Climate Articles

We invest in research, but what about teaching?
Improving science education requires rethinking academic priorities
Since President Obama's announcement of the Educate to Innovate program in November 2009, an encouraging number of technology and media companies, non-profit organizations and government agencies have been working in concert to strengthen the nation's approach to science education. But the reality is that the lion's share of transformation must come from within: from school systems, in the case of K-12 education, and from the academy, in the case of higher education.
A position paper recently issued by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) illustrates this point in the context of higher education. Vikram Savkar, Senior VP & Publishing Director for Education Markets at NPG has the story in this repost.
A significant majority, 77 percent, of the 450 faculty surveyed for the paper consider their educational responsibilities to be equally as important as research responsibilities. Only 6 percent consider research more important than education. Yet when asked to appoint a hypothetical candidate to an open tenure position in their department, the majority chose a star researcher with poor teaching skills over both a star teacher with little research background and a candidate equally skilled, though not notable, in both teaching and research.
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Why Is Population Control Such a Radioactive Topic?
We put that question to several experts from diverse perspectives, including a feminist, a science writer, an obstetrician, a racial justice advocate, and the author of The Population Bomb.
They'll be checking in on this Mother Jones forum starting Wednesday to discuss their controversial answers with readers—and each other. Want to talk to Paul Ehrlich, Fred Pearce, Julia Whitty, and the rest of our panel about their take on population control? Now's your chance. Leave a question below for our experts and they'll respond this week.
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New Jersey-sized dead zone envelops Gulf Coast
Our ongoing efforts to wipe out sea life may lack the media-grabbing pizzazz of a Titanic oil spill, but it does not lack the punch. See, for instance, "Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones "devoid of fish and seafood" are poised to expand and "remain for thousands of years"). Or watch coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson's 18-minute TED talk, "How we wrecked the ocean":
Some aquatic dead zones are primarily due to global warming, and some are due to fertilizer runoff. In the future the two will combine with acidification to wipe out most ocean life if we don't change course soon. Now a new study says U.S. corn ethanol policy will aggravate the New Jersey-size (!) area of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico.
As Scientific American explains:
The water in brooks, streams and creeks from Michigan to Puerto Rico carries a heavy load of pollutants, particularly nitrates from fertilizers. These nitrogen and oxygen molecules that crops need to grow eventually make their way into rivers, lakes and oceans, fertilizing blooms of algae that deplete oxygen and leave vast "dead zones" in their wake. There, no fish or typical sea life can survive. And scientists warn that a federal mandate to produce more biofuel may make the situation even worse.
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Which Household Cleaners Contain Secret Toxic Ingredients?
The label on my shower spray cleaner claims it's supposed to smell like ylang ylang. To me it smells like, well, chemicals. I was curious to see whether any real ylang ylang actually made its way into my cleaner, so I looked up the ingredients online. No ylang ylang (or any other plant for that matter) in sight. Near the end of a long list of ingredients were the words "fragrance oil." Mysterious. Is my shower spray hiding something?
The environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice thinks it might be. Turns out that despite a New York state law that requires manufacturers of cleaning products to disclose the ingredients in their products, very few manufacturers are willing to cough up the full list. Earthjustice contacted dozens of companies and asked them to comply with the law, but four major manufacturers refused. (Full list of companies and products below.) Earthjustice and a coalition of other environmental groups responded by suing them (PDF). Jamie Silberberger is the director of programs and policy at Women's Voices for the Earth, another group in the coalition. "We know that there are chemicals in cleaning products that are linked to reproductive harm, asthma, and a whole host of other problems," says Silberberger. "But if consumers don't know what's in these products, they can't make an informed decision about what to buy. We have the right to know what we're being exposed to."
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L.A. Times: Climate change is the true crisis
Lawmakers today aren't seeing the forest for the trees; that will change when the forest has burned or been destroyed by bark beetles, but by then it will be too late. That's the concluding paragraph from a terrific editorial in today's L.A. Times, "Climate change is the true crisis: West Virginia's mining disaster and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill were disastrous and investigations are justified, but the real threat is much worse."
