Group items tagged

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.

He states, "our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century."[3][4] In June 2008 Stern increased the estimate to 2% of GDP to account for faster than expected climate change.[5]

GeoEye-1, designed and built by General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, is the world's highest resolution commercial imaging satellite. Designed to take color images of the Earth from 423 miles (681 kilometers) in space and moving at a speed of about four-and-a-half miles (seven kilometers) per second, the satellite will make 15 earth orbits per day and collect imagery with its ITT-built imaging system that can distinguish objects on the Earth's surface as small as 0.41-meters (16 inches) in size in the panchromatic (black and white) mode. The 4,300-pound satellite will also be able to collect multispectral or color imagery at 1.65-meter ground resolution. While the satellite will be able to collect imagery at 0.41-meters, GeoEye's operating license from NOAA requires re-sampling the imagery to half-meter resolution for all customers not explicitly granted a waiver by the U.S. Government.

EX Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing. For example, in recent decades most of North America has been experiencing more unusually hot days and nights, fewer unusually cold days and nights, and fewer frost days. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense. Droughts are becoming more severe in some regions, though there are no clear trends for North America as a whole. The power and frequency of Atlantic hurricanes have increased substantially in recent decades, though North American mainland land-falling hurricanes do not appear to have increased over the past century. Outside the tropics, storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are becoming even stronger.

In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday.

Data from the UK Met Office shows that temperatures in the first half of the year have been more than 0.1 Celsius cooler than any year since 2000. The principal reason is La Nina, part of the natural cycle that also includes El Nino, which cools the globe. Even so, 2008 is set to be about the 10th warmest year since 1850, and Met Office scientists say temperatures will rise again as La Nina conditions ease.

Eight crazy experiments bold enough to change the world.

I often dream about the ocean

There's been a lot of pressure lately to open up protected areas for oil drilling. But common sense says drilling is not the answer. Switching is.

It seems the Post Carbon Institute is as excited to push toward meeting Al Gore's challenge as we are. Julian Darley, the Institute's Founder and author of High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis, posted an outline to their web site detailing the ten steps the country would need to take in order to meet the goal of producing 100% of our nation's electricity in 10 years.

How can cities reduce the role they may play in global warming? Could fire departments, garbage collection services, residential building codes, and industrial regulations be greener? Attempting to help address those questions, 21 U.S. cities, including New York, Las Vegas, and New Orleans will describe their major sources of greenhouse gas emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project, one of the world's largest repositories linking such data to climate change.

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 watermark on the outlet tower, seen in 2007, shows the fall in the water level of Pejar Dam near Goulburn in the Australian state of New South Wales. Thousands of people rallied in southern Australia Sunday to protest the dwindling water levels in the Murray River, claiming the loss was causing an environmental disaster.

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.

Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent.