Clipmarks | invictus's 'global warming' clips

Antarctic shelf 'hangs by thread'

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:44:45 GMT

clipped by: invictus

A chunk of ice the size of the Isle of Man has started to break away from Antarctica in what scientists say is further evidence of a warming climate.

Satellite images suggest that part of the ice shelf is disintegrating, and will soon crumble away.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf has been stable for most of the last century, but began retreating in the 1990s.

Six ice shelves in the same part of the continent have already been lost, says the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

Professor David Vaughan of BAS said: "Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened.

"I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread - we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be."

Tags: climate change, global warming, antarctica, wilkins ice shelf, science

Alarm over new oil-from-coal plans

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:13:15 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

A Chinese energy company is poised to open a chemical plant to make liquid fuels for cars and aircraft from coal, a move that has alarmed environmental campaigners who say it will increase carbon emissions and worsen global warming.

The plant, in Inner Mongolia, will use technology developed by Germany during the second world war to convert coal directly into synthetic diesel, dubbed "Nazi fuel". China says the process will help break its booming economy's reliance on foreign oil, and that it will build more such plants.

The US and India are also investing heavily in the technology, which is being heavily promoted by coal companies across the world as a cost-effective solution to soaring oil prices and concerns about energy security.

Tags: energy, oil, coal, environment, alternative energy, china, science

2007 data confirms warming trend

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:44:45 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: "The 11 warmest years in this set have all occurred within the last 13 years."

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

In Spain's 2007 heatwave, people cooled off as best they could

2007 has been one of the warmest years since 1850, despite the cooling influence of La Nina conditions.

The UK's Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia conclude that globally, this year ranks as the seventh warmest.

The 11 warmest years in this set have all occurred within the last 13 years. For the northern hemisphere alone, 2007 was the second warmest recorded.

The findings come as politicians at the UN climate summit try to agree a path leading to cuts in carbon emissions.

Tags: climate change, global warming, science

Experts warn Fla. about climate change

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:08:59 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Scientists and economists Tuesday warned lawmakers of consequences Florida faces from climate change, including more destructive hurricanes and a rising sea level, but they also said the state could be a leader in reducing global warming.

Three panels of experts spoke at a symposium held by the House Environmental Resources Council and three related committees.

Climate change will figure into comprehensive energy and environmental policy legislation the lawmakers will be considering during the 2008 legislative session, said Council Chairman Stan Mayfield, R-Vero Beach.

Some legislators, though, questioned whether Florida could do much to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, spewed mostly from power plants and vehicle exhausts, that contribute to global warming. That's because Florida emits only 1 percent of those gasses worldwide.

Tags: climate change, global warming, florida, science

Notes on a Sick Planet

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:45:06 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

The authors may reach a bit when they try to sound less square, likening the buying of compact fluorescent light bulbs to “an upgrade on your iTunes software.” But they make the science relevant and enjoyable with abundant visuals and conclude with some meaty ways for kids to make a difference. The old standbys are all there (switch light bulbs, recycle, use canvas bags at the grocery store). But I smiled on noticing something new: the authors suggest some “sustainable careers” kids can consider, like meteorologist and “glacial geologist.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

There’s no use avoiding it: our kids need to know about the global environmental crisis — climate change, deforestation, species extinction. And as long as we’re teaching them about all that, we may as well teach them some science at the same time. Learning about evaporation can be as boring as watching a pot boil, but if it’s part of a habitat-destroying, polar-bear-killing, actually-somewhat-interesting environmental disaster, maybe that’s something kids could enjoy reading.

Here are two new books that don’t shy away from the complexity of the science or the gravity of our environmental situation, but which also don’t forget their audience. Never before have so many serious ecological ideas been mixed so heavily with flatulence jokes and sad pictures of cute animals. The details of global warming boggle some of the world’s finest minds, but Laurie David and Cambria Gordon’s “Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming” actually makes it easy to understand.