The piece opens:
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: One deadly explosion while extracting fossil fuels may be regarded as a misfortune, but two within a month looks like carelessness. That's the problem lawmakers are wrestling with amid hearings and federal investigations of the Upper Big Branch mine blast in West Virginia and the BP oil rig collapse in the Gulf of Mexico. We're pleased to see that the reactive machinery is functioning, and confident that it will result in regulations to better protect miners and oil workers. But we can't help thinking that our representatives are missing the signs of a far more destructive crisis in the making.
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What Is A Tipping Point?
The term 'tipping point' is in widespread use in English, but what does it mean?
Imagine a child's seesaw with an empty bucket on each end. The seesaw is initially at rest with one end touching the ground. If left alone, nothing would happen - there would be no motion. The whole mechanical contraption would be in a static configuration - in static, or stable equilibrium.
A sensitive dial scale is placed under the lower end of the seesaw. You now drip water or trickle sand into the upper bucket. For a long time, nothing much happens. Eventually, on close observation you will see that the needle of the scale shows movement. With each grain of sand or drop of water the needle moves more. The needle starts to twitch. Suddenly, just a tiny amount of sand or water is enough to tip the seesaw completely.
The point where the seesaw is 'twitching' is very sensitive to even a small application of force. Once such force has been applied the seesaw tips. Due to the effect of momentum, to stop it tipping you would have to fill the other bucket instantly, and with a greater mass than the one causing the tip. The mass needed to stop the motion is many orders of magnitude greater than the tiny mass needed to push the seesaw past its tipping point.
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April 2010 Water Level in Lake Powell
From the late 1990s through the middle of the 2000 decade, a multi-year drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin caused water levels in Lake Powell to plummet. As people's demands on the river outpaced the rate of recharge, the deep, meandering reservoir dropped to only 33 percent of capacity in 2005. This image from April 2010 is the latest update in the Earth Observatory's feature World of Change: Water Levels in Lake Powell, which documents changes in lake levels each spring since 1999.
The Landsat 5 satellite captured this view of the northeastern part of the lake on April 7, 2010. The Colorado River flows in from the east around Mille Crag Bend and is swallowed by the lake. At the west end of Narrow Canyon, the Dirty Devil River joins the lake from the north. As the reservoir bends sharply south, sediment in the water mixes and settles, and the water becomes first greenish, and farther downstream, a deep, clear blue. Water levels in 2010 were lower than they were a decade ago at this time of year, but they continued to be an improvement over the extremely low levels that occurred in 2005.
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World of Change
Earth is constantly changing. Some changes are a natural part of the climate system, such as the seasonal expansion and contraction of the Arctic sea ice pack. The responsibility for other changes, such as the Antarctic ozone hole, falls squarely on humanity's shoulders. Our World of Change series documents how our planet's land, oceans, atmosphere, and Sun are changing over time.
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Glacier park turns 100, but age has not been kind
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. -- Age has not been kind to Glacier National Park.
The gorgeous million-acre park in northwestern Montana celebrated its 100th birthday on Tuesday. But many of its glaciers have melted, and scientists predict the rest may not last another decade. The forests are drier and disease-ridden, leading to bigger wildfires. Climate change is forcing animals that feed off plants to adapt.
Many experts consider Glacier Park a harbinger of Earth's future, a laboratory where changes in the environment will likely show up first.
"What national parks all give us is, in effect, a controlled landscape where we can see the natural and climatic processes at work," said Steve Running, a University of Montana professor and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his work on climate change.
Average temperatures have risen in the park 1.8 times faster than the global average, said Dan Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist.
The change is visible to the naked eye, with the vast moraines left behind as the giant glaciers melt away. Climate change is blamed for the increasing size and frequency of wildfires, and lower stream flows as summer progresses.
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Too hot to live: grim long-term prediction
HALF the Earth could become too hot for human habitation in less than 300 years, Australian scientists warn.
New research by the University of NSW has forecast the effect of climate change over the next three centuries, a longer time scale than that considered in many similar studies.
The research suggests that without action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, average temperatures could rise as much as 10 to 12 per cent by 2300.
The research, produced in partnership with Purdue University, in the US, is published today in the American scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
''Much of the climate change debate has been about whether the world will succeed in keeping global warming to the relatively safe level of only 2 degrees Celsius by 2100,'' said Professor Tony McMichael, from the Australian National University, in an accompanying paper published in the journal.
