canaries in the coalmine: Observable impacts of climate change
Climate Most Significant Factor In Fanning Wildfires' Flames, In The Warming West - redOrbit Study finds that climate's influence on production, drying of fuels -- not higher temperatures or longer fire seasons alone -- critical determinant of Western wildfire burned areaThe recent increase in area burned by wildfires in the Western United States is a product not of higher temperatures or longer fire seasons alone, but a complex relationship between climate and fuels that varies among ...
Dolphin 'super pod' shifts north - BBC Environmental charity Earthwatch says a massive migration of short-beaked common dolphins are a sign of climate change.
26th June 2009
Hot Summers, Calm Seas Are Tipping Point for Tatoosh Island's Red Alga - UBC Faculty of Science Hot Summers, Calm Seas Are Tipping Point for Tatoosh Island's Red AlgaUBC Faculty of Science, Canada"If we take predicted temperature increases related to global warming and apply them to our study system, lethal combinations of environmental conditions which previously occurred only about once per decade will begin to happen once every two to four ...
25th June 2009
Ozone Hole Reduces Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Uptake In Southern Ocean - Science Daily Does ozone have an impact on the ocean s role as a carbon sink ? Yes, according to researchers. Using original simulations, they have demonstrated that the hole in the ozone layer reduces atmospheric carbon uptake in the Southern Ocean and contributes to the increase in ocean acidity. These results should have a considerable impact on future models of the IPCC, which do not currently take ozone ...
25th June 2009
Himalayan glaciers feared to be swelling dangerously due to global warming - Smash Hits Himalayan glaciers feared to be swelling dangerously due to global ...Smash Hits, IndiaLondon, June 24 (ANI): Scientists in Nepal have embarked on the first field studies of Himalayan glacial lakes, some of which are feared to be swelling dangerously due to global warming. In May, they completed the field visit to the first location, ...
24th June 2009
Swiss glaciers melting faster than ever before: study - Reuters ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland's glaciers shrank by 12 percent over the past decade, melting at their fastest rate due to rising temperatures and lighter snowfalls, a study by the Swiss university ETH showed Monday.
Tibet drought worst in 30 years: Chinese state media A drought in Tibet has intensified into the region's worst in three decades, leaving thousands of hectares parched and killing more than 13,000 head of cattle, China's state media said Saturday.
20th June 2009
Rising ocean temperatures near worst-case predictions - The Age The ocean is warming about 50 per cent faster than reported two years ago, according to an update of the latest climate science. A report compiling research presented at a science congress in Copenhagen in March says recent observations are near the worst-case predictions of the 2007 report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the case of sea-level rise, it is happening at an even greater rate than projected - largely due to rising ocean temperatures causing thermal expansion of seawater.
Alaska polar bear numbers declining: U.S. agency - Reuters ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Polar bear populations in and around Alaska are declining due to continued melting of sea ice and Russian poaching, according to reports released Thursday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
19th June 2009
Pine Beetle Infestation Threatens Water Source for U.S. Southwest - Yale e360 The destruction of 2.5 million acres of Rocky Mountain forest because of a pine beetle infestation could threaten the water supplies of 33 million people, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Rick Cables, chief forester for the Rocky Mountain region, told a congressional committee that the dead and dying forest at the headwaters of the Colorado River could burn extensively and reduce water supplies to residents in Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Tucson, Ariz. Roughly 25 percent of the water piped to these cities originates in national forests in the Rockies that have suffered extensive damage from infestations of pine bark beetles, Cables said.
18th June 2009
Oyster Die-Off in Pacific May Be Linked to Ocean Acidification - Yale e360 The oyster industry in parts of Washington state in the Pacific Northwest is experiencing its fifth year of a massive die-off of oyster larvae, a condition that may be linked to increasing acidification of ocean waters from high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The Seattle Times reports that the larvae have been dying before they have a chance to attach to hard surfaces, such as rocks or other oyster shells, and grow their own shells made from calcium carbonate. Researchers have noticed periodic drops in the pH of the surrounding ocean waters, apparently linked to upwellings of deep, more acidified water.
U.S. faces security threat from climate change: Kerry - Reuters NEW YORK (Reuters) - Global warming threatens U.S. security by leaving important military hubs vulnerable to rising seas and possibly fomenting anti-American sentiment, U.S. Sen. John Kerry said on Monday.
16th June 2009
Climate change divides the Alps down the middle - Independent The dramatic effect of climate change on the Alps comes into focus as never before this week with the publication of a major report which reveals that the mountain range is rapidly dividing into two contrasting climatic zones, each posing new problems.
16th June 2009
Water supply shifts as global climate changes - PhysOrg Many of the world's great rivers are becoming less so. Yet in the Midwest, the wet is getting wetter. So says a study that finds global climate change shifting weather and water patterns around the planet.
Lifestyle melts away with Uganda peak snow cap - PhysOrg In 1906, Mount Speke, one the highest peaks of Uganda's Rwenzori Mountains was covered with 217 hectares (536 acres) of ice, according to the Climate Change Unit at Uganda's ministry of water and environment. In 2006, only 18.5 hectares remained. Uganda's National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) believes that if melting continues at the current rate the ice will be gone by 2023. For the people of Bundibugyo who rely on agriculture to survive, temperature increases have changed their lives dramatically. "I used to be able to plant beans down here at around March," said Nelson Bikalwamuli, 45, referring to his garden at the base of the mountain. "But now it has changed." Beans serve as both a food crop and a crash crop for Bikalwamuli, so he can?t afford to lose them. He?s had to secure a plot of land part way up the mountain, where he says temperatures are still cool enough to yield a descent crop, but the trek up is hard, and competition for space is growing increasingly fierce. "People just keep moving up, up, up," he said. "I fear soon we may be on top of each other."
15th June 2009
Korea moving toward a subtropical climate - Korea Herald Global warming has increased temperature and precipitation and widened regional and seasonal weather differences on the Korea Peninsula, changing it closer to a subtropical climate, the state meteorological agency said yesterday. The Korea Meteorological Administration yesterday released its analysis on climate change that occurred for the past 10 years.
New signs of climate change: shifting seasons, warmer Antarctica - FOX2now.com The news might seem welcome in the middle of a long, cold winter: Scientists have shown that the start of spring has moved almost two days earlier in the last 50 years. But scientists say the finding, one of two papers released today on climate change, is actually a warning sign. Together, the studies bolster the argument that the planet's temperatures have shifted significantly in the last half-century, with many of the potential consequences likely to be negative. Reporting in the scientific journal Nature, two teams of scientists presented evidence that all seasons are occurring earlier worldwide and that more of Antarctica is showing signs of warming than had been thought.
14th June 2009
Arctic Sea Ice Extent Trending Below Record 2007 Melt - Daily Green The annual melting of Arctic sea ice is trending toward another record-low. While it's still too early to say whether the 2009 melt will exceed the record 2007 melt -- the annual low-point isn't reached until September -- the trend line for 2009 for the first time has dipped below 2007, according to the latest data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
13th June 2009
Winds of change - RealClimate Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann There was an interesting AP story this week about possible changes in wind speed over the continental US. The study (by Pryor et al (sub.)), put together a lot of observational data, reanalyses (from the weather forecasting models) and regional models, and concluded that there was some evidence for a decrease in wind speeds, particularly in the Eastern US. However, although this trend appeared in the observational data, it isn't seen in all the reanalyses or regional models, leaving open a possibility that the trend is an artifact of some sort (instrumental changes, urbanization etc.).
12th June 2009
Bird numbers decline 'worrying' - BBC Scotland's seabird numbers plunged by 19%, with the Northern Isles and east coast badly hit, a new report says.
12th June 2009
Reindeer herds in global decline - BBC Reindeer numbers are falling everywhere as they struggle to survive in a warming, developed world, a new survey reveals.
Not so windy: Research suggests winds dying down - AP WASHINGTON (AP) — The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming — the very problem wind power seeks to address. The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East. "It's a very large effect," said study co-author Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University. In some places in the Midwest, the trend shows a 10 percent drop or more over a decade. That adds up when the average wind speed in the region is about 10 to 12 miles per hour.
Is the daddy-longlegs doomed? Is the humble daddy-longlegs in trouble? The RSPB thinks so, at least in the uplands. Its research suggests that, because of hotter summers, that is to say, because of global warming, the peat bogs are drying out. It is suggested that, since the larvae prefer moist conditions, their numbers are falling, which in turn spells trouble for those birds, such as golden plover, that feed on them.My first memories of daddy-longlegs, or crane flies, are from school: Redcar in the 60s, a gang of us huddled next to the brick wall of the playground, and several daddy-longlegs blundering against the wall.
8th June 2009
Weeds damage homes as the climate warms - Guardian A combination of a warmer climate, increased rainfall and a ban on the use of chemicals has created an epidemic of weeds causing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage to homes and public buildings.Homeowners are facing large bills due to weeds damaging pipes and buildings as climate change produces an explosion in plant life.According to Peter Brownless, horticulturalist at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, long periods of warm and wet weather combined with increasing volumes of detritus in gutters and drains is encouraging plants to grow out of control at a faster rate than ever before."A recent change in European legislation means there are far less herbicides available for local authorities and home gardeners to use to control weeds," he said.According to Brownless many problems are caused by alien species which are thriving in Scotland's increasingly mild climate.
An amphibious assault - Globe and Mail Around the world, frogs and toads are falling victim to a loss of habitat, pesticides, pollution and an insidious, quick-acting fungus. And now they are going extinct faster than any other animals since the dinosaurs. We need to deal with every single issue at once: climate change, excessive use of agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, depletion of the ozone layer and, above all, habitat degradation.
8th June 2009
Strange sights under northern lights - Kitchener - Waterloo Record PANGNIRTUNG, NUNAVUT (Jun 6, 2009) -- The fish changed colour. Different bird species were spotted. Two bridges were wiped out by a once-in-a-lifetime flood that forced villagers to dump sewage into their pristine waters.
6th June 2009
New NSIDC director on “death spiral” Arctic ice I interviewed by email Dr. Mark Serreze, recently named director of The National Snow and Ice Data Center. Partly I wanted him to explain his death spiral metaphor for Arctic ice. And partly I wanted his reaction to the blog WattsUpWithThat, the quintessential victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS), who called his appointment Bad News.
6th June 2009
US urged to abandon ageing flood defences in favour of Dutch system The US must adopt an integrated model of water management like the Netherlands, says New Orleans senator Mary LandrieuAmerica, now entering its hurricane season, was today urged to abandon the outmoded "patch and pray" system of levees whose failure magnified the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and borrow from the Dutch model of dykes and water management.Mary Landrieu, a senator from New Orleans who was brought to tears during a helicopter tour of the destruction of 2005, said America needed to rethink its entire approach to low-lying coastal areas and adopt an integrated model of water management like that of the Netherlands.The US has budgeted $14bn since Katrina to shore up the flood defences of Louisiana and other low-lying areas.
Hurricane barriers floated to keep sea out of NYC - Guardian As a new hurricane season starts Monday, some scientists and engineers are floating an ambitious solution: Barriers to choke off the surging sea and protect flood-prone areas. The plan involves deploying giant barriers and gates that would move into place and in some cases rising out of the water and for storms. One proposal calls for a 5-mile-long barrier between New Jersey and Queens.
2nd June 2009
The Dutch strive to make their country 'climate proof' - New York Times AMSTERDAM -- "Can we actually save the Netherlands? Or should we abandon part of the country?" This is the basic question Dutch leaders were asking themselves within the context of global warming after witnessing Hurricane Katrina's devastating blow to New Orleans in 2005.
Mysterious green meanies - Financial Times It’s been a strange year in Harlem. The robins didn’t migrate. The hyacinths popped up in the snow. And then tropical intruders took over the garden. This global warming is getting out of control.
30th May 2009
El Nino odds rising with warming Pacific - Reuters SYDNEY (Reuters) - The chances of a 2009 El Nino, a warming of eastern Pacific waters that often brings drought to Australia's farmlands, has risen and is above a 20 percent probability, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology said on Thursday.
Melting Greenland ice sheets may threaten Northeast United States ... - PhysOrg.com Melting of the Greenland ice sheet this century may drive more water than previously thought toward the already threatened coastlines of New York, Boston, Halifax, and other cities in the northeastern United States and in Canada, according to new research led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
28th May 2009
Cyclone Aila - a grim reminder of climate change - Thaindian.com Kolkata, May 26 (IANS) Cyclone Aila, that hit the east coast of India Monday devastating over 100,000 people in the Sundarbans delta region of crops and lifestock, was a grim consequence of climate change, say experts. NGOs who work in the area said the main dykes in major islands such as Sagar, Patharpratima, Sandeshkhali I and II, Hingalganj, Kultoli, Mousuni and many small islands in the Gosaba area had been breached, and brackish water had entered farmlands and freshwater ponds during the cyclone Monday, ruining the crops and killing the fish. See also: Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, Part 1 - Grist
27th May 2009
China on high alert of forest fire - China Daily HARBIN -- China faces a tough test in preventing forest fires, with key wooded areas reporting a surge in blazes during the past month, a forestry official said Monday.
27th May 2009
Jeepers Creepers! Climate Change Threatens Endangered Honeycreepers - USGS Today, native Hawaiian birds face one of the highest rates of extinction in the world. Of 41 honeycreeper species and subspecies known since historic times, 17 are probably extinct, 14 are endangered, and only 3 are in decent shape. Pox and malaria transmission in Hawaii depends on climatic conditions, especially seasonal changes in temperature and rainfall that increase or decrease mosquito populations. “ Although most disease transmission now occurs in these mid-elevation forests, this will change if the projected 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Centigrade) raise in temperature occurs. “With this kind of temperature change, about 60 to 96 percent of the high-elevation disease refuges would disappear,” said Atkinson. For example, available high-elevation forest habitat in the low-risk disease zone would likely decline by nearly 60 percent at Hanawi Natural Area Reserve on Maui to as much as 96 percent at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge on Hawaii Island. On other islands, such as Kauai, with lower elevations and no low-risk zones even now, predicted temperature changes would likely be catastrophic for remaining honeycreeper species.
Climate change amplifying animal disease - PhysOrg Climate change is widening viral disease among farm animals, expanding the spread of some microbes that are also a known risk to humans, the world's top agency for animal health said on Monday.
26th May 2009
Climate change making Everest ascent harder: sherpa - Reuters KATHMANDU (Reuters) - A Nepali sherpa who holds the world record for climbing Mount Everest said on Monday rising temperatures were melting snow and turning the slopes barren, making it even harder to scale the world's tallest peak.
Appearance of Himalayas are changing due to climate change, garbage - Xinhua KATHMANDU, May 25 (Xinhua) -- The mountainous range of Himalayan nation Nepal are gradually changing their appearance as they are caught with severity of global warming and garbage. Apa Sherpa, also known as Nepal's "Super Sherpa" who had climbed Mt. Qomolangma 8848 meters 19th time beating his own previous record said on Monday, "White part of the Mt. Qomolangma is melting exposing its rocky parts."
25th May 2009
Droughts drain northern lakes - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Scientists and property owners say they are worried about the long-term effects of a prolonged drought on fishing and water quality in northern Wisconsin as they've watched some lakes drop to their lowest point in 70 years. As people flock to the north this weekend, drought conditions also are evident in tinder-dry forests that experienced a surge in fires last week.
24th May 2009
Insurer blames climate change - Sydney Morning Herald AS FLOODS lash northern NSW, insurance companies say they are revising their estimates due to climate change. Damage from severe weather has increased significantly in the past few years, while other forms of natural disasters have remained static, said the head of geo risks research at the global insurance giant Munich Re, Peter Hoeppe. "If you calculate the trends in weather-related natural catastrophes you find a distinct difference in recent years," Dr Hoeppe told the Herald.
23rd May 2009
Data on global warming - Atlanta Journal Constitution If I’m watching a baseball game and the guy in the next seat says “He’s gonna hit to shortstop,” and then the player hits it to shortstop, I’m intrigued. If he gets it right batter after batter, I’m really impressed. And that’s pretty much what climate scientists have achieved.
Now, you can hear global warming - Economic Times WASHINGTON: A new study has determined that it's now possible to hear the rise of global warming, in the form of more larger and more intense storms , which are signs of climate change.
23rd May 2009
Thousands evacuate Australian floods, one dead SYDNEY (Reuters) - Thousands more people in Australia's flood-hit east were told to leave their homes on Saturday as gale-force winds lashed the coast and emergency services said up to 20,000 people had been cut off.
23rd May 2009
Study: Michigan mammals rapidly migrating north - WTOL Scientists say some of Michigan's mammal species are migrating rapidly northward, probably because of climate change. Researchers studied records of 9 common mammals such as opossums, white-footed mice and eastern chipmunks. They found that species historically from the South are gaining ground in northern Michigan. Meanwhile, historically northern species are declining.
Disappearance of Aral Sea In a dramatic series of satellite photos, NASA has documented one of the great environmental disasters of the last century: the disappearance - and near death - of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea became the victim of a grand Soviet public works project that diverted the water bound for the inland body of water and pumped it into the desert to grow cotton and other crops. By 2000, when the first photograph in this series was taken by NASA's Terra satellite, the Aral Sea had already shrunk by more than half since the diversion projects began in 1960.
20th May 2009
Bahrain has driest 'rainy season' in 40 years - Trade Arabia Bahrain has driest 'rainy season' in 40 yearsTrade Arabia, Bahrain'We are certain this dry spell can be attributed to the effects of global warming and climate change,' Isa said. 'There have also been high velocity winds at times when they are not supposed to be there.' Isa said the unsettling weather in the last ...
19th May 2009
Your world in maps: climate change edition Incendiary graphic from the The Lancet shows who causes climate change (the North) and who will suffer (Africa and Southeast Asia). read more
NOAA: Fifth Warmest April for Globe - NOAA The combined average global land and ocean surface temperatures for April 2009 ranked fifth warmest since worldwide records began in 1880, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
19th May 2009
As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It's Land That's Rising - The Ledger As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It's Land That's RisingThe Ledger, FLJUNEAU, Alaska - Global warming conjures images of rising seas that threaten coastal areas. But in Juneau, as almost nowhere else in the world, climate change is having the opposite effect: As the glaciers here melt, the land is rising, causing the sea ...
Native songbirds under threat - The Cornishman Native songbirds under threatThe Cornishman, UKExperts believe there are two main culprits – intensive land use and global warming. "The way that land is managed is very intensive, such as the cropping regimes how we treat crops with pesticides and fertilisers," said Mr Exley. ...
17th May 2009
Arctic explorers find more evidence of global thaw VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - A team of British adventurers measuring ice conditions in the Canadian Arctic said on Wednesday they did not find the thicker, older ice that scientists expected to be there.
Climate change displacement has begun – but hardly anyone has noticed - Guardian The first evacuation of an entire community due to manmade global warming is happening on the Carteret IslandsJournalists – they're never around when you want one. Two weeks ago a momentous event occurred: the beginning of the world's first evacuation of an entire people as a result of manmade global warming. It has been marked so far by one blog post for the Ecologist and an article in the Solomon Times*. Where is everyone? The Carteret Islands are off the coast of Bougainville, which, in turn, is off the coast of Papua New Guinea. They are small coral atolls on which 2,600 people live.
10th May 2009
Getting Warmer Rapidly - Korea Times It's only early May, but summer is already here, almost one month earlier than in previous years. But summer's early arrival is increasingly becoming the norm. That is, summer is getting longer, while winter is getting shorter. This phenomenon unquestionably stems from climate change driven by global warming. Climate change is taking place at an alarming rate worldwide. But what's more noteworthy is that the pace is much faster in Korea than any other place around the world. According to the National Institute of Meteorological Research, the average temperate on the Korean Peninsula climbed 1.7 degrees Celsius during the 1912-2008 period.
South Florida now under extreme drought - Sun-Sentinel Because of the lack of significant rain in recent weeks, most of South Florida now is under extreme drought conditions, the National Weather Service in Miami said today.
9th May 2009
Scientists expecting massive iceberg from glacier crack - ABC Online A massive iceberg with enough freshwater in it to fill Sydney Harbour 135 times over is about to break off the Mertz glacier in Antarctica. The iceberg will be 75 kilometres long and contains 750,000 gigalitres of ice which is apparently quite a lot.
Global warming threatens Tibet railway: report BEIJING (Reuters) - China's controversial railway to the remote and restless mountainous region of Tibet could be threatened by global warming, which may melt the permafrost on which the tracks are built, state media said Wednesday.
Bolivia's Chacaltaya glacier is gone - MiamiHerald.com CHACALTAYA, Bolivia -- -- If anyone needs a reminder of the on-the-ground impacts of global climate change, come to the Andes mountains in Bolivia. At 17,388 feet above sea level, Chacaltaya, an 18,000 year-old glacier that delighted thousands of visitors for decades, is gone, completely melted away as of some sad, undetermined moment early this year. ''Chacaltaya has disappeared. It no longer exists,'' said Dr. Edson Ramirez, head of an international team of scientists that has studied the glacier since 1991.
4th May 2009
Natural disasters killed 220000 in 2008 - Canada.com BERLIN — Natural disasters killed over 220,000 people in 2008, making it one of the most devastating years on record and underlining the need for a global climate deal, the world's number two reinsurer said Monday. "This continues the long-term trend we have been observing. Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes," Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek said.
3rd May 2009
All we do now to save salmon could mean nothing - The Idaho Statesman "The only salmon that are going to survive the century mark are the ones in the large populations in the higher elevations that are still going to have snow and cold water," said Jim Martin, a former chief of fisheries for the state of Oregon. But even these runs and those as far north as Alaska would be threatened if the world does not reduce gases like carbon dioxide over the next 50 years.
3rd May 2009
Climate change threatens Lake Baikal's unique biota - PhysOrg Siberia's Lake Baikal, the world's largest and most biologically diverse lake, faces the prospect of severe ecological disruption as a result of climate change, according to an analysis by a joint US-Russian team in the May issue of BioScience.
2nd May 2009
Sea Salt Holds Clues to Climate Change - PhysOrg (PhysOrg.com) -- We know that average sea levels have risen over the past century, and that global warming is to blame. But what is climate change doing to the saltiness, or salinity, of our oceans?
2nd May 2009
Hundreds of miles of ice drop from Antarctic shelf New satellite images from the European Space Agency show massive amounts of ice are breaking away from a shelf on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, researchers said today.
Tibet experiencing higher temperature - Times of India Hit by global warming, excessive grazing and human activities, temperature in Tibet has risen continuously over the past 48 years, triggering snow melting, glacial shrinking and rising water levels in the fragile Himalayan region. The study, based on data from 38 weather stations under the Tibet Autonomous Regional Meteorological Bureau, indicated that the average temperature in the landlocked region rose 0.32 degree Celsius every 10 years between 1961 to 2008.
30th April 2009
Mercury levels in Arctic seals may be linked to global warming Researchers in Canada are reporting for the first time that high mercury levels in certain Arctic seals appear to be linked to vanishing sea ice caused by global warming. Their study, a new insight into the impact of climate change on Arctic marine life, is scheduled for the May 1 issue of ACS` Environmental Science Technology.
30th April 2009
Climate change menaces Galapagos: scientists WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The unique wildlife of the Galapagos Islands -- penguins, fur seals, swimming iguanas and flightless birds -- is profoundly threatened by climate change, scientists said on Wednesday.
30th April 2009
Climate change 'hitting entire Arctic' - Guardian Extensive climate change is now affecting every form of life in the Arctic, according to a major new assessment by international polar scientists. In the past four years, air temperatures have increased, sea ice has declined sharply, surface waters in the Arctic ocean have warmed and permafrost is in some areas rapidly thawing. In addition, says the report released today at a Norwegian government seminar, plants and trees are growing more vigorously, snow cover is decreasing 1-2% a year and glaciers are shrinking. Scientists from Norway, Canada, Russia and the US contributed to the Arctic monitoring and assessment programme (Amap) study, which says new factors such as "black carbon" – soot – ozone and methane may now be contributing to global and arctic warming as much as carbon dioxide.
