Climate Articles

Iceberg B17-B in the Indian Ocean
The third-largest remaining piece of the slowly disintegrating B17-B iceberg, which broke off Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf a decade ago, resembles a cartoon drawing of a whale in this natural-color image from the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. The image was captured on December 30, 2009. The berg drifted around the Southern Ocean for years before heading northward into the southern Indian Ocean, southwest of Australia.
Read More...

Britain's cold snap does not prove climate science wrong
Climate skeptics are failing to understand the most basic meteorology - that weather is not the same as climate, and single events are not the same as trends
It's as predictable a feature of the British winter as log fires and roasting chestnuts: a national outpouring of idiocy every time some snow falls.
Here's what Martyn Brown says in today's Express:
As one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is growing warmer.
There's a clue as to where he might have gone wrong in that sentence: "country" has a slightly different meaning to "world". Buried at the bottom of the same article is the admission that " ... other areas including Alaska, Canada and the Mediterranean were warmer than usual." But that didn't stop Brown from using the occasion to note that "critics of the global warming lobby said the public were no longer prepared to be conned into believing that man-made emissions were adding to the problem."
Read More...

Climate change has no time for delay or denial
Powerful vested interests and climate skeptics will work overtime to block legislation and discredit the science ahead of the next global climate summit in Mexico It is often said by perceptive observers that a disconnect is in evidence in many countries between a public that want stringent action to tackle climate change and what governments are actually doing.
The United States, for example - which for many years has had no forward-looking policies in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) - is still encumbered with a large number of senators unwilling to act on account of partisanship or skepticism about the science of climate change.
It is a well-known fact that powerful vested interests and those opposed to action on climate change are working overtime to see that they can stall action for as long as possible.
The Centre for Public Integrity in the US has found that some 770 companies and interest groups have hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence America's federal policies on climate change in the past year, just as the stakes became higher with the prospect of far-reaching climate legislation in the US. That translates into more than four lobbyists for each member of Congress in Washington DC.
Read More...

With science journalism "basically going out of existence," how should climate scientists deal with well-funded, anti-science disinformation campaign?
The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.
A few scientists answered the Climategate charges almost instantly. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, whose e-mails were among those made public, made a number of television and radio appearances. A blog to which Mann contributes, RealClimate.org, also launched a quick response showing that the e-mails had been taken out of context. But they were largely alone. "I haven't had all that many other scientists helping in that effort," Mann told me recently.
Read More...

Methane release 'looks stronger'
Scientists have uncovered what appears to be a further dramatic increase in the leakage of methane gas that is seeping from the Arctic seabed.
Methane is about 20 times more potent than CO2 in trapping solar heat.
The findings come from measurements of carbon fluxes around the north of Russia, led by Igor Semiletov from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
"Methane release from the East Siberian Shelf is underway and it looks stronger than it was supposed [to be]," he said.
Professor Semiletov has been studying methane seepage in the region for the last few decades, and leads the International Siberian Shelf Study (ISSS), which has launched multiple expeditions to the Arctic Ocean.
Read More...

Melt season for Canadian Arctic sea ice outpacing global average: study
American researchers suggest the melting season for Arctic sea ice is growing faster across much of the Canadian Arctic than anywhere else in the world.
A recently published article outlines how they used satellite microwave data to measure when sea ice begins to melt in the spring and when it starts refreezing in the fall. The researchers were able to look with 99 per cent accuracy as far back as 1979 and examine the entire circumpolar globe, the first time scientists have been able to do so.
They found that, on average, sea ice has started melting 2.5 days earlier every decade and begun to refreeze 3.7 days later. That means the average melt season is just under 20 days longer than it was 30 years ago.
"All areas in the Arctic show a trend toward earlier melt onset and also a trend toward later freeze-up," says the paper, published in the latest Journal of Geophysical Research.
However, the melt period for ice in several areas of the Canadian Arctic is growing even faster.
In Baffin Bay, at the eastern gate of the Northwest Passage, it is increasing about 20 per cent faster than the global average. And in the Beaufort Sea and Hudson Bay, the melt period is now a full month longer than it was in 1979.
In fact, the melting season for Hudson Bay ice is increasing at one of the fastest paces in the world, probably because it's one of the most southerly ice packs.
Read More...

