Group items tagged

in a biological sense butterflies are heavy hitters when it comes to protecting species threatened by climate change.As the world warmed, a butterfly called Edith's checkerspot was the first organism to show a documented range shift,

Edith's checkerspot has been dying out in northern Mexico and doing well in Canada

Parmesan said Tuesday during a break in the conference. It's also dying out at lower elevations and flourishing in the Sierra Nevada's highest elevations.

ISSUED BY ENVIRONMENT CANADA ON 01 JULY 2010.

Taking all of the above into consideration, the current pack ice pattern in the Western Arctic resembles that normally seen in the last two weeks of July. The consolidated sea ice pattern in the Central Arctic at the end of June resembles conditions normally seen at this time, except for the region spanning Barrow Strait to M'Clure Strait which more closely resembles that seen at the end of July or in early August.

Turbulent weather blows into the Southwest

According to many scientists, our atmospheric system is in such a “hydrologic cycle” with water, vapor and energy responding to the increase in heat from the Earth just like a pot of water on the stove. And this boiling point has made for increasingly windy years around the Four Corners

“Climate models indicate that global warming could be responsible for our colder temperatures and blustery days,” said Chris Fox, former Environmental Sciences professor at the University of Maryland. Fox has been studying weather for more than 20 years and spent last summer in the Durango area. Fox predicted five years ago that the “next big factor we’d be dealing with would be the wind after observing changes and “connecting the dots.”

Scientists from the Northwest Territories confirmed that a bear spotted by Inuit hunter David Kuptana on April 8 is a second-generation hybrid. DNA tests made by the NWT Environment and Natural Resources said the animal is a grizzly-polar bear cross breed.

The polar bear features of the animal were its creamy white fur, while its grizzly features were the big head, long claws and a ring of brown hair around its hind. It is being billed as the first recorded second-generation grolar in the area. The department said the grolar was the offspring of a polar/grizzly female with a male grizzly bear.

The cross-breeding of the two species is believed to have been caused by global warming, which have prompted the grizzlies to move to the north, which is polar bear territory. The first sighting of a grolar was in 2006 in Banks Island by an American hunter.

Quebec is already seeing economic effects of climate change, said Economic Development Minister Clement Gignac. On Lac St. Jean, extremely low water levels forced sailboat owners to remove their craft from the lake, while Rio Tinto, which owns hydro dams in the area, has had to ask Hydro-Quebec for electricity."I know scientists like to be prudent, and they need proof, but there is an accumulation of meteorological anomalies in our weather -heat waves, low precipitation -that have significant economic impact," said Gignac.

Bolstered by mild winters and heavy spring rains, the poison ivy creeping across the Chicago landscape this summer is at bumper crop levels.The abundance of poison ivy and other invasive plants proliferating in Illinois and across much of the nation this year is a symptom of a scenario more serious than an itchy red rash, experts say.Elevated CO2 levels in the atmosphere, although destructive to many plant species, are proving a boon for adaptive weeds such as poison ivy, said Lewis Ziska, a federal plant physiologist.

"We are up to our arms in poison ivy this summer," said Ziska, with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Md. The higher CO2 levels, he said, also are contributing to an increasing abundance of kudzu, the legendary vine once limited to the South but was discovered lurking in central Illinois and as far north as Canada. Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director for the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, said recent studies show that poison ivy is not only more prevalent across the U.S. but more toxic, too. The rise in CO2 levels strengthens an oil in the plant that triggers itchy havoc when it touches the skin, he said. The heavy rains, warmer temperatures and rising CO2 levels that have disturbed plant chemistry also have increased pollen counts, leading to higher rates of asthma and allergies. "It's not an accident we're having this perfect storm," said Epstein. "Pests and pathogens thrive in extreme events, like floods or droughts. We need to stabilize the climate by reducing fossil fuel emissions dramatically." John Masiunas, an associate professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, said he is unaware of any quantitative data tracking an increase in poison ivy taking root across the state. But, he said, "it makes perfect sense that higher CO2 levels will make these plants more efficient." The plant has "a survivor's ability" to grow in a variety of environments, Masiunas said, adding that climate change is also detrimental to endangered species such as native thistles and orchids that require specific soils and pollinators to thrive. "When climate change occurs … it is poor for these plants and contributes to the extinction of the species," Masiunas said. "When endangered plants are competing in an agricultural ecosystem, they start losing, and plants like poison ivy start doing better."

the ice has been melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the autumn, so that the bears are now spending on average three more weeks on land per year, without food, than they did three decades ago, the researchers say. As a consequence, their body weight in that time has dropped by 60lb, females have lost 10 per cent of their body length, and the west Hudson Bay population has declined from 1,200 animals to 900.

As climate scientists watched the Arctic's sea-ice cover shrink year after year, they thought there might be a silver lining: an ice-free Arctic Ocean could soak up large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, slowing down the accumulation of greenhouse gases and climate change. But research published in Science today suggests that part of the Arctic Ocean has already mopped up so much CO2 that it could have almost reached its limit1. Wei-Jun Cai, a biogeochemist at the University of Georgia in Athens and an international team sampled the amount of CO2 in the surface waters of the Canada Basin, in the western Arctic Ocean. "We found that ice-free basin areas had rather high CO2 values that approached atmospheric levels," says Cai. "It was not expected." Although the Arctic Ocean accounts for only 3% of the world's ocean surface area and is mostly covered in ice, it takes up 5-14% of all the CO2 absorbed by the planet's oceans. It tends to take in proportionately more CO2 because gases dissolve more easily in cold water. Scientists had previously thought that open water would promote the exchange of CO2 between the air and the ocean and that the increase in light reaching the water would also trigger the microscopic ocean plants called phytoplankton to transfer more CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean through photosynthesis2. But that "prediction was based on observations of either highly productive ocean margins or ice-covered basins prior to a major ice retreat," says Cai. Very few scientists had surveyed CO2 concentrations in offshore waters.

A 2007 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looked at codfish catch records over four decades. It concluded what fishermen who know this cold-loving fish would have predicted: As the bottom water temperature increased, the probability of catching a cod decreased.

Last year, a federal effort to coordinate research, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, found ocean warming already was forcing a migration of some species.

"The northward shifts we have seen in the area are due in part to climate change. We are starting to see some of the effects of global climate change in our area," said Janet Nye, a NOAA researcher working out of Woods Hole, Mass. She studied historical fish records and found that of 36 northwest Atlantic species, almost half had moved northward in 40 years as water temperatures warmed. She predicted the traditional stocks of cold-water fish are likely to be replaced by croaker and red hake, fish normally found farther south.