Clipmarks | jetcloud's 'climate' clips

An Exploding Asteroid

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 04:55:23 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud

A new study shows that a comet or asteroid may have exploded over Canada and caused the Earth's climate to change at the end of the last Ice Age some 12,900 years ago.

During the period known as the Younger Dryas, large mammals like wooly mammoths became extinct.
Credit: USGS

Many scientists hypothesize that mass extinctions our planet’s history may well have been due to comet and asteroid impacts.
Credit: NASA ARC

Samples of diamonds, gold and silver that have been found in the region have been conclusively sourced through X-ray diffractometry in the lab of UC Professor of Geology Warren Huff back to the diamond fields region of Canada.

The only plausible scenario available now for explaining their presence this far south is the kind of cataclysmic explosive event described by West’s theory. "We believe this is the strongest evidence yet indicating a comet impact in that time period," says Tankersley.

Rapid permafrost thaw expected

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:09:32 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: "Climate warming is degrading permafrost, and roads, runways and building foundations in many parts of the North have been buckling and cracking as the top layer of the ground thaws. The increasingly mushy ground also has created "drunken forests," where trees now lean at strange angles.

At least 30 per cent of all the carbon stored in soils worldwide is found in the North -- and scientists worry rising temperatures will release carbon dioxide and methane, both potent greenhouse gases, now locked in the permafrost.

"To me, probably the biggest uncertainty is whether methane emissions are going to go up, and if they are, by how much," says Lawrence.

Last summer, the Arctic sea ice shrank to more than 30 per cent below average, setting a modern-day record. Temperatures over land in the western Arctic also were unusually warm, reaching more than 2 C above the 1978-2006 average and raising questions about whether the ice retreat was tied to the warming temperatures over land."

Clip Source: www.canada.com

researchers warn

Melting could happen much more quickly than previously thought, putting towns and roads at risk, study says

Permafrost, which covers close to half of Canada and threatens to release vast stores of carbon into the atmosphere, could undergo a much more rapid thaw than previously thought, according to an American study.

The rate of climate warming over northern Canada, Alaska, and Russia could more than triple if Arctic ice continues to retreat rapidly, says the report, which highlights the vulnerability of permafrost and the roadways, communities and ecosystems now sitting on the frozen ground.

"We are expecting the Arctic to warm faster than the rest of the world, and this suggests that in relatively short, 5-10 year periods that rate of warming can really go up," says David Lawrence, lead author of the study conducted at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Tags: permafrost, arctic, climate warming, canada, drunken forests

Canada first in the world to pass climate act

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:16:30 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud

Clip Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

TORONTO: The Canadian House of Commons has become the first parliament in the world to pass a climate act, which commits the country to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.

The House passed the Climate Change Accountability Bill on Wednesday. It was moved by the leader of the opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) Jack Layton.

The two other opposition parties - the Liberal party and the Bloc Quebecois - supported the bill.

"This is a world first," Layton said in a statement later.

"Our legislation sets tough but achievable targets that will ensure Canada does its share to avoid the dangerous two-degree increase in average global temperature that scientists warn us about," he said.

The bill sets an interim target of 25 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020 and requires progress reports from the government every five years.

Tags: climate change, canada, new democratic party (ndp), jack layton

WTKR weather: Clear skies ahead

Fri, 30 May 2008 08:17:27 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud

Clip Source: www.dailypress.com

Meteorologists rely on all kinds of equipment to forecast the weather, from radar and satellites to billion-dollar super computers.

But on days like today, a DC-9 flying overhead can give you a pretty good forecast. Just watch the jet contrails!

We're expecting clear, blue skies today. Chances are the contrails will fade very quickly. That means the upper atmosphere is pretty dry and there aren't any storm systems trying to move our way.

But by tomorrow afternoon, those contrails should start to stick around longer and even thicken up a bit. That means some humid air is pushing in to the region and we can expect some storms this weekend. We'll see how our contrail forecasting holds up.

With those blue skies today, expect high temperatures in the lower 70s.

Expect clear skies tonight with low temperatures in the low-to-mid 50s.

