Climate Articles
INFERNO ON EARTH: WILDFIRES SPREADING AS TEMPERATURES RISE
Future firefighters have their work cut out for them. Perhaps nowhere does this hit home harder than in Australia, where in early 2009 a persistent drought, high winds, and record high temperatures set the stage for the worst wildfire in the country's history. On February 9th, now known as "Black Saturday," the mercury in Melbourne topped 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46.4 degrees Celsius) as fires burned over 1 million acres in the state of Victoria-destroying more than 2,000 homes and killing more than 170 people, tens of thousands of cattle and sheep, and 1 million native animals.
Even as more people move into fire-prone wildlands around the world, the intense droughts and higher temperatures that come with global warming are likely to make fires more frequent and severe in many areas. (See table of regional observations and predictions) For southeastern Australia, home to much of the country's population, climate change could triple the number of extreme fire risk days by 2050.
Although fires typically make the news only when they grow large and put lives or property at risk, on any given day thousands of wildfires burn worldwide. Fire is a natural and important process in many ecosystems, clearing the land and recycling organic matter into the soil. Some 40 percent of the earth's land is covered with fire-prone vegetation. A number of plants-such as giant Sequoia trees and certain prairie grasses-need fire to propagate or to create the right conditions for them to flourish.
Fire patterns have changed over time as human populations have grown and altered landscapes by clearing forests, allowing pasture animals to overgraze grasslands, and importing new plant species. Across parts of the western United States, for example, cheatgrass, an invasive annual adapted to frequent burns, has supplanted native brush, desert shrub, and perennial grasses that typically experience longer intervals between fires. In other areas, mixed-age and mixed-species forests have been replaced by single-species plantations where flames can jump easily from tree to tree. The result, instead of a low-intensity restorative fire, is a fire so hot that it can cause lasting harm to soils.
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Sceptics anger Arctic scientists
Tomso, Norway - As the world climate summit closes in, scientists monitoring the impact of global warming in the far north have grown frustrated by public apathy and disbelief about the extent of the problem.
"Measuring ice thickness is extremely difficult," says Edmond Hansen, an arctic change researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute meticulously charting the effects of climate change, ahead of the December 7-18 Copenhagen summit.
"Satellites can't do it for the moment. You have to drill into the ice and use electro-magnetic techniques," he says at his office in the fjords of Tromso, a university town on the same latitude as Siberia.
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Black Carbon: An Overlooked Climate Factor
You can see it as you're flying into New Delhi - or rather, you can't see a thing. As the plane descends to the Indian capital on an ordinary November day, it is immersed in air so polluted as to be opaque, a brownish sludge that scatters any sunlight. The air clears a bit once you've deplaned, but the horizon still contracts, pollution closing off the New Delhi sky like a dome.
That soupy brown air is the result of so-called black carbon expelled into the atmosphere in and around the Indian capital, from the burning of biomass for cookstoves and of black coal for electricity, and the incomplete combustion in the old diesel engines that propel most of the cars and trucks in the city.
Breathing here isn't all that good for you - there's a reason the city is home to the "Delhi cough" - and now scientists are discovering that the sooty air isn't good for the climate either. According to some estimates, black carbon may be responsible for as much as 18% of the planet's warming, making it the No. 2 contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide, which accounts for 40%. "The world could think that we just cut CO2 and the problem is solved and we all go home, but it's not," says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climatologist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and an expert on black carbon. "That's my nightmare."
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Greenland Ice Cap Melt Accelerating
BRISTOL, UK, November 12, 2009 (ENS) - Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, reports a new study by a team of British, Dutch and American scientists.
The total 2000–2008 mass loss of about 1,500 gigatons is equivalent to 0.46 millimeters per year of global sea level rise, the scientists said.
This loss of mass is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland's fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface.
Professor Jonathan Bamber from the Bristol Glaciology Centre at the University of Bristol and an author on the paper said, "It is clear from these results that mass loss from Greenland has been accelerating since the late 1990s and the underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future."
"We have produced agreement between two totally independent estimates, giving us a lot of confidence in the numbers and our inferences about the processes," said Bamber, a glaciologist who has done previous studies of the melting taking place in Antarctica.
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U.S. Record High Temperatures Double Record Lows Since 2000
BOULDER, Colorado, November 12, 2009 (ENS) - Daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, according to new research released today.
"Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States," says Gerald Meehl, lead author of the study and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting."
The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb, he says.
If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be about even.
Instead, for the period from January 1, 2000, to September 30, 2009, the continental United States set 291,237 record highs and 142,420 record lows, as the country experienced unusually mild winter weather and intense summer heat waves.
