Late 2006 Updates
Mass Coral Die-Off
Feared as Caribbean Hits Temperature High Two Months Early
Tuesday,
July 04, 2006
Associated
Press
Charlotte Amalie, U.S. Virgin Islands-Caribbean Sea temperatures have
reach their annual high two months ahead of schedule-a sign
coral reefs may suffer the same widespread damage as last
year, scientists said Monday.
Sea
temperatures around Puerto Rico and the Florida Keys reached
83.5 degrees Saturday-a high not normally seen until September,
said Al Strong, a scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch.
"We've got a good two more months of heating," Strong
told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Washington.
"If it were to go up another degree, it would be pretty
serious. That's what we had last year."
Researchers fear another hot summer could be disastrous
for coral still recovering from last year, when up to 40 percent
of coral died in abnormally warm seas around the U.S. Virgin
Islands.
July; 6, 2006: In a report by The
National Center for Atmospheric Research and the UCAR Office
of Programs, They said that global carbon dioxide emissions
are dramatically altering the ocean's chemistry and threatening
marine organisms, especially coral reefs. They fear CO2 emissions could overload the seas.
The report is in line with earlier warnings from individual
scientists.
Western Wildfires Linked to Global Warming
July
7, 2006
A recent increase in wildfire activity has been correlated with rising
seasonal temperatures and the earlier arrival of spring, a
new study by the University of California, San Diego concludes.
"At higher elevations what really drives the fire
season is the temperature.
When you have a warm spring and early summer, you get
earlier snowmelt," so says the study co-author Anthony Westerling
of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of
California, San Diego. "With
the snowmelt coming out a month earlier, areas then get drier
earlier overall and there is a longer season in which a fire
can be started-there's more opportunity for ignition."
The country's western forests used to act as storage
"sinks" by sequestering 20 to 40 percent of all U.S. carbon
output, are now transforming into a source of atmospheric
CO2 as they burn up, the authors write.
"I see this as one of the first big indicators of climate-change
impacts in the continental United States," said study co-author
Thomas Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research
at the University of Arizona in Tuscon. "Lots of people think climate change and the
ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away.
But it's not 50 to 100 years away-it's happening right
now in forest ecosystems through fire."
The study was detailed in this weeks online version
of the journal Science.
Scientists say Killer Heat Waves Tied to Global Warming
Tuesday
August 1, 2006,
Associated
Press
In Fresno, the morgue is full of victims from a California heat wave.
A combination of heat and power outages killed a dozen
people in Missouri. And
in parts of Europe, temperatures are hotter than in 2003 when
a heat wave killed 35,000 people.
Get used to it.For the long-term future, the world
will see more and more killer heat waves because of global
warming, scientists say. The July burst of killer heat waves around the
world can't be specifically blamed on global warming. And they aren't the worst ever-they still can't
quite hold a candle to the scorching heat of America's 1930's
Dust Bowl. But the trend is pointed in that direction,
experts say.
Heat waves and global warming "are very strongly" connected,
said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis branch chief at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado."You
can't tie global warming into one single event," he said.
But what global warming has done is make the nights
warmer in general and the days drier, which help turn merely
uncomfortable hot days into killer heat waves, Trenberth said. Much of the global warming science concentrates
on average monthly and yearly temperatures, but recent studies
in the past five years show that climate change is at its
most dangerous during extreme events, such as high temperatures,
droughts and flooding, he said. "These [heat] events always occur. What global warming does is push it up another
notch," Trenberth said.
And the computer models show that soon, we'll get many
more-and hotter-heat waves that will leave the old Dust Bowl
records of the 1930s in the dust, said Ken Kunkel, director
of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Illinois State
Water Survey.
The way to really judge will be when scientists look
back a decade from now, not at a single heat wave, but at
the frequency and extremes of all of them, said Mike Wallace,
a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington
in Seattle.
That's when scientists will likely see a statistically
significant increase in heat waves and their severity, he
said. In fact, he said,
that can be seen a bit now.
