World-News

Droughts, floods, changing rain patterns and rising sea levels are threatening development in the world's poorest countries, specialists and aid workers said yesterday at an international water forum. Development agencies predict "devastation" in some regions.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/032106LA.shtml

Humans have provoked the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65m years ago, according to a UN report that calls for unprecedented worldwide efforts to address the slide.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329438787-111492,00.html


From Information Clearing House

Ostafrika hungert wegen andauernder Trockenheit und Prognosen sagen Dürre für den ganzen Kontinent voraus.

http://www.telepolis.de/tp/r4/artikel/22/22186/1.html

16.03.2006

Schnee und Kälte bis Mitte März - ist der Treibhauseffekt vorbei? War alles nur Panikmache?

http://www.sonnenseite.com/index.php?pageID=6&news:oid=n4832

18.03.2006

Unterlassener Klimaschutz könnte die Staaten über 10 Prozent ihrer Wirtschaftsleistung kosten. Dies zeigen neue Modellrechnungen, die das Umweltbundesamt (UBA) und das Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK) soeben vorgestellt haben.

http://www.sonnenseite.com/index.php?pageID=6&news:oid=n4850

STUDY CONFIRMS

By Ker
Than LiveScience
March 16, 2006

http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/060316_hurricane_sst.html

A rise in the world's sea surface temperatures was the primary contributor to the formation of stronger hurricanes since 1970, a new study reports.

While the question of what role, if any, humans have had in all this is still a matter of intense debate, most scientists agree that stronger storms are likely to be the norm in future hurricane seasons.

The study is detailed in the March 17 issue of the journal Science.

An alarming trend

In the 1970s, the average number of intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring globally was about 10 per year. Since 1990, that number has nearly doubled, averaging about 18 a year.

Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 mph. Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Wilma last year set a record as the most intense hurricane on record with winds of 175 mph.

Hurricanes from Above

While some scientists believe this trend is just part of natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, others argue that rising sea surface temperatures as a side effect of global warming is the primary culprit.

According to this scenario, warming temperatures heat up the surface of the oceans, increasing evaporation and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere. This in turn provides added fuel for storms as they travel over open oceans.

Other factors less important

The researchers used statistical models and techniques from a field of mathematics called information theory to determine factors contributing to hurricane strength from 1970 to 2004 in six of the world's ocean basins, including the North Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

They looked at four factors that are known to affect hurricane intensity:

* Humidity in the troposphere -- the part of the atmosphere stretching from surface of the Earth to about 6 miles up

* Wind shear that can throttle storm formation

* Rising sea-surface temperatures

* Large-scale air circulation patterns known as "zonal stretching deformations"

Of these factors, only rising sea surface temperatures was found to influence hurricane intensity in a statistically significant way over a long-term basis. The other factors affected hurricane activity on short time scales only.

"We found no long-term trend in things like wind shear," said study team member Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "There's a lot of year to year variability but there's no global trend. In any given year, it's different for each ocean."

An answer for the critics

The new study potentially addresses one major criticism leveled by scientists skeptical of any strong link between sea surface temperatures and hurricane strength, said Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study.

Last year, Emanuel published a study correlating the documented increase in hurricane duration and intensity in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans since the 1970s to rises in sea surface temperatures over the same time period.

"We were criticized by the seasonal forecasters for not including the other environmental factors, like wind shear, in our analysis," Emanuel said in an email. "[We didn't do so] because on time scales longer than 2-3 years, these do not seem to matter very much. This paper more or less proves this point."

Kevin Trenberth, the head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), believes the new study's main finding is accurate but thinks the effects of some of the environmental factors on hurricane intensity might have been underestimated.

"The reason is they're covering a period from 1970 to 2004. 1979 is the year when satellites were introduced into the [NCEP/NCAR] Reanalysis. The quality of the analysis prior to 1979 is simply nowhere near as good," said Trenberth, who also was not involved in the study.

The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis is the database the researchers drew upon for information about the effects of troposphere humidity, wind shear and zonal stretching deformation on hurricane intensity; sea surface temperature data came from a different database.

