Skip to main content

Home/ Climate Change Impacts Inventory/ Group items tagged season change

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Hunter Cutting

Rhode Island floods prompt cold water phytoplankton surge - 0 views

green.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-fearsome-floods-a-dividend

climate change impact Rhode Island USA flooding algal bloom

shared by Hunter Cutting on 04 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Torrential rains last month in Rhode Island led to widespread flooding, causing millions of dollars in property damage and leaving thousands homeless. The floodwaters also overwhelmed water treatment plants, spilling vast amounts of raw sewage into the rivers and streams that flow into Narragansett Bay. It sounds like the makings of an environmental nightmare, but in fact it’s just the opposite. To scientists’ delight, the sewage-laden floodwaters have caused a well-timed bloom of phytoplankton, the microscopic creatures that form the foundation of marine food chains. With more food available for fish, clams and other sea creatures, the bay’s fisheries industry is expected to benefit. The timing of the rains was fortuitous. In decades past, Narragansett Bay typically experienced a late winter/early spring algal bloom that fed creatures up and down the water column. But in recent years, the waters of Narragansett Bay have warmed greatly, interrupting this seasonal event. In particular, bottom-feeding fish like the flounder have suffered dramatic declines. The surge of freshwater and nutrient-rich sewage this spring, however, is mimicking the conditions of years past. Mark Berman, an oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service, said the flood seemed to have sent the bay back to its  normal state.
  • Hunter Cutting on 04 Jun 10
     
    In Fearsome Floods, a Dividend - Green Blog - NYTimes.com
Hunter Cutting

Bumper crop of poison ivy fits climate trend - 1 views

www.nhregister.com/...doc4c27cd2e90f1f672127071.txt

climate change impact USA species health poison ivy

shared by Hunter Cutting on 29 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Add this one to the year’s lengthening list of natural disasters — a bumper crop of poison ivy. It’s flourishing this summer, which, The Wall Street Journal says, “is shaping up to be one of its most virulent and unpredictable seasons.”
  • Long term, it seems that poison ivy responds positively to global warming, especially the increase in carbon dioxide, which produces bigger and more irritating plants.
Hunter Cutting

Last Pacific glacier now pounded by rain, not snow - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010070100394_pf.html

climate change impact Indonesia glacier

shared by Hunter Cutting on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The 3-mile- (4,884-meter-) high glacier was pounded by rain every afternoon during the team's 13-day trip, something the American scientist has never encountered in three decades of drilling ice cores. He lay awake at night listening to the water gushing beneath him. By the time they were ready to head home, ice around their sheltered campsite had melted a staggering 12 inches (30 centimeters). "These glaciers are dying," said Thompson, one of the world's most accomplished glaciologists. "Before I was thinking they had a few decades, but now I'd say we're looking at years."
  • The mountain has lost about 80 percent of its ice since 1936 - two-thirds of that since the last scientific expedition in the early 1970s. Thompson says he thinks temperatures are rising twice as fast in high altitudes as at the earth's surface, which, if true, could have broad implications on people who depend on glaciers for water during the dry season, such as in the Himalayas.
  • Geoffrey Hope, a professor at Australian National University who took part in the 1971 expedition to Puncak Jaya, noted that Papua has the wettest mountain region in the world, so high precipitation levels didn't come as a great surprise. Still, his own experience was markedly different. "The roof of our marque tent fell in on many evenings due to the weight of the snow," he recalled, "and all water coming from the glacier would freeze by 8 p.m. each night."
Hunter Cutting

Russian grain prices up 38% on crop losses driven by record temperatures - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-grain-price-funding-need.html

climate change impact Russia agriculture grain prices wheat heat wave temperature drought

