July 29, 2008

Climate Experts Tussle Over Details. Public Gets Whiplash

When science is testing new ideas, the result is often a two-papers-forward-one-paper-back intellectual tussle among competing research teams.

When the work touches on issues that worry the public, affect the economy or polarize politics, the news media and advocates of all stripes dive in. Under nonstop scrutiny, conflicting findings can make news coverage veer from one extreme to another, resulting in a kind of journalistic whiplash for the public.

This has been true for decades in health coverage. But lately the phenomenon has been glaringly apparent on the global warming beat.

Discordant findings have come in quick succession. How fast is Greenland shedding ice? Did human-caused warming wipe out frogs in the American tropics? Has warming strengthened hurricanes? Have the oceans stopped warming? These questions endure even as the basic theory of a rising human influence on climate has steadily solidified: accumulating greenhouse gases will warm the world, erode ice sheets, raise seas and have big impacts on biology and human affairs.

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July 22, 2008

Scientists: Vanishing wetlands could release “carbon bomb”

Draining marshes and other wetlands could hasten climate change, a group of experts meeting in Brazil this week warned.

Wetlands contain 771 tons of carbon dioxide and methane, said scientists gathered in the central western town of Cuiaba for a four-day wetlands-preservation conference hosted by the United Nations University and Brazil's Federal University of Mato Grasso (UFMT). The world's remaining wetlands hold about one-fifth of the world's carbon, an amount equivalent to that currently in the atmosphere.

A UN University press release warns that continued destruction of these wetlands could unleash the stored carbon into the atmosphere:

If the decline of wetlands continues through human and climate change-related causes, scientists fear the release of carbon from these traditional sinks could compound the global warming problem significantly, says Prof. Paulo Speller, Rector of UFMT. Drained tropical swamp forests release an estimated 40 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year. Drained peat bogs release some 2.5 to 10 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year.

"We could call it the carbon bomb," Paulo Teixeira of the Pantanal Regional Environment Program told Reuters. "It's a very tricky situation."

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July 17, 2008

U.S. Summers to Get Hotter and Deadlier Due to Climate Change

Climate change will have a "substantial" impact on human health in the coming decades, making wildfires and hurricanes more likely, cooking up more smog, and making summer heat waves longer, hotter and deadlier, according to a new report today from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The report details how rising temperatures could slowly but significantly shift the rhythms of nature that Americans are used to -- with disruptive, sometimes even deadly, consequences. In the West, it found, changing weather patterns could thin the snowpacks that feed rivers, with repercussions for both hydroelectric dams and water supplies.

And, in Washington and other Eastern cities, it found that a warmer climate will likely mean summers that start earlier, last longer and produce more periods of sustained heat.

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July 15, 2008

Warmer Temps, More Kidney Stones

In early July, when a former government employee accused Dick Cheney's office of deleting from congressional testimony key statements about the impact of climate change on public health, White House staff countered that the science just wasn't strong enough to include. Not two weeks later, however, things already look different. University of Texas researchers have laid out some of the most compelling science to date linking climate change with adverse public-health effects: scientists predict a steady rise in the U.S. incidence of kidney stones - a medical condition largely brought on by dehydration - as the planet continues to warm.

Kidney stones are already more common in the warmer Southern states than in the North. Urologists even talk about a "kidney stone belt," a high-risk zone through the South where populations are more likely to develop stones - crystallized chemicals (usually calcium, phosphates and oxalates from an ordinary diet) that form in the urinary tract, and often cause sharp, intense pain when they pass. The Texas researchers used regional data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to predict how this belt might grow, publishing their report this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By 2050, the research suggests, 56% of Americans will live in regions encompassed by the kidney stone belt, compared with 40% in 2000. And by 2095, the belt should expand to 70% of the population. 

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July 11, 2008

Study links global warming to more smog

U.S. environmental regulators quietly published a draft study on Thursday that linked global warming to higher levels of smog that could harm human health, a report green groups said stood in contrast to the Bush Administration's slow movement on climate change.

The draft report published by the Environmental Protection Agency in the Federal Register said, "Climate change has the potential to produce significant increases in near-surface (ozone) concentrations in many areas of the U.S."

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June 30, 2008

Climate Change Causing Significant Shift In Composition Of Coastal Fish Communities

A detailed analysis of data from nearly 50 years of weekly fish-trawl surveys in Narragansett Bay and adjacent Rhode Island Sound has revealed a long-term shift in species composition, which scientists attribute primarily to the effects of global warming.

According to Jeremy Collie, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography, the fish community has shifted progressively from vertebrate species (fish) to invertebrates (lobsters, crabs and squid) and from benthic or demersal species -- those that feed on the bottom -- to pelagic species that feed higher in the water column. In addition, smaller, warm-water species have increased while larger, cool-water species have declined.

"This is a pretty dramatic change, and it's a pattern that is being seen in other ecosystems, including offshore on Georges Bank and other continental shelf ecosystems, but we're in the relatively unique position of being able to document it. These patterns are likely being seen in estuaries around the world, but nowhere else has similar data," said Collie.

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June 23, 2008

Years Later, Climatologist Renews His Call for Action

"The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now," Dr. Hansen said then, referring to a recent string of warm years and the accumulating blanket of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other gases emitted mainly by burning fossil fuels and forests.

To many observers of environmental history, that was the first time global warming moved from being a looming issue to breaking news. Dr. Hansen's statement helped propel the first pushes for legislation and an international treaty to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. A treaty was enacted and an addendum, the Kyoto Protocol, was added.

Even as the scientific picture of a human-heated world has solidified, emissions of the gases continue to rise.

