Tundra burns as Arctic warms

The treeless ecosystem of mosses, lichens, and berry plants is giving way to shrub land and boreal forest. As scientists study the transformation, they are discovering that major warming-related events, including fires and the collapse of slopes due to melting permafrost, are leading to the loss of tundra in the Arctic. By Bill Sherwonit During […]

Pine beetles transform B.C. forests into net carbon emitters

Last year, B.C.’s forests were praised in the climate-change fight. But the pine beetle has forced the province to rethink its forest policy By Justine Hunter Victoria — From Saturday’s Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Jan. 08, 2010 7:54PM EST Last updated on Saturday, Jan. 09, 2010 4:31PM EST In a single season, an […]

Warmer climate could stifle carbon uptake by trees

  (University of Colorado at Boulder) Contrary to conventional belief, as the climate warms and growing seasons lengthen subalpine forests are likely to soak up less carbon dioxide, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study. As a result, more of the greenhouse gas will be left to concentrate in the atmosphere. “Our […]

Graph of the Day: Aragonite Saturation in the Greater Caribbean Region, 1880-2009

An extended time series of the regional mean aragonite saturation state for the Greater Caribbean Region derived using the NOAA extended reconstructed SST (ER SST V3b; red curve) with the Experimental Ocean Acidification Product Suite v0.3 values derived from satellite SST overlaid (blue curve). The global mean (green curve) is estimated from the representative SST […]

Graph of the Day: Aragonite Saturation in the Greater Caribbean Region, 1988-2009

Using climatological salinities (World Ocean Atlas available from NOAA NODC at http://www.nodc.noaa.gov) and NOAA SSTOI, we extended this approach to model fields back through 1988 (Figure 2b), revealing regionally averaged Ωar values declining at a rate of about 3% per decade amid considerable seasonal variability. These values are consistent with in situ measurements obtained at […]

Australia baked under hottest decade on record

By Michael PerryTue Jan 5, 2010 9:24am EST SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia experienced its hottest decade on record from 2000 to 2009 due to global warming, the nation’s bureau of meteorology said on Tuesday, as annual summer bushfires again burn drought lands and destroy homes. The average temperature in Australia over the past 10 years […]

Graph of the Day: Mid-tropospheric Carbon Dioxide, Sep 2002 – Jul 2008

This visualization is a time-series of the global distribution and variation of the concentration of mid-tropospheric carbon dioxide observed by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on the NASA Aqua spacecraft. For comparison, it is overlain by a graph of the seasonal variation and interannual increase of carbon dioxide observed at the Mauna Loa, Hawaii observatory. […]

Koalas to starve as the world warms

AAP — Koalas are highly vulnerable to climate change and face starvation, a leading conservation group has warned. The koala – an Australian icon known the world over – has made it on to a global list of 10 well-known species threatened by climate change, along with the fish that inspired the cartoon character, Nemo. […]

Acidification irreversible ‘on timescales of tens of thousands of years’

By 2050, ocean acidity could increase by 150 percent. This increase is 100 times faster than any change in acidity experienced in the marine environment over the last 20 million years. By Nanet Poulsen 14/12/2009 06:10 The secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) released Monday a major study in collaboration with the UNEP […]

Fishermen say carbon dioxide having ‘really scary’ ocean effect

By Daniel Whitten Jeremy Brown, a fisherman from the Pacific Northwest, is pulling things from the ocean he says are so disturbing that he came to Washington to warn U.S. lawmakers about it. “This is not overfishing, this is something far larger,” said Brown, one of 10 people who met with lawmakers and legislative aides […]

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