Home/Posts Tagged ‘climatecentral.org’
Posts Tagged ‘climatecentral.org’
Climate Change, Politics, Science & Technology, May 10th, 2012,
By Michael D. Lemonick It’s just two weeks since a paper in Nature flagged an ominous thinning of ice shelves along parts of the Antarctic coast lying due south of the Pacific Ocean. The ice appears to be melting from below, as changing ocean currents are bringing relatively warm water to bathe the shelves’ undersides — and as the ice shelves lose mass, they also lose their ability to slow land-based ice in its slide toward the sea. Now there’s something new to worry about. A pair of brand-new studies published today, one in Nature and one in its sister…
Tags: Antarctica, Climate change, climate science, climatecentral.org, global warming, ice melting
Climate Change, Natural disasters, Nature, Wildlife & Flora, Apr 19th, 2012,
By Michael D. Lemonick For years, we who communicate about climate change have been wringing our hands over how to make people understand the problem at a gut level. Endangered polar bears? Too far removed. Island nations like the Maldives sinking beneath the waves? Too far away. Hot temperatures by 2100? Too far in the future. But like the first, outlying squalls from an oncoming hurricane, the first effects of climate change are already here, in the form of heat waves, droughts, intense rainstorms and more, and people are evidently noticing. Not just the extremes themselves: you couldn’t have missed…
Tags: Climate change, climatecentral.org, extreme weather, global warming, natural disasters
Climate Change, Natural disasters, Nature, Science & Technology, Apr 12th, 2012,
By Andrew Freedman Severe thunderstorm season is upon us, with the array of threats it brings, from tornadoes to flash flooding. On Tuesday, tornadoes grabbed most of the headlines, as several strong tornadoes struck the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area, tossing tracker trailer trucks into the air, and damaging dozens of homes. But the large hail the same supercell thunderstorms dropped caused major impacts as well, largely because they fell on top of one of the world’s busiest airports. A passenger aboard a flight preparing to depart DFW International Airport when the storm hit described the sounds of the hail hitting…
Tags: big hail, changes due to climate change, Climate change, climatecentral.org, global warming, hail, hailstone climate change, supercell thunderstorms, tornadoes
Climate Change, Conservation, Nature, Science & Technology, Apr 5th, 2012,
One of the most striking changes that has taken place in the Arctic since the start of satellite monitoring in 1979 is the rapid decline of the perennial sea ice cover. This ice is the sea ice that survives the summer melt season, and is typically the thickest part of the sea ice cover, sometimes spanning several years. Sea ice extent has declined as the globe has warmed, but the ice cover has thinned as well. Thinner sea ice melts more easily, and as multiyear sea ice is lost, Arctic sea ice has declined more rapidly. This NASA visualization shows…
Tags: arctic ice, Climate change, climatecentral.org, melting arctic ice, melting ice caps, NASA
Climate Change, Conservation, Science & Technology, Mar 29th, 2012,
Video Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio A nifty animation from NASA illustrating the paths of global ocean surface currents from June 2005 through December 2007. Surface currents circulate water of varying temperature around the globe and thus play a significant role in weather and climate patterns. Note the Gulf Stream along the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean. This powerful current transfers warm water away from the equator and up into the North Atlantic Ocean, in turn warming the climate along the eastern coast of North America and the western coast of Europe. It is believed that…
Tags: climatecentral.org, NASA, oceans, science
Climate Change, Science & Technology, Mar 22nd, 2012,
By Andrew Freedman COMMENTARY One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when communicating climate science is the resistance many have to accepting the notion that human activities are capable of altering the earth’s climate system. After all, the planet is a pretty big place, and the climate was doing its thing long before humans arrived. To some, the abundant scientific evidence showing that manmade emissions of global warming gases, such as carbon dioxide, are likely the key driver behind recent global warming seems, well, kind of arrogant. To these folks, I say check out a recent study that had nothing…
Tags: Climate change, climatecentral.org, man infuences climate, manmade climate change
Climate Change, Science & Technology, Weird Stuff, Mar 16th, 2012,
By Andrew Freedman SimCity, the iconic strategy game that gave rise to a generation of “Sims” games, is getting a 21st century makeover. With the real cities of the world increasingly on the front lines of climate change, SimCity will include a climate change component. The new version of the game, developed by Maxis in conjunction with the organization Games for Change, will force players to reckon with the consequences of their energy choices. If you put coal-fired power plants in your city, for example, you may see a rise in pollution and a decline in public health. You also…
Tags: Climate change, climate change SimCity, climatecentral.org, SimCity, video games
Climate Change, Green living, Health, Natural disasters, Politics, Mar 8th, 2012,
