By Nicolas Guérin, Mediacom18 January 2012 EPFL mathematicians have shown that the risk of extreme climate events is largely underestimated. They are developing a model for better understanding the impact of climate change. Remember the 2003 heat wave? According to the standard weather models, it was impossible. Mathematicians from EPFL’s Chair of Statistics, however, say […]
Moscow, January 17 (IANS/RIA Novosti) – Temperatures in Russia in the past century rose at twice the rate of warming in the rest of the world, the emergencies ministry said. “Despite ongoing discussions in the scientific community about the nature and long-term outlook for global climate change, the fact of global warming itself is uncontroversial,” […]
ROME, 28 November 2011 (FAO) – Widespread degradation and deepening scarcity of land and water resources have placed a number of key food production systems around the globe at risk, posing a profound challenge to the task of feeding a world population expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050, according to a new FAO […]
By DAVID LESTER, The Yakima Herald-Republic8 January 2012 YAKIMA, Washington (AP) – Spectacular on a clear, sunny day, Mount Adams rises a scant 53 miles from Yakima. But the mountain holds what until now has been pretty much a secret. In the first comprehensive study of its kind, a Portland State University study has found […]
By Mark Tran, www.guardian.co.uk 9 January 2012 Governments in the Sahel and international relief agencies have been quick off the mark in acknowledging a looming food crisis. Last October, the government in drought-hit Niger – where almost 1 million people are in urgent need of food after a poor harvest – drafted a response plan, […]
Projected annual changes in dryness assessed from changes in soil moisture (soil moisture anomalies, SMA). Increased dryness is indicated with yellow to red colors; decreased dryness with green to blue. Projected changes are expressed in units of standard deviation of the interannual variability in the three 20-year periods 1980-1999, 2046-2065 and 2081-2100. The figure shows […]
HOUSTON, January 7 (AP) – The National Weather Service says 2011 was Texas’ driest year on record as well as its second hottest. The agency said Friday the average rainfall for the drought-stricken state last year was 14.88 inches. The previous driest average total was in 1917 with 14.99 inches. The weather service says 2011’s […]
By Jens Erik Gould / Los Angeles 3 January 2011 To quench the thirst of Southern California’s some 20 million people, water must be imported from hundreds of miles away, across a daunting array of deserts, valleys and mountains. For decades, Angelenos have muttered a doomsday refrain: our water supply isn’t sustainable, and we are […]
ISI Web of Science search of the trend in published reports of climate-related forest mortality in the scientific literature, for the years 1985–2009. Plotted bars show the percent of references using the topic words “forest AND mortality AND drought”, relative to all “forest” references. Line represents the linear regression model fitted to the data (R2 […]
By Jeff Masters30 December 2011 A remarkable blitz of extreme weather events during 2011 caused a total of 32 weather disasters costing at least $1 billion worldwide. Five nations experienced their most expensive weather-related natural disasters on record during 2011 – Thailand, Australia, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. According to insurance broker AON Benfield’s November […]
