Climate Articles
Think this summer is hot? Get used to it
This summer's stifling, deadly heat along the Eastern Seaboard and Deep South could be a preview of summers to come over the next few decades, according to a report about global warming to be published Wednesday by the National Wildlife Federation and the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.
In fact, according to NWF climate scientist Amanda Staudt, the summer of 2010 might actually be considered mild compared with the typical summers in the future. "We all think this summer is miserable, but it's nothing compared to what's in store for us," she says.
DEATH: Summer heat brings danger for seniors
NATIONAL EXTREMES: August 2010 temperatures
The East just sweltered through one of its hottest Julys on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Monday. Every state from Maine to Florida endured one its top-10 warmest Julys since records began in 1880. Two states, Delaware and Rhode Island, had their hottest July ever.
A federal report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program in 2009, which much of this report was based on, found that average temperatures in the USA have increased more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the past five decades, largely as the result of emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which are produced by burning fossil fuels.
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Heat Records Broken in 17 Countries So Far This Year
This year is a little more than half over, and already it is one for the climate record books. 2010 has featured several extreme heat events, as well as record flooding, in many countries worldwide. The number of countries that have set new national records for the warmest temperature recorded - 17 - would beat the old record of 14, provided that all of the new records are verified by meteorological agencies. According to meteorologist Jeff Masters of the private weather forecasting firm Weather Underground, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the countries that have set new records thus far this year comprise about 19 percent of the earth's surface area.
Masters wrote on his blog: "These nations comprise 19 percent of the total land area of Earth. This is the largest area of Earth's surface to experience all-time record high temperatures in any single year in the historical record. Looking back at the past decade, which was the hottest decade in the historical record, 75 countries set extreme hottest temperature records (33 percent of all countries.) For comparison, fifteen countries set extreme coldest temperature records over the past ten years (six percent of all countries)." According to Masters, Guinea, which is located in northwestern Africa, is the one nation so far this year to break its coldest temperature record, which occurred in early January.
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Berserk Weather Causes Worldwide Chaos
From floods in Pakistan to droughts in Russia, "extreme and very unusual" weather across the world is bringing death and misery to millions of people.
2010 is already being branded as the year the weather went berserk.
In Pakistan, floods have claimed over 1,600 lives and left over two million people homeless.
Countries across the world are scrambling to donate aid supplies to the 14 million people affected by the flooding.
In China, massive downpours have caused mudslides, killing more than 1,117. Rescue teams have given up trying to find survivors and are attempting to locate bodies.
There is growing concern that supplies of clean drinking water could become contaminated and the National Meteorological Centre is reporting more heavy rain, with up to three inches forecast for Friday.
Rivers have also swollen in central Europe with hundreds of people evacuated across Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic.
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Borehole network confirms, permafrost is thawing worldwide
An expanded network of boreholes across the northern hemisphere has confirmed that permafrost throughout polar and sub-polar regions is thawing, say scientists who studied the topic during International Polar Year.
"You look at a whole hemisphere and see the patterns everywhere," said Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor with the snow, ice and permafrost group at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, and lead author of a paper documenting the research.
Romanovsky and his colleagues launched a campaign to improve the global network of boreholes for International Polar Year, a science program focused on the Arctic and Antarctic that ran from 2007 to 2009. Boreholes are holes drilled anywhere from 6 feet to over 200 feet into the ground and equipped with sensors to allow scientists to measure soil conditions. The researchers established nearly 300 boreholes, nearly doubling the existing network.
"The heart of monitoring is the measuring of the temperatures in boreholes," Romanovsky said.
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Higher Temperatures to Slow Asian Rice Production
ScienceDaily (Aug. 9, 2010) - Production of rice -- the world's most important crop for ensuring food security and addressing poverty -- will be thwarted as temperatures increase in rice-growing areas with continued climate change, according to a new study by an international team of scientists.
The research team found evidence that the net impact of projected temperature increases will be to slow the growth of rice production in Asia. Rising temperatures during the past 25 years have already cut the yield growth rate by 10-20 percent in several locations.
Published in the online early edition the week of Aug. 9, 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the report analyzed six years of data from 227 irrigated rice farms in six major rice-growing countries in Asia, which produces more than 90 percent of the world's rice.
