Climate Articles

Money can't buy me sustainability
Many people subscribe to the notion that buying certain items while eschewing others is the best way to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle. This logic suggests that you vote with your dollar, and if you buy fuel-efficient, organic, and "green" products you're contributing to sustainability. But this CAP cross-post asks, "What about simply not buying things at all?"
True, completely abandoning the consumer economy is probably an untenable goal. But an increasing number of people have turned to no-cost solutions when acquiring home furnishings, clothes, food, and other necessary items. In doing so, they're keeping items out of landfills, cutting the carbon it takes to manufacture new products, and generally living a more sustainable lifestyle.
Some of the more hardcore practitioners of free consumption call themselves freegans. They use sites like freegan.info to get information about which grocery stores and restaurants throw out the most food and to meet up with other freegans in their cities. The loosely organized social movement also draws liberally from such ideological strands as anticonsumerism, radical environmentalism, and punk rock.
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Scientists say we'd better get used to sweating out heat waves
WASHINGTON - Folks sweating out the heat wave battering parts of the country may just have to get used to it.
As global warming continues such heat waves will be increasingly common in the future, a Stanford University study concludes.
"In the next 30 years, we could see an increase in heat waves like the one now occurring in the eastern United States or the kind that swept across Europe in 2003 that caused tens of thousands of fatalities," Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford, said in a statement.
Diffenbaugh and Moetasim Ashfaq, a former Stanford postdoctoral fellow now at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, used a series of computer models of climate to calculate changes in the future with increased levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere. Their findings are reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
They calculate that within 30 years average temperature could be 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 Celsius, higher than in the mid-1800s.
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Heat Waves Could Be Commonplace in the US by 2039
ScienceDaily (July 9, 2010) - Exceptionally long heat waves and other hot events could become commonplace in the United States in the next 30 years, according to a new study by Stanford University climate scientists.
"Using a large suite of climate model experiments, we see a clear emergence of much more intense, hot conditions in the U.S. within the next three decades," said Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study.
Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Diffenbaugh concluded that hot temperature extremes could become frequent events in the U.S. by 2039, posing serious risks to agriculture and human health.
"In the next 30 years, we could see an increase in heat waves like the one now occurring in the eastern United States or the kind that swept across Europe in 2003 that caused tens of thousands of fatalities," said Diffenbaugh, a center fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. "Those kinds of severe heat events also put enormous stress on major crops like corn, soybean, cotton and wine grapes, causing a significant reduction in yields."
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Plan for a food-insecure future, academic warns
Breakdown in global systems can devastate cities unable to feed themselves
A city that grows at least some of the food that its people eat will be better able to withstand changes and breakdowns in global food supply, according to post-doctoral researcher Tara Moreau.
"There's a movement now to design livable areas that have agriculture as one of [their] main components, so that people can live, grow food and eat close to where they work and play," Moreau explained. "These are systems designed for resiliency."
And resiliency will be required. Climate change will almost certainly alter the kinds of crops that we can grow commercially, she said. As rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels, waning fresh water supplies and extreme weather create a new agricultural reality in the coming decades, there will be breakdowns in the supply of food.
"We saw that just recently, in 2008, with rice," said Moreau, a board member of the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation.
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World on Track for Warmest Year on Record, U.S. Scientist Says
July 8 (Bloomberg) -- The current year may become the warmest on record, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist.
Temperature trends across the U.S. and around the world have been among the warmest on record, said David Easterling, a climatologist with NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.
"If the warming around the world continues the way it has so far this year, we are likely to have 2010 be the warmest on record," Easterling said during a conference call on climate change hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The combined land and ocean temperatures around the world were 1.22 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average, according to NOAA records. Since 1975, global temperatures have been rising and since 1960 the number of heat waves has been increasing, Easterling said on the call.
Much of the U.S. Northeast has been gripped by a heat wave that broke temperature records in New York, Washington and Baltimore and brought 100 degrees or more to Newark four days in a row.
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Germany Swelters Amid Soaring Temperatures
More than 40 train passengers needed medical treatment for dehydration in Germany this weekend after the air conditioning broke down. The railway apologized for the fault which affected several of its high-speed ICE trains as Europe gasped under temperatures approaching 40 degrees Celsius.
German railway operator Deutsche Bahn apologized on Sunday after several passengers collapsed from heat exhaustion in three of its high-speed ICE trains when the air conditioning broke down on Saturday during the hottest weekend of the year so far.