Bangladesh feels the heat, clocks 14y highs - Bangladesh News 24 hours Bangladesh feels the heat, clocks 14y highsBangladesh News 24 hours, BangladeshMannan said the mounting temperature was an impact of global warming. "Bangladesh has been witnessing climate change," he said. Records of the Department of Environment's Climate Change Cell from 1985-1998, show average May temperatures to have 'risen' ...
The Truth Behind Global Jellyfish Swarms - US News & World Report Large swarms of jellyfish and other gelatinous animals--sometimes covering hundreds of square miles of ocean--have recently been reported in many of the world's prime vacation and fishing destinations.
28th April 2009
Forest fires rage across Nepal - Republica Forest fires rage across NepalRepublica, Nepal... as a direct effect of global warming, the winter months remained extremely dry thereby drying up the moisture content of vegetation and land and leading to widespread forest fires. “From a climate change perspective, this dryness is very natural ...
28th April 2009
CHILE: Scientist Warns of Threats to Rock Glaciers - IPS SANTIAGO, Apr 24 (IPS) - A new government policy on glaciers adopted by Chile "is a step forward, but it doesn't resolve all of the problems," German geographer Alexander Brenning, who blames mining companies for threats to this South American country's rock glaciers, told IPS.
25th April 2009
CLIMATE CHANGE: Native Peoples Sound Dire Warning - IPS ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Apr 22 (IPS) - Humanity's hot carbon breath is not just melting the planet's polar regions, it is disrupting natural systems and livelihoods around the world, indigenous people reported this week at a global meeting on climate change in Anchorage, Alaska.
24th April 2009
Bolivia: water people of Andes face extinction - Guardian Climate change robs Uru Chipaya of lifeline that had sustained them for millennia. Its members belong to what is thought to be the oldest surviving culture in the Andes, a tribe that has survived for 4,000 years on the barren plains of the Bolivian interior. But the Uru Chipaya, who outlasted the Inca empire and survived the Spanish conquest, are warning that they now face extinction through climate change. The tribal chief, 62-year-old Felix Quispe, 62, says the river that has sustained them for millennia is drying up. His people cannot cope with the dramatic reduction in the Lauca, which has dwindled in recent decades amid erratic rainfall that has turned crops to dust and livestock to skin and bones.
As world warms, water levels dropping in major rivers - ScienceBlog.com As world warms, water levels dropping in major riversScienceBlog.com, CAThe research, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., suggests that the reduced flows in many cases are associated with climate change, and could potentially threaten future supplies of food and water.
21st April 2009
Lack of permanent Arctic ice surprises explorers OTTAWA (Reuters) - British explorers walking to the North Pole on a mission to gauge how fast Arctic ice sheets are melting say they are surprised by how little permanent ice they have found so far.
18th April 2009
Polar bears in Russian Far East threatened by extinction - WWF - RIA Novosti The population of polar bears in Russia's Far Eastern republic of Chukotka has dwindled to the point of being vulnerable to extinction, according to research carried out by World Wildlife Fund experts. "In the 1990s large numbers of bears were shot in Chukotka when most villages were on the brink of starvation. Now the bear population faces a negative influence from climate change."
EU greenhouse emissions fall - because it's warmer OSLO (Reuters) - European Union emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for stoking global warming fell by 1.2 percent in 2007, paradoxically aided by a mild winter that cut heating demand, EU data showed on Friday.
Earth's temperature 8th-warmest on record so far in 2009 - The News-Press The Earth's temperature from January-March 2009 was the 8th-warmest on record, according to data released Thursday from the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The global temperature of 55.04 degrees for the year's first three months was almost a full degree above the 20th-century average of 54.1 degrees.
17th April 2009
Up, up, and away - Guardian Swifts may also be facing problems on their long journey to and from their winter quarters in Africa. Climate change is leading to unpredictable weather patterns across much of that continent, while increased desertification may pose a problem for swifts on their twice-yearly crossing of the Sahara desert, by reducing the insect food available on their journey.
17th April 2009
Tiny warbler at risk from longer African migration - Independent They are some of the world's most remarkable and improbable journeys – vast odysseys across desert, mountain and sea by creatures often no bigger than a Mars bar. But the annual flights of Europe's migratory birds to and from sub-Saharan Africa are set to get even longer. Climate change, shifting the breeding range of many European bird species northwards, is likely to lengthen the migrants' marathon journeys substantially, in some cases by hundreds of miles, a new scientific study predicts. The added distance is likely to make what are already hazardous and chancey long-distance flights even more risky, with possible fatal consequences for many birds.
16th April 2009
The Dire Fate of Forests in a Warmer World - TIME It's not easy to kill a full-grown tree — especially one like the piñon pine. The hardy evergreen is adapted to life in the hot, parched American Southwest, so it takes more than a little dry spell to affect it. In fact, it requires a once-in-a-century event like the extended drought of the 1950s, which scientists now believe led to widespread tree mortality in the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. So, when another drought hit the area around 2002, researchers were surprised to see up to 10% of the piñon pines die off, even though that dry spell was much milder than the one before. The difference in 2002 was the five decades of global warming that had transpired since the drought in the 1950s.
14th April 2009
Historic drought in Mexico suggests human influence - Science Centric University of Arkansas researchers and their colleagues have examined recent climate patterns in Mexico and determined that the country underwent severe drought conditions between 1994 and 2008, and that human changes related to land use and global warming may have aggravated the dry, warm conditions.
14th April 2009
Warming is wearing on Australia - Chicago Tribune Climate scientists say Australia - beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves-epitomizes the "accelerated climate crisis" that global warming models have forecast
Warming is wearing on Australia - Chicago Tribune Climate scientists say Australia - beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves-epitomizes the "accelerated climate crisis" that global warming models have forecast
Breaking the silence about Spring - RealClimate Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring - in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May. This is one of the interesting facts that you'll read about in Amy Seidl's book, Early Spring, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us – the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.
12th April 2009
More of NSW is now in drought | Environment | Lismore Northern Star - Northern Star New drought statistics show more of NSW is desperately in need of rain, with the south and west of the state worst affected. The April figures show the area affected by drought has increased to 59.6 per cent, from 56.5 per cent in March, NSW Primary Industries minister Ian Macdonald says.
10th April 2009
Obama looks at climate engineering - PhysOrg (AP) -- The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air. [No surer sign that climate change is upon us...]
9th April 2009
Half Canada's boreal caribou herds in decline: report - CNews OTTAWA - The federal government plans to release a report Thursday that finds half Canada's boreal caribou herds are in decline and may die out in the next century without changes to their habitats, The Canadian Press has learned.
9th April 2009
Climate change cause of mass invert die-offs - environmentalresearchweb Increasing temperatures are causing a higher level of stratification in the coastal waters of the northwest Mediterranean and bringing about mass die-offs of suspension-feeders such as gorgonians and sponges, according to researchers from Spain. The stratification acts to prolong summertime conditions, in which temperature rises and food becomes scarce, leading the invertebrates to go into a state of "summer dormancy".
UK butterfly numbers plunge after worst year since 1976 - Guardian Wet summers and changes to countryside behind dramatic fall, leaving some species threatened with extinction. Wildlife Minister Huw Irranca-Davies said: "Climate change is having a detrimental effect on a number of our butterfly species and in parts of England we're in danger of losing some species all together.
8th April 2009
Climate Change Leads to Major Decrease in CO2 Storage - Newswise The 'carbon sink' in the North Atlantic is the primary gate for carbon dioxide (CO2) entering the global ocean and stores it for about 1500 years. The oceans have removed nearly 30 per cent of anthropogenic (man-made) emissions over the last 250 years. However, several recent studies show a dramatic decline in the North Atlantic Ocean's carbon sink.
8th April 2009
Climate change in Lake Superior ice - Minneapolis Star Tribune What started as a high school science fair project is the latest piece of evidence that global warming is affecting Lake Superior. Forrest Howk, now a freshman at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, studied 150 years of data in his hometown of Bayfield, Wis., and found that the harbor's frozen season has shrunk from about 120 days to 80 days.
Satellite data shows Arctic on thinner ice - Reuters LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Arctic sea ice, a key component of Earth's natural thermostat, has thinned sharply in recent years with the northern polar ice cap shrinking steadily in surface area, government scientists said on Monday.
Ice bridge ruptures in Antarctic - BBC News An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped. Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence or rapid change in the region.
5th April 2009
Warming takes center stage as Australian drought worsens - Energy Bulletin With record-setting heat waves, bush fires and drought, Australians are increasingly convinced they are facing the early impacts of global warming. Their growing concern about climate change has led to a consensus that the nation must now act boldly to stave off the crisis. read more
5th April 2009
Climate clock is ticking - The Gazette - Montreal “Some people are saying we have already crossed this threshold (into unstoppable, jarring changes),” Ford, who is also an IPCC contributor, said. “Others are saying … we haven’t crossed it yet, but it’s pretty close. The climate is definitely changing faster than we thought, especially the Arctic. Globally as well. This really caught the scientific community by surprise. In 2002, what was involved was this idea of gradual climate change: We may see dramatic changes but towards the end of the century, not today. “That is now changing, we are now thinking these changes are occurring quite rapidly today. Quite a few people are speculating that we are going to see even more dramatic changes quite soon.”
CLIMATE CHANGE: Seals in the Baltic Left without Ice - IPS BERLIN, Apr 3 (Tierramérica) - Ringed seals in the Baltic Sea are finding fewer and fewer ice caves in which to raise their young. Rising global temperatures are the problem, and in turn are depleting the main food source of the giant polar bear, say scientists.
4th April 2009
Last stand - The National Having once covered much of Lebanon’s rugged terrain, the country’s cedar tree, prized throughout history and the unifying emblem of a divided nation, is under threat from a warming world.
Small islands urge deep CO2 cuts, fear rising seas - Reuters BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Small island states have sharpened their calls for the rich to make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, saying low-lying atolls risk being washed off the map by rising ocean levels.
Canada's winter sports melting away, report warns - Globe and Mail Future winter Olympics may have a hard time finding snow and ice to play on, says a study being released today that details the impact of global warming on winter sports in Canada. "If heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions are not significantly cut, global warming stands to wipe out more than half of Canada's ski season later this century with few exceptions," states the study by the David Suzuki Foundation, released in conjunction with the 8th World Conference on Sport and the Environment, being held as part of pre-Olympic activities in Vancouver this week.
31st March 2009
The Exploding Squid Population - CBS News It's been said there are not so many fish in the sea as there used to be. However, John Blackstone reports on a proliferation of Humboldt squid that is even more than enough for modern fishing boats to handle:
31st March 2009
Reporters Miss The Boat - Again on Fargo Flood, Fail to Mention It Fits Global Warming Trends - DeSmogBlog fargo-flood-global-warming.jpg In an interview with reporters last week, President Barack Obama correctly raised the point that global warming could lead to more severe flooding events in the future. Although it's impossible to link a specific event to global climate change – as Obama was careful not to do – the record-breaking flooding of the Red River in Fargo, North Dakota is consistent with the trend towards increased frequency and severity of extreme precipitation events predicted by the climate science community.“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating,” Obama told the reporters.
Global warming hits Japan's cherry blossom season - Telegraph.co.uk Global warming hits Japan's cherry blossom seasonTelegraph.co.uk, United KingdomHowever, climate change experts warned that the increasingly early arrival of the cherry blossoms, known as sakura, reflected steadily rising global temperatures. "A rise in temperatures is one of the key elements prompting cherry trees to bloom," said ...
27th March 2009
Global warming 37 percent to blame for droughts: scientist - Reuters SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Global warming is more than a third to blame for a major drop in rainfall that includes a decade-long drought in Australia and a lengthy dry spell in the United States, a scientist said on Wednesday.
Scientists: The trend is less ice on Great Lakes - Chicago Tribune Scientists at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory say there has been more than a 30 percent ice decline on the lakes since the 1970s. The drop attributed to global climate change leaves the largest system of freshwater lakes on Earth open to evaporation that can lead to lower lake levels.
Global warming leaving its mark on polar bears - SpaceDaily TROMSOE, Norway, March 19 (AFP) Mar 19, 2009 Potentially fatal to the polar bear, global warming has already left its mark on the species with smaller, less robust bears that are increasingly showing cannibalistic tendencies.
19th March 2009
Signs of global warming in Iran - Payvand Iran News This winter, temperatures in Iran were much warmer than in previous years, to the point that people sought out the shade to protect themselves from getting sunburns. It's really amazing how warm this past winter has been. People have even begun to turn on their air conditioners in some cities, which they had never before used at this time of the year. -M.A. Saki, MNA
Carbon sinks losing the battle with rising emissions - EurekAlert! ( CSIRO Australia ) The stabilizing influence that land and ocean carbon sinks have on rising carbon emissions is gradually weakening, scientists who attended the international Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.
17th March 2009
Spring to emerge earlier than ever - Daily Telegraph Spring is likely to arrive ever earlier as a result of climate change a survey by nature watchers suggests after they spotted birds nesting and plants flowering across the UK already.
14th March 2009
Spring to emerge earlier than ever - Daily Telegraph Spring is likely to arrive ever earlier as a result of climate change a survey by nature watchers suggests after they spotted birds nesting and plants flowering across the UK already.
14th March 2009
Climate change already shaping society - New Scientist Climate change already shaping societyNew Scientist, UKHuman society is already, in small but significant ways, being shaped by global warming. So said a climatologist at the climate change congress in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday. Jean Palutikof of the University of East Anglia, UK, ...
13th March 2009
Carbon Dioxide, Methane Rise Sharply in 2007 - NOAA Last year alone global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the primary driver of global climate change, increased by 0.6 percent, or 19 billion tons. Additionally methane rose by 27 million tons after nearly a decade with little or no increase.
13th March 2009
International Scientists Find ‘Acidified' Water on the Continental Shelf from Canada to Mexico - NOAA Evidence of corrosive water caused by the ocean's absorption of carbon dioxide (CO2) was found less than 20 miles off the west coast of North America during a field study from Canada to Mexico last summer. This was the first time “acidified” ocean water has been found on the continental shelf of western North America.
13th March 2009
NOAA: Global Temperature Seventh Warmest for Spring, Eighth Warmest for May - NOAA The combined average global land and ocean surface temperatures for spring (March-May) ranked seventh warmest, while May was the eighth warmest since worldwide records began in 1880 according to an analysis by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
"Mad" microplants show Antarctic climate change - Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Because atmospheric circulation patterns are shifting over the peninsula -- probably due to climate change -- there are now cloudy skies where there used to be sunshine and vice versa, said study co-author Martin Montes-Hugo of Rutgers University. In the southern part of the peninsula, the clouds are decreasing and sunlight is melting the sea ice, freeing up more open water that sunlight can shine through, Montes-Hugo said by telephone. "You have more open water and so you have light penetration, so the phytoplankton is happy in the south," he said, because like most plants, phytoplankton need sunlight for photosynthesis. In the northern part of the peninsula closer to the warm equator there are more clouds, and sea ice is even more reduced than in the south. Changing atmospheric patterns are whipping up increasing winds in the area, churning the ocean water, which enables the phytoplankton to go deeper. At these deeper levels, the little plants can catch less sunshine.
Climate change reduces nutritional value of algae - PhysOrg Micro-algae are growing faster under the influence of climate change. However, the composition of the algae is changing, as a result of which their nutritional value for other aquatic life is decreasing. And because algae are at the bottom of the food chain, climate change is exerting an effect on underwater life. This is the conclusion of researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Ecology and the Universiteit van Amsterdam.
12th March 2009
Sea levels rising twice as fast as predicted - Independent Sea levels are predicted to rise twice as fast as was forecast by the United Nations only two years ago, threatening hundreds of millions of people with catastrophe, scientists said yesterday in a dramatic new warning about climate change. Rapidly melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are likely to push up sea levels by a metre or more by 2100, swamping coastal cities and obliterating the living space of 600 million people who live in deltas, low-lying areas and small island states.
Carbon emissions creating acidic oceans not seen since dinosaurs - Guardian Chemical change placing 'unprecedented' pressure on marine life and could cause widespread extinctions, warn scientistsHuman pollution is turning the seas into acid so quickly that the coming decades will recreate conditions not seen on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs, scientists will warn today.The rapid acidification is caused by the massive amounts of carbon dioxide belched from chimneys and exhausts that dissolve in the ocean. The chemical change is placing "unprecedented" pressure on marine life such as shellfish and lobsters and could cause widespread extinctions, the experts say.The study, by scientists at Bristol University, will be presented at a special three-day summit of climate scientists in Copenhagen, which opens today.
10th March 2009
Is the U.S. West going the way of parched Australia? - Reuters The drought-induced infernos which ravaged parts of Australia earlier this year may be a harbinger of the water challenges coming to the American West. ”Think of that (Australia) as California's future,” water researcher Heather Cooley of California's Pacific Institute told my colleague Peter Henderson. You can see his report, part one of our series on water scarcity in the U.S. West, here. Plush green golf courses in the desert, verdant boulevards in Los Angeles and fountains that dance 20 stories high in Las Vegas are very much part of today's landscape and life in the American West. See also: Climate change accelerates water hunt in U.S. West
10th March 2009
Ranchers sell up as pampas turn to dust - Guardian Ranchers are being forced to sell their cattle as a drought converts much of the Argentinian pampas into a dry and desolate wasteland.The sweeping grasslands are a key part of Argentinian identity, stretching for 1 million sq km. It was once one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. But as a result of the drought an estimated 1.5 million cattle have died. Many farmers are simply giving up on cattle altogether, and switching to growing wheat or soy."I've sold my entire herd," said Hector Gómez, a sixth-generation cattle farmer. "Next year I will plant soy." It's a sad end for a country that was built on the cattle trade.
9th March 2009
Proof on the Half Shell: A More Acid Ocean Corrodes Sea Life - Scientific American The shells of tiny ocean animals known as foraminifera--specifically Globigerina bulloides--are shrinking as a result of the slowly acidifying waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. The reason behind the rising acidity: Higher carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere, making these shells more proof that climate change is making life tougher for the seas' shell-builders.
Arctic summer ice could vanish by 2013, expert says - Reuters OTTAWA (Reuters) - The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday.
6th March 2009
Urchins in peril - Nature Ocean warming, but not acidification, could significantly hinder reproduction in purple sea urchins. Previous studies have shown that a decrease in ocean pH could impair shell formation in adult urchins, but few urchin larvae may survive to the adult stage under plausible climate change scenarios, according to a new study.
6th March 2009
Drought grips Afghanistan - UPI KABUL, Afghanistan, March 4 (UPI) -- Afghanistan is experiencing its worst drought in a decade and its food crisis is deepening as a result, experts said.
California snow not enough to overcome drought - Reuters LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California's mountain snowpack is only at 80 percent of normal, despite recent snowstorms, and is far from enough to ease a prolonged drought, making water conservation measures a necessity, state officials said on Monday.
3rd March 2009
China plans 59 reservoirs to collect meltwater from its shrinking glaciers - Guardian China is planning to build 59 reservoirs to collect water from its shrinking glaciers as the cost of climate change hits home in the world's most populous country. The far western province of Xinjiang, home to many of the planet's highest peaks and widest ice fields, will carry out the 10-year engineering project, which aims to catch and store glacier run-off that might otherwise trickle away into the desert.
3rd March 2009
Britain's birds facing extinction as climate change leaves them with nowhere to go - Guardian As temperatures rise and European breeds arrive, native species such as the lapwing and Scottish crossbill are being forced out. Soon, say the RSPB and Durham University, many of our rare birds will disappearBritain's birds are being driven northwards to extinction at an accelerating rate because of global warming. Scientists have calculated that the average range of British birds will move 550 kilometres (340 miles) to the north by 2100 as the climate heats up.Birds with ranges in Scotland or in mountain regions will be wiped out - such as the snow bunting, which today survives only on the Cairngorm plateau.
2nd March 2009
Large fish going hungry as supplies of smaller species dwindle: report - CNews HALIFAX, N.S. - Dolphins, sharks and other large marine species around the world are going hungry as they seek out dwindling supplies of the small, overlooked species they feed on, according to a new study that says overfishing is draining their food sources. Climate change is also taking its toll on prey fish, which are more sensitive to warming ocean temperatures than their larger predators. So, if the world's waters continue to warm, scientists worry stocks will have even more difficulty recovering.
2nd March 2009
Hong Kong records warmest February in 125 years - China Economic Net Hong Kong recorded a monthly mean temperature of 20.5 degrees Celsius at the Hong Kong Observatory in February, making it the warmest February in Hong Kong since records of the local temperature began in 1884.
Study finds hemlock trees dying rapidly, affecting forest carbon cycle - EurekAlert! New research by U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) scientists and partners suggests the hemlock woolly adelgid is killing hemlock trees faster than expected in the southern Appalachians and rapidly altering the carbon cycle of these forests. SRS researchers and cooperators from the University of Georgia published the findings in the most recent issue of the journal Ecosystems. The authors suggest that infrequent frigid winter temperatures in the southern Appalachians may not be enough to suppress adelgid populations.
27th February 2009
Scientists find bigger than expected polar ice melt - SpaceDaily GENEVA, Feb 25 (AFP) Feb 25, 2009 Icecaps around the North and South Poles are melting faster and in a more widespread manner than expected, raising the sea level and fuelling climate change, a scientific survey revealed Wednesday.
25th February 2009
Climate change hits Spain's glaciers - Guardian Spain loses 90% of its glaciers thanks to global warming, threatening drought as rivers dry upThe Pyrenees mountains have lost almost 90% of their glacier ice over the past century, according to scientists who warn that global warning means they will disappear completely within a few decades.While glaciers covered 3,300 hectares of land on the mountain range that divides Spain and France at the turn of the last century, only 390 hectares remain, according to Spain's environment ministry.The most southerly glaciers in Europe are losing the battle against warming and look set to be among the first to disappear from the continent over the coming decades.
25th February 2009
Is global warming confusing pelicans? - Daily Breeze Climate change might have fooled thousands of California brown pelicans, who stayed north later than usual last year and encountered harsh winter storms on their trip south, researchers now believe.
Methane risk from a thawing Arctic | Video - Chicago Tribune As permafrost thaws in the Arctic, huge pockets of methane -- a potent greenhouse gas -- could be released into the atmosphere. Experts are only beginning to understand how disastrous that could be.
23rd February 2009
HEALTH: Warmer Climate Gives Malaria New Hunting Grounds - IPS CHICAGO, U.S., Feb 19 (IPS) - Climate change is bringing malaria to regions of Africa where the disease was previously unknown, researchers report from the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago this week.
20th February 2009
Linking the climate-ecology attribution chain - RealClimate Guest commentary by Jim Bouldin, Department of Plant Sciences, UC Davis Linking the regional climate-ecology attribution chain in the western United States Many are obviously curious about whether certain current regional environmental changes are traceable to global climate change. There are a number of large-scale changes that clearly qualify-rapid warming of the arctic/sub-arctic regions for example, and earlier spring onset in the northern hemisphere and the associated phenological changes in plants and animals. But as one moves to smaller scales of space or time, global-to-local connections become more difficult to establish. This is due to the combined effect of the resolutions of climate models, the intrinsic variability of the system and the empirical climatic, environmental, or ecological data-the signal to noise ratio of possible causes and observed effects.
20th February 2009
Singapore bushfires hit nearly decade high in January - Reuters SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Island-state Singapore faced the largest number of bushfires in nearly a decade in January, thanks to an unusually long dry spell, the government's anti-fire agency said Wednesday. The tropical nation saw 182 vegetation fires in January, mostly due to the dry spell, which the Singapore Civil Defense Force said was "unprecedented."
Butterfly colony trial hints at novel climate fix - Reuters OSLO (Reuters) - An experiment relocating butterfly colonies in Britain shows that animals and plants can be moved to new, cooler habitats to help them survive global warming, scientists said on Wednesday.
'Climate refugees' headed to Washington - Seattle Post Intelligencer 'Climate refugees' headed to WashingtonSeattle Post Intelligencer. "We know that people are already dying of heat waves, even before the effects of global warming can be felt, and interestingly, most of this is happening in ...
13th February 2009
Fish seen shifting 125 miles by 2050 due to warming OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming will push fish stocks more than 200 km (125 miles) toward the poles by mid-century in a dislocation of ocean life, a study of more than 1,000 marine species projected.
