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://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 |