Climate Articles
FLASHBACK: When Breitbart called for death penalty in "Climategate"
Turns out "Climategate" itself was the fraud, not the work produced by scientists and administrators who had their emails apparently stolen from the UK's Climate Research Unit (CRU). After the theft late last year, rightwingers accused scientists of trying to dupe the public and hide the real facts about global warming.
But today brings word of the latest independent review of the email 'scandal'; a review that also concluded the players involved, including James Hansen director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, did nothing dishonest or corrupt with their email exchanges or their research.
While we wait for the Andrew Breitbart apology and correction, we'll recall his 2009 tweet:
:Capital punishment for Dr. James Hansen. Climategate is high treason" - Andrew Breitbart
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Climate scientist: "Positive carbon-climate feedback is still very likely"
- and even without "a runaway feedback," warming will be "substantial and critical"
Plus a review of recent research on amplifying feedbacks
As the United States, like much of the rest of the world, bakes in record, killer heat, climate scientists continue to refine our understanding of the dire future of global warming in the years to come. The United Nations has named the 831 scientists who will author the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, to be published in 2013 with new model runs and observations of the ongoing destruction of our habitable environment.
They do this work despite the endless assault from the fossil-fueled right wing, weathering death threats and media and politicians who ignore, downplay, distort, or lie about the science. Brad Johnson has yet another instance of this criminal deception (with an addendum by JR reviewing the recent literature on feedbacks).
The First Post, a website of Great Britain's The Week run by Tim Edwards, has claimed that new climate research from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry "is set to rock the boat again." Edwards' headline, promoted by climate disinformer Marc Morano, blares:
‘Runaway climate change' ‘unrealistic', say scientists
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New Children's Book Inspires Conservation, Eco-responsibility
Rascal and Shady Recycle and Reuse by Elizabeth Starr tells the story of a community of wildlife characters that band together to clean up their home
In her playful new book, Rascal and Shady Recycle and Reuse, author Elizabeth Starr has created wildlife characters that entertain children while delivering a message
about building communities that respect the environment.
Children 5 to 12 can identify with raccoon friends Rascal and Shady as they enjoy cleaning up the forest with a little help from their friends.
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Sea Ice in the Arctic Not Recovering: Another Critical Minimum Forecast
ScienceDaily (June 24, 2010) - A critical minimum for Arctic sea ice can again be expected for late summer 2010, according to researchers.
Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) in Bremerhaven and from KlimaCampus of the University of Hamburg have now published data in this context in the annual issue of Sea Ice Outlook. The online publication compares the forecasts on ice cover for September 2010 prepared by around a dozen international research institutes in a scientific "competition." The ice reaches its minimum area at this time every year.
The forecast developed by the team from KlimaCampus of the University of Hamburg, i.e. 4.7 million square kilometres (km2), is more negative than that submitted by the AWI researchers, who arrived at a figure of 5.2 million km2. Nevertheless, neither of the two research groups anticipates that the record minimum of 4.3 million km2 in 2007 will be reached.
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Scientific Expertise Lacking Among 'Doubters' of Climate Change, Says New Analysis
ScienceDaily (June 27, 2010) - The small number of scientists who are unconvinced that human beings have contributed significantly to climate change have far less expertise and prominence in climate research compared with scientists who are convinced, according to a study led by Stanford researchers.
In a quantitative assessment -- the first of its kind to address this issue -- the team analyzed the number of research papers published by more than 900 climate researchers and the number of times their work was cited by other scientists.
"These are standard academic metrics used when universities are making hiring or tenure decisions," said William Anderegg, lead author of a paper published in the online Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.
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Global Wind Shifts May Have Ushered in Warmer Climate at End of Last Ice Age
ScienceDaily (June 27, 2010) - Scientists still puzzle over how Earth emerged from its last ice age, an event that ushered in a warmer climate and the birth of human civilization. In the geological blink of an eye, ice sheets in the northern hemisphere began to collapse and warming spread quickly to the south. Most scientists say that the trigger, at least initially, was an orbital shift that caused more sunlight to fall across Earth's northern half. But how did the south catch up so fast?
