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G-HOUSE NEWS
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Dec 22, 03: Soot mostly from diesel engines is blocking snow and ice from reflecting sunlight, which is contributing to "near worldwide melting of ice" and as much as a quarter of all observed global warming, top NASA scientists say. Elsewhere, burning wood, animal dung, vegetable oil and other biofuels is a major source of soot.
. . The effect is greater in northernmost snow regions, and about zero in the tropics. Levels of airborne soot as high as about 100 parts per billion were found in the Alps, enough to reduce the snow's ability to reflect light rather than absorb it from about 98 down to between 80 and 90 percent. Soot particles, which absorb toxic organic material, are minute enough to penetrate skin when breathed in. Soot is the aerosol most responsible for the haze in rapidly developing countries such as India and China, the scientists said.
Dec 16, 03: The year 2003, marked by a sweltering summer and drought across large swaths of the planet, was the third hottest in nearly 150 years, the United Nations weather agency said. They estimated the average surface temperature for the year to be 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the normal 25.2 degrees.
. . The three hottest years since accurate records began to be kept in 1861 have all been in the past six years. The hottest was 1998, when the average temperature was up 0.99 degrees. "The rhythm of temperature increases is accelerating. But global warming is likely to lead to more frequent extraordinary events and greater intensity of these events."
. . Over the 2002-03 winter, North America received its 10th lowest recorded snowfall. In the Atlantic Ocean, 16 separate storms developed this year, well above the 1948-96 average of 9.8.
Dec 11, 03: Global warming killed 150,000 people in 2000, and the death toll could double again in the next 30 years if current trends are not reversed, the World Health Organization said --one heatwave killed 20,000 people in Europe alone this year.
. . "An estimated 150,000 deaths... were caused in the year 2000 due to climate change", the study said. A further 5.5 million healthy years of life were lost worldwide due to debilitating diseases caused by climate change, it said.
. . "We see an approximate doubling in deaths and in the burden in healthy life years lost" by 2030. The book estimated climate change was to blame for 2.4 percent of cases of diarrhea because, Campbell-Lendrum said, the heat would exacerbate bacterial contamination of food.
. . Climate change was also behind two percent of all cases of malaria, because increased rainfall created new breeding grounds for mosquitoes which carry the disease, he said.
Dec 10, 03: Preliminary figures from some countries suggest 2003 will be the warmest year ever recorded.
Dec 10, 03: Global warming joined with overfishing to deliver a double whammy to the Atlantic cod, the most important species of commercial fish in Western Europe and northeastern United States and Canada, a study says. French oceanographers say rising temperatures in the North Sea over the past 20 years disrupted supplies of plankton, the basic food for baby cod.
Dec 6, 03: Western Europe might actually get colder as a result of global warming, because the melting Arctic ice cap is cooling off the warm ocean current that is largely responsible for Europe's mild weather, scientists and environmentalists said.
. . If the ice cap in Greenland and the Arctic continues to melt at its current rate, Europe's temperatures would take a sharp dip after five or more decades of increasingly warm weather. That turnaround could spell trouble for regions that by then will have adapted to more tropical conditions.
. . Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol said increased influxes of water from the Artic could trigger a slowdown or diversion of the Gulf Stream, the current that sweeps warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up to the North Atlantic, warming the waters and climate of Western Europe.
. . Bamber also said that in the next five years, Europe could expect increasingly hazardous conditions in the Alps. Last summer was the first ever that the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc were closed for fear of rocks loosened by melted ice and snow.
. . During Europe's record heat wave this summer, 10 percent of the "permanent" ice in the Italian Alps melted away. 53 billion cubic feet of fresh water was lost --a resource critical to northern Italy's water-intensive crops, like rice. "Within about 20 or 30 years, well lose it all."
Dec 5, 03: The United States has a better-than-average chance of being hit by a major hurricane next year, which will be a busy one with 13 tropical storms or hurricanes.
. . Dr. William Gray of Colorado State University said seven of the 13 expected storms will grow to hurricane strength and three of those will be major hurricanes with winds over 110 mph. Gray's forecast, which he makes each year, was issued a day after a rare December tropical storm formed in the Caribbean, four days after the official end of the 2003 hurricane season. It starts on June 1.
. . An average hurricane season produces 9.6 tropical storms, 5.9 of which develop into hurricanes. The average season sees 2.3 major hurricanes. The last nine years have been the most active period of storm formation in history.
Dec 4, 03: There can be no doubt that global warming is real and is being caused by people, two top U.S. government climate experts said. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen by 31 percent since preindustrial times.
. . "There is no doubt that the composition of the atmosphere is changing because of human activities, and today greenhouse gases are the largest human influence on global climate", wrote Thomas Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, and Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
. . "The likely result is more frequent heat waves, droughts, extreme precipitation events, and related impacts, e.g., wildfires, heat stress, vegetation changes, and sea-level rise."
Nov, 03: Two sections of Antarctica's Larsen ice shelf have collapsed over the past decade and another portion could be headed for the same fate as warming ocean waters undermine the ice, researchers say. The ice shelf rests along the Antarctic Peninsula extending toward South America. The team estimated the average annual thinning of the shelf at about 30 inches, with melting of about six to nine feet per year measured in some locations.
Nov 27, 03: The world's glaciers could melt within a century, if global warming accelerates, leaving billions of people short of water and some islanders without a home. WWF said that nations most at risk also included Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, where melt water from Andean glaciers supplies millions during dry seasons. Island states like Tuvalu in the Pacific, meanwhile, could be submerged by rising sea levels.
. . Himalayan glaciers feed seven great rivers of Asia that run through China and India, the world's most populous nations, ensuring a year-round water supply to two billion people.
. . "Unless governments take urgent action to prevent global warming, billions of people worldwide may face severe water shortages as a result of the alarming melting rate of glaciers, the WWF group said.
. . Sea levels could rise even further if two of the world's largest ice caps, in Antarctica and Greenland, melt substantially, though the report left them out of its reckoning because of their unpredictability.
Nov 20, 03: Volcanoes are a prime cause for El Nino, the climate phenomenon that can catastrophically disrupt weather patterns across the Pacific and beyond, a study says. A major eruption doubles the chance that an El Nino will be unleashed in the following winter, according to the research in the British scientific journal Nature.
. . The research is the first to supply statistical flesh to the theory that volcanic fallout may affect the world's climate system, spewing out billions of tons of fine ash that lingers in the upper atmosphere, reflecting back solar heat. "The results imply roughly a doubling of the probability of an el Nino event occurring in the winter following a volcanic eruption", they write.
. . El Ninos occur in cycles that vary from three to 11 years, when the sea surface temperature in the western tropical Pacific Ocean is warmer than usual. The prevailing east-west trade winds die, causing a huge buildup of warm water in the western part of the ocean. This has effects on climate that can reverberate around the southern hemisphere, inflicting snowfalls and landslides in South America, drought in southern Africa, a weak hurricane season in the Atlantic and forest fires in Indonesia. The shift in weather is so abrupt that crops and fish migrations are hit, having a dramatic effect on human life.
. . According to the study, the El Nino usually lasts for the first three years after a big tropical volcanic eruption, and then goes into reverse, with the so-called El Nina phenomenon, for the three years after that.
. . But the researchers add a big caveat: eruptions themselves are not the only factor. Man-made global warming --the spewing out of greenhouse gaases by the burning of fossil fuels-- is also likely to play a role.
Nov 11, 03: Fires that charred nearly three-quarters of a million acres in the San Bernardino National Forest could presage increasingly severe fire danger as global warming weakens more forests through disease and drought, experts warn.
. . Windier weather could bring to Northern California a variation of the desert Santa Ana winds that whipped the Southern California blazes into firestorms. And there are factors like increased lightning strikes. "Fires may be hotter, move faster, and be more difficult to contain under future climate conditions."
Nov 10, 03: Monarch butterflies, which journey hundreds of miles to spend the winter in a mountain forest in Mexico, may be endangered within 50 years because a changing climate could make their winter refuge too wet and cool. A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says climate models show that rainfall will increase significantly in the winter home of the monarchs as the planet warms.
. . "If it rains and the temperatures drop and ice crystals form, it will kill them". she said. These conditions occurred in January, 2002, and about 80 percent of the monarch population overwintering in Mexico died.
Nov 5, 03: Global warming means more snow, not less, for the snowbound region along the eastern border between Canada and the United States, researchers said. Their study of snowfall records in the Great Lakes region and elsewhere suggests there has been a significant increase in snowfall in the Great Lakes region since the 1930s but not anywhere else.
Nov 4, 03: A powerful Antarctic storm has helped split apart an iceberg the size of Jamaica. The huge original iceberg, named B15 and measuring 4,400 square miles broke into two pieces over the past month, according to data from satellites. The area is surrounded by the massive Ross ice shelf, a field of floating ice the size of France.
Oct 29, 03: A NASA study to be published in Nov --which used satellite images taken from space-— found that most of the Arctic warmed significantly over the last 10 years, rising 1.08 degrees per decade. The biggest temperature increases occurred in North America, with an increase of 1.9 degrees in 10 years.
. . Last year, another NASA study found that sea ice in the Arctic was declining at a rate of 9 percent per decade. That study also found that in 2002, summer sea ice hit record low levels.
Oct 29, 03: Longer Arctic summers and thinning sea ice are threatening the habitats of polar bears and the livelihood of native people, scientists said. The thickness of the Arctic ice has decreased by as much as 40 percent in the past 50 years. The cap reached record lows in 2002 and 2003. But researchers, who measured it from space for the first time, said it varies more widely than previously thought and is mainly because of summer melting.
. . According to NASA's new study, the rate of warming in the Arctic over the last 20 years is eight times the rate of warming over the last 100 years.
. . Researchers at NASA are worried because global warming speeds up as the ice cap melts, forming a vicious cycle. "Snow and sea-ice are highly reflective because they are white." "We cannot afford to wait a long period of time for technological solutions", said David Rind of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
Oct 24, 03: There were 562 tornadoes in the United States in May '03, more than any month on record.
August 2003 was the warmest August on record in the northern hemisphere. Though heat waves rarely are given adequate attention, they claim more lives each year than floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes combined. Heat waves are a silent killer, mostly affecting the elderly, the very young, or the chronically ill.
. . In India, death tolls from heat that were recorded over an entire summer some 10 years ago are now occurring in just one week.
. . In keeping with the recent global and national trends, September 1998 was the warmest such month for the U.S. and the entire globe since records began, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. With a national average temperature of 69.1°F, September 1998 surpasses September 1931 (68.4°F) as the warmest such month on record.
Oct 16, 03: in the journal Science: Melting of glaciers in the Patagonian ice fields of southern Argentina and Chile has doubled in recent years, caused by higher temperatures, lower snowfall and a more rapid breaking of icebergs, a new study suggests. Researchers measured the loss from two ice fields on the southern tip of South America and found that the rate of melting doubled from 1995 to 2000 when compared with earlier measurements.
. . The two ice fields cover a total of 6,600 square miles and contain 63 glaciers. Researchers estimated that the glaciers are losing the equivalent of 10 cubic miles of ice every year now. Alaska, for instance, has five times more ice than Patagonia. Yet, the melt off from Patagonia is almost a third as much as the melt off from Alaska's mountain glaciers.
. . Mountain glaciers are retreating in many parts of the world and earlier studies have shown the melting high altitude ice is helping to boost a gradual rise sea level. The researchers estimate that water from the Patagonia ice fields is contributing about 9 percent of the sea level rise caused by the melting of mountain glaciers. Alaska's contribution to water reaching the sea from mountain glaciers is estimated at about 30 percent.
Oct 5, 03: Sergei Shoigu, Russia's Emergencies Minister, said that climate change was likely to trigger more floods, forest fires and industrial emergencies. He said that thawing permafrost in Russia's north would destabilize buildings.
. . Putin may instead be holding out for guarantees of cash from the EU and Japan.
. . Russia's smokestack industries have collapsed since Kyoto's baseline year of 1990, meaning that its emissions have fallen 30 percent when other rich nations are facing costly curbs. Russia can hope to export some of its spare quotas in a market that could be worth billions of dollars a year, though a U.S. pullout has undermined likely prices. And Russia may be worried that a shift to renewable energies under Kyoto would undermine the value of its oil and gas exports. Russia is the world's biggest oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia.
. . Russia has a veto on Kyoto because the pact will only enter into force if nations representing 55 percent of the emissions by developed nations sign up. So far, countries representing 44 percent have ratified, Russia has a 17 percent stake and the United States 36 percent.
Sept 30, 03: About 160,000 people die every year from side-effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition and the numbers could almost double by 2020, a group of scientists said. The study, by scientists at the World Health Organization (WHO) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said children in developing nations seemed most vulnerable.
. . "We estimate that climate change may already be causing in the region of 160,000 deaths ... a year" ...even taking account of factors like improvements in health care. Most deaths would be in developing nations in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, which would be hardest hit by the spread of malnutrition, diarrhea and malaria in the wake of warmer temperatures, floods and droughts. "These diseases mainly affect younger age groups, so that the total burden of disease due to climate change appears to be borne mainly by children in developing countries."
. . Milder winters, however, might mean that people would live longer on average in Europe or North America despite risks from heatwaves. The study suggested climate change could "bring some health benefits, such as lower cold-related mortality and greater crop yields in temperate zones, but (that) these will be greatly outweighed by increased rates of other diseases." Haines said small shifts in temperatures, for instance, could extend the range of mosquitoes that spread malaria. Water supplies could be contaminated by floods, for instance, which could also wash away crops.
Sept 29, 03: In a blow to supporters of the Kyoto treaty, President Vladimir Putin said Russia had yet to decide whether it will ratify the landmark environmental pact, which needs Moscow's approval to come into force. The cold north may even benefit from an increase in temps.
Sept 22, 03: The largest ice shelf in the Arctic, a solid feature for 3,000 years, has broken up, scientists in the United States and Canada said. They said the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory, broke into two main parts, themselves cut through with fissures. A freshwater lake drained into the sea. The team said all of the fresh water poured out of the 20 mile long Disraeli Fjord. This in turn has affected communities of freshwater and marine species of plankton and algae.
. . Large ice islands also calved off from the shelf and some are large enough to be dangerous to shipping and to drilling platforms in the Beaufort Sea. Local warming of the climate is to blame, they said.
. . Only 100 years ago, the whole northern coast of Ellesmere Island, which is the northernmost land mass of North America, was edged by a continuous ice shelf. About 90 percent of it is now gone, Vincent's team wrote.
. . Records indicate an increase of four-tenths of a degree centigrade every 10 years since 1967. The average July temperature has been 1.3 degrees Celsius or 34 degrees F --just above the freezing point-- since 1967.
. . Climate change has affected ocean temperature, salinity and flow patterns, which also influence the break- up of ice shelves in the Antarctic. "It's not just as simple as it gets x degrees warmer and the ice melts this much." Warmer temperatures weaken the ice, leaving it vulnerable to changed currents and other forces.
Sept 17, 03: Climate researchers studying records at thousands of locations have discovered that, in many communities, the temperature range between the daily high and low changes on the weekend. And, as with some people, there seems to be a little hangover of this weekend effect on Mondays. "The beauty of this weekend effect is it necessarily has to be of human origin, because we don't have something in nature that cares whether it's Tuesday or Saturday."
Sept 9, 03: The number of environmentally protected areas across the globe adds up to more than 100,000, the United Nations announced, as leading environmentalists warned global warming has already caused irreparable damage to many sites. The UN recorded more than 100,000 protected areas, covering a total area larger than the combined land surface of India and China, making up 11.5 percent of the earth's land surface. But the world's oceans were lagging behind, with protected sites making up less than 0.5 percent of the seas and oceans --representing 70 percent of the globe, the report said.
. . The once-a-decade World Parks Congress, hosted by the World Conservation Union and attended by 2,500 delegates from 170 countries, aims to take stock of the world's protected areas and set priorities to safeguard them.
. . Tests have shown that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are currently at their highest point in the past 420,000 years.
Sept 2, 03: The Earth appears to have been warmer since 1980 than at any time in the last 18 centuries, scientists say. The climate sceptics are flogging a dead horse, according to Professor Philip Jones, University of East Anglia.
. . The study reconstructed the global climate from data derived from ice cores, vegetation and other records. They believe their research provides unequivocal confirmation that humans are affecting the climate.
Sept 1, 03: Researchers at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology have earned a patent pending on a technique that could help farmers tap into a billion-dollar market for "carbon credits." Zimmerman thinks carbon sequestration —-the process in which plants absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases-— could be $100 billion- a-year industry for at least the next 10 years. The technique —-called C-Lock-— is designed to help farmers better measure, certify and market the carbon stored in their soil. "If that can be documented and measured, it has market value." He estimates South Dakota's carbon-credit potential at $100 million to $500 million a year in the Conservation Reserve Program alone. The federal CRP program encourages landowners to plant fragile cropland back to grass.
. . Tilled soil, for example, releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than untilled soil. Converting to "no till" agriculture, for example, decreases carbon released to the atmosphere.
. . The carbon-credit market is driven by the Kyoto Protocol, an international accord to combat global warming. The United States has not signed the accord, but Zimmerman said countries and companies are already trading carbon credits in anticipation of widespread acceptance of Kyoto.
AUG 28, 03: A heatwave this month in France has killed hundreds of thousands of trees in the worst crisis to hit forests since violent storms in 1999 and has claimed Marie Antoinette's favorite oak tree at the Palace of Versailles.
Aug 14, 03: A massive freshwater lake that covered much of southern Canada 8,200 years ago burst through its ice dam and flooded into the Atlantic, disrupting ocean currents and causing a climate change that chilled the Northern Hemisphere for 200 years, a study suggests.
. . The ancient body of water, called Lake Agassiz, was formed by ice dams that blocked drainage from the vast central plains of Canada during the fading centuries of the last ice age. The lake once was more than twice the size of the current Great Lakes and contained more than 39,000 cubic miles of water.
. . At its most expanded, Lake Agassiz stretched from western Manitoba, east to Quebec and south to North Dakota and Minnesota, some 135,000 square miles. Its overflow spilled first down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and then down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
. . But around 8,200 years ago, the waters of Lake Agassiz suddenly broke through into Hudson Bay and within a matter of months virtually the whole lake drained into the North Atlantic. "There is an ocean system like a conveyor belt that drives the Gulf Stream", said David W. Leverington, a Smithsonian Institution geologist and a co-author of the study. "When there is a large influx of fresh water into this system, the system is slowed down and perhaps stopped altogether." It could have taken as little as 9 to 12 months to drain.
Aug 14, 03: Global warming will melt most of the Arctic icecap in summertime by the end of the century, a new report showed. The three-year international study indicated that ice around the North Pole had shrunk by 7.4 percent in the past 25 years with a record small summer coverage in September 2002.
. . "The summer ice cover in the Arctic may be reduced by 80 percent at the end of the 21st century." The Arctic Barents Sea north of Russia and Norway could be free of ice even in winter by the end of the century.
. . The study showed a thinning of the icecap from 1920-1940 was caused by natural climate fluctuations, such as ocean currents and winds, rather than by a build-up of greenhouse gases. They said the new survey added to evidence of a gradual thinning of the icecap and gave firmer signs that human emissions, such as exhausts from cars and factories, were mainly to blame. Climate experts say that polar areas are heating up more than other regions.
Aug 14, 03: The record-breaking heatwave wreaking havoc across Europe has caused the level of Lake Constance to fall, exposing eight unexploded World War II bombs submerged for more than half a century. A number of hand grenades dating back to both World Wars have been found on the shores of the lake.
Aug 14, 03: Global warming is wrecking Africa's Lake Tanganyika, inflicting a catastrophic decline in fish catches, a new study says. Since the mid-1950s, catches of sardines and other food species in one of the world's largest and most productive lakes have plummeted, prompting some environmentalists to point the finger at overfishing.
. . But the newest research says local fishermen are not to blame. Instead, it points the finger at the greenhouse effect, a finding that strengthens accusations that reckless burning of fossil fuels is changing the Earth's weather system.
. . Fishing provides up to 40 percent of the animal protein supply for local people, but catches have fallen by between 30 and 50 percent, to 165,000 to 200,000 tons per year, since the late 1970s, which is also considered a threshold when planetary temperatures suddenly shot up.
. . It is the world's second deepest lake, the second largest by volume and a treasure store of biodiversity.
Aug 5, 03: Large scale irrigation began in the 1960s and has led to the Aral losing half its area and three-quarters of its volume. Sands laden with salt and pesticide residues are whipped up into storms by a climate no longer subject to the sea's moderating influence. The independent states of Central Asia are now joined in an association to manage the waters that feed the Aral but in practice there is little agreement among them on how best to share the resource.
July 28, 03: Human induced global climate change is a weapon of mass destruction at least as dangerous as nuclear, chemical or biological arms, a leading British climate scientist said. John Houghton, a former key member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He said the United States, in an "epic" abandonment of leadership, was largely responsible for the threat. "Like terrorism, this weapon knows no boundaries," Houghton said. "It can strike anywhere, in any form -- a heatwave in one place, a drought or a flood or a storm surge in another."
. . The US mainland was struck by 562 tornados in May, killing 41 people, he said, but the developing world was hit even harder. For example, pre-monsoon temperatures this year in India reached a blistering 49C (120F), 5C above normal. "Once this killer heatwave began to abate, 1,500 people lay dead -- half the number killed outright in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre," Houghton said.
. . "Nowadays everyone knows that the US is the world's biggest polluter, and that with only one 20th of the world's population it produces a quarter of its greenhouse gas emissions."
. . Apart from being co-chairman of the scientific assessment group of the climate change panel, Houghton is also the former chief executive of the British Meteorological Office.
July 24, 03: After a somewhat slow start, wildfire season is intensifying across the West. Just today, the National Interagency Fire Center reported 317 new blazes. It was the fourth straight day with at least 300 new fires.
. . Weeks of triple-digit temperatures, after years of drought, are partly to blame. Hot weather remains hunkered down over much of the region. It has raised temperatures 5 to 15 degrees above normal and has blocked storm fronts from bringing relief. The small, scattered storms that do pop up often carry more lightning than rain. As a result, they provide the sparks that ignite new fires.
July 13, 03: More than three million people have been displaced and 73 [known] killed in floods and monsoon storms in India, as authorities continued the evacuation of marooned villagers in the northeast.
. . Central China's Hubei province braced for the largest flood crest of the year along the Yangtze River while waters in the swollen Huai River moved east, washing away homes and destroying lives. As water levels along critical points on the Yangtze were expected to exceed warning lines in Hubei, home to 60 million people, flood control officials were preparing for the worst.
July 7, 03: In east China, five people have died and more than 370,000 have been evacuated as huge holes were blown in dikes to tackle flood waters that are at record highs, officials said.