Temperatures across much of Germany rose to just under 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and exceeded 50 degrees in the affected trains. In one train traveling from Berlin to the western town of Bielefeld on Saturday, several students on a school trip suffered dehydration and fainted and a pregnant woman tried to smash the window in a desperate attempt to get air.
A total of 27 students and 17 other passengers needed medical treatment and a total of about 1,000 passengers had to switch trains as a result of the technical fault affecting three ICEs, the flagships of Germany's fleet of trains.
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Changing Climate Could Alter Meadows' Ecosystems, Says Researcher
ScienceDaily (July 6, 2010) - Changing climate could affect the diversity of plants and animals, and we can get a glimpse of what this may look like by studying the effects of drought in a relatively pristine ecosystem, according to an Iowa State University researcher.
Diane Debinski has been studying the meadows in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of the Rocky Mountains since 1992. She has found that if the area's climate becomes drier as the earth's temperature climbs, it could lead to a change in the types of plants and animals that live there.
To study the potential effects of climate change, Debinski has been conducting large-scale, long-term, observational studies of the plant and insect communities in 55 montane (mountainous) meadows in the ecosystem.
Debinski studied six different types of montane meadows that ranged from dry (xeric) to wet (hydric).
These meadows get most of their water from the melting of winter snows. This runoff provides water to the area into July and August.
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Soybean Yields to Drop on Climate, Ozone, U.S. Researcher Says
July 8 (Bloomberg) -- Climate change and pollution may cut yields for soybeans and other crops by 2050 unless plants are adapted, the University of Illinois said, citing research.
Tests showed crops grown in open fields benefited less than expected from higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air, the university said in a report published yesterday. The yield increase was only half of that assumed by the United Nations' climate-change panel to predict world food supply in 2050, according to the report.
The world must grow 70 percent more food by 2050 to feed a rising population, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization says. One assumed positive aspect to climate change has been that higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will stimulate photosynthesis and boost yields, the researchers said.
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Methane Releases in Arctic Seas Could Wreak Devastation
Potential impacts include dead zones, acidification, shifts at the base of the ocean's food chain Massive releases of methane from arctic seafloors could create oxygen-poor dead zones, acidify the seas and disrupt ecosystems in broad parts of the northern oceans, new preliminary analyses suggest.
Such a cascade of geochemical and ecological ills could result if global warming triggers a widespread release of methane from deep below the Arctic seas, scientists propose in the June 28 Geophysical Research Letters.
Worldwide, particularly in deeply buried permafrost and in high-latitude ocean sediments where pressures are high and temperatures are below freezing, icy deposits called hydrates hold immense amounts of methane (SN: 6/25/05, p. 410). Studies indicate that seafloor sediments beneath the Kara, Barents and East Siberian seas in the Arctic Ocean, as well as the Sea of Okhotsk and the Barents Sea in the North Pacific, have large reservoirs of the planet-warming greenhouse gas, says study coauthor Scott M. Elliott, a marine biogeochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
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Does the Heat Wave Confirm Climate Change? Yes and No
(July 7) -- With record-breaking summer temperatures from Beijing to Baghdad to Boston, many people are wondering whether the searing heat is a direct result of global warming.
Most every climatologist will tell you that you can't extrapolate a long-term climate trend from a single weather event or finite period. So, even though the current heat wave gripping much of the world has been rewriting the record books, it may not really tell us all that much about climate change.
Indeed, in attempting to quell climate-change skeptics following a period of heavy snow this past winter, Obama administration scientist Jane Lubchenco stated, "It is important that people recognize that weather is not the same thing as climate."
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Great lake warms up
Long notorious for its bone-chilling frigidity, Lake Superior is far warmer than normal, and could be headed for record-setting high temperatures later this summer.
C'mon in -- the water's fine (relatively speaking). Long notorious for its bone-chilling frigidity, Lake Superior is far warmer than normal for this time of year, and could be headed for record-setting high temperatures later this summer.
Thanks to less ice last winter and an early spring, the top layer of the big lake will be "exceptionally warm by August," according to researchers at the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
Temperatures in the top 30 to 50 feet of water usually peak at 59 degrees in mid-August, but they hit that mark this week. The record of 68 degrees, reached in 1998, could well be matched or broken.
The heat is welcome news for swimmers and some species of fish, but streams feeding the largest Great Lake have seen some fish kills.
