Climate Change Impacts Inventory

global warming is also having a profound effect on Iceland economically — and in many ways the effects have actually been beneficial. Warmer weather has been a boon to Iceland’s hydroelectric industry, which is producing more energy than before as melting glaciers feed its rivers.

There are more immediate signs of climate change, though, and these are worrying Iceland’s residents. This winter, Reykjavik experienced double-digit swings in temperature, as the normally sub-zero conditions suddenly turned balmy. the capital was flooded. “I don’t think it’s even a question,” said Asta Gisladottir, asked whether the freak weather was caused by global warming. “We’re so close to the North Pole,” the 36-year-old hotel worker said. “It’s just in our backyard.” Gisladottir recalled winters during her childhood in the village of Siglufjordur, on the island’s north, as very different. then there was snow from November to April. Now, it is mostly rain. Geophysicist Johannesson, who has studied climate change since the early 1990s, said the evidence was not just anecdotal.

“What we see here is an overall warming from a rather cold 19th century,” he said. “As a general rule, this is sufficient for us to have many significant changes in the environment.”

June ended with below average rainfall and updated provisional figures show that January to June had average rainfall of around 362.5 mm, making it comparable with 1953 which had 361.1 mm. 1929 had the driest first six months of a year, when 275.7mm of rain was recorded.

Last month’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record and the warmest on record averaged for any April-June and January-June periods, according to NOAA. Worldwide average land surface temperature was the warmest on record for June and the April-June period, and the second warmest on record for the year-to-date (January-June) period, behind 2007.

he combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for June 2010 was the warmest on record at 61.1°F (16.2°C), which is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20th century average of 59.9°F (15.5°C). The global June land surface temperature was 1.93°F (1.07°C) above the 20th century average of 55.9 °F (13.3°C) — the warmest on record.

Warmer-than-average conditions dominated the globe, with the most prominent warmth in Peru, the central and eastern contiguous U.S., and eastern and western Asia.

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.

Over the last few days the temperature in Taiwan has shot up and the media has been awash with articles of how people can avoid the worst of the heat wave. The papers have also been full of stories about the number of heat-related deaths. Questions have been raised as to the potential health risks posed by the scorching heat, when in fact the best way to deal with this problem, and to reduce the health risks posed by climate change, is to establish some form of early warning mechanism.

Over the last century Taiwan’s average temperature has increased by between 1.1 and 1.4 percent, twice the global average. The temperature of the surrounding oceans has risen at a higher rate, having a considerable impact on the fishing ecology.

The Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, one of the largest glaciers in Greenland, swiftly lost a 2.7-square mile chunk of ice between July 6 and 7, NASA announced late last week. The ice loss pushed the point where the glacier meets the ocean, known as the "calving front," nearly one mile farther inland in a single day. According to the space agency, the new calving front location is the farthest inland on record.

The Jakobshavn Isbrae is what is known as an outlet glacier, which the National Snow and Ice Data Center defines as "a valley glacier which drains an inland ice sheet or ice cap and flows through a gap in peripheral mountains." In other words, it serves as a drainage pipe from the land ice into the ocean. According to NASA, the Jakobshavn Isbrae, which is located in western Greenland at about 69 degrees north latitude, is the largest outlet glacier in Greenland, draining 6.5 percent of Greenland's ice sheet area.

NASA reports that "as much as 10 percent of all ice lost from Greenland is coming through Jakobshavn, which is also believed to be the single largest contributor to sea level rise in the northern hemisphere."

Russia is experiencing the worst drought in almost 40 years, the presidential advisor on climate said Monday, RIA Novosti reported."The country has not seen such an overwhelming drought since 1972," Alexander Bedritsky said.

Some 14 regions across the country have been hit by an extended heat wave and crops in nine million hectares of the 48 million hectares of sown land have been destroyed. Farmers fear they will be unable to pay off loans due to the losses. Meanwhile, the heat wave continues in Moscow where the country’s chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko suggests introducing a siesta period like they traditionally have in some Latin American countries.