. . More than 1.1 million people have been left homeless by monsoon floods in India and neighboring Bangladesh, which have reportedly also left more than 80 dead. At least 65,000 more people were left homeless after fresh flooding overnight in India's northeastern state of Assam, taking the total number of those displaced by the rains to more than 926,000.

July 5, 03: Rocks deep below the North Sea or the Ohio River in the United States could become burial grounds for global warming despite opposition from environmentalists who fear a leaky, short-sighted fix. Many environmentalists see CO2 storage as a distraction from shifting to clean, renewable energy like wind or solar power and away from dirty fossil fuels like coal and oil.
. . "Our view is that this is illegal", said Truls Gulowsen of the environmental group Greenpeace, referring to Statoil's Sleipner scheme. "Dumping of industrial waste at sea or beneath the sea is banned." "It's more important to build windmills in China than to show that you can bury CO2," he said. "No one can know if it will not leak over thousands of years. And who'll check?" CO2 might corrode concrete plugs meant to seal wells. "And it costs more fuel to capture CO2", he said. "Rather than use one unit of coal, you use 1.3 units for the same power. Everything gets worse."
. . The United States generates about 5.8 billion tons of CO2 a year.
July ~6, 03: The deforestation rate in Brazil's Amazon, the world's largest jungle, has jumped a dramatic 40 percent, sparking alarm. Deforestation in the Amazon jumped to 9,840 square miles last year --the highest since 1995-- from 7,010 square miles in 2001.
July 5, 03: If the Earth's climate continues to warm up as predicted, some crab species along the Pacific coast may face extinction. A study shows that small crabs that live just off the beach in warmer waters have little tolerance for rising temperatures.
. . "The results were a surprise," said Stillman. "You would expect the animals that live in the hottest habitat are the animals that would be better able to handle an increase in temperature. But it turns out they are the most susceptible.
June 10, 03: Water-laden exhaust from a space shuttle can drift over the North Pole and create elusive high-altitude clouds visible only at night, according to a surprising new study. The discovery was made serendipitously with data collected by a German satellite launched and retrieved eight days later during a Space Shuttle Discovery mission. Surprised scientists watched the clouds develop from water that had been shuttled into the upper atmosphere by the very craft that lofted the satellite into orbit.
. . The outer atmosphere is thin and tenuous. A little goes a long way. Contrails also contribute about 1 percent of manmade greenhouse effects, a 1999 report showed. More work is needed to understand how the plume moved northward so quickly.
June 9, 03: Authorities in one Indonesian province have started handing out face masks to pedestrians and motorcyclists as choking smoke haze from ground fires returns to the region. Officials in Riau province on Sumatra island have also distributed bumper stickers urging the public to stop forest fires.
June 6, 03: Computers loaded with weather data and vegetation maps can look over the past century and find the confluences of heat, dryness and fuel that produced the Yellowstone fires of 1988 and the Tillamook Burns of the 1930s.
. . And can they accurately search out the conditions for wildfires far enough into the future to allow the U.S. Forest Service to budget scarce firefighting funds, target forest thinning projects and prescribed burning to reduce fire danger, or even help decide where and when to deploy fire crews and equipment
. . Last year, $1.6 billion was spent fighting wildfires that burned across 7 million acres and destroyed 815 structures.
May 31, 03: Forecasters warned the United States must brace for massive hurricane destruction in coming years and said there was a 70 percent chance a major hurricane would slam the US coastline & Caribbean countries this season. It forecast that eight hurricanes, three of them intense, would form in the Atlantic basin this season, which runs from June 1 to November 30. "It is inevitable that we will see hurricane-spawned destruction in coming years on a scale many, many times greater than what we have seen in the past."
May 12, 03: Rising carbon dioxide levels may be helping forests to start reclaiming the world's deserts, scientists believe. The trend could explain why a forest planted on the edge of the Negev desert in Israel 35 years ago is expanding much faster than expected. It could also help account for the estimated seven billion tons of carbon dioxide that goes missing from the atmosphere each year. Scientists believe vegetation creeping back into arid lands could be soaking up the greenhouse gas. They were surprised to find the Yatir forest on the edge of the desert was a substantial carbon dioxide "sink".
. . It was absorbing carbon dioxide as efficiently as vegetation in more fertile areas and it was also expanding quickly into the desert. Seeing the forest, planted 35 years ago, flourish so well, contradicted all expectations. "It wouldn't have even been planted there had scientists been consulted", said Professor Yakir. The observation could indicate an unexpected consequence of man-made greenhouse gas pouring into the atmosphere. While contributing to global warming and turning parts of the world hotter and drier, it could also help to make arid regions more green.
. . Plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, and they absorb the gas through pores in their leaves. But the wider the pores open, the more water is lost through them. Professor Yakir believes that when large amounts of carbon dioxide are present, plants do not need to open their pores so much to obtain the carbon dioxide they need. This allows them to conserve water, so that more is left in the ground. Forests are therefore able to grow in areas that previously would have been too dry for them.
May 9, 03: Global warming may increase deaths and injuries due to flooding in Australia by as much as 240 percent by 2020, and cause a huge jump in the number of Pacific islanders whose homes could be washed away, a new report said.
. . The study, which was commissioned by the Australian government, also warned that the risk of tropical diseases, like dengue, could spread south in Australia and urged the authorities to start preparing the health system.
. . 'Reducing the total level of greenhouse gas emissions remains a primary preventive health strategy,' environment, health and weather experts said.
. . Australia, which ranks as the world's top per capita emitter of greenhouse gases due to huge coal exports and its small population, has infuriated environmentalists by joining the United States in rejecting the Kyoto pact.
. . Global warming is expected to drastically reduce rainfall in some parts.
. . Malaria and dengue, both mosquito-borne, may spread with up to 1.6 million Australians potentially exposed to dengue by 2050.
. . More vulnerable than wealthy Australia are the largely poor and low-lying islands of the South Pacific, the report said. Most affected would be the Papua New Guinea islands, Micronesia and Kiribati.
. . If sea levels rise by 80 cm by 2085 as some scientific models predict, 170,000 people across the South Pacific could be exposed annually to flooding compared with around 5,000 now.
Apr 14, 03: Bangladesh. Flooding in the country is set to increase by up to 40 per cent this century as global temperatures rise, the latest climate models suggest. Each year, roughly a fifth of Bangladesh is flooded, and climate change is forecast to exacerbate the problem as sea levels rise, monsoons become wetter and more intense cyclones lead to higher tidal surges.
. . To make things worse, heavier rainfall triggered by global warming will swamp Bangladesh's riverbanks, a previously unforeseen effect, flooding between 20 and 40 per cent more land than today, says Monirul Qader Mirza, a Bangladeshi water resources expert now at the Adaptation and Impacts Research Group at the University of Toronto.
. . In 1988 and 1998 over two-thirds of the country was under water at some point. Most climate models predict up to 20 per cent more precipitation in South-East Asia if temperatures rise by 5 °C. But no one had investigated how Bangladesh's three major rivers would cope.
Mar 21, 03: In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun's radiation has increased by .05 percent per decade since the late 1970s, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
. . If the change has indeed persisted at the present rate through the 20th Century, "it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years", he said. That does not mean industrial pollution has not been a significant factor, Willson cautioned.
. . Confounding efforts to determine the Sun's role is the fact that its energy output waxes and wanes every 11 years. This solar cycle, as it is called, reached maximum in the middle of 2000 and achieved a second peak in 2002. It is now ramping down toward a solar minimum that will arrive in about three years.
. . Examinations of ancient tree rings and other data show temperatures declined starting in the 13th Century, bottomed out at 2 degrees below the long-term average during the 17th Century, and did not climb back to previous levels until the late 19th Century. Separate records of sunspots, auroral activity (the Northern Lights) and terrestrial deposits of certain substances generated in atmospheric reactions triggered by solar output, suggest the Sun was persistently active prior to the onset of this Little Ice Age, as scientists call the event. Solar activity was lowest during the 17th Century, when Earth was most frigid.
. . To get above all this, scientists rely on measurements of total solar energy, at all wavelengths, outside Earth's atmosphere. The figure they derive is called Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). The new study shows that the TSI has increased by about 0.1 percent over 24 years. That is not enough to cause notable climate change, Willson and his colleagues say, unless the rate of change were maintained for a century or more.
. . A separate recent study of Sun-induced magnetic activity near Earth, going back to 1868, provides compelling evidence that the Sun's current increase in output goes back more than a century, Willson said.
. . He said firm conclusions about whether the present changes involve a long-term trend or a relatively brief aberration should come with continued monitoring into the next solar minimum, expected around 2006.
Mar 12, 03: Belgian scientists found that adding fish oil to animal fodder could cut the release of methane by 25 percent to 40 percent in sheep without disrupting their normal digestion.
. . About 22 percent of the global emission of methane is released through belching farm animals, according to the EPA. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas because it traps nearly 20 times as much heat as carbon dioxide.
Mar 5, 03: Reindeers, caribou and elks could be the latest victims of climate change. Increased rainfall on snow- covered pastures is causing ice crusts to form over the soil which make it difficult for animals living in permafrost areas such as Scandinavia, Siberia and Alaska to feed. They can't break the ice to get to food.
. . A weather pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation increases the likelihood of rain falling on snow (ROS). Strong winds and storms and warm air from the south combine to produce rain instead of snow. "By 2080, ROS is likely to affect 40 percent more land than it does at present, squeezing the reindeer into an ever smaller area."
Mar 5, 03: World water reserves are drying up fast and booming populations, pollution and global warming will combine to cut the average person's water supply by a third in the next 20 years, the United Nations said. They criticized political leaders for failing to take action and, in some cases, disputing the very existence of a water crisis.
. . "About 20 percent of the world's population does not have access to safe drinking water, which we take for granted", said Gordon Young, director of the World Water Assessment Program at UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural agency, which compiled the report. "There is not sufficient water for adequate sanitation and hygiene for about 40 percent of the world's population," he told a news conference in Tokyo. "It is an absolute tragedy." Water supplies per capita have fallen dramatically since 1970 and are set to continue declining, the report found, & more than 2.2 million people die each year from diseases related to contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation, but evidence of the problem was being ignored.
. . By 2050, water scarcity will affect between two billion and seven billion people out of a projected total of 9.3 billion.
. . The report also touched on the threat of conflict over water, which Young said was a concern in a number of regions but especially the Middle East. One particular area of concern surrounds the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which rise in Turkey and flow through Syria before providing much of the water available to Iraq.
Feb 26, 03: The Bush administration's proposed research plan on the risks of global warming drew fire. The plan, the experts concluded, lacks "a guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress, an assessment of whether existing programs are capable of meeting these goals, explicit prioritization and a management plan." The plan is intended to integrate about $1.7 billion a year in climate research now being conducted by more than a dozen agencies.
February 14, 03: Wild coal fires are a global catastrophe, scientists are warning, burning hundreds of millions of tons of coal every year and contributing to climate change and damaging human health. These fires can rage both above and below ground and may contribute more than three per cent of the world's annual carbon dioxide emissions, which are thought to be causing global warming.
. . Scientists note that if coal-producing countries could tackle the infernos, it might be a cost-effective way to meet their targets under the Kyoto protocol. "Estimates for the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere from underground fires in China are equivalent to the emissions from all motor vehicles in the US." They also emit mercury, selenium and sulphides.
. . In Indonesia, there may be up to 1000 fires blazing underground in that country alone. Underground fires can be particularly dangerous as they can burn for decades, and ignite forest fires in times of drought.
Feb 24, 03: For the first time ever, a University of Alberta researcher has discovered that an animal species has changed its genetic make-up to cope with global warming. In the past, organisms have shown the flexibility - -or plasticity-- to adapt to theirr surroundings, but this is the first time it has been proven a species has responded genetically to cope with environmental forces.
. . Dr. Stan Boutin, from the University of Alberta, has been studying a North American red squirrel population in Canada's southwest Yukon for almost 15 years. The squirrels, faced with increasing spring temperatures and food supply, have advanced the timing of breeding by 18 days over the last 10 years -—six days for each generation.
Feb 23, 03: About 55 million years ago, a short-term global warming event is thought to have occurred when something triggered the release of methane from methane clathrate --a kind of 'methane ice' found in ocean sediments. the animals showed an intriguing response: they became smaller. For example, "horses from this period that had been the size of a small dog were reduced to the size of a Siamese cat.
. . "They find that if you grow plants in a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, the plants love it. They grow fast. It's easy for them." But in the process, the plants incorporate less protein and more defensive compounds than they normally would. Insects that eat these plants grow more slowly, and the same might be true of mammals, Gingerich reasoned.
Feb 18, 03: Tufts civil engineer predicts boston's rising sea levels could cause billions of dollars in damage there.
Feb 11, 03: Global temperatures have kept rising and 2002 was one of the warmest years on record while many greenhouse gases reached their highest ever levels in 2001, a British government report said. Data analyzed by the UK Meteorological Office's Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research found that last year joined 2001 and 1998 as the top three warmest since records began in 1860.
Feb 5, 03: The world's first commercial-scale carbon dioxide sequestration effort is already underway on a natural-gas rig off the coast of Norway. Each week, workers pipe 20,000 tons of it --an amount equivalent to the output of a 150-megawatt coal-fired power plant-- into the porous rock of a saltwater aquifer more than half a mile below the seafloor. The source of the carbon dioxide isn't a power plant, but the natural gas itself. It comes out of the well containing a high percentage of carbon dioxide, which must be stripped out before the fuel can be sold. After Norway levied a tax on offshore carbon dioxide emissions in 1996, the rig's owners decided to bury the waste gas instead of venting it. So far, the aquifer seems to be gas-tight.
. . It will be at least a decade before geologists will be able to say with any certainty whether aquifers can contain the gas over the long term. But if they can, the search for storage space would be over. It's been estimated that deep saline aquifers in the United States alone could hold 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide, room enough to store centuries' worth of U.S. emissions, at current levels.
. . The Great Plains Synfuels Plant near Beulah, N.D., turns coal into clean-burning natural gas, producing carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Two years ago the plant began piping carbon dioxide north to the Weyburn oil field. There it's pumped deep underground to help squeeze extra output from the well--a common practice in fields that have begun to run dry. Depleted oil and gas fields have less than a tenth of the total storage capacity of the world's saline aquifers, but they've successfully stored oil and gas for tens of millions of years--a "bulletproof indication" that these formations don't leak.
. . "Instead of trying to put the smokestack underwater, we should be investing massively in energy efficiency and renewables [like solar and wind power]," argues Kert Davies, research director for the U.S. office of Greenpeace.
. . Even scientists who think the scheme is worth studying have doubts about large-scale efforts, fearing that dumping billions of tons in the oceans could smother deep-living organisms and have unintended --and dire-- effects on climate.
. . Scientists have long speculated that they could encourage the growth of single-celled marine algae by fertilizing the ocean with iron, a scarce nutrient. In theory, the plants would gobble carbon as they grew and store it away in the depths as they died and sank. But when scientists spread iron fertilizer in waters south of New Zealand recently, they found that although the algae did flourish and absorb extra carbon dioxide from the water, it took fully 1 ton of iron to sequester 1,000 tons of carbon. Moreover, the iron-gorged algae cranked up their production of two harmful gases-- isoprene, itself a greenhouse gas, and methyl bromide, which is known to damage the Earth's protective ozone layer.
. . For now, either approach is far too expensive: as much as $100 per ton of carbon emissions avoided. Another approach is levying a tax on carbon emissions.
Jan 30, 03: Video cameras aboard the space shuttle Columbia captured an image over Brazil that scientists said proved a scientific theory about how a major fire on Earth can alter global climate.
. . The picture shows a large plume of smoke rising from a fire in the rain forest on a cloudy day in the Amazon Basin. Israeli scientist Joachim Joseph said the picture demonstrated the scientific theory that smoke dissipates cloud cover in its vicinity, allowing more sunlight to enter. "If the clouds do that, then this is a factor that has to be taken into account when you try to model climate, and greenhouse effect on climate, more accurately."
Jan 2, 03: Rising global temperatures that have lured plants into early bloom and birds to nest earlier in the spring are altering the ranges and behavior of hundreds of plant and animal species worldwide, two studies conclude. From North America's marmots to Britain's birds, the findings could spell bad news for species already stressed by habitat loss. This could foretell the extinction of many species in the coming decades, as rising temperatures force them to retreat from their historic ranges or face new competitors.
. . "These papers are the conclusive evidence that the natural world is already responding in a big way to climate change, even though that change has only just got going and there is a lot more to come", Fitter said.
. . A United Nations panel has predicted that average global temperatures could rise as much as 10.5 degrees F over the next century as heat-trapping gases from human industry accumulate in the atmosphere.