In a review paper published June 25 in the journal Science, a team of researchers look to a global shift in winds for the answer. They propose a chain of events that began with the melting of the large northern hemisphere ice sheets about 20,000 years ago. The melting ice sheets reconfigured the planet's wind belts, pushing warm air and seawater south, and pulling carbon dioxide from the deep ocean into the atmosphere, allowing the planet to heat even further. Their hypothesis makes use of climate data preserved in cave formations, polar ice cores and deep-sea sediments to describe how Earth finally thawed out.
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Higher Wetland Methane Emissions Caused by Climate Warming 40,000 Years Ago
ScienceDaily (June 25, 2010) - 40,000 years ago rapid warming led to an increase in methane concentration. The culprit for this increase has now been identified. Mainly wetlands in high northern latitudes caused the methane increase, as discovered by a research team from the University of Bern and the German Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association. This result refutes an alternative theory discussed amongst experts, the so-called "clathrate gun hypothesis." The latter assumed that large amounts of methane were released from the ocean sediment and led to higher atmospheric methane concentrations and thus to rapid climate warming.
Earlier measurements on ice cores showed that the atmospheric methane concentration changed drastically in parallel to rapid climate changes occurring during the last ice age. Those climate changes – so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger events – were characterised by a sudden warming and an increase in methane concentration. However, it was not yet clear to what extent the climate changes 40,000 years ago led to the methane increase or vice versa. Climate researchers from the Universities in Bern and Copenhagen and from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven now conclude that the methane increase at that time was largely due to higher methane emissions from wetlands.
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Climate change could wipe out 40% of species in Arab world - report
AMMAN - Arab countries will be devastated by climate change, which threatens to wipe out almost half of the species in the region and transform the Levant into an "infertile crescent", warned a report released on Sunday.
The "2009 Arab Environment: Climate Change. Impact of Climate Change on Arab Countries" report, released yesterday by the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED), indicated that the phenomenon will lead to fewer water resources, a rise in sea levels, damage bio-diversity and spread diseases throughout the region.
The report, which seeks to address areas impacted by climate change and serve as the basis for future mitigation and adaptation policies, warned that water resources in the Arab region are dwindling and will reach an alarming stage by the year 2025.
It indicated that the Fertile Crescent, lands stretching from Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine, will lose all traits of fertility by the end of the century due to deteriorating water supplies from major rivers and soil erosion.
"With continuing rising temperatures, water flow in the Euphrates River may decrease by 30 per cent and the Jordan River by 80 per cent before the turn of the century," the report warned.
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Global Boiling: June Brings Climate Destruction Predicted By Scientists
As the planet warms, the destructive changes predicted by scientists are coming to pass. As in previous months, this June has seen records fall, people die, and infrastructure destroyed from the terrible power of our planet's climatic system, fueled by increasing heat trapped by invisible greenhouse pollution from fossil fuels.
The 2009 U.S. Global Change Research Program report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, described the changes coming to the United States in detail. Using multiple lines of evidence and theory, scientists from a broad array of government agencies explained that America needs to be on alert for the growing threats from global warming - immediately. The report described both regional sectoral impacts from a killer climate that are being seen not in the distant future, but now:
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Climate Changes in the Atlantic Can Affect Drought in Distant Regions
ScienceDaily (June 29, 2010) - Cyclical changes in atmospheric pressure and sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic Ocean affect drought in the Sahel region on the southern Sahara rim. This has been revealed in an international study carried out by researchers from the University of Haifa, the French National Meteorological Service, Columbia University and the University of San Diego. The study was published recently in the scientific journal Atmospheric Science Letters.
That climate variability in one region can have an effect on more distant areas is known in the climate research literature -- the challenge being to locate these far-connections and understand their projections. The current study, co-authored by Dr. Shlomit Paz of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Haifa, analyzed a number of climate parameters in the North Atlantic over the 20th century, including atmospheric pressure at sea level and sea surface temperature. They revealed two "natural climate signals": a multi-decadal signal of a period exceeding 40 years, and a quasi-decadal signal with periodicity ranging from 8 to 14 years. These two signals may cancel or enhance one another.