In the past 25 years most of the world, has seen summer
nights getting much warmer with far less evening heat relief,
according to a study published earlier this year in the peer-reviewed
Journal of Geophysical Research.
Another study this year by the Climate Research Unit
at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, concluded
that European summer heat waves "have increased in frequency
at most stations since 1880" and will continue to increase
with man-made global warming."
Scientists: Sea Creatures Dying Along Oregon Coast Due to Global Warming
Sunday,
August 6, 2006
Associated
Press
Washington-Bottom fish and crabs washing up dead on Oregon beaches are
being killed by a recurring "dead zone" of low-oxygen water
that is larger than in previous years and may be triggered
by global warming, scientists said.
".Scientists
studying the 70-mile-long zone of oxygen-depleted water, along
the Continental Shelf between Florence and Lincoln City, conclude
that it is being caused by explosive blooms of tiny plants
known as phytoplankton, which die and sink to the bottom,
then are eaten by bacteria which use up the oxygen in the
water. The recurring phytoplankton blooms are triggered
by northerly wind, which generates a process known as upwelling
in which nutrient rich water is brought to the surface from
lower depths.
"We are seeing swings from year to year in the timing
and duration of the winds that are favorable for upwelling,"
Jane Lubchenco, professor of marine ecology at Oregon State
and a member of the Pew Oceans Commission, said from Corvallis. "This increased variability in the winds is
consistent with what we would expect under climate change."
Montana Wildfire Grows to 80,000 Acres, Firefighters Battle Other Western
Blazes
Thursday,
August 31, 2006
The
evacuation orders cover about 250 homes in Stillwater and
Sweet Grass counties, fire information officer Pat Cross said
Thursday. The wildfire
was about 100,000 acres, or about 150 square miles.
The Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies: Summer is Getting Longer
August
2006
A
study done by the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies
in Calverton, MD traced backwards every known rainfall event
on the globe, for a 25-year period ending in 2003. The scientists wanted to determine where the
moisture that supplied each rainfall came from.
They found remarkable trends in what they term "recycling"
over a period of time. Precipitation
recycling is the fraction of rain falling over a particular
area that originated as evaporation from that same area.If
recycling is increasing in spring and fall, it suggests that
summer regime is expanding,
Dirmeyer said. "In
other words, you're getting more summer-like conditions in
the spring and fall." This trend observed in high latitudes in consistent
with other changes attributed to global warming. Studies have found that the spring season is
arriving earlier, and vegetation is lasting later into the
fall."
Montana Wildfire Continues to Grow, More Burning Expected
Thursday
September 7, 2006
Associated
Press
Helena, Mont.-The states largest wildfire grew to nearly 300 square miles
on Thursday and officials predicted the more than two-week
old blaze in south-central Montana will keep growing because
of high winds and the density of dead trees.
Firefighters in Western States Battle 60 Active Blazes
Saturday,
September 9, 2006
Associated
Press
Stanley, Idaho-Federal officials on Friday were tracking 60 large, active
fires that were burning more than 1 million acres, or more
than 1,500 square miles, across the West.
The
states in the region with the most number of fires included
Idaho, Nevada, and Montana, according to the Web site of Boise-based
National Interagency Fire Center, composed of various federal
agencies that coordinate to battle wildfires. In Idaho, fires had burned more than 231,000
acres, or 360 square miles, the center reported.
California Wildfire Scorches 20 Square Miles; Blazes Continue in Nevada,
Washington, Montana
Sunday,
September 10, 2006
Associated
Press
CASTAIC, California-Firefighters face more hot, dry weather Sunday as
they struggle to contain a wildfire burning across nearly
20 square miles of dry brush and timber in the Los Padres
National Forest.
The
blaze broke out Monday about 40 miles north of Los Angeles.
More than 1,380 firefighters were battling the blaze
and there was no estimate on when it might be contained, said
James Turner of the U.S. Forest Service.
Montana Wildfire Doubles in Size; 325 Evacuations Ordered
Thursday,
September 14, 2006
Associated
Press
Livingston, Mont.-A wildfire in an area peppered with property owned by
celebrities nearly doubled in size Wednesday, prompting evacuation
orders for about 325 homes.