. . Spring events such as egg-laying or flower- blooming advanced 2.3 days on average each decade. Her analysis of studies of 99 species of birds, butterflies and alpine herbs in North America and Europe found these species' ranges have shifted northward an average of about 6km per decade. They found, for example, that the earlier arrival of spring weather had shifted events such as egg- laying, the end of hibernation and flower blooming ahead about 5 days per decade for temperate-zone species.
Dec 20, 02: U.S. greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming fell by 1.2 percent last year, the largest decrease in a decade, but it was due in part to slow economic growth and a milder winter, the government said. Still, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2001 were 11.9 percent higher than in 1990.
Dec 17, 02: 2002 has been the second warmest since 1860, extending a quarter-century pattern of accelerated global warming linked to greenhouse gas emissions, United Nations scientists said.
. . The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a United Nations agency, said that 1998 remained the hottest year on record, with 2002 surpassing last year as the next warmest. The 10 warmest years had all occurred since 1987, nine since 1990.
. . "Clearly for the past 25 or 26 years, the warming is accelerating ... The rate of increase is unprecedented in the last 1,000 years", Kenneth Davidson, director of WMO's world climate program told a news briefing.
Dec 17, 02: Canada formally ratified the Kyoto accord on global warming, brushing off fierce opposition from some provinces and major energy producers. "It is a great day for Canada and for the world", Environment Minister David Anderson told a news conference. The treaty awaits ratification by another large developed nation, such as Russia, before it can take effect.
Dec 6, 02: Global climate change is expected to include a rise in the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, and laboratory studies have suggested this will stimulate plants to grow more abundantly. But apparently that is not the whole story.
. . New research in California has found that when other elements linked to global climate change are added to the environment of plants, carbon dioxide actually may act as a drag on growth. When enhanced temperature, nitrogen and water were applied to a plot, the production soared by 84 percent, she said. But when carbon dioxide was added to this mix, the production dropped by 40 percent.
. . "This was unexpected", Shaw said.
Nov 2, 02: Forest soils and the organic matter buried in them typically contain three to four times as much carbon as the vegetation above. CarboEurope's researchers have discovered that when ground is cleared for forest planting, rotting organic matter in the soil releases a surge of CO2 into the air. This release will exceed the CO2 absorbed by growing trees for at least the first 10 years, they say. Only later will the uptake of carbon by the trees begin to offset the losses from soils.
Nov 6, 02: Wildfires like those that ravaged Indonesia five years ago fuel global warming by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, scientists said. The catastrophic fires in Asia destroyed forests and caused losses estimated at over $20 million. They also released about 2.6 billion tons of carbon from smoldering underground peat fires which accounted for 13-40 percent of the annual global production emitted by burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas.
. . The scientists said their research highlights the fact that tropical peatlands store huge amounts of carbon that will be released during future forest fires and when land is converted for a different use.
1975 had more tornadoes than any year on record. Then, 1998 saw twice the tornadoes of 1975.
Oct 18, 02: Southern Africa's food crisis has affected animals as well as people, prompting Zambia to start distributing food to the country's starving wildlife, a conservation official said. Animals are also running out of water, so the authorities are pumping supplies to the park from the nearby Zambezi river. In southern Zambia, the worst affected part of the country, animals are competing for water and wild fruits with some of the three million people living there. Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland are also facing severe food shortages.
October 7, 2002 - Climate change is causing natural disasters that the financial services industry must address, a group of the world's biggest banks, insurers and re-insurers warned. They estimated the cost of financial losses from events such as this summer's devastating floods in central Europe at $150 billion over the next 10 years.
. . The report was supported by 295 banks and insurance and investment companies. A partnership between the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the financial institutions, known as UNEP Finance Initiatives commissioned the report. It shows that losses as a result of natural disasters appear to be doubling every decade and have reached $1 trillion in the past 15 years.
. . "In addition to the emitting industry needing to take a carbon constrained future into account", Fitzpatrick said, "the financial services industry, of which we are a part, also has an obligation to contribute to the solution of these problems through its own investments and business expertise."
Oct 7, 02: Global warming could increase rice, soybean and wheat production in some areas [another study says not], but the greater plant growth could also hurt the nutritional value of the crops, Ohio researchers said. The nutritional quality declines because while the plants produce more seeds with higher levels of carbon dioxide, the seeds themselves contain less nitrogen. "If you're looking for a positive spin on rising carbon dioxide levels, it's that agricultural production in some areas is bound to increase", Curtis said. "Crops have higher yields when more carbon dioxide is available, even if growing conditions aren't perfect." But while there may be more food, it may not be as nutritious, Curtis said.
. . The total number of seeds in wheat and barley plants increased by 15 percent, but the amount of nitrogen in the seeds declined by 20 percent. "That's bad news", Curtis said. "Nitrogen is important for building protein in humans and animals.
Sept 26, 02: Australian Institute of Marine Science ecologist Cathie Page said that a condition scientists are calling "white syndrome" was found on 33 of 48 reefs surveyed in the national marine park, one of Australia's prime tourist attractions. The Great Barrier Reef, which stretches over 133,400 square miles down the coast of the eastern state of Queensland, last southern hemisphere summer suffered the warmest sea water temperatures ever recorded.
. . Mass bleaching, which occurs when coral becomes stressed by high temperatures and its symbiotic relationship with algae breaks down, often leading to death, affected around 60 percent of the reef in early 2002.
Oct 11, 02: Implementing the Kyoto protocol could cost Canada --or not. Environment Minister David Anderson sought to allay concerns by saying that the studies included only the costs, not the job or economic benefits from moving to cleaner energy. "The ultimate results will probably be either a wash or -- and I'm an optimist here -- I think quite substantial positive number of job gains", he told reporters in Parliament.
Sept 10, 02: Carbon dioxide emissions will have to be injected into the earth's surface if the environment is to be saved, a scientist said. "CO2 sequestration is one of the most powerful tools we have of reducing CO2 emissions to the atmosphere", Andy Chadwick, principal geophysicist at the British Geological Survey told reporters. "We need to bring about some quite Draconian cuts in CO2 emissions."
. . The technique has been applied and perfected at the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea over the past few years. It's contained by an impermeable cap of shale and clay.
. . He said that even if only one percent of the aquifer's storage volume was used to store carbon dioxide it would represent one year's output of CO2 from the equivalent of 900 coal-fired or 2,300 gas-fired 500 megawatt power stations. Chadwick said the technique did involve a cost which would obviously rise in the case of a power station and where no suitable geological structure was in the immediate vicinity. "It is expensive at the moment, but a lot of research is being done to find out how to reduce the costs."
Sept 6, 02: A sticky protein shed by fungi living on plant roots is responsible for absorbing and storing sizable amounts of the carbon dioxide pollution linked to global warming, U.S. Agriculture Department scientists said.
. . The protein, glomalin, glues soil particles and organic matter together which stabilizes soil and keeps carbon from escaping into the atmosphere. Farmland and forests around the world are seen as valuable to offset carbon emissions from cars and industrial plants, offering the potential for carbon credit emission trading.
. . Tests showed that the glomalin stored nearly one- third of the carbon absorbed by soil, an amount far greater than humic acid which had been thought to store the most carbon. Glomalin gives soil the rich, fertile texture readily recognized by farmers and longtime gardeners. It lasts from 7 to 42 years in soil, depending on conditions. Another USDA researcher, Sara Wright, is studying glomalin levels to measure the amount of carbon stored in soils beneath tropical forests. "Glomalin is unique among soil components for its strength and stability", Wright said. Other soil components that contain carbon are quickly degraded and break down, she said.
Sept 9, 02: Thousands of the world's esoteric species of sea animals from spiders the size of dinner plates to giant woodlice face extinction if Antarctic sea temperatures rise as predicted, a scientist said. "So far we have looked at 11 species and the answer has come up the same each time. At a temperature rise of two to three degrees, they asphyxiate." Peck said water temperatures around the Antarctic -- one of the last outposts of relatively untouched environment in the world --were rising at more than twice the rate of the land temperature, having climbed by one degree in the past 15 years.
. . Scientific models trying to predict the pace and scale of future change pegged the likely rise at up to three degrees within 100 years. Surveys have shown that the Antarctic sea dwellers were unable to adapt to such temperature changes, so they effectively suffocated, due to their inability to move oxygen around their bodies.
. . "These are probably the most fragile group of animals in the world to temperature change. They grow very slowly, producing only a few generations in 100 years. Yet studies show it takes several generations to adapt." On the plus side of climate change, krill --a basic foodstuff of whales and penguins-- might not be as much at risk as previously thought. They stay at the edge of the ice, wherever it is.
Aug 28, 02: In the Western Amazon jungle of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, the number of drainpipe-thick lianas has nearly doubled in the past 20 years. They could be stifling forests' ability to cool the climate. The vines are heavy enough to drag limbs off trees and block out forest light. "Total biomass is a lot less in forests with lianas than in those without." By bringing down trees that might absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the thriving lianas could be detrimental to our warming planet. Paradoxically, increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere could be to blame for the surfeit of vines. Körner recently completed a study showing that lianas grow faster in today's CO2 levels.
. . This chokes trees and potentially slows the forests' ability to soak up damaging greenhouse gases, scientists say. They found that the "dominance" of lianas over trees had increased by between 1.7 and 4.6 per year over the last two decades of the twentieth century. It appeared to have been caused by greater concentrations of carbon dioxide.
. . As the vines weigh down trees and kill them, they can reduce the ability of the forest to soak up more carbon, making the problem of global warming even worse.
. . Other plant and animal species are also likely to have been affected by the increase in vines relative to trees. Different insects may pollinate vines rather than trees, different birds may eat the insects, and so on. "The ecosystem's connected. You change one part and other parts are likely to change too", Phillips said. "It's a kind of example of how we can't predict how the world is going to respond to the changes we're causing."
Aug 27, 02: "We just don't have any more room left on the island to move homes to." Residents voted overwhelmingly last month in favor of moving the village to some yet- undetermined location. Now residents are searching for the millions of dollars needed for the job.
. . Some blame Shishmaref's erosion on global warming. The once-solid layer of permafrost that protected the island is now thawing, villagers point out. "The material that used to be frozen isn't frozen anymore, and it's easily washed away." Over the years, he has seen sea ice thawing earlier in the summer and winter freezes occurring later. A recent estimate for moving Kivilina, an Inupiat village of 380 located north of Shishmaref, came in at $120 million. "We have a whole series of villages along the west coast that will have to be moved if the level of water continues rising",."It's not just the villages. It's the whole ecology of the Arctic that's changing", Senator Stevens (R) said.
Aug 27, 02: The devastating floods which have killed scores of people across central Europe are the wake-up call that could push industrial nations to act faster to stop the planet heating up, a leading scientist said. Robert Watson is now the World Bank's chief scientist. Watson says pressure from Washington ensured climate change was not on the agenda in Johannesburg.
Aug 12, 02: The Great Salt Lake isn't as great as it used to be: A lack of precipitation and a hot summer have left the lake at its lowest level since 1980. The lake is at 4,198 feet above sea level. Gwynn predicted the lake will bottom out around Dec. 1 at 4,197 feet. The last time it was that low was in 1972.
Aug 11, 02: A two-mile-thick cloud of pollution shrouding southern Asia is threatening the lives of millions of people in the region and could have an impact much further afield, according to a U.N.-sponsored study. It said the cloud, a toxic cocktail of ash, acids, aerosols and other particles, was damaging agriculture and changing rainfall patterns across the region which stretches from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka. Toepfer said the cloud was the result of forest fires, the burning of agricultural wastes, dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, industries and power stations and emissions from millions of inefficient cookers.
. . They said the cloud was cutting the amount of solar energy hitting the earth's surface beneath it by up to 15 percent. The report calculated that the cloud -- 80 percent of which was man-made -- could cut rainfall over northwest Pakistan, Afghanistan, western China and western central Asia by up to 40 percent.
. . Apart from drastically altering rainfall patterns, the cloud was also making the rain acid, damaging crops and trees, and threatening hundreds of thousands of people with respiratory disease.
Aug 7, 02: Clouds formed by trails of water vapor from jet aircraft affect temperatures on the ground, scientists said. Although researchers had suspected the streams of condensation and ice crystals known as contrails had an impact on temperatures, they were not able to test the theory because air traffic over the United States never stopped for any extended period until September 11, when the suicide hijackings on the Pentagon and World Trade Center prompted U.S. authorities to ground all commercial aircraft for three days. The grounding of the aircraft allowed researchers to test the impact of contrails.
. . After analyzing maximum and minimum temperatures over the U.S. during the grounding period and comparing it with weather records for the same period from 1977 to 2000, they found the change in temperature was plus 1.1 degree Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, above the 30-year average temperature.
. . "September 11-14, 2001 had the biggest diurnal temperature range of any three-day period for the past 30 years", said Dr. Andrew Carleton of Pennsylvania State University. The diurnal temperature is the difference between the night-time low temperature and the daytime high temperature, usually for a given day.
. . Contrails, which can last from one to six hours, alter temperature just like high clouds -- they reflect sunlight from above and trap the heat from below. Without the contrails, the daytime temperature would be slightly higher and the night temperature would be lower, creating the increased range between the lowest and highest temperatures. The research is reported in the science journal Nature.
Aug 11, 02: A new European study has found that the world's tropical rainforests are disappearing more slowly than previously thought, though the rate of destruction is still alarming, a magazine reported. But... even the new figures (if accurate) mean an area of rainforest twice the size of Belgium is cut down each year!
Ironically, warmer winter weather last year that many scientists blamed on global warming... decreased the demand for heating fuels and electricity from coal-fired power plants, which reduced emissions growth from electricity generation. That saved energy. BUT... the next summer, increased heat required greater use of air-conditioning, which in turn... made it HOTTER! That's a viscious cycle.
Aug 7, 02: Scientists have overestimated the potential of trees and shrubs to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to a new study. The reassessment casts doubt on whether planting trees is always a positive step in the fight against global warming, as President Bush and others have suggested.
. . Duke University scientists say trees and shrubs growing in areas of abundant rainfall are less effective storehouses for carbon than the native grasslands they have steadily replaced across much of the western United States. "Grasses are deceptively productive", Jackson said. "You don't see where all the carbon goes so there is a misconception that woody species store more carbon. That's just not always the case." The study helps dispel the notion that humans can plant their way out of global warming.
The Senate Environment Committee recently passed a bill that would impose the first-ever limits on emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the United States, but Republicans called the measure dead before it gets to the Senate floor. Also, the bill would cut emissions of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide and smog-forming nitrogen oxides far beyond the levels proposed by the White House in February. The legislation also would set first-time limits on mercury emissions.
July 25, 02: Sea temperatures at Australia's Great Barrier Reef last summer were the warmest on record, and this year's El Nino event means the risk of mass coral bleaching has increased considerably, scientists reported. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) has just completed an atlas of sea temperatures over the past decade, and amalgamated it with historical data to show 2002 was the warmest year for water temperatures off northeast Australia since at least 1870.
. . The rise in temperatures around the world's largest living organism coincided with mass bleaching earlier this year that affected around 60 percent of the Great Barrier Reef's 345,400 square km (133,300 square miles) of coral. Corals tend to live within one to two degrees of their maximum temperature threshold and a tiny increase is therefore enough to ensure a major impact. Bleaching occurs when coral becomes stressed. It involves a breakdown in the symbiotic relationship between the coral and algae and in severe cases the coral will die.
. . Last year was not an El Nino year, making the high temperatures even more unusual, and meaning they were almost certainly a by-product of pollution-induced global warming. There is evidence that coral can acclimate over long periods of time, but so far no indication of any short- term ability.
July 17, 02: Attorneys general from 11 U.S. states criticized President Bush for failing to adopt a comprehensive policy to combat global warming, urging him to rethink his response to climate change and enact a cap on greenhouse gases. The 3-1/2-page letter applauded a State Department's report issued in May that cited the threat to ecosystems and coastlines from rising global temperatures and sea levels, but criticized the administration for not acting on it: "While we are certainly heartened that the United States has now officially recognized the existence and scope of the climate change problem, the administration has yet to propose a credible plan that is consistent with the dire findings and conclusions being reported."
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/ne
Source: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)ws/index.html


