KidsGCCI

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.

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.

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.

Geographers have projected temperature increases due to greenhouse gas emissions to reach a not-so-chilling conclusion: climate zones will shift and some climates will disappear completely by 2100.

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.