shared by Hunter Cutting on 26 Jul 10 - Cached
  • High temperatures, which rose to a record 37.4 Celsius (99 Fahrenheit) yesterday in Moscow, have damaged 32 percent of land under cultivation and forced Russia to declare states of emergency in 23 regions. Grain prices may double this year because of the drought, according to the Grain Producers’ Union.
  • Inflation may quicken to 8.1 percent by December, compared with the government’s annual forecast of less than 6.5 percent, according to Yaroslav Lissovolik, Deutsche Bank AG’s head of research in Moscow. That will put pressure on the central bank to raise its benchmark rate by year-end for the first time since December 2008, said Natalia Orlova, Moscow-based chief economist at Alfa Bank, Russia’s biggest private lender.
  • Higher rates “may cause a correction in short-term sovereign bonds and, later, in long-term sovereign bonds,” said Evgeniy Nadorshin, senior economist at Trust Investment Bank in Moscow and an adviser to Economy Minister Elvira Nabiullina. The government, which plans to sell 1.2 trillion rubles ($39.3 billion) of bonds on the domestic market this year to finance its budget deficit, may increase that figure to pay for subsidies and contain the drought’s fallout, Nadorshin said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Yesterday’s temperature in Moscow was the highest since Russia began keeping records 130 years ago, according to the website of the Hydrometeorological Monitoring Service. The previous high was 36.8 degrees in July 1920, during the Civil War. The temperature may rise to 38 degrees on July 29, according to Gidromettsentr, the state weather service. Russia, the world’s third-biggest wheat exporter, will harvest about 80 million metric tons of grain this season, 17 percent less than last year, according to Moscow-based researcher SovEcon. Grain prices rose as much as 33 percent last week on drought concerns, SovEcon said on its website. Drought is likely to have a bigger impact on prices in Russia than in other countries, Orlova said. Food accounts for 38 percent of the consumer price index in Russia, compared with 15 percent in the U.S. and 32 percent in China, Alfa estimates.
Hunter Cutting

Arctic sea ice at second lowest ever for July - 0 views

nsidc.org/...080410.html

climate change impact Arctic sea ice Arctic ice melt

shared by Hunter Cutting on 05 Aug 10 - Cached
  • July sea ice second lowest: oldest ice begins to melt Arctic sea ice extent averaged for July was the second lowest in the satellite record, after 2007. After a slowdown in the rate of ice loss, the old, thick ice that moved into the southern Beaufort Sea last winter is beginning to melt out.
  • Average ice extent for July was 8.39 million square kilometers (3.24 million square miles), 1.71 million square kilometers (660,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 mean, but 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 square miles) above the average for July 2007, the lowest July in the thirty-two-year satellite record.
  • The daily rate of decline for July was 77,000 square kilometers (29,700 square miles) per day, close to the 1979 to 2000 average of 84,400 square kilometers (32,600 square miles).
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Ice extent for July 2010 was the second lowest in the satellite record for the month. The linear rate of decline of July ice extent over the period 1979 to 2010 is now 6.4% per decade.
  • Older, thicker ice melting in the southern Beaufort Sea This past winter's negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation transported old ice (four, five, and more years old) from an area north of the Canadian Archipelago. The ice was flushed southwards and westward into the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, as noted in our April post. Ice age data show that back in the 1970s and 1980s, old ice drifting into the Beaufort Sea would generally survive the summer melt season. However, the old, thick ice that moved into this region is now beginning to melt out, which could further deplete the Arctic’s remaining store of old, thick ice. The loss of thick ice has been implicated as a major cause of the very low September sea ice minima observed in recent years.
Hunter Cutting

Category 5 hurricanes in up 30% in the Atlantic since 1995 - 0 views

wwww.examiner.com/10m5d19-New-Hurricane-research

hurricanes Atlantic USA climate change impact Central America Caribbean

shared by Hunter Cutting on 14 Jul 10 - Cached
  • New research from the May hurricane conference of the American Meteorological Society sheds new light just ahead of the start of the season June first.
  • Greg Holland of NCAR looked at the distribution of the strongest hurricanes over time by using a mathematical description of the historical hurricane data. His analysis showed that during the period 1995 - 2008, we probably had about a 30% increase in Category 5 storms in the Atlantic, and an 18% increase in Category 4 hurricanes. Using a climate model, he predicted that by the years 2045 - 2055, we should see a 60% increase in Cat 5s, 32% increase in Cat 4s, and 16% increase in Cat 3s in the Atlantic.
‹ Previous 21 - 26 of 26
Showing 20▼ items per page