05.12.11
Can Clouds Help Mitigate Global Warming?
Can Clouds Help Mitigate Global Warming? Missing Links Found in Biology of Cloud Formation Over Oceans
ScienceDaily (May 11, 2011) —
05.08.11
Effects Of A Hotter Planet
Published on Saturday, May 7, 2011 by National Public Radio
World’s Farmers Feel The Effects Of A Hotter Planet
by Richard Harris
Scientists have long predicted that — eventually — temperatures and altered rainfall caused by global climate change will take a toll on four of the most important crops in the world: rice, wheat soy and corn.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/07-1
05.05.11
Climate Change in Arctic
Effects of Climate Change in Arctic More Extensive Than Expected, Report Finds
ScienceDaily (May 4, 2011) — A much reduced covering of snow, shorter winter season and thawing tundra: The effects of climate change in the Arctic are already here. And the changes are taking place significantly faster than previously thought. This is what emerges from a new research report on the Arctic, presented in Copenhagen this week. Margareta Johansson, from Lund University, is one of the researchers behind the report.
05.04.11
Gulf stream and global warming
Indian Ocean current ‘could save British climate’An ocean current on the other side of the world could save Britain from a freezing climate like that seen in the film The Day After Tomorrow, say scientists.
04.25.11
Ozone Hole
Ozone Hole Linked to Climate Change All the Way to the EquatorScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2011) — In a study to be published in the April 21st issue of Science, researchers at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science report their findings that the ozone hole, which is located over the South Pole, has affected the entire circulation of the Southern Hemisphere all the way to the equator. While previous work has shown that the ozone hole is changing the atmospheric flow in the high latitudes, the new Columbia Engineering paper demonstrates that the ozone hole is able to influence the tropical circulation and increase rainfall at low latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere.
04.22.11
Sea Level Rise
Melting Ice on Arctic Islands a Major Player in Sea Level Rise
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2011) — Melting glaciers and ice caps on Canadian Arctic islands play a much greater role in sea level rise than scientists previously thought, according to a new study led by a University of Michigan researcher.
Book review: ‘Here on Earth’ by Tim Flannery
Book review: ‘Here on Earth’ by Tim Flannery
The zoologist is optimistic about the odds of human survival but believes it will take sweeping behavioral change.
Prehistoric recovery
Earth Recovered from Prehistoric Global Warming Faster Than Previously ThoughtScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2011) — Earth may be able to recover from rising carbon dioxide emissions faster than previously thought, according to evidence from a prehistoric event analyzed by a Purdue University-led team.
04.12.11
Penguins That Shun Ice
Penguins That Shun Ice Still Lose Big from a Warming ClimateScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2011) — Fluctuations in penguin populations in the Antarctic are linked more strongly to the availability of their primary food source than to changes in their habitats, according to a new study published online on April 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Funded in part by the Lenfest Ocean Program, this research indicates that species often considered likely “winners” of changing conditions, such as large-scale ice melting, may actually end up as the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
04.11.11
Clues for Predicting Climate Change
Ancient Fossils Hold Clues for Predicting Future Climate ChangeScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2011) — By studying fossilized mollusks from some 3.5 million years ago, UCLA geoscientists and colleagues have been able to construct an ancient climate record that holds clues about the long-term effects of Earth’s current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a key contributor to global climate change.
04.10.11
New York set to be big loser as sea levels rise
RG mail
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13011073
8 April 2011
New York set to be big loser as sea levels rise
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News, Vienna
New York is a major loser and Reykjavik a winner from new forecasts of sea
level rise in different regions.
04.06.11
Depletion of Arctic Ozone
Record Depletion of Arctic Ozone Layer Causing Increased UV Radiation in Scandinavia
ScienceDaily (Apr. 5, 2011) — Over the past few days ozone-depleted air masses extended from the north pole to southern Scandinavia leading to higher than normal levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation during sunny days in southern Finland. These air masses will move east over the next few days, covering parts of Russia and perhaps extend as far south as the Chinese/Russian border. Such excursions of ozone-depleted air may also occur over Central Europe and could reach as far south as the Mediterranean.