Curry acknowledged that reanalysis data prior to 1979 is of slightly lower quality than more recent data but believes this doesn't substantially change the study's main finding. Trenberth agreed: "I suspect they may well have gotten the right answer anyway," he told LiveScience.

Natural cycles?

Some scientists have explained the rising strength of hurricanes as being part of natural weather cycles in the world's oceans.

In the North Atlantic, this cycle is called the Atlantic multi-decadal mode. Every 20 to 40 years, Atlantic Ocean and atmospheric conditions conspire to produce just the right conditions to cause increased storm and hurricane activity.

The Atlantic Ocean is currently going through an active period of hurricane activity that began in 1995 and which has continued to the present. The previous active cycle lasted from the late 1920's to 1970, and peaked around 1950.

These cycles definitely do influence hurricane intensity, but they can't be the whole story, Curry said.

While scientists expect stronger hurricanes based on natural cycles alone, the researchers suspect other contributing factors, since current hurricanes are even stronger than natural cycles predict.

"We're not even at the peak of current cycle, we're only halfway up and already we're seeing activity in the North Atlantic that's 50 percent worse than what we saw during the last peak in 1950," Curry said.

Some scientists still think it's too premature to make any definitive links between sea surface temperatures and hurricane intensity.

"We simply don't have enough data yet," said Thomas Huntington in of the U.S. Geological Survey. "Category 5 hurricanes don't come around very often, so you need the benefit of a much longer time series to look back and say 'Yup, there has been an increase.'"

Huntington is the author of a recent review of more than 100 peer-reviewed studies showing that although many aspects of the global water cycle -- including precipitation, evaporation and sea surface temperatures -- have increased or risen, the trend cannot be consistently correlated with increases in the frequency or intensity of storms or floods over the past century. Huntington's study was announced this week and is published in the current issue of the Journal of Hydrology.

Brace yourselves

Whatever the underlying cause, most scientists agree that people will need to brace themselves for stronger hurricanes and typhoons in the coming years and decades.

However, most regions around the world will not experience more storms. The only exception to this is the North Atlantic, where hurricanes have become both more numerous and longer-lasting in recent years, especially since 1995. The reasons for this regional disparity are still unclear.

The team's findings are controversial because they draw a connection between stronger hurricanes and rising sea surface temperatures -- a phenomenon that has itself already been linked to human-induced global warming.

The study by Curry and her colleagues therefore raises the frightening possibility that humans have inadvertently boosted the destructive power of one of Nature's most devastating and feared storms.

"If humans are increasing sea surface temperatures and if you buy this link between increases rising sea surface temperatures and increases in hurricane intensity, that's the conclusion you come to," Curry said.


Informant: NHNE

By Deborah Zabarenko
Reuters
March 14, 2006

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-03-14T205458Z_01_N14283840_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-ARCTIC.xml

WASHINGTON - Ozone pollution in the Northern Hemisphere, churned out by factories and vehicles that burn fossil fuels, is a major factor in the dramatic warming of the Arctic zone, NASA climate scientists reported on Tuesday.

This finding is surprising, since ozone has been considered a minor player in the study of global climate change, according to Drew Shindell, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

Carbon dioxide has long been considered a key cause of overall global warming, because it remains in the atmosphere for a long time, Shindell said in a telephone interview.

But ozone -- the damaging, heat-trapping tropospheric ozone encountered at lower levels of the atmosphere, as opposed to the protective ozone observed at higher altitude -- was seen as fairly perishable and therefore less of a factor, he said.

Globally, ozone accounts for perhaps one-seventh of the global warming and climate change that carbon dioxide does, Shindell said. However, a new study of climate change over the past 100 years indicates that ozone may be responsible for as much as 50 percent of the warming in the Arctic zone.

This is because many of the world's most highly industrialized nations are in the Northern Hemisphere, and at relatively high latitudes. For most of the year, that means the ozone produced in these countries is blown by prevailing winds north and east, toward the Arctic Circle.

"Instead of being this tiny player, (ozone) can be more like 30 or 40 or even 50 percent of the cause of warming that we're seeing in the Arctic now," Shindell said. "It's very dramatic."

