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For the first time, climate scientists from across the country have successfully incorporated the nitrogen cycle into global simulations for climate change, questioning previous assumptions regarding carbon feedback and potentially helping to refine model forecasts about global warming. The results of the experiment at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research are published in the current issue of Biogeosciences. They illustrate the complexity of climate modeling by demonstrating how natural processes still have a strong effect on the carbon cycle and climate simulations. In this case, scientists found that the rate of climate change over the next century could be higher than previously anticipated when the requirement of plant nutrients are included in the climate model. ORNL's Peter Thornton, lead author of the paper, describes the inclusion of these processes as a necessary step to improve the accuracy of climate change assessments.

For the first time, climate scientists from across the country have successfully incorporated the nitrogen cycle into global simulations for climate change, questioning previous assumptions regarding carbon feedback and potentially helping to refine model forecasts about global warming. The results of the experiment at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research are published in the current issue of Biogeosciences. They illustrate the complexity of climate modeling by demonstrating how natural processes still have a strong effect on the carbon cycle and climate simulations. In this case, scientists found that the rate of climate change over the next century could be higher than previously anticipated when the requirement of plant nutrients are included in the climate model. ORNL's Peter Thornton, lead author of the paper, describes the inclusion of these processes as a necessary step to improve the accuracy of climate change assessments.

Abrupt climate change is a potential menace that hasn't received much attention. That's about to change. Through its Climate Change Prediction Program, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER) recently launched IMPACTS - Investigation of the Magnitudes and Probabilities of Abrupt Climate Transitions - a program led by William Collins of Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division (ESD) that brings together six national laboratories to attack the problem of abrupt climate change, or ACC.

As the site says Climate science from climate scientists. This page has links for complete beginners.

KINGSTON, Ontario, Jun 25 (IPS) - North America's abject failure to meet the challenge of climate change has been "un-American", environmentalist and scientist David Suzuki told delegates Tuesday at the World Wind Energy Conference, the first ever in the region. "We're facing an ecological crisis, a crisis far, far worse than Pearl Harbour," Suzuki said. Twenty years ago this week, one of the United States' leading scientists warned Congress of the imminent danger of climate change and said that waiting decades to take action was too risky. Now James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has published new research indicating that greenhouse gas concentrations have pushed the climate near a dangerous tipping point that will unleash far-reaching changes in the atmosphere and oceans that could take millennia to reverse.

Climate change will carry a price tag of billions of dollars for a number of U.S. states, says a new series of reports from the University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Environmental Research (CIER). The researchers conclude that the costs have already begun to accrue and are likely to endure. Combining existing data with new analysis, the eight studies project the long term economic impact of climate change on Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey and Ohio. Studies on additional states are in the works.

Chemists claim that by mimicking photosynthesis in the lab, they could revolutionize fuel production within five years. Katharine Sanderson reports. Dan Nocera, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, made a bold statement at the American Chemical Society's fall meeting in Philadelphia last month. He claimed that within five years he could build a device capable of producing locally sourced hydrogen gas, which could power all the world's houses, fill people's car batteries and revolutionize energy supply in the developing world. "I guarantee, in under five years, you'll see this," he said.

"The Conservative government is planning a quiet release for a major Health Canada report that warns of the harmful impact of climate change on the health of Canadians, particularly the young, elderly and aboriginals." Only days after the "quiet release" of a major US climate science program report on the same topic, Canada appears to be following the Bush administration's bad example: Instead of highlighting these reports and using them to advance broader public awareness of the consequences of unchecked global warming, current US and Canadian government "leaders" leave them to be released by middle management and discussed by a relatively few experts.

This map is from the August 2008 "Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change" report, commissioned by U.N. OCHA and CARE. It shows cumulative humanitarian risk hotspots for all three climate-related hazards studied - floods, cyclones and drought. Areas at risk of more than one type of hazard are considered to be of most concern for humanitarian actors.

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a major study by the US Climate Change Science Program synthesizing current scientific knowledge of climate change-induced threats to human health. This information should be critical to the EPA's previous "endangerment finding" for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. However, the EPA Office of Air and Radiation, the branch assigned rulemaking responsibility, evidently did not rely on and did not cite the CCSP report.

The row over US inaction on carbon emissions reached new heights yesterday after the White House allowed Congress to look at last year's government proposal to officially deem climate change a threat to public health - a plan that aides to George Bush refused to acknowledge or read. The climate plan was finished in December by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to a supreme court ruling that required the Bush administration to state whether carbon emissions should be regulated to protect public health.

Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA officials maintains. When six pages were cut from testimony on climate change and public health by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, the White House insisted the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science.

Eastern Europeans and others seeking to use the current financial meltdown as an excuse to roll back climate commitment have failed (for now). The BBC reports: European Union leaders agreed to stick to their plan to cut greenhouse gases - despite a surprise demand by Poland and six other member states to drop them to ease the impact on industry struggling with the global credit crunch. Speaking at the end of a two-day summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said: "The deadline on climate change is so important that we cannot use the financial and economic crisis as a pretext for dropping it."

California issues plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions Over the next 12 years, new regulations would seek to turn the climate change clock back to 1990 levels. More efficient electricity use, less traffic and cleaner cars are goals.

The man who had predicted the storm was Goesta Wollin. Since the early 1970's he has been convinced that the earth's magnetism affects climate…In 1970 Wollin and a colleague, David Ericson, began to study climatic changes that have taken place since the last ice age, 11,000 years ago. By chance, the same week they finished plotting their temperature curves, an article published in Science outlined the changes in the earth's magnetic field over the identical span of time.