04.05.11
Trees and climate change
Tree Growth and Fecundity Affected More by Climate Change Than Previously Thought
ScienceDaily (Apr. 4, 2011) — An 18-year study of 27,000 individual trees by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientists finds that tree growth and fecundity–the ability to produce viable seeds–are more sensitive to climate change than previously thought.
04.04.11
Should We Remain Silent About Climate Change?
RG mail
by Brendan Smith and Jeremy Brecher
To talk of climate change or not to talk of climate change — that is the question.
For the last several years many of the biggest players in the
climate movement have argued that to save the planet we need to purge
the words “global warming” and “climate change” from our talking points
and educational materials. Poll-oriented groups like the Breakthrough
Institute and the Environmental Defense Fund argue that public opinion
surveys prove Americans care most about jobs and lack the capacity to
act on some distant threat.
They maintain that instead of being prophets of doom, climate
protection advocates should gather around a “good news” agenda that
limits our messaging to green jobs, national pride, and reducing our
dependence on foreign oil. “Forget about climate change” Jonathan Foley,
director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of
Minnesota, explained to a gathering of environmentalists last year. Just ask people “Do you love America?”
Eerily, the “good news” strategy is heavily influenced by the
Republican pollster and messaging maven Frank Luntz — infamous for
coining phrases like “death tax”.” In 2009 the Environmental Defense Fund teamed up with Luntz ‘s firm The Word Doctors to figure out
how to help marshal public support for a climate bill. Luntz’s
advice? “The least important component of climate change is climate
change…You’re fighting the wrong battle. What they want is an end to
dependence on foreign oil.”
This is the same Frank Luntz who has long been advising the
Republican party on how to grind climate policy to a halt. In 2002 he
authored an influential memo
advising Republicans to greenwash their public image while sowing
public confusion about climate change. Republicans should “continue to
make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate”
because otherwise, he warned, “[s]hould the public come to believe that
the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming
will change accordingly.”
Both political parties took Luntz’s advice. Democrats and their
allies began calling their climate bill the “Clean Energy Jobs and
American Power Act.” They stopped highlighting the economic and
environmental implications of failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
To hear them speak there was no climate crisis, only promises of green
jobs and energy independence. Meanwhile, Republicans and their forces
of climate denial talked about climate change all the time. Rush
Limbaugh and Glenn Beck obsessively ridiculed Al Gore during snow
storms and profiled “experts” who denied the existence of climate
change.
So what was the effect of climate activists’ decision to stop
talking about climate change? The enemies of the planet won. Climate
legislation is dead. The US has not cut emissions, created millions of
new climate-protecting green jobs, or reduced dependence on foreign
oil. Not talking about climate change has failed to reap even modest
wins for the climate movement — let alone save the planet.
And possibly the most damning of all: Public concern about climate has plummeted
in direct correlation with the “stop talking about climate change”
strategy. In 1998, before Al Gore tirelessly began traveling the
country with his doom and gloom slideshow, only 50% if the country
considered climate change a major worry. By 2008, a year after Gore
and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel
Peace Prize, two-thirds of Americans said they “worry a great deal or
fair amount about climate change.” In 2009 Frank Luntz instructed
environmentalists to stop talking about climate change and by March
2011, the number of people concerned about the climate had dropped back
down to 51%.
It is time to stop trying to save the planet by silence about what
threatens it. The climate movement needs to start telling the
inconvenient truth again. Richard Wiles, co-founder of the
Environmental Working Group, writing recently about his own struggle with climate denial,
observed that “what’s worse” than climate denial: “the other lie I’ve
discovered in the process. It’s the lie that I’m telling. It’s the lie
that we all tell to our children and each other when we don’t talk
about climate disruption. It’s the lie of us all pretending that
everything will be OK.”