March '02: 1.39°F above 1880-2001 long-term mean. Warmest March on record.
February: 1.28°F above 1880- 2001 long-term mean. 2nd warmest February on record.
January: 1.24°F above 1880-2001 long-term mean. Warmest January on record.

Studies Agree on Short-Term Warming
The world is likely to warm by 0.3-1.3ºC (0.5-2.3ºF) during the next 20-30 years no matter whether greenhouse gas emissions increase sharply or weakly, according to two new studies by independent groups of researchers. The groups used different models and different emissions scenarios in their projections, but obtained remarkably consistent results.
Earth's continental crust has warmed during the past 500 years, according to a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers. More than half the heat gain occurred during the 20th century, and nearly one-third of it since 1950. The results are consistent with other studies. "This further supports the conclusion that the observed warming of Earth during the last 50 years has been truly global and extends upward into the atmosphere as well as downward into Earth's oceans, cryosphere, and continental crust." ...published in the April 17,'02 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
May 13, 02: Last year, a United Nations group predicted world temperatures could rise by as much as 10.5 degrees or as little as 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. A British study released last week predicted a 12.4- degree rise by 2100. A Swiss study, meanwhile, estimated a 7.7-degree rise in the same time frame.

NOW: Planet earth is warming up faster than previously expected, said Geoff Jenkins, head of the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research. Jenkins said recent revisions showed much greater output of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide than earlier estimated.
. . Warmer weather will generate more droughts, floods and rising sea levels which many fear will create millions of refugees from drowning island-nations and possible wars over increasingly scarce fresh water. Economies are also likely to take a blow as farming, fishing and business will be affected by the change in climate.
. . But recent data suggest temperatures could rise even higher as a worst case scenario shows four times as much emitted CO2 as today's levels, which Jenkins said is significantly higher than expected.
. . Carbon dioxide is blamed for two thirds of all global warming and is largely produced when burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Half of all CO2 emissions last in the atmosphere for about 100 years, while the rest is soaked up by seas, land and vegetation. But the opposite effect may kick in as warmer weather and less rainfall in some places will dry out and kill trees... which emit CO2 as they decompose, Jenkins said.
. . CO2-absorbing microbes in the soil are also set to boost emissions as higher temperatures will fuel their activities which produce the greenhouse gas. "Instead of helping, they will make global warming worse", Jenkins said.

Feb 15, 02: President Bush's new climate strategy met a frosty response around the world, with one EU politician questioning the morality of a plan that will let U.S. greenhouse gas emissions rise.
. . "It's really shocking...it's a bit like saying: 'wealth is for us today in 2002 and we will leave the problems for our children or for people in Africa or Asia'", said Belgium's Green Party Energy Minister Olivier Deleuze. "It's a policy that's not very moral, I feel."
. . Greenpeace calculated that the policies would allow U.S. emissions to rise 29 percent above 1990 levels by the end of the decade.
Dec 18, 01: 2001 was the second warmest year on record and the trend toward higher mean global temperatures looks set to continue, World Meteorological Organization officials said.
. . It is the 23rd year in succession that temperatures have been above the 1961-1990 mean! The 2001 average temperature was second only to 1998 when temperatures rose under the impact of La Nina, the sister phenomenon to El Nino.
. . World Meteorological Organization officials said the warming trend would be accompanied by further cases of extreme weather conditions --both flooding and drought, as well as sharp temperature variations.

Nov 21, 01: OCTOBER GLOBAL TEMPERATURE WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD! AGAIN!!
...scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center said. They calculated last month's climate conditions using the world's largest weather database.
. . The globally averaged temperature was 14.6 Celcius (58.2 degrees F). This was 0.6 C (1.0 F) above the 1880-2000 long-term mean, the warmest October on record. October global temperatures have been above average for 23 of the past 25 years.
The year-to-date global temperature was 0.5 C (0.9 F) above average, the second warmest January-October period since global surface temperature records began in 1880. Global temperatures have risen over the past 100 years by 0.6 C (1.0 F). The rise in temperature has been more rapid during the past 25 years, a rate approximately three times greater than the century-scale trend.

March 28, 01: An international outcry has followed Bush's announcement that he was in effect abandoning the Kyoto agreement to cut "greenhouse gas" emissions blamed for global warming.
. . German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was scheduled to meet Bush on the 29th for talks including the issue.
. . "This isn't some marginal environmental issue that can be ignored or played down", European Union Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstroem said at a news conference. While stressing it was too soon to discuss "tactics to punish the United States", Wallstroem said she will go to Washington next week with an EU delegation.
. . "It is not acceptable that national economic worries mean that the world cannot act against a global threat", Danish Minister of Energy and Environment Svend Auken said, visibly angry.
. . "This is outrageous and sabotages many years of hard work", Sweden's environment minister Kjell Larsson was quoted saying.
In Tokyo, Japanese Environment Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi said she would "try to make the United States understand the importance of the protocol" so that it can go into effect as planned next year. Japan urged Washington to reconsider.
. . Australia reminded the world's most voracious resources consumer that it had a responsibility to cut the globe's emissions of greenhouse gases.
In the Pacific Ocean, island states already suffering devastation because of rising sea levels and severe storms and droughts said their very survival was at stake. Rising seas could wipe them off the map.
. . Environmental Protection Agency chief Christie Whitman told President Bush a week before he broke a campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that such a move would undermine this country's world reputation, The Washington Post said. The warning came in a March 6 memo in which Whitman wrote, "I would strongly recommend that you continue to recognize global warming is a real and serious issue."

. . March 29th, 01: A top Canadian official said: The Kyoto agreement to fight global warming is not dead and Canada still intends to meet its environmental commitments, despite the withdrawal of White House support for the international accord.
. . We're going to discuss with them what those reservations are, and we'll try to overcome them."
. . Canada is now pumping out 13 percent more greenhouse gases than in 1990, but Fauteux iterated the nation's commitment to meeting its target of a 6 percent reduction below 1990.
. . April 3rd, Prime Minister Jean Chretien called on the United States to stick with the Kyoto accord to combat global warming, and iterated Canada's intention to honor its commitment to cut greenhouse gases.
. . 3-5-01: Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien is worried by what he sees as a confrontational and isolationist tone by the new U.S. administration and is getting ready to adopt a harder line with Washington if necessary, political sources said.

Feb 6, 02: Canada wants to be involved in the development of the new U.S. program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and expects the program will be vigorous, Environment Minister Anderson said.
Anderson told a conference in Toronto he hoped the United States will outline its alternative to the Kyoto treaty by next month, a year after President Bush withdrew his country, the world's biggest polluter, from the U.N.-backed climate treaty.
As fertilizers build up in the soil, bacteria convert more and more of it into nitrous oxide (N2O). Nitrous oxide is best known as "laughing gas", a common dental anesthetic, but it is also a powerful greenhouse gas, hundreds of times more effective than carbon dioxide, and a threat to the ozone layer.
Venice, which rests on millions of wooden piles pounded into marshy ground, has sunk by about three inches a century for the past 1,000 years, but in the last century alone has subsided over nine inches, a U.S. study showed. [JKH: Some of this is sea-level rise.]
Dec 11, 01: Britain's emissions of greenhouse gases, blamed by many scientists for contributing to global warming, have fallen by 14 percent since 1990, according to their latest government report. British lakes and rivers are also on the road to recovery from acid rain poisoning, following successful curbs to air pollution from cars and heavy industry. Substantial curbs on sulphur dioxide emissions across the UK and Europe has cut acid rain by half over the last 12 years. The switch to gas from coal and oil in power generation.
. . The government has a target to cut greenhouse gases by 23 percent by 2010. This is almost double the target of 12.5 percent to which the UK is committed under the Kyoto Protocol.
Nov 5, 01: British supermarket chain Asda said it will use chicken waste and used cooking oil to power its delivery trucks. Asda's Environment Manager Ian Bowles said the chain's 258 stores in the United Kingdom generated 138,000 liters of chicken waste and cooking fat, which after April would be transformed into biodiesel and used to fuel delivery lorries. "Historically, chicken waste and used cooking fat from our in-store rotisseries and canteens has gone to landfills."
Oct 1, 01: The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted the global average surface temperature will rise 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius before the turn of the century --due to rising levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
July 26, 01: A sharp increase in hurricane activity in the Atlantic and Caribbean since 1995 is part of a trend that could last another 40 years, scientists said.
. . "The record level of activity that we've had recently, the increased activity overall over the last six years, is not a result of little, short-term fluctuations", Goldenberg said. "This extra activity is associated with some long-term climate shifts. ... So once they change in one direction, you don't expect it to switch back any time soon.
. . "Hopefully, this is something to motivate people to take this all more seriously, especially emergency managers and government officials.

Desert dust may slightly diminish estimates on how warm the world will become, based on findings of how much sunlight is absorbed by dust. Scientists studying dust blowing off the Sahara Desert have found that dust particles absorb much less solar radiation than previously thought, reducing the amount of solar warming of the Earth’s surface.

Greenhouse gas emissions have caused the world's oceans to heat up over the past half century, according to studies that researchers said pointed with near certainty to human activity, not natural climate fluctuations, as the culprit behind global warming.
. . We believe this is some of the strongest evidence to date that this warming is, in fact, of human-induced origin", Levitus said in an interview. The results provide a "95 percent confidence level" that human-produced greenhouse gases are behind the warming.
July 20, 01: The Earth will become a much hotter place over the next century, according to researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. They predict in a published study that there is a 90 percent chance the planet's average temperatures will rise 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
. . An estimated global warming range of 2.5 to 10.4 degrees was announced this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988 by the U.N. World Meteorological Organization and U.N. Environment Program.

. . Another complication in the Global Heat Balance equation... but don't let the nay-sayers take it as evidence of no warming--it isn't! "How clouds impact on climate is widely regarded as one of the great unknowns in atmospheric science.
. . Thick, bright, watery clouds (like cumulus) shield the atmosphere from incoming solar radiation by reflecting much of it back into space.
. . Thin, icy cirrus clouds are poor sunshields but very efficient insulators that trap energy rising from the Earth's warmed surface. A decrease in cirrus cloud area would have a cooling effect by allowing more heat energy, or infrared radiation, to leave the planet.
. . Researchers noticed that when the temperature of the sea was rising, the coverage of cirrus clouds decreased, allowing the release of more infrared energy into space. This had the effect of cooling the ocean.
. . The researchers estimate that this effect could cut by two-thirds the projected increase in global temperatures initiated by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."
March 7th, 01: - Scientists dispelled any lingering doubts about the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with new evidence from satellites orbiting the Earth. Until now, researchers have depended on ground-based measurements and theoretical models to gauge the change in greenhouse gases, believed by scientists to be the cause of global warming and major climate disruption.
. . "Since these are the models used to predict future climate and influence policy decisions, it is imperative that they can accurately simulate measurements of what is considered to be the driving mechanism behind climate change", said Professor John Harries, the first author of the Nature study.
In about 25 years, 75 percent of the global population will be living on or near an ocean's edge--making the effects of typhoons, polar ice cap melting, earthquakes, marine pollution and algae blooms more pronounced on humankind.
Feb. 22, 2001 - Measuring temperatures inside holes in the ground is an accurate way of showing that Earth's Northern Hemisphere has warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the Industrial Revolution began, University of Utah scientists found. “This is another piece of independent evidence that says global warming is real, and that it is proceeding at a rate faster than we have observed in recent geologic history,” said David S. Chapman, graduate school dean and professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah.
. . "The warming we found implies a link between global warming and greenhouse gas emissions from industrialization” that began in about the 1750s, said Robert N. Rob” Harris, an assistant professor of geology and geophysics. "The warming is real and significant."
February 10, 2001: The Siberian 2000-01 winter has been unusually severe. The region has experienced its harshest winter weather in decades. Some areas reportedly had mid- January temperatures as low as -94 F in the Kemerovo region, some 1800 miles east of Moscow. If those temperatures are accepted as official, this would be a new record low for the continent of Asia.
(Again, the weather "engine" runs on heat --more heat, more "rpms", yields more extremes-- hot & cold, mostly hotter.)

Nov 9th, 00: The first climate model to incorporate realistic plant life produces dismal predictions.