Long Drought Ahead From Global Warming, Study Says
Warmer temperatures will hurt forests and fuel wildfires, Nobel winner Steven Running finds.
A University of Montana study led by acclaimed scientist Steven Running shows that climate change will significantly extend drought periods in the Northern Rockies, stressing forests and inviting more frequent and virulent wildfires.
Running, the author of the study, is a Regents professor of ecology in UM's College of Forestry and Conservation and a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The peer-reviewed study, conducted with the help of other UM forestry researchers, predicts that global warming will have a dramatic impact on regional forests. Rising temperatures could spark an epidemic of insect infestations and cause catastrophic fires in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, "potentially affecting more than 360,000 people who live in homes in the forest-urban interface that are valued at $21 billion," according to a UM announcement about the study.
Read More...

'Humankind solely responsible for climate change'
India's top farm scientist M.S. Swaminathan holds humankind solely responsible for global warming causing climatic changes.
"Global warming is anthropogenic (man-made) and not caused by nature. Man is solely responsible for whatever is happening in the earth's atmosphere," Swaminathan, considered father of India's first green revolution, told IANS in an interview on the margins of the 97th Indian Science Congress (ISC 2010) here Thursday.
"Burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas over the last two centuries for industrial production, transportation and heating, largely by the developed countries, has led to increase in the concentration of green house gases (GHGs), mainly carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere and warming of the earth by a degree," the noted scientist said.
The cataclysmic climatic changes being witnessed are a result of the GHG emissions, affecting farm output, causing frequent droughts and floods and a gradual rise in the sea level.
Read More...

Behind Mass Die-Offs, Pesticides Lurk as Culprit
In the past dozen years, three new diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, honeybees, and - most recently - bats. Increasingly, scientists suspect that low-level exposure to pesticides could be contributing to this rash of epidemics.
Ever since Olga Owen Huckins shared the spectacle of a yard full of dead, DDT-poisoned birds with her friend Rachel Carson in 1958, scientists have been tracking the dramatic toll on wildlife of a planet awash in pesticides. Today, drips and puffs of pesticides surround us everywhere, contaminating 90 percent of the nation's major rivers and streams, more than 80 percent of sampled fish, and one-third of the nation's aquifers. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, fish and birds that unsuspectingly expose themselves to this chemical soup die by the millions every year.
But as regulators grapple with the lethal dangers of pesticides, scientists are discovering that even seemingly benign, low-level exposures to pesticides can affect wild creatures in subtle, unexpected ways - and could even be contributing to a rash of new epidemics pushing species to the brink of extinction.
Read More...

Where on Earth is it unusually warm? Greenland and the Arctic Ocean, which is full of rotten ice
Map of air temperature anomalies for December 2009, at roughly 3,000 feet above surface, Areas in orange and red are warm anomalies, areas in blue and purple are cool.
It's cold here and in northern Eurasia, but it's been positively toasty around the Arctic circle - thanks to an extreme negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation, as the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) explained in their online report yesterday.
The temperatures reported by NSIDC show some Arctic anomalies exceeding 7oC (13oF)! That's not good news for the kind of re-freezing one wants to see in the otherwise rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet (see Nature: "Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized"). It's also one reason "December 2009 had the fourth-lowest average ice extent for the month since the beginning of satellite records, falling just above the extent for 2007. The linear rate of decline for December is now 3.3% per decade."
Significantly, a new study, "Perennial pack ice in the southern Beaufort Sea was not as it appeared in the summer of 2009" by Barber et al. finds that all the crowing by the anti-science crowd about the supposed "recovery" of Arctic sea ice was quite premature:
Read More...