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Freak April Rain Showers Hit Canadian Arctic
While the Gulf of Mexico continues to choke on oil from a man-made disaster, the Arctic is experiencing another form of man-made onslaught thanks to climate change.
Late last month, British explorers hiking in the Canadian Arctic reported that their ice base off Ellef Ringnes Island had been hit by a three-minute rain shower. A team of Canadian scientists camped about 145 km west also reported being hit by rain at the same time.
Pen Hadow, the British team's expedition director, told Reuters, "It's definitely a shocker ... the general feeling within the polar community is that rainfall in the high Canadian Arctic in April is a freak event."
Hadow, whose team is gathering data on the effects of climate change on the Arctic Ocean in the Catlin Arctic Survey, said that "scientists would tell us that we can expect increasingly to experience these sorts of outcomes as the climate warms."
But the group was not expecting such a sudden reminder of the consequences of a warming Arctic.
Ice base manager Paul Ramsden said, "It is obviously quite worrying when you are camped out on ice. I felt distinctly nervous for a while because the consequences of getting wet here can be serious." And the rain isn't the only indicator that things are out of whack in the North.
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'Climate dice' now dangerously loaded: leading scientist
PARIS — Evidence for global warming has mounted but public awareness of the threat has shrunk, due to a cold northern winter and finger-pointing at the UN's climate experts, a top scientist warned Wednesday.
James Hansen, a leading NASA scientist whose testimony to the US Congress in 1988 was a landmark in the history of climate change, said he was worried by "the large gap" in knowledge between specialists and the public, including politicians.
"That gap has increased substantially in the last year," Hansen told a press conference during a visit to Paris.
"While the science was becoming clearer, the public's perception became less clear, in part because of the unusually cold winter in both North America and Europe, and in part because of the inappropriate over-emphasis on small minor errors in IPCC documents and because of the so-called Climategate."
The IPCC -- the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- is under fire for several errors that appeared in a key 2007 report.
Its authors have acknowledged the mistakes, but say the overall conclusions of the report, that man-made greenhouse gases are changing the climate, remain solid.
The "Climategate" affair relates to stolen emails exchanged among British scientists that, sceptics said, showed they had ignored evidence that natural, rather than man-made, causes were to blame for climate change.
The scientists have been cleared by a British parliamentary panel.
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Dead dolphins wash up on the Gulf Coast
As ThinkProgress has documented, the BP oil spill off of Louisiana's coast threatens more than 400 species, with the potential "devastation beyond human comprehension." Already, brown pelicans, sea turtles, and various types of fish have turned up dead. Now, the National Marine Fisheries Service is reporting that six dolphin carcasses have also been found in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama since May 2. The AP reports that officials are reporting the deaths as "oil spill-related even though other factors may be to blame." Watch a video taken by NRDC staff of dolphins swimming in water with oil dispersants:
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Audio Slideshow: Fisheries Expert Daniel Pauly on the Gulf Spill's Impact
The Gulf of Mexico, which supplies as much as a third of America's domestically caught seafood, is at risk of becoming a giant "no fishing" zone after the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform disaster. Eminent marine biologist Daniel Pauly has long been a proponent of marine protected zones, which restrict fishing and other underwater activities so that sea life may grow large, breed, and regenerate from its current depleted condition.
The French-born fisheries expert and professor at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia spoke with OnEarth about the expected impacts of the BP oil spill, the damage it will likely cause to ocean life, and the hope that this disaster could provide an opportunity for rebirth. Read the full interview or watch and listen above.
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CO2 Smackdown, Step 5: Low-Cost Cooling
A quick look at your summer heating bill will confirm that cooling your home is expensive—in fact, according to the EPA AC accounts for 21% of annual home electricity consumption at an average cost of $239 year. Per household, that results in 1.5 tons of CO2 emissions from AC alone. But by following the steps outlined in this step of our year-long CO2 Smackdown series, you can save at least $494 and .95 tons of CO2 and even more if you upgrade your AC or replace with a ceiling fan.
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Global warming blamed for pattern of lizard deaths
When it comes to the hazards of global warming, it may turn out that lizards in burrows are the canaries in the coal mine.
In a study to be published Friday in the journal Science, an international team of biologists reports that in more than one-tenth of the places in Mexico where lizards flourished in 1975, the reptiles now cannot be found. The researchers predict that by 2080, about 40 percent of local lizard populations worldwide will have died off and 20 percent of lizard species will be extinct.