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Prepare for Hotter and Drier Southwestern US, Climate Experts Urge
ScienceDaily (June 28, 2010) - Two prominent climate experts, including one from the University of Arizona, are calling for a "no-regrets" strategy for planning for a hotter and drier western North America. Their advice: use water conservatively and continue developing ways to harness energy from the sun, wind and Earth.
Jonathan Overpeck, principal investigator with the Climate Assessment for the Southwest at the UA, and Bradley Udall, director of the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado, write in the June 25 issue of the journal Science that such an approach is necessary for coping with a wide range of projected future climate changes in the West and Southwest.
In their overview of shifting climate in the region, Overpeck and Udall cite published findings of prevalent signs of change: rising temperatures, earlier snowmelt, northward-shifting winter storms, increasing precipitation intensity and flooding, record-setting drought, plummeting Colorado River reservoir storage, widespread vegetation mortality and more large wildfires.
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Reseachers Predict Larger-Than-Average Gulf 'Dead Zone'; Impact of Oil Spill Unclear
ScienceDaily (June 28, 2010) - University of Michigan aquatic ecologist Donald Scavia and his colleagues say this year's Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" is expected to be larger than average, continuing a decades-long trend that threatens the health of a $659 million fishery.
The 2010 forecast, released by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), calls for a Gulf dead zone of between 6,500 and 7,800 square miles, an area roughly the size of Lake Ontario.
The most likely scenario, according to Scavia, is a Gulf dead zone of 6,564 square miles, which would make it the Gulf's 10th-largest oxygen-starved, or hypoxic, region on record. The average size over the past five years was about 6,000 square miles.
It is unclear what impact, if any, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill will have on the size of this year's Gulf dead zone because numerous factors are at work, the researchers say.
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Michael Mann says hockey stick should not have become 'climate change icon'
The scientist behind the controversial 'hockey stick' graph has said it was 'somewhat misplaced' to make his work an 'icon of the climate change debate'.
Professor Michael Mann plotted a graph in the late 1990s that showed global temperatures for the last 1,000 years. It showed a sharp rise in temperature over the last 100 years as man made carbon emissions also increased, creating the shape of a hockey stick.
The graph was used by Al Gore in his film 'An Inconvenient Truth' and was cited by the United Nations body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as evidence of the link between fossil fuel use and global warming.
But the graph was questioned by sceptics who pointed out that is it impossible to know for certain the global temperature going back beyond modern times because there were no accurate readings.
The issue became a central argument in the climate change debate and was dragged into the 'climategate' scandal, as the sceptics accused Prof Mann and his supporters of exaggerating the extent of global warming.
However, speaking to the BBC recently, Prof Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, said he had always made clear there were "uncertainties" in his work.
"I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate," he said.
In a BBC Panorama programme, scientists from both sides of the debate agree that global warming is happening and it is at least partly caused by mankind.
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How hot is it? So hot that 8 countries in Africa and Asia set all-time high temperature records
And the Tea Party postponed their Las Vegas convention
Before getting to the irony of the anti-science Tea Partiers canceling their big convention because the weather is too hot, let's look at some of the staggering extreme weather events around the globe.
In China, "The Southern Daily said over 600 millimetres (24 inches) of rain fell in Guangdong's Huilai county over a six-hour period on Friday, a 500-year record." That's two feet of rain in 6 hours!
As Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told me earlier this month:
There is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It's about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it's unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.
The latest record-smashing U.S. superstorm was two weeks ago in Oklahoma. Now we know it was even more record-setting than initially thought - see Capital Climate's update "Oklahoma City Paralyzed By Flash Floods":
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Arctic Climate May Be More Sensitive to Warming Than Thought, Says New Study
ScienceDaily (June 29, 2010) - A new study shows the Arctic climate system may be more sensitive to greenhouse warming than previously thought, and that current levels of Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide may be high enough to bring about significant, irreversible shifts in Arctic ecosystems.
