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Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Scientists fear 'tipping point' in Pacific Ocean "Where scientists previously found a sea bottom abounding with life, two years ago they discovered the rotting carcasses of crabs, starfish and sea worms, swooshing from side to side in the current. Most fish had fled -- and those that didn't or couldn't joined the deathfest on the sea floor. Extraordinarily low oxygen levels were to blame -- swept up from the deep ocean into normally productive waters just off the Pacific Northwest coast by uncharacteristically strong winds....It looks like the Pacific has reached a "tipping point," a threshold where low-oxygen levels are becoming the rule, researchers said."
2008-02-12 16:29:55
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Chicago Tribune: Refinery pollution may soar "Global-warming pollution from Midwest oil refineries is expected to soar by as much as 40 percent during the next decade, a dramatic increase that runs counter to regional and national efforts to curb heat-trapping gases. Expansion plans at the BP refinery in Whiting would boost the facility's greenhouse-gas emissions to 5.8 million tons a year, the company told the Tribune. That would be equivalent to adding 320,000 cars to the nation's highways. While greenhouse gases from the tailpipes of cars get the most attention, the refineries that keep cars and trucks running also contribute to global warming. Fuel must be burned to make gasoline from oil, generating carbon-dioxide pollution."
2008-02-11 16:31:39
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The Times of India: King penguins could be wiped out by climate change "PARIS: One of the emblems of the Antarctic, the king penguin, could be driven to extinction by climate change, a French study published on Monday warns. In a long-term investigation on the penguins' main breeding grounds, investigators found that a tiny warming of the Southern Ocean by the El Nino effect caused a massive fall in the birds' ability to survive. If predictions by UN scientists of ever-higher temperatures in coming decades prove true, the species faces a major risk of being wiped out, they say. "
2008-02-10 13:33:18
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Toronto Star: The alarming redefinition of 'glacial' "The Athabasca Glacier, remnant of ice sheets that once enveloped the Canadian Rockies and most of Canada, draws hundreds of thousands of tourists each year who catch a glimpse of what much of North America and Europe probably looked like some 10,000 years ago, the twilight of the last Ice Age...the Athabasca is melting at a faster-than-glacial pace. During the last Ice Age, the Athabasca Glacier – a river of ice six kilometres long, one kilometre wide, and as deep as 300 metres – was much deeper and stretched down the valley ... one sign predicts the glacier's disappearance in 100 years."
2008-02-07 19:50:04
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Post-Tribune: Emission increase expected "WHITING -- BP projects it will release 1.5 million to 2 million tons more carbon dioxide -- a greenhouse gas -- after its Whiting expansion is complete in 2011. Carbon dioxide is not a regulated pollutant, which means there's no limit on it in BP's proposed air permit. But BP was among the first corporations to recognize global warming in 1998, and environmentalists question how the 30-40 percent increase fits with BP's corporate image of reducing greenhouse gases."
2008-02-07 19:40:54
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Nature: Poor Projections "The extent to which sea level could rise by 2100 is greatly underestimated in current models, suggests a new study, highlighting the risk faced by coastal areas and island nations. Radley Horton at Columbia University, US, and colleagues estimated that sea level could rise by 54 to 89 centimetres by the end of the century, in contrast to the latest estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of 18 to 59 centimetres."
2008-02-07 19:31:57
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Salt Lake Tribune: Carbon dioxide could saturate seas first, kill plant life that supplies oxygen "Greenhouse emissions' warming effect on the atmosphere is bad enough, but their bigger threat is the ecological chaos they are causing as the world's oceans become more acidic, according to a marine scientist. Oceans are absorbing the glut of atmospheric carbon dioxide - stemming from two centuries of rampant burning of fossil fuels - at the rate of 1 million metric tons an hour. Reacting with seawater, the absorbed carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid and throws marine chemistry out of whack. Without a major effort to curb emissions, massive die-off will occur in coral reefs, the shells of crucial mollusk species will dissolve and key marine plant life, which produces half the world's atmospheric oxygen, will disappear..."
2008-02-07 18:47:35
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Associated Press: Study: Ethanol may add to global warming "The widespread use of ethanol from corn could result in nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the gasoline it would replace because of expected land-use changes, researchers concluded Thursday. The study challenges the rush to biofuels as a response to global warming. The researchers said that past studies showing the benefits of ethanol in combating climate change have not taken into account almost certain changes in land use worldwide if ethanol from corn — and in the future from other feedstocks such as switchgrass — become a prized commodity."
2008-02-06 18:48:56
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Charleston City Paper: Should we be taxed for eating animals? "The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization found in 2006 that livestock production generates 18 percent of greenhouse gases worldwide — more than the entire transportation sector of cars, trucks, planes, and ships combined. Cows constantly belch methane from their four stomachs, and lagoons of pig effluent release the gas into the air. Much of the world's beef comes from deforested areas (70 percent of former Amazon rainforest is now used for cattle grazing), a one-two punch from the loss of carbon dioxide-absorbing trees and the addition of more animals. Meat and dairy production is predicted by the U.N. to double in the next 40 years, a growth PETA feels could be abated by a 10-cent tax on each pound of meat."