Warmer weather returns tomorrow. Expect plenty of sunshine with high temperatures in the low-to-mid 80s on Friday.

Current weather

Tags: contrails, weather, clouds, climate change

Insects 'will be climate change's first victims'

Tue, 06 May 2008 03:05:33 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

Tropical insects rather than polar bears could be among the first species to become extinct as a result of global warming, a study has found.

Insects in the tropics are already living at the limit of their temperature range and any further increases could quickly kill them off with huge repercussions for tropical habitats, which rely on insects for everything from pollination to waste disposal. Scientists have found that a rise in average temperatures in the tropics of just 1C or 2C could be enough to exert a significant and harmful effect on the survival of a wide variety of important insects.

Climate scientists predict that the polar regions will experience the greatest increases in average temperatures this century as a result of climate change, but the latest study suggests that even the smaller predicted change in the tropics could have a far more serious impact on local wildlife.

North Pole could be ice free in 2008

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:11:44 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud

Clip Source: environment.newscientist.com

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility.

"The set-up for this summer is disturbing," says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.

In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska.

[Video]

"There is this thin first-year ice even at the North Pole at the moment," says Serreze. "This raises the spectre – the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year."

Tags: north pole, arctic ice, canada, climate change

Thousands of Pacific walruses die; global warming blamed

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 23:25:42 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: And then, along comes a Polar Bear...

Clip Source: canadianpress.google.com

In what some scientists see as another alarming consequence of global warming, thousands of Pacific walruses above the Arctic Circle were killed in stampedes earlier this year after the disappearance of sea ice caused them to crowd onto the shoreline in extraordinary numbers.

The deaths took place during the late summer and fall on the Russian side of the Bering Strait, which separates Alaska from Russia.

"It was a pretty sobering year - tough on walruses," said Joel Garlach-Miller, a walrus expert for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Unlike seals, walruses cannot swim indefinitely. The giant, tusked mammals typically clamber onto the sea ice to rest, or haul themselves onto land for just a few weeks at a time.

But ice disappeared in the Chukchi Sea this year because of warm summer weather, ocean currents and persistent eastern winds, Garlach-Miller said.

walruses came ashore earlier and stayed longer

with herds as big as 40,000 at Point Shmidt

Tags: pacific walruses, arctic circle, killed- in- stampedes, climate change

Effects of contrails and ship tracks on climate

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:44:14 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: http://jc.stumbleupon.com/

Clip Source: jc.stumbleupon.com

The track of large ships is sometimes visualised by a trail of shallow stratus clouds. These clouds, known as 'ship tracks', form in the wake of ships and are remarkably long-lived (Fig 1). They typically are between 0.5-5 km wide, i.e. wide enough to be seen in visible satellite imagery. Sometimes a ship track appears as a band of enhanced cloud thickness embedded in stratus. Ship tracks are due to cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) in the ship's exhaust (4). They are most likely in a near-saturated environment that is otherwise depleted of CCN. Such environment is very common in the marine boundary layer over the subtropical highs. Over these large, quasi-stationary highs, the boundary-layer air is divergent, making it unlikely to draw in CCN-rich continental air.

The nature and climatic effect of ship tracks was investigated in a field campaign labeled MAST (Monterey Area ShipTrack), which was conducted during June 1994 off the central California coast.

Tags: ship tracks, contrails

Red Cross warns of global warming role in disasters

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 13:09:18 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: "Disaster costs were estimated at $34.5 billion (SFr39 billion) for 2006, a much lower figure than in 2005 - $210 billion - the year of the devastating Hurricane Katrina.
"The figures confirm the trend of the past years," Niskala told reporters. By October 2007, 410 disasters had been tallied, 56 per cent of which were weather-related.

Overall, the agency noted that in the past ten years (1997-2006) the number of natural disasters had increased by 60 per cent compared with the previous decade.

The number of dead doubled during this period to 1.2 million people.

Although some of the figures could be due to better reporting, said the Federation, there was no doubt that "severe disasters are also on the increase"."

Clip Source: www.swissinfo.ch

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has pointed to the growing role of global warming in causing natural disasters.

