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Polar heat pushing jet stream south, bringing Harder Winters for U.S./E.U./Japan - 0 views

  • Last winter's big snowfall and cold temperatures in the eastern United States and Europe were likely caused by the loss of Arctic sea ice, researchers concluded at the International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference in Norway last week.Climate change has warmed the entire Arctic region, melting 2.5 million square kilometres of sea ice, and that, paradoxically, is producing colder and snowier winters for Europe, Asia and parts of North America. "The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009-2010 in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic," said James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States. "In future, cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception" in these regions, Overland told IPS.
  • Temperatures in January were -2C over the water, while the land was -25C, making conditions far windier and producing more snowfall than normal. Heavy snow on the remaining ice insulates it from the cold air, preventing it from thickening during the long winter.
  • This huge mass of warmer air over the Arctic in the late fall not only generates more wind and snow locally, several studies have now documented the impacts on global weather patterns. The winter of 2005-6 was the coldest in 50 years in Japan and eastern Eurasia, reported Meiji Honda, a senior scientist with the Climate Diagnosis Group at Japan's Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. Honda's studies show that the air over the Arctic was quite warm in the fall of 2005, which altered normal wind patterns, pushing the jet stream further south and bringing arctic cold to much of Eurasia and Japan. He also documented the same mechanism for the colder winters of 2007-8 and 2009-10, he told participants. In eastern North America, the same conditions of 2007-8 produced increased precipitation and colder temperatures in the winter. As the sea ice declines, big impacts are likely to be seen in this region, said Sara Strey of the University of Illinois.
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Heat wave kills clams, crabs in Japan, waters 5° higher than normal - 0 views

  • A heat wave has caused mass deaths of clams and crabs in Tokyo Bay, ecological researchers say. Scientists from Toho University say they believe the die-off of up to 80 percent of baby-neck clams was due to lack of oxygen when the extended heat wave accelerated the decomposition of marine algae, The Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
  • Researchers think the algae dissolved abruptly as the heat wave warmed waters in the bay, resulting in less oxygen in the water and making it deadly for certain species of clams and crabs. Weather records show the average temperature in the Tokyo area this year has been 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal, The Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
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New England's oaks and hemlocks falling to pests as region warms - 0 views

  • Spring did not come for the oaks of Martha's Vineyard. For three years, the residents here watched a stunning outbreak of caterpillars that stripped an oak tree bare in a week, then wafted on gossamer threads to another.  In the denuded branches, scientists see a fingerprint of climate change - and a pattern of things to come. The islanders fought through clouds of drifting filaments with brooms, brushed off the showers of excrement after they walked under trees, and tiptoed through a maze of half-inch worms on the sidewalks. The local newspapers ran pictures of building sides covered with caterpillars, looking like horror-movie outtakes. 
  • Spring did not come for the oaks of Martha's Vineyard. For three years, the residents here watched a stunning outbreak of caterpillars that stripped an oak tree bare in a week, then wafted on gossamer threads to another. 
  • In the denuded branches, scientists see a fingerprint of climate change - and a pattern of things to come.
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  • Scientists see a fingerprint of climate change in the denuded branches, and a pattern of things to come. The effects of climate change, they say, are unlikely to be gradual or predictable. Warming winters will throw into confusion old orders of species, nurturing unexpected predators and weakening age-old relationships that helped form forests.
  • "They were gross," recalled Barbara Hoffman, 53, with a visible shudder. "You could hear them munching. I said spray 'em." Most trees recovered in the first year; fewer survived the second. But as the bugs struck again in late 2007, an accomplice drought hit the weakened trees, leaving the island now with swaths of stark, barren and lifeless branches.
  • The islanders fought through clouds of drifting filaments with brooms, brushed off the showers of excrement after they walked under trees, and tiptoed through a maze of half-inch worms on the sidewalks. The local newspapers ran pictures of building sides covered with caterpillars, looking like horror-movie outtakes.
  • "You can get unexpected dynamics in nature as we generate new combinations with climate change," said David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, who heads a research group financed by the National Science Foundation to study the Martha's Vineyard die-off
  • In New England, the majestic hemlocks that were grist for Longfellow and Frost are doomed by the steady advance of a pest in warmer winters. "To see hundreds of acres of dead forest like this in New England is remarkable," said Foster.
  • Farther north and west in Massachusetts, Foster and others are studying the devastation of the stately hemlocks.  An insect brought from Japan, called the hemlock woolly adelgid, is moving steadily northward into New England. It already has infested much of the US South, bringing what forestry officials call "an ecological disaster" to the iconic Great Smokey Mountains and Blue Ridge Parkway. With warmer temperatures in New England-some studies put the average winter increase at 4 degrees in 40 years-the pest is advancing. "The northward spread is being kept in check by cold winters. As winters warm, which is what is projected, that all falls apart," said Wyatt Oswald, an assistant professor of science at Emerson college who is studying the hemlocks. "At some point, climate change will allow all these hemlock to be wiped out."
  • Certainly the residents here were perplexed at the caterpillar outbreaks from 2004 to 2007. Although several insects were at work, the prime culprit was eventually identified as a fall cankerworm, a long-time resident of the island that no one recalled having done more than minimal damage. This outbreak was a full-fledged invasion.
  • "It was disgusting," said Jason Gale, 39. He recalls glancing back at the island from his lobster boat, and being shocked by the stretches of dead trees.
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