Climate Change

Here's a bunch of interesting articles that have been piling up in my bookmark toolbar. So now I can get them off the toolbar, and I'll be able to find them when I search my blog, if I want to refer to them. I'm putting smaller excerpts than I might if I were posting fewer items.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090622103833.htm

Close Relationship Between Past Warming And Sea-level Rise

ScienceDaily (July 7, 2009) — A team from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS), along with colleagues from Tübingen (Germany) and Bristol presents a novel continuous reconstruction of sea level fluctuations over the last 520 thousand years. Comparison of this record with data on global climate and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels from Antarctic ice cores suggests that even stabilisation at today's CO2 levels may commit us to sea-level rise over the next couple of millennia, to a level much higher than long-term projections from the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31748671/ns/world_news-world_environment/

U.N official: Developing countries need money now to fight global warming

updated 8:31 p.m. ET, Mon., July 6, 2009

AMSTERDAM - Developing countries need money now to grapple with global warming, and the Group of Eight summit this week could energize troubled climate negotiations if it decided to make "significant" funds available, the top U.N. climate official said Monday.
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More than 100 countries — many of them among the world's poorest — will suffer severely from climate change, he said.

For many of the poorest countries, climate change will mean more erratic and expensive food supplies, Oxfam International said in a report released Monday as a briefing paper for the G-8 leaders.

The British-based charity said chronic hunger may be "the defining human tragedy of this century," as climate change causes growing seasons to shift, crops to fail, and storms and droughts to ravage fields.

It predicted that as weather patterns change, farmers will be forced to abandon traditional crops. Water and food scarcity could lead to mass migration and conflict, it said in a study that found striking similarities across geographic zones.

More than 1 billion people, or about one in six people on earth, go hungry today. Without action, Oxfam said, most of the gains of fighting poverty in the world's poorest countries over the past 50 years will be wiped out, "irrecoverable for the foreseeable future."
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630132005.htm

Super-size Deposits Of Frozen Carbon In Arctic Could Worsen Climate Change

ScienceDaily (July 6, 2009) — The vast amount of carbon stored in the arctic and boreal regions of the world is more than double that previously estimated, according to a study published this week.

The amount of carbon in frozen soils, sediments and river deltas (permafrost) raises new concerns over the role of the northern regions as future sources of greenhouse gases.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090701102900.htm

Sea Ice At Lowest Level In 800 Years Near Greenland

ScienceDaily (July 2, 2009) — New research, which reconstructs the extent of ice in the sea between Greenland and Svalbard from the 13th century to the present indicates that there has never been so little sea ice as there is now. The research results from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, are published in the scientific journal, Climate Dynamics.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090618161150.htm

Sudden Collapse In Ancient Biodiversity: Was Global Warming The Culprit?

ScienceDaily (June 19, 2009) — Scientists have unearthed striking evidence for a sudden ancient collapse in plant biodiversity. A trove of 200 million-year-old fossil leaves collected in East Greenland tells the story, carrying its message across time to us today.

Results of the research appear in the journal Science.

The researchers were surprised to find that a likely candidate responsible for the loss of plant life was a small rise in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which caused Earth's temperature to rise.

Global warming has long been considered as the culprit for extinctions--the surprise is that much less carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere may be needed to drive an ecosystem beyond its tipping point than previously thought.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090223221425.htm

Lower Increases In Global Temperatures Could Lead To Greater Impacts Than Previously Thought

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2009) — A new study by scientists updating some of the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001 Third Assessment Report finds that even a lower level of increase in average global temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions could cause significant problems in five key areas of global concern.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225073215.htm

Ice Declining Faster Than Expected In Both Arctic And Antarctic Glaciers

ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2009) — Multidisciplinary research from the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008 provides new evidence of the widespread effects of global warming in the polar regions. Snow and ice are declining in both polar regions, affecting human livelihoods as well as local plant and animal life in the Arctic, as well as global ocean and atmospheric circulation and sea level.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225073213.htm

Climate Change Is Not Taken Seriously Because Media Is Not Highlighting Its Significance, Expert Says

ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2009) — Climate change will not be taken seriously until the media highlights its significance, say researchers at the University of Liverpool.

Researchers found that the total number of articles on climate change printed over three years was fewer than one month’s worth of articles featuring health issues. The articles offered mixed messages about the seriousness and imminence of problems facing the environment.

Dr Gavin explains: “Our research suggests that the media is not treating these issues with the seriousness that scientists would say they deserve. The research company lpsos-MORI found that 50% of people think the jury is still out on the causes of global warming. The limited amount of media coverage - which tends to be restricted to the broadsheets - means that this statistic is unlikely to alter in the short-term.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090220074831.htm

Global Warning: Hotter Days, Increased Hospitalizations For Respiratory Problems

ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2009) — High summer temperatures, pushed higher by global climate change, may bring with them a spike in hospitalizations for respiratory problems, according to an analysis of data from twelve European cities, from Dublin to Valencia.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090224133507.htm

Rich Countries’ Invisible Carbon Dioxide Emissions

ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2009) — Rich countries are contributing to the emission increases in developing nations, but this is not accounted for in international negotiations.

The report “Journey to world top emitter”, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, states that Chinese CO2 emissions increased by 45 percent from 2002 to 2005. Half of the increase was due to export production, 60 percent of which was exported to western countries. Electronic commodities and metals are important products.

Only 7 percent of the emissions increase was triggered through househould consumption in China, the researchers from the University of Cambridge, CICERO, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Leeds found.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090212150848.htm

Tracking Warming Trend In Northwestern North America

ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2009) — A new Montana State University study says that weather, especially in late winter and early spring, is getting warmer in northwestern North America.
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http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change

Line plot of global mean land-ocean temperature index, 1880 to present. The dotted black line is the annual mean and the solid red line is the five-year mean. The green bars show uncertainty estimates.




http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=1

Paul Krugman: Betraying the Planet

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 28, 2009

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
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But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.
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