The Swiss-based humanitarian agency made the comments as it published its World Disasters Report 2007, which this year focuses on tackling discrimination of women, people with disabilities and the elderly during catastrophes.

Federation secretary-general Markku Niskala said that overall disasters killed fewer people in 2006 and caused less financial damage around the world than in 2005.

There were 427 disasters in 2006 compared with 433 in 2005. In the same period, the number of affected people dropped ten per cent, while the number of deaths plunged by 75 per cent to 23,833.

However, the annual report also noted that more than two thirds of natural disasters last year were caused by floods or by extreme weather and pointed to global warming as a main factor.

Tags: climate change, global warming, environment, red cross, red crescent

Arctic Impact Crater Lake Reveals Interglacial Cycles in Sediments

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:38:01 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: "The coring equipment and other instrumentation was set up using a tripod over the hole in the ice. The scientists were able to extract a core of the topmost 8.5 meters of sediment.

The international team of researchers in the field included Guillaume St-Onge; Reinhard Pienitz, principal investigator; Veli-Pekka Salonen of the University of Helsinki, Finland; and Richard Niederreiter, coring expert. Please visit http://www.cen.ulaval.ca/pingualuit/index.html for more information."

Clip Source: dailyheadlines.uark.edu

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A University of Arkansas researcher and a team of international scientists have taken cores from the sediments of a Canadian Arctic lake and found an interglacial record indicating two ice-free periods that could pre-date the Holocene Epoch.

Sonja Hausmann, assistant professor of geosciences in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, and her colleagues will report their preliminary findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week.

Sonja Hausmann, professor of geosciences at the University of Arkansas (center) and her colleagues prepare to ride Ski-doos to get their equipment to Lac Pingualit. They took a core of sediments from the crater lake and found evidence of two ice-free periods that could pre-date the Holocene Epoch.

The researchers had to pull the equipment into the crater-fed lake using sleds.

spent three weeks traveling back and forth to the lake in sub-zero temperatures to gather their data.

Tags: arctic, climate change, global warming, last ice age, meteorite, canadian arctic lake, sonja hausmann

Bali Baird in Flip-Flops? Canada's Youth Delegation Tells It like It Is

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 08:43:25 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud

Clip Source: www.desmogblog.com

The first bit of this video provides some great insight into just how bad things are going for Canada's Minister of Environment, John Baird at the United Nation's climate conference underway in Bali, Indonesia.

[Video]

Tags: canadian youth delegation, bali, bali global warmin unfccc, john baird, climate change, global warming

Fires undo forests' climate benefits, scientists find

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 09:53:59 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: "Fire activity more than doubled since the '70s across Canada," Flannigan says. And the mountain pine beetle, which has proliferated because of warmer winters, has killed vast track of boreal forest in British Columbia that is also becoming a source of CO2.

"I used to say this is what we'll expect with climate change," Flannigan says, pointing to the increasing rate of fires and insect infestation.

"Now I say climate change is here."

Flannigan says the new study builds on previous Canadian research, and provides a more detailed picture of how the forest's carbon budget is changing.

"It's a real concern," Flannigan says. "We were hoping our forests would be a carbon sink. But the more work we do the more we see they are a becoming a source because of things like disturbances."

Clip Source: www.canada.com

Northern wildfires in Prairie provinces blamed for rising carbon in atmosphere

A huge swath of Canada's boreal forest, one of the largest storehouses of carbon on the planet, is now spewing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it soaks up, scientists say.

"The sink has become a source," says forest ecologist Tom Gower, at the University of Wisconsin, whose team has documented an ominous shift in the "carbon balance" of the forest blanketing northern Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

"These boreal forests not too long ago were helping offset rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by taking up carbon dioxide and storing it," Gower said in an interview.

But with an increase in the frequency and size of fires in recent years, "that is no longer the case," he says.

"In fact, these wildfires are actually contributing to the rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere," Gower says.

A 2001 forest fire about 200 km north of Edmonton near the town of Chisholm.