13th February 2009
U.S. to mull protection for alpine rabbit on warming - Reuters NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government has agreed to study whether the American pika, a tiny cold-loving relative of the rabbit, should be protected under the Endangered Species Act due to warmer temperatures, scientists said on Thursday.
Australian bushfires: When two degrees is the difference between life and death - Guardian The day after the great fire burned through central Victoria, I drove from Sydney to Melbourne. For much of the way – indeed for hundreds of miles north of the scorched ground - smoke obscured the horizon, entering my air conditioned car and carrying with it that distinctive scent so strongly signifying death, or to Aboriginal people, cleansing.It was as if a great cremation had taken place. I didn't know then how many people had died in their cars and homes, or while fleeing the flames, but by the time I reached the scorched ground just north of Melbourne, the dreadful news was trickling in.
11th February 2009
Plants take a hike as temperatures rise Plants are flowering at higher elevations in Arizona's Santa Catalina Mountains as summer temperatures rise, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.
11th February 2009
Australia fires a climate wake-up call - experts Weekend bushfires in Australia that killed 173 people are a climate change wake-up call for the public and politicians and a window to the future, experts said on Tuesday.
11th February 2009
Salamander losses in Mexico, Guatemala cause worry - Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Many salamander species in Mexico and Guatemala have suffered dramatic population declines since the 1970s, driven to the brink probably by a warming climate and other factors, U.S. scientists said on Monday.
Kiribati Islanders Seek Land to Buy as Rising Seas Threaten - Bloomberg Kiribati, a Pacific island-nation in danger of being submerged because of global warming, may purchase land elsewhere to relocate its people, President Anote Tong said. “We would consider buying land,” Tong said in an interview in New Delhi. “The alternative is that we die, we go extinct.” Kiribati, between Hawaii and Australia, is the second island-nation after the Maldives that’s floated the idea of buying land should their islands be swamped by rising seas and more powerful storms.
9th February 2009
Bushfires and global warming: is there a link? - Guardian Scientists are reluctant to link individual weather events to global warming, because natural variability will always throw up extreme events. However, they say that climate change loads the dice, and can make severe episodes more likely. Some studies have started to say how much global warming contributed to severe weather. Experts at the UK Met Office and Oxford University used computer models to say man-made climate change made the killer European heatwave in 2003 about twice as likely. In principle, the technique could be repeated with any extreme storm, drought or flood – which could pave the way for lawsuits from those affected. See also: Australia's deadliest bushfire, 84 dead - Reuters via Yahoo! News 'Horror movie' - BBC News Fires follow floods as wild weather hits Australia - TODAYonline
8th February 2009
Drought starts to bite in northern Kenya - Reuters WAREGADUD, Kenya (Reuters) - Clouds of dust rising above the harsh scrub herald the arrival of more livestock at a borehole in northeastern Kenya, the end for some of a 45-km (28-mile) trek for water that must be repeated every few days.
Ocean Acidification from CO2 Is Happening Faster Than Thought - Scientific American Marine ecologist J. Timothy Wootton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues spent eight years compiling measurements of acidity, salinity, temperature and other data from Tatoosh Island off the northwestern tip of Washington State. They found that the average acidity rose more than 10 times faster than predicted by climate simulations.
Drought in Australia food bowl continues - Reuters CANBERRA (Reuters) - Drought in Australia's main food growing region of the Murray-Darling river system continues, with water stores near record lows despite recent rains, the head of the government's oversight body for the system said on Wednesday.
5th February 2009
Severe drought expected this time in Kerala - Business Standard India Kerala will face a severe drought this summer as there has been a 20-25 per cent drop in rainfall from normal, forcing the government to draw up contingency plans to supply drinking water, water resources minister N K Premachandran said here today.
5th February 2009
Time running out for Turkish wetlands, warn NGOs - Today's Zaman Three Turkish nongovernmental organizations have issued a joint call to action, saying that Turkey's lifelines are drying up as a result of faulty policies, climate change and poor ecological awareness.
5th February 2009
Arctic storms seen worsening; threat to oil, ships - Reuters OSLO (Reuters) - Arctic storms could worsen because of global warming in a threat to possible new businesses such as oil and gas exploration, fisheries or shipping, a study showed on Wednesday.
5th February 2009
Antarctic warming is robust - RealClimate The difference between a single calculation and a solid paper in the technical literature is vast. A good paper examines a question from multiple angles and find ways to assess the robustness of its conclusions to all sorts of possible sources of error - in input data, in assumptions, and even occasionally in programming. If a conclusion is robust over as much of this as can be tested (and the good peer reviewers generally insist that this be shown), then the paper is likely to last the test of time. Although science proceeds by making use of the work that others have done before, it is not based on the assumption that everything that went before is correct.
Rising sea salinates India's Ganges: expert - Reuters KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - Rising sea levels are causing salt water to flow into India's biggest river, threatening its ecosystem and turning vast farmlands barren in the country's east, a climate change expert warned Monday.
Drought threatens peace in Iraq's marsh Eden - Reuters MARSHES, Iraq (Reuters) - Miles of reed stalks and baked mud are all that can be seen of much of Iraq's ancient marshes this year, as a lack of water threatens to turn one of the world's most important wetlands to wasteland.
Climate change may be stoking stronger winds, altered oceans - PhysOrg The specter of an ocean floor littered with dead shellfish, rock fish, sea stars and other marine life off the Oregon coast spurred Mark Snyder, a climate change expert, to investigate whether California's coast faced a similar calamity.
A global glacier index update - RealClimate Guest commentary by Mauri Pelto For global temperature time series we have GISTEMP, NCDC and HadCRUT. Each has worked hard to assimilate global temperature data into reliable and accurate indices of global temperature. The equivalent for alpine glaciers is the World Glacier Monitoring Service's (WGMS) record of mass balance and terminus behavior. Beginning in 1986, WGMS began to maintain and publish the collection of information on ongoing glacier changes that had begun in 1960 with the Permanent Service on Fluctuations of glaciers. This program in the last 10 years has striven to acquire, publish and verify glacier terminus and mass balance measurement data from alpine glaciers the world over on a timely basis.
1st February 2009
Possum first climate victim? - The Courier Mail SCIENTISTS fear the world's first localised climate change extinction of a major mammal species might have already occurred in north Queensland.
Under the ice - Grist By Joseph RommArctic sea ice extent just dipped below January 2007 levels in the last few days, according to the daily time series from the National Snow and Ice Data Center: The NSIDC notes that they are showing the data from 2007 on this figure since that year "went on to reach the lowest summer minimum in the satellite record." The NSIDC also has an interesting 2008 Year-in-Review for cryosphere buffs. It explains why the ice stopped growing for a week in mid-December. It also has an interesting graphic comparing the Arctic sea ice extent in 2008 with 2007:The day by day meanderings of Arctic sea ice extent are not overly meaningful yet, but I think they are worth reporting because it bugs the deniers to see any evidence whatsoever that the world is not undergoing global cooling.
31st January 2009
Global glacier melt continues - PhysOrg Glaciers around the globe continue to melt at high rates. Tentative figures for the year 2007, of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, indicate a further loss of average ice thickness of roughly 0.67 meter water equivalent (m w.e.). Some glaciers in the European Alps lost up to 2.5 m w.e.
31st January 2009
Q&A: Water Pushed to the Limit SANTIAGO, Jan 30 (Tierramérica) - When it comes to water, "humanity does not have the full awareness of the danger it is facing and will only act under extreme circumstances. The bad news is that those extremes are drawing near," Manuel Baquedano, president of the Chilean non-governmental Institute of Political Ecology, told Tierramérica. See also: World heads for 'water bankruptcy' - Philippine Daily Inquirer
31st January 2009
Southern Australia feels the heat - BBC Residents of south-eastern Australia are being warned to expect the worst heatwave in a century. Temperatures went up to 45.5C (114F) in Adelaide, its hottest day in 70 years. In Melbourne, two people died in the searing heat, including a 75-year-old man who collapsed while walking to his car, the AFP news agency said. Some train and tram services were cancelled as rail lines buckled in the heat. There were also power outages, as people turned on their air-conditioning units to cool down. See also: Train tracks buckle under record heat - ABC
29th January 2009
Climate change forces moths to higher ground - Guardian Global warming is forcing tropical species uphill to escape the rising temperatures at a rate of more than a metre a year, a new study from the mountains of Borneo suggests.More than four decades after a group of undergraduate students visited the south-east Asian island in 1965, a team of British scientists returned to the same sites on Mount Kinabalu to repeat their survey of moths.The group of six, including a member of the original trip, found that on average the insects had raised the altitude of their range by 67m.Although the trip had only been repeated once so far, they did everything possible to repeat the original survey, travelling at the same time of year in July and August, using photographs to identify exact sites for moth traps, and even carrying out the work at the same phases of the moon.
29th January 2009
Climate change leaves emperor penguins 'facing extinction' - Times Online If rising temperatures continue to melt sea ice at current rates, the population of a large emperor penguin colony in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, will shrink from 3,000 to just 400 breeding pairs, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI). The prediction is based on evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If replicated in other colonies the species could be devastated.
27th January 2009
Predator Jumbo Squid Feasting On NorCal Fish - CBS 5 Bay Area In Mexico, they are called the "red devil" and "the beast" in Central America. They are jumbo squid: deadly, fast moving creatures with tentacles that can suck the life out of a human being. The squid are devouring parts of large populations of native fish in Northern California.
27th January 2009
Heavy weather: What climate change really means for Britain - Independent In 1992, Tom Clarke became an apprentice gardener with the National Trust. He was a bright student, but he didn't want to be stuck in an office job: he wanted to use his hands, and he loved the outdoors. He didn't know exactly what he would be doing at the age of 35, some 17 years later, but it's safe to assume that he might have hoped to have graduated past the intricacies of lawn mowing.
26th January 2009
Global warming impacting monsoon trend in India: Study - Times of India Global warming impacting monsoon trend in India: StudyTimes of India, India. The fourth Assessment Report of the Inter-government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had also given an account of ongoing Global Warming scenario and its ...
26th January 2009
Record warm temperatures hit Russia - BBC Over the past few weeks, several records have been broken in Russia for unseasonably mild weather, including the warmest ever December temperature on record. In Moscow, a temperature of 9.4 degrees Celsius (49F) was recorded on Saturday, the highest December temperature in the history of meteorological observations. Strangely, this record occurred at 3 o’clock in the morning, when usually the temperature would be plummeting towards its minimum. During Russia’s long, harsh winters, the temperature in Moscow rarely rises above freezing, and the average December temperature ranges between minus 10 and minus 5 degrees C (14 to 23F). This recent warm spell has brought temperatures 15 to 20 degrees above normal, with some climate meteorologists claiming this is further evidence of global warming.
7th December 2008
Native hunters say climate affecting herds - Yahoo Chief Bill Erasmus of the Dene nation in northern Canada brought a stark warning about the climate crisis: The once abundant herds of caribou are dwindling, rivers are running lower and the ice is too thin to hunt on. Erasmus raised his concerns in recent days on the sidelines of a U.N. climate conference, seeking to ensure that North America's indigenous peoples are not left out in the cold when it comes to any global warming negotiations.
'I didn't see one cube of ice' By Joseph Romm CBC News reports: The Canadian Coast Guard has confirmed that in a major first, a commercial ship travelled through the Northwest Passage this fall to deliver supplies to communities in western Nunavut.The MV Camilla Desgagnés, owned by Desgagnés Transarctik Inc., transported cargo from Montreal to the hamlets of Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk, Gjoa Haven and Taloyoak in September."We did have a commercial cargo vessel that did the first scheduled run from Montreal, up through the eastern Arctic, through the Northwest Passage to deliver cargo to communities in the west," Brian LeBlanc of the Canadian Coast Guard told CBC News."That was the first -- that I'm aware of anyway -- commercial cargo delivery from the east through the Northwest Passage."NEW ERA IN ARCTIC SHIPPING?
3rd December 2008
Florida's elkhorn coral nears extinction - CDNN Florida's elkhorn coral nears extinctionCDNN, New Zealand. Global warming is not only accelerating problems that already have sickened and shrunken coral reefs, it has created a new, potentially more lethal threat:
3rd December 2008
Soot darkens ice, stokes runaway Arctic melt: study POZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - Soot is darkening ice in the Arctic and speeding a melt that could make the ocean around the North Pole ice-free in summer well before 2050, experts said on Tuesday.
2008 saw record-breaking hurricane season: US agency - PhysOrg The record-breaking 2008 hurricane season, which officially ends on Sunday, has been one of the most active since comprehensive reports began 64 years ago, a US government agency said Wednesday.
Ocean growing more acidic faster than once thought - PhysOrg University of Chicago scientists have documented that the ocean is growing more acidic faster than previously thought. In addition, they have found that the increasing acidity correlates with increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a paper published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Nov. 24.
Global warming causes winter migratory birds to shun UK - guardian.co.uk Fewer birds will migrate to the UK each year as warmer temperatures caused by climate change will encourage them to spend winters closer to home, a report warned today. Research from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) has shown a big drop in the numbers of ducks, geese, swans and wading birds migrating to UK wetlands in winter.
Lemmings in Norway hit by global warming - Reuters OSLO (Reuters) - Lemming numbers are dwindling in Norway because of climate change, ending a historic cycle of population booms and busts that inspired a myth of mass suicides by the rodents, scientists said on Wednesday.
Extreme weather postpones the flowering time of plants - PhysOrg Extreme weather events have a greater effect on flora than previously presumed. A one-month drought postpones the time of flowering of grassland and heathland plants in Central Europe by an average of 4 days. With this a so-called 100-year drought event equates to approx. a decade of global warming.
6th November 2008
In hot water - Nature The ocean's enormous capacity for soaking up greenhouse gases has gone some way toward softening the blow of escalating emissions; over the last century, the upper ocean has soaked up over 500 billion tonnes of fossil fuel carbon. But in acting as a buffer for the planet, the ocean itself has begun to suffer. Some of the harm is obvious; some is more obscure. Most notably, the seas are warming, having taken up around 20 times more heat than the atmosphere since 1960. For some time, it has been realized that the ocean will also become more acidic in a carbon-rich world. Now studies show it will become saltier and, rather surprisingly, noisier too. If, as predicted under some scenarios, the ocean's pH drops 0.3 units from its current value of 8.1 units by 2050, sound waves at one kilohertz and below could travel up to 70 per cent further underwater.
5th November 2008
Chilean glacier will vanish in 50 years: study - PhysOrg Chile's official water authority warned Saturday that the Echaurren glacier near Santiago, which supplies the capital with 70 percent of its water needs, could disappear in the next half century.
3rd November 2008
Warning as seabird breeding fails - BBC Kittiwakes, Arctic terns and Arctic skuas suffer a breeding season which could see them wiped out, it is claimed. Changes in food supply, which may be linked to climate change, could threaten the future of these species. RSPB Scotland said recent reports of significant declines in plankton biomass point to major changes to ocean ecosystems in the Atlantic, which could be affecting seabirds. It said that although direct evidence was still lacking, increased winter sea surface temperatures disrupting the food chain are thought to be driving the declines. Douglas Gilbert, an ecologist with RSPB Scotland, said: "The outlook for some species such as Arctic skua, kittiwake and Arctic tern is dire, and there are problems with other species like guillemots and puffins in some areas too. "Unless conditions change to allow these birds the chance of successful breeding, the long-term future for them is bleak. "The evidence that this is linked to changes in sea surface temperatures is now growing."
30th October 2008
Climate-warming methane levels rose fast in 2007 - Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Levels of climate-warming methane -- a greenhouse gas 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide -- rose abruptly in Earth's atmosphere last year, and scientists who reported the change don't know why it occurred.
Climate change making seas more salty, research finds - Guardian Unlimited Experts at the UK Met Office and Reading University say warmer temperatures over the Atlantic Ocean have significantly increased evaporation and reduced rainfall across a giant stretch of water from Africa to the Carribean in recent years. The change concentrates salt in the water left behind, and is predicted to make southern Europe and the Mediterranean much drier in future.
29th October 2008
Earth on course for eco 'crunch' - BBC The planet is headed for an ecological "credit crunch", according to a report issued by conservation groups. The document contends that our demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third. The Living Planet Report is the work of WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network.
"The events in the last few months have served to show us how it's foolish in the extreme to live beyond our means," said WWF's international president, Chief Emeka Anyaoku. "Devastating though the financial credit crunch has been, it's nothing as compared to the ecological recession that we are facing." He said the more than $2 trillion (£1.2 trillion) lost on stocks and shares was dwarfed by the up to $4.5 trillion worth of resources destroyed forever each year. The report's Living Planet Index, which is an attempt to measure the health of worldwide biodiversity, showed an average decline of about 30% from 1970 to 2005 in 3,309 populations of 1,235 species. An index for the tropics shows an average 51% decline over the same period in 1,333 populations of 585 species. See also: FAQ: Planet's capacity - Guardian Unlimited
29th October 2008
Yellowstone amphibians in decline due to climate change - Mongabay.com Climate change appears to be responsible for a "marked drop" in the population of three of four species of amphibian once common to Yellowstone National Park, the world's oldest national park, report researchers writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using surveys and remote sensing to monitor and record changes in wetlands in northern Yellowstone National Park, Sarah McMenamin of Stanford University and colleagues linked declining amphibian populations to drier and warmer conditions over the past 60 years, including a four-fold increase in the number of number of permanently dry ponds over the past 16 years.
28th October 2008
Wildflowers disappear from Walden Pond as earth heats up - Boston Globe In the 1850s, a few years after he had gone to “live deliberately” in a cabin in the woods at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau began to compile detailed records on hundreds of species of plants in his beloved Concord. That same data is now being used to measure the effect of climate change and, according to researchers, the news is not good. Scientists from Harvard and Boston University reported today that the mean annual temperature has climbed by 4 degrees since Thoreau's time in Concord, and over that same period, 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have disappeared.
28th October 2008
Swans stay in 'warm' Siberia - The Independent UK: The late arrival in Britain of migratory birds from Russian region is being blamed on global warming. Wildlife experts are reporting that the swans' 1,800-mile mid-October migration has so far failed tomaterialise, with climate change turning the once famously harsh Russian region into a more inviting winter haven for the majestic birds.
Methane rise reminds us of climate change feedback loop - Gather.com The total methane in the air is now around 5.6 billion tons. Scientists are concerned that we may be seeing the beginning of a feedback loop in the arctic in terms of methane release. For perspective on this, ask yourself, smugly and complacently, "what's the worst thing that could happen?" Then search your memory from the year 2005, when you asked yourself that same question about the subprime mortgage problem.
27th October 2008
Sea levels to rise a metre this century, German experts warn - EARTHtimes.org Sea levels around the world will rise one metre this century, according to German scientists who warn that global warming is happening much faster than hitherto predicted. Citing UN date on climate change, two senior German scientists say that previous predictions were far too cautious and optimistic.
27th October 2008
Primeval ice melts in Finnish Lapland - Helsingin Sanomat The primeval ice in an ice cave on the isle of Korkia-Maura in Lake Inari has melted, turning into a pond of crystal water. Recent years’ mild winters as well as longer summer and autumn periods have been too much for the ice cover of the cave, which began to grow in the Little Ice Age some 500 to 1,000 years ago.
27th October 2008
Climate Change Seeps into the Sea - PhysOrg Good news has turned out to be bad. The ocean has helped slow global warming by absorbing much of the excess heat and heat-trapping carbon dioxide that has been going into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution
25th October 2008
Oceans may provide clues to future rainfall - PhysOrg Changes in the salinity of our oceans are being brought about by man's influence on our climate, suggests new research conducted by the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Walker Institute for Climate System Research at the University of Reading, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters next month.
25th October 2008
Ice cap threat to migrating birds - BBC News Some of Britain's most treasured bird species face extinction because of melting polar ice, a Cumbrian wildlife expert warns.
Dr Roy Armstrong from Cumbria University said shrinking polar ice may lead to droughts which could threaten the wintering grounds. "We're expecting a severe drought to hit West Africa at any time."
23rd October 2008
Data show US riding out worst storms on record - The News-Press More frequent and powerful hurricanes from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico since the mid-1990s have created one of the most dangerous and costliest storm eras in recorded history, a USA TODAY analysis of weather data shows.
Since 1995, there have been 207 named storms in the Atlantic basin, which includes the Gulf of Mexico � a 68% increase from the previous 13 years, according to statistics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Of those storms, 111 were hurricanes, a 75% increase over the previous period.
Global warming leads India tigers to village attacks - Reuters KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - The number of tiger attacks on people is growing in India's Sundarban islands as habitat loss and dwindling prey caused by climate change drives them to prowl into villages for food, experts said Monday.
Yosemite glacier on thin ice - Sacramento Bee As signals of climate change begin to come into focus in the Sierra Nevada, its melting glaciers spell trouble in bold font. Not only are they in-your-face barometers of global warming, they also reflect what scientists are beginning to uncover: that the Sierra snowpack – the source of 65 percent of California's water – is dwindling, too.
20th October 2008
Bad news for arachnophobics - gair rhydd Global warming hasn’t just affected the icebergs but the UK’s increasingly mild climate has also caused spiders to hitch a ride on the country’s food and plant imports and manage to survive. Some new residents include the False Widow spider and scientists believe it’s only a matter of time before the poisonous Black Widow spiders invade.
20th October 2008
A failing grade - Gristmill NOAA's arctic report card shows stronger effects of warming in Greenland and permafrost.
19th October 2008
Southern drought creeps northward - MSNBC The drought that plagued the Deep South for more than a year is creeping north, and officials in multiple states are restricting outdoor burning in the face of water shortages and forest fire risks.
17th October 2008
Arctic air temperatures climb to record levels - Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fall air temperatures have climbed to record levels in the Arctic due to major losses of sea ice as the region suffers more effects from a warming trend dating back decades, a report released on Thursday showed.
17th October 2008
POVERTY: Water Wars Hit Rural Zimbabwe - IPS PLUMTREE, Oct 16 (IPS) - When water experts warned at the turn of the millennium that soon wars will be fought not over oil anymore but over water, little did Zimbabweans know that they would be some of the first people affected by this dire prediction.
Warmer water devastates reef's seabirds - The Australian GLOBAL warming has been blamed for dramatic declines in seabird populations on the Great Barrier Reef and surrounding waters. Tens of thousands of seabirds are failing to breed because warmer water from more frequent and intense El Nino events means there is insufficient food to raise their young, according to research compiled by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Warm water near the surface forces fish, plankton and other prey into deeper water, where it cannot be reached by seabirds.
SOUTHERN CHILE GLACIAL LAKE DISAPPEARS - AGAIN - Santiago Times The Cachet 2 glacial lake, located in the southern Chilean region of Aysén (Region XI), disappeared last week for the second time in six months. The lake spilled into the nearby Baker River, possibly due to a phenomenon some say is related to global warming.
13th October 2008
Drought the hottest ever - Queensland Country Life The current and on-going drought ranks along side the Federation and World War II droughts as one of Australia's worst, but new figures show it has also been the hottest of all the big dries.
12th October 2008
Climate change ground zero - Sydney Morning Herald The earth is disappearing from under the feet of millions of impoverished Bangladeshis.
Increased temperatures mean a torrent of additional melt-water from Himalayan glaciers is gushing down the great rivers of India - the Ganges and the Brahmaputra - into the Bangladeshi delta, causing savage erosion. At the same time coastal areas are being gradually flooded by rising sea levels. If that wasn't enough, Bhola is cyclone-prone and likely to experience more frequent and extreme storms as sea temperatures rise because of global warming.
Sierra climate change puts range's species on the run - Sacbee YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK: One century ago, alpine chipmunks owned the upper half of Yosemite. They skittered under logs and darted across rocks from the rugged Sierra crest down to the conifer forests at 7,800 feet. Today, they are missing in action below 9,800 feet. "It's lost half its geographic range," Patton said. "Climate is the culprit. I don't think there is any iota of reason not to think that." See also: Climate change may threaten biodiversity in tropics
10th October 2008
Birds' decline shows wider damage to nature: study - Reuters BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - Dwindling numbers of birds worldwide are a sign that governments are failing to keep promises to slow damage to nature by 2010, an international report said on Thursday.