The reason for the huge die-off appears to be rising temperatures. But it isn't heat that is killing the lizards directly.
Instead, global warming appears to be lengthening the period of the day when lizards must seek shelter or risk fatal overheating. In the breeding season, that sheltering period is now so long that females of many species are unable to eat enough food to produce eggs and offspring.
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Arctic poised to see record low sea ice volume this year
The big Arctic news remains the staggering decline in multiyear ice — and hence ice volume. If we get near the Arctic's sea ice area (or extent) seen in recent years this summer, then this may well mean record low ice volume — the fourth straight year of low volume. And the latest extent data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center suggests we will:
Of course, the anti-science crowd — and much of the media — remain stuck in two-dimensional thinking. So the headlines last month were mostly about how the Arctic ice was supposedly "recovering" to the 1979-2000 average. Now, it was reasonable to ignore the third dimension — ice thickness — when we didn't have good data on it. But now we do, so it is unreasonable to continue focusing on just two dimensions in the Arctic.
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Arctic double stunner: Sea ice extent is now below 2007 levels, while volume hit record low for March Summer poised to set new record
While the anti-science crowd scours the globe desperately looking for any indication of their imaginary cooling, reality has intruded again.
Because they and the media — and even some scientists who don't follow the subject closely — tend to take a two-dimensional view of the Arctic, they along with much of the public have been fooled into thinking the Arctic "recovered" in the past two years because sea ice extent appeared to recover. Heck, some even claimed last month the Arctic ice was "recovering" to the 1979-2000 average.
Climate Progress readers have long understood that trends in multi-year ice — ice volume — are what matter most in terms of the long-term survivability of the Arctic ice in the summer (see New study supports finding that "the amount of [multi-year] sea ice in the northern hemisphere was the lowest on record in 2009?).
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How the Science of Global Warming Was Compromised
To what extent is climate change actually occuring? Late last year, climate researchers were accused of exaggerating study results. SPIEGEL ONLINE has since analyzed the hacked "Climategate" e-mails and provided insights into one of the most unprecedented spats in recent scientific history.
Is our planet warming up by 1 degree Celsius, 2 degrees, or more? Is climate change entirely man made? And what can be done to counteract it? There are myriad possible answers to these questions, as well as scientific studies, measurements, debates and plans of action. Even most skeptics now concede that mankind -- with its factories, heating systems and cars -- contributes to the warming up of our atmosphere.
But the consequences of climate change are still hotly contested. It was therefore something of a political bombshell when unknown hackers stole more than 1,000 e-mails written by British climate researchers, and published some of them on the Internet. A scandal of gigantic proportions seemed about to break, and the media dubbed the affair "Climategate" in reference to the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon. Critics claimed the e-mails would show that climate change predictions were based on unsound calculations.
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Plant study dims silver lining to global warming
So much for a hoped-for bright spot to global warming.
Some biologists had theorized earlier that rising greenhouse gas levels would encourage plant growth over the long term because of the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But plant physiologists from UC Davis may have dashed those hopes.
They've shown that too much carbon dioxide, which plants need for energy, actually can inhibit a plant's ability to assimilate nitrates — nitrogen-based nutrients pulled from the soil that plants use to make enzymes and other essential proteins.
Without those essential proteins, plant health — and food quality — may suffer, the researchers say in a study published online Thursday in the journal Science.
Scientists had previously thought that a rise in carbon dioxide levels — 39% globally since 1800, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — would in the long run boost photosynthesis, the sunlight-fueled process by which plants make sugar.
But studies before the UC Davis report showed that after an initial spike in sugar-making activity, photosynthesis appeared to level off, even if the carbon dioxide rate remained high.
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Caterpillar infestations on rise
Global warming has been blamed for an increase in caterpillar infestations which can leave people with severe allergic reactions.
In the latest incident, residents of West Street, Newport, Isle of Wight, have been forced to stay indoors or wear protective body suits and face masks to avoid coming into contact with tiny hairs shed by the brown tail moth caterpillars.
The insects have set up home in an isolated plot of land next to gardens in the street which has become overgrown.
Steve Gardner, of Island Pest Control, has been called in to eliminate the caterpillars.