. . A climate model that incorporates realistic plant life suggests much faster global warming than previously predicted.
. . Peter Cox and his colleagues at the Hadley Centre in Berkshire, England, have created the first model that takes into account interactions between plant growth and other environmental factors, such as temperature and carbon dioxide levels.
. . The results are dismal. By 2050, Cox predicts that the biosphere will make a quick switch from sucking up a small amount of carbon dioxide to belching out a lot.
. . Land temperatures could rise significantly -- by 6° Celcius instead of the 4 °C predicted by models that don't allow for changing patterns of vegetation.
. . "The severity of this surprised us", says Cox. "We didn't anticipate the biosphere would be this important."
. . Plants usually absorb more carbon dioxide as more is pumped into the atmosphere. But as it gets hotter, the amount absorbed by plants levels out, while the amount expelled by microorganisms in the soil increases exponentially.
. . This means that overall the biosphere begins to have a warming effect. (New Scientist, 23 October 1999, p 20)
. . Drying and warming will turn large areas of the Amazon into grassland, further accelerating the effect, Cox predicts.
. . The study, from the newly founded Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, predicts that some countries will warm up more than twice as much as others during the coming century.
. . The study predicts more than 5 °C of warming for a string of Asian countries, from Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia, that are already among the hottest and driest in the world. Several, including Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Iran, have suffered famine this year. They are followed by other drought-ridden countries in West Africa. Mike Hulme, director of the center, says: "What is critical about our report is that for the first time it shows individual countries how much warming to expect and how the burden of climate change will be distributed across the world."
. . In line with previous predictions, the study confirms that the biggest temperature rises are likely to be in Russia and Canada, whose large Arctic territories are expected to be more than 6 °C warmer by the end of the 21st century.
. . The six nations set for the least warming, at around 3 °C or less, are Ireland and Britain in the northern hemisphere, and New Zealand, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina in the south.
. . Hulme's study divided national wealth by the predicted temperature rise to assess the likely impact of warming on each country's population. The four most vulnerable countries by this measure are Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. Each has only $100 of its GDP per inhabitant to cope with every degree of warming.

Oct 28th, 00. New data: Atmospheric CO2 levels have risen at a rate of some 10 to possibly 100 times faster than at any prior time in the Earth's history. As northern spring gets earlier, crops (etc) will start to grow, & be more susceptible to frost. Five to 15 percent of the world's agricultural production is lost to frost each year. Oct 25th, 00. The past five years has produced still stronger evidence that human activities are influencing climate and that the earth is likely to get hotter than previously predicted, a U.N. panel of climate scientists says.
. . "There is now stronger evidence for a human influence" on the climate and more certainty that man-made greenhouse gases "have contributed substantially to the observed warming over the last 50 years."
. . Equally significant is the conclusion in the new assessment: that if greenhouse emissions are not curtailed, the earth's average surface temperatures could be expected to increase substantially more than previously estimated.
. . The panel concluded that average global temperature increases ranging from 2.7 to as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit can be expected by the end of this century if current trends of concentration of heat-trapping gases continues unabated in the atmosphere.
. . Five years ago, the panel put the projected increases at a range 1.8 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit. The panel said the higher temperatures stem mainly from more sophisticated computer modeling and expected decline in sulfate releases into the atmosphere, especially from power plants for other environmental reasons. These sulfates tend to act as a cooling agent by reflecting the sun's radiation.
. . Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist at Environmental Defense, said the new warming estimates pose "a risk of devastating consequences within this century."
Climate change is already increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, and the trend is likely to continue according to a report released Friday by the World Wide Fund for Nature.
. . The report, 'Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events', said global temperatures would increase, sea levels would rise, and few places in the world would be spared an increase in violent rainstorms, droughts, tropical cyclones and other climatic disruptions.
. . The authors said the increase in extreme weather would affect different parts of the world differently, and that the southern hemisphere would suffer most.
. . Increases in world water usage by 2025 are expected to lead to water shortages in at least 18 countries. By 2050, an estimated four billion people will be affected by water shortages, increasing tensions over the management and allocation of man's most basic need.
April 1, 02: Isn't it funny that while nay-sayers still try to deny global warming, others are hard at work on the effects it has already caused?!
. . Rising water temperatures have dramatically changed the species of fish, e.g. in Portugal's Tejo River estuary, the biggest in Western Europe. Maria Jose Costa, director of oceanography at the University of Lisbon, said global warming had caused such cold-water species as flounder and red mullet almost to disappear in the last two decades. At the same time, the numbers of warm-water fish such as Senegal sea bream, common to North African waters, and dogfish have vastly increased.
One billion people live in the world's dry areas, which for the most part, stretch across Central and West Asia and North Africa, from Kazakhstan to Mauritania. West Asia and North Africa face the most serious threat of water shortages.
By U.N. figures, Indonesia has the world's third-largest expanse of tropical forest (after Brazil and Congo), but it's shrinking rapidly.

global-warming editorial: http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/opinion/bookman/122701.html

by Seattle Mayor: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/51284_schellop.shtml

http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/
. . EPA Global Warming Site - with information on climate, emissions, uncertainties and EPA reports. "Sea level has risen 6-8 inches over the past century. Approximately 2-5 cm (1-2 inches) of the rise has resulted from the melting of mountain glaciers. Another 2-7 cm has resulted from the expansion of ocean water."

May 2nd, 01: Canada, which is already suffering the effects of global warming, said it would be unhappy if the United States decided to rely on heavily polluting coal- fired power stations as a way of dealing with a major energy crisis.
According to a new study in the journal Nature, soot may be the second biggest contributor to global warming -—just behind the infamous greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2). “Soot, or black carbon, may be responsible for 15 to 30 percent of global warming."
. .Jacobson’s findings come on the heels of a Jan. 21 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC), an organization made up of hundreds of scientists from around the world. In its most dire forecast to date, the IPCC predicted that, by the end of the century, the average surface temperature of the Earth could increase by 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit, with catastrophic results: melted glaciers, flooded shorelines and long periods of drought that persist for hundreds of years.
. .Soot consists primarily of elemental carbon. Exposure has been linked to respiratory illnesses and cancer.
..."The World Health Organization reports that about 2.7 million people die each year from air pollution-- 900,000 in cities and 1.8 million in rural areas", he observes.
Feb 19, 01: Massive flooding, disease and drought could hit rich and poor countries around the world over coming decades if global warming is not halted, an authoritative U.N. scientific team warned. The scientists said they foresaw glaciers and polar icecaps melting, countless species of animals, birds and plant life dying out, farmland turning to desert, fish-supporting coral reefs destroyed, and small island states sunk beneath the sea.
. . The disaster scenario, with its major impact on the global economy, was set out in a 1,000-page report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which links nearly 3,000 experts in dozens of countries and has been studying the warming problem since 1990.
. . "Projected climate changes during the 21st century have the potential to lead to future large-scale and possibly irreversible changes in Earth systems, resulting in impacts on continental and global scales" the report said.
...Last month, the first report said the earth's atmosphere was warming faster than the IPCC initially thought and largely because of human activity --use of carbon-based fossil fuels, industrial pollution and destruction of forests and wetlands. Next month in Accra, Ghana, the body is to issue a third report looking at what can be done to slow the process and help people, animals and plant life to adapt to irreversible change.
March, 01: "Lake Chad was about 25,000 square kilometers in surface area back in 1963", Foley noted. Now the lake is about 5% the size it was in the mid 1960s.
. . . They cite a drier climate and high agricultural demands for water as reasons why what was once one of Africa’s largest freshwater lakes is shrinking.
. . With a drier climate and less rainfall, agricultural areas become more desperate for water to irrigate their crops, and will continue draining what is left of Lake Chad. Foley said, “The problem is expected to worsen in the coming years as population and irrigation demands continue to increase.”
Feb 1, 01: An increase in natural disasters as a result of global warming could cost the world over $300 billion annually by the year 2050, a United Nations commissioned report says. "And certain countries, especially small island states, could face losses far exceeding 10 percent."
. . Low-lying states most at risk included the Maldives, the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia.
. . The extra costs from health-related measures and more intensive water management could cost the United States nearly $30 billion a year and Europe $21.9 billion annually by 2050, the report says.
Oct 28, '00. It is now certain that coral reefs are being damaged by global climate change, a meeting in Bali heard.
. . The first warning signs came from bleaching, which occurs when warmer waters force corals to expel their symbiotic algae. During the 1997-1998 El Niño, reefs bleached throughout the world, and there were mass deaths of coral in the Caribbean. Now cores drilled from Caribbean reefs off Belize show that nothing like this has happened for at least 3000 years.
. . "This is the first palaeontological evidence that directly links the new bleaching-related mass mortality to global warming", says Rich Aronson from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, who did the research. "It's clearly a cause for grave concern."
. . Mark Eakin and his colleagues at the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology in Boulder, Colorado. "There is a definite increase in temperatures in the last 400 years, with warmer, wetter conditions." This must be a result of human activity, says Eakin. "The rate is extreme and we cannot explain it any other way."
. . There is no evidence to suggest corals are acclimatizing to the changes.
. . A call for action to cut greenhouse emissions was unanimously supported by scientists at the meeting.
AGU WARNING. The American Geophysical Union, a prestigious scientific body, has now proclaimed that the threat posed by climate change is sufficiently severe to justify action.
They also said there is no known geological example in which such large amounts of CO2 have been injected into the atmosphere without simultaneous changes in other parts of the carbon cycle and the climate system.
The statement concludes: "AGU believes that the present level of scientific uncertainty does not justify inaction in the mitigation of human-induced climate change and/or the adaptation to it."
Nov 1st, '00. A three-year study of the impact of global warming, funded by the European Union, predicts that shifting climate zones will cause increased winter flooding across northern Europe and the Alps. The number of people in northern Europe at risk of flooding in their homes will have doubled by 2050 and rise more than tenfold by 2080.
. . Rivers in northern Europe such as the Thames in Britain face a 20 per cent increase in peak flood flows. At the same time, deserts will spread further south. "Dry areas will get drier and wet areas wetter."

Other key predictions include:

  1. • Forests in northern Europe will grow 70 per cent faster by 2080
  2. • Climate zones suitable for specific crops will move north by 50 kilometers a decade
  3. • Up to 90 per cent of Alpine glaciers will have melted by 2100
  4. • Virtually all the existing coastal wetlands around the Mediterranean and Baltic will disappear as sea levels rise.
From explorezone.com : 1-19-00
. . Dire predictions about rising seas have possible real consequences that seem unfathomable. Like the inundation of New Orleans.
"We're living on the verge of a coastal collapse", warns University of New Orleans coastal geologist Dr. Shea Penland.
. From 1930 to 1990, the Mississippi River Delta lost more than 1,000 square miles of land to sinking land (called subsidence) and rising seas. Land loss rates have now accelerated, running at about 25 square miles a year, according to Penland and other researchers. "With the projected rate of subsidence, wetland loss, and sea level rise, New Orleans will likely be on the verge of extinction by this time next century", says Chip Groat, Director of the U.S. Geological Survey.
New Orleans is sinking one meter per century --eight times faster than the worldwide rate, the researchers say. Already, New Orleans sits 2 meters below sea level, on average, and is protected by a series of barrier islands and dikes. Many low-lying barrier islands are expected to disappear by 2050.
Recent hurricanes that have battered the U.S. east coast, flooding towns, drowning livestock and sweeping away beaches, are nothing compared to what's on the way, climate scientists said on Saturday. "People think Camille and Andrew were devastating, but we haven't seen anything yet", Kam-biu Liu of Louisiana State University in New Orleans said.
~1-10-00: U.S. and British experts sounded a fresh global warming alert, saying humanity had triggered rapid climate change and must now act fast to help prevent environmental turmoil.
"It's important we take action now", James Baker, undersecretary of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Reuters. He urged business to boost energy efficiency and increase its use of renewable power sources.
The letter's frank tone breaks with the conservative approach normally adopted in public by climate change scientists traditionally reticent about venturing into the political arena.
"We're now coming clean and saying we believe the evidence is almost incontrovertible, that man has an effect and therefore we need to act accordingly", Ewins later told BBC Radio.
The fact is that if you add enough carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the laws of physics tell us that you're going to change the climate.
Experts say 1998 was the costliest year ever for insured losses from weather-related catastrophes. The storms, floods, droughts and fires around the world in 1998 exceeded all the weather related losses of the 1980s decade!
Baker praised as a welcome exception... Ford Motor Co for quitting the industry-funded U.S. Global Climate Coalition, which lobbies against measures to curb greenhouse gases.
Temperatures in the United States finished 1999 as the second-warmest on record since 1900, only topped by 98's all-time high mark, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
. . Precipitation ebbed on average, dropping 1.05 inches below normal levels to a projected 30.60 inches despite heavy local rainfall in the Pacific Northwest.
. . Record dryness was seen in the Northeast, Mid- Atlantic and Ohio Valley. More than 70 tornadoes also occurred during a May outbreak, making 1999 the fourth busiest year.
. . The U.S. saw a busier than normal hurricane season, with 12 tropical storms, eight that became hurricanes, and five major hurricanes.
The 11-member panel of the National Academy of Sciences reported that 1998 had the highest mean worldwide temperature, topping the previous record set in 1995.

According to surface monitors, the Earth's temperature during the 20th century increased 0.7 to 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The satellite and balloon data, going back to 1979, have shown a warming trend in the upper atmosphere up to 5 miles of no more than 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit.
. . The discrepancies between the surface and aerial readings should not invalidate the conclusion that surface temperatures have been rising significantly, said the panel, whose members represented a variety of views on climate change.
. . "We're saying emphatically that it is not valid to equate these two kinds of observations", said Wallace.