"We found that as the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop," said Jarrod Welch, lead author of the report and graduate student of economics at the University of California, San Diego.
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Rice yields falling under global warming
Yields have fallen by 10-20% over the last 25 years in some locations.
The group of mainly US-based scientists studied records from 227 farms in six important rice-producing countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, India and China.
This is the latest in a line of studies to suggest that climate change will make it harder to feed the world's growing population by cutting yields.
In 2004, other researchers found that rice yields in the Philippines were dropping by 10% for every 1C increase in night-time temperature.
That finding, like others, came from experiments on a research station.
The latest data, by contrast, comes from working, fully-irrigated farms that grow "green revolution" crops, and span the rice-growing lands of Asia from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to the outskirts of Shanghai.
Describing the findings, which are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), lead researcher Jarrod Welch said:
"We found that as the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop."
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The crack in the roof of the world: 'Yes, global warming is real - and deeply worrying'
Around me is an endless expanse of searing white beneath an unmarked blue August sky. In front of me is a roaring, angry river of the richest, brilliant turquoise, churning at 20 knots through a crystal gorge fringed with icicles.
This river runs deep, possibly 13ft. Not a speck of dust, mud, weed or debris pollutes its flawless, azure depths.
Despite being only 100ft across, this mighty channel carries more water than the Thames, and if I fell in I would have about 20 seconds to live.
It's not the cold that would kill me. Long before I had time to succumb to hypothermia I would disappear into a gaping, hellish maw - one of the deadly, awesome plugholes which punctuate the Greenlandic ice sheet.
Incredibly, this vertical shaft - called a moulin (French for mill) - manages to swallow this entire river into oblivion, the water plunging a third of a mile towards the base of the icecap. It is an astounding sight, one of the most dramatic spectacles on the planet - about a quarter of a million gallons-a-second simply vanishing from view.
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Floods and mudslides on three continents, as drought hits Africa
How victims of extreme weather conditions and natural disaster are faring around the world
Regions across the world have been buffeted by extremes of weather, drought and floods. Sometimes an area is hit by one extreme, followed soon after by another, Niger being a case in point. In the case of floods in Pakistan, the Met Office says high pressure over Russia has forced the jet stream much further south than usual this year and this pattern has remained almost stationary over recent weeks. Therefore low pressure has been sitting over Pakistan longer than normal, intensifying the monsoon rains. "The extremes of rainfall are getting heavier and are entirely consistent with climate change predictions," said Helen Chivers, a spokeswoman with the Met Office.
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The Asian Floods-Signs of Climate Catastrophes to Come?
They haven't gotten anywhere near the attention they deserve, but the floods that have struck much of Asia over the past couple of weeks may be the biggest humanitarian disaster in recent memory-bigger even than the earthquake that hit Haiti in January and the 2004 Asian tsunami. Both of those catastrophes killed far more, but the floods have affected 13 million people in Pakistan alone, and parts of India, China and North Korea have also suffered from the rains. The floods will destroy homes and business, wreck agriculture and destroy infrastructure, leave disease and disability in their wake. Flooding in China has already killed more than 1,100 people this year and caused tens of billions of dollars of damage. In shaky Pakistan, where the public has been enraged by the government's typically fumbling response to the flood, it could even increase support for hard-line Islamic groups.
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Russian Meteorological Center: "There was nothing similar...
... to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat."
Masters: Over 15,000 likely dead in Russia, 17 nations comprising 19% of Earth's total land area set extreme heat records this year, July was "sixth straight record warm month in the tropical Atlantic"
Caption: "A comparison of August temperatures, the peak of the great European heat wave of 2003 (left) with July temperatures from the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 (right) reveals that this year's heat wave is more intense and covers a wider area of Europe. Image credit: NOAA/ESRL" - Jeff Masters.
Ria Novisti reports:
Russia has recently seen the longest unprecedented heat wave for at least one thousand years, the head of the Russian Meteorological Center said on Monday....
"We have an ‘archive' of abnormal weather situations stretching over a thousand years. It is possible to say there was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat," Alexander Frolov said.
He said scientists received information on ancient weather conditions by exploring lake deposits.