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.

June SSTs in the tropical Atlantic set a new recordSea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) in the Atlantic's Main Development Region for hurricanes had their warmest June on record, according to an analysis I did of historical SST data from the UK Hadley Center. SST data goes back to 1850, though there is much missing data before 1910 and during WWI and WWII. SSTs in the Main Development Region (10°N to 20°N and 20°W to 80°W) were 1.33°C above average during June, beating the previous record of 1.26°C set in June 2005. June 2010 is the fifth straight record warm month in the tropical Atlantic, and the third warmest anomaly measured for any month in history. The only warmer anomalies were 1.51°C and 1.46°C, set in May 2010 and April 2010, respectively.

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.

Global warming is already leading to rising temperatures in the mountains and declining rainfall in Hawaii, climate change experts said at a meeting Friday. Temperatures at Hawaii's higher elevations are rising faster than the global average, said Deanna Spooner, coordinator of the Pacific Islands Climate Change Cooperative. "It's getting hotter here faster than anywhere else in the world up in the upper elevations," Spooner said at the Honolulu meeting of the federal Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.

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.

AS anyone who works in a museum knows, art conservators can be slow to embrace change. But for Sarah Staniforth, director of historic properties at the National Trust in Britain, the eye opener came last September, as she contemplated photographs of a torrential downpour that had just invaded the billiard room of Cragside, one of the trust’s Victorian house museums.

Since 2000 catastrophic rainstorms have become so prevalent in England that the trust has gradually retrained its emergency teams to cope with floods, in addition to its time-honored enemy, house fires. Yet at Cragside, as with all of the trust’s 300-plus historic house museums, employees still use a standard British mid-20th-century conservation method — chiefly an electric or hot water heating system that maintains constant humidity levels — to protect irreplaceable treasures, like its painting by J. M. W. Turner and its early Burroughes & Watts billiard table.

nd now, in the photographs Ms. Staniforth viewed in her office, Cragside’s carefully tended electric conservation heating system was standing in a pool of water. So were the 19th-century fire irons and ornate wrought-iron fireplace seating unit, which had both rusted, and the billiard table, whose legs would take several months to dry out. (The room finally reopened to the public in late February.) “That photograph made me feel that we had just been fiddling while Rome burned — or, rather, flooded,” Ms. Staniforth said. “It made me see how important it is to get your priorities right, and not to worry exclusively about the humidity when your house can fill up with water as a result of climate change.”

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.

The incidence of cardiovascular, respiratory and water-borne diseases is rising in Uruguay in tandem with climate change, while dengue fever and malaria lurk at the country's borders. Higher temperatures are encouraging the presence of insect vectors carrying diseases that were eradicated decades ago, experts say.Increasingly frequent spells of extreme weather particularly affect the health of the poorest, who live in overcrowded conditions in precarious dwellings lacking sanitation, in the shantytowns that have sprung up at an exponential rate since the 1990s in the Montevideo metropolitan area. Many of them are on low-lying land exposed to flooding. Diarrhoea, hepatitis A and leptospirosis are some of the most common illnesses resulting from flooding and inadequate disposal of human waste, the head of the Health Ministry's Environmental and Occupational Health Division, Carmen Ciganda, told IPS. "These diseases are not exactly caused by climate change, but they are associated with it and become more prevalent when there are floods or droughts," she said. At the Pereira Rossell Hospital, the country's main children's hospital, respiratory diseases climbed from 17.7 percent in 2003 to 23.3 percent in 2007, and leptospirosis cases increased from 64 in 2006 to 106 in 2007. But Ciganda warned of threats that so far have been kept at bay beyond the country's borders. "If our climate becomes more tropical, conditions will be more favourable for the vectors that transmit diseases like dengue, yellow fever and malaria," she said. The average yearly temperature in Uruguay has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last 100 years, and spring and summer average temperatures are now higher than they were in the early 20th century, while rainfall has become heavier and more frequent in the last 50 years.