Led by the University of Colorado at Boulder, the international study indicated that while the mean annual temperature on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic during the Pliocene Epoch 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago was about 34 degrees Fahrenheit, or 19 degrees Celsius, warmer than today, CO2 levels were only slightly higher than present. The vast majority of climate scientists agree Earth is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping atmospheric gases generated primarily by human activities like fossil fuel burning and deforestation.
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New Research Sheds Light on Antarctica's Melting Pine Island Glacier
New results from an investigation into Antarctica's potential contribution to sea level rise are reported this week (Sunday 20 June) by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and the National Oceanography Centre in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Thinning ice in West Antarctica is currently contributing nearly 10 per cent of global sea level rise and scientists have identified Pine Island Glacier (PIG) as a major source. As part of a series of investigations to better understand the impact of melting ice on sea level an exciting new discovery has been made. Using Autosub (an autonomous underwater vehicle) to dive deep and travel far beneath the pine Island Glacier's floating ice shelf, scientists captured ocean and sea-floor measurements, which revealed a 300m high ridge (mountain) on the sea floor.
Pine Island Glacier was once grounded on (sitting on top of) this underwater ridge, which slowed its flow into the sea. However, in recent decades it has thinned and disconnected from the ridge, allowing the glacier to move ice more rapidly from the land into the sea. This also permitted deep warm ocean water to flow over the ridge and into a widening cavity that now extends to an area of 1000 km² under the ice shelf. The warm water, trapped under the ice, is causing the bottom of the ice shelf to melt, resulting in continuous thinning and acceleration of the glacier.
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Scientist Links Increase in Greenhouse Gases to Changes in Ocean Currents
KNOXVILLE -- By examining 800,000-year-old polar ice, scientists increasingly are learning how the climate has changed since the last ice melt and that carbon dioxide has become more abundant in the Earth's atmosphere.
For two decades, French scientist Jérôme Chappellaz has been examining ice cores collected from deep inside the polar ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. His studies on the interconnecting air spaces of old snow -- or firn air -- in the ice cores show that the roughly 40 percent increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the Earth's last deglaciation can be attributed in large part to changes in the circulation and biological activity of the oceanic waters surrounding Antarctica.
Chappellaz presented his findings today in Knoxville, Tenn. during the Goldschmidt Conference, an international gathering of several thousand geochemists who converge annually to share their research on Earth, energy and the environment. The event, hosted by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is taking place June 13-18.
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Butterflies are early warning system for climate change
EDMONTON - They may look like lightweights, but in a biological sense butterflies are heavy hitters when it comes to protecting species threatened by climate change.
As the world warmed, a butterfly called Edith's checkerspot was the first organism to show a documented range shift, said Camille Parmesan, an associate professor of biology at the University of Texas at Austin, who is in Edmonton for the sixth International Conference on the Biology of Butterflies.
Edith's checkerspot has been dying out in northern Mexico and doing well in Canada, Parmesan said Tuesday during a break in the conference. It's also dying out at lower elevations and flourishing in the Sierra Nevada's highest elevations.
Parmesan and some colleagues also did a study of 57 European species that showed two-thirds were moving northward. Research shows many species move northward because of changes in the growth pattern of plants the butterfly relies on for food.
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Study Affirms Consensus on Climate Change
Many debates about global warming seem to boil down to appeals to authority, with one side or the other citing some famous scientist, or group of them, to buttress a particular argument. The tone is often, "My expert is better than yours!"
Against this backdrop, some analysts have been trying for several years to get a firm handle on where climate researchers come down, as a group, on the central issues in the global-warming debate: Is the earth warming up, and if so, are humans largely responsible?
Now comes another entry in this developing literature. William R.L. Anderegg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, and his fellow authors compiled a database of 1,372 climate researchers. They then focused on scientists who had published at least 20 papers on climate, as a way to concentrate on those most active in the field. That produced a list of 908 researchers whose work was subjected to close scrutiny.
The authors then classified those researchers as convinced or unconvinced by the evidence for human-induced climate change, based on such factors as whether they have signed public statements endorsing or dissenting from the big United Nations reports raising alarm about the issue. Then the authors analyzed how often each scientist had been published in the climate-science literature, as well as how often each had been cited in other papers. (The latter is a standard measure of scientific credibility and influence.)