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Hawaii is already seeing effects of global warming, experts say
Global warming is already leading to rising temperatures in the mountains and declining rainfall in Hawaii, climate change experts said at a meeting Friday.
Temperatures at Hawaii's higher elevations are rising faster than the global average, said Deanna Spooner, coordinator of the Pacific Islands Climate Change Cooperative.
"It's getting hotter here faster than anywhere else in the world up in the upper elevations," Spooner said at the Honolulu meeting of the federal Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.
Rainfall levels, meanwhile, are falling. "Our freshwater resources are shrinking," she said.
The federal task force is holding five meetings around the country to hear how climate change is affecting communities and how people are coping.
It has already held meetings in Portland, Ore., and Miami, and due to meet in Chicago on Thursday and in Denver on July 19.
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Staggering Tree Loss from 2005 Amazon Storm
ScienceDaily (July 13, 2010) - A single, huge, violent storm that swept across the whole Amazon forest in 2005 killed half a billion trees, a new study shows While storms have long been recognized as a cause of Amazon tree loss, this study is the first to produce an actual body count. And, the losses are much greater than previously suspected, the study's authors say. This suggests that storms may play a larger role in the dynamics of Amazon forests than previously recognized, they add.
Previous research had attributed a peak in tree mortality in 2005 solely to a severe drought that affected parts of the forest. The new study says that a single squall line (a long line of severe thunderstorms, the kind associated with lightening and heavy rainfall) had an important role in the tree demise. This type of storm might become more frequent in the future in the Amazon due to climate change, killing a higher number of trees and releasing more carbon to the atmosphere.
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Researchers Witness Overnight Breakup, Retreat of Greenland Glacier
ScienceDaily (July 12, 2010) - NASA-funded researchers monitoring Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier report that a 7 square kilometer (2.7 square mile) section of the glacier broke up on July 6 and 7, as shown in a new image. The calving front -- where the ice sheet meets the ocean -- retreated nearly 1.5 kilometers (a mile) in one day and is now further inland than at any time previously observed. The chunk of lost ice is roughly one-eighth the size of Manhattan Island, New York.
Research teams led by Ian Howat of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University and Paul Morin, director of the Antarctic Geospatial Information Center at the University of Minnesota have been monitoring satellite images for changes in the Greenland ice sheet and its outlet glaciers. While this week's breakup itself is not unusual, Howat noted, detecting it within hours and at such fine detail is a new phenomenon for scientists.
"While there have been ice breakouts of this magnitude from Jakonbshavn and other glaciers in the past, this event is unusual because it occurs on the heels of a warm winter that saw no sea ice form in the surrounding bay," said Thomas Wagner, cryospheric program scientist at NASA Headquarters. "While the exact relationship between these events is being determined, it lends credence to the theory that warming of the oceans is responsible for the ice loss observed throughout Greenland and Antarctica."
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North Pacific: Global Backup Generator for Past Climate Change
ScienceDaily (July 12, 2010) - Toward the end of the last ice age, a major reorganization took place in the current system of the North Pacific with far-reaching implications for climate, according to a new study published in the July 9, 2010, issue of Science by an international team of scientists from Japan, Hawaii, and Belgium.
Earth's climate is regulated largely by the world ocean's density-driven circulation, which brings warm surface water to the polar regions and transports cold water away from there at depth. As poleward flowing salty waters cool in the North Atlantic, they become so heavy that they sink. This sinking acts as a pump for the ocean's conveyor belt circulation.
A well-established fact by now is that there have been times in the past when the North Atlantic branch of the conveyor belt circulation was shut down by melting ice sheets, which released so much fresh glacial meltwater that the sinking of cold water in the Nordic Seas stopped and the Northern Hemisphere was plunged into a deep freeze. The last time such a collapse took place was toward the end of the last ice age, from around 17,500 to 15,000 years ago, the first stage of what scientists call the Mystery Interval.
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Climate change can be hazardous to your health
From heat stress to sewage overflows, climate change promises to bring extreme weather that can throw our nation's ill-prepared public health infrastructure 'back to the 1890s,' according to experts.
Extreme weather induced by climate change has dire public health consequences, as heat waves threaten the vulnerable, storm runoff overwhelms city sewage systems and hotter summer days bake more pollution into asthma-inducing smog, scientists say.
The United States - to say nothing of the developed world - is unprepared for such conditions predicted by myriad climate models and already being seen today, warn climate researchers and public health officials.
