climate change

Tackling climate change by reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions will have major direct health benefits in addition to reducing the risk of climate change, especially in low-income countries, according to a series of six papers appearing yesterday (Wed., Nov. 25) in the British journal The Lancet.
Two University of California, Berkeley, authors of the [...]

Rising water temperatures are kicking up more powerful winds on Lake Superior, with consequences for currents, biological cycles, pollution and more on the world’s largest lake and its smaller brethren.
Since 1985, surface water temperatures measured by lake buoys have climbed 1.2 degrees per decade, about 15 percent faster than the air above the lake and [...]

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows.
The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.
Results of the research, by authors [...]

The seriousness of current global warming is underlined by a reconstruction of climate at Maxwell Bay in the South Shetland Islands of the Antarctic Peninsula over approximately the last 14,000 years, which appears to show that the current warming and widespread loss of glacial ice are unprecedented.
“At no time during the last 14 thousand years [...]

New technologies and policies that save energy, remove atmospheric carbon and limit greenhouse gas emissions are needed to fight global climate change — but face daunting technological, economic and political hurdles, a Michigan State University scientist said.
The good news: Basic actions taken by everyday people can yield fast savings at low cost, according to MSU [...]

The possibility that climate change might simply be a natural variation like others that have occurred throughout geologic time is dimming, according to evidence in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published today.
The research reveals that sediments retrieved by University at Buffalo geologists from a remote Arctic lake are unlike those seen [...]

Starting this month, a giant NASA DC-8 aircraft loaded with geophysical instruments and scientists will buzz at low level over the coasts of West Antarctica, where ice sheets are collapsing at a pace far beyond what scientists expected a few years ago. The flights, dubbed Operation Ice Bridge, are an effort by NASA in cooperation [...]

Ancient soil-inhabiting creatures decreased in body size by nearly half in response to a period of boosted carbon dioxide levels and higher temperatures, scientists have discovered.
The researchers’ findings were published in the October 5, 2009, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Jon Smith, a scientist at the Kansas Geological [...]

Human activities have already pushed the Earth system beyond three of the planet’s biophysical thresholds, with consequences that are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world; six others may well be crossed in the next decades, conclude 29 European, Australian and U.S. scientists in an article in the Sept. 24 issue of [...]

A new study indicates that Arctic temperatures suddenly increased during the last 50 years of the period from 1 AD to the year 2000. Because this warming occurred abruptly during the 20th Century while atmospheric greenhouse gases were accumulating, these findings provide additional evidence that humans are influencing climate.
Incorporating geologic records, biologic records and computer [...]

The warming of an Arctic current over the last 30 years has triggered the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from methane hydrate stored in the sediment beneath the seabed.
Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton working in collaboration with researchers from the University of Birmingham, Royal Holloway London and IFM-Geomar in Germany have [...]

When it comes to using climate models to assess the causes of the increased amount of moisture in the atmosphere, it doesn’t much matter if one model is better than the other.
They all come to the same conclusion: Humans are warming the planet, and this warming is increasing the amount of water vapor in the [...]

No one knows exactly how much Earth’s climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study this week suggests scientists’ best predictions about global warming might be incorrect.
The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid [...]

Milder winters are causing Scotland’s wild breed of Soay sheep to get smaller, despite the evolutionary benefits of possessing a large body, according to new research published in this week’s Science Express.
The new study provides evidence for climate change as the cause of the mysterious decrease in the size of wild sheep on the Scottish [...]

Modern glaciers, such as those making up the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, are capable of undergoing periods of rapid shrinkage or retreat, according to new findings by paleoclimatologists at the University at Buffalo.
The paper, published on June 21 in Nature Geoscience, describes fieldwork demonstrating that a prehistoric glacier in the Canadian Arctic rapidly retreated [...]

More and more, scientists are getting a better grip on the nitrogen cycle. They are learning about sources of nitrogen and how this element changes as it loops from the nonliving, such as the atmosphere, soil or water, to the living, whether plants or animals. Scientists have determined that humans are disrupting the nitrogen cycle [...]

Author and democracy activist Frances Moore Lappe says we already know how to solve the pressing issues of our time, such as climate change and world hunger.
But she says our own pre-conceived ideas about how things should work — our mental map of the world — is actually preventing us from taking action.
In a speech [...]

The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet this century may drive more water than previously thought toward the already threatened coastlines of New York, Boston, Halifax and other cities in the northeastern United States and Canada, according to new research.
Results of the study are being published this week in Geophysical Research Letters. They suggest that [...]

A team of atmospheric chemists has moved closer to what’s considered the “holy grail” of climate change science: the first-ever direct detections of biological particles within ice clouds.
The team, led by Kimberly Prather and Kerri Pratt of the University of California at San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, sampled water droplet and ice crystal residues [...]

Beef farmers can breathe easier thanks to University of Alberta researchers who have developed a formula to reduce methane gas in cattle.
By developing equations that balance starch, sugar, cellulose, ash, fat and other elements of feed, a Canada-wide team of scientists has given beef producers the tools to lessen the methane gas their cattle produce [...]