There is a high probablity that the warming will release methane from tundra, undersea hydrates, & other sources. This will vastly compound the greenhouse effect! (See the review: "The Spirit in the Gene", by Reg Morrison.)
NOAA said that global warming, caused by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas, is partly to blame for the temperature spike.
Evidence of ancient volcanic eruptions and indicate the the Little Ice Age ended abruptly, a new study shows.

The Upper Fremont Glacier in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, has evidence of the 1815 Tambora and 1883 Krakatau eruptions. Evidence from this ice core indicates that the Little Ice Age, a period from the 1400's to the mid-1800's characterized by cooler temperatures, took less than 10 years to end, roughly from 1840 to 1850.
. . Schuster, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said: "Based on these findings, it's not unreasonable to consider the possibility that a major shift in climate could occur well within an average human lifespan."

G-HOUSE GASSES. . 11-5-98: The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that U.S. greenhouse gasses rose only 1.4% in '97 --from the year before. ("Good news", the surgeon said, "The patient is dying slower than before!")
DATA ERROR. . AP: Those who've argued against warming have used satellite data that showed a cooling at 3KMs altitude. Now that's shown to be wrong--it was the satellites' loss of altitude that caused the cooler readings. Another straw slips out of their grasp! A previous straw was the now-discounted and compensated "heat- island effect".
WARMING STUDY. . 5-13-99: "Up to recently, many people have believed that the medieval time (AD 900- 1300) was warmer. It wasn't. This latter aspect takes away one of the arguments that greenhouse skeptics have used."

Other conclusions:
. . Annual global surface temperatures warmed by 1.03 degrees F from 1861 to 1997. From 1901 to 1997, the gain was 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit. Over both periods, the gain was greater in the southern than in the northern hemisphere.
. . Most warming in the 20th century occurred in two distinct periods: 1925-1944 and 1978-1997. In both periods, warming was greatest over the northern continents and during the December-February and March-May seasons. Arctic temperatures have warmed slightly on an annual basis, with statistically significant increases from 1961 to 1990 during the months of May and June.
. . Much of the recent increase in average temperature has occurred at night. From 1950 to 1993, the minimum nighttime temperature warmed by 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, while the maximum daytime temperature increased 0.14 degrees per decade. The coldest year of the millennium was 1601, at the start of the coldest century, the 17th.
. . A paper on the study, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.K. Natural Environmental Research Council, and other agencies, was published in the May issue of Reviews of Geophysics.

LONGER GROWING SEASONS. . A study by the Univ of Munich, found that the average European growing season (a sensitive indicator) has lengthened by eleven days since last studied!

Besides Arctic ice being much thinner lately, scientists find that far-north soils emit vast amounts of carbon dioxide when heated. This portends a runaway effect of any warming--the effect gets larger, then wham, the cause gets stronger!

"Science" mag: Glaciers in Greenland are rapidly melting and slipping into the ocean. The ice is much thinner over the entire island except the west edge-- thinning by up to a meter a year. That'll make the land under it slowly rise. It had been thought that warming might increase northern snowfall --locking more water onto the land.

METHANE

AN ANCIENT WARMING. . 11/19/99: Analyzing sediments taken from the ocean floor, scientists have found strong evidence linking a dramatic period of global warming, approximately 55.5 million years ago, to a massive release of methane. The event has now been linked to a mass death of deep-sea organisms. In an article in the journal Science, researchers say frozen methane was released by the warming, mixing with oxygen in the water and fueling a cascade of events that led to warmer land temperatures at higher latitudes.
. . One result: Land mammals scampered north and proliferated.
. . Vast deposits of methane, a carbon-based molecule, under the sea floor are locked in crystals of water ice, forming "methane hydrate."
. . Marine geologist Erwin Suess and co-workers from the Research Center for Marine Geosciences in Germany estimate the total amount of carbon locked in these deposits exceeds the amount in all of the known coal, oil and gas reservoirs. What is more, methane hydrate is very unstable and releases methane if the temperature or pressure rises slightly above that existing under the seafloor.
. . Researchers say the impact fireball and the forest fires would have created huge quantities of nitrogen oxides, which react with water vapor to form acid rain. By chance, the Chicxulub event struck rocks with an unusually large proportion of calcium sulfate. This would have generated sulfur dioxide--another source of acid rain.
. . There are several signs of a massive dose of acid rain at the time, including sudden weathering of continental rocks plunged to freezing conditions--typically 70 degrees Fahrenheit below normal --and photosynthesis would not have been possible, even if plants had survived the fires and acid rain.
. . After several months, the dust would have settled and sunlight would have begun to heat up the land. Now the greenhouse effect would have taken over due to the excess of carbon dioxide created by the fires and the melting of limestone rocks at the impact site.
. . Methane released from ocean sediments could have added to the greenhouse effect. It has been estimated that the surface temperatures on Earth were at least 10 degrees Fahrenheit above normal for hundreds of thousands of years after the impact. So dinosaurs, if they were not consumed in a firestorm, would have had to live through a torturous sequence of events--from the barbecue to the freezer, to a dip in acid and then a hothouse baking.

METHANE . Methane is the second-most important greenhouse gas (not counting water vapor...), and, along with other non-carbon dioxide gases, is currently responsible for about 40% of the warming problem. [There would be very little methane in a "no-life" atmo.] Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have doubled in the last two centuries. Landfills, coal mining, livestock, manure and the production and transmission of natural gas are the five major sources of human-produced methane in the US.

HURRICANE FORECAST . It looks like we're in for a 15-20 year period of destructive hurricanes in the Atlantic. Tho it'll be interrupted, some years, by El Nino effects--upper level winds which "blow the tops off" the incipient hurricanes.
. . There are three major cycles going on (on top of g-warming), and they're all inter-related:

1: Thermohaline circulation pattern.
This refers to the lighter warm water and the heavier saltier water that's left when the warm water endures a lot of evaporation. Cooler, saltier water sinks and warm water stays on top. It forms a world-wide "conveyor belt" of ocean water. It's tied to the El Nino/La Nina cycle and countless other global air- and sea-current patterns.
. . Water is warmed in the equatorial areas. In the Pacific, it flows around and south thru the China Sea, north of Australia, across the Indian, up the Atlantic, cools in the North Atlantic, drops and retraces its path back to well up in the Pacific again. There are many side currents, such as the Gulf Stream.

2: High Gear / Low Gear Cycle
. . Lately, the belt has kicked into a higher "gear". This time, high-gear began about 1995. The cycle generally lasts around 20 to 25 years, but things are so different now that it may not--or cycle between "second-gear" and "overdrive", so to speak.

A likely candidate as the "gear-shifter" is:
3: Fluctuations in the sun's magnetic field
which affects the amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth. In the past, this cycle has been roughly 20-27 years. This one seems outside of Man's influence.
. . Remember, all this is on top of the greenhouse effects.
. . East and Gulf Coast cities are likely to get at least 15 more years of unusually frequent and destructive hurricanes. Out west, Oregon, Washington, & B.C. and will get more very wet/snowy winters. After that time, the G.E. may be enough stronger that the conditions may not slow/cool down. Then, when the cycles turn to a higher gear again, look out!

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OCEAN RISE.
May 13, 01: The IPCC report is the work of 2,500 of the world's top climate scientists, and predicts sea levels will rise about 0.08-0.98 meters between 1990 and 2100. The average temperature is expected to increase by 1.5-6.0 degrees Celsius in the same period. Jonathan Gregory, doctor of physics at Britain's Hadley climate center, said it was only in the mid-1900s that global temperatures could be measured properly and previous data were unreliable. "The sea level rise in the last 100 years was about 10 times faster compared with the average growth over the last 3,000 years."
. . Gregory said the movements of sea levels differed around the world. (gravity effects & changes in land levels) "In a short time, levels [in spots] may have sunk, but our conclusion is that sea levels [overall] rose 10-20 centimeters in the 20th century." The average temperature is expected to increase by 1.5-6.0 degrees Celsius in the same period.
. . Against that team of 2,500, one man disagrees. Nils-Emil Morner of the International Association of Quarternary Research (INQUA). In most news stories, he gets equal billing! Typical.
Sea level rises are not even and uniform. Using Greenland as an example, researchers explained that if its ice caps melted, sea levels would fall, not rise, in nearby places such as Britain and Newfoundland.
. . "The reason is fairly simple: despite its small size, the Greenland ice sheet exerts a strong gravitational pull on the seas. As the polar sheet melts, it will exert less pull, resulting in lower, not higher, sea levels around Greenland."
An average 1.5 millimeter annual rise in sea level turns two [linear] meters of forest to salt marsh each year on the west coast of Florida where a study was conducted. This will kill a strip of forest all around the state.
. . Although trees absorb CO2 during photosynthesis, they also release it back into the air during respiration (in breaking down the sugars they have made), which increases in response to temperature rises. Many scientists believe that respiration may be about to accelerate, turning the forests from *sinks to *sources of carbon dioxide.
OCEAN RISE. . 6-99: Two South Pacific islands have disappeared beneath the waves, as climate change raises sea levels to new heights. They are Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea--which ironically means "the beach which is long-lasting"--in the island state of Kiribati. Neither island was inhabited, though Tebua Tarawa was used by fishermen.
. . The South Pacific Regional Environment Programme says other islands are at risk, both in Kiribati and in nearby Tuvalu. It says most of the coastline of the 29 atolls of the Marshall Islands is suffering erosion. (as salt encroaches, and vegetation dies, the remaining land quickly vanishes.)
. . All three island groups have experienced severe flooding by storms and high tides, and populated islands are now being affected.

HOWEVER, it's not all the same. Oct. 29, 99 — A group of New Guinea's islands (the Duke of York Islands) is sinking into the Ocean at the rate of 4 to 6 inches a year, and government scientists recommended that 20,000 residents move to other islands. This time it's not rising sea levels, but seismic activity. Volcanoes there are emptying the magma from beneath them.