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Carbon Monoxide over Western Russia
Even as Muscovites choked under a blanket of thick smoke in the first week of August 2010, concentrations of a colorless, odorless gas spiked to dangerous levels. A product of fire and a component of smoke, carbon monoxide is among the pollutants that wildfires spread across much of western Russia. This image, made with data from the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) sensor flying on NASA's Terra satellite, shows carbon monoxide over western Russia between August 1 and August 8, 2010.
The highest levels of carbon monoxide are shown in red, while lower levels are yellow and orange. Western Russia, including Moscow, sits under a broad area of elevated carbon monoxide. Areas where the sensor did not collect data during the period-probably because of clouds-are gray.
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Oil Slick, Mississippi River Delta, Gulf of Mexico
The International Space Station (ISS) observed the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in late July 2010, as part of ongoing observations of the region. When this image was taken, three months after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, the leak had been plugged for eight days. Water surfaces appear bright and land surfaces appear dark in the image. The stark contrast is due to sunglint, in which the Sun is reflected off water surfaces back towards the astronaut observer on board the ISS. The sunglint reveals various features in the Gulf of Mexico, especially sheens of oil that appear as packets of long bright streaks (image right). Sediments carried by the Mississippi River have a pale beige coloration in this image, with distinct margins between plumes that likely mark tidal pulses of river water into the Gulf of Mexico. A boat wake cuts across one of the oil packets at image top right.
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Increasing 'Bad' Ozone Threatens Human and Plant Health
On July 6 this summer, Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality issued the region's first "unhealthy" air alert since 2008.
The culprit? "Bad" ozone and other air pollution that had combined to produce an abnormally high reading of 119 parts per billion in Suffolk and 70-80 parts per billion in other parts of southeastern Virginia. That compares to the natural concentration of ozone of about 10 parts per billion that was the norm more than a century ago.
Ozone spikes are part of a pattern of increasing O3 levels globally, in even the most remote areas, says Dr. Jack Fishman, senior research scientist in the Science Directorate at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
Health effects
"I think what we have to dispel is that ozone pollution is confined to places like Los Angeles and Houston," says Fishman. "Despite emission controls that have resulted in notable reductions in many American cities, O3 concentrations in non-urban areas in both the U.S. and around the world are increasing, with negative impacts to all living things -- plants, animals, and people."
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Deep Sea Methane Vents at Hydrate Ridge
The 125-foot-tall column overlooking Astoria, Ore., is covered with scenes of the region's exploration-rich history: Capt. Robert Gray claims the region for America in 1792, Lewis and Clark reach the Pacific in 1805, and explorers with the Pacific Fur Company arrive in 1811. Despite these textbook-worthy highlights, Astoria is perhaps best known for its starring role in the Oscar-snubbed cult classic film "The Goonies" (apparently we missed the 25-year "Goonies" reunion by a couple of weeks). Nonetheless, it's a fitting place to set off on our own journey of discovery.
Over the next 12 days, our contingent of 24 scientists and 30 crew members will be mounting a scientific assault on Hydrate Ridge, a fascinating site 90 kilometers off the Oregon coast where methane gas flows out of the earth's crust and into the deep ocean. Methane has a P.R. problem: In the atmosphere, the gas is a troublemaker, contributing to climate change with 25 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide. But on the seafloor, it's a lifeline, as innovative micro-organisms are able to eke out a living converting methane to carbon dioxide and using the resulting energy to grow. Where one type of organism leads, others will follow, and entire ecosystems have grown up around these methane vents: microbes, clams, stringy tube worms and a range of other exotic species.
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Ice age permafrost unearthed in Poland to help clock warming
WARSAW (AFP) – Permafrost dating from the end of the last Ice Age around 13,000 years ago recently discovered in Poland could prove an invaluable tool in gauging global warming, Polish geologists said on Friday.
The unique discovery of pre-historic permafrost was made on Monday in a corner of north-eastern Poland bordering Lithuania, near the village of Szypliszki.
Geologists drilling at the site were astounded to find the temperature of the drill cores decreasing rather than increasing -- as is normally the case -- the deeper they went.
The core containing ancient frost is the first of its kind found in central Europe and is an invaluable source of information about the climate on the Earth tens of thousands of years ago, the Polish geologists said.
Usually, similar valuable information can be derived from ancient cores found in Antarctica or Greenland.