"Climate change as it's projected will impact almost every aspect of public health, both in the developed world and - more importantly - in the developing world," said Michael McGeehin, director of the Environmental Hazards and Health Effects division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Shellfish at risk: Puget Sound becoming acidified
The waters of Puget Sound and Hood Canal are becoming more acidified as a result of rising carbon dioxide from industries, power plants and vehicles. Scientists from the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warn that the shifting water chemistry could damage the region's shellfish industry.
The waters in Puget Sound's main basin are acidifying as fast as those along the Washington Coast, where wild oysters have not reproduced since 2005. And in parts of Hood Canal, home to much of the region's shellfish industry, water-chemistry problems are significantly worse than the rest of Puget Sound. Scientists from the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned Monday that the changing pH of the seas is hitting Puget Sound harder and faster than many other marine waters.
That increasingly corrosive water - a byproduct of carbon-dioxide releases from industries, power plants and vehicles - is probably already harming shellfish, and over time it could reverberate through the marine food chain.
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Video 2: Climate Change and National Security
Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has another video on "Climate Change and National Security":
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Climate change to have major impacts on Western water
Water resource advocates worry over dry times for the Colorado River Basin as temperatures rise
Of all the current and future impacts of climate change, threats to water resources may be the most painful in the American West, according to a new report published Monday.
"Protecting the lifeline of the West," written by Western Resource Advocates, a Boulder-based environmental law and policy organization, brings together dozens of studies by climate and water experts, detailing the ways in which water, energy and climate are deeply entwined in states like Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona. "Of all the implications of a hotter climate, the water implications are the most dramatic or long-term," said Bart Miller, the organization's water-program director. "There's no way to adjust by making more water."
The report's release coincides with the U.S. Senate's return to Washington to take up energy and climate legislation this week.
"One aspect of the global-warming challenge that is not often talked about inside the Beltway is the threat posed by global warming to the West's most critical natural resource - water," said Dan Grossman, regional director for Environmental Defense Fund. "In addition to helping increase droughts that are associated with climate change, developing clean-energy technologies will also let us move away from water-intensive energy sources so we can devote more of our water to meet the growing needs of Western cities, agriculture, recreation and the environment."
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Haneisen: A warmer, harsher climate?
Imagine a New England with no maple syrup or cranberries. Or perhaps struggling apple orchards, the trees surrounded by super-potent poison ivy and ultra allergenic ragweed.
If experts on climate change are correct, New England forests and farms at the end of this century could be markedly different.
Regardless of whether you believe climate change or global warming is caused by man or a natural cycle, research by botanists and ecologists suggest that some plants may thrive in a newer, warmer New England and others may fade into memory or migrate north.
In the August/September 2010 issue of Organic Gardening, an article by Christina Santiestevan outlines how climate change is influencing the planned altering of plant hardiness zones by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Beyond advising what plants can be grown in certain parts of the country, new plant hardiness maps are further evidence of our (relatively) rapidly changing climate.
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Sea Levels Rising in Parts of Indian Ocean; Greenhouse Gases Play Role, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (July 13, 2010) - Newly detected rising sea levels in parts of the Indian Ocean, including the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and Java, appear to be at least partly a result of human-induced increases of atmospheric greenhouse gases, says a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The study, which combined sea surface measurements going back to the 1960s and satellite observations, indicates anthropogenic climate warming likely is amplifying regional sea rise changes in parts of the Indian Ocean, threatening inhabitants of some coastal areas and islands, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Weiqing Han, lead study author. The sea level rise -- which may aggravate monsoon flooding in Bangladesh and India -- could have far-reaching impacts on both future regional and global climate.
The key player in the process is the Indo-Pacific warm pool, an enormous, bathtub-shaped area of the tropical oceans stretching from the east coast of Africa west to the International Date Line in the Pacific. The warm pool has heated by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, or 0.5 degrees Celsius, in the past 50 years, primarily caused by human-generated increases of greenhouse gases, said Han.
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Warming Waters Exacerbate Dwindling New England Fisheries
Curbs on fishing may not be enough to help fish populations deal with the changes wrought by global warming
GLOUCESTER, Mass.-- Pete Libra is frustrated. The 40-year-old cod fisherman sees lots of fish in the ocean, and he wants to catch more. Fishing authorities see fewer, and want him to catch less.
"I'm not a scientist. But I see the fish," said Libra. His is the voice of many of the fishermen in Gloucester, the heart of a once-great fishing industry that powered fledgling America and underwrote New England's economy.
