The Independent, December 13, 2011: Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head…
PIK June 20, 2013: Day-to-day rainfall in India might become much more variable due to climate change – potentially putting millions of poor farmers and the country’s agricultural productivity at risk. The Indian monsoon is a complex system which is likely to change under future global warming. While it is in the very nature of…
The understanding of the puzzle about what is going on with our climate system and possible implications improved recently. Let’s begin with going back to 2006, here i quote an excerpt from the blog post “Revealed: Secrets of Abrupt Climate Shifts” via RealClimate, describing more robust understanding of the bipolar / see-saw mechanism of the…
Unusually high frequency points to human influence | NASA climatologist James Hansen made headlines during the US heatwave of 1988, declaring in testimony to Congress and during interviews on prime-time television that a build-up of greenhouse gases was increasing the probability of weather extremes. Now, as much of the United States sizzles through another torrid…
An analysis of a decade’s worth of tropical cyclones shows that when hurricanes blow over ocean regions swamped by fresh water, the conditions can unexpectedly intensify the storm. Although the probability that hurricanes will hit such conditions is small, ranging from 10 to 23 percent, the effect is potentially large: Hurricanes can become 50 percent…
A key uncertainty is the fraction of carbon that might be decomposed under anaerobic conditions – resulting potentially in methane emissions to the atmosphere. Given the high warming potential of methane, the overall magnitude of the permafrost-carbon feedback will depend strongly on this fraction. Thawing of permafrost and the associated release of carbon constitutes a…
By analyzing the chemistry of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists have been able to determine the composition of Earth’s atmosphere going back as far as 800,000 years, and they have developed a good understanding of how carbon dioxide levels have varied in the atmosphere since that time. But there has been…
Feedbacks in the climate system – in which warming is linked to natural CO2 increase, driving further warming – may operate faster than previously thought. ACE CRC: Researchers use Antarctic and Greenland ice cores to examine temperature and CO2 changes during the largest natural climate change in Earth’s recent climate history: the warming out of…
A global data set of fatalities from nonseismically triggered landslides that resulted in loss of life between A.D. 2004 and 2010 permits for the first time proper quantification of impacts and spatial distributions. Global loss of life from landslides is poorly quantified. A global data set of fatalities from non seismically triggered landslides that resulted…