"It is like touching cold that is 13,000-years-old," Professor Jerzy Nawrocki, director of the Polish Geological Institute (PGI), told reporters
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Russia fires cause "brown cloud," may hit Arctic
(Reuters) - Smoke from forest fires smothering Moscow adds to health problems of "brown clouds" from Asia to the Amazon and Russian soot may stoke global warming by hastening a thaw of Arctic ice, environmental experts say.
"Health effects of such clouds are huge," said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, chair of a U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) study of "brown clouds" blamed for dimming sunlight in cities such as Beijing or New Delhi and hitting crop growth in Asia.
The clouds -- a haze of pollution from cars or coal-fired power plants, forest fires and wood and other materials burned for cooking and heating -- are near-permanent and blamed for causing chronic respiratory and heart diseases.
"In Asia just the indoor smoke - because people cook with firewood - causes over a million deaths a year," Ramanathan, of the University of California, San Diego, told Reuters.
Moscow's top health official said on Monday that about 700 people were dying every day, twice as many as in normal weather, as Russia grapples with its worst heat wave in 130 years.
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Daily Mail: "Global warming is real and deeply worrying"
"Greenland appears to be literally cracking up in front of our eyes"
The Daily Mail has become the latest previously ‘climate sceptic' newspaper to shift its editorial line to acknowledge that climate change is "real and deeply worrying".
Yesterday the paper's science editor, Michael Hanlon, who could previously be seen as the UK's most influential ‘sceptic,' writes:
"I have long been something of a climate-change sceptic, but my views in recent years have shifted. For me, the most convincing evidence that something worrying is going on lies right here in the Arctic."
After describing his trip to see the break up of a glacier in Greenland – somewhere he describes as "Global Warming Ground Zero" – Hanlon says:
"So has this remarkable week changed my mind? I still believe climate change has probably been exaggerated, but after coming here it is impossible to maintain that nothing is going on."
Hanlon already signalled, in the Daily Mail on 24 August 2006, he was changing his position, when he wrote:
"Few scientists now doubt that human activity, the burning of fossil fuels, is having an impact on global temperatures."
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10 indicators of a human fingerprint on climate change
The NOAA State of the Climate 2009 report is an excellent summary of the many lines of evidence that global warming is happening. Acknowledging the fact that the planet is warming leads to the all important question: What's causing global warming? To answer this, here is a summary of the empirical evidence that answer this question. Many different observations find a distinct human fingerprint on climate change:
To get a closer look, click on the pic above to get a high-rez 1024×768 version (you're all welcome to use this graphic in your Powerpoint presentations). Or to dig even deeper, here's more info on each indicator (including links to the original data or peer-reviewed research):
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Indonesian Ice Field May Be Gone in a Few Years, Core May Contain Secrets of Pacific El Nino Events
ScienceDaily (Aug. 11, 2010) - Glaciologists who drilled through an ice cap perched precariously on the edge of a 16,000-foot-high Indonesian mountain ridge say that the ice field could vanish within in the next few years, another victim of global climate change.
The Ohio State University researchers, supported by a National Science Foundation grant and the Freeport-McMoRan mining company and collaborating with Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysical Agency (BMKG) Indonesia and Columbia University, drilled three ice cores, two to bedrock, from the peak's rapidly shrinking ice caps.
They hope these new cores will provide a long-term record of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon that dominates climate variability in the tropics.
"We were able to bring back three cores from these glaciers, one 30 meters (98.4 feet) long, one 32 meters (105 feet) long and the third 26 meters (85 feet) long," explained Lonnie Thompson, Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences and a senior researcher with Ohio State's Byrd Polar Research Center.
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Long hot summer of fire and floods fit predictions
NEW YORK - Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.
The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says - although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.
The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They'll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship.
"There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott.
He said modelers of climate systems are "very keen" to develop supercomputer modeling that would enable more detailed linking of cause and effect as a warming world shifts jet streams and other atmospheric currents. Those changes can wreak weather havoc.
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Record Droughts, Floods and Fires Strain Food Markets' Resilience
UNITED NATIONS -- A string of devastating natural disasters many are attributing to climate change has sent food prices on a roller coaster ride, leading to fears of a wave of climate-induced food price shocks of the sort that sparked rioting in the developing world two years ago.