Arctic Tundra is Being Lost As Far North Quickly Warms
The treeless ecosystem of mosses, lichens, and berry plants is giving way to shrub land and boreal forest. As scientists study the transformation, they are discovering that major warming-related events, including fires and the collapse of slopes due to melting permafrost, are leading to the loss of tundra in the Arctic.
During the summer of 2007, lightning strikes sparked five tundra fires on Alaska's North Slope. Two of the fires - rare events north of the Arctic Circle - began in neighboring drainages, only a couple of days apart. That, in itself, might have gained the attention of tundra researchers. But the 2007 fire season would ultimately burn a record swath across the North Slope, while reshaping the way scientists think about the Arctic's response to global warming.
Researchers have known for years that the Arctic landscape is being transformed by rising temperatures. Now, scientists are amassing growing evidence that major events precipitated by warming - such as fires and the collapse of slopes caused by melting permafrost - are leading to the loss of tundra in the Arctic. The cold, dry, and treeless ecosystem - characterized by an extremely short growing season; underlying layers of frozen soil, or permafrost; and grasses, sedges, mosses, lichens, and berry plants - will eventually be replaced by shrub lands and even boreal forest, scientists forecast.
Read More...

Pine beetles transform B.C. forests into greenhouse enemy
In a single season, an army of pine beetles has transformed our allies in the battle against climate change into the enemy.
Now the province is in a race against nature, as one billion beetle-killed trees across the province slowly seep the greenhouse gases they had so generously stored up in their decades of growth.
Such a turnaround seemed unimaginable back in February, 2008, when Premier Gordon Campbell first seized on the value of B.C.'s forests in his campaign against global warming. Trees lock away carbon dioxide, and the province has a lot of them – 60 million hectares of forests. They seemed to offer a natural, elegant means of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.
"We have few natural allies in our fight against climate change that are more important than our forests," the Campbell government's Throne Speech read. The centrepiece of that speech was the Premier's climate action plan, which promises to reduce one-third of the province's GHG emissions by 2020.
Two months later, federal researchers published findings that exposed a fatal flaw in that great green design. The pine beetle epidemic has killed so many trees that the province's forests are now net emitters of greenhouse gases. Using computer modeling, they've determined the scales tipped in 2003, when the forests began to release more emissions than they absorbed.
By last year, the devastation wrought by the tiny, hungry beetles in British Columbia contributed more GHG emissions than all of the province's human activity put together – and nearly double the output of Alberta's much-maligned oil sands.
Read More...

U.S. Snow Cover Shrinking (Yes, Really)
It may not seem so in many places today, but North America and Eurasia's snow cover has shrunk, according to study of more than 40 years of weather satellite-based snow cover maps.
The discovery of a sharp decline in late winter and early spring snow cover starting in the 1980s until 1990 was revealed after researchers made overdue adjustments to decades of daily snow cover maps.
After the fine tuning the maps, New Jersey State Climatologist and Rutgers University professor David Robinson found a 1990 decline in spring snow extent that we still see today. "It has remained lower over the past 20 years compared to the previous 20 years in North America and Eurasia," he said.
Put another way, the snow cover is leaving earlier but is just
Read More...

Warmer Climate Could Stifle Carbon Uptake by Trees
Contrary to conventional belief, as the climate warms and growing seasons lengthen subalpine forests are likely to soak up less carbon dioxide, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.
As a result, more of the greenhouse gas will be left to concentrate in the atmosphere.
"Our findings contradict studies of other ecosystems that conclude longer growing seasons actually increase plant carbon uptake," said Jia Hu, who conducted the research as a graduate student in CU-Boulder's ecology and evolutionary biology department in conjunction with the university's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES.
The study will be published in the February edition of the journal Global Change Biology.
Working with ecology and evolutionary biology professor and CIRES Fellow Russell Monson, Hu found that while smaller spring snowpack tended to advance the onset of spring and extend the growing season, it also reduced the amount of water available to forests later in the summer and fall. The water-stressed trees were then less effective in converting CO2 into biomass. Summer rains were unable to make up the difference, Hu said.
"Snow is much more effective than rain in delivering water to these forests," said Monson. "If a warmer climate brings more rain, this won't offset the carbon uptake potential being lost due to declining snowpacks."
Drier trees also are more susceptible to beetle infestations and wildfires, Monson said.
Read More...