By Alyson Kenward While the cumulative effects of rising global temperatures have already caused dramatic changes to our planet, those changes often seem distant and it’s hard to put faces to them. But as climate change becomes more disruptive to daily life around the world, it’s more likely than not that the faces of that disruption will be those of women. With the world celebrating International Women’s Day on Thursday, it’s a good time to reflect on just how vulnerable women are to the effects of climate change. If you’re surprised to hear that gender makes a difference, you shouldn’t…
Tags: climatecentral.org, international women's day, Natural Resources Defense Council, women and climate change, world health organization
Climate Change, Science & Technology, Weird Stuff, Feb 23rd, 2012,
By Michael D. Lemonick Legend has it that in the final days of the Third Reich, loyalists smuggled Adolf Hitler’s remains out of Berlin along with those of his paramour, Eva Braun. The deceased were later ferried by U-Boat all the way down to a secret Nazi base in Antarctica, where they were, depending on which version you believe, interred or used for cloning experiments. Maybe a thousand identical copies of the mass murderer walk among us! Or maybe the legends about Nazis in Antarctica are as every bit as ridiculous as they sound (though not as ridiculous as this…
Tags: Antarctica, Climate change, climatecentral.org, ice
Climate Change, Natural disasters, Science & Technology, Feb 16th, 2012,
By Andrew Freedman The cold snap in Europe that has killed more than 600 people and buried communities under record snow cover has had an entirely different impact in the Arctic, which is where you’d normally expect to find frigid weather at this time of year. In parts of the Far North, it has been unusually mild recently, and broad expanses of open water have emerged. This open water has raised questions about whether Arctic sea ice is declining even faster than before. The open water, located in the Barents and Kara Seas, led one blogger to claim that the…
Tags: Arctic ice shift, Climate change, climatecentral.org, Europe cold weather, unusual weather patters
Climate Change, Natural disasters, Science & Technology, Feb 9th, 2012,
By Andrew Freedman The weather pattern responsible for bringing frigid air to Europe, like this heavy snow fall on the Colosseum in Rome, is driven in part by a naturally-occurring pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation. While the U.S. cruises through winter with a snow drought and above-average temperatures, much of Europe and Eurasia are locked in the grips of a deadly cold air outbreak, with more than 300 people reported dead so far. According to news reports, entire communities in Italy, Bosnia, and Romania have become inaccessible due to heavy snowfall and power outages. According to Sky News, a…
Tags: arctic sea ice volume, climate central, Climate change, climatecentral.org, deadly cold europe, europe weather, winter
Science & Technology, Weird Stuff, Feb 2nd, 2012,
By Andrew Freedman NASA released a new, high-resolution “Blue Marble” image of Earth this week, taken from instruments aboard the recently launched Suomi NPP satellite. The image is actually a composite of many pictures from Jan. 4, 2012 that were stitched together, and shows North America in stunning detail. One feature that is notably absent from the picture is snow cover, which is confined to parts of the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada. In many parts of the country, snowfall has been running well below average so far this year. The image was taken by one of the five instruments…
Tags: blue marble, climatecentral.org, earth images, NASA, space
Climate Change, Green living, Health, Natural disasters, Science & Technology, Jan 19th, 2012,
By Andrew Freedman It often seems like weather forecasters blame everything unusual on El Niño or La Niña, be it a drought, a heat wave, or a snowless winter. But this natural climate cycle in the equatorial Pacific Ocean may actually have much greater — and far deadlier — impacts. A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the possibility that La Niña helps make conditions more favorable for deadly global flu pandemics. The study finds that the past four flu pandemics, including the Spanish Flu of 1918, the Asian Flu of 1957, the Hong Kong…
Tags: Climate change, climatecentral.org, Flu pandemics, La Nina
Climate Change, Green living, Politics, Science & Technology, Jan 12th, 2012,
By Andrew Freedman At just five-days-old, the EU’s plan to subject non-European airlines to greenhouse gas emissions fees continues to reverberate worldwide. A day after we noted that Delta Airlines has begun passing on some of the emissions fees to fliers, in the form of a $3 surcharge on tickets to or from Europe, comes a report in the Guardian newspaper that the four top Chinese airlines are refusing to pay. The new rule subjects airlines flying to or from Europe to the EU’s Emissions Trading System, which allows companies that emit carbon dioxide, a gas that contributes to global…
Tags: airlines carbon tax, climatecentral.org, EU carbon tax
Climate Change, Science & Technology, Dec 22nd, 2011,
Sometimes, covering climate science feels like playing a neverending game of whack-a-mole, since the same dubious arguments — often put forward by the same people — pop up again and again, only to be repeatedly debunked. Today is no different. Over at the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang blog, I have a column responding to a press release issued late last week marking the 33rd year of temperature data from the lower atmosphere, as detected by satellites. The release, from John Christy and Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, made several claims that were misleading at best, including the…
Tags: Climate change, climatecentral.org, global warming, man-made climate change, temperature rise