In computer models using climate data going back to 1880, environmental scientists found Arctic temperatures remained normal until about 1950. After that, the model shows higher temperatures, widely spread around the Arctic region.

This rise in temperatures is linked to the rise in tropospheric ozone at northern latitudes, Shindell said.

"Global warming has really taken off since the 1970s," he said. "The warming in the past several decades has been more than it was the whole previous record, which is about 100 years before that."

Arctic warming has been more extreme than global warming overall, he said, because as snow and ice melt they uncover darker-colored ground or water that absorb heat, accelerating warming.

More information and video is available online at: http://tinyurl.com/gc5f8


Informant: NHNE

The atmosphere's level of greenhouse gases associated with climate change is hitting record highs. A bulletin on greenhouse gas levels by the World Meteorological Organization said there were 377 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2004, up from around 280ppm before the industrial revolution.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/031506EC.shtml

ENS March 13, 2006

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2006/2006-03-13-09.asp

CORVALLIS, Oregon - Global warming in coming decades may cause the disappearance of large areas of the low-elevation snowpack in the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest, a new study concludes. Area ski resorts will face warm winters far more often than they do now, predict the authors, geographers from Oregon State University (OSU).

The new OSU study, based on computer models, details the "at risk" snowpacks in the Pacific Northwest. Most lie in Oregon's Cascade Range, parts of the southern Cascade Range of Washington, and Olympic National Park.

Similar impacts are also possible for portions of the southern Cascade Range in Washington, and also in Washington's Olympic Range, most of which is in Olympic National Park. There, global warming is projected to melt 61 percent of the snow cover.

"Previous studies show that snowpack has fluctuated widely in the past, but appears to be trending downward in the Pacific Northwest since the 1920s," said Anne Nolin, an assistant professor in the OSU Department of Geosciences.

"This region has already experienced the largest declines in snowpack in the western United States. What we're able to do now is identify much more precisely where the snow may disappear, based on the warming we expect," Nolin said. "We've never before had projections that are this specific in their spatial scale."

For their study, Nolin and Chris Daly, an associate professor of geosciences, used widely accepted global climate models which, on average, suggest this region may warm about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 40 years.

While than two percent of the current snow-covered area is modeled to be at risk in the future in a four state Pacific Northwest region that includes Idaho and parts of western Montana, more than half of all the "at risk" snow is in the Oregon Cascades.

Nolin team projects that about 22 percent of the area in the Oregon Cascades could soon experience precipitation that falls as rain in the winter, rather than as snow.

Some of the most profound impacts may be on ski resorts in the region, the scientists said, especially those at the lower elevations.

For instance, based on the increase in temperature that is expected 40 years from now, the study showed that Mt. Hood Meadows, a popular ski area near Portland, Oregon, may experience warm winters about seven times more frequently than it does now - going from a warm winter seven percent of the time to 47 percent of the time.

A warm winter means that, based on the elevation of the ski area, climate conditions, and other local geographical conditions, precipitation that now falls predominately as snow during December, January and February will instead fall predominately as rain.

The potential for changes in snow and rain precipitation patterns, the researchers say, could affect not just ski resorts but also stream flows, fisheries, flood control, hydroelectric power generation, irrigated agriculture and other water-related activities.

Reductions in summer stream flow as a result of diminished snowpack would be a special problem for fisheries management, the researchers said.

Similar concerns would almost certainly affect the Sierra Nevada range of California, the researchers said, but an analysis of that region was not a part of this study.

The report has been accepted for publication in a future issue of the "Journal of Hydrometeorology," a publication of the American Meteorological Society. The work was funded in part by the U.S. Geological Survey and by NASA.


Informant: NHNE

By Alister Doyle
Reuters
March 13, 2006

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2006/3/14/worldupdates/2006-03-14T093801Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_-240499-1&sec=Worldupdates

OSLO - Exotic frogs and toads are dying out in the jungles of Latin America, apparent victims of global warming in what might be a harbinger of one of the worst waves of extinction since the dinosaurs.

Accelerating extinctions would derail a United Nations goal of "a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss" by 2010. That target will be reviewed at a U.N. meeting of environment ministers in Curitiba, Brazil, on March 20-31.