Tags: environment, books, kids, learning, education, earth, book review, science

Gore and UN panel win Nobel prize

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:47:59 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth was an unlikely box office hit

Climate change campaigner Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The committee cited "their efforts to build up and disseminate knowledge about man-made climate change".

Mr Gore, US vice-president under Bill Clinton, said he was "deeply honoured".

Mr Gore, 59, won an Oscar for his climate change film An Inconvenient Truth while the IPCC is the top authority on global warming.

HAVE YOUR SAY

It would have made more sense to wait and see if Gore et al actually had an effect, but at least this might serve as a wake-up call to the naysayers

Geoff, Bensberg, Germany

Send us your comments

Nobel Peace Prize quiz

Indian's surprise at award

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said he was "overwhelmed" by the award.

Tags: climate change, inconvenient truth, al gore, nobel peace prize

Hurricane Planet: Is the Worst Yet to Come?

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:36:01 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Aug. 22, 2007 — If Earth is running a fever, then hurricanes like Dean and Katrina are her febrile seizures. As the rise in global temperature has accelerated over the last century, these tempestuous spasms have become more frequent and violent.

Each new spinning storm is also finding ever more victims populating its coastal targets — whether it be Mississippi or Madagascar, Kingston or Connecticut — and more ways to trigger trouble thousands of miles inland by way of an ever-more interdependent, globalized economy.

Climatologists and hurricane scientists now have little doubt there is a connection between hurricanes and global warming. Some of the strongest evidence comes from 100 years of records on Atlantic hurricanes — the most complete archive of its kind for any ocean basin. That record shows hurricanes have been increasing in a stepwise fashion since 1900.

Tags: climate change, hurricanes, weather, world

Soot 'influences Arctic climate'

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:51:12 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Soot 'influences Arctic climate'

Human activities have left a visible mark on the Arctic

Measurements from ice cores suggest that soot released by industrial activities has influenced climate change in the Arctic.

The researchers looked at ice cores covering the period 1788 to 2002.

The natural record shows that concentrations of black carbon, or soot, were particularly bad from 1851 to 1951, Science journal reports.

Soot adds to local climate warming because dark ground absorbs energy from the Sun that white snow would reflect.

Joe McConnell and Ross Edwards from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, US, gathered and analysed ice core samples from various regions of Greenland.

These samples allowed them to analyse annual deposits of soot and other chemicals going back 215 years.

"In addition to black carbon, we measured a broad range of other chemicals at very high depth resolution in this same ice core," said Dr McConnell.

Tags: climate change, global warming, arctic, ice cores, industry, science

Is climate change boosting hurricanes?

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:15:55 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

What it tells us, says Mooney, is that the link between climate change and hurricanes is complicated. As he emphasizes again and again, “global warming did not cause Hurricane Katrina, or any other weather disaster.” On the other hand, statistical analysis of the past century’s hurricanes and computer modeling of a warmer climate, nudged along by greenhouse gases, does indicate that rising ocean temperatures could fuel hurricanes that are more intense.

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

More than 28 tropical storms and hurricanes, including Katrina, were spawned in the Atlantic Ocean in 2005. In fact, the season was so extreme that it instigated an ongoing debate: Has climate change made hurricanes fiercer and more frequent? As Chris Mooney relates in Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming (Harcourt, 2007), proponents of both sides of the dispute have had a field day with this question. Yet the danger of extrapolating from a single catastrophic season became clear in 2006, an unusually quiet year for Atlantic hurricanes. Just 10 storms brewed, only two of which became major hurricanes. So what does this mixed record say about global warming?

The basic scenario goes as follows: Hurricanes—circular storms spinning around a region of low atmospheric pressure—are powered by energy released by spiraling surface winds that draw heat from the ocean. Warmer seas should provide more energy and make hurricanes stronger.

Tags: climate change, global warming, hurricanes, weather, science

Extreme weather breaks records in 2007

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 22:23:31 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: africa.reuters.com

Extreme weather breaks records in 2007

GENEVA (Reuters) - The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfall in South Africa, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1 degree Celsius higher than average for those months.