10th October 2008
What links the retreat of Jakobshavn Isbrae, Wilkins Ice Shelf and the Petermann Glacier? - RealClimate Guest commentary from Mauri Pelto Changes occurring in marine terminating outlet glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet and ice shelves fringing the Antarctic Peninsula have altered our sense of the possible rate of response of large ice sheet-ice shelf systems. There is a shared mechanism at work that has emerged from the detailed observations of a number of researchers, that is the key to the onset and progression of the ice retreat. This mechanism is shared despite the vastly different nature of the environments of Jakobshavns Isbrae, Wilkins Ice Shelf and the Petermann Glacier. We reviewed in a previous post the first mechanism for explaining the change in velocity of Greenland's large outlet glacier - the Zwally effect - and why it is not the key.
Climate change poised to devastate penguins: WWF - SpaceDaily BARCELONA, Oct 8 (AFP) Oct 08, 2008 Half to three-quarters of major Antarctic penguin colonies could be damaged or wiped out if global temperatures are allowed to climb by more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a report released Wednesday.
2008 probably represents the lowest volume of Arctic sea ice on record - National Snow and Ice Data Center NSIDC Research Scientist Walt Meier said, �Warm ocean waters helped contribute to ice losses this year, pushing the already thin ice pack over the edge. In fact, preliminary data indicates that 2008 probably represents the lowest volume of Arctic sea ice on record, partly because less multiyear ice is surviving now, and the remaining ice is so thin.
NASA data show Arctic saw fastest August sea ice retreat on record - PhysOrg Contributing to the near-record sea ice minimum in 2008 was a month-long period in the summer that saw the fastest-ever rate of seasonal retreat during that period. From August 1 to August 31, NASA data show that arctic sea ice extent declined at a rate of 32,700 square miles per day, compared to a rate of about 24,400 square miles per day in August 2007. Since measurements began, the arctic sea ice extent has declined at an average rate of 19,700 miles per day at the point when the extent reaches its annual minimum.
29th September 2008
Europe warms fast: Med drier, north ever wetter - Reuters Europe's mountains, coasts, the Mediterranean and the Arctic were most at risk from global warming, according to the report by the European Environment Agency and branches of the World Health Organization and the European Commission. "Global average temperature has increased almost 0.8 C (1.4 F) above pre-industrial levels, with even higher temperature increases in Europe and northern latitudes," it said. Europe had warmed by 1.0 C. Northern Europe would get wetter this century while more of Europe's Mediterranean region might turn to desert, based on trends already under way, it said. European heatwaves like in 2003, during which 70,000 people died, could be more frequent.
Forest fires 'pushing Lebanon toward desertification' - Daily Star - Lebanon Devastating fires caused by climate change are threatening forests in Lebanon, in turn accelerating the pace of global warming, an environmental activist has warned. "We are witnessing a rise in temperature which leads to the dryness of forest soil and pushes it toward desertification," Sawsan Bou Fakhreddine, director general of the Association for Forests, Development and Conservation (AFDC), a Lebanese NGO, told IRIN.
Planet in debt at earliest day ever - Metro The world slides into 'ecological debt' today, having used up all the natural resources the planet can provide this year, according to the New Economics Foundation. The think-tank said humans were using up resources such as forests and fisheries faster than they can be regenerated and producing more waste, mainly carbon dioxide, than the planet can absorb.
23rd September 2008
Birds decline seen sign of biodiversity crisis - Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Many of the world's most common birds suffered steep population drops over recent decades, a sign of a deteriorating global environment and a biodiversity crisis, BirdLife International said on Monday.
23rd September 2008
Bringing Oceans to a Boil - RedOrbit Scientists have known for a long time that the ocean plays a huge role in climate. Covering 70% of the globe, it stores 1,000 times more heat than the atmosphere, but often overlooked in the public debate on climate change is the ocean's synergistic role-how it responds to the growing amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
22nd September 2008
Glaciers vanish in North Cascades - Sierra Sun Nearby, Spider Glacier has already passed away. The scientist who pronounced it dead three years ago believes that one-third of the glaciers in the North Cascades — including Lyman — are doomed.
20th September 2008
'Fish in the forest': Rising seas push PNG coast dwellers inland - Reuters AlertNet To lose your territory is to lose a significant part of your identity - and your freedom. To be displaced onto somebody else's puts you entirely at their mercy. That is the bleak prospect facing the world's first sea level-rise "refugees". Although PNG's Carteret Islanders hold the dubious honour of being the first to permanently lose their land to sea levels, in fact they are just the most vocal of three or four atoll populations in PNG who are today's vanguard among the environmentally displaced. When sea levels rise, loss of land will displace tens of thousands in PNG. The contamination of fresh-water lenses, poisoning of crops and flooding of low-lying settlements is a trend that will only continue, not just on outlying island chains but increasingly, on mainland coastal communities as well.
19th September 2008
Beijing taps "emergency" water supplies - Reuters BEIJING (Reuters) - China's capital started pumping "emergency" water from its long-parched neighboring province on Thursday, officials said, weeks after the Beijing Olympics when they declared the city had enough supply. "Owing to continuous drought in recent years, the water situation in the capital Beijing is grim and water sources are quite strained," said a statement on the website, adding that the two government had reached an agreement on the supplies.
19th September 2008
The clams are nearly gone - Daily Express Giant clams in Sabah waters have been severely depleted by overfishing - Another threat that is hastening their extinction is global warming or climate change through excessive carbon dioxide in the sea making the water acidic and lessening the ability of giant clams to build their skeleton. The rise in sea temperature is also known to disturb the symbiotic relationship that the clams have with zooxanthellae (symbiotic algae), which nourished them.
19th September 2008
The escalator effect - Nature Rising temperatures are changing mountain ecosystems as the heat forces some species upwards — until there is nowhere left to go. Emma Marris reports on the 'escalator effect', which is threatening species worldwide.
Climate change may prompt need for grapes rethink - ABC Online A viticulture expert says the days of solely growing traditional French varieties in Western Australia's south-west and great southern may be drawing to a close. Melbourne University Professor Snow Barlow says growers may have to consider more Mediterranean wines, like Spanish or Italian grape varieties, due to global warming.
17th September 2008
Lowest ever sea ice in Arctic - WWF International Arctic sea ice may well have reached its lowest volumes ever, as summer ice coverage of the Arctic Sea looks set to be close to last year’s record lows, with thinner ice overall. Final figures on minimum ice coverage for 2008 are expected in a matter of days, but they are already flirting with last year’s record low of 1.59 million square miles, or 4.13 million square kilometres. “If you take reduced ice thickness into account, there is probably less ice overall in the Arctic this year than in any other year since monitoring began,” said Martin Sommerkorn, WWF International Arctic Programme’s Senior Climate Change Advisor.
Traditional almanacs ponder change in the air - Boston Globe Prognosticators create long-range weather charts for the handful of surviving farmer's almanacs - an old job, done an old way. They eschew Doppler radar and weather satellites and look for clues in the timeless rhythms of nature. But now, the world and the weather don't look as timeless as they used to. Scientists say the planet is warming, threatening to make droughts more widespread, heat waves more punishing and hurricanes more severe. So one of the country's most fervently unmodern subcultures has had to confront climate change. Prognosticators are deciding how - or if - they should factor greenhouse gases into weather-predicting formulas that are two centuries old. "Global warming has kind of messed it up."
Walruses: The friendly, fun-loving, musically talented creatures are under threat from climate change - Independent The future is far from rosy for these musical beasts, as the threat of global warming looms over their icy habitat. The most disturbing signs of climate change surfaced in 2004, when a team of climate-change researchers cruising through the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska, saw walrus calves swimming alone in deep water, far from either ice or land. Crying loudly, they had, it seemed, been separated or abandoned by their mothers as the sea ice retreated north to deeper water. Summer ice cover has been declining since 1980 and last September shrunk to just 1.65 million square miles – almost 40 per cent less than the average since 1979, when satellite records began. This lack of sea ice is causing walruses "to look further afield for places to 'haul out' – pull themselves on to the ice – and this means we are getting more crowding in areas which can have more interference from humans, trampling and frightening, leading to more deaths," Dr Schusterman says. As walruses come ashore earlier, they congregate in extremely large herds, as big as 40,000 in one location last year, and as many as 4,000 are thought to have been killed in stampedes in Arctic Russia.
11th September 2008
Australia buys huge farm to save dying river - elEconomista.es An irrigation farm larger than Singapore and sucking up billions of liters of water each year has been bought by Australia's government to help save one of the country's most vital rivers from a slow death and climate change.
Michael McCarthy: Another summer of sodden misery. Is it bad luck - or worse? - The Independent It's getting wearisomely familiar, isn't it? Last summer's toll of sodden misery is with us again as people are flooded out of their homes from one end of the land to the other and, for the second year running, a famous medieval abbey is an island. You could be forgiven for thinking, is this really all just coincidence?
9th September 2008
As Andean glacier retreats, tiny life forms swiftly move in, study shows - PhysOrg A University of Colorado at Boulder team working at 16,400 feet in the Peruvian Andes has discovered how barren soils uncovered by retreating glacier ice can swiftly establish a thriving community of microbes, setting the table for lichens, mosses and alpine plants.
9th September 2008
Bark beetles are feasting on Utah forests - Deseret Morning News A vicious cycle is brewing in Utah: Bark beetles are killing a lot of trees in the state. Dead trees are fuel for wildfires, which experts say contributes to global warming. And climate change is now being blamed for an increased population of bark beetles.
Ribbon Seal Endangered - LiveScience.com The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is considering placing the Bering Sea’s ribbon seal under the protection of the Endangered Species Act. In late December 2007, the San-Francisco-based Center for Biological Diversity petitioned NOAA’s Fisheries Service to list the ribbon seal as threatened or endangered, citing current and future destruction of their icy habitat in Alaska’s Bering Sea due to climate change.
Indian cyclones soar - Nature The frequency and intensity of summer tropical cyclones forming in the north Indian Ocean could increase in the coming century, according to scientists.
Major ice-shelf loss for Canada - BBC News Canada's Arctic ice shelves have lost a colossal area this year, scientists report, with one 50 sq km shelf breaking off completely. See also: A planet on thin ice - Boston Globe MANY SCIENTISTS worry that there will be tipping points in global warming, as changes in the delicate balance of the earth's ice, land, water, and air cause sudden accelerations in average temperatures. One focus of concern is the Arctic, where ice annually expands and recedes with the seasons. Just as the data on Arctic summer ice came in, researchers also reported alarming releases of methane gas in the Arctic. As a greenhouse gas, methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Scientists have long feared that gigantic burps of this gas would be a result of warming in the Arctic.
For the first time in human history, the North Pole can be circumnavigated - The Independent Open water now stretches all the way round the Arctic, making it possible for the first time in human history to circumnavigate the North Pole, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. New satellite images, taken only two days ago, show that melting ice last week opened up both the fabled North-west and North-east passages, in the most important geographical landmark to date to signal the unexpectedly rapid progress of global warming. See also: North Pole kayak trip to highlight global warming - BBC
31st August 2008
Gustav grows back into hurricane - Reuters GEORGE TOWN (Reuters) - Gustav strengthened back into a hurricane in the warm Caribbean on Friday as it left flooded Jamaica and churned toward the Cayman Islands, headed for the Gulf of Mexico on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's deadly strike on New Orleans. See also: The storm of the century - so far - Grist Magazine
31st August 2008
Sea-Ice Melt Imperils Walruses, and Economy Based on Them - Washington Post Walrus need to rest on sea ice no more than 400 feet above the ocean floor so they can dive down to eat shellfish and plants. But sea ice is retreating so far north that the waters are too deep for walrus to feed. This forces them to squeeze onto land, and last summer about 4,000 young walruses were trampled to death by males in the crowded conditions.
As wildfires spread, so does the red ink - The Christian Science Monitor Faced with hundreds of big, hard-to-control blazes, California is struggling with what could be its most expensive wildfire season ever, burning through $285 million in the last six weeks alone and up to $13 million a day.
A view from the North - Alaska's melting glaciers - PhysOrg Welcome to the front lines of global warming in the United States - the Harding Ice Field in Alaska, the biggest icefield in the United States. At the Exit Glacier north of Seward - the only glacier in the Kenai Fjords National Park reachable by foot - the giant cerulean blue ice sheet gives every sign of staying put. But one only has to glance at the many signs along the roadway and footpath to the glacier's edge to mark its retreat - it hit its peak size in 1815 and has been receding ever since. Signs along a footpath leading to the base of the glacier show just how far it has retreated.
27th August 2008
Not-So-Permafrost: Big Thaw of Arctic Soil May Unleash Runaway Warming - Scientific American "Drunken" trees listing wildly, cracked highways and sinkholes--all are visible signs of thawing Arctic permafrost. When this frozen soil warms, it releases carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases as microbes start to thrive on the organic material it contains--a potentially potent source of uncontrollable climate change.
27th August 2008
Scientists Report Further Shrinking of Arctic Ice - Washington Post Arctic sea ice has shrunk to the second-lowest level since record-keeping began three decades ago, a group of international researchers determined yesterday, a revelation underscoring how rapidly climate change is transforming ecosystems in northern latitudes. The extent of Arctic sea ice is now 2 million square miles below the long-term average for Aug. 26, according to the International Arctic Research Center and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, a figure that is within 400,000 square miles of the all-time record low set in September 2007. This figure is already below the long-term average for September ice cover and because the ice traditionally reaches its minimum level in mid-September, researchers warned that a new low might be recorded within weeks.
Rising sea buries village - International Herald Tribune TOTOPE, Ghana: The old shore road to Totope is now under the sea. Developers began carving out another road, but it was washed away so often they abandoned it. Now the road to this village is just a track across the sand. On this southern coast of Ghana, the Atlantic Ocean is rising. Every few years, residents of a string of villages leave their homes and build new ones farther back, abandoning them to the encroaching sand and water.
Global warming sign? Major Arctic glacier is cracking - Los Angeles Times In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday. That has led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year.
"As we see this phenomenon occurring further and further north -- and Petermann is as far north as you can get -- it certainly adds to the concern," said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth From Space at the University of Colorado. [Interesting that the element of doubt introduced by the article is based on norms from the 1990's, considering that global warming started showing up in the records some ten years earlier (see diagram). ]
Greenland Glacier Breakup Suggests Imminent Disintegration - LiveScience.com via Yahoo! News New satellite images reveal that a massive ice chunk recently broken away from one of Greenland's glaciers, which researchers say will continue to disintegrate within the next year. Scientists at Ohio State University monitoring daily NASA satellite images of Greenland's glaciers discovered that an 11-square-mile (29-square-kilometer) piece of the Petermann Glacier broke away between July 10 and 24. The chunk was about half the size of Manhattan.
22nd August 2008
Rapid climate change threatens to thaw icy wonderland of Alaska - The Flint Journal Flint Journal staff writer Elizabeth Shaw was in Alaska for 10 days in August on a fellowship to see firsthand the effects of global warming.
"I watched massive chunks of glacial ice breaking off into the sea. I fished for salmon from muddy riverbanks where beavers -- once uncommon near the Arctic Circle -- are ravaging trees and blocking spawning streams. I hiked up mountainsides once white with snow year-round. I walked through white spruce forests devastated by pine bark beetle infestations, and peat wetlands drying up for the first time in 14,000 years. I listened to an Aleut leader lament the loss of his native culture to flooded coastlines and vanishing icebound prey. Now put all that in the context of one stark and simple fact: In those same 10 days, Alaska lost an area of sea ice the size of Texas."
Global warming pushes Peru to pick coffee earlier - Reuters Global warming pushes Peru to pick coffee earlierReuters. ... a migrant worker who picks coffee on the steamy, lush, green farms near La Merced in central Peru, might not understand the mechanics of climate change, ...
21st August 2008
Birds can't keep up with climate change: study - TODAYonline A bird flies over the sea after sunset. The habitats of wild bird species are shifting in response to global warming, but not fast enough to keep pace with rising temperatures, according to a study released Wednesday.
20th August 2008
Warming Climate Threatens Alaska's Vast Forests - Planet Ark KENAI NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska - Here in a 13,700-year-old peat bog, ecologist Ed Berg reaches into the moss and pulls out more evidence of the drastic changes afoot due to the Earth's warming climate. Altogether more than 3 million acres (1.21 million hectares) of spruce have been killed in south-central Alaska since 1992, the biggest recorded outbreak in North American history.
20th August 2008
Algae could explain dead whales, seals in St. Lawrence - National Post As blue-green algae continues to plague Quebec's lakes, a 500 square kilometre swath of red algae in the St. Lawrence Seaway appears to be causing the deaths of marine animals, including the threatened beluga whale. The "red tide" moved with the current east from Riviere-du-Loup and Tadoussac toward Rimouski, leaving in its wake the carcasses of seven harbour porpoises, nine beluga whales, 35 seals and thousands of seabirds like gulls, loons, ducks and cormorants, said Pierre Beland, a doctor and spokesman for the St. Lawrence National Institute of Ecotoxicology. While patches of red algae are not abnormal in the St. Lawrence Seaway, the severity of the blooms this year could be the result of global warming, Mr. Beland said. "It's not a direct result of human activity, but if climate change is causing more rainfall and higher temperatures, we can expect to see more of these kinds of outbreaks in the future."
Flooding Hits Ireland After Record August Rainfall - Planet Ark DUBLIN - Ireland faced further flooding on Monday after a second successive weekend of torrential summer rain drove people from their homes, blocked road and rail links and threatened to destroy farmers' crops.
Increased Rainfall Affecting Bees - CCND UK: Torrential summer rains in SW England have destroyed flowers, forcing bees to consume their vital winter food supplies.
19th August 2008
Drought spreads to cities - Adelaide Now THE drought still holds almost two-thirds of NSW in its grip, with hardworking families now feeling the pinch at the supermarket checkout, NSW Primary Industries Minister Ian Macdonald says.
17th August 2008
Canada seeks historic shipwrecks - BBC A Canadian team is to search for two ships lost in an 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Retreating Arctic ice has made the Northwest Passage much more accessible and Canada is also using the search as a way of asserting its sovereignty over the region.
Human activity, El Nino warming W. Antarctic-study - Reuters India Human activity and the El Nino weather pattern over the last century have warmed West Antarctica, part of the world's coldest continent, according to a study based on four years of collecting ice core data. The West Antarctic warmed in response to higher temperatures in the tropical Pacific, which itself has been warming due to weather patterns like a major El Nino event from 1939 to 1942 and greenhouse emissions from cars and factories, according to the study.
13th August 2008
Ice bet - Gristmill The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Monday that in the first 10 days of August, Arctic sea ice extent declined one million kilometers. Sea ice is now disappearing on a daily basis nearly 50 percent faster than it typically does this time of year. So the race is on again to see whether 2008 can repeat -- or beat -- the record set only last year. The NSIDC explains exactly what is going on in the Arctic this summer:Ice extent has begun to decline sharply. The decline rate surged to -113,000 square kilometers per day on August 7 and as of August 10 was -103,000 square kilometers per day.
North Pole could lose summer ice - PhysOrg While the summer of 2007 saw record low sea-ice coverage of the Arctic Ocean, a six-year study of the Arctic's sea ice has confirmed its ongoing, massive shrinking and drastic thinning.
12th August 2008
Climate change caused widespread tree death in California mountain range - PhysOrg Warmer temperatures and longer dry spells have killed thousands of trees and shrubs in a Southern California mountain range, pushing the plants' habitat an average of 213 feet up the mountain over the past 30 years, a UC Irvine study has determined.
12th August 2008
Thousands rally to mark 'death' of Australian river - PhysOrg Thousands of people rallied in southern Australia Sunday to protest the dwindling water levels in one of the country's greatest rivers, claiming the loss was causing an environmental disaster.
12th August 2008
Warming Effects Already Starting To Snowball - Hartford Courant The impacts of global climate change are upon us. There is little time to mitigate our growing emissions of greenhouse gases. There is even less to adapt to the staggering disruptions already permeating our natural world.
Global warming boosts garden pest - Channel 4 Milder winters caused by climate change are providing a boost to plant-damaging aphids, scientists have warned. Researchers revealed the familiar garden pest was flying earlier and in larger numbers because of warm conditions in winter and spring.
Indonesia reports more than 500 fire hot spots in Sumatra - AlertNet More than 500 hot spots have been spotted across Indonesia's Sumatra island, signalling the annual dry-season forest fires and the haze it sometimes carries, a Forestry Ministry official said on Monday. Forestry ministry official fear the number of hot spots could exceed last year's record as the current dry season will be marked by less rain than usual, Sonny Partono, the director of forest fire control, told Reuters.
Porpoise Deaths Unexplained Off California Waters - Planet Ark SAN FRANCISCO - A wave of porpoise deaths in Northern California has puzzled scientists and more of the dead mammals may wash ashore onto beaches in August, animal researchers said on Sunday.
Climate of fear as ice vanishes - Sydney Morning Herald Scientists warn that the Arctic could be ice free as early as 2013.
"The Arctic really can feed back into the global climate system," said Dr Macdonald, who has worked with the UN's peak scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "You know what happens when you get feedbacks - you get surprises and we don't like surprises."
4th August 2008
Arctic ice continues to thin - New Scientist Christian Haas of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, and his team estimated the thickness of late summer ice at the North Pole in 2001, 2004 and 2007. They found that the ice was on average 1.3 metres thick at the end of the summer in 2007. By contrast, its depth was 2.3 metres in 2001 and 2.6 metres in 2004. Study links melting ice to increased carbon pollution - Vancouver Sun
3rd August 2008
Best of Times, Worst of Times: Tony Kirkham - Times Online Tony Kirkham, 50, has worked at Kew Gardens for 30 years, and has been head of the arboretum since 2001. He describes the anguish he feels witnessing the dramatic effects of climate change, which is eradicating native British trees
More acidic ocean could spell trouble for marine life's earliest stages Increasingly acidic conditions in the ocean brought on as a direct result of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could spell trouble for the earliest stages of marine life, according to a new report in the August 5th issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. Levels of acidification predicted by the year 2100 could slash the fertilization success of sea urchins by an estimated 25 percent, the study shows.
1st August 2008
Arctic ice continues to thin - New Scientist The North Pole could soon be ice-free during summer, as studies show that the ice cover at the end of last summer was at its thinnest ever
31st July 2008
Birds fly north in climate change vanguard: study - stv.tv Birds have been moving north in Europe over the past 25 years because of climate change in the vanguard of likely huge shifts in the ranges of plants and animals, scientists said on Wednesday.
31st July 2008
Huge chunk snaps off storied Arctic ice shelf - Globe and Mail A four-square-kilometre chunk has broken off Ward Hunt Ice Shelf - the largest remaining ice shelf in the Arctic - threatening the future of the giant frozen mass that northern explorers have used for years as the starting point for their treks. Scientists say the break, the largest on record since 2005, is the latest indication that climate change is forcing the drastic reshaping of the Arctic coastline, where 9,000 square kilometres of ice have been whittled down to less than 1,000 over the past century, and are only showing signs of decreasing further.
30th July 2008
The Last Continent: One hot doc - National Post Although The Last Continent opens with shots of stark, almost lunar beauty, the film also chronicles the effects of one of the region's mildest winters on the crew. Warm temperatures threatened to ruin their food supplies, which they had planned to bury in the ice. Worse, floating ice around the ship prevented most of their mainland expeditions, since boats couldn't navigate the berg-filled waters but sleds were useless without pack ice.
30th July 2008
Forest Service burns through its budgets - SitNews The Forest Service has struggled for years to pay for fighting fires that last year alone scorched almost 10 million acres, mainly in the West. As fire seasons grow longer and the blazes more intense in forests stressed by global warming, the agency's funding woes mount. The Forest Service has already spent roughly $900 million this year, almost 75 percent of its fire-suppression budget, and the season is just nearing its peak.
30th July 2008
Valuable Seagrasses Face Global Warming Threat - Planet Ark GENEVA - Seagrass meadows, which are vital for the survival of much marine life and a source of household materials in Europe and Africa, face a mounting threat from global warming, a report said on Friday.
