Antarctica’s massive Pine Island Glacier ‘has started a phase of self-sustained retreat and will irreversibly continue its decline’ – Could raise sea level by 1 centimeter

By Ari Phillips    13 January 2014 (Climate Progress) – After last week’s Arctic-fueled cold snap — dubbed the ‘Polar Vortex’ — brought freezing temperatures and claims of climate change denial to the attention of the general public, the situation has now returned to normal. Or the new normal at least — in which climate change […]

Earth’s poles are shifting because of climate change

By Anil Ananthaswamy13 December 2013 (New Scientist) – Climate change is causing the North Pole’s location to drift, owing to subtle changes in Earth’s rotation that result from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. The finding suggests that monitoring the position of the pole could become a new tool for tracking global warming. Computer […]

Mass starvation of penguins on Cape Denison, as iceberg blocks access to ocean and food – ‘The most eerie thing about the rookeries is how quiet they are’

By Alok Jha and Laurence Topham24 December 2013 (The Guardian) – Every coast or sea we have visited in Antarctica, we have seen penguins. They come to the shoreline to investigate our ship as we sail past, they hop on and off ice floes, flocks of them fly in formation through the water. Night or […]

Arctic temperatures highest in 44,000 years – ‘All of Baffin Island is melting, and we expect all of the ice caps to eventually disappear’

By Douglas Main24 October 2013 (LiveScience) – Plenty of studies have shown that the Arctic is warming and that the ice caps are melting, but how does it compare to the past, and how serious is it? New research shows that average summer temperatures in the Canadian Arctic over the last century are the highest […]

Graph of the Day: Comparison of observed and simulated climate change based on three large-scale indicators in the atmosphere, the cryosphere, and the ocean

27 September 2013 (IPCC) – [This graph shows a] comparison of observed and simulated climate change based on three large-scale indicators in the atmosphere, the cryosphere and the ocean: change in continental land surface air temperatures (yellow panels), Arctic and Antarctic September sea ice extent (white panels), and upper ocean heat content in the major […]

The Economist: Global warming is still our fault

STOCKHOLM, 27 September 2013 (The Economist) – It has been a long time coming. But then the fifth assessment of the state of the global climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, was a behemoth of an undertaking. It runs to thousands of pages, involved hundreds of scientists and […]

Wringing China dry and blaming climate change – ‘Catastrophic urbanisation’ has caused up to 28,000 rivers to vanish since the 1990s

BEIJING, 23 September 2013 (Reuters) – For China, global warming has become something of a convenient truth. Beijing blames climate change for wreaking havoc on scarce water resources, but critics say the country’s headlong drive to build its industrial prowess and huge hydro projects are just as responsible. On the eve of a global climate […]

Australia floods of 2010 and 2011 caused global sea level to drop – ‘Only in Australia could the atmosphere carry such heavy tropical rains to such a large area, only to have those rains fail to make their way to the ocean’

By Tim Radford for Climate News Network23 August 2013 (The Guardian) – Rain – in effect, evaporated ocean – fell in such colossal quantities during the Australian floods in 2010 and 2011 that the world’s sea levels actually dropped by as much as 7mm. Rainwater normally runs swiftly off continental mountain ranges, pours down rivers, […]

National Geographic: Rising Seas

By Tim Folger1 September 2013 (National Geographic) – By the time Hurricane Sandy veered toward the Northeast coast of the United States last October 29, it had mauled several countries in the Caribbean and left dozens dead. Faced with the largest storm ever spawned over the Atlantic, New York and other cities ordered mandatory evacuations […]

Global warming more rapid than any time in the last 65 million years, ‘presents terrestrial ecosystems with an environment that is unprecedented in recent evolutionary history’

By Jeremy Hance1 August 2013 (mongabay.com) – According to a new review of 27 climate models, scientists say the global climate is likely to experience a warmth as great as any in the last 65 million years, only much, much faster. According to the study published today in Science, the Earth’s land temperature will rise […]

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