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Not Getting Climate Science
Apparently you can write an entire article on how the public doesn't get climate science without mentioning the disinformation campaign or the media's failings
Exhibit A: "Scientists From Mars Face Public From Venus" by opinion blogger Andy Revkin.
Revkin was writing about - and soliciting expert opinions on - a Chris Mooney WashPost piece, "If scientists want to educate the public, they should start by listening."
I wasn't originally going to write about the piece because, as Evil Monkey points, out the piece doesn't offer much in the way of news or solutions. Also, Mooney conflates very different issues - climate change and vaccination (and Yucca Mountain).
Yes, science messaging sucks (see "Why scientists aren't more persuasive, Part 1" and Part 2: Why deniers out-debate "smart talkers"). And yet somehow the overwhelming majority of parents in this country get their children all the vaccinations they need, even though it is a time-consuming process that, for many, isn't cheap, and oftentimes leads to crying children.
Maybe it's because climate science - and not vaccination science - has been the victim of one of the largest and best funded disinformation campaign in human history, one that has been the subject of many major books.
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Warmer Ecosystems Could Absorb Less Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
ScienceDaily (June 30, 2010) - Research by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London has found that a predicted rise in global temperature of 4ºC by 2100 could lead to a 13% reduction in ecosystems' ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
Writing in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the scientists describe a new model to predict how the carbon storage capacity of ecosystems would respond to future global warming. They tested their predictions against data collected from experimental ponds which were warmed to simulate global warming, revealing a 13% reduction in the amount of CO2 absorbed by the warmed ecosystems.
Lead author of the Philosophical Transactions paper, Gabriel Yvon-Durocher from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences said: "The beauty of this model is in its simplicity. We made our prediction based on just two parameters - the 'activation energies' for photosynthesis and respiration, and the increase in temperature which exactly predicted the changes observed in our experiment."
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Climate Change Scientists Turn Up the Heat in Alaska
ScienceDaily (June 30, 2010) - Scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are planning a large-scale, long-term ecosystem experiment to test the effects of global warming on the icy layers of arctic permafrost.
While ORNL researchers have conducted extensive studies on the impact of climate change in temperate regions like East Tennessee, less is known about the impact global warming could have on arctic regions.
"We're beginning to take these lessons learned and start applying them to sensitive and globally important ecosystems, such as the arctic," said Stan Wullschleger of the Environmental Sciences Division. "The arctic regions are important to the topic of global warming because of the large land area they occupy around the world and the layer of permanently frozen soil, known as permafrost."
Wullschleger and a team of architects, engineers and biologists from ORNL and other national laboratories design, simulate using computers and then field test large-scale manipulative experiments that purposely warm a test area in order to evaluate ecosystem response to projected climate conditions.
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Arctic Climate May Be More Sensitive to Warming Than Thought, Says New Study
ScienceDaily (June 30, 2010) - A new study shows the Arctic climate system may be more sensitive to greenhouse warming than previously thought, and that current levels of Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide may be high enough to bring about significant, irreversible shifts in Arctic ecosystems.
Led by the University of Colorado at Boulder, the international study indicated that while the mean annual temperature on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic during the Pliocene Epoch 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago was about 34 degrees Fahrenheit, or 19 degrees Celsius, warmer than today, CO2 levels were only slightly higher than present. The vast majority of climate scientists agree Earth is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping atmospheric gases generated primarily by human activities like fossil fuel burning and deforestation.
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Climate science: An erosion of trust?
Many climate researchers worry that scepticism about global warming is on the rise. Jeff Tollefson investigates the basis for that concern and what scientists are doing about it.
Last November, a catchy music video popped up on YouTube and attracted thousands of fans. Called 'Hide the Decline', the video featured a caricature of climate researcher Michael Mann admitting that he had committed fraud while creating his famous 'hockey-stick' graph of temperatures over the past millennium. Accompanied by a kitten playing the guitar, the cartoon image of Mann joyfully sings, "Making up data the old hard way, fudging the numbers day by day."