He said his company had dealt with an increasing number of infestations as the climate had become warmer in the past five years.
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Errors caused by human failure, says climate panel
AMSTERDAM – The UN panel of climate scientists said yesterday that mistakes in a 2007 report should not eclipse its progress and detract from a valid body of work on the risks of global warming.
Addressing a committee reviewing its work, the panel's chairman said the mistakes were down to human failure, adding that its limited budget was partially responsible for the errors.
"We have been less than adequate in informing the public that, all right, we made an error, but this does not take away from the fact that the glaciers are melting," said Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In January, the IPCC said its latest report in 2007 exaggerated the pace of melt of Himalayan glaciers by saying they might all disappear by 2035. In February, it said it also overstated how much of the Netherlands was below sea level.
Some doubt that human activities are warming the planet and say that these errors fit a tendency to exaggerate evidence for global warming. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon announced the review of the panel in March.
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NASA: Easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — in temperature record
Plus a new record 12-month global temperature, as predicted
It was the hottest April on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of the hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record, it's also the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record
The record temperatures we're seeing now are especially impressive because we've been in "the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century." It now appears to be over. It's just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.
Most significantly, NASA's March prediction has come true: "It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010.?
Software engineer (and former machinist mate in the US Navy) Timothy Chase put together a spreadsheet using the data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (click here). In NASA's dataset, the 12-month running average temperature record was actually just barely set in March — and then easily set in April.
Actually, NASA first made its prediction back in January 2009:
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Global Surface Temperatures Highest on Record in April
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have just released data showing that global surface temperatures in April were the warmest on record. Indications of the warmth include record low snow cover in North America, a precipitous decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice, and record high sea surface temperatures in the region of the tropical Atlantic where most hurricanes originate.
Data released by NASA on Friday (14 May 2010) show that globally, the combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature anomaly was 0.73oC above the 1951-1980 mean, shattering the previous record of 0.66oC set in April 2007. The records go back to 1880. For the Northern Hemisphere alone, it also was a record breaking month, with surface temperatures 1.32oC above the long term mean, slightly above the previous record of 1.29oC set just two years ago in 2007.
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Climate change: The new national security challenge
On August 6, 2001, President George W. Bush famously received an intelligence briefing titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Thirty-six days later, al Qaeda terrorists tragically turned threat into reality.
Today, scientists tell us we have a 10-year window — if even that — before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable and irreversible.
This is our intelligence briefing — it tells us the threat is real and time is not on our side.
The national security threat posed by unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is great (see "NYT: Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security" and "Quadrennial Defense Review Should Spark Interagency Climate Conversation"), The threat is so clearcut that even the Bush Administration's top intelligence experts were raising the alarm (see "The moving Fingar writes").
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China drought highlights future climate threats
Yunnan's worst drought for many years has been exacerbated by destruction of forest cover and a history of poor water management.
Born into a farming family in south Yunnan province, China, Zhu Youyong's life has always been tied to the soil. At the age of 54, however, Zhu — now president of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming — says he "has never seen such severe drought in Yunnan".
Since last September, the province has had 60% less rainfall than normal. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, 8.1 million people — 18% of Yunnan's population — are short of drinking water, and US$2.5-billion worth of crops are expected to fail.
Scientists in China say that the crisis marks one of the strongest case studies so far of how climate change and poor environmental practice can combine to create a disaster. They are now scrambling to pin down exactly what caused the drought, and whether similar events are likely to hit the region more often in the future
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Nitrate contamination spreading in California communities
The water supply of more than two million Californians has been exposed to harmful levels of nitrates over the past 15 years – a time marked by lax regulatory efforts to contain the colorless and odorless contaminant, a California Watch investigation has found.
Nitrates are now the most common groundwater contaminant in California and across the country. A byproduct of nitrogen-based farm fertilizer, animal manure, wastewater treatment plants and leaky septic tanks, nitrates leach into the ground and can be expensive to extract.
The problem affects both rural Californians and wealthier big-city water systems. State law requires public water systems to remove nitrates. Many rural communities, however, don't have access to the type of treatment systems available in metropolitan areas.
Nitrates have been linked to "blue baby syndrome," which cuts off an infant's oxygen supply. Some studies have found connections to certain cancers in lab animals.
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