There have also been severe monsoon floods across South Asia, abnormally heavy rains in northern Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heatwaves in southeastern Europe and Russia, and unusual snowfall in South Africa and South America this year, the WMO said.

"The start of the year 2007 was a very active period in terms of extreme weather events," Omar Baddour of the agency's World Climate Programme told journalists in Geneva.

Tags: climate change, global warming, weather, science

The Earth fights back

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:40:43 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Never mind higher temperatures, climate change has a few nastier surprises in store. Bill McGuire says we can also expect more earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and tsunamis

Unlike most apparently intractable problems, which have a tendency to go away when examined closely and analytically, the climate change predicament just seems to get bigger and scarier the more we learn about it.

periods in our planet's history when the climate was swinging about wildly, most notably during the last ice age, it appears that far more than the weather was affected

an increase in volcanic activity, earthquakes, giant submarine landslides and tsunamis

there was a close correlation between how quickly sea levels went up and down during the last ice age and the level of explosive activity at volcanoes in Italy and Greece

how can rising sea levels cause volcanoes to erupt?

answer lies in the enormous mass of the water pouring into the ocean basins

seems to be sufficient to load and bend the underlying crust.

Tags: science, earth, global warming, earthquakes, volcanooes

Hurricanes Brewing in Mediterranean?

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:46:00 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Hurricanes Brewing in Mediterranean?

July 19, 2007 — Climate change models tailored to investigate some strange storms in the Mediterranean suggest that global warming could lead to hurricanes forming in that sea. If so, countries around the Mediterranean could be in for the most violent weather in centuries.

Most hurricanes form in the tropical Atlantic, rarely reaching Europe. But warming oceans could encourage them in the relatively landlocked Mediterranean, say the authors of a new study.

"It should be a matter of concern," said Miguel Gaertner, a researcher at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo, Spain. "The consequences could be quite dangerous."

Tags: climate change, hurricanes, mediterranean, weather

China's Massive Glaciers Melting

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:27:14 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

China's Massive Glaciers Melting

Massive glaciers in northwest China have melted at an alarming rate over the past 40 years, with global warming believed to be the culprit, scientists said in comments published Friday.

China's remote Xinjiang region is home to nearly half of the nation's glaciers that supply the rest of the country and other parts of Asia with water.

However they have shrunk by 20 percent and snow lines there have receded by about 200 feet since 1964, the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a report, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Global warming is believed to be to blame, with the internal temperature of the glaciers rising by 10 percent over the past two decades, the academy said.

Tags: climate change, china, global warming

Water World: Slipping Toward Climate Catastrophe

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:28:42 GMT

clipped by: JICWyllie

Clip Source: www.alternet.org

Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at NASA, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic.

The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees Celsius above today's level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 cm but by 25 meters.

Hansen and his team find it "implausible" that the expected warming before 2100 "would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century."

As well as drowning most of the world's centers of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature

less ice means less heat reflected

Tags: environment, ice, i-climate change, i-risks, i-catastrophe, i-increase

Global Warming Q & A From NASA

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:57:15 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: earthobservatory.nasa.gov

On May 11, 2007, the Earth Observatory published Global Warming, a fact sheet outlining the basic principles behind the science of global warming. This follow-up article of questions and answers is based on questions from readers and other common questions about global warming. Many scientists and writers contributed to this article.

What does NASA have to do with global warming?

If Earth has warmed and cooled throughout history, what makes scientists think that humans are causing global warming now?

Has the Sun been more active in recent years, and could it be responsible for some global warming?

Haven’t satellites actually observed cooling temperatures in the lower atmosphere?

Are the ozone hole and global warming related?

Are the unusual or extreme weather events in my area caused by global warming?

Are there natural processes that will amplify or limit global warming?

What if global warming isn’t as severe as predicted?

Why is global warming a problem?

Tags: climate change, global warming, reference, nasa