The video wasn't funny to the real Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. A lawyer wrote to the group responsible for it, threatening to sue them for defamation and for using a copyrighted image. The video was promptly taken down and a new version - without the copyrighted photo - appeared on YouTube.
Mann has grown weary of dealing with the various groups that are criticizing him. "In reality, these groups are guilty over and over again of defamation, slander and libel, but that is far more difficult to fight legally," Mann says. "Even if you were to prevail, you would have invested potentially several years of your career, and frankly those of us who love doing science are not willing to do that."
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Indonesia's last glacier will melt within years
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Lonnie Thompson spent years preparing for his expedition to the remote, mist-shrouded mountains of eastern Indonesia, hoping to chronicle the affect of global warming on the last remaining glacier in the Pacific. He's worried he got there too late.
Even as he pitched his tent on top of Puncak Jaya, the ice was melting beneath him.
The 3-mile- (4,884-meter-) high glacier was pounded by rain every afternoon during the team's 13-day trip, something the American scientist has never encountered in three decades of drilling ice cores. He lay awake at night listening to the water gushing beneath him.
By the time they were ready to head home, ice around their sheltered campsite had melted a staggering 12 inches (30 centimeters).
"These glaciers are dying," said Thompson, one of the world's most accomplished glaciologists. "Before I was thinking they had a few decades, but now I'd say we're looking at years."
Thompson has led 57 such expeditions in 16 countries around the planet, from China to Peru.
But for him, the Papuan glaciers, because they lie along the fringe of the world's warmest ocean and could provide clues about regional weather patterns, were an unexplored "missing link."
It is this region that generates El Nino disturbances and influences climate from India's monsoons to the Amazon's droughts.
As such, it is one of the only "archives" about the story of the equatorial phenomenon, said Michael Prentice of the Indiana Geological Survey, who has long been interested in the area. It also could point to what lies ahead for billions of people in Asia.
The ice that covered much of Papua thousands of years ago is today just 1 square mile (2 square kilometers) wide and 32 yards (meters) deep. Deep crevasses crisscross the dirty ice.
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Turbo-boosting plants won't save us from climate change
Humans are pumping extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but isn't that just plant food?
After all, plants take in CO2 and use it to make sugar, so any extra CO2 ought to be good news for plants - and as a bonus they should take the stuff out of the atmosphere for us.
This is one of those ideas that looks good at first glance, but doesn't quite work in the real world. The main problem is that plants do not live by CO2 alone: they need other nutrients, like water and nitrogen, and if they don't have them in abundance they won't take in any more CO2.
But what if we gave them a helping hand, by making sure they had plenty of nitrogen-rich fertiliser?
A new paper in Nature looks at just that: and it seems the plants just aren't playing ball.
Adam Langley and Patrick Megonigal of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, Maryland spent four years studying a brackish marsh in the vicinity of Chesapeake Bay, on the eastern seaboard.
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Newspapers retract faulty climate reporting
The reverberations of the scandal many refer to as "climategate," which erupted last December after personal emails between top climate scientists were taken from a British University server and posted online, continue... but they are taking some new twists and turns.
One of the key components of the pseudo scandal was the hostile treatment that climate scientists received in the mass media, in North America but especially in Europe. Story after story appeared that lambasted the credibility of all of climate science, based only on emails between a handful of climate specialists. Press coverage was so unfair to one researcher that he has resorted to suing a publication for libel to force it to issue retractions.
It didn't help that immediately following climategate there came another kerfuffle regarding minor errors in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report. One such dustup concerned statements about the likelihood that climate change would dry out the Amazon Rainforest. A particular reference to Amazon drying was sourced to the environmental group WWF, rather than to a peer-reviewed scientific paper.
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Emissions of Greenhouse Gases Methane and Nitrous Oxide Underestimated, Research Suggests
ScienceDaily (July 1, 2010) - The emission of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide has been structurally underestimated, as a result of the measuring methods used. This is the conclusion of the scientist Petra Kroon, who carried out research for the Energy research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN) and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) into an innovative method for measuring the emission of these gases.
Kroon recently obtained her PhD degree for this much more accurate method, which also partly solves the problem of this systematic underestimation.
