Latest Climate forcing Stories

Earth sits between two worlds that have been devastated by climate catastrophes. In the effort to combat global warming, our neighbours can provide valuable insights into the way climate catastrophes affect planets.Modelling Earth's climate to predict its future has assumed tremendous importance in the light of mankind's influence on the atmosphere. The climate of our two neighbours is in stark contrast to that of our home planet, making data from ESA's Venus Express and Mars Express...

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 next week, much of the nation should expect more "extreme heat," the National Weather Service predicts.-- In the month of August, most of the United States will see "above normal temperatures," forecasters...

Arizona  -- There's a lot of talk about global warming, but not much hard data on the chemicals that cause it.In fact, engineers who design environmentally friendly manufacturing processes often are stymied because data on a chemical's global warming potential (GWP) just isn't available.A University of Arizona chemical engineer is working on computationally based methods that should produce the hard numbers needed by both engineers and policy makers who are trying to curb global...

New Jersey -- Less sunlight reaching the Earth's surface has not translated into cooler temperatures, according to a team of solar physicists at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). The scientists, who monitor the Earth's reflectance by measuring what is known as the moon's earthshine, have observed that the amount of light reflected by Earth -- its albedo -- has increased since 2000. The result has been less sunlight reaching the Earth's surface. "Our findings have significant...

WASHINGTON -- The effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth's atmosphere has increased 20 percent since 1990, a new government index says. The Annual Greenhouse Gas Index was released Tuesday by the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide accumulate in the atmosphere as a result of industrial and other processes. They can help trap solar heat, somewhat like a greenhouse, resulting in a gradual warming of the Earth's atmosphere. The...

LIVERMORE, Calif. "“ For the first time, new climate observations and computer models provide a consistent picture of recent warming of the tropical atmosphere.Over the past decade, scientific evidence from a variety of sources has implicated human-caused increases in greenhouse gases as a major driver of recent climate change. A key argument used to rebut such findings relates to satellite records of temperature change in the troposphere "“ the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere. Until...

ORLANDO, FLA. - (Aug. 10, 2005) - Summers are getting sunnier in Oregon, according to evidence presented today by University of Oregon physicists during the 2005 Solar World Congress in Orlando. The study is a first step toward testing and refining regional climate models for the Pacific Northwest that will help track global warming. In sharp contrast to reports of increased global dimming, the study's researchers reported a 10 to 15 percent increase in solar radiation at sites in Burns,...

NASA satellites improve understanding of urban effects on climate and weatherNASA -- Just how does society's desire to live in densely populated areas have the potential to change our Earth's climate? According to a new paper, satellites can help us answer that question. "More and more people live in cities. This means that cities will grow rapidly over the next several decades. Evidence continues to mount that cities affect the climate," said J. Marshall Shepherd, Deputy Project...

Projects such as Deep Space Climate Observatory would retrieve vital information In an article in this week's issue of Science, three leading climate and atmospheric scientists argue that scientific research is lacking in several core areas concerning Earth's climate and its fundamental energy system. In a "Perspectives" article in the journal, the scientists say that a significant gap exists in accounting for the amount of the sun's energy that is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and...