But international agriculture experts say those concerns are unfounded. Though they acknowledge dramatic spikes in wheat and corn, and new pricing pressure on rice, U.N. and other food policy experts say data show global food inventories are still healthy and that declining production in some parts of the world will be offset by bumper crops elsewhere.
"We shouldn't panic, and we shouldn't think that there's going to be another food crisis," said Manuel Hernandez, a researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Concern began when Russia recently announced a ban on wheat exports, citing a severe heat wave and drought that have charred that nation's wheat crop in the fields. Massive wildfires near Russia's breadbasket are further hampering farming.
Experts say that Russia, which was previously on track to becoming the world's largest exporter of wheat, has lost more than 20 percent of its crop to the drought.
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Oceanography: Dead in the water
Every summer for the past nine years, water with lethally low concentrations of oxygen has appeared off the Oregon coast. The hypoxia may be a sign of things to come elsewhere, finds Virginia Gewin.
The dead fish were one of the first signs. In July 2002, scientists with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife found unusual numbers of bottom-feeding sculpin lying lifeless on the ocean floor, which would normally be teeming with life. Crabs were also dying, and they washed up onto some beaches in large numbers.
Officials at the government agency asked Francis Chan, a biogeochemist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, for help in discovering the cause of the disturbance as quickly as possible. Chan was about to set off on a scheduled research cruise along the Oregon coast, so he grabbed all the extra equipment he could think of, including a brand-new oxygen sensor.
Ocean surface waters normally contain 5–8 millilitres of oxygen per litre of water, a number that declines rapidly with depth. But on his first day out, Chan found that at a depth of 50 metres the inner coastal waters off Oregon were hypoxic - oxygen levels there were lower than 1.43 millilitres per litre, so low that fish can't survive1.
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Connecting the Dots Between Russian Heat Wave and Asian Floods
Depending on your news source, the weather around the world has either gone "berserk," haywire, off its rocker, or plain old extreme.
Take a Sky News headline from August 10, for example: "Berserk Weather Causes Worldwide Chaos." It's a quintessential example of how the media sensationalizes unusual weather events. (My compliments go to the author, however, for managing to use the words "berserk" and "chaos" in the same sentence).
Despite the excessively alarming tone of some of the stories, it's difficult to avoid being at least somewhat concerned by the facts: thus far 2010 ranks as the warmest year in recorded history. Western Russia continues to suffer through its worst heat wave in generations that is killing thousands and brought the first-ever 100-degree plus weather to Moscow – twice – along with rampaging wildfires that are polluting vast areas of the country and halting Russian wheat exports.
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Jellyfish armada threatens Spanish beaches
A VAST flotilla of small, virtually undetectable jellyfish have stung hundreds of people on Spanish beaches this week - a swimmer's nightmare that biologists say will become increasingly common due to climate change and overfishing.
The blobs attacked three areas near the eastern city of Elche along a famed stretch of white sand beaches known as the Costa Blanca.
On Tuesday alone, 380 people were stung, compared to the usual four or five swimmers a day, said Juan Carlos Castellanos of the Elche city tourism department.
The was no sign of the jellyfish yesterday but since Sunday at least 700 people have been stung.
"In the five or six years I have been in this job, I have never seen anything like this," Mr Castellanos said.
The beaches were never closed but officials put up warning signs and stationed lookout boats offshore.
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Russia's Peatland Fires Seen Burning For Months
Some of Russia's smog-causing peatland fires are likely to burn for months, part of a global problem of drained marshes that emit climate-warming greenhouse gases, experts said on Wednesday.
Novel carbon markets could offer a long-term fix for peat bogs, from Indonesia to South Africa, if negotiators of a U.N. climate treaty can agree ways to pay to safeguard marshes that are often drained to make way for farms, roads or homes.
"Peat fires continue underground and...they will not be extinguished in Russia before winter rains and snow set in," said Hans Joosten, professor of peatland studies and paleoecology at the University of Greifswald in Germany.
To put out fires "you must inundate the area completely," he said, adding that one peat fire in South Africa near the border with Botswana, for instance, had smoldered for 5 years. Peat is formed from partly decayed vegetation.
Environmental group Wetlands International estimated 80 to 90 percent of the smog in Moscow was from peatland fires near the capital, rather than forest fires linked to what weather officials call Russia's hottest summer in a millennium.
