Latest Climate Stories

The Earth experienced the seventh warmest April since record keeping began in 1880, as the climate phenomenon La Niña continued to be a significant factor. April's annual Arctic sea ice extent was the fifth smallest since record keeping began in 1979, while the Antarctic sea ice extent was the fourth smallest.The monthly analysis from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides government, business and community leaders so...

A sediment core from a South American lake revealed a steady, sharp drop in crucial monsoon rainfall since 1900, leading to the driest conditions in 1,000 years as of 2007 and threatening tropical populations with water shortages, a team from Pitt, Union College, and SUNY-Albany reports in PNAS A 2,300-year climate record University of Pittsburgh researchers recovered from an Andes Mountains lake reveals that as temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rise, the planet's densely populated...

A national volunteer project, 4 years in the making, and now published as a peer reviewed scientific study, has discovered that the majority of the US climate monitoring network does not meet technical requirements for long term climate monitoring. Only 1 in 10 NOAA stations were found to meet siting criteria to be free of urbanization encroachment. The study raises questions about the accuracy and certainty of the climate record. Boulder, CO (PRWEB) May 11, 2011 The discovery that poor...

El Nino and its partner La Nina, the warm and cold phases in the eastern half of the tropical Pacific, play havoc with climate worldwide. Predicting El Nino events more than several months ahead is now routine, but predicting how it will change in a warming world has been hampered by the short instrumental record. An international team of climate scientists has now shown that annually resolved tree-ring records from North America, particularly from the US Southwest, give a continuous...

The production of wind energy in the U.S. over the next 30-50 years will be largely unaffected by upward changes in global temperature, say a pair of Indiana University Bloomington scientists who analyzed output from several regional climate models to assess future wind patterns in America's lower 48 states.Their report -- the first analysis of long-term stability of wind over the U.S. -- appears in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition."The greatest...

Researchers from six countries are in the Arctic studying the potential role that soot, or black carbon, has on the rapidly changing Arctic climate. Although the Arctic is typically viewed as a vast white wasteland, scientists believe a thin layer of soot is causing it to absorb more heat. They want to find out if that is the main reason for the recent rapid warming of the Arctic, which could have an impact on the world's climate for years to come. Black carbon is produced by vehicle engines,...

The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed rapidly for the last half-century or more, and recent studies have shown that an adjacent area, continental West Antarctica, has steadily warmed for at least 30 years, but scientists haven't been sure why.New University of Washington research shows that rising sea surface temperatures in the area of the Pacific Ocean along the equator and near the International Date Line drive atmospheric circulation that has caused some of the largest shifts in Antarctic...

By Kim DeRose, UCLABy studying fossilized mollusks from some 3.5 million years ago, UCLA geoscientists and colleagues have been able to construct an ancient climate record that holds clues about the long-term effects of Earth's current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a key contributor to global climate change.Two novel geochemical techniques used to determine the temperature at which the mollusk shells were formed suggest that summertime Arctic temperatures during the early Pliocene...

The effects of climate change and population growth on agricultural land area vary from region to region, according to a new study by University of Illinois researchers.Regions with relative high latitudes "“ China, Russia and the U.S. "“ could see a significant increase in arable land in coming years, but Africa, Europe and India and South America could lose land area.Civil and environmental engineering professor Ximing Cai and graduate student Xiao Zhang published their findings in the...

International climate negotiations are deadlocked between the affluent global North and "developing" South, between political Left and Right, and between believers and deniers. Now, authors writing in the latest issue of the International Journal of Water argue that a more integrative analysis of climate should help resolve these conflicts.Land use changes and water management are highly relevant to climate change. To quote hydrologists Juraj Kohutiar and Michal Kravcik of the...