29th July 2008
Scientists worry as once frozen tundra thaws in Alaska - McClatchy Washington Bureau TOOLIK LAKE, Alaska — Ground here that for tens of thousands of years was frozen solid is terra firma no more. Across the tundra and coast of the Arctic Ocean, land is caving in. Soils loosed by freshly thawed earth set off a new era of rot, and of bloom — dumping a bonanza of nutrients into a top-of-the-world environment that swirls from months of midnight sun to deep-freeze dark.
Orkney seabirds may be victims of Global warming - stv.tv For almost 60 years, scientists have been visiting the uninhabited island of Eynhallow in Orkney to study a seabird called the Fulmar. Their long running research is showing that the birds may well be the victims of climate change.
Russian ice camp in rapid shrink - BBC Twenty Russian scientists are to be taken off their ice camp in the Arctic because the melt has set in sooner than expected.
Coral reef deaths bring bleak outlook - The Age Food supplies will run short, tourism will be hit and coastal communities affected as the world's coral reefs gradually decline under climate change, scientists say. The reefs already were dying at an increasing rate because of global warming and acidification of the oceans, said researchers meeting this week at the International Coral Research Symposium (ICRS) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
10th July 2008
How will the Arctic sea ice cover develop this summer? - PhysOrg The ice cover in the Arctic Ocean at the end of summer 2008 will lie, with almost 100 per cent probability, below that of the year 2005 - the year with the second lowest sea ice extent ever measured. Chances of an equally low value as in the extreme conditions of the year 2007 lie around eight per cent. Climate scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association come to this conclusion in a recent model calculation.
10th July 2008
Salmon lesson - Gristmill Atlantic Salmon restoration efforts face grim realities. Stocks of wild salmon in the North Pacific are in trouble. That's news. What isn't news is that the spring has passed us by in Massachusetts again without returning more than a handful of wild Atlantic Salmon. The river closest to me, the Connecticut, saw just 132 salmon return.
10th July 2008
Corals Collapsing in More Acid Oceans - IPS FORT LAUDERDALE, U.S., Jul 8 (IPS) - Coral reefs need to be put on "life support" if they are to survive climate change, but their ultimate survival is dependant on major reductions in fossil fuel emissions, say experts.
9th July 2008
Acidifying Oceans Add Urgency To CO2 Cuts - PollutionOnline Besides loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases, human emissions of carbon dioxide have also begun to alter the chemistry of the ocean-often called the cradle of life on Earth
8th July 2008
Ice dam to break prematurely on Argentine glacier A huge ice dam on Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier will break apart for the first time in the southern hemisphere winter, likely as a result of global warming, scientists and environmentalists said Monday. Watch Video
Acidifying Oceans Add Urgency To Carbon Dioxide Cuts - Science Daily It's not just about climate change anymore. Besides loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases, human emissions of carbon dioxide have also begun to alter the chemistry of the ocean. The ecological and economic consequences are difficult to predict but possibly calamitous, warn a team of chemical oceanographers in the July 4 issue of Science, and halting the changes already underway will likely require even steeper cuts in carbon emissions than those currently proposed to curb climate change.
4th July 2008
Deep trouble - Nature Global warming is forcing North Sea fish to head to greater depths. An increasing number of species are migrating in response to global warming; some alpine organisms are climbing to higher altitudes, others animals are moving towards the poles. A new study suggests that as sea temperatures rise, many fish may be electing to move into deeper, cooler waters, rather than moving to higher latitudes as many theorists had previously predicted.
Penguins setting off sirens over health of world's oceans - PhysOrg Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, penguins are sounding the alarm for potentially catastrophic changes in the world's oceans, and the culprit isn't only climate change, says a University of Washington conservation biologist.
HEALTH-KENYA: Malaria Rises to Highland Areas - IPS NAIROBI, Jun 26 (IPS) - The end of June marks the start of the malaria season in East Africa. After the long rains, conditions in lowland swamps and coastal regions are more conducive for mosquito breeding. But in recent years malaria has also appeared in the highland areas where it was previously unheard of.
27th June 2008
Starving fish killing Great Barrier Reef - The New Zealand Herald BRISBANE - Starving fish are killing sections of the Great Barrier Reef already weakened by climate change, an Australian scientist says. And some fish species also face extinction - with potentially serious consequences for commercial fisheries.
23rd June 2008
Ice diary: Science in the fast-changing Arctic - BBC News Liz Kalaugher reports from the High Arctic as she travels aboard the Amundsen, a Canadian Coast Guard vessel. She has joined an expedition investigating the effects of climate change off Banks Island.
Earthquakes Became Five Times More Energetic - Earthtimes Increase in the annual energy of earthquakes is the strongest symptom yet of planetary overheating. "Unless the problem of global warming (the problem of persistent thermal imbalance of Earth) is addressed urgently and comprehensively -- the rapid increase in global seismic, volcanic and tectonic activity is certain. Consequences of inaction can only be catastrophic. There is no time for half-measures."
As Sea Turtles Disappear, Scientists Ponder Climate Change - New America Media A dramatic drop in the nesting population of sea turtles in the Yucatán could be the latest evidence of the domino effect of climate change. The Yucatan Peninsula, home to the largest hawksbill nesting population in the Atlantic, is witnessing a dramatic drop in the nesting population of the hawksbill sea turtle, one of the rarest marine turtles in the world. For more than a month now hundreds of female hawksbill turtles have been arriving to lay their eggs in thousands of nests around the thumb-shaped peninsula. But for unknown reasons, only about one-third of the nests will be laid by the endangered sea creature this year compared to the numbers a decade ago. Almost two decades of conservation efforts - which began in earnest in 1989 after Hurricane Gilbert, the strongest hurricane on record in the area - are now confronting a series of puzzling challenges that suggest the emergence of global warming as a principal factor in declining sea turtle populations.
INTERVIEW-Disaster-prone deltas next climate risk-ecologist - AlertNet Some of the world's most productive and populous places -- river deltas from the Mekong to the Mississippi -- are ripe for disasters made worse by climate change, an ecological catastrophe expert said. In fact, said marine biologist Deborah Brosnan, these disasters are already occurring.
16th June 2008
Climate change 'to affect coral fish' - The Age Australia: Scientists say coral fish could suffer from climate change just as much as the reefs they live in. Over 400,000 species of fish live in or around coral reefs and the lives of many of them depended on the health of corals, said Dr Philip Munday from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, based at James Cook University in Townsville. "We have already seen episodes of mass die-off of corals as a result of warmer waters associated with global warming," Dr Munday said.
Even the Antarctic winter cannot protect Wilkins Ice Shelf - PhysOrg Wilkins Ice Shelf has experienced further break-up with an area of about 160 km² breaking off from 30 May to 31 May 2008. ESA's Envisat satellite captured the event - the first ever-documented episode to occur in winter.
Arctic thaw threatens Siberian permafrost - The Independent The permafrost belt stretching across Siberia to Alaska and Canada could start melting three times faster than expected because of the speed at which Arctic Sea ice is disappearing.
14th June 2008
Infested fish may bear scars of global warming A new scourge ... - Los Angeles Times The emergence of disease in Alaska's most prized salmon has come as a shock to fishermen and fisheries managers. Alaskan wild salmon has been an uncommon success story among over-exploited fisheries, with healthy runs and robust catches that fetch ever higher prices at fish markets and high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and London. Fishermen and regulators who have cooperated to save species from overfishing and local environmental hazards have been caught unprepared to deal with forces beyond their control: how to manage a fishery for climate change.
Putting sea life to the acid test - Flinders News Putting sea life to the acid testFlinders News, Australia. What happens to all this marine life when rising acid levels combine with the rising sea temperatures caused by global warming? ...
'Big Dry' cranks out C02 - Stuff New Zealand: Greenhouse gas emissions are soaring as coal and gas-fired generators run flat out, day and night, to compensate for fast-emptying hydro storage lakes.
Drought declared in California - CNN.com SACRAMENTO, California (AP) -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a statewide drought after two years of below-average rainfall, low snow-melt runoff and a court-ordered restriction on water transfers.
Desert is claiming southeast Spain - International Herald Tribune Southern Spain has long been plagued by cyclical drought, but the current crisis reflects a permanent climate change brought on by global warming and it is a harbinger of a new kind of conflict, climate scientists say.
3rd June 2008
China has warmest spring in 57 years - UPI BEIJING, May 31 (UPI) -- China is experiencing the warmest spring temperatures the country has felt in 57 years, weather experts say.
1st June 2008
The Race for Survival - Newsweek Enlisting endangered species in the fight against global warming is either a brilliant tactical maneuver? or an arrogant abuse of the law.
1st June 2008
Federal scientists probe decline of BC salmon runs - CBC.ca The scientists are testing the theory that a one-degree increase in water temperature has effectively reduced the food supply for the salmon that arrive later in the season, such as chinook and coho.
Wasps on the rise in Alaska as climate warms - Times Online Wasps Wasps used to be an uncommon sight in Fairbanks until two years ago. Then huge numbers of them swarmed on the city, ten times more than normal. The number of stings grew so bad that outdoor school events were cancelled, 178 patients were treated in hospital for stings and two people died. A study now reveals that wasp stings across northern Alaska have increased sevenfold over the past few years. And they are also occurring farther north than ever before. In 1994 a wasp was found inside the Arctic Circle of Canada, causing huge excitement among the local Inuit community, who had never seen one before and had no word for wasp. So bizarre was the sight that the local radio station had to broadcast warnings not to touch it.
27th May 2008
Warm winds comfort climate change models: study - PhysOrg Climate change models predicting a dangerous warming of the world's atmosphere got a confirming boost Sunday from a study showing parallel trends at altitudes nearly twice as high as Mount Everest.
26th May 2008
Indian Ocean behind autumn rain decline in Australia - Australian News A new study has determined that there has been a decline in autumn rain in south-eastern Australia, a major reason of which is changing weather systems originating from the subtropical Indian Ocean. The study, carried out by Dr Wenju Cai and Tim Cowan from CSIRO, determines that since 1950, Victoria has suffered a 40 per cent decline in autumn rainfall (March to May) compared to the average recorded between 1961-90. The identified causes show imprints of climate change influences, in part through a reduction in the number of La Nina events, and in part through changing weather systems originating from the subtropical Indian Ocean that are conducive to late autumn rainfall across Victoria.
25th May 2008
Pacific coast turning more acidic - PhysOrg An international team of scientists surveying the waters of the continental shelf off the West Coast of North America has discovered for the first time high levels of acidified ocean water within 20 miles of the shoreline, raising concern for marine ecosystems from Canada to Mexico. Researchers aboard the Wecoma, an Oregon State University research vessel, also discovered that this corrosive, acidified water that is being ? upwelled? seasonally from the deeper ocean is probably 50 years old, suggesting that future ocean acidification levels will increase since atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have increased rapidly over the past half century.
23rd May 2008
Alps hit by two-decade decline in snowfall - PhysOrg A forthcoming study has added to worries that the Alpine ski industry will be badly affected by global warming, the British weekly New Scientist reports on Wednesday.
22nd May 2008
Drowning Villages Threaten Ghana's History and Tourist Trade - Bloomberg Along the Gulf of Guinea in northwest Africa, residents blame climate change for accelerating the destruction of homes and beaches. Lawmakers and scientists say a network of sea walls is necessary to stem the destruction and save Ghana's nascent tourism industry.
Are We Ready for Water Shortages in Western States? - AlterNet Are We Ready for Water Shortages in Western States?AlterNet, CA. Global warming is already affecting water in western states. The EPA has some proposals on what to do, but will they be enough?
Russian scientist discovers gassy permafrost - Contra Costa Times Sergei Zimov waded through knee-deep snow to reach a frozen lake where so much methane belches out of the melting permafrost that it spews out from the ice like small geysers. In the frigid twilight, the Russian scientist struck a match to make a jet of the greenhouse gas visible. The sudden plume of fire threw him backward. Zimov stood up, brushed the snow off his parka and beamed. "Sometimes a big explosion happens, because the gas comes out like a bomb," Zimov said. "There are a million lakes like this in northern Siberia."
Alberta Puts C$55 Million Into Pine Beetle Fight - Planet Ark VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Alberta will spend C$55 million ($54 million) this year to stem the spread of pine beetles, which have ravaged forests in neighbouring British Columbia, the Alberta government said Monday.
The Ashy Storm-petrel Advances Toward Endangered Species Act Protection - E-Wire ? The ashy storm-petrel is a barometer of the health of California? s coastal waters,? said Dr. Shaye Wolf, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity who has studied the ashy storm-petrel as well as the effects of ocean climate change on California? s seabirds. ? The declines we? ve observed in its numbers and breeding success are indicative of troubling changes we? re seeing throughout the ocean off the West Coast.?
17th May 2008
Britain having warmest May since 1772 - UPI LONDON, May 13 (UPI) -- Raging wildfires and flash floods accompanied the warmest weather recorded in Britain for the first week of the month of May since 1772, weather records show.
14th May 2008
Drought forces Barcelona to ship in water - CNN.com BARCELONA, Spain (AP) -- Spain's worst drought in decades forced the city of Barcelona to begin shipping in drinking water Tuesday in an unprecedented effort to avoid water restrictions before the start of vacation season.
California drought fears mount - Contra Costa Times SACRAMENTO - Californians are being asked to water their lawns less, plant native shrubs and install more-efficient irrigation systems to stave off water shortages and mandatory rationing amid growing worries about a possible long-term drought.
3rd May 2008
Federal agency declares West Coast salmon fishery a disaster - PhysOrg (AP) -- Federal authorities have declared the West Coast ocean salmon fishery a failure, opening the way for Congress to appropriate economic disaster assistance for coastal communities in California, Oregon and Washington.
3rd May 2008
Major Arctic sea ice melt is expected this summer - PhysOrg (AP) -- The Arctic will remain on thinning ice, and climate warming is expected to begin affecting the Antarctic also, scientists said Friday. "The long-term prognosis is not very optimistic," atmospheric scientist Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University said at a briefing.
World's largest lake warming rapidly - Reuters Siberia's Lake Baikal has warmed faster than global air temperatures over the past 60 years, which could put animals unique to the world's largest lake in jeopardy, U.S. and Russian scientists said. The lake has warmed 1.21 degrees Celsius (2.18 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1946 due to climate change, almost three times faster than global air temperatures, according to a paper by the scientists to be published next month in the journal "Global Change Biology."
1st May 2008
Big squid imperil fish, people - Times Colonist Canada, BC: Nightmarish packs of rapacious giant devil squid are hunting off the B.C. coast -- and as their numbers increase, scientists are worrying about an attack on fish stocks. Humboldt squid, called diablos rojos or red devils in Mexico, have been known to attack scuba divers and were once a rarity in B.C. waters. But a changing ocean environment has brought them northward, and they may now be permanently establishing themselves off the B.C. coast.
29th April 2008
Ward Hunt Ice Shelf destined to disappear - Toronto Star New cracks in the largest remaining Arctic ice shelf suggest another polar landmark seems destined to break up and disappear. Scientists discovered the extensive new cracks in the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf earlier this year and a patrol of Canadian Rangers got an up-close look at them last week.
12th April 2008
End of the sequoias? - Scripps News FRESNO, Calif. -- The 2,000-year-old giant sequoias east of Fresno, Calif., have survived warm spells lasting centuries, but in just 100 years, global warming could snuff them out -- along with many Sierra Nevada species.
Warming trends rise in large ocean areas -study - AlertNet Warming trends in a third of the world's large ocean regions are two to four times greater than previously reported averages, increasing the risk to marine life and fisheries, a U.N.-backed environmental study said.
10th April 2008
East Lancashire pays the price of extreme weather - This Is Lancashire EXTREME weather caused by climate change is leaving local councils facing a multi-million pound bill. Council bosses say things are getting worse after an internal report warned the true cost of bad weather was "grossly underestimated".
10th April 2008
CLIMATE CHANGE: European Mountain Top Vanishes - IPS BERLIN, Apr 7 (IPS) - The peak of the Stubai Mountains in the Austrian Alps has vanished. It was around a couple of months back, but since then no one can say exactly when it disappeared.
8th April 2008
Global warming continues, regardless of La Nina weather pattern - TREND Information The long-term trend of global warming is continuing, despite the current La Nina weather phenomenon that is bringing relatively cooler temperatures to parts of the Equatorial Pacific region, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said yesterday. Worldwide temperatures this year are expected to be above the long-term average, even though La Nina is also likely to persist through to the middle of 2008, WMO said in a press statement issued in Geneva.
6th April 2008
Koalas in danger - Independent The future of the koala, perhaps Australia's best-loved animal, is under threat because greenhouse gas emissions are making eucalyptus leaves – their sole food source – inedible. Scientists warned yesterday that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were reducing nutrient levels in the leaves, and also boosting their toxic tannin content.
6th April 2008
Spanish region may ship water to relieve drought - Environmental News Network MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's northeast Catalonia region will need to import water by ship and train from May to ensure domestic supplies if the current drought persists, the regional government said in a report. The report, sent to Reuters on Friday, said rainfall in all but one of Catalonia's 15 river basins was below emergency levels for the year so far.
Canadian Researchers Warn Of New Arctic Worries - Planet Ark Melting ocean ice is apparently allowing larger storm surges to flood into the delta in Canada's far north, a change that could have an impact on energy development plans for the region, said Lance Lesack, who has been tracking environmental changes in the region for more than a decade. "With receding sea ice, suddenly we're seeing bigger storm surges moving into the delta from storms that really aren't any bigger than they have been historically," said Lesack, a geographer from Simon Fraser University near Vancouver.
4th April 2008
Harmful algae taking advantage of global warming - PhysOrg You know that green scum creeping across the surface of your local public water reservoir" Or maybe it`s choking out a favorite fishing spot or livestock watering hole. It`s probably cyanobacteria - blue-green algae - and, according to a paper in the April 4 issue of the journal Science, it relishes the weather extremes that accompany global warming.
US West Warming Faster Than Rest Of World - Study - Planet Ark LOS ANGELES - The US West is heating up at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the world and is likely to face more drought conditions in many of its fast-growing cities, an environmental group said on Thursday.
31st March 2008
Thai temple fights off encroaching tide as world sea levels rise - Raw Story Thailand: Visanu Kengsamut, 26, has already moved three times in his life, while his mother -- the village chief -- has fled the crumbling coast and rebuilt her home eight times, and each time the village has paid for its own relocation. Khun Samut Chin now sits about one kilometre inland from the temple. "We know that the cause of this is the effects of global warming," says Visanu.
Austrian glaciers shrink the most in five years Austria's glaciers retreated more than 22 metres (24 yards) on average last year, in the biggest shrinking for five years, the country's Alpine Club said Saturday.
30th March 2008
The lesser-spotted butterfly - Independent The lesser-spotted butterflyIndependent, UK. With the losses greater in south-east England, Butterfly Conservation says that suggests the problem may be linked to climate change, because climate ...
Russian, Canadian Winter Days Much Milder - UK Study - Planet Ark OSLO - The coldest winter days in Russia and Canada have become up to 4 Celsius (7 Fahrenheit) milder since the 1950s in an extreme sign of climate change, the British Meteorological Office said on Wednesday.
27th March 2008
Australian industry dying on the vines - Toronto Star MELBOURNE–Australian grape growers reckon they are the canary in the coal mine of global warming, as a long drought forces winemakers to rethink the styles of wine they can produce and the regions they can grow in.
27th March 2008
Western Canadian Pine Beetle Infestation Spreads - Planet Ark VANCOUVER, British Columbia - About half of the marketable pine trees in West Coast Canadian province of British Columbia have been ravaged by a nearly decade-long beetle infestation, according to new government statistics.
27th March 2008
Ice shrinks in Arctic sea - International Herald Tribune Winter sea ice around a Norwegian Arctic island has thinned to less than one metre (3 feet) since the 1960s, according to a study on Tuesday of a region that may be more attractive to oil firms because of climate change. The Norwegian Polar Institute said ice around Hopen island southeast of the Svalbard archipelago had become more than 40 cms (16 inches) thinner in the past 40 years, in what it called the first long-term study of ice thickness in the Barents Sea.
26th March 2008
New Parasite Discovered; Infects Waterfowl, Other Species - PhysOrg.com The findings were just reported in the International Journal for Parasitology, and raise concerns not only about the new parasite but about others that may become more widespread, cause more health problems or possibly even move into new species as a result of global warming and climate change.
26th March 2008
Pine beetle infestation impacting salmon runs - Canada.com If the heat of climate change weren't enough of a danger to Pacific salmon, scientists are cataloging how the effects of the global-warming-aided mountain pine beetle infestation are adding to salmon's woes. Because the enormous pine forests are dead or dying, the tree boughs don't intercept snow and rain, or shade the forest floor to slow the spring snow-melt. The result is bigger snow packs, more rapid snow melts leading to flash flooding and higher peak stream flows that erode streams. Then rapid runoffs mean more summer droughts, combined with higher summer water temperatures, the report notes.
26th March 2008
Sea levels rising too fast for Thames Barrier - The Independent A fear that sea levels will rise far faster than predicted this century has led to a revision of the plan to protect London from a devastating flood caused by the sort of storm surge in the North Sea that resulted in the closure of the Thames Barrier yesterday.
23rd March 2008
Noah's Ark for salmon - Salt Lake Tribune As global warming bears down on our Western rivers and watersheds, it threatens one of the great symbols of Western abundance: wild salmon. With each passing year, their numbers have dropped precipitously. This decline is believed to be in part the result of warming temperatures in streams and rivers.
23rd March 2008
Bat 'die-off' raises alarms - Times Herald-Record US: Unprecedented "die-off" of thousands of cave-dwelling bats across the Northeast - climate change has kept bats flying during fall, winter and spring periods when insects are in short supply or almost nonexistent.
21st March 2008
Icy start, but 2008 may be in top 10 warmest years - Environmental News Network OSLO (Reuters) - After the coldest start to a year in more than a decade, spring will bring relief to the northern hemisphere from Thursday. Bucking the trend of global warming, the start of 2008 saw icy weather around the world from China to Greece. But despite its chilly start, 2008 is expected to end up among the top 10 warmest years since records began in the 1860s.
Israel suffers worst drought in decade - AP via Yahoo! News Israel is suffering its worst drought in a decade and will have to stop pumping from one of its main sources of drinking water, the Sea of Galilee, by the end of the summer, an official said Wednesday.
Faster climate change fears - Adelaidenow SOUTH Australians are being warned to brace for harsher and more regular heatwaves amid fears climate change may be occurring faster than forecast. Meteorologists and researchers say timeframes calculated by organisations such as the CSIRO for climate change impacts of higher temperatures, falling rainfall and rising sea levels are now conservative at best. And they warn the normal four seasons will blur as temperatures increase and summer stretches well into the autumn months.
16th March 2008
Global warming is taking a toll on streams - The Daily American Pennsylvania is predicted to lose 50 percent of its trout habitat in the coming decades. Other states such as North Carolina and Virginia could lose up to 90 percent of habitat. Even warmwater species are being impacted by climate alterations. The ongoing concern of the disappearance of and disease infested smallmouth bass in the Susquehanna River watershed is now being seen as result of heavy rains during the spring spawning season that have almost wiped out entire year classes of fish. Then followed by a long dry summer that escalates water temperature further stressing those fish that survive.
16th March 2008
INTERVIEW-Antarctic glacier melted more quickly last year - AlertNet A glacier used as a benchmark to measure global warming's impact on the Antarctic Peninsula melted more than usual in the past year, according to an Argentine glacier researcher. For more than 20 years, Pedro Skvarca has studied the Devil's Bay glacier on Vega Island off the Antarctic Peninsula, a part of Antarctica that is warming five times faster than the average in the rest of the world.
14th March 2008
"It's An Ill Wind" -- Well Not All That Ill! - DeSmogBlog Powerful winter storms sweeping across Europe have boosted wind power, oversupplying the wholesale market for electricity and driving down prices by some 12 percent since Friday. Even though road, rail and ship travel has been disrupted and insurers facing claims from damage brought by high winds, operators of wind turbines have been able to generate and sell more supply of the renewable energy into the power network.