Beyond an ethical aversion to lying, there are hard-nosed political
reasons why the forces of climate protection need to keep ringing the
climate alarm bell.
Whether or not they currently believe in climate change, people are
going to experience the climate catastrophe. Disasters are coming —
indeed they are already here — and that is going to drive the agenda.
It is up to us to explain why the floods, hurricanes, droughts, and
other catastrophes are happening and to lay out what to do.
Even though people may initially curse the messenger and trigger
despair, history shows that bad news can spur action and social change.
It was the danger of nuclear fallout in America’s children’s milk
that spurred the movement that led to a ban on nuclear testing and
ultimately to the reduction of strategic arsenals by 80 percent. It
was Rachel Carson’s revelation in Silent Spring that DDT was poisoning
the songbirds that led the public to understand the ecological
interaction of nature and therefore support environmental protection
legislation.
Success goes to those who change the polls, not those who follow
them. Al Gore, climate scientists, and millions of climate activists
reshaped public opinion on climate. A majority of Americans are still
seriously concerned about climate. They — and others — need to know
why they’re right. Dreadful events — interpreted truthfully — are
unlikely to be ignored forever. But people will have little
opportunity to connect the dots between devastating floods,
catastrophic storms, and lethal heat waves on the one hand and the
greenhouse gasses that cause them on the other unless they are
persistently and consistently presented with the facts.
The right wing, backed by the fossil fuel industry, have spent
millions of dollars promoting this story: The climate crisis is an
imaginary threat invented by liberals to justify government power over
individuals and companies, destroying both liberty and jobs in the
process. To remain silent about the reality of the climate change
threat is to maximize the credibility and effectiveness of this
argument. Conversely, spelling out the facts of climate change is the
way to expose the climate denialist argument for the hoax it is.
As the climate crisis deepens, many people are likely to pass
directly from denial to despair. Fear can make people hopeless and
immobilized. If they don’t hear realistic explanations of what the
climate crisis is all about, combined with rational proposals for what
to do about it, they are made vulnerable to fantasy-based explanations
and irrational solutions. Climate change is indeed scary, but it is a
threat that affects all of us, so it provides an opportunity to
cooperate in new ways at every level from the local to the global.
The right wing is talking about climate change all the time. They
have the initiative in framing the debate. And people will make
ignorant decisions in the face of a one-sided debate. Without forceful
articulation of the truth, the proportion of the public who grasp the
seriousness of climate change could fall even further.
The real “good news” is that there are climate activist groups like 350.org and the 1Sky Campaign
that never bought into the Frank Luntz’s school of climate politics.
They kept sounding the alarm about the climate crisis. These are the
folks who organized a global day of action with 5,200 rallies from Mt.
Everest to the Great Barrier Reef in what CNN called “the most
widespread day of political action on the planet.”
Of course we should keep talking about green jobs and reduced
dependence on foreign oil — in fact we need to be presenting a robust
vision for how to build a more just and sustainable future. And of
course we need to avoid scaring people into despair. But that doesn’t
require us to be silent in the face of an existential threat. It is as
true as ever that silence equals consent.
http://www.labor4sustainability.org/post/should-we-remain-silent-about-climate-change/
04.03.11
…are we to blame?
Published on Saturday, April 2, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
Natural Disasters?Floods, earthquakes, landslides: 2011 is a year of disasters. Bill McKibben asks: are we to blame? Plus, survivors tell their tales
by Bill McKibben
03.27.11
CO2 and droughts
Cutting Carbon Dioxide Could Help Prevent Droughts, New Research Shows
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2011) — Recent climate modeling has shown that reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would give Earth a wetter climate in the short term. New research from Carnegie Global Ecology scientists Long Cao and Ken Caldeira offers a novel explanation for why climates are wetter when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations are decreasing. Their findings, published online March 24 by Geophysical Research Letters, show that cutting carbon dioxide concentrations could help prevent droughts caused by global warming.