OCEAN CURRENTS. . 11-25-99: Scientists have found evidence that the Atlantic Ocean current which gives Europe its mild climate is being disrupted. Several teams have found signs that the current, which brings warm water to northwest Europe from the Gulf Stream, is being disrupted by a growing amount of freshwater entering the Arctic Ocean. Water from the Greenland Sea now flows in the opposite direction.
. . The current, called the North Atlantic Drift, brings warm water northwards from the Gulf Stream. The North Atlantic Drift is part of a global conveyor belt that brings warm surface water from the Gulf of Mexico to northwest Europe and sends cold deep water back. The belt is driven by two "pumps", one in the Greenland Sea and one in the Labrador Sea, where the surface water cools, sinks and then returns south.
. . If it stopped, then the temperatures in western Europe would plunge by five degrees Celsius (10F), creating bitter winters.
This increase is a result of changes attributed to climate change and possibly global warming: melting ice, increased rainfall and changing wind patterns.
HOT & WET. . 2-12-00: Newly analyzed satellite data shows that Earth's atmosphere has gotten warmer and wetter over the past 11 years, with the amount of water vapor increasing 2 percent.
. . In a study appearing in the Jan 27,00 issue of the journal Nature, researchers compared measurements of sea surface temperature, air temperature and humidity from three satellites.
. . "The three satellites combined provide some of the strongest evidence so far of a climate trend of increasing air temperature and humidity", says Frank Wentz, a physicist at Remote Sensing Systems. "Water vapor is really the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and has a greater influence on global warming than carbon dioxide..."
. . An expected outcome: As air temperature increases, the atmosphere is able to hold more water and as the Earth's global temperature increases, so the amount of water in the atmosphere would be expected to increase.
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DROUGHT.
Dec 1, 03: This year's Atlantic hurricane season, which ended on Sunday, exceeded the norm and produced 14 named tropical storms. Seven of the 2003 season's 14 storms became hurricanes, with three --Fabian, Isabel and Kate-- becoming major.
. . This was the season of Isabel, which slammed into North Carolina as one of the strongest hurricanes on record with maximum sustained winds of 165 miles per hour, and Juan, the worst hurricane to hit Halifax, Nova Scotia, in modern history, and Fabian, the most destructive hurricane to hit Bermuda in more than 75 years.
. . NOAA said the years from 1995 through 2003 had been the most active period for Atlantic hurricanes on record. Since 1995, 7 of 9 seasons have been above normal.
Dec 12, 03: The massive amounts of heat and pollution that rise from the world's cities both delay and stimulate the fall of precipitation, cheating some areas of much-needed rain and snow while dousing others, scientists said. The findings support growing evidence that urbanization has a sharp and alarming effect on the climate, and those changes can wreak havoc with precipitation patterns that supply life's most precious resource: water.
. . In California, eastward-blowing pollution induces a precipitation deficit across the Sierra Nevada mountain range equal to about 1 trillion gallons of water a year, said Daniel Rosenfeld of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Sierra Nevada is a major source of water for much of California, which relies on it to supply its cities and farms.
. . The warmth and grit generated in urban areas can have the opposite effect on local precipitation and actually boost rainfall levels in large cities like Atlanta and Houston. During the past 60 years, while Houston has grown to become the nation's fourth-largest city, scientists have measured increased amounts of rain in areas downwind of the urban core during hot, humid summer months.
. . In Southern California, a 24 percent decrease in the amount of rainfall measured since 1890 in the town of Cuyamaca appears linked to aerosol pollution wafting from San Diego, roughly 40 miles to the southwest.
. . Cities also generate and trap tremendous amounts of heat and are on average one to 10 degrees warmer than surrounding undeveloped areas. That heat also changes the dynamics of clouds. In more humid cities, urbanization appears to invigorate summer storm activity by allowing clouds to build higher and larger before unleashing torrential rains.
Dec 12, 03: Weather forecasters are predicting extremes of tropical downpours and drought throughout Southeast Asia and the South Pacific as the effects of global warming take effect. Pacific climatologists at a four-day meeting here this week, said warming was already producing more pronounced extremes. A bigger part of annual rainfall was now falling on the four wettest days of the year, with less rain and possibly droughts for the rest of the year.
. . Niwa climatologist Brett Mullan said warmer air rose more quickly than cold, allowing more moisture to build up before turning into rain. "That process builds up and results in heavier, extreme rains over often narrower, smaller regions", he said. "Therefore the drier areas might expand as well, so you have the apparent contradiction of more heavy rain and more drought."
Sept 23, 03: Australia may be facing a permanent drought because of an accelerating vortex of winds whipping around the Antarctic that threatens to disrupt rainfall, scientists said. Spinning faster and tighter, the 100 mile an hour jetstream is pulling climate bands south and dragging rain from Australia into the Southern Ocean, they say. They attribute the phenomenon to global warming and loss of the ozone layer over Antarctica. A cooling polar area and warming elsewhere is spinning the vortex faster, which in turn pulls winds and pressure belts that deliver Australia's winter and spring rains southward.
. . Australia, one of the world's top agricultural supply nations, has just been through its worst drought in 100 years. Australia's 2002/03 drought, the worst in 100 years and the cause of shortages of a wide variety of some of the world's largest supplies of bulk farm foods, was too extensive to blame on the Antarctic vortex. But a long- standing drought in the southwest corner of Western Australia state could be a foretaste of more extensive drought yet to come in Australia.
. . "This is a very serious situation that we're probably not confronting as full-on as we should." Most worrying is that this could be more or less permanent, scientists say.
Sept 1, 03: After weeks of crippling droughts and record temperatures across Europe, the people of Berlin are witnessing a new sign of climatic disruption after the river Spree began flowing the wrong way... channelled straight into the city's water supply. Many species would find it difficult to survive in the shallow pools now left in many parts of the river bed.
Aug 1, 03: The intense heat wave that has baked much of Europe for weeks, fueling deadly forest fires, causing drought and damaging crops, has convinced many people that global warming is a reality. Less than a year ago, scores of people were dying as floods swamped Germany, Russia, Austria and the Czech Republic.
. . This year, the problem is extremely hot weather and drought, which, though it might be welcome to holidaymakers, is threatening lives and livelihoods in many parts of Europe. "We've not seen such an extended period of dry weather and sunny days since records began (in about 1870)."
. . In most parts of Italy, temperatures have hovered around the mid-30s Celsius every day for two months, with Milan hitting a June record of over 40 degrees Celsius. The heat wave has pushed Italy's electricity grid to its limit as people crank up their air conditioners, leading to rolling blackouts that have affected millions of Italians. Drought has caused billions of euros in crop damages.
July 30, 03: Parts of China are facing their worst drought in a decade with nearly three million people suffering from water shortages in two provinces alone. In eastern Zhejiang province, some 1.3 million people are short of drinking water while 200,000 hectares of crops have been damaged.
. . Eastern Anhui province, struggling to overcome the worst floods in years, is also now blighted by intense heat. Meanwhile, torrential rains that have plagued central and eastern China have moved towards the northeast where water levels are rising on the Nengjiang river. The area around the famous Three Gorges in Hubei province meanwhile is threatened by landslides, while boats have been prohibited from navigating the Tongzhuang river.
. . China has been particularly hard hit by wild weather this year with at least 3.5 million people made homeless by floods. And last week, a powerful typhoon swept over the south, leaving a trail of destruction in its path.
June 19, 03: Scientists in China have said that increasing desertification is costing the country more than US $40 bn a year. They blamed the increase on harsh envrionmental conditions and industrial activities. They said that desertification is severely harming agricultural production, communication and transportation networks and even burying whole villages.
. . China now has more than 2.62 million square kilometres of land under desertification, twice the amount of the total available farmland in China. Duststorms choke northern China nearly every spring, often blown off the dry expanses of the Mongolian desert plain. The desert is now less than 250 kilometres from the capital, Beijing.
May 5, 03: When they celebrated Panama's independence from Spain in 1821, villagers there laid claim to a thickly forested, abundant land. Now, as a nationwide drought lays waste to this once lush land, the people of Villa de los Santos have only bone-dry fields peppered with skeletal animals to acclaim.
. . After seven months without rain in a tropical country that usually sees heavy rainfall for most of the year, farmers and city-dwellers alike are suffering the effects of almost two centuries of deforestation, as one of Panama's worst droughts in living memory takes hold.
. . The relentless felling of tropical dry forest, once prevalent across Central America and Mexico, to make way for farming and ranching, has robbed the land of the trees that kept moisture in the soil and maintained the fragile microclimate of the humid tropics.
. . The deciduous forest once covered more than 200,000 square miles of Pacific coastal lowlands from Panama to Central Mexico, but now less than 0.1 percent of the original forest survives. Without trees, the soil soon loses its nutrients as the rain water runs off to the sea.
. . Panama is already a testament to deforestation at its worst, environmentalists say, in the form of the Sarigua desert, 150 miles southeast of Panama City. Though not a desert in strict ecological terms, years of deforestation, overgrazing by livestock and the loss of topsoil through erosion have devastated 19,760 acres in Sarigua, leaving it utterly barren and saline.
Mar 14, 03: A study of southern Caribbean sediments suggests that a century-long dry trend may have been the killing blow in the demise of the Mayan civilization that once built pyramids and elaborate cities in Mexico. Sediments from the Cariaco Basin in northern Venezuela clearly record a long dry siege that struck the entire Caribbean starting in about the seventh century and lasting more than 100 years.
. . The Maya flourished in what is known as the pre- classic period before 700 A.D., building cities and elaborate irrigation systems to support a population that soared above a million. The civilization collapsed and many of the sites were abandoned early in the 800s. They were later reoccupied only to collapse again, with some cities deserted in 860 and others in 910. "Those abandonments occur synchronously with the timing of the droughts in our record (from the sediments), suggesting the droughts were causing those events", said Hughen.
Dec 17, 02: El Nino's return in 2002 helped to hike global temperatures to the second highest on record and scorch the earth with widespread drought, U.S. government forecasters said. The weather anomaly El Nino caused drought in India and Indonesia and record high temperatures in Australia during the year.
. . The average temperature for 2002 for the contiguous United States is expected to be 53.6 degrees F, about one-half degree cooler than 2001, NOAA said. About one-third of the US is still drought-stricken. El Nino will affect U.S. weather through March or April, bringing a mild winter to the northern half of the country while pounding the South and East with more storms.
. . The average global temperature in 2002 rose nearly 1 degree from last year to 57.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the second-warmest year since the United States started tracking weather data in 1880. The highest temperature on record was 58.0 F in 1998. Nine of the 10 warmest years recorded on earth since 1880 have occurred since 1990, NOAA said.
. . During 2002, scientists saw the greatest surface melt on the Greenland ice sheet in the 24 years that satellites have monitored the formation and a record low in Arctic sea ice in September.
Nov 13, 02: El Nino, the weather phenomenon blamed for causing devastating droughts, storms and floods around the globe, works on a 2,000-year cycle, scientists said. The frequency of El Nino events peaked about 1,200 years ago during the Middle Ages and will probably reach another high in the early part of the 22nd century.
Nov 21, 02: Global warming will have a devastating effect on water availability in the western United States, a new climate forecast predicts. Even the report's best-case scenario predicted water supplies would fall far short of future demands by cities, farms and wildlife, generating critical water-rights' issues that have already surfaced during the West's current drought. The study predicts overall precipitation levels are likely to remain constant, but warmer temperatures mean [some of] what would have fallen as snow will instead come down as rain.
. . Among the new study's forecasts for the next 25 to 50 years:
  • _ Reservoir levels along the Colorado River will drop by more than a third, and releases by 17 percent. The lower levels and flows will cut hydropower generation by as much as 40 percent.
  • available for irrigation, cities and hydropower. With less fresh water, the Sacramento Delta will increase in salinity, disrupting the ecosystem.
  • _ Along the Columbia River system, there will be either water in the summer and fall to generate electricity, or in the spring and summer for salmon runs — but not both.
    Sept 13, 02: With nearly half the country reeling from a blistering drought, this summer is the hottest since the depression-stricken "Dust Bowl" of the 1930s, U.S. government weather experts said. And the 1930s drought was likely surpassed only in the 1570s and 1580s. The summer of 2000 was only the 12th warmest on record.
    . . The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average temperature for the contiguous United States from June through August was 73.9 degrees, the third hottest summer since records began in 1895. The only warmer summers ever recorded were 1936 and 1934, when vast numbers of farmers were driven from their land by drought. Moderate to extreme drought covers more than 45 percent of the United States. Six states are suffering their worst drought on record, NOAA said. Five others are also near unprecedented dry levels. Crops will be the smallest in years. Just up to now, South Dakota alone has reported over $1.8 billion in agricultural losses. Costs to fight forest blazes are expected to amount to more than $1.25 billion.
    As of the end of August '02, some 48 percent of the contiguous United States was undergoing drought conditions, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (NOAA)
    Aug 28, 02: Suburban strip malls, office buildings and other paved areas have worsened the drought covering half the United States by blocking billions of gallons of rainwater from seeping through the soil to replenish ground water, environmental groups said. "Sprawl development is literally sending billions of gallons of badly needed water down the drain each year --the storm drain."
    Aug 11, 02: Erratic monsoon rains have caused flooding in eastern India, and adjoining Nepal and Bangladesh, while leaving large swathes of the rest of India with its worst drought in 15 years.
    . . China was battling with the effects of floods in its southern Hunan province, where torrential rains have triggered landslides and floods, killing 70 people and damaging crops in a main rice-producing area. So far this year, around 900 people in China have been killed in seasonal floods. South Korea, where 14 people have died, has mobilized troops to battle further downpours after a week of deluges dumped two-fifths of the average annual rainfall on the country. More rain is forecast.
    . . North Korea, already suffering a severe food shortage, has also reported crops destroyed by torrential rains, but there are no estimates so far of the extent of the damage.
    May 17, 01: Windblown desert dust can choke rain clouds, cutting rainfall hundreds of miles away. This a new discovery, made with the help of NASA satellites. It suggests that droughts over arid regions, such as central Africa, are made worse by damaging land- and livestock- management methods that expand the desert. It's a viscious circle!
    . . The findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, present a new view of the decades-long drought in the African Sahel, which has been accompanied by increasing levels of airborne dust during the rainy season.
    . . The higher dust frequency is not necessarily a result of the decreased rainfall, but rather its cause, according to scientists from Israel's Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute.
    Feb 2000: Tree ring records in North America show evidence of a "mega-drought" in the 16th century that wreaked havoc for decades among early settlers and native populations.
    . . Researchers used tree ring chronologies that extend back more than 500 years in Western North America, the Southeast and the Great Lakes. Dry conditions extended from Mexico and the Southwest to the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi Valley throughout the last half of the 1500s.
    . . Back as far as A.D. 1200, no other drought appears to have been as intense, prolonged and widespread. Severely dry weather may explain why some native populations in Mexico and the Southwest (Anasazi) abandoned their pueblos between 1540 and 1598, the researchers contend.
    UGLY OIL. . As the world's weather grows warmer and deadlier, uneasy public opinion is starting to see climate change as the ugly legacy of the oil era.
    . . So says oilman-turned- environmentalist Jeremy Leggett, who argues that oil companies are sowing the seeds of their own demise if they continue to dismiss the fight against global warming.
    . . "We are seeing the first faint signals of how bad it can get", Leggett told Reuters, referring to the mudslides that killed as many as 30,000 in Venezuela and storms that battered France last month.
    . . In a book called "The Carbon War" he says a growing chorus of concern, reaching into financial sectors like insurance, points the finger at Big Oil's inability to embrace clean energy.
    . . Unrepentant firms might eventually face disinvestment and punitive class action lawsuits in a parallel with the U.S tobacco industry's troubles with sick smoker damages, he says.
    . . The book, a racily-written diary of those years, portrays what he calls crass disinformation put out by oil lobby spin-doctors to undermine evidence of human-induced climate change.
    . . He acknowledges ruefully the skill of oil lobbyists and lawyers in brushing aside scientific complexities to present powerful soundbites attractive to conservative columnists.
    . . He saw oilmen work closely with OPEC states like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to delay or skew debate at key gatherings.
    . . The oil lobby mostly succeeded in veiling from public view worst case scenarios in which human-induced climate warming could trigger natural mechanisms spewing uncontrollable amounts of methane greenhouse gases from ocean floors, Leggett writes.
    . . "We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the Age of Oil, Atlantic Richfield chief executive Mike Bowlin said last year to a chorus of environmental approval.
    CONTRAIL EFFECTS . 6/24/99: The condensation trails, or contrails, left by jet airplanes already cover more than 5 percent of the sky over some heavily traveled parts of the eastern United States. It's long been known that they are useful indicators of weather to come. Now, it seems, they may affect the climate in a more long-term way.
    . . They already cause about one percent of all manmade greenhouse effects and will increase enough in the next 50 years to contribute significantly to global warming. The research team of scientists, headed by NASA's Patrick Minnis, says the contrails will increase sixfold by 2050.
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    TORNADOS.

    After a study looking at 81 years of climate history, researchers say this year's strong La Niña could double the tornado activity in the central midwest.
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    For views on global warming not filtered through fuel-industry-funded right-wing think tanks, read through these:
    1. Climate Ark.)
    2. The Heat is on.)
    3. The EPA.)
    4. IPPC.)
    5. Envi ro Defense Fund.)
    6. News.
    7. NOAA.GOV)

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