2008-02-07 19:34:06
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PNAS, via Yahoo News: Tipping points on many horizons "Tipping elements in the tropics, the boreal zone, and west Antarctica are surrounded by large uncertainty," they wrote, pointing to more potential abrupt shifts than seen in a 2007 report by the U.N. Climate Panel.
A projected drying of the Amazon basin, linked both to logging and to global warming, could set off a dieback of the rainforest.
"Many of these tipping points could be closer than we thought," lead author Timothy Lenton, of the University of East Anglia in England, told Reuters of the study.
2008-02-03 12:31:55
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DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Human-caused Climate Change At Root Of Diminishing Water Flow In Western US, Scientists Find "The Rocky Mountains have warmed by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The snowpack in the Sierras has dwindled by 20 percent and the temperatures there have heated up by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit. All could lead to dire consequences for the water supply in the Western United States, including California. Scientists have noted that water flow in the West has decreased for the last 20 to 30 years, but had never explained why it was happening. Until now."
2008-02-03 11:07:33
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Associated Press: Rain forests fall at 'alarming' rate "ABO EBAM, Nigeria - In the gloomy shade deep in Africa's rain forest, the noontime silence was pierced by the whine of a far-off chain saw. It was the sound of destruction, echoed from wood to wood, continent to continent, in the tropical belt that circles the globe. From Brazil to central Africa to once-lush islands in Asia's archipelagos, human encroachment is shrinking the world's rain forests. The alarm was sounded decades ago by environmentalists — and was little heeded. The picture, meanwhile, has changed: Africa is now a leader in destructiveness. The numbers have changed: U.N. specialists estimate 60 acres of tropical forest are felled worldwide every minute, up from 50 a generation back."
2008-01-28 19:16:18
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American Geophysical Union: American Geophysical Union Revises Position On Climate Change "A statement released on January 24 by the world's largest scientific society of Earth and space scientists--the American Geophysical Union, or AGU--updates the organization's position on climate change: the evidence for it, potential consequences from it, and how to respond to it. The statement, Human Impacts on Climate ... is the first revision since 2003 of the climate-change position of the AGU, which has a membership of 50,000 researchers, teachers, and students in 137 countries."
2008-01-27 21:55:40
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Science: The Ocean "The Sahara, the Gobi, the Chihuahuan--all are great deserts. But what about the South Pacific's subtropical gyre? This "biological desert" within a swirling expanse of nutrient-starved saltwater is the largest, and least productive, ecosystem of the South Pacific. Together with the subtropical gyres in other oceans, biological deserts cover 40 percent of Earth's surface. But their relative obscurity may be about to change. Researchers are reporting that the ocean's biological deserts have been expanding, and they are growing much faster than global warming models predict."
2008-01-27 21:53:43
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National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration: 2007 Was Tenth Warmest For U.S., Fifth Warmest Worldwide "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. The average U.S. temperature for 2007 was 54.2°F; 1.4°F warmer than the 20th century mean of 52.8°F."
2008-01-16 19:11:52
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Telegraph.co.uk: Changing climate "Climate change is having a significant impact on the health of the seas surrounding Britain, says a new report. Rising seas, bigger waves, flooding, and more violent storms are already happening as temperatures increase. 2006 was the second-warmest year in UK coastal waters since records began in 1870 and seven of the 10 warmest years have occurred in the last decade, according to the Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) report card 2007-08."
2008-01-16 20:25:11
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Reuters: Greenland thaw biggest in 50 years "OSLO: ” Climate change has caused the greatest thaw of Greenland's ice in half a century, perhaps heralding a wider meltdown that would quicken a rise in world sea levels, scientists said on Tuesday. "We attribute significantly increased Greenland summer warmth and ice melt since 1990 to global warming," a group of researchers wrote in the Journal of Climate, adding to recent evidence of faster Antarctic and Arctic thaws. "The Greenland ice sheet is likely to be highly susceptible to ongoing global warming," they said. Greenland contains enough ice to raise world sea levels by seven metres, although the process would take centuries if it were to start."
2008-01-14 22:23:50
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Associated Press: Study: Northeast winters warming fast "ALBANY, N.Y. - 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. A study of weather station data from across the Northeast from 1965 through 2005 found December-March temperatures increased by 2.5 degrees. Snowfall totals dropped by an average of 8.8 inches across the region over the same period, and the number of days with at least 1 inch of snow on the ground decreased by nine days on average."
