UK's chief scientist Professor John Beddington.
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Warming 'big threat' to Yosemite
Wildfires within California's world famous Yosemite National Park could become more frequent and severe due to climate change, say scientists.
New research in the International Journal of Wildland Fire says warmer temperatures pose a twin threat.
As well as directly triggering fires, they could also melt the snow that covers the forest in winter.
Lightning strikes would then trigger more fires, burning more intensely.
"People already expect more ignitions from hotter summers," says Dr James Lutz of the University of Washington at Seattle, US, one of the study's authors.
That is because predicted higher temperatures will make vegetation more flammable and allow larger fires to take hold.
"But this research suggests that declines in snowpack will have an additional effect," says Dr Lutz.
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North Atlantic Fish Populations Shifting as Ocean Temperatures Warm
About half of 36 fish stocks in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, many of them commercially valuable species, have been shifting northward over the last four decades, with some stocks nearly disappearing from U.S. waters as they move farther offshore, according to a new study by NOAA researchers.
Their findings, published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, show the impact of changing coastal and ocean temperatures on fisheries from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to the Canadian border.
Janet Nye, a postdoctoral researcher at NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. and the lead author of the study, looked at annual spring survey data from 1968 to 2007 for stocks ranging from Atlantic cod and haddock to yellowtail and winter flounders, spiny dogfish, Atlantic herring, and less well-known species like blackbelly rosefish. Historic ocean temperature records and long-term processes like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation dating back to 1850 were also analyzed to put the temperature data into context.
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Jellyfish swarm northward in warming world
KOKONOGI, Japan - A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venomous tentacles trapped in a fishing net. Within minutes, hundreds more were being hauled up, a pulsating mass crowding out the catch of mackerel and sea bass.
The fishermen leaned into the nets, grunting and grumbling as they tossed the translucent jellyfish back into the bay, giants weighing up to 200 kilograms (450 pounds), marine invaders that are putting the men's livelihoods at risk.
The venom of the Nomura, the world's largest jellyfish, a creature up to 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter, can ruin a whole day's catch by tainting or killing fish stung when ensnared with them in the maze of nets here in northwest Japan's Wakasa Bay.
"Some fishermen have just stopped fishing," said Taiichiro Hamano, 67. "When you pull in the nets and see jellyfish, you get depressed."
This year's jellyfish swarm is one of the worst he has seen, Hamano said. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.
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Snows of Kilimanjaro Shrinking Rapidly, and Likely to be Lost
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The remaining ice fields atop famed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania could be gone within two decades and perhaps even sooner, based on the latest survey of the ice fields remaining on the mountain.
The findings indicate a major cause of this ice loss is very likely to be the rise in global temperatures. Although changes in cloudiness and precipitation may also play a role, they appear less important, particularly in recent decades.
The first calculation of ice volume loss indicates that from 2000 to 2007, the loss by thinning is now roughly equal to that by shrinking.
These predictions, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are among the latest dramatic physical evidence of global climate change.
Paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University, and his colleagues amassed a trail of data showing the rapid loss of ice atop Africa's highest mountain:
85 percent of the ice that covered the mountain in 1912 had been lost by 2007, and 26 percent of the ice there in 2000 is now gone;
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Arctic Sediments Show that 20th Century Warming is Unlike Natural Variation
Buffalo, N.Y. - The possibility that climate change might simply be a natural variation like others that have occurred throughout geologic time is dimming, according to evidence in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published today.
The research reveals that sediments retrieved by University at Buffalo geologists from a remote Arctic lake are unlike those seen during previous warming episodes.
The UB researchers and their international colleagues were able to pinpoint that dramatic changes began occurring in unprecedented ways after the midpoint of the twentieth century.
"The sediments from the mid-20th century were not all that different from previous warming intervals," said Jason P. Briner, PhD, assistant professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "But after that things really changed. And the change is unprecedented."
The sediments are considered unique because they contain rare paleoclimate information about the past 200,000 years, providing a far longer record than most other sediments in the glaciated portion of the Arctic, which only reveals clues to the past 10,000 years.
"Since much of the Arctic was covered by big ice sheets during the Ice Age, with the most recent glaciations ending around 10,000 years ago, the lake sediment cores people get there only cover the past 10,000 years," said Briner.
