24 May 2010 13:28:16 GMT Thousands are fleeing their homes amidst fears of flooding as a breach of the Attabad Lake in northern Pakistan looks imminent. An estimated 13,935 people (1,747 families) from 39 villages have been displaced following an avalanche which blocked the Hunza River farming a19km by 80-metres deep artificial lake in Attabad, […]
What is a 100 year flood? A 100 year flood is an event that statistically has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. A 500 year flood has a .2% chance of occurring and a 1000 year flood has a .1% chance of occurring. The map below relates [the] amount of rainfall that […]
(University of Arizona) Droughts in the late 20th century rival some of North Africa’s major droughts of centuries past, reveals new research that peers back in time to the year 1179. The first multi-century drought reconstruction that includes Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia shows frequent and severe droughts during the 13th and 16th centuries and the […]
Climate change will trigger a dramatic and sudden decline in the number of polar bears, a new study has concluded. The research is the first to directly model how changing climate will affect polar bear reproduction and survival. Based on what is known of polar bear physiology, behaviour and ecology, it predicts pregnancy rates […]
By MICHAEL BURNHAM AND NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD of GreenwirePublished: May 25, 2010 AMBOSELI NATIONAL PARK, Kenya – … When the rains failed for the second straight year in 2009, plants withered to their roots in this critical dry-season refuge. Marshes and the shallow bed of Lake Amboseli, usually fed by seasonal rains and runoff from […]
Tucson AZ (SPX) May 25, 2010 – Lake Tanganyika’s surface waters are currently warmer than at any time in the previous 1,500 years, a University of Arizona researcher and his colleagues report online in Nature Geoscience. The rise in temperature during the 20th century is driving a decline in the productivity of the lake, […]
As glaciers disappear in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, one man is helping farmers irrigate their fields by storing water in an innovative way By Gaia Vince LEH, INDIA—In the high-altitude desert of the Indian trans-Himalayas, one man is buying time for villagers suffering from global warming by creating artificial glaciers. The ancient kingdom […]
By John PlattMay 24, 2010 02:03 PM An extremely rare “grolar bear”–a polar bear/grizzly bear hybrid–was shot and killed by an Inuit hunter in Canada’s Northwest Territories last month. Global warming has reportedly been driving grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) further north in search of food, bringing them into polar bear (U. maritimus) territory. […]
The balance of biodiversity within North American small-mammal communities is so out of whack from the last episode of global warming about 12,000 years ago that the current climate change could push them past a tipping point, with repercussions up and down the food chain, say Stanford biologists. The evidence lies in fossils spanning the […]
Christmas Bird Count (CBC) show that the warmer winters in recent decades have played an important role in shifting winter bird ranges to the north. CBC data from the mid-1960s through 2006 show that 170 (56%) of the 305 most widespread, regularly occurring species have shifted their ranges to the north, whereas only 71 species […]