The
fire estimated at 18,845 acres, or about 29 square miles,
information officer Al Nash said. It had been reported at 9,360 acres, or about
15 square miles, the night before.The fire started by lightning
Aug. 25, is on the West Boulder River about 30 miles north
of Yellowstone National Park.
Evacuations Ordered as Montana Wildfire Triples in Size
Friday,
September 15, 2006,
Associated
Press
Livingston, Mont.-Strong winds that had caused a fire in an area popular
with celebrities to nearly triple in size Thursday and helped
slow the blaze's growth.The fire grew to 32,000 acres,
or about 50 square miles.
On Wednesday, winds helped grow the fire to 27,400
acres, or nearly 43 square miles.
NASA Finds Arctic Ice Melting
Rapidly Due to Global Warming
Thursday,
September 14, 2006
Associated
Press
--Arctic sea
ice in winter is melting far faster than before, two new NASA
studies reported Wednesday, a new and alarming trend that
researchers say threatens the ocean's delicate ecosystem.
Scientists point to the sudden and rapid melting as
a sure sign of man-made global warming.
"It has never
occurred before in the past," said NASA senior research scientist
Josefino Comiso in a phone interview. "It is alarming.This winter ice provides the
kind of evidence that it is indeed associated with the greenhouse
effect." Scientists
have long worried about melting Arctic sea ice in the summer,
but they had not seen a big winter drop in sea ice, even though
they expected it. For more than 25 years Arctic sea ice has slowly
diminished in winter by about 1.5 percent per decade. But in the past two years the melting has occurred
at rates 10 to 15 times faster.
From 2004 to 2005, the amount of ice dropped 2.3 percent;
and over the past year, it's declined by another 1.9 percent,
according to Cosmiso.
The ice is melting even in subfreezing winter temperatures
because the water is warmer and summer ice covers less area
and is shorter-lived, Comiso said. Thus, the winter ice season shortens every year
and warmer water melts at the edges of the winter ice more
every year. Scientists
and climate models have long predicted a drop in winter sea
ice, but it has been slow to happen. Global warming skeptics have pointed to the
lack of ice melt as a flaw in global warming theory.
The latest
findings are "coming more in line with what we expected to
find," said Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the
National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "We're starting to see a much more coherent
and firm picture occurring."
Serreze said only five years ago he was "a fence sitter"
on the issue of whether man-made global warming was happening
and a threat, but he said recent evidence in the Arctic has
him convinced. Summer
ice also has dramatically melted and shrunk over the years,
setting a record last year.
This year's measurements are not as bad, but will be
close to the record, Serreze said.
Equally disturbing is a large mass of water-melted
sea ice-in the interior of a giant patch of ice north of Alaska,
Serreze said. It's
called a polynya, and while those show up from time to time,
this one is large-about the size of the state of Maryland-and
in an unexpected place. "I
for one, after having studied this for 20 years, have never
seen anything like this before," Serreze said."
To see James
Hansen in an interview on this very subject, log onto http://cbs2.com/watercooler/watercooler_story_257210600.html
.
Other good
html links to log onto are: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/03/24/MNG22HTITV1.DTL&type=printable
http://nsidc.org/news/press/2006_sealceminimum/20060816_arcticsealcenews.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4290340.stm
http://redorbit.com/news/space/336498/nasas_grace_finds_greenland_melting_faster/index.html?source=r_space
http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/qthinice.asp
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212598,00.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,184147,00.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,183599,00.html
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/arcticice_decline_prt.htm
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=arctic+ice+melting+in+winter
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060914/ap_on_sc/warming_sea_ice&printer+1
http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0928-nsidc.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0916-09.htm
http://www.countercurrents.org/cc-connor140306.htm
http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200609150007
http://www.bigelow.org/COSEE-OS/sea_ice.htm
and last but not least
http://www.naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-09/ns_ket.html
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2704.htm
http://oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/Pdf/heat_2006.pdf
Massive Ice Shelf
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