"In Russia, peat fires can sometimes last under snow cover through the winter," said Ilkka Vanha-Majamaa, a scientist at the Finnish Forestry Research Institute.
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Lobster Dieoffs Linked to Chemicals in Plastics
Lobsters in Long Island Sound have suffered intense dieoffs in the past decade, and a peculiar affliction, known as "shell disease," has been a major contributor. Now, a molecular biologist at the University of Connecticut has discovered that waterborne chemicals, leached from plastics and detergents, may contribute to the disease in lobsters in the Sound.
Hans Laufer, a research professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has found that by interfering with hormones crucial to young lobster growth, chemicals such as bisphenol A can slow the lobsters' molting patterns and interfere with regular development, leading to body deformations, susceptibility to disease, and potential death.
Laufer will join researchers from 15 other New England institutions this week to present the results of a three-year, $3 million research initiative at the 9th Annual Ronald C. Baird Sea Grant Science Symposium, taking place at the University of Rhode Island. The New England Lobster Research Initiative examined the causes of lobster shell disease and the contributing factors that make lobsters vulnerable to the disease.
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Unprecedented warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity
Lake Tanganyika, in East Africa, is the second largest lake in the world (by volume). The lake supports a prodigious sardine fishery which provides a major source of animal protein for the region as well as employment for around 1 million people. Direct observations over past 90 years find that Lake Tanganyika has warmed significantly. At the same time, there's been a drop in primary productivity in the lake impacting sardine populations. To further explore this matter, geologists took lake cores to determine the lake's surface temperature back to 500 AD (Tierney 2010). They found that warming in the last century is unprecedented over the last 1500 years.
What effect does temperature have on the lake's sardine population? To answer this question, a proxy for primary productivity was also reconstructed from the lake cores. Primary productivity was determined from the percentage of biogenic silica in the sediment. They found that over the last 1500 years, when temperature rose, primary productivity fell. In the last 150 years, productivity plummeted from relatively high levels during the early 1800s to some of the lowest sustained values during the past 1,500 years.
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Lake Superior reaches record temp
Duluth, Minn. - On another muggy August afternoon in Duluth, the Park Point city beach is again packed.
Clara Goellner is one of the three life guards trying to keep an eye on the mob of teens and children splashing away in water that's typically bone-chilling.
But this year, the normally uncomfortably cool surface waters of Lake Superior aren't so cold, as summer heat is showing up in one of the Minnesota's colder places.
Experts say the lake's surface temperatures set a new record high this week -- and the entire lake likely is warmer than ever recorded.
"It's extremely warm," Goellner said. "It's about 70 every day -- really big crowds, even on weekdays."
At Park Point, it's not just little kids in the water. A squad of teenaged cheerleaders practices lifts hip-deep in the water.
This is Goellner's third year guarding the beach, and she knows warm water isn't the norm.
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Lake Mead's Water Level Plunges as 11-Year Drought Lingers
Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir of Colorado River water that hydrates Arizona, Nevada, California and northern Mexico, is receding to a level not seen since it was first being filled in the 1930s, stoking existential fears about water supply in the parched Southwest.
Heightening those concerns are recent signs that the region's record-breaking, 11-year drought could wear on for another year or longer. July not only saw the lake drop to 1956 levels but also brought cooling temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that signaled a developing La Niña system, historically a harbinger of more hot and dry weather.
The La Niña "appears to be strong, and it might even last two years," said Brad Udall, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Western Water Assessment program at the University of Colorado.
In the 75 years since the workers began to hold back the Colorado River behind the Hoover Dam, the lake's water has taken two precipitous plunges: first during the prolonged drought of the 1950s, which ranks second only to the current dry spell, and again in the mid-1960s, when water managers began filling Mead's cousin 250 miles upstream, Lake Powell.
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Biodiversity Hot Spots More Vulnerable to Global Warming Than Thought
ScienceDaily (Aug. 12, 2010) - Global warming may present a threat to animal and plant life even in biodiversity hot spots once thought less likely to suffer from climate change, according to a new study from Rice University.
Research by Amy Dunham, a Rice assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, detailed for the first time a direct correlation between the frequency of El Niño and a threat to life in Madagascar, a tropical island that acts as a refuge for many unique species that exist nowhere else in the world. In this case, the lemur plays the role of the canary in the coal mine.
