Climate Articles

Global warming to trigger more warming
OSLO (Reuters) - Climate change caused by mankind will release extra heat-trapping gases stored in nature into the atmosphere in a small spur to global warming, a study showed.
But the knock-on effect of the additional carbon dioxide -- stored in soils, plants and the oceans -- on top of industrial emissions building up in the atmosphere will be less severe than suggested by some recent studies, they said.
"We are confirming that the feedback exists and is positive. That's bad news," lead author David Frank of the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL said of the study in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.
"But if we compare our results with some recent estimates (showing a bigger feedback effect) then it's good news," Frank, an American citizen, told Reuters of the report with other experts in Switzerland and Germany.
The data, based on natural swings in temperatures from 1050-1800, indicated that a rise of one degree Celsius (1.6 degree Fahrenheit) would increase carbon dioxide concentrations by about 7.7 parts per million in the atmosphere.
That is far below recent estimates of 40 ppm that would be a much stronger boost to feared climate changes such as floods, desertification, wildfires, rising sea levels and more powerful storm, they said.
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The year climate science caught up with what top scientists have been saying privately for years
Key aspects of the climate are changing faster than expected and if we stay on our current emissions path, we face catastrophe January 4, 2010
In 2009, the scientific literature caught up with what top climate scientists have been saying privately for a few years now:
* Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected - particularly ice melt, everywhere you look on the planet.
* If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century's end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread Dust-Bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9^oF warming - much of which could be all but irreversible for centuries. And that's not the worst-case scenario!
* The consequences for human health and well being would be extreme.
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STORM SHELTER NEEDED IN HAITI; THE STORM OVER CLIMATE RAGES ON
How do you dispose of the concrete rubble of shattered cities? Truck it inland to sites that most will never see? Or build an island memorial in remembrance?
(Forget about recycling the concrete into new buildings. New buildings made from the material that crushed so many would be filled with hauntings.) With the hurricane season only months away, how can shelter stronger than tents be built to protect from a disaster from the skies?
Perhaps a meeting should be convened of global architects, engineers and in particular panelized building manufacturers. What can be built that's sturdy, anchored to the ground, and constructed at least in part by Haitians?
The Haitian side of the island of Hispaniola has been deforested. Forget about building with wood.
Forget, too, about trailers as long-term shelter solutions as with Katrina: Too much bulk to ship, too many people to house. At first, panelized buildings of wood, foam, metal or plastic could be shipped in containers from abroad. Then factories could be set up in Haiti to build panel homes using local workers who had lost their livelihoods. Homebuilding would be the beginnings of economy rebuilding. But who will pay?
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Study Documents Reaction Rates for Three Chemicals With High Global Warming Potential
ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2010) - A study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides new information about the rates at which three of the most powerful greenhouse gases are destroyed by a chemical reaction that takes place in the upper atmosphere.
The three compounds are potentially important because they absorb infrared energy in the so-called "atmospheric window" region -- at wavelengths where other major greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide allow radiation to pass freely out into space. Though these long-lived compounds now exist in relatively low concentrations, their ability to absorb energy at these wavelengths means their contributions to global warming could increase if their levels continue to rise.
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Rapid Sea Ice Breakup along the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf - Photos
Within a 24-hour space, an area of sea ice larger than the state of Rhode Island broke away from the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf and shattered into many smaller pieces. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites captured this event in this series of photo-like images from January 12 and January 13, 2010.
The long, narrow tongue of ice is a bridge of sea ice linking the A-23A iceberg to the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf in West Antarctica. The ice bridge is fast ice, or sea ice that does not move because it is anchored to the shore. Compared to an ice shelf, the sea ice is a thin shell of ice over the ocean. The difference in thickness is visible in the images.
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Evidence for climate change caused by man mounts
One degree Fahrenheit might not sound like a lot, but picture the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a cup of water that amount. Multiply that for a swimming pool. Do so again for a planet, say Earth.
For biology and environmental studies professor Dan Perlman of Brandeis University in Waltham, that's the import of a new report citing the past decade as the globe's warmest on record, by nearly one degree.
"That, along with all the other evidence, continues to support the idea that we're in store for something really big here," Perlman said this past week, citing his belief that man-made emissions are artificially warming the Earth. "It's like it's another few bricks in our certainty."
The report, issued Tuesday by the National Climatic Data Center, found that the decade 2000 to 2009 had the highest average temperature dating back to the start of record-keeping in 1880. The decade was 0.96 degree warmer than the 129-year average, breaking the record of 0.56 degree warmer set by the '90s and continuing a trend from the '60s.
Also, while 0.96 degree represents a significant amount of energy, Perlman said, that number is an average for the globe, with some places staying flat or cooling and others, like the polar north, spiking.
"There are some places that are really getting hammered," he said.
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Fewer temperature reports could underestimate warming trend, Environment Canada says
Environment Canada says climate scientists who track global temperature trends may be underestimating the amount of warming in the Canadian Arctic, because they are working with data from a declining sample of weather stations across the region.