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World has only ten years to control global warming, warns Met Office
In the first study of its kind, climate scientists looked at how much pollution the world could afford to produce between now and the end of the century in order to keep temperature rises within a "safe limit".
A number of different scenarios were run and the most likely outcome was that carbon dioxide from factories and cars peaked somewhere between 2010 and 2020 and then fell rapidly to zero by 2100.
In the worse-case scenario, modelled by the Met Office Hadley Centre, emissions had to turn negative by 2050 to stand any chance of keeping the temperature rise below 2C (3.6F). This would mean using "geo-engineering" such as artificial trees that are designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
The five-year Ensembles Project is funded by the European Commission and led by the Met Office. It brings together scientists from 66 institutions around the world.
The new research developed five climate models that predicted how much greenhouse gas could be produced by mankind, as well as naturally from plants, the oceans and soil, before concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused temperatures to rise more than 2C
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Earth 'heading for 6C' of warming
Average global temperatures are on course to rise by up to 6C without urgent action to curb CO2 emissions, the lead author of a new analysis says.
Emissions rose by 29% between 2000 and 2008, says the Global Carbon Project.
All of that growth came in developing countries, but a quarter of it came through production of goods for consumption in industrialised nations.
The study comes against a backdrop of mixed messages on the chances of a new deal at next month's UN climate summit.
According to lead scientist Corinne Le Quere, the new findings should add urgency to the political discussions.
"Based on our knowledge of recent trends and the time it takes to change energy infrastructure, I think that the Copenhagen conference next month is our last chance to stabilise at 2C in a smooth and organised way," she told BBC News.
"If the agreement is too weak or if the commitments are not respected, it's not two and a half or three degrees that we will get, it's five or six - that's the path that we are on right now."
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Clean Energy & Global Warming Reports
Executive Summary
America's reliance on fossil fuels-oil, coal and natural gas-for energy creates a host of problems, including air and water pollution, global warming pollution, high and unpredictable bills for consumers and businesses, and the need to import oil from unstable parts of the world. Moving to clean energy-such as solar and wind power, more efficient homes, and plug-in cars-will cut pollution, help rebuild our economy, and reduce America's dependence on oil.
For decades, America's use of fossil fuels-and the global warming pollution that results-has been on the rise nationally and in states across the country. But this trend is starting to change in some states-in part because of the move to clean energy. Following the lead of those states will start to put the United States on a path to lower global warming emissions and help drive the creation of a clean energy economy.
This report analyzes the most recent data available from the federal Department of Energy to calculate emissions of carbon dioxide from the use of oil, coal and natural gas at the national and state level from 1990 to 2007. Our analysis finds that:
* Emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading global warming pollutant, from fossil fuel consumption increased by 19 percent in the United States from 1990 to 2007. Nationally, the rate of emissions growth has slowed in recent years, and emissions peaked in many states in 2004 and 2005.
* Seventeen states saw declines in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use between 2004 and 2007.
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Sulfur Dioxide Air Quality Standards Going Up
WASHINGTON, DC, November 17, 2009 (ENS) - For the first time in nearly 40 years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to strengthen the nation's sulfur dioxide air quality standard to protect public health.
Power plants and other industrial facilities emit sulfur dioxide, SO2, directly into the air where it forms fine particles and acid rain. Exposure to SO2 can aggravate asthma, cause respiratory difficulties, and result in emergency room visits and hospitalization. People with asthma, children, and the elderly are especially vulnerable to exposure to this gas.
"Short-term exposures to peak SO2 levels can have significant health effects – especially for children and the elderly - and leave our families and taxpayers saddled with high health care costs," said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. "We're strengthening clean air standards, stepping up monitoring and reporting in communities most in need, and providing the American people with protections they rightly deserve."
EPA is taking public comment on a proposal to establish a new national one-hour SO2 standard, between 50 and 100 parts per billion may be present in the air during in any one hour period.
This standard is designed to protect against short-term exposures ranging from five minutes to 24 hours.
The existing standards are 140 parts per billion measured over 24 hours, and 30 ppb measured over an entire year.
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What the Future May Hold
What will the United States be like in 20 years when today's toddlers are in college
The answer will depend to a great extent on decisions we make now about the American infrastructure.
This came to mind as I was reading about yet another closure of the problem-plagued San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which is more than 70 years old. In 20 years, will today's toddlers be traveling on bridges and roads that are in even worse shape than today's? Will they endure mammoth traffic jams that start earlier and end later? Will their water supplies be clean and safe? Will the promise of clean energy visionaries be realized, or will we still be fouling the environment with carbon filth to the benefit of traditional energy conglomerates and foreign regimes that in many cases wish us anything but good?
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