Category — Global warming

The headline of the week:

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature]

Time to do your bit.

A view of the remaining part of the Larsen B ice shelf that extends into the northwest part of the Weddell Sea is seen in this handout photo taken on March 4, 2008.

A glacier used as a benchmark to measure global warming’s impact on the Antarctic Peninsula melted more than usual in the past year, according to an Argentine glacier researcher.

For more than 20 years, Pedro Skvarca has studied the Devil’s Bay glacier on Vega Island off the Antarctic Peninsula, a part of Antarctica that is warming five times faster than the average in the rest of the world.

The whole of Antarctica holds enough ice and snow to raise world sea levels by 187 feet if it all melted over thousands of years, according to UN data.

Skvarca said the Devil’s Bay glacier has thinned by 3.3 feet (1 metre) per year on average since his research began. But its deterioration has been unusually marked in the past year.

Australia experienced its hottest January on record this year, with the dry continent heating up as part of the global warming process, according to the bureau of meteorology.

Temperatures rose by between 1.0 and 2.0 degrees in most parts of the country, with the national average hitting 29.2°C (84°F) for the summer month, said the bureau’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.

‘It’s a remarkable number certainly. Averaging, as we did across the whole country 1.3 degrees above average is the highest temperature we’ve seen in our history of records for Australia in January,’ he said.

Paul Sorensen photographed the five-metre long whale shark as it swam close to his group

A young whale shark has been found off the Queensland coast, as far as 1,000 kilometres off course of its annual migration.

The discovery has puzzled scientists, who have not ruled out a link to climate change.

The lonesome whale shark comes from the world’s biggest fish species, characterised by a wide flat mouth and covered in white stripes and spotted skin.

It is a highly migratory species, but to be seen off Stradbroke Island in Queensland’s south is extraordinary.”

The United States has finally dropped opposition to a compromise plan to launch talks on a new UN climate treaty after pleas from other nations.

It was a real last-minute deal. There might now be some hope for our children’s future …

‘We will go forward and join consensus,’ Paula Dobriansky, heading the US delegation, told the 190-nation meeting to cheers from many in the audience, minutes after triggering boos by saying Washington was opposed.

[Read more →]

Until recently scientists had almost no idea where southern elephant seals went when they left their island homes to spend winter feeding at sea each year.

So Australian, British, US and French researchers glued satellite transmitters to the heads of 85 of the seals and tracked them for months as they swam and dived in search of food.

However, the answer has scientists concerned, because it raises the possibility that the marine food chain close to Antarctica is in decline - and the cause may be climate change.

Seals that lived on South Georgia, in the South Atlantic, stayed close to home, feasting on fish and squid from nearby open ocean waters.

But those from Pacific and Indian Ocean islands, including Australia’s Macquarie Island and France’s Kerguelen Island, which preferred to feed near pack