Many fishermen here feel threatened by a sweeping new set of fishing limits imposed this spring by authorities trying to rebuild fish stocks they say are depleted by overfishing and facing pressures that include climate change. Federal fishing regulators have traditionally reacted to falling stocks by putting additional curbs on fishing. But that approach may not work in the face of larger environmental changes such as global warming.
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Interview with scientist Stephen Schneider on his "Expert Credibility in Climate Change" study
Last month I wrote about the new study that reaffirmed the broad scientific understanding of climate change and questioned the media's reliance on a tiny group of less-credibile scientists for "balance." The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study "Expert credibility in climate change," was predictably attacked and misrepresented by the disinformers as part of their ongoing efforts to promote their fringe anti-science views.
To set the record straight, ClimateScienceWatch.org talked with one of the article's coauthors, Stanford University Prof. Stephen Schneider. The video and transcript of the interview are below. First, let me repost the study's main conclusion:
Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that 1) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and 2) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
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Climate scientists: "The urgent need to act cannot be overstated."
"Climate change caused by humans is already affecting our lives and livelihoods - with extreme storms, unusual floods and droughts, intense heat waves, rising seas and many changes in biological systems - as climate scientists have projected."
Today, a large body of evidence has been collected to support the broad scientific understanding that global climate warming, as evident these last few decades, is unprecedented for the past 1000 years - and this change is due to human activities. This conclusion is based on decades of rigorous research by thousands of scientists and endorsed by all of the world's major national science academies….
Although uncertainties remain, they concern issues like the rate of melting of major ice sheets rather than the broader topic of whether the climate is changing.
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Interactive climate map from Google shows future impact of climate change
The impact of climate change on the earth has been illustrated by an interactive map launched by ministers and scientists.
The Google Earth map shows how the world would be affected by a global average temperature increase of 4C in a bid to rebuild public trust in climate science. It illustrates rising water levels and reduced crop yields in different parts of the world if temperatures are not curbed by cutting greenhouse gases.
The launch of the map by the Foreign Office (FCO) and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) comes in the wake of the "climategate" row over emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and the sustained attack it prompted on scientific research into man-made global warming. Government chief scientist Professor John Beddington said there was "no doubt there is a problem in public confidence in climate change".
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Hudson Bay polar bears 'could soon be extinct'
Polar bears in the Hudson Bay area of Canada are likely to die out in the next three decades, possibly sooner, as global warming melts more Arctic ice and thus reduces their hunting opportunities, according to Canadian biologists.
The animals in western Hudson Bay, one of 19 discrete sub-populations of the species around the Arctic, are losing fat and body mass as their time on the floating sea ice gets shorter and shorter, according to the researchers from the University of Alberta.
The sea ice is where the bears hunt ringed and bearded seals, their main prey, and they have to build up enough fat in the winter, when the ice is at its greatest, to get through the summer, when the ice retreats from the shoreline and the bears can find no food.
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Future summers in region could be sizzling
Northwest Indiana could experience more than a month of summer days with highs over 100 degrees if global warming continues until the end of the century, scientists project. In a worst-case scenario, temperatures could increase so much toward the end of the century that humans who stay outside for longer than six hours would die, one researcher said.
"By the end of this century, what we currently consider a heat wave or hotter-than-normal day will be considered normal because the climate has warmed," said David Easterling, a climatologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center.
Depending on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions emitted, Northwest Indiana could experience between seven and 28 days of 100-degree-plus summer days toward the end of the century, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists' 2009 report "Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Midwest."
"Model simulations say we can expect more and larger heat waves in the future," Easterling said. "That largely depends on the trajectory of carbon emissions."
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Scourge of the Jellies: Small Fish Shows How Ecosystems Adjust to Potentially Catastrophic Changes
One fish--the bearded goby--has employed special adaptations to support an ecosystem challenged by overfishing, low-oxygen waters and even climate change Jellyfish are returning to prominence in the world's oceans, thanks to a combination of overfishing, climate change and even "dead zones". A case in point is in the Benguela Current, an upwelling in the South Atlantic off the coast of Namibia and South Africa. Sardines thrived here, feeding on the rich blooms of plankton fertilized by nutrients carried along by rising deep ocean waters. The sardines, in turn, were consumed by everything from seabirds and sea lions to predatory fish like the mackerel.