Peru Bets On Desalination To Ensure Water Supplies - Planet Ark LIMA - Peru plans to start desalinating water from the Pacific Ocean to make up for declining supplies from fast-melting glaciers affected by climate change, President Alan Garcia said on Tuesday.
Global Warming Alliance warns accident risk due to aircraft design weakness - openPR ‘The maximum crosswind limits have only increased on Boeing aircraft by 7 knots since the beginning of the jet age,’ says Donald Burfitt-Dons, Chairman of the Global Warming Alliance and a former airline pilot. ‘The control systems are designed to cope with a 30 to 35 knot crosswind on landing. That is no longer sufficient’. He is urging an immediate review of safety standards to ensure future aircraft can handle the meteorological conditions of today. Ship engineers also need to look at rudder control limitations in order for vessels particularly high sided ones, to maintain directional control in the hurricane strength winds now being encountered often in straits with limited room to manoeuvre.
11th March 2008
Salmon fishing ban mulled in California as run suffers record plunge - The Sacramento Bee The decline occurred because the jet stream changed course in spring 2005, in turn disrupting ocean currents. The currents drive an upwelling of nutrient-rich waters, touching off a phytoplankton bloom that forms the base of the food chain. That bloom either failed to happen in some places or was delayed, leaving the menu empty when hungry young salmon went looking for food. Scientists have said the disrupted jet stream is consistent with changes likely to be caused by global warming. Salmon guide, J.D. Richey,may be one of Sacramento's first climate change victims. "A lot of people don't realize it's more than just a fish going away. We're losing a significant neighbor," Richey said. "I felt this last year there was something missing – almost at the soul level. I could just feel the salmon weren't anywhere, and it just bummed me out.".
11th March 2008
Seal cubs threatened by global warming, WWF warns Hundreds of newborn seal cubs risk dying of hunger and cold because global warming is making ice in the Arctic Circle melt too fast, the World Wide Fund for Nature in Germany warned Monday.
11th March 2008
Reef Fish Get Lost As Climate Changes - Planet Ark SYDNEY - Climate change might be causing reef fish to get lost, unable to return to breeding grounds from the open ocean, which could have profound implications for the survival of reef ecosystems, Australian scientists say.
11th March 2008
New Research Confirms Antarctic Thaw Fears - Spiegel Online New research confirms that ice sheets in West Antarctica are thinning at a far faster rate than in past millennia. Although scientists are divided as to the cause of the melt, many feel it is directly related to climate change.
8th March 2008
Expanding ‘Deserts,' by Land and Sea - New York Times Scientists have long projected that areas north and south of the tropics will grow drier in a warming world –- from the Middle East through the European Riviera to the American Southwest, from sub-Saharan Africa to parts of Australia.
7th March 2008
Global Warming Means Fewer Flowers in the Rockies - RedOrbit Spring in the Rockies begins when the snowpack melts. But with the advent of global climate change, the snow is gone sooner. Research conducted on the region’s wildflowers shows some plants are blooming less because of it.
Drought arrives early this year in the North - Bangkok Post Drought has arrived early this year and it may be a lengthy one as nine northern provinces are already bracing for water shortages. The dry spell has gripped Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Lampang, Uttaradit, Nan, Phrae, Kamphaeng Phet, Sukhothai and Tak, according to officials.
6th March 2008
Will global warming increase plant frost damage? Widespread damage to plants from a sudden freeze that occurred across the Eastern United States from 5 April to 9 April 2007 was made worse because it had been preceded by two weeks of unusual warmth, according to an analysis published in the March 2008 issue of BioScience.
Winter temperature in Finland hits record high - Xinhua The average temperature in the Finnish capital Helsinki in January was 0.6 degrees Celsius, which was 4.8 degrees higher than that of the period between 1971 and 2000, said the institute.
29th February 2008
Hottest arctic winter ever - Barents Observer This winter might become the mildest winter in Northern Norway ever registered. So far the average temperature in parts of the region has been up to eight degrees Celsius above the normal.
27th February 2008
Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean - BBC News UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica.
26th February 2008
Nature's in bloomin' chaos as global warming turns the seasons on their head - Daily Mail UK: Early spring brings with it a host of dangers to our flora and fauna. The balance of Nature is being upset and the knock-on effect may be devastating. Some species are able to adapt, while others may vanish, and their disappearance will have a significant effect on the rest of the ecosystem.
26th February 2008
Watching Peru's Oceans for Cholera Cues - NPR Warming oceans were behind Peru's cholera outbreaks in the 1990s, and global warming may cause future outbreaks. Some scientists in Peru are closely watching microscopic marine life, hoping to catch an outbreak before it begins.
As South American Rivers Dry Up, Miners Tap Ocean - Planet Ark CERRO LINDO - Vast mines in Peru and Chile that supply the world with crucial metals have started to pump water from the Pacific Ocean high into the Andes Mountains because of chronic water shortages exacerbated by climate change.
Spain suffering worst drought in over a decade - BBC News Spain faces water restrictions widely this summer as it suffers its worst drought in more than a decade. In one of the worst affected areas, Catalunya, the Barcelona government is hoping to pre-empt a summer crisis by importing water by tanker.
21st February 2008
Climate Change Has Major Impact On Oceans - Science Daily Climate change is rapidly transforming the world's oceans by increasing the temperature and acidity of seawater, and altering atmospheric and oceanic circulation, reported a panel of scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston.
18th February 2008
Southern Ocean rise due to warming, not ice melts - AlertNet Rises in the sea level around Antarctica in the past decade are almost entirely due a warming ocean, not ice melting, an Australian scientist leading a major international research programme said.
World Wine Map Changing With Climate - Discovery Channel Climate change is threatening to redraw the world's wine-producing map, and the effects are already being seen in earlier harvests and coarser wines, experts told an international conference Friday.
16th February 2008
Pacific Northwest hypoxic events unprecedented - EurekAlert! CORVALLIS, Ore. – A review of all available ocean data records concludes that the low-oxygen events which have plagued the Pacific Northwest coast since 2002 are unprecedented in the five decades prior to that, and may well be linked to the stronger, persistent winds that are expected to occur with global warming.
Growers face early start to Myzus pest migration - Farming UK UK: Potato, sugar beet and vegetable growers must be ready for an early attack of Myzus persicae again this year, predicts aphid expert Dr Richard Harrington of Rothamsted Research. And it is a trend that is set to continue with climate warming, he reported. Official forecasts will be issued at the end of February, but the mild conditions so far make early aphid movement look likely.
14th February 2008
Antarctica is Cold? Yeah, We Knew That - RealClimate Guest commentary from Spencer Weart, science historian Despite the recent announcement that the discharge from some Antarctic glaciers is accelerating, we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn't this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century. It's not just that Antarctica is covered with a gazillion tons of ice, although that certainly helps keep it cold.
Climate change affects Ugandan coffee output - Independent Online The temperature is rising a little too quickly in Uganda - and coffee farmers are getting worried. Growers say that global warming is damaging production of coffee, Uganda's biggest export. Ask coffee farmer Emmanuel Kawesi, who has a "feeling" about the impending danger. "It's hotter now - this is not usual,"
California salmon collapse roils West Coast fishing industry - San Francisco Chronicle Humboldt County fisherman Dave Bitts is bracing for another lean year after the sudden collapse of California's most important salmon run. Like many West Coast fisherman, Bitts depends on wild "king" salmon for up to two-thirds of his income. Now, he doesn't know how he's going to pay his bills. "We've never been in this situation before," said the 59-year-old Bitts. "It's my bread-and-butter, as it is for all my pals. And this year, it appears our bread-and-butter is not there." Federal fishery regulators said this past week that the number of chinook salmon returning to the Sacramento River and its tributaries last fall was astonishingly low.
4th February 2008
Ice cores show faster global warming - United Press International Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica show that Earth warmed faster in the 20th century than at any other time in the past 22 millennia, researchers said. Climatologists from Bern University said their study also showed that concentrations of greenhouse gases are increasing at a faster rate, Swissinfo.com reported. For example, the concentration of carbon dioxide increased by 31 parts per million during one 1,600-year interval in the pre-industrial period -- its fastest growth before the industrial age -- and went up by the same amount in the past 20 years.
2nd February 2008
Greenhouse effect has 'significantly dried' the western United States - Nature.com Stop development in southwestern states, say researchers.
Human activity is largely to blame for the worsening water shortages in the western United States over the past half-century, a new study shows.
The analysis of climate trends that influence the availability of freshwater shows that humans are responsible for 60% of the observed changes.
Increased hurricane activity linked to sea surface warming - PhysOrg The link between changes in the temperature of the sea`s surface and increases in North Atlantic hurricane activity has been quantified for the first time. The research - carried out by scientists at UCL (University College London) and due to be published in Nature on January 31 - shows that a 0.5°C increase in sea surface temperature can be associated with a ~40 per cent increase in hurricane activity.
31st January 2008
warming exposes ancient vegetation - Canada.com Large tracts of land and ancient vegetation that has not seen the light of day in 1,600 years have been liberated from ice caps on Baffin Island, confirming the unprecedented scale of climate change underway in Canada's North. The "current warming exceeds any sustained warm episode in at least the past 1,600 years," reports a U.S. research team that is dating the landscape reappearing as the island's ice disappears.
Calif. Salmon Population Declines - PhysOrg (AP) -- The number of chinook salmon returning to California's Central Valley has reached a near-record low, pointing to an "unprecedented collapse" that could lead to severe restrictions on West Coast salmon fishing this year, according to federal fishery regulators.
2007 Was Tenth Warmest For U.S., Fifth Warmest Worldwide - Science Daily The average temperature for the contiguous U.S. in 2007 is officially the tenth warmest on record, according to data from scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The agency also determined the global surface temperature last year was the fifth warmest on record.
Red Cross says changing climate worsens disasters - Reuters Climate change is making it harder for many people to access clean water and food, and widening the spread of malaria and dengue fever, the world's largest humanitarian aid agency said on Monday. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is asking donors for $292 million per year for 2008 and 2009 to help communities steel themselves for the threats of global warming.
Sea adventure: Thoreson saw changes caused by warming - DesMoinesRegister.com Sea adventure: The sea-weary crew of six with Dave Thoreson of Okoboji was halfway into the 73-day trek on the edges of the Earth, trying to become the first American yacht to travel east to west through the Northwest Passage. Thoreson, surprised by the lack of Arctic ice, knew they had made it.
Spring comes early for Max the stork - Physorg Max the stork, currently the oldest animal being tracked by satellite, is flying north after a remarkably short winter sojourn in southern Spain, a natural history museum in Switzerland said Wednesday.
17th January 2008
2007 was tied as Earth's second warmest year - PhysOrg Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City have found that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth`s second warmest year in a century.
17th January 2008
Ice loss from Antarctica accelerating - NEWS.com.au GLOBAL warming has caused annual ice loss from the Antarctic ice sheet to surge by 75 per cent in a decade, according to the most detailed survey ever made of the white continent's coastal glaciers.
14th January 2008
Study: Northeast Winters Warming Fast - Physorg (AP) -- Earlier blooms. Less snow to shovel. Unseasonable warm spells. Signs that winters in the Northeast are losing their bite have been abundant in recent years and now researchers have nailed down numbers to show just how big the changes have been.
13th January 2008
Global warming taking its toll on Kootenays - Globe and Mail Global warming taking its toll on KootenaysGlobe and Mail, Canada. Ian Bruce, a climate-change specialist with the David Suzuki Foundation, said there are troubling signs the Kootenay region is changing more quickly than ...
12th January 2008
Older Arctic sea ice replaced by young, thin ice - Physorg A new study by University of Colorado at Boulder researchers indicates older, multi-year sea ice in the Arctic is giving way to younger, thinner ice, making it more susceptible to record summer sea-ice lows like the one that occurred in 2007.
12th January 2008
Winter Ice on Lakes, Rivers, Ponds: A Thing of the Past? If you're planning to ice skate on a local lake or river this winter, you may need to think twice, according to scientists John Magnuson, Olaf Jensen and Barbara Benson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The records show that later freezing and earlier ice breakup occurred on lakes and rivers across the Northern Hemisphere from 1846 to 1995. Over those 150 years, said Magnuson, changes in freeze dates averaged 5.8 days per 100 years later, and changes in ice breakup dates averaged 6.5 days per 100 years earlier. The findings translate to increasing air temperatures of about 1.2 degrees Celsius each century.
Drought-hit Cyprus considers importing water - Environmental News Network Drought-stricken Cyprus may import water to beat a crippling shortage that is threatening to tap the island's reservoir reserves dry, its agriculture minister said on Wednesday. The decision to bring water in sea tankers from Greece would depend on weather over the next two months, but the outlook for rain was not promising, Photis Photiou said.
Global Warming Hits China - Forbes There are few more startling embodiments of climate change than the current health of China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang Lake, in the southeastern province of Jiangxi. The surface area of Poyang Lake has shrunk to 50 square kilometers from its peak of more than 3,000 during the summer--it is 1.67% of its size six months ago. Some perspective is needed. A spectacular fluctuation in the lake's area from the summer flood season to the winter dry period has long been commonplace. However, the Jiangxi hydrological bureau reported that the area of the lake last winter was 300 to 500 square kilometers, up to 10 times larger than this year's figure. The lake's title would seem to require a caveat: China's largest freshwater lake-- in July.
On the brink - Guardian Unlimited Hardly anybody else has mentioned it, so I might as well. An estimated £38bn ($75bn) went up in smoke, down the drain, was swept away or blown to kingdom come during 2007. Or to put it another way, human disasters triggered by natural hazards pushed economic losses to alarming levels.
5th January 2008
This drought may never break - Sydney Morning Herald IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation's most senior weather experts warned yesterday.
Australia Hit by Floods, Fires Amid Global Warming - Planet Ark CANBERRA - Australia endured bushfires, floods and record high temperatures in its drought-ravaged foodbowl in 2007 as global warming brought the nation's sixth hottest year on record, the weather bureau said on Thursday.
Significant decline in monsoon rainfall - The Hindu Bangalore: The southwest monsoon, responsible for 80 per cent of the country's annual rainfall and the basis of Indian agriculture, has substantially reduced in the last 50 years, shrinking in duration, spatial distribution and quantum.
31st December 2007
Terror of the north on the brink - Globe and Mail The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to announce within days whether, in light of the animal's shrinking habitat, it will classify the polar bear as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
The Year in Review: The planet - The Independent The sheer scale of what happened hasn't sunk in, it probably hasn't sunk in at all, with most people. They're not looking back on 2007 and talking about it, in the office, in pubs or over dinner. Listen to them: they're talking about Brown taking over from Blair, or David Cameron's prospects, or England failing to qualify for the European football championships. Or they're talking about getting and spending, or love and hate, as they always have. But what happened in September dwarfs all that.
28th December 2007
Insured losses from natural disasters nearly double, risks up on global warming - CBC News From winter storms in Europe, flooding in Britain and wildfires in the U.S., losses to insurers from natural disasters nearly doubled this year to just below US$30 billion globally after an unusually quiet 2006, a leading reinsurer said Thursday. Munich Re warned that climate change could mean a growing number of weather-related catastrophes in coming years. "The trend in respect of weather extremes shows that climate change is already taking effect and that more such extremes are to be expected in the future," board member Torsten Jeworrek said in a statement. "We should not be misled by the absence of mega-catastrophes in 2007."
Climate change adversely affecting predators in world's oceans - TopNews Climate change adversely affecting predators in world's oceansTopNews, India. "Global warming may lead to severe contraction of favorable reproductive zones for some species of tunas that will have larger effects than fisheries on ...
26th December 2007
Erosion threatens Canada's coastlines - Times Colonist Crumbling coastlines are hardly a problem unique to P.E.I. Bigger storms are eroding Canadian shorelines, particularly throughout the North and the Atlantic region. Scientists identify climate change as one of the culprits.
24th December 2007
Group says warming imperils ribbon seals - Seattle Times The Center for Biological Diversity on Thursday filed a 91-page petition with the National Marine Fisheries Service seeking to list ribbon seals as threatened or endangered. The group says the classification is needed because sea ice is disappearing because of climate change brought on by humans.
Without its insulating ice cap, Arctic surface waters warm to as much as 5 C above average - PhysOrg Record-breaking amounts of ice-free water have deprived the Arctic of more of its natural "sunscreen" than ever in recent summers. The effect is so pronounced that sea surface temperatures rose to 5 C above average in one place this year, a high never before observed, says the oceanographer who has compiled the first-ever look at average sea surface temperatures for the region.
Scientist: 'Arctic is screaming' - CNN.com WASHINGTON (AP) -- An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.
12th December 2007
2007's weather extremes: 263 all-time high temps broken in US ... - UI The Daily Iowan 2007's weather extremes: When the calendar turned to 2007, the heat went on and the weather just got weirder.
January was the warmest first month on record worldwide - 1.53 degrees above normal. It was the first time since record-keeping began in 1880 that the globe's average temperature has been so far above the norm for any month of the year.
And as 2007 drew to a close, it was also shaping up to be the hottest year on record in the Northern Hemisphere.
U.S. weather stations broke or tied 263 all-time high temperature records, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. weather data. England had the warmest April in 348 years of record-keeping there, shattering the record set in 1865 by more than 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit.
It wasn't just the temperature. There were other oddball weather events. A tornado struck New York City in August, inspiring the tabloid headline: "This ain't Kansas!"
In the Middle East, an equally rare cyclone spun up in June, hitting Oman and Iran. Major U.S. lakes shrank; Atlanta had to worry about its drinking water supply. South Africa got its first significant snowfall in 25 years. And on Reunion Island, 400 miles east of Africa, nearly 155 inches of rain fell in three days - a world record for the most rain in 72 hours.
12th December 2007
New Tibetan ice cores missing A-bomb blast markers; Suggest Himalayan ice fields haven't grown in last 50 years Ice cores drilled last year from the summit of a Himalayan ice field lack the distinctive radioactive signals that mark virtually every other ice core retrieved worldwide.
Scientists believe that the missing signal means that this Tibetan ice field has been shrinking at least since the A-bomb test half a century ago. If true, this could foreshadow a future when the stockpiles of freshwater will dwindle and vanish, seriously affecting the lives of more than 500 million people on the Indian subcontinent.
12th December 2007
Penguins in decline due to global warming - Times Online The Emperor penguins which won the hearts of millions of children in the film Happy Feet have suffered a devastating population slump in the last 50 years, according to a report. Many colonies have fallen in size by 50 per cent as the penguins have been squeezed by the effects of climate change and overfishing, the WWF said in its report, Antarctic Penguins and Climate Change.
SA fire danger reaches 'extreme' level - The Australian SA fire danger reaches 'extreme' levelThe Australian, Australia. FIREFIGHTERS fear South Australia is "breaking new ground" as climate change brings days of extreme fire danger earlier in the summer.
7th December 2007
Global warming wreaks havoc with nature - Seattle Post Intelligencer While humans debate at U.N. climate change talks in Bali, global warming is already wreaking havoc with nature. Most plants and animals are affected, and the change is occurring too quickly for them to evolve.
6th December 2007
Greenhouse robs rainfall in farm belt - Sydney Morning Herald GLOBAL warming has caused the world's tropical regions to expand much more rapidly than predicted, raising the prospect of an even drier farm belt in southern Australia, and the spread south of diseases such as dengue fever. As talks on climate change begin at a United Nations meeting in Bali today, research reveals the tropical zone has widened by more than two degrees of latitude over the past 25 years..
3rd December 2007
Global warming resulting in an increased similarity of plants in Alps - The Cheers New research by environmentalists indicates that global warming has resulted in an increased similarity of vegetation in mountain summits in the Alps. The findings indicate that as a result of climate change, an upward shift of flora is taking place in the area. This is not only increasing the number of species on the mountain summits studied, but also leading to an increasing homogenization of the species composition of Alpine summit vegetation. This means that species diversity within individual areas is increasing, but that species diversity across ecosystems is declining. According to biologists, the resulting homogenization of the flora could lead to a reduction in regional biodiversity, as more and more species are now forced to share the summits.
2007 cools, set to be 6th warmest year on record - AlertNet Source: Reuters By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO, Nov 28 (Reuters) - This year is set to be the sixth warmest since records began 150 years ago, cooler than earlier predicted which means a slight respite for European ski resorts or bears trying to hibernate. "2007 will likely be near equal with 2006, so joint sixth warmest year," Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, told Reuters.
29th November 2007
Global warming sends salamanders packing - PhysOrg A genetic study of the salamander family that encompasses two-thirds of the world's salamander species shows that periods of global warming helped the amphibians diversify and expand their range from North America into Europe and Asia, where pockets of them are still found today.
28th November 2007
Flying foxes fall prey to Earth's rising temperature - Times Online Flying foxes have been dropping off trees and dying in droves because of the effects of climate change, researchers say. More than 30,000 of the fruit bats are estimated to have died since 1994 in heat waves associated with global warming. Mass deaths from heat stress have occurred at least 19 times since 1994, as opposed to only three anecdotal reports of similar flying fox deaths before then. The bats started to die as temperatures approached 42C, the study in Australia found. They are the first large mammal other than humans to be shown to suffer mass mortality during a heat wave.
28th November 2007
Melting Ice Displaces Walruses In The Russian Arctic - Science Daily Some 40,000 walruses have appeared on the Russian Arctic coast, a phenomenon that scientists believe is a result of global warming melting Arctic sea ice. According to WWF, this is the largest walrus haul out - areas where walruses rest when they are out of the water - registered in the Russian Arctic.
27th November 2007
This winter may be warmest ever - WZZM 13 Grand Rapids The Northern Hemisphere is the warmest this year since record-keeping started 127 years ago, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Temperatures for January through October averaged 1.3 degrees above the norm.
27th November 2007
Polar bears dying in years of early ice melt - Nature A census of polar bears in Canada’s Hudson Bay has lent some hard numbers to the long-held fear that retreating sea ice is causing some bears to starve or drown. Now, looking at 20 years of data from bears captured along the coast of Hudson Bay, a team of scientists from the United States and Canada has found that fewer of the youngest and oldest bears survived in years when the ice broke early.
24th November 2007
Early climate change victim: Andes water - Las Cruces Sun-News Bolivia: El Alto and its sister city of La Paz, the world's highest capital, depend on glaciers for at least a third of their water—more than any other urban sprawl. And those glaciers are rapidly melting because of global warming..
Climate change a growing threat in Tibet, media report - Phayul Climate change is causing more weather-related disasters than ever in the Himalayan region of Tibet, where the temperature is rising faster than the rest of China, state press reported Wednesday.
22nd November 2007
Snowdonia shows signs of global warming - Daily Post Welsh environment minister Jane Davidson said last night she was shocked by photographs taken ten years apart, one showing Snowdon covered in snow and the other more recent picture, without its white peaks. They are part of an exhibition by the National Trust entitled Exposed – Climate Change in Britain’s Backyard, which opened in the Senedd building in Cardiff Bay last night.
22nd November 2007
Billions of jellyfish wipe out N. Irish salmon farm - CNN.com DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- The only salmon farm in Northern Ireland has lost its entire population of more than 100,000 fish, worth $2 million, to a spectacular jellyfish attack, its owners said Wednesday.
Flocks of 'lost' auks spark climate change fears - The Independent Record-breaking sightings of vast flocks of little auks in Britain have prompted new concerns over the impact of climate change on the migration patterns of bird species. The record for the size of flock has been broken twice in four days, according to the National Trust, with 18,000 of the tiny black-and-white seabirds recorded around the Farne Islands off Northumberland last week - 7,000 more than the previous record set off Flamborough Head, East Yorkshire, in 1995. But even this vast gathering was dwarfed by the flock spotted there on Sunday when 29,000 little auks were seen.
15th November 2007
The big thirst: The great American water crisis - Independent The US drought is now so acute that, in some southern communities, the water supply is cut off for 21 hours a day. Leonard Doyle reports from Chattanooga, Tennessee, on a once-lush region where the American dream has been reduced to a single four-letter word: rain.
15th November 2007
Chile's San Rafael glacier fast disappearing - PhysOrg Chunks of glacial ice tinkled in whisky glasses as chilled tourists gazed in wonder from their boat at the massive San Rafael glacier and the markers tallying its losing battle against global warming.