"We are facing an extinction crisis," said Anne Larigauderie, head of Paris-based Diversitas which promotes research into life on the planet.

She estimated the rate of loss of all species was now 10-100 times faster than little-understood rates from fossil records. The task of gauging the exact rate is complicated by the fact that no one knows exactly how many species exist.

Many scientists say global warming -- widely blamed on burning fossil fuels in factories, power plants and vehicles -- is adding to other human threats including destruction of habitats from expanding cities, deforestation and pollution.

For now, amphibians such as frogs, toads, salamanders and newts are on the front-line -- they live both in water and on land and have a porous skin sensitive to changes in temperature and moisture. A skin fungus is also decimating amphibians.

In coming decades, threats could widen to creatures ranging from polar bears to tropical butterflies. A few species might benefit, such as forests expanding north to the Arctic.

"We're probably looking at one of the worst spasms of extinction in millions of years, even without climate change," said Lee Hannah, an expert at Conservation International. "But we have it in our ability to do something about it."

"Many species are already moving right to the brink," said Craig Hilton-Taylor, head of the "Red List" publication of endangered species at the World Conservation Union.

GOLDEN TOAD

The latest 2004 Red List gives "climate change" alongside "disease" as main factors for the extinction of the Golden Toad of Costa Rica, Ecuador's Jambato Toad and an Ecuadorean toad known as Atelopus Longirostis.

"We have never used 'climate change' in previous publications as a cause of extinction," Hilton-Taylor said. "I'm sure it will be used more in future."

A study in the journal Nature in January said two-thirds of 110 species of Harlequin frog in central and South America had died out in the past 20 years. It implicated a warming climate in helping spread fungus.

In the worst case, some studies say the world could be facing one of the biggest waves of species loss since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.

Larigauderie said the U.N. goal of slowing biodiversity loss was impossible. "It's totally unrealistic. We don't know what there is out there and we don't know how it's changing," she said.

Overall, the Red List says 844 species have disappeared since 1500, ranging from the dodo to the Tasmanian tiger.

In one of the bleakest projections, a 2004 international study said a quarter of all species -- perhaps a million -- could be condemned to extinction by 2050, partly because of a warming climate.

"You could argue that climate change is already starting to be on a par with other causes of species loss," said Chris Taylor, the study's lead author who is a professor of conservation biology at the University of York in England.

Species limited to a single mountain-top -- like the Golden Toad -- were unable to escape if it got too hot. In other cases, cities, roads or farmland may block the path of animals and plants moving towards the poles, the study said.

CLIMATE REFUGEES

Others say the outlook is less grim.

"In a lot of cases, species will be able to move towards the poles or find pockets of environments where they can survive," said Paul Leadley, a professor of ecology at the University of Paris.

He said an abrupt temperature rise at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago did not trigger a mass extinction.

The head of the U.N.'s climate panel said preserving nature was more than just a question of helping exotic animals and plants to survive.

"Human progress has been supported by the healthy continuation of biodiversity," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific body of about 2,000 scientists that advises the United Nations.

"All our food crops, medicines and so many other things that we take for granted in day-to-day living are the result of what we have exploited in the form of nature's bounty," he said. He urged governments to do more to slow climate change.

The Kyoto Protocol, the main U.N. plan to curb global warming, obliges about 40 industrial nations to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

President George W. Bush pulled the United States, the world's top source of emissions, out in 2001. He denounced Kyoto as an economic straitjacket that would cost U.S. jobs and said it wrongly excluded developing nations.

Public concern about nature can sometimes produce huge efforts to protect species.

In the United States, discovery of the tiny snail darter fish delayed construction of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River after it was listed as endangered in the 1970s.

In other cases, species that held promise have vanished.

The tiny Australian Northern Gastric-Brooding Frog had the trick of incubating its young in its stomach by turning off its digestive juices. That could have helped pharmaceutical companies to work out stomach anti-ulcer drugs.

Extinct according to the Red List, it has not been seen in the wild since
1985, a victim of habitat loss and disease.


Informant: NHNE