When it comes to greenhouse gases many of us think first of CO2. But a large proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions are actually other gases, such as N2O (nitrous oxide) and CH4 (methane). In the Netherlands the contributions of methane and nitrous oxide to the total emission of greenhouse gases are estimated to be 8% and 6% respectively. Worldwide these figures are 14% and 9%.
The emission of methane and nitrous oxide is largely the result of agricultural activities; nitrous oxide from fertilisers and methane mostly from cows. In peat pasture areas these emissions are particularly prevalent. PhD student Petra Kroon carried out measurements of methane and nitrous oxide for ECN and TU Delft on an intensively managed peat pasture, but the measuring techniques she used can also be used in other ecosystems.
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Warmer Ecosystems Could Absorb Less Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
ScienceDaily (July 1, 2010) - Research by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London has found that a predicted rise in global temperature of 4°C by 2100 could lead to a 13% reduction in ecosystems' ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
Writing in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the scientists describe a new model to predict how the carbon storage capacity of ecosystems would respond to future global warming. They tested their predictions against data collected from experimental ponds which were warmed to simulate global warming, revealing a 13% reduction in the amount of CO2 absorbed by the warmed ecosystems.
Lead author of the Philosophical Transactions paper, Gabriel Yvon-Durocher from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences said: "The beauty of this model is in its simplicity. We made our prediction based on just two parameters - the 'activation energies' for photosynthesis and respiration, and the increase in temperature which exactly predicted the changes observed in our experiment."
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High Above the Earth, Satellites Track Melting Ice
The surest sign of a warming Earth is the steady melting of its ice zones, from disappearing sea ice in the Arctic to shrinking glaciers worldwide. Now, scientists are using increasingly sophisticated satellite technology to measure the extent, thickness, and height of ice, assembling an essential picture of a planet in transition.
After carbon dioxide, the substance most crucial in determining how climate change will play out over the next century and beyond isn't a greenhouse gas - it's the solid state of the molecule H20. Summer melt in the sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean exposes heat-absorbing seawater to the sun, accelerating global warming in a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Summer melting in the land-based ice that covers Greenland is increasingly responsible for the sea-level rise that has already begun to endanger many thousands of miles of coastline. Glaciers moving more rapidly to the sea, in both Greenland and Antarctica, threaten to raise sea level even higher, while disappearing mountain glaciers around the world could choke off water supplies to many hundreds of millions of people.
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For Hudson Bay Polar Bears, The End is Already in Sight
The polar bear has long been a symbol of the damage wrought by global warming, but now biologist Andrew Derocher and his colleagues have calculated how long one southerly population can hold out. Their answer? No more than a few decades, as the bears' decline closely tracks that of the Arctic's disappearing sea ice.
No polar bears have been more closely studied than Canada's western Hudson Bay population. In recent decades, biologists such as Andrew E. Derocher of the University of Alberta have compiled an impressive store of data on everything from the weight of females at denning, to the body mass of bears of all sexes, to the length of time the bears spend annually on the shores of Hudson Bay, to the decline of sea ice in the bay itself.
Now, Derocher, working with Peter K. Molnar and other colleagues from the University of Alberta, has marshaled that data to forecast how long it will be before western Hudson Bay's polar bears disappear. The calculation is not overly complex, since the health of polar bears is directly tied to the amount of time they spend on sea ice hunting seals.
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A Misleading CNN Blog Post on Climate Change Polling
There are so many problems with this CNN blog post on public opinion on global warming that I barely know where to start. Broadly speaking, I'm glad CNN is taking on substantive issues like this, but if they don't have the resources to do so without making basic mistakes, they might as well not bother.
Problem 1: They Cite Old Data
The July 7th piece cites ‘recent polling by Rasmussen Reports' showing the number of respondents who consider global warming a problem at a low-point, just 54%. But the poll this data comes from was conducted three months ago, in mid April. Plenty of other pollsters, including Rasmussen Reports, have surveyed the same question much more recently. Rasmussen's late-May survey on the topic, for example, showed a greater level of concern about global warming than the mid-April survey.
This raises two questions:
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