10th November 2007
Global Warming Behind Water Crisis in Northeast China - DeSmog Blog Government officials in China are claiming global warming as the culprit behind massive water shortages in Northeast China. The famous Crescent Moon lake used to be over 10 meters deep, but is now only 1 meter deep as the encroaching desert sucks up the water. The disappearing lake at this point of the Silk Road is the most powerful symbol of an emerging water crisis. China's Water Resources minister, Chen Lei, said recently that an annual water shortage of nearly 40 billion cubic meters in China can be blamed on global warming. "The changes have led to a combination of both frequent drought and flooding." water shortage water crisis china global warming climate change crescent moon lake
Humpback whales seen in Arctic - The West Australian Endangered humpback and fin whales swam hundreds of kilometres north of their usual habitat this northern summer. Environmentalists say it is another sign of the effects of global warming and the shifting Arctic ecosystem.
7th November 2007
Tibetans wake up to nosebleeds in super-dry autumn BEIJING (Reuters) - Moisture has become a luxury in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa where many locals are waking up to nosebleeds in the dry autumn, state media said on Monday as the Himalayan region faces growing threat of global warming.
Lake Huron water levels spell deep trouble - Toronto Star When Julie Woodyear was a kid, she and her brother raced each other around their family's Georgian Bay island in dinghies. Thirty years later, a dinghy race would involve dragging the boats over land because her island is no longer an island. It's become part of the mainland.
Forests losing the ability to absorb man-made carbon - PhysOrg The sprawling forests of the northern hemisphere which extend from China and Siberia to Canada and Alaska are in danger of becoming a gigantic source of carbon dioxide rather than being a major "sink" that helps to offset man-made emissions of the greenhouse gas.
1st November 2007
Western Canada's Glaciers Hit 7000-Year Low Tree stumps at the feet of Western Canadian glaciers are providing new insights into the accelerated rates at which the rivers of ice have been shrinking due to human-aided global warming.
31st October 2007
More astounding NASA video: Arctic Sea Ice Loss 1979 to 2007 For some of our readers, the video we posted last week of the startling loss of Arctic sea-ice as recorded by NASA this summer just wasn't enough to convince them that the planet is in serious trouble. So here's a new NASA video showing the massive Arctic sea ice loss over the last 28 years. Look at the difference between 2005 and 2007 alone. Startled now? This animation is from NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio at the Goddard Space Flight Center. This animation compares the 2005 annual Arctic minimum sea ice from 09/21/2005 (shown in orange) with the 2007 minimum sea ice from 09/14/2007.
Massive California fires consistent with climate change - PhysOrg The catastrophic fires that are sweeping Southern California are consistent with what climate change models have been predicting for years, experts say, and they may be just a prelude to many more such events in the future - as vegetation grows heavier than usual and then ignites during prolonged drought periods.
Sweatin' the Mediterranean Heat - RealClimate Guest Commentary from Figen Mekik This quote from Drew Shindell (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York) hit me very close to home: "Much of the Mediterranean area, North Africa and the Middle East rapidly are becoming drier. If the trend continues as expected, the consequences may be severe in only a couple of decades. These changes could pose significant water resource challenges to large segments of the population" (February, 2007-NASA, Science Daily). I live in Michigan, but Turkey is my home where I go for vacation on the Med. This year's drought was especially noteworthy, so I would like to share some of my observations with you, and then explore the links between the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Mediterranean drought and anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
23rd October 2007
Inch By Inch, Great Lakes Are Getting Smaller, And Cargo Carriers Face Losses - Free Internet Press Water levels in the Great Lakes are falling; Lake Ontario, for example, is about seven inches below where it was a year ago. And for every inch of water that the lakes lose, the ships that ferry bulk materials across them must lighten their loads by 270 tons - or 540,000 pounds - or risk running aground, according to the Lake Carriers' Association, a trade group for United States-flag cargo companies.
THREATENED SEABIRDS THRIVE IN CORNWALL - The Cornishman Global warming has led to the waters and cliffs of Cornwall increasingly becoming a haven for Europe's most threatened seabird - a species usually found in the Mediterranean. A new survey by National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, and the RSPB has discovered that a significant chunk of the world population of Balearic shearwaters now spend summer and autumn in Cornwall - with some staying on all year.
17th October 2007
Acid oceans warning - University of Queensland The world's oceans are becoming more acid, with potentially devastating consequences for corals and the marine organisms that build reefs and provide much of the Earth's breathable oxygen.
17th October 2007
Carteret Islands sinking fast - The National THE Carteret Islands are almost invisible on a map of the South Pacific, but the horseshoe scattering of atolls in eastern-most Papua New Guinea is on the frontline of climate change, as rising sea levels and storm surges eat away at their existence.
Kashmir glaciers face the heat - OneWorld South Asia Owing to global warming, most of the small glaciers in Indian administered Kashmir have totally melted down while the big glaciers in most of the areas have decreased in size.
6th October 2007
Dengue fever epidemic hits Caribbean, Latin America SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (Reuters) - Dengue, a mosquito-borne virus that causes high fever, nausea and painful body aches, is reaching epidemic levels in the Caribbean and Latin America, health officials say.
6th October 2007
Western Progress / Experts look at forest 'reality' - The Missoulian Since 2002, six of 11 Western states have set records for the amount of acreage burned in a single season. In the 1950s, an average of about 160,000 acres burned in the Rocky Mountain West each year. By the 1960s, the number was closer to 230,000 acres. In the 1970s, fire swept over closer to 400,000 acres every year. Since the late 1980s, it's not unusual for wildfire to scorch more than 1 million acres in a season, Covington said. With the effects of global warming, it is likely wildfires could burn even larger areas over time. "We're not finished yet," he said.
Climate change disaster is upon us - Guardian Unlimited A record number of floods, droughts and storms around the world this year amount to a climate change "mega disaster", the United Nation's emergency relief coordinator, Sir John Holmes, has warned. Sir John, a British diplomat who is also known as the UN's under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said dire predictions about the impact of global warming on humanity were already coming true.
5th October 2007
The Top 5 Nastiest Creatures Getting Stronger Due To Climate Change - Groovy Green When some people think of Global Warming, a vision of comfortable winters, more days at the beach, and less sweaters comes to mind. For those living away from coastal regions, the concerns of hurricanes or sea levels is non-existent. Out of sight, out of mind. The realities are that climate change will affect each and every one of us. From the ways our communities rely on food produced in other states and nations; to the costs of energy and sourcing of water. But it gets worse. Much worse. We now present to you The Top 5 Nasty Creatures Getting Stronger Due To Climate Change. Some of them seem straight out of science fiction.
1st October 2007
Alien intrusions threaten Sweden's seas - PhysOrg A gluttonous American pseudo-jellyfish, giant Japanese oysters, and an unidentified virus killing seals: strange intrusions are threatening Sweden's seas and fishermen are concerned.
29th September 2007
Bluetongue disease detected in UK - BBC News The first-ever case of Bluetongue disease in Britain is found in a cow near Ipswich, Suffolk.Bluetongue disease is transmitted by the Culicoides imicola midge. It is passed from animal to midge, and from midge to animal, but is not transmitted from animal to animal. The virus has long blighted Africa, but in recent years has begun to spread northwards into Europe. Some scientists believe that climate change could be behind its spread, as warmer temperatures have seen the biting insects gradually move north.
23rd September 2007
Global warming concerns after Africa deluge - Financial Times More than 1m people have been hit by some of the worst floods in Africa in a generation, fuelling concerns over the continent's exposure to extreme weather events linked to climate change.
20th September 2007
Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier sounds climate change alarm - TODAYonline French Minister for Ecology, Sustainable development and Planning Jean-Louis Borloo (C) is pictured, on 10 Sep, in Quervain bay (Greenland west coast) with amateur speleologist Serge Aviotte (L) and climatologist Jean Jouzel (R), during a visit in Greenland to survey the impact of global warming in the Arctic.
20th September 2007
Evidence of global warming surrounds a skeptic - Seattle Post Intelligencer "We will not lose our forests. We will not run out of energy, raw materials or water," argues Lomborg, booked at Town Hall tonight. Huh? Instead of coming into our house and lecturing us, Lomborg ought to take a few days off and look around. He should travel into British Columbia, where warmer winters in the very cold Chilcotin Plateau have allowed the mountain pine beetle to embark on what's likely to be a cross-North America killing spree. The pine beetle has "colonized" a swath of land 800 miles long and 300-plus miles wide. The beetles have crossed the Continental Divide into Alberta.
20th September 2007
Arctic Summer Ice Thickness Halves to 1 Metre - Planet Ark OSLO - Large tracts of ice on the Arctic Ocean have halved in thickness to just 1 metre (3 ft) since 2001, making the region more accessible to ships, a researcher said on Tuesday.
Western Canadian pine beetle infestation spreads VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Voracious beetles that have ravaged more than 9 million hectares (35,000 square miles) of British Columbia's forests have wiped out about 40 percent of the infested region's marketable pine trees, according to a report released on Monday.
18th September 2007
Humans implicated in rising water vapor - Contra Costa Times The case implicating humans' role in climate change was bolstered this week by another fingerprint, this one on water vapor in the atmosphere. Scientists used computer models that simulate the climate to show that the rise in water vapor could not have been caused by natural climate fluctuations
18th September 2007
Mammoth dung, prehistoric goo may speed warming - AlertNet For millennia, layers of animal waste and other organic matter left behind by the creatures that used to roam the Arctic tundra have been sealed inside the frozen permafrost. Now climate change is thawing the permafrost and lifting this prehistoric ooze from suspended animation. But Zimov, a scientist who for almost 30 years has studied climate change in Russia's Arctic, believes that as this organic matter becomes exposed to the air it will accelerate global warming faster than even some of the most pessimistic forecasts. "This will lead to a type of global warming which will be impossible to stop," he said. When the organic matter left behind by mammoths and other wildlife is exposed to the air by the thawing permafrost, his theory runs, microbes that have been dormant for thousands of years spring back into action.
"The deposits of organic matter in these soils are so gigantic that they dwarf global oil reserves," Zimov said. U.S. government statistics show mankind emits about 7 billion tonnes of carbon a year. "Permafrost areas hold 500 billion tonnes of carbon, which can fast turn into greenhouse gases," Zimov said. "If you don't stop emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere ... the Kyoto Protocol (an international pact aimed at reducing greenhouse emissions) will seem like childish prattle."
17th September 2007
Satellites witness lowest Arctic ice coverage in history - ESA The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk to its lowest level this week since satellite measurements began nearly 30 years ago, opening up the Northwest Passage - a long-sought short cut between Europe and Asia that has been historically impassable.
15th September 2007
The sea ice is getting thinner - PhysOrg Large areas of the Arctic sea-ice are only one metre thick this year, equating to an approximate 50 percent thinning as compared to the year 2001. These are the initial results from the latest Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association lead expedition to the North Polar Sea.
14th September 2007
WARM SUMMER IN U.S. ENDS WITH RECORD HEAT IN SOUTH, WIDESPREAD DROUGHT CONTINUES IN SOUTHEAST, WEST - NOAA News The June-August 2007 summer season ended with a long-lasting heatwave that set more than 2,000 new daily high temperature records across the southern and central U.S., according to scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The record heat helped make this the second warmest August and the sixth warmest summer on record for the contiguous U.S., based on preliminary data. At the end of August, drought affected almost half of the continental U.S. The global surface temperature was seventh warmest on record for the June-August period.
Gorillas head race to extinction - BBC Gorillas, orangutans, and corals are among the plants and animals which are sliding closer to extinction. The Red List of Threatened Species for 2007 names habitat loss, hunting and climate change among the causes.
CHILE: RATE OF MELTING GLACIERS HAS DOUBLED IN TEN YEARS - Santiago Times Glacier Melt Casts Doubt On Value Of Southern Hydroelectric Projects (Sept. 11, 2007) Scientists from the Center of Scientific Studies of Valdivia (CECS) said this week that Chile's glaciers are melting at twice the speed observed just ten years ago. The scientists, who recently participated in a specially called international forum on glaciers, also warned that this trend could have devastating ramifications due to current plans to construct hydroelectric dams around Chile.
Bigger, hotter and longer - BBC News Fires wreaking destruction in the American West are set to become the norm for many months of the year, says Tim Egan.
Warming leaves gray whales hungry - OCRegister ANCHORAGE, Alaska Researchers off Mexico's Pacific coast have observed what might be a case of global warming's effects in the far north: gray whales returning to calving grounds malnourished. Where layers of fat should have covered whales' spines last winter, researchers saw vertebrae sticking out. They spotted other signs of malnutrition - depressions around the blowholes and head, and protruding shoulder blades - that may indicate declining health.
1st September 2007
The pine beetle's deadly march - The Globe and Mail At night, you can hear them moving in the trees. They've swept through parks and golf courses and ranchland and caught thermal currents to fly on the jet stream. They've colonized an area 1,200 kilometres long and 575 kilometres wide, nearly the size of Sweden.
1st September 2007
Climate change ticks ever closer - Toronto Star On the Leslie St. spit, signs of global warming are being picked right from the feathers of migratory birds. And the ticks now spreading north carry with them the spectre of Lyme disease
Global warming ruining the tundra - RIA Novosti Scientists all over the world have been talking about global warming for a long time. Now some of the threats are becoming real. Global climate change has prejudiced a unique environmental project of Russian scientists - a Pleistocene Park in the northeast of Russia, the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the lower reaches of the Kolyma, a tributary of the Lena River. In the 1980s, scientist Sergei Zimov, now an expert on the environment with an international reputation, was in charge of the North-East Scientific Station run by the Russian Academy of Sciences. He decided to restore in the pre-polar tundra the environment of the Pleistocene era of 10,000 years ago, when the climate, flora and fauna had already become modern and humans started evolving into their present form.
While Greece burns ... - Grist Magazine Now we have an unprecedented outbreak of fire in Greece, and once again some are quick to insist that no connection can be made between drought, wind, record-breaking heat -- and devastating fires. Scientists aren't so sure. Nineteen different climate models predict that the subtropic zones, such as the American Southwest and south Greece, including the Athens area, will become hotter, drier, and more likely to suffer drought as global warming intensifies.
1st September 2007
From voles to beetles, they all suffered this summer As the wettest, weirdest summer I've seen in 35 years as a naturalist draws to an end, what will it mean for wildlife long-term? For most insects and other invertebrates, it has been a poor season (though those which like it damp have thrived).
Sockeye salmon running on empty - Abbotsford News The worst sockeye salmon run in decades is now swishing its way upstream toward the spawning beds. With less than 30 per cent of the expected number of salmon showing up in the Fraser River, it's a disaster for commercial fishermen, aboriginals and sports anglers alike. The developing pattern of poor returns in recent years is deeply disturbing. Plenty of salmon should have hatched from the previous spawn and gone out to sea. But indications point to warmer ocean water - likely due to climate change - that has resulted in less food for offshore sockeye and more predators chasing them.
Extreme conditions: What's happening to our weather? Britain is just a few showers away from recording a record wet summer, at the climax of the most remarkable period of broken weather records in the country's history. All of the smashed records are to do with temperature and rainfall - the two aspects of the climate most likely to be intensified by the advent of global warming.
28th August 2007
Leading Article: The world is warming before our eyes Toasted villages, torched forests. Images of weeping relatives confronting the sight of charred bodies of failed escapees in their cars. The terrible scenes from Greece in recent days have added to suspicions voiced throughout Europe that 2007 was no ordinary summer. Statistics suggest the popular hunch was indeed correct and that 2007 really was a mad, bad summer, marked by unprecedented deluges in the north and extreme heat in the south.
Beetles devour Colorado forests - Pueblo Chieftain Mountain pine beetles are obliterating a forest that stretches from British Columbia to Mexico, and in the process are creating a hazard for fire, public safety and water supply.
28th August 2007
European blood-sucker falls victim to global warming - Mongabay.com Europe's only known land leech may be on the brink of extinction due to shifts in climate, report researchers writing in the journal Naturwissenschaften. The findings are significant because they suggest that "human-induced climate change without apparent habitat destruction can lead to the extinction of populations of cold-adapted species that have a low colonization ability," according to the authors.
28th August 2007
Is climate change bringing the state more bugs? Bitten by the bug - Barre Montpelier Times Argus As state entomologist, Jon Turmel speaks with authority about bugs: "They're just so cool." But ask him about the new insects arriving with the onset of global warming and he admits they're not so hot. Turmel points to ticks spreading Lyme disease northward. Mosquitoes flying up with West Nile virus and several forms of encephalitis. Plant-eating pests such as the hemlock woolly adelgid, a tree-munching troublemaker recently discovered in the southeastern corner of the state. Scientists can report with certainty the appearance of new and more numerous insects statewide. They also note the creatures are coming as the state's average temperatures are rising as a result of global warming.
28th August 2007
Long-term increase in rainfall seen in tropics NASA scientists have detected the first signs that tropical rainfall is on the rise with the longest and most complete data record available.
28th August 2007
Death toll mounts in Greek fires - BBC Greek emergency workers continue to find the charred bodies of people burned to death by forest fires that are raging in the south of the country.
Islands emerge as Arctic ice shrinks to record low - AlertNet NY ALESUND, Norway, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Previously unknown islands are appearing as Arctic summer sea ice shrinks to record lows, raising questions about whether global warming is outpacing U.N. projections, experts said. Polar bears and seals have also suffered this year on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard because the sea ice they rely on for hunts melted far earlier than normal. "Reductions of snow and ice are happening at an alarming rate," Norwegian Environment Minister Helen Bjoernoy said at a seminar of 40 scientists and politicians that began late on Monday in Ny Alesund, 1,200 km (750 miles) from the North Pole. "This acceleration may be faster than predicted" by the U.N. climate panel this year, she told reporters at the Aug. 20-22 seminar. Ny Alesund calls itself the world's most northerly permanent settlement, and is a base for Arctic research.
Warm temperatures may be causing Sierra tree deaths - Contra Costa Times Tree deaths in the Sierra Nevada have increased over the past two decades, and scientists say the trend may be linked to higher temperatures. Ecologists at the U.S. Geological Survey's Western Ecological Center in Three Rivers tracked the fate of more than 21,000 trees in old-growth forests of Yosemite and Sequoia national parks and found the death rates rose significantly between 1983 and 2004.
9th August 2007
Swifter decline for coral reefs - BBC Coral reefs in the Pacific and Indian oceans are vanishing faster than had previously been thought, a study shows.
Massive slide covers entire glacier - The Globe and Mail Landslide on Yukon's Mount Steele had a minimum velocity of 252 kilometres an hour and covered the Steele glacier“Thanks to glacier melt due to global warming, mountain areas have become more susceptible to changes and stress,” he said. “This is a worldwide phenomenon taking place.”
9th August 2007
Purple Snail May Be Climate Change Casualty - NPR Scientists say a purple snail that lived on islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean may be the first species to go extinct in the modern era due to climate change. They say an unusual series of long hot summers did the snail in.
9th August 2007
Spain Hauls in 8 Tonnes of Jellyfish From Beaches - Planet Ark MADRID - Spain has launched a campaign to investigate and collect a plague of jellyfish on its coastline, and so far has collected eight tonnes of them, the Environment Ministry said on Tuesday.
8th August 2007
'07 weather extremes seen as sign of what awaits us - Seattle Times A monsoon dropped 14 inches of rain in one day across many parts of South Asia this month. Germany had its wettest May on record, and April was the driest there in a century. Temperatures reached 113 degrees last month in Bulgaria and 90 degrees in Moscow in late May, shattering longtime records. The year still has almost five months to go, but it has already experienced a range of weather extremes that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Tuesday is well outside the historical norm and is a precursor of much greater weather variability as global warming transforms the planet.
Global warming cited in feline 'heat' wave - National Post An explosion in Toronto's stray cat population is the latest phenomenon being blamed on global warming, joining a growing list of evils that includes increases in hay fever and seal mating as well as decreases in the supply of maple syrup and Bulgarian prostitutes.
2nd August 2007
Warm waters deadly to Yellowstone trout - Denver Post In the Firehole River that slashes through the wild grasses and woods of Yellowstone's west side, the trout began to take notice. As the water warmed on that early July day, the levels of dissolved oxygen dropped. The fish - rainbows, with their bright crimson lateral slash, and brown trout, with their multicolored spots - began to panic. They darted up and down the river, seeking a cooling pocket. Within 48 hours, rangers and biologists would stand amid the tall grasses on the banks of one of the nation's most famous trout streams and watch in sadness as several hundred - and perhaps 1,000 - big and small trout were swept downstream, the white bellies of their corpses reflecting the sunlight. It was the largest fish kill known to biologists in the 135-year history of the park.
Gannet population under threat from global warming Researchers at the University of Leeds have warned that global warming is a major threat to the gannet, a species known for its stable populations and constant breeding success.
Climate Change Affects Cod Stocks - Post Chronicle A U.S. study has linked environmental factors such as climate change to the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery. University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth researchers determined a recently published study of cod stocks off Canada and New England showed that after falling in the 1970s stocks increased sharply for about five years then began a steep decline again, suggesting environmental factors played a stronger role in the collapse of the cod fishery than previously thought. In the new study, Brian Rothschild and colleagues at UMass Dartmouth argue an interruption in the food chain, possibly caused by climate change, was a key factor in the cod's disappearance.
16th June 2007
Crawfish is sign of climate change - East Lothian Courier Skipper of local fishing boat, the Tern, Andrew Mack, 59, found a crawfish (or crayfish) in his nets as he trawled for langoustines a couple of miles offshore from Gullane. And his son Daniel said he couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the spiny lobster as they are usually only found in warmer climates such as the Caribbean or the Mediterranean coast, and are particularly common Down Under. It is reported to be the first time this species has been caught in the Firth of Forth and only the third time on the east coast.
15th June 2007
Widespread warmth leads to the fifth warmest spring for united states - NOAA News Driest spring on record across the southeast worsens drought. The fifth warmest spring on record for the contiguous United States occurred in 2007, according to scientists at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. A severe-weather outbreak in the nation's midsection brought devastating tornadoes in early May, while a record-dry spring in the Southeast led to worsening drought conditions. Continued extreme dryness in May east of the Mississippi River and in the Far West expanded the drought area. The global land-surface temperature was the highest for the month of May, as well as for boreal spring. The combined global land- and ocean-surface temperature was fourth warmest for May, and tied with 1998 as the warmest January-May period.
Arctic plants have adjusted to climate changes - International Herald Tribune Many Arctic plant species have readily adjusted to big climate changes, repeatedly re-colonizing the rugged islands of Norway's remote Svalbard archipelago through 20,000 years of warm and cool spells since the frigid peak of the last ice age, researchers say.
Burning down the South - Creative Loafing Atlanta The wildfires that have swept through the Okefenokee this year are the largest in the lower 48 states in nearly a century. Do they portend a hotter future?
14th June 2007
Climate change brings toxic moth to England - Scientific American A species of toxic moth which has been moving steadily north from the Mediterranean because of global warming has reached England, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew said on Wednesday. Emergency measures have been put in place to protect trees in Kew Gardens in West London, where a number of Oak Processionary Moths (Thaumetopoea processionea) have been discovered, Kew Gardens said in a statement.
14th June 2007
Trees lose to beetles - The Star Online A once-majestic pine forest in Belize is struggling to recover from a devastating plague of beetles that scientists say was caused by climate change.
12th June 2007
Climate change causes early arrival of Caretta caretta to Alanya shores - Today's Zaman Turkey’s endangered caretta carettas [turtles] were already the subject of much attention both as a tourist attraction and a part of the country’s natural wealth, now however, they are in the news for a different reason after their arrival on Turkey’s southern sandy shores a month early; yet another result of global warming, experts say.
11th June 2007
Climate change fires up dengue - Shanghai Daily Climate change fires up dengueShanghai Daily, China. "The threat of dengue is increasing because of global warming, mosquitoes are becoming more active year by year, and their geographical reach is expanding ...
Warming clouds national parks - Chicago Tribune Global warming is altering the identity of national parks in the West, especially the Pacific Northwest, where the iconic string of glacier-capped mountains inexorably shrinks from the horizon, park officials warn. The melting ice caps in Washington state, home to more glaciers than anywhere else in the lower 48, are providing one of the most visual accountings of global warming outside Alaska and the Arctic region, enhanced by federal officials' digital archiving last year of photos of park glaciers taken 50 years ago.
