Latest IPCC Third Assessment Report Stories
A United Nations report released Tuesday calls for fast action on reducing emissions of black carbon, ground level ozone and methane to help limit near term global temperature rise preventing the Earth from overheating, reports AFP. Fast action could also reduce losses of mountain glaciers and reduce projected warming in the Arctic over the coming decades by as much as two thirds. Cutting out these pollutants now could also boost global food output and save millions of human lives lost to...
Phil Jones, the United Kingdom scientist who was targeted in the "ClimateGate" affair, now says global warming since 1995 is statistically significant, a year after telling BBC News that post-1995 warming was not significant. He noted that a year worth of data had pushed the trend past the threshold typically used to assess whether trends are in fact "real." Jones said this shows the importance of using longer records for analysis. Scientists generally use a minimum...
Climate scientists gathering at a conference on Arctic warming were asked Wednesday to explain the dramatic melting in the region in layman's terms, the Associated Press (AP) reports. An authoritative report released at the meeting in Copenhagen showed melting ice in the Arctic could result in global sea levels rising 5 feet within this century, much higher than previous forecasts. James White of the University of Colorado at Boulder told fellow researchers to use plain language when...
A top climate specialist with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said Tuesday that despite variations in predictions of climate change trends, Europe should take action over the increase in droughts and floods across the union. "There are some robust areas like Siberia, we know what the climate will be, another robust area is the Mediterranean, because the models tell the same story," said Zbigniew Kundzewicz, review editor of IPCC's chapter on freshwater resources. "Climate change...
New forecasts on rising sea levels suggest that New York will be a big loser, while some regions, including those closer to polar regions, will win big, reports BBC News.. A 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast sea levels to rise by as much as 1 foot by 2100. But that forecast was a global average. A Dutch team has now made an attempt to model all the factors leading to regional variations. And whatever the global figure turns out to be, there will be...
First global map suggests climate change will have greatest impact on the populations least responsible for causing the problemResearchers already study how various species of plants and animals migrate in response to climate change. Now, Jason Samson, a PhD candidate in McGill University's Department of Natural Resource Sciences, has taken the innovative step of using the same analytic tools to measure the impact of climate change on human populations. Samson and fellow researchers combined...
How should a new 'IPCC for biodiversity' work? Leading world scientists offer prescriptionScientific advice on the consequences of specific policy options confronting government decision makers is key to managing global biodiversity change.That's the view of leading scientists anxiously anticipating the first meeting of a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-like mechanism for biodiversity at which its workings and work program will be defined.Writing in the journal Science,...
New University of Washington research has found that the world is already committed to a warmer climate because of emissions that have occurred up to now. The researchers said that there would continue to be warming even if the most stringent policies were adopted because there would still be some emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. The team found that even if all emissions were stopped now, temperatures would remain higher than pre-industrial...
The aggressive wolverine may not be powerful enough to survive climate change in the contiguous United States, new research concludes.Wolverine habitat in the northwestern United States is likely to warm dramatically if society continues to emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, according to new computer model simulations carried out at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The study found that climate change is likely to imperil the wolverine in two ways: reducing or...
DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 27, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- International leaders attending the World Economic Forum in snow-covered Davos, Switzerland, are embracing the new perspective of the Global Adaptation Institute (www.globalai.org) that puts "adaptation" at the center of world climate policy. Institute CEO, Dr. Juan Jose Daboub, former Managing Director of the World Bank, speaking to journalists at the conference said: "Some of the world's most prominent private sector leaders...
