The free ecosystem service that has been buying us time may not last. Richard Betts, Mike Sanderson, Debbie Hemming, Mark New, Jason Lowe, Chris Jones, 4°C global warming: regional patterns and timing, 4 Degrees and Beyond Conference, [pdf], p. 9 Technorati Tags: carbon sequestration,carbon dioxide,global warming,climate change
By Frank Nyakairu NAIROBI (Reuters) – Drought for a fifth year running is driving more than 23 million east Africans in seven countries toward severe hunger and destitution, international aid agency Oxfam said on Tuesday. Launching a 9.5 million pound appeal, it said the situation was being worsened by high food prices and conflict. […]
Reductions in terrestrial snow cover (blue) and sea ice (red) extent during June to August over the Northern Hemisphere since the late 1960s and 1970s, respectively. Data are from the Global Snow Lab, Rutgers University, New Jersey, and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado, Boulder. Eric Post, et al., Ecological […]
ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2009) — Unusually high temperatures in the Arctic and heavy rains in the tropics likely drove a global increase in atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008 after a decade of near-zero growth, according to a new study. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, albeit a distant second. […]
Northward expansion of insect herbivores such as the winter moth in northernmost Fennoscandia (intact mountain birch forest is shown in green, severely defoliated forest during the most recent outbreak in 2005 to 2008 is in dark brown, and tundra beyond the tree line is in white; reports of local winter moth outbreaks before the last […]
Change measurements are median filtered (10-km radius), spatially averaged (5-km radius) and gridded to 3 km, from intervals (Dt) of at least 365 d, over the period 2003–2007 (mean Dt is 728 d for Antarctica and 746 d for Greenland). East Antarctic data cropped to 2,500-m altitude. White dashed line (at 81.5° S) shows southern […]
Picturesque views of the snow-covered Alps may soon be relegated to picture books due to increasing climate change, a new European environmental report says. And it’s not just skiers and tourism officials who are getting nervous about the fate of the continent’s famous mountains. Temperatures in the Alps are increasing at a rate more […]
By Thin Lei Win BANGKOK (Reuters) – Climate change is threatening 163 rare species discovered only last year in the Greater Mekong region, conservation group WWF said Friday. Events such as frequent droughts and floods plus a rise in sea levels spell danger for species in what WWF called in a report “one of the […]
Baghdad (UPI) Sep 23, 2009 – Iraq’s water crisis is getting worse by the day, adding to the political uncertainty sweeping the country ahead of potentially incendiary parliamentary elections in January. On top of the cutbacks in the water flow of the life-giving Tigris and Euphrates rivers by Turkey, Iraq’s parched south is now threatened […]
Washington/Nairobi, 24 September 2009 -The pace and scale of climate change may now be outstripping even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). An analysis of the very latest, peer-reviewed science indicates that many predictions at the upper end of the IPCC’s forecasts are becoming […]