Spanish Beaches Invaded by Jellyfish - PhysOrg.com (AP) --What do tourists and jellyfish have in common? They both love warm water and proliferate along Spanish beaches in the summer.
Scientists blame the problem in part on overfishing, which has sapped stocks of natural jellyfish predators like tuna and turtles, and of small fish that compete with jellyfish to feed on plankton. Another factor is global warming: jellyfish are drifting close to beaches more frequently as decreasing rainfall causes a drop in cooler, freshwater runoff from rivers - a natural barrier for the creatures, said Josep-Maria Gili, a marine biologist.
Hong Kong summers hotter than 40 years ago - Reuters HONG KONG (Reuters) - Average summer temperatures in Hong Kong have risen over the past 40 years, researchers have found, blaming global warming and heat trapped by buildings.
7th June 2007
'Twice as many' species at risk - BBC The number of endangered species in Britain has almost doubled in 13 years, according to a major new study. There are now 1,149 species of plants, mammals, birds and insects, and 67 different types of habitat under threat from climate change and human activity. See also: Up to 900 species of land bird at risk by 2050
Drought Uncovers Artifacts in Fla. Lake (AP) -- A drought that has bared parts of the bed of Florida's largest lake has exposed human bone fragments, pottery and even boats - and archaeologists are trying to evaluate the artifacts before water levels rise again.
6th June 2007
Thunder? It's the sound of Greenland melting - Reuters AlertNet Atop Greenland's Suicide Cliff, from where old Inuit women used to hurl themselves when they felt they had become a burden to their community, a crack and a thud like thunder pierce the air. "We don't have thunder here. But I know it from movies," says Ilulissat nurse Vilhelmina Nathanielsen, who hiked with us through the melting snow. "It's the ice cracking inside the icebergs. If we're lucky we might see one break apart." It's too early in the year to see icebergs crumple regularly but the sound is a reminder. As politicians squabble over how to act on climate change, Greenland's ice cap is melting, and faster than scientists had thought possible.
Global Warming Threatens New Zealand "Dinosaurs" - Planet Ark WELLINGTON - It has survived ice ages, volcanic eruptions and the intrusion of humans on its South Pacific island home, but New Zealand's last survivor of the dinosaur age may become extinct due to global warming.
5th June 2007
Norwegians Strain to Remove Pesky Arctic "Palm" - Planet Ark TROMSOE, Norway - Stimulated by warming temperatures, a poisonous plant commonly called the "Tromsoe palm", has invaded Norway and threatens to damage its pristine Arctic ecosystem, its nature agency chief said on Monday.
2006: Second most extreme weather ever - Grist Magazine Global warming has long been predicted to make the weather more extreme. Wouldn't it be great if there were an official government index of extreme weather -- of heat, drought, rainfall, and hurricanes -- that would let us know if the prediction had come true? Well, such an index exists: the National Climatic Data Center's Climate Extremes Index. As the figure shows, the most extreme year by far was 1998; 2006 was the second most extreme, followed closely by 2005. The fourteen least extreme years all predate 1981. The weather is becoming more extreme, as predicted...
5th June 2007
Climate Change Signal Detected In The Indian Ocean - Science Daily The signature of climate change over the past 40 years has been identified in temperatures of the Indian Ocean near Australia. “From ocean measurements and by analysing climate simulations we can see there are changes in features of the ocean that cannot be explained by natural variability,” said CSIRO oceanographer Dr Gael Alory.
UK's Met Office Sees Another Hot Summer - Planet Ark LONDON - This summer will probably be hotter than average in Britain and there is now a one in six chance of average temperatures reaching or exceeding levels seen in the sweltering summer of 2003, the UK's Met Office said.
Glacier visit aiming to be an ice-opener - Denver Post "My main message is the Greenland ice sheets and the Arctic in general are responding to climate change," Steffen said by satellite phone this week. "And the ice loss here is even larger than we expected."
26th May 2007
Ice melting a threat to hydro plants: ISRO - Hindustan Times The glaciers in the Himalayan landscape are not only melting at a faster rate because of climate change, they also pose a threat to the hydro power plants in the region, says a study by the Indian Space Research Organsiation (ISRO)
26th May 2007
The village that was swallowed by the sea - BBC News Dr Thanawat Jarupongsakul, a scientist from Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University says that climate change has helped cause the loss of nearly 600 km of Thailand's coastline.
26th May 2007
Warm spring 'affecting wildlife' A warm spring has brought about the early arrival of some UK wildlife, the first results of this year's Springwatch survey suggest.
26th May 2007
Experts cite climate change in European allergy explosion Scientists, meeting in Vienna from May 16 to 20 for the annual congress of the EuropeanAcademy for Dermatology and Venereology, said global warming has not only added to the number of allergies but also resulted in an increasing number of foreign plants moving into Europe, causing still more new allergies. Often hay fever, asthma or allergic eczemas were interconnected with skin diseases, allergy specialist Johannes Ring of Munich Technical University said. "Most allergies start with skin problems, even food allergies." In severe cases - for example heavy asthma attacks or allergic reactions to insect bites - an allergy could be fatal.
19th May 2007
Global April Surface Temperature Third Warmest on Record - NOAA News DESPITE RECORD COLD START, APRIL TEMPERATURE NEAR AVERAGE FOR U.S. The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for April was the third warmest on record (1.21 degrees F/0.67 degrees C above the 20th century mean). The global surface temperature for the combined January-April period was the warmest on record. Separately, the global April land-surface temperature was the warmest on record. Elevated monthly mean temperatures—more than 5 degrees F (3 degrees C) above average—covered large parts of Asia and Western Europe. The April ocean-surface temperature tied for seventh warmest in the 128-year period of record as neutral ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) conditions persisted in the equatorial Pacific..
18th May 2007
Big Area of Antarctica Melted, Satellite Finds - Planet Ark WASHINGTON - Vast areas of snow in Antarctica melted in 2005 when temperatures warmed up for a week in the summer in a process that may accelerate invisible melting deep beneath the surface, NASA said on Tuesday.
China drought threatens water supply for millions - AlertNet Source: Reuters BEIJING, May 15 (Reuters) - A spring drought is intensifying across north China thanks to scarce rainfall and high temperatures, drying up reservoirs and farmland and threatening drinking water ...
220 wildfires rage across Florida - Independent Florida, the US state that is most vulnerable to global warming, is belatedly joining the fight to control climate change as more than 220 wildfires - fanned by the first named storm of the season - rage across its territory.
13th May 2007
Glacial melt threatens watershed of Asian plateau - San Jose Mercury News The glaciers of the Himalayas store more ice than anywhere else on Earth except the polar regions and Alaska, and the steady flow of water from their melting icepacks fills seven of the mightiest rivers of Asia. Now, because of global warming and related changes in the monsoons and trade winds, the glaciers are retreating at a startling rate, and scientists say the ancient icepacks could nearly disappear within one or two generations.
13th May 2007
Missouri Floods Subside, May Have Been Exacerbated by Warming - Bloomberg The heavy rainfall that caused the Missouri River to rise as much as 13 feet (4 meters) above its flood stage in some areas may have been exacerbated by global warming, climatologists said. As much as 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain fell in the state in the past week, the National Weather Service said. ``Some of the extreme rains can be blamed on global warming,'' said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground Web site in Ann Arbor, Michigan. ``It's thought that as the globe continues to warm, these events will become more extreme.''
13th May 2007
Climate Change Fosters Coral-Eating Starfish - IPS At the Kushimoto marine park, 640 km southwest of the national capital, divers proudly display the coral-eating starfish they pluck away from the famed table coral formations that attract tourists for their sheer beauty. 'The ocean around Kushimoto has become one degree warmer compared to the 1970s, and this is causing the proliferation of coral-destroying starfish. Removing the animals is hard work but our divers are eager to help,'' says Keiichi Nomura, biologist at the marine park.
Wildlife fears after low rainfall - BBC News People are asked to report any environmental incidents as fears grow for wildlife after a hot and dry spring. Fears that rivers could become toxic to fish have been voiced by the Environment Agency after a dry April.
6th May 2007
Timeline: Changeable UK weather - BBC The UK is experiencing summertime conditions in early spring - with temperatures already hitting more than 26C in the south. Here is a summary of this year's changeable weather. Record highs and observations will be updated through what the Met Office predicts could be the hottest year yet recorded.
6th May 2007
Something?s Up With the Violets - New York Times FOR many New Yorkers, familiarity with nature comes mainly in the form of extravagant salads, but for Steve Brill, extravagant salads come from his familiarity with nature. He has been living off the bounty of the city?s parks for 25 years, feasting on wild edibles and leading foraging tours twice a week.
6th May 2007
Italy declares drought emergency - CNN.com ROME, Italy (Reuters) -- Italy declared a state of emergency in northern and central regions on Friday due to fears of drought following unusually warm and dry weather.
Alarm grows in European farming over drought - EARTHtimes.org Berlin - A spring drought affecting parts of Europe north of the Alps is worrying farmers, who say they need rain within the next couple of weeks or crops will fail. Helmut Born of the German Farmers Federation said this week: "We are hearing from the meteorologists that the drought area stretches from northern France through to Poland." Affected farmers say the soil is as dry as it usually is in August.
Arctic Leaders Blame Warming for Wolves, Suicide - Planet Ark WASHINGTON - Global warming sent marauding wolves into an Alaskan hamlet, killed Norwegian reindeer with unlikely parasites and may even spur suicide among Inuit youth, Arctic leaders said on Thursday.
As the Climate Changes, Bits of England's Coast Crumble - New York Times As climate change has accelerated erosion on the east coast of Britain, many scientists and politicians have decided that it no longer makes sense to defend the land. Under the policy of managed retreat, farms, nature preserves and villages are surrendered to the sea.
Global warming blamed for Swedish beetle-infestation - International Herald Tribune Until now, the beetle has never been a big problem in Northern Europe, mainly because long and cold winters kept their numbers down. But for this year and the next, experts are predicting an explosion in the number of beetles, causing the death of up to 60 million cubic meters, or 2.1 billion cubic feet, of trees - almost two-thirds of the yearly regeneration of Sweden's forests. "This is the worst situation we've ever seen here in Sweden," said Bo Langstrom, a professor of entomology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. "Usually, the beetle only produces one brood per year here in Sweden. But last year, for the first time, it produced two."
Shrinking giants: The grey whales under threat from starvation They were one of the triumphs of conservation worldwide. Grey whales were hunted to the brink of extinction in the 1850s after the discovery of calving lagoons, and again in the early 1900s with the introduction of floating whaling factories. In 1937, they were given partial protection by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), and full protection 10 years later.
3rd May 2007
Amphibians in losing race with environmental change Even though they had the ability to evolve and survive for hundreds of millions of years - since before the time of the dinosaurs and through many climatic regimes - the massive, worldwide decline of amphibians can best be understood by their inability to keep pace with the current rate of global change, a new study suggests.
Ice shrinks, birds migrate early in warmer Arctic - AlertNet A Norwegian glacier has shrunk on an island 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, a usually frozen fjord is ice-free and snow bunting birds have migrated back early in possible signs of global warming.
26th April 2007
It's springtime for snifflers - New York Daily News Spring is barely in swing but New York doctors are already getting calls from allergy sufferers miserable from trees pollinating after a short, mild winter.
Arctic ice nears record low - USA Today Scientists report that the 2007 minimum extent of sea ice across the Arctic could set an all-time record low due to global warming. Based on current data, researchers at the University of Colorado say there's a 33% chance this will...
24th April 2007
An island made by global warming - The Independent The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland's enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.
24th April 2007
Higher temperatures slow tropical tree growth - Mongabay.com Climate change may be reducing growth rates of tropical rainforest trees, a development that could have widespread impacts for biodiversity, forest productivity, and even climate change itself, according to new research published in Ecology Letters.
24th April 2007
Deep sea fish growing slower due to global warming - Mongabay.com Changes in ocean temperature have altered the growth rates of commercially harvested fish over the past century, according to a new study published in this week's early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
24th April 2007
The 'Canaries' Under The Sound - Hartford Courant Microscopic shells shed by single-celled creatures lie deep within the estuary's sediment, and researchers believe they have a lot to tell us about climate change.
Foraminifera: Elphidium excavatum ousted by Ammonia beccarii. Causes: A warming Ocean and excess nitrogen. Effects: Dramatic changes to the marine food chain.
Leading Article: A global warning from the dust bowl of Australia - Independent Australia is in the midst of a crippling drought, the country's worst on record. Many towns and cities have been forced to enact drastic water restrictions as reservoirs have run dry. Rivers have been reduced to a trickle. The drought has severely damaged the agricultural sector. Farmers are raising emaciated cattle and sheep. Cotton-lint production has plummeted. Wine grape and rice output has collapsed. Agricultural production has fallen by almost one-quarter in a year. And it is estimated that the drought has knocked three-quarters to 1 per cent off the country's growth as a whole.
Early sighting of basking shark - BBC News A basking shark is spotted cruising through Irish waters - two months earlier than usual. According to Dr Savidge, the sighting of the shark is extremely unusual for this time of year as there are only a few sightings in the lough each year and these are usually in the high summer months of July and August. However, in recent years there has been a rise in the number of sightings of the coast off the British Isles which is believed to be partially due to climate change as the sharks follow plankton from warmer seas.
20th April 2007
Global warming blamed for lack of icebergs - StarPhoenix Plenty of icebergs have been produced in Greenland in the last decade, but warming seas are melting them before they get to Canada, according to marine geologist Chris Woodworth-Lynas.
20th April 2007
Forest fire alert due to warm, dry weather - NZZ The Swiss environment office has put the country on alert, warning of a high risk of forest fires due to the lack of rain and unseasonably warm weather.
Drought in Australia by Matt Taylor - BBC News Australia's worst drought on record got tougher on Thursday when the prime minister announced there won't be enough water to allow irrigation along the country's largest river system, unless there's significant rainfall over the next month.
19th April 2007
Climate change has pushed up Jakarta rainfall: BMG - Jakarta Post Climate change has pushed up Jakarta rainfall: BMGJakarta Post, Indonesia. Increased temperatures caused by human-induced global warming have led to higher monthly rainfall in Jakarta, according to the Geophysical and ...
Bangladesh: A nation in fear of drowning The once lush island of Aralia is disappearing under rising waters as flooding becomes more frequent, temperatures increase and disease kills four people a month. Shamola Begum will never forget the way her son cried in the last days of his life. Nine-year-old Masuk had always been a sickly child, but before he died he'd pleaded: "Mother, I need food." But Shamola often only had a little rice to feed him; nothing more.
18th April 2007
'Fewer leaves' behind frog demise A decline in leaf-litter in forests, not a fungal infection, could be behind the demise of frogs, a study suggests. Scientists, from Florida International University, the University of Costa Rica and San Diego State University, suggested shifts in the area's climate had led to a decline in the habitat needed to sustain the creatures.
Out of Africa: diseases could hit animals and crops - The Herald Many different species are relocating their habitats in response to global warming, and diseases are doing much the same. Blue-tongue is one such disease that now poses an imminent threat to the UK. It was first described in South Africa and then spread through the tropics and sub-tropics.
Catastrophic Climate change very evident for travellers to Argentina - Canadian National Newspaper Global warming is a subject that is never far from the news, and yet there are very few places on the planet where evidence of climate change can be so clearly seen as in the ice fields of the south Andies in Argentina and Chile. The Perito Moreno glacier in southern Argentina is a particularly beautiful and arguably typical example. Until recently this ancient frozen leviathan was still advancing, one of only three in the world to do so. Now, things have changed, as we discovered when we visited the area.
17th April 2007
Storm Spurs Talk of Climate Shift - The New York Sun The greatest storm to hit the city in more than 20 years, providing the plants with a needed drink, causing some challenging commutes, and threatening the Long Island coastline, is escalating the debate about a climate shift. "We can no longer deny the science and bury our heads in the sand. Climate change is real issue with real consequences. And as a coastal city, New York can't just sit back and hope for the best."
Britons set for a warm weekend - Guardian Unlimited Large parts of Britain to enjoying temperatures of up to 25C, around 10 degrees above the seasonal average and warmer even than the south of Spain. Looking ahead to this summer, the Met Office warned yesterday there was a "high probability" that temperatures would exceed the averages of the last 30 years. Bookmakers William Hill said today they were cutting the odds on the UK seeing a temperature of 100F (37.8C) this year from 8-1 to 4-1 following heavy betting. "The sums of money we are taking on the temperatures reaching 100F are unprecedented," a spokesman said. "We have already taken several four-figure bets and we are now the shortest price we have ever been in April."
13th April 2007
Satellite to study source of 'night shining' clouds - New Scientist Iridescent, silvery blue clouds at the edge of space that may be connected to global warming will be studied by a NASA spacecraft set to launch on 25 April. The Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) mission will be the first satellite dedicated to studying the enigmatic phenomenon of "noctilucent", or night-shining clouds. The shimmering clouds can be seen glowing just before sunrise or just after sunset because they are so high up - forming at an altitude of about 80 kilometres - that the Sun illuminates them from below the horizon.
13th April 2007
Street crime 'to rise with temperatures' experts warn - The Scotsman as Britain warms over the next century, law enforcement experts are beginning to worry that they will soon lose the help of two of their key winter allies - Frost and Snow. There are also concerns that warmer summers will encourage increased alcohol consumption, which is strongly linked to criminal activity. Ken Pease, visiting professor of crime science at University College London and one of Britain's leading criminologists, said: "We know that more people on the streets, larger crowds, and alcohol consumption are all linked to increases in crime. And it stands to reason that warmer weather will encourage all three. "The question really is not whether global warming will lead to an increase in street crime, but by how much?"
12th April 2007
What's killing seabirds? Scientists baffled - Seattle Times Something is killing seabirds. For the third winter running, seabirds not usually seen in such near-shore waters have been washing up, apparently starved to death, on beaches in California, Oregon and Washington. And for the third year, scientists say the reasons aren't clear. What they do know is this: The deaths matter. Ocean temperatures have, on average, been warm and the food web has been unproductive during the past three years, said Bill Peterson, an oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service. "The birds were stressed at the end of their rope," he said.
12th April 2007
Unicorns of the sea: Dying in the depths Narwhals, the "unicorns" of the sea, are in particular danger as whales and dolphins, already depleted by centuries of hunting, are driven towards extinction by global warming, a new report reveals.
Climbers Witnessing Global Warming - San Francisco Chronicle Mountaineers are bringing back firsthand accounts of vanishing glaciers, melting ice routes, crumbling rock formations and flood-prone lakes where glaciers once rose. The observations are transforming a growing number of alpine and ice climbers, some...
Lake Superior's warming accelerates - Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune For the past generation, Lake Superior has been warming even faster than the climate around it, according to a study by several professors at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Attributed to reduced ice cover because of milder winters, the warming has caused the lake's "summer season" to begin about two weeks earlier than it did 27 years ago. "It's a remarkably rapid rate of change," said Jay ...
6th April 2007
Reef could be dead in 20 years - Sydney Morning Herald The Great Barrier Reef could be dead in 20 years unless there is a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, a marine biology expert said today. Rising sea temperatures were bleaching the coral and causing it to die, said Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.
6th April 2007
Sea life threatened by acidic oceans: UN panel - Sydney Morning Herald Rising carbon dioxide emissions are making the world's oceans more acidic, particularly closer to the poles, heralding disaster for marine life, a major UN report on climate change impacts has warned. Harvey Marchant, Australian lead author on polar regions for the report, the second of four this year by the UN climate panel, said research showed a high take-up of carbon dioxide by polar oceans was producing marked changes in several species.
Warming may not spark tree growth - Harvard University Gazette A bright spot in the gloomy global warming picture has been scientists' predictions that at least some carbon dioxide will be removed from the atmosphere by a burst of growth from tropical forests. New research from the Arnold Arboretum, however, questions that prediction, finding that trees in two forests on opposite sides of the world have been growing dramatically slower, not faster, as temperatures have risen over the past 20 years.
Global Harming -- Climate Change Threatens Ecosystems Worldwide - RedNova The frogs went silent SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Back in the Puerto Rican rain forest for the first time in five years, biologist Rafael Joglar sensed something was wrong. He wasn't hearing the frogs whose nocturnal calls he had long recorded in the misty highlands.
4th April 2007
Warming sea to hit commercial fisheries: CSIRO - ABC Online A new CSIRO report has warned that climate change is causing a significant change in the make-up of Australia's oceans. The first major study into the impact of global warming on Australia's marine ecosystem reveals that ocean temperatures on the east coast of Tasmania have increased by up to two degrees Celsius in the last 20 years. That is sparking a significant shift in fish species, with tropical fish migrating south into temperate waters.
4th April 2007
Crops threatened by heat, drought - China Daily Warm winter weather combined with the prolonged drought that has gripped a wide swathe of China have put crops at risk across the country, officials have said.
4th April 2007
Warmest March ever - The Norway Post The Met Office has never recorded as high a mean temperature for March as this year. The average temperature for the month was 4.1 degrees higher than normal.
3rd April 2007
Russia Sees Ill Effects of 'General Winter's' Retreat - Washington Post Experts have long feared that Earth's warming climate would cause tropical diseases such as malaria to spread into more temperate zones, but a dramatic example of an apparently climate-related disease outbreak cropped up this winter in a cold place -- Russia. Warmer winters are allowing virus carrying mice that would normally perish to survive and infect humans. The viruses can cause a serious, and sometimes deadly, disease known as hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, or HFRS.
2nd April 2007
The Age Of Warming - CBS News If you were waiting for the day global warming would change the world, that day is here. It's happening, far from civilization's notice, in a place about as remote as you can get. Scientists believed Antarctica, at the bottom of the world, was too vast, too remote, to be bothered by climate change any time soon. But now glaciers are setting speed records for melting. Whole colonies of penguins are disappearing. Why does it matter? Antarctica is a climate giant, driving ocean and wind currents worldwide, with enormous potential to raise sea levels.
2nd April 2007
Climate change: Canada's cruel harvest - Independent The authorities in Ottawa announced last week a sharp reduction in the numbers of pups that hunters will be allowed to kill this spring in a first official acknowledgement of the impact the melting ice is having on the seal population. Conservationists, however, are demanding that the harvest be cancelled.
2nd April 2007
Dengue Surging In Mexico, Latin America - CBS News The deadly hemorrhagic form of dengue fever is increasing dramatically in Mexico, and experts predict a surge throughout Latin America fueled by climate change, migration and faltering mosquito eradication efforts.
Where have all the cuckoos gone? Reseacher David Glue believes that the main reason why the cuckoo is in crisis is to be found not in the UK but thousands of miles away in Africa. "We know that the cuckoo overwinters in East Africa, which is increasingly being hit by drought as a result of climate change and which is making conditions very difficult for both wildlife and people in the region,"
29th March 2007
Norwegian ocean waters are warmest ever recorded - USA Today Winter ice cover in the Arctic Barents Sea in 2006 was the lowest ever recorded, and waters all along the Norwegian coast were hitting record high average temperatures, the national Institute of Marine Research said Wednesday.
29th March 2007
Scientists say Antarctic ice sheet is thinning HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas-sized piece of the Antarctic ice sheet is thinning, possibly due to global warming, and could cause the world's oceans to rise significantly, polar ice experts said on Wednesday.
29th March 2007
NASA Data Shows Golden State Heating Up - RedNova Average temperatures in California rose almost one degree Celsius (nearly two degrees Fahrenheit) during the second half of the 20th century, with urban areas blazing the way to warmer conditions, according to a new study by scientists at NASA and California State University, Los Angeles.
29th March 2007
Lack of ice set to kill start of Canada seal hunt OTTAWA (Reuters) - The first stage of Canada's controversial annual harp seal hunt is likely to be scrapped because the ice floes where pups are born have broken up and many animals have drowned, officials and animal rights activists said on Tuesday.
100pc in drought declared in Victoria - Stuff SYDNEY: Australia's lingering drought, one of the worst on record, has produced a first-ever official declaration that all agricultural land in the southeastern state of Victoria is in drought.