A U.S. government agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, compiles an important database of historic surface temperatures, based on readings from thousands of local weather stations across the planet. The raw data is obtained from the World Meteorological Organization, which receives temperatures from national governments around the world.
The number of local stations included in that database has dropped precipitously in recent years. In Canada, for example, temperature measurements for the 1970s were sampled from nearly 600 stations across the country, compared to only 35 stations today.
Only one station -- Eureka, on Ellesmere Island -- is included in the 2009 database to measure the temperature for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle, even though the federal government still operates more than 100 stations in the high Arctic.
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Adapting to Climate Change
While the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is greater than ever, we now also ought to focus attention on adapting our buildings to the inevitable impacts of climate change.
Climate change is no longer a question of whether or when. It is a reality. Northern regions have experienced significant warming in the past few decades. Glaciers and pack ice in the Antarctic and Arctic are melting at an alarming rate. Rising sea levels are driving residents of some low-lying island countries from their homes. Changing precipitation patterns are turning arable land into deserts and exacerbating forest fires. And powerful storms are appearing in unusual places with devastating ferocity. Worse, the pace of these changes has surpassed even the most dire predictions of a few years ago. A new report on the impacts of climate change that will be seen in the U. S. paints the clearest picture yet of what's ahead. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a multi-agency research effort set up under the George W. Bush Administration, produced "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States" (available at www.globalchange.gov), a document that provides sobering projections about specific climate-change impacts for different regions of the country. The impacts in the U.S. of the "unequivocal" global warming that is occurring, according to the report, will include higher temperatures in every region, greater incidence of intense rainfall events in the Northeast, droughts in the West, rising sea levels that will inundate key roadways and ports along the Gulf Coast, increased crop pests and reduced crop production in the Midwest, and rising heat-related deaths in cities.
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CU Scientists: Asian Air Pollution Affecting Western States
GRANTS PASS, Ore. - Ozone blowing over from Asia is raising background levels of a major ingredient of smog in the skies over California, Oregon, Washington and other Western states, according to a new study appearing in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.
The amounts are small and, so far, only found in a region of the atmosphere known as the free troposphere, at an altitude of two to five miles, but the development could complicate U.S. efforts to control air pollution.
Though the levels are small, they have been steadily rising since 1995, and probably longer, said lead author Owen R. Cooper, a research scientist at the University of Colorado attached to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
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The real holes in climate science
Like any other field, research on climate change has some fundamental gaps, although not the ones typically claimed by sceptics. Quirin Schiermeier takes a hard look at some of the biggest problem areas.
The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November presented an early Christmas present to climate-change denialists. Amid the more than 1,000 messages were several controversial comments that - taken out of context - seemingly indicate that climate scientists have been hiding a mound of dirty laundry from the public.
A fuller reading of the e-mails from CRU in Norwich, UK, does show a sobering amount of rude behaviour and verbal faux pas, but nothing that challenges the scientific consensus of climate change. Still, the incident provides a good opportunity to point out that - as in any active field of inquiry - there are some major gaps in the understanding of climate science. In its most recent report in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted 54 'key uncertainties' that complicate climate science.
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World's glaciers melting at accelerated pace, leading scientists say
From the Alps to the Andes, the world's glaciers are retreating at an accelerated pace - despite the recent controversy over claims by the United Nations' body of experts, leading climate scientists said today.
Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, said there is strong evidence from a variety of sources of significant melting of glaciers - from the area around Kilimanjaro in Africa to the Alps, the Andes, and the icefields of Antarctica because of a warming climate. Ice is also disappearing at a faster rate in recent decades, he said.
"It is not any single glacier," he said. "It is very clear that these glaciers are behaving in a similar fashion."
The United Nations' climate science experts admitted today that it did not have the evidence to support the claim in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035.
Thompson, in a conference call with reporters, would not be drawn into making specific predictions on the future of the Himalayan glaciers. He said only about 800 of the 46,000 glaciers in the Himalayas are being monitored by scientists. Data from those under observation suggests that 95% of glaciers are in retreat, but it is still unclear how much mass the glaciers are losing without knowing the depth of the affected places. Scientists still do not have enough of that data, he said. It was also unclear that Himalayan glaciers were thinning at a faster pace than in other parts of the world.
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Global warming opens Arctic for Tokyo-London undersea cable
Global warming has melted so much Arctic ice that a telecommunication group is moving forward with a project that was unthinkable just a few years ago: laying underwater fiber optic cable between Tokyo and London by way of the Northwest Passage.
The proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Asia, said Walt Ebell, CEO of Kodiak-Kenai Cable Co. The route is the shortest underwater path between Tokyo and London.
The quicker transmission time is important in the financial world where milliseconds can count in executing profitable trades and transactions. "Speed is the crux," Ebell said. "You're cutting the delay from 140 milliseconds to 88 milliseconds."
The project, while still facing many significant obstacles, also serves as an example of how warming has altered the Arctic landscape in profound ways.
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