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El Nino-driven sea surface temperatures are soaring. Forecast: Hot and then even hotter.
Last week I noted that the weak El Nino appears to be strengthening, as expected, so record temperatures will continue.
Nino RegionsThe warming in the Nino 3.4 region of the Pacific is typically used to define an El Nino � sustained postive sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies of greater than 0.5^oC across the central tropical Pacific Ocean.
After languishing for months, Nino 3.4 SSTs finally took off, as many models had been predicting. Last week, the anomaly was 1.1^oC. This week it was 1.5^oC. This SST data is from the NOAA's October 26 weekly update on the El Nino/Southern oscillation, "ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions":
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World Faith Leaders Join Forces to Battle Global Warming
LONDON, UK, November 4, 2009 (ENS) - The world's religions have a crucial role to play in the fight against global climate change, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday, characterizing the battle with global warming as a "moral" issue.
It is a pivotal moment for our world," said Ban as he co-hosted with Prince Philip an inter-faith gathering of religious and secular leaders at Windsor Castle called Many Heavens, One Earth: Faith Commitments for a Living Planet.
At the event organized by Prince Philip's Alliance of Religions and Conservation, leaders from nine of the world's major faith traditions are highlighting the Earth's fragility, and discussing initiatives to protect the planet against the ravages of climate change.
Prince Philip said, "The fact that the majority of the world's faiths ascribe the creation of the world to an all-powerful deity, implies that the leaders and followers of each faith have a moral responsibility for the continued well-being of our planet, and particularly for its natural environment. In recent times it has become apparent that the sheer size of the human population, and its consequent increasing demand for natural resources, is seriously threatening the future health of our planet and the welfare of all life on Earth."
Leaders from Baha'ism, Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism and Sikhism gathered to commit to long-term practical action to save the environment.
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Revealed: polluters' fear tactics on climate
BIG greenhouse polluting companies around the world, employing thousands of lobbyists, are exerting heavy pressure on governments to weaken climate change laws at home and slow progress on an international climate agreement in Copenhagen, a global investigation reveals.
In Australia, 20 companies who have already won the most concessions from the Rudd Government's emissions trading scheme employ 28 lobbying firms with well over 100 staff, many of them former politicians, political advisers or government officials.
In the US there are more than 2800 climate lobbyists, five for every member of Congress, an increase of more than 400 per cent over the past six years. From Washington to Canberra and New Delhi to Brussels, companies and their lobbyists are often raising the same widespread fears about jobs, power blackouts and economic losses unless governments weaken commitments to combat climate change.
The report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists examined the climate lobby in eight countries including the US, Canada, Australia, India, Japan, China, Belgium and Brazil. It relied on more than 200 interviews, lobbying registers and political donation records. The Herald collaborated in the investigation for Australia.
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Vanishing glaciers jolt smokestack China
AS an expedition from Chinese state television worked its way across the remote Tibetan plateau earlier this year, the explorers were amazed by what they found.
The plateau has been called the world's third largest ice store after the North and South Poles. Yet according to Chinese scientists, the "third pole" is warming up faster than anywhere else on earth.
The TV team found bare rock where glaciers had retreated. Lakes had dried up. Lush grassland had turned to desert. The livestock was dead, the farmers impoverished.
They brought back a visual lesson in global warming so stark that censors allowed the programme makers to broadcast a frank expos�. Their film attracted the attention of the Communist party's leaders and has put climate change at the centre of a remarkably open debate in China ahead of a summit on the issue in Copenhagen next month.
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Soil scientists warn of worsening food crisis
DesertificationSoil scientists have warned of worsening food insecurity in the next decades unless pragmatic measures were adopted to enhance soil productivity by minimising the effects of changing weather patterns.
Quoting from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted that climate change, could cause potential crop yields from rain-fed agriculture to decline by 50 per cent in some African countries by 2050 while the population increased from 770 million in 2005 to 1.5 billion in 2050, the scientists said this would result in soaring prices for inadequate food which would make most of the people hungry.
Dr. Kofi Budu Laryea, a Professor at the Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences, University of Ghana, said the current farming practices (slash and burn) involving burning to clear the land, taking away of the top soil, did not encourage environmental sustainability but rather fuelled climate change.
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