Northern Forests Do Not Benefit From Lengthening Growing Season
Forests in northern areas are stunted, verging on the edge of survival. It has been anticipated that climate change improves their growth conditions. A study published last week in Forest Ecology and Management journal shows that due to their genetic characteristics trees are unable to properly benefit from the lengthening growing season. Furthermore, the researchers were surprised to find that the mortality of established trees considerably promotes the adaptation of forests to the changing environment.
In cooperation with colleagues at the Universities of Oulu and Potsdam, Anna Kuparinen, Docent at the University of Helsinki's Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, simulated forest growth from southern to northern Finland. A meteorological dispersal model was applied to describe the spread of pollen and seeds in the atmosphere. Above all, the results illustrate the slowness of the adaptation process.
Generally, trees stop growing before the frosts and this cessation of growth has been programmed in their genotype. Therefore, trees are unable to effectively follow the increasing environmental growing season. Instead, they cease growth as dictated by their genotype. It is estimated that after hundred years from now northern forests will substantially lag behind the speed of growth that would be enabled by their environment.
Evolution is promoted by the mortality of established trees
Read More...

Lose 10 Tons in 2010: 12 Cash-Saving, Carbon-Reducing Steps - National Resource Defense Council
It's 2010. Congress is finally taking steps towards seriously dealing with America's energy addiction and outsized contribution to the world's global warming problem, but while they deliberate, here's a 12-step plan to deal with your own. Simple Steps will help you be the biggest loser on your block (and we mean this in the best way possible): This year we'll show you how to trim ten tons of heat-trapping pollutants and show you how to get help-including financial help when there are upfront costs to consider and expertise because some times you need that too.
12 Month Overview
Each month, we will take you through a new step, with a concrete plan, cost reduction strategies and alternatives if you've already taken a given action or it doesn't apply to your situation.
  1. January: Conduct a home energy audit
  2. February: Seal and insulate your home
  3. March: Upgrade your furnace
  4. April: Improve your commute
  5. May: Cool your home at no cost
  6. June: Watch what you eat
  7. July: Improve your water consumption
  8. August: Travel better
  9. September: Reduce waste
  10. October: Replace an inefficient appliance
  11. November: Make your electronics more efficient
  12. December: Cut your food waste

Read More...

Answers to Copenhagen Questions
In December I led the NRDC delegation to the Copenhagen climate summit. Many people have asked me about my experience there and what the Copenhagen Accord means for global climate change. Here are my answers.
Q. Leaders from 128 countries, and senior officials from 65 more, gathered in Copenhagen to take action against climate change. What did they accomplish?
A. President Obama and other world leaders agreed to take real and unprecedented action to curb climate change. With dissent from just five countries -- including Cuba and Sudan -- they agreed to work to keep the global average temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Centigrade, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Read More...

2009: HOTTEST YEAR FOR SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE
The journal Science reports that recent NASA data indicates that 2009 was the hottest year on record south of the Equator. The data come a month after announcements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and by the World Meterological Organization that the decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s. The NOAA is expected to announce possible record highs in the tropics when it releases its final report on 2009 temperatures this week.

COLD WEATHER DOESN'T DISPROVE GLOBAL WARMING
It might be tempting to see the recent cold snap in many parts of the US as evidence against global warming. But it's important to distinguish between short-term weather and long-term climate. Experts remind us that the cold weather doesn't disprove global warming, but is just a blip in the long-term heating trend.
"It's part of natural variability," said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, "we'll still have record cold temperatures. We'll just have fewer of them."
As the Associated Press reported, "According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880, and scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes, such as heat waves, storms, floods, droughts and even cold spells."

FOR EDUCATORS: NO IMPACT PROJECT
The free No Impact Project curriculum helps middle and high school students explore the effects their everyday behavior has on the environment and their well-being. It also guides students to take action to bring about positive change.
Read More...