Antarctic icebergs and climate
Antarctic Icebergs Play a Previously Unknown Role in Global Carbon Cycle, Climate
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2011) — In a finding that has global implications for climate research, scientists have discovered that when icebergs cool and dilute the seas through which they pass for days, they also raise chlorophyll levels in the water that may in turn increase carbon dioxide absorption in the Southern Ocean.
Clues To Climate Change
Spring Flowers: Clues To Climate Change
Climate Change Researchers Ask Amateur Botanists To Record Signs Of Spring
May 1, 2008 — Researchers began a nationwide initiative to track climate change by recording the timing of the first bud, first flower, and seed dispersal for plants across the country. They encouraged people to record information in their own neighborhoods and plan to compile those findings to build a comprehensive record of the changing climate.
03.20.11
Deadly heatwaves will be more frequent
Deadly heatwaves will be more frequent in coming decades, say scientists
‘Mega-heatwaves’ like the one estimated to have killed tens of thousands in western Europe in 2003 will become up to 10 times more likely over the next 40 years, a study suggests
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/17/deadly-heatwaves-europe
03.17.11
Earth history and global warming
Ancient ‘Hyperthermals’ Serve as Guide to Anticipated Climate Changes; Sudden Global Warming Events More Frequent?
ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2011) — Bursts of intense global warming that have lasted tens of thousands of years have taken place more frequently throughout Earth’s history than previously believe, according to evidence gathered by a team led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego researchers.
Killing EPA climate bills
Competing GOP and Dem Bills Share Same Goal: ‘Kill EPA Climate Rules’
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/03/16-4
03.16.11
Fire and Ice
RG mail
Fire and Ice: Melting Glaciers Trigger Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanos
Geologists Say Global Warming Expected to Cause Many New Seismic Events
By Larry West
Climatologists have been raising alarms about global warming for years,
and now geologists are getting into the act, warning that melting
glaciers will lead to an increasing number of earthquakes, tsunamis and
volcanic eruptions in unexpected places.
http://environment.about.com/od/globalwarming/a/earthquakes.htm
03.15.11
Record Ozone Loss
Arctic on the Verge of Record Ozone LossScienceDaily (Mar. 14, 2011) — Unusually low temperatures in the Arctic ozone layer have recently initiated massive ozone depletion. The Arctic appears to be heading for a record loss of this trace gas that protects Earth’s surface against ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This result has been found by measurements carried out by an international network of over 30 ozone sounding stations spread all over the Arctic and Subarctic and coordinated by the Potsdam Research Unit of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) in Germany
03.14.11
Hot air and GW: the political brand
With the climate ‘debate’, politicians never let the facts get in the way of their rigid ideologies. It makes you wonder if their hot air contributes to global warming … continue
03.09.11
Ice melt an sea rise
Melting Ice Sheets Now Largest Contributor to Sea Level RiseScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2011) — The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study — the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass — suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.
03.08.11
Clock ticking, and Arctic ice dripping
http://wiredcampus.chronicle.com/campusViewpointArticle/Climate-change-The-clock-is/388/
03.05.11
Rising CO2 and plants
Rising Carbon Dioxide Is Causing Plants to Have Fewer Pores, Releasing Less Water to the Atmosphere
ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2011) — As carbon dioxide levels have risen during the last 150 years, the density of pores that allow plants to breathe has dwindled by 34 percent, restricting the amount of water vapor the plants release to the atmosphere,
02.25.11
How Severe Can Climate Change Become?
Ancient Catastrophic Drought Leads to Question: How Severe Can Climate Change Become?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2011) — How severe can climate change become in a warming world? Worse than anything we’ve seen in written history, according to results of a study recently appearing in the journal Science.
02.20.11
Permafrost Melt Soon Irreversible
Published on Sunday, February 20, 2011 by Inter Press Service
Permafrost Melt Soon Irreversible Without Major Fossil Fuel Cutsby Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE – Thawing permafrost is threatening to overwhelm attempts to keep the planet from getting too hot for human survival.
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