Twenty years ago Monday, James E. Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA, shook Washington and the world by telling a sweating crowd at a Senate hearing during a stifling heat wave that he was "99 percent" certain that humans were already warming the climate.

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June 20, 2008

Report on Climate Predicts Extremes

As greenhouse-gas emissions rise, North America is likely to experience more droughts and excessive heat in some regions even as intense downpours and hurricanes pound others more often, according to a report issued yesterday by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.

The 162-page study, which was led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of how global warming has helped to transform the climate of the United States and Canada over the past 50 years -- and how it may do so in the future. 

Coming at a time when record flooding is ravaging the Midwest, the new report paints a grim scenario in which severe weather will exact a heavy toll. The report warned that extreme weather events "are among the most serious challenges to society in coping with a changing climate." 

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June 18, 2008

Ocean Temperatures And Sea Level Increases 50 Percent Higher Than Previously Estimated

New research suggests that ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961 and 2003 were 50 percent larger than estimated in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

An international team of researchers, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory climate scientist Peter Gleckler, compared climate models with improved observations that show sea levels rose by 1.5 millimeters per year in the period from 1961-2003. That equates to an approximately 2½-inch increase in ocean levels in a 42-year span.

The ocean warming and thermal expansion rates are more than 50 percent larger than previous estimates for the upper 300 meters of oceans.

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June 11, 2008

Strong Action Urged to Curb Warming

The scientific academies of 13 countries on Tuesday urged the world to act more forcefully to limit the threat posed by human-driven global warming.

In a joint statement, the academies of the Group of 8 industrialized countries - Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States - and of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa called on the industrialized countries to lead a "transition to a low-carbon society" and aggressively move to limit impacts from changes in climate that are already under way and impossible to stop.

The statement, posted by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, urged the Group of 8 countries to move beyond last year's pledge to consider halving global emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 and "make maximum efforts" to reach this target.

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May 30, 2008

Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal

For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground.  President Bush is for it, and indeed has spent years talking up the virtues of "clean coal." All three candidates to succeed him favor the approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal companies are for it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are practically begging for the technology.

But it has become clear in recent months that the nation's effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons. 

 
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May 28, 2008

Satellites, Beekeepers Track Climate Change Response

High-tech satellites combined with low-tech methods on the ground will soon be used to help understand how bees are responding to climate change, and to predict how far aggressive Africanized bees -- sometimes called "killer bees" -- will spread in North America.

The project combines two passions for leader Wayne Esaias of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Esaias is an oceanographer who specializes in remote sensing via craft such as satellites -- and a master amateur beekeeper.

What triggered Esaias's interest in the new project was data he collected in his backyard. When the flowering plants that bees rely on for food are blooming, beehives pack on up to 25 pounds per day, through reproduction and storing honey. This weight gain is easily detected when hives sit on scales (they are then called scale hives), and provides a precise and reliable way to track the flowering of local plants.

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May 15, 2008

Out with the old

Soils are at risk of leaking 'old carbon' back into the atmosphere in a high-emissions world. Exposing alpine forests to increased levels of carbon dioxide stimulates the breakdown of carbon that has been locked up in the soil for years, according to a new study in the Swiss Alps.

Frank Hagedorn, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, and colleagues monitored the impact of elevated carbon dioxide, over a five-year period, on the leaching of 'old' carbon from the forest soil to the surrounding soil water. Although usually only a small percentage of carbon in the soil enters the groundwater, this increased by 20 per cent after the five-year experiment. Over 80 per cent of the carbon that leached into the groundwater originated not from newly acquired carbon sources, such as fresh plant litter, but from organic matter stored in the soil before the experiment began.

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May 14, 2008

They say they want a revolution - Climate scientists call for major new modelling facility

Climatologists have called for massive investment in computer and research resources to help revolutionize modelling capabilities. The eventual aim is to provide probabilistic climate predictions that are as useful, and usable, as weather forecasts.

At the end of a four-day summit held last week at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, the scientists made the case for a climate-prediction project on the scale of the Human Genome Project. A key component of this scheme, which would cost something up to, or over, a billion dollars, would be a world climate research facility with computer power far beyond that currently used in the field.

 
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May 2, 2008

'Fishery Failure' Declared For West Coast Salmon Fishery

Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez has declared a commercial fishery failure for the West Coast salmon fishery due to historically low salmon returns.  Hundreds of thousands of fall Chinook salmon typically return to the Sacramento River every year to spawn. This year, scientists estimate that fewer than 60,000 adult Chinook will make it back to the Sacramento River.

"The unprecedented collapse of the salmon population will hit fishermen, their families, and fishing communities hard, and that is why we have moved quickly to declare a fishery disaster," Gutierrez said. "Our scientists are working to better understand the effects that ocean changes have on salmon populations. We are also working closely with fishing communities to improve salmon habitat in river systems to support sustainable fishing."

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April 7, 2008

Climate change will erode foundations of health

Scientists tell us that the evidence the Earth is warming is "unequivocal." Increases in global average air and sea temperature, ice melting and rising global sea levels all help us understand and prepare for the coming challenges. In addition to these observed changes, climate-sensitive impacts on human health are occurring today. They are attacking the pillars of public health. And they are providing a glimpse of the challenges public health will have to confront on a large scale, WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan warned today on the occasion of World Health Day.


"The core concern is succinctly stated: climate change endangers human health," said Dr Chan. "The warming of the planet will be gradual, but the effects of extreme weather events -- more storms, floods, droughts and heat waves -- will be abrupt and acutely felt. Both trends can affect some of the most fundamental determinants of health: air, water, food, shelter and freedom from disease."

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