Group items tagged

Barack Obama is to invite China to join the United States in an effort by the world's two biggest polluters to stop global warming running out of control.

Scientists have been warning for years that climate change will bring higher temperatures and lower rainfall to Australia, increasing the likelihood of deadly wildfires. Some questioned whether Saturday's fire was a sign of things to come. "It's a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change," said Bob Brown, the leader of Australia's minor Greens Party.

We profile two women activists taking on the global water crisis. Canadian Maude Barlow is a well known leader in the global struggle for water justice. Ge Yun from China is in the vanguard of her country's growing conservation movement. In this program, they both warn us about the link between climate change and the loss of one of our most basic human requirements: water for life.

This study is the first to show directly the impact of climate change on a mountainous ecosystem by physically studying the location of plants, and it shows what could occur globally if the Earth's temperature continues to rise. The finding also has implications for forest management, as it rules out air pollution and fire suppression as main causes of plant death.

The most extensive and detailed study to date of 130 North American tree species concludes that expected climate change this century could shift their ranges northward by hundreds of kilometers and shrink the ranges by more than half.

A study by researchers at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) has documented, for the first time in the northeastern United States, that a variety of bird species are extending their breeding ranges to the north, a pattern that adds to concerns about climate change.

Amanda Leigh Mascarelli looks at how far our understanding of climate change has come in the past twelve months.

Scientists have long established that the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming spots on Earth. Now, new research using detailed satellite data indicates that the changing climate is affecting not just the penguins at the apex of the food chain, but simultaneously the microscopic life that is the base of the ecosystem.

However much the oceans rise by the end of the century, add an extra 8 inches or so for New York, Boston and other spots along the coast from the mid-Atlantic to New England. That's because of predicted changes in ocean currents, according to a study based on computer models published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Some of the mightiest rivers on the planet, including the Ganges, the Niger, and the Yellow river in China, are drying up because of climate change, a study of global waterways warned yesterday. The study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado found that global warming has had a far more damaging impact on rivers than had been realised and that, overwhelmingly, those rivers in highly populated areas were the most severely affected. That could threaten food and water supply to millions of people living in some of the world's poorest regions, the study warned.

The critical role of forests as massive "sinks" for absorbing greenhouse gases is "at risk of being lost entirely" to climate change-induced environmental stresses that threaten to damage and even decimate forests worldwide, according to a new report released April 17. The report will be formally presented at the next session of the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) taking place 20 April-1 May 2009 at the UN Headquarters in New York City.

The world has only six years left to limit greenhouse gas emissions, Pachauri warns. "It's essential that we take action by which we allow emissions to peak no later than 2015," he says, to limit the world's temperature increase to 2C. Beyond that and we reach a tipping point when the world's poorest communities will suffer the most. "They are the ones who are the most vulnerable" due to a much greater scarcity of water, a decline in agricultural lands, and the danger of sea level rises, as spelt out in the fourth assessment report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Global Warming Using Data, Charts, Models, Animations, Web Links and Videos to Learn About Climate Change

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil, for example, contributed more than $600,000 to Heartland, according to annual reports of charitable contributions from the company and company foundations. Alan T. Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said by e-mail that the company had ended support "to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner."

Its conclusion is that temperature increased and decreased a little over the centuries, but the fluctuations were small enough that the line was roughly flat, like the shaft of a horizontal hockey stick. Then, from about 1980 to now, temperature increased sharply, more than any increase before - like the blade of the hockey stick. For the past 10 years, climate-change skeptics have been calling the hockey stick bogus. Now the scientists who studied the climate record and produced the original hockey-stick graph have done a new study using more data from more sources - and they got the same pattern.