The study in the journal Global Change Biology is currently available online and will be included in an upcoming print issue.
Dunham said most studies of global warming focus on temperate zones. "We all know about the polar bears and their melting sea ice," she said. "But tropical regions are often thought of as refuges during past climate events, so they haven't been given as much attention until recently.
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Current extreme weather events
Unprecedented sequence of extreme weather events
Several regions of the world are currently coping with severe weather-related events: flash floods and widespread flooding in large parts of Asia and parts of Central Europe while other regions are also affected: by heatwave and drought in Russian Federation, mudslides in China and severe droughts in sub-Saharan Africa. While a longer time range is required to establish whether an individual event is attributable to climate change, the sequence of current events matches IPCC projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming. The Monsoon activity in Pakistan and other countries in South-East Asia is aggravated by the la Niña phenomenon, now well established in the Pacific Ocean.
The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) has been issuing warnings since the onset of the pre-Monsoon season in mid-June and issues continuous weather and flood advisories and warnings to assist in emergency relief (http://www.pakmet.com.pk) Heavy and persistent rainfall has been recorded since July causing severe flash floods and widespread flooding. The event affected first the north-western part of Pakistan and later extended to large parts of the country, with Khyber-Pakhtonkwa, Punjab and Sindh among the most affected provinces. The province of Khyber-Pakhtonkwa received nearly 180 % excess of total July rainfall compared to the monthly long-term average.
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Greenland ice sheet faces 'tipping point in 10 years'
Scientists warn that temperature rise of between 2C and 7C would cause ice to melt, resulting in 23ft rise in sea level
The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists told Congress today.
Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University
"Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive," Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland's ice sheet.
The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.
"What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done," he said.
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Climate Change: How Extreme Heat May Affect Your Food
Hot enough for you? If you live in one of the more than 15 states that were suffering under a heat advisory or excessive heat warning on Tuesday, I'm going to guess the answer is yes, God, please make it all stop. The oppressively high temperatures that gripped much of the U.S. during June-the hottest month on record worldwide, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-barely relented in July, when average temperatures around the country were 1.3 F higher than the 20th century norm. In New York where I live, this past July just missed being the hottest month on record in the city, but air conditioners still ran overtime-the city had the highest electricity use ever last month. Of course it could be worse-in Moscow unusual and unrelenting heat and smoke from wildfires has killed as many as 700 people a day, and meteorologist Jeff Masters of Weather Underground estimates that the death toll could be as high as 15,000 by the time the temperatures drops:
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Getting to the Bottom of Methane
Scientists drop a tool into the ocean that allows them to record the sound of methane bubbling up from the seafloor.
Scientists have discovered the permafrost beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is melting, releasing large amounts methane into the atmosphere. Some say it could mean serious climate consequences, others say C02 is still the bigger problem. Host Jeff Young speaks with Dr. Matthew Reagan of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory about the need to answer key questions before sounding the alarm about methane: how much and how fast?
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Climate experts agree: Global warming caused unprecedented Russian heat wave
Carver: "Without contributions from anthropogenic climate change, I don't think this event would have reached such extremes or even happened at all."
The World Meteorological Organization says this "unprecedented sequence of extreme weather events … matches IPCC projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming." NASA says July 2010 is "What Global Warming Looks Like."
Top climate scientists - Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at UK's Met Office and Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research - have been making the link between the record-smashing extreme weather and human caused global warming (see here)
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Yes, global warming has continued since 1998
To properly understand what's happening to our climate, you have to consider the full body of evidence. Most arguments that support climate skepticism have one thing in common - they neglect the full body of evidence and cherry pick just the select pieces of data that support a particular point of view. There is one argument that is so misleading - it requires 3 separate levels of cherry picking. This argument is "global warming stopped in 1998". Let's look at the 3 ways it cherry picks the data:
Cherry Pick #1: Select one particular temperature record
This argument is based on a temperature record from the Hadley Centre in the UK, often referred to as HadCRUT (Hadley Climatic Research Unit Temperature). This dataset shows unusually warm temperatures, leading to 1998 being the hottest year in the HadCRUT record. These unusually warm conditions were due to the strongest El Niño on record occurring at the time (more on this later).