2008-01-13 15:52:05
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Globe and Mail (Canada): Antarctic ice sheet shrinking at faster rate But a new study released today, based on some of the most extensive measurements to date of the continent's ice mass, presents a worrisome development: Antarctica's ice sheet is shrinking, at a rate that increased dramatically from 1996 to 2006.... "Over the time period of our survey, the ice sheet as a whole was certainly losing mass, and the mass loss increased by 75 per cent in 10 years," the study said.
2008-01-09 15:31:21
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PortClintonNewsHerald (Ohio): 101-year temperature record broken "In any time in Ohio, we can get a mix of weather. In January it's not really common that we get southerly weather this far north, but it can happen. The jet stream has shifted its position to allow the warm air to flow north into Ohio," the meteorologist said.
"We've had several swings in recent years where we do get warm-ups in January. ... Getting temperatures in the 50s is really not that uncommon, but getting them into the 60s is really noteworthy."
2008-01-09 22:35:02
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The Daily Green: Carbon Isn't the Only Global Cycle Out of Whack "The world is getting familiar with the carbon cycle and how pumping carbon that's been buried for millions of years into the atmosphere causes some global problems. Well, get ready to learn about nitrogen.
Like carbon, the nitrogen cycle is all out of whack. In this case, the origins are similar. Instead of burning petroleum or coal, nitrogen comes from natural gas transformed into ammonia fertilizer and used to grow crops; what doesn't absorb into the soil runs off into streams, which flow into rivers, which flow to the ocean, where the nitrogen fuels "dead zones" -- areas where nitrogen (and phosphorus) fertilizes so much algae growth that it absorbs enough oxygen to make the water inhospitable to fish and other marine life. Jellyfish are about the only thing that thrives in these conditions; corals certainly do not."
2008-01-02 19:39:53
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Associated Press: California sues EPA over tailpipe rules "California sued the federal government Wednesday in its ongoing bid to set the country's first greenhouse gas limits on cars, trucks and SUVs, providing new data to show its program is superior to a federal plan. EPA Administrator Stephen L. ... Johnson said energy legislation signed by President Bush will raise fuel economy standards to an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, which he called a far more effective approach to reducing greenhouse gases than a patchwork of state regulations."
2007-12-17 19:08:56
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NPR: Worries About Water as Chinese Glacier Retreats "China's lowest glacier, the Mingyong glacier — an enormous, dirty, craggy mass of ice wedged in a mountain valley 8,900 feet above sea level — is melting. And as it melts, the glacier on the edge of the Tibetan plateau is retreating up the mountain faster than experts can believe."
2007-12-16 10:17:29
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American Geophysical Union, by way of Reuters: Carbon cuts a must to halt warming -- US scientists "We're a lot closer to climate tipping points than we thought we were," said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "If we are to have any chance in avoiding the points of no return, we're going to have to make some changes." .... "In the summer of 1980, the North Pole was covered by an ice sheet about the size of the continental United States, but this year the ice would not have covered the states west of the Mississippi River."
2007-12-11 19:16:48
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AP News: Ominous Arctic melt worries experts "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.
Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press."
2007-12-11 17:46:19
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AAAS (US): Sir David King Urges Global Pact by 2009 to Reduce Greenhouse Gases Speaking to an overflow audience, King said that the Earth is already feeling destructive effects of human-caused climate change. But if a rigorous new agreement could be approved in 2 years and implemented by 2012, he said, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases could be stabilized between 450 and 550 parts per million. "The impacts at 450 ppm will be 'dangerous,'" King said. But if levels were to approach 550 ppm and beyond, possible on current trends by mid-century, impacts which would become progressively more severe at higher levels include: reduced crop yields in many areas; reduced supplies of fresh water; storms, droughts, and forest fires of increasing intensity; species extinction; lethal heat waves; and coastal flooding that could create tens of millions of refugees.
"We must get global agreement," he said, "and I'm standing here in Washington [D.C.] saying: 'We need it in a very short period of time.' "
2008-01-09 22:52:57
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Sydney Morning Herald (Australia): Academic seeks 100 percent greenhouse target Nations need to cut greenhouse pollution by 50 per cent by 2025 and 100 per cent by 2050 to avoid climatic disaster, an academic says.
Climate change researcher Ian McGregor said the kind of emissions cuts being discussed at the UN conference on Bali would fail to avert catastrophic climate change.
2007-12-08 11:51:09
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ScienceDaily: Ocean Plankton Reducing Greenhouse Gases By Using More Carbon Dioxide "Microscopically tiny marine organisms known as plankton increase their carbon uptake in response to increased concentrations of dissolved CO2 and thereby contribute to a dampening of the greenhouse effect on a global scale. An international group of scientists led by the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany documented this biological mechanism in a natural plankton community for the first time.
In simulations of the future ocean, they measured an increased CO2 uptake of up to 39%. The unexpected positive effect for the global climate system harbours at the same time considerable risks for the oceans and their ecosystems."