"Since 2007, the mosquito has been detected in the capital city. Longer summers, and the delayed onset of cold weather (in the southern hemisphere winter) until late May, mean that the mosquitoes do not go into hibernation and continue to reproduce for a longer time," the coordinator of the Departmental Emergency Committee in Montevideo, Daniel Soria, told IPS. He said frequent heavy rainfall, a result of climate variability, hampers the struggle to prevent dengue and other diseases entering the country. "When 50 or 60 millimetres of rainwater falls in less than half an hour, it overwhelms the sewer system in Montevideo, and people in the shanty towns suffer most," he said. "Flooding of the Miguelete, Pantanoso and Carrasco rivers, which flow across the city, causes a lot of erosion, so people are constantly having to be evacuated." In Uruguay, nearly 60,000 people were evacuated between 1997 and 2008, and over half a million were affected in various ways from floods following a 30 percent increase in rainfall. The trend is expected to worsen in future, according to official reports.

Unusually high acid readings were measured in the deep waters of southern Hood Canal, according to Richard Feeley, director of the Ocean Acidification Program at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. Increased acidity appears to be caused by increased carbon dioxide working its way from the atmosphere into the ocean, as well as the decomposition of organic matter in local waters. “Our calculations suggest that ocean acidification can account for a significant part of the pH decrease in this region,” said Feeley, whose laboratory is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A research team found that ocean acidification caused by climate change accounts for 24 to 49 percent of the increased acidity in Hood Canal relative to pre-industrial times. The remainder of the pH shift occurs as a result of decomposition of organic material. Ocean effects provide the greatest contribution — 49 percent of the change — in winter when the rate of decomposition slows.

Increasing ocean acidity has been linked to the deaths of free-swimming oyster larvae at oyster hatcheries on the Oregon Coast, Newton said, and something similar may be happening at hatcheries on Hood Canal. Bill Dewey of Taylor Shellfish Farms, which operates an oyster hatchery on Dabob Bay, said oyster larvae production dropped by 60 percent in 2008 and 80 percent last year. It is too early to know how things will turn out this year, he said.

Still recovering from a 10-year drought on the world's driest inhabited continent, Australia is increasingly turning to the oceans that surround it for drinking water. Australia's five largest cities have embarked on a massive $13-billion plan to build desalination plants that can remove the salt from seawater and make it potable. By 2012, when the last plant is scheduled to be up and running, Australia's big cities will get 30% of their water from the oceans, The New York Times reported Sunday. The government says Australia's latest decade-long drought was largely caused by climate change and one official called the $13-billion desalination programme "the cost of adapting to climate change."

"We consider ourselves the canary in the coal mine in for climate change-induced changes to water supply systems,” Ross Young, executive director of the Water Services Association of Australia, told The New York Times.

In a Congressional briefing on 30 June 2010, hurricane expert Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) said the potential for a disastrous 2010 hurricane season reflects not just natural variability but also climate change.  He explained that record high sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic were one of the principal factors behind the dire forecast, and that rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases may account for roughly half of the anomalous warmth.  He warned that "we’re looking at potentially a doubling of major hurricanes in the next 20 to 30 years" as a result of global warming.  Holland, Director of NCAR's Earth System Laboratory, made his remarks as a member of a panel on Hurricanes and Oil Will Mix: Managing Risk Now. 

A month before the panel's briefing, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued on 27 May its 2010 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook. NOAA said there was a 70% chance that the Atlantic hurricane season would see 14-23 named storms, 8-14 hurricanes, and 3-7 major hurricanes.

Among the factors underlying its outlook, NOAA cited warm Atlantic Ocean surface waters, which in May were for the fourth month in a row at record high temperatures for the month:  "Sea surface temperatures [SSTs] are expected to remain above average where storms often develop and move across the Atlantic. Record warm temperatures – up to four degrees Fahrenheit above average – are now present in this region."