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Scientist Explores Links Between Extreme Weather and Climate Change
Extreme weather events around the world during the summer of 2010, ranging from devastating flooding in Pakistan to a deadly heat wave in Russia, have many people asking if climate change is now influencing daily weather patterns. After all, scientific assessments of climate change, including the 2007 report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have stated that climate change increases the odds of certain extreme weather events, such as heat waves and heavy rainfall. Still, the science of climate change attribution is an emerging field, with research programs just getting underway in the U.S. and other countries.
To find out more about how climate change might be connected to the recent string of extreme weather events, I spoke via Skype with Dr. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office. Stott is one of the leading researchers in this area, having conducted a study that examined the role that climate change may have played in the 2003 European heat wave, which killed an estimated 40,000 people. In the interview, he explains why climate scientists can't say that that climate change caused a particular extreme event, but that global warming is increasing the odds that such events will occur.
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A looming oxygen crisis and its impact on our oceans
We've known for a while that we are poisoning the oceans and that human emissions of carbon dioxide, left unchecked, would likely have devastating consequences. A 2010 study found that oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.
And we've known those impacts might last a long, long time -a 2009 study concluded ocean dead zones "devoid of fish and seafood" are poised to expand and "remain for thousands of years." Worse, a Nature study just found that global warming is already the likely cause of a 40% decline in the ocean's phytoplankton: "Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic."
As warming intensifies, scientists warn, the oxygen content of oceans across the planet could be more and more diminished, with serious consequences for the future of fish and other sea life.
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Climate Change Affects Geographical Range of Plants, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Aug. 15, 2010) - Researches at the University of Gothenburg have shown how climate change many million years ago has influenced the geographical range of plants by modelling climate preferences for extinct species. The method can also be used to predict what effects climate change of today and tomorrow will have on future distributions of plants and animals.
The researcher Mats Töpel at the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, has studied how climate change has influenced the development of a group of plants in the genus Potentilla, commonly known as cinquefoils.
His research shows that this group of plants developed during a period of climate change in western North America around 25 million years ago, which led to summer drought in California and the largest desert in North America, the Great Basin.
The small plant Ivesia bailey is adapted to living in extremely dry conditions, by seeking shade on north-facing rocks in the Nevada Desert. This lifestyle is believed to have evolved in the genus Potentilla around 20 million years ago.
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Human Noise Pollution in Ocean Can Lead Fish Away from Good Habitats and Off to Their Death
ScienceDaily (Aug. 13, 2010) - The growing amount of human noise pollution in the ocean could lead fish away from good habitat and off to their death, according to new research from a UK-led team working on the Great Barrier Reef.
After developing for weeks at sea, baby tropical fish rely on natural noises to find the coral reefs where they can survive and thrive. However, the researchers found that short exposure to artificial noise makes fish become attracted to inappropriate sounds.
In earlier research, Dr Steve Simpson, Senior Researcher in the University of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences discovered that baby reef fish use sounds made by fish, shrimps and sea urchins as a cue to find coral reefs. With human noise pollution from ships, wind farms and oil prospecting on the increase, he is now concerned that this crucial behaviour is coming under threat.
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Evidence of New Solar Activity from Observations of Aurora in New Zealand
ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2010) - Scientists from Boston University's Center for Space Physics (CSP) have obtained sub-visual evidence of the onset of a new cycle of solar-terrestrial activity. The key results being reported deal with the fact that recent auroral displays at high latitudes (ones visible to the naked eye) were accompanied by far less luminous glows in the atmosphere at lower latitudes.
"It's exciting to see the return of aurora to mid-latitudes," Dr. Steve Smith said, referring to the periodic occurrence of emissions in the Earth's atmosphere that have intrigued observers from ancient to modern times.
What has fascinated space scientists in recent years is the delayed onset of such effects. Typically, the Sun has an activity cycle of about 11 years, with flares and ejections of electrically charged particles (called the solar wind) that cause changes in the Earth's magnetic field that produce, as a side product, luminous emissions in the atmosphere. Such effects are subdued during so-called solar minimum years (e.g., in 1996-1997) and very prominent in solar maximum years (e.g., 2001-2002). Thus, the onset of a new wave of such activity had been expected to be well underway by 2009, but the Sun remained surprisingly quiet. Now, in 2010 there are finally signs of the cycle re-appearing.
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