Tags: canada, bushfire, climate change, environment, boreal forest, global warming

Scientist warns Tas of rising bushfire risk from climate change

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 11:29:03 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: More rain forest, bye,bye.

Clip Source: abc.net.au

A Tasmanian scientist has warned of the state's vulnerability to massive bushfires, driven by climate change.

Professor David Bowman from the University of Tasmania is leading a team of researchers investigating the impact of global climate change on rainforests in eastern Australia.

Professor Bowman says Tasmania is a tinderbox, like those areas of California being ravaged by bushfires.

"Each summer which passes which is dry and hot and windy, we are accumulating a larger burden of flammable biomass waiting to be incinerated, possibly in the worst-case scenario in uncontrollable mega-fires," said the professor.

Tags: disasters-and-accidents, fires, bushfire, environment, climate-change, environmental-management, tas

Jet traffic affecting climate

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:31:05 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: "I remember walking to and from my office [during that time] and thinking how incredibly clear the skies were," recalls Carleton. He mentioned this to a colleague and former Ph.D. student of his, David Travis of the University of Wisconsin, who had noticed the same thing. "Then we started thinking that we should look at the temperature conditions" during those days in September and compare them to years past, Carleton says.

Looking at daytime highs and nighttime lows, Carleton and Travis found the average daily temperature range across the no-fly period to be almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit larger than when jets do fly. This implies, Carleton explains, that contrails lower daytime maximum temperatures and increase nighttime low temperatures—probably in the same way that cirrus clouds do, by blocking some solar radiation from reaching earth's surface during the day, and insulating against heat loss at night.

Since finding this association, Carleton has used contrails as a sort of metr

Clip Source: www.rps.psu.edu

Young (narrow) contrails as well as older ones expand laterally across the sky. Photo by David Travis

Is this atmospheric graffiti a problem? Research by Penn State geography professor Andrew Carleton suggests it could be. Contrails "can extend the natural cirrus cover," Carleton explains, and unlike most clouds, cirrus tend to warm the surface overall because they trap heat more than they reflect the Sun's radiation. "This is a concern to climate scientists because it could mean that a lot more contrails would make global warming worse."

Although scientists had suspected that contrails affect regional temperatures, there was no way to truly test the idea until the tragic attacks on September 11, 2001. In the enforced no-fly period following the collapse of the World Trade Center, air traffic was completely stopped for three days and scientists were able to directly compare temperatures logged in the presence of contrails against temperature data collected with contrail-free skies.

Tags: aircraft, contrails, climate change, global warming

Canada goose-kill in United States

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:08:59 GMT

clipped by: jetcloud
clipper's remarks: In 1990 the Garden State had 28,000 resident Canada geese. By 1999, the population had ballooned to 82,000.
New Jersey has the highest concentration of resident Canada geese.
"In the last 60 years they've rapidly increased in numbers and they're very successful in breeding. They have five, six, seven young and they have no enemies so no animals kill them and so they're spreading wildly."

Typically, the geese are protected under The Migratory Birds Convention, a shared treaty between Canada and the United States.
"A Canada goose could not be captured, harassed, shot, wounded, killed or collected with out a permit," Carol Bannerman, a spokeswoman from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Service told CTV.ca."
Ya, da permit, eh?

Clip Source: www.ctv.ca

Between October 2005 and September 2006, about 13,160 resident Canada geese were killed in the United States by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wild Life Service. Most of them were culled in eastern states like New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

'Resident' Canada geese nest in the U.S. and southern parts of Canada. They're one of several kinds of Canada geese, and their numbers have been booming in recent years.

Retired University of Toronto professor Theo Hofmann has studied bird populations and says humans are partly to blame for the population explosion of Canada geese.

Years ago the geese would have naturally flown to vast fields in the southern United States for food during the winter months, he said. But a warmer climate and the continued feeding of geese by people has kept the birds closer to home.

"One of the major problems is that people have been feeding them. That's certainly what started it...

Covering geese eggs with oil to prevent hatching,

rules of a cull

Tags: canada goose, canada goose-kill, migritory birds, meat, captured, harassed, shot, wounded, killed, permit