Overfishing brought that to an end by the 1970s and jellyfish-as in many ocean ecosystems around the globe from the Yellow to the Black seas-came to dominate. That might seem an ecological dead end because few modern marine critters are equipped to cope with a jelly's stinging defenses. But that assumption has proved wrong in the Benguela, at least, thanks to a 13-centimeter-long fish known as the bearded goby (Sufflogobius bibarbatus).
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Glacier National Park faces a massive meltdown
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. - Standing under a cloudless midsummer sky at the Many Glacier Hotel, ranger Bob Schuster gestures toward the saw-toothed southern horizon and holds up evidence of a changing climate in a place indigenous Blackfeet Indians dubbed the "backbone of the world." His repeat photographs show the rapid retreat of the 100-year-old park's iconic geological features, which have declined from about 150 at the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century to about two dozen today.
It's all but impossible for Schuster's charges to distinguish whether those white patches glinting in the distance represent snowpacks or glaciers (the latter, he explains, are defined as moving icefields at least 100 feet thick and 25 acres in size). What's more, the vast majority of the park's 2.2 million annual visitors will never make the grueling six-hour trek that's required for an up-close glimpse of Grinnell, the most accessible of the 1,600-square-mile preserve's remaining glaciers.
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Do We Need a Local Water Movement?
We have a local food movement, which encourages people to have a smaller environmental impact by eating food grown within a 100 mile radius. Is the next local movement going to be aimed at water? Dr. Peter H. Gleick, the co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute, hopes so. In an article at Huffington Post, he argues that it's time to extend the idea of living local to water sources.
Gleick writes:
Our major cities long ago outgrew their ability to provide enough food for the - sometimes - millions of people living in them, and they long ago outgrew their ability to provide enough water with purely local resources. New York City relies on water from upstate New York. Los Angeles relies on water from northern California and the Colorado River. San Francisco moves water from the Sierra Nevada. Even ancient Rome built aqueducts to move water long distances to supply the needs of the city when it outgrew local springs.
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Saving the parched West
Last year, when the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, more than half of the representatives from the mountain West voted against the comprehensive climate and energy legislation. Given that extensive research predicts the West will experience some of the worst impacts of climate change in the U.S., including a permanent drought with Dust-bowl like conditions by mid-century - and an increase of wildfire burn area by as much as 175% - the resistance among western lawmakers to legislation that could save their region borders on self-destructive, as CAP's Tom Kenworthy explains.
As the U.S. Global Change Research Program noted, "climate change appears to be well underway in the Southwest," and future even more severe droughts than have occurred in the last decade are "a significant concern" in part because of population pressures in the arid region that are already stressing scarce water supplies.
Now comes a new report from Western Resource Advocates and the Environmental Defense Fund that ought to be required reading for those western politicians. "Protecting the Lifeline of the West: How Climate and Clean Energy Policies Can Safeguard Water" should make it abundantly clear even to western dunderheads that without comprehensive energy and climate legislation the West's way of life – dependent on fragile water sources - is in peril.
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Stanford climate scientist Steve Schneider dead at 65
19 July 2010 A scientist with a knack for communicating to the public dies Monday after a career that was both 'impressively long and all-too short.' Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider, one of the pre-eminent voices in the climate debate and a rare researcher who argued with wit and passion about the limits of climate science and the need for aggressive response, died Monday of an apparent heart attack while en route to London from a scientific conference in Stockholm. He was 65.
Over the course of his 40-year career, Schneider built the case that the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has dire consequences for the globe. He also studied the policy implications of human-caused global warming, publishing some 400 articles on climate change and society's response.
"Steve did for climate science what Carl Sagan did for astronomy," wrote Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory atmospheric scientist Benjamin Santer
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Opinion: Today the world lost a great man
We honor Steve Schneider by caring about the strange and beautiful planet on which we live, by protecting its climate, and by ensuring that our policymakers do not fall asleep at the wheel.
Today the world lost a great man. Professor Stephen Schneider - a climate scientist at Stanford University - passed away while on travel in the United Kingdom. Stephen Schneider did more than any other individual on the planet to help us realize that human actions have led to global-scale changes in Earth's climate. Steve was instrumental in focusing scientific, political, and public attention on one of the major challenges facing humanity - the problem of human-caused climate change. Some climate scientists have exceptional talents in pure research. They love to figure out the inner workings of the climate system. Others have strengths in communicating complex scientific issues to non-specialists. It is rare to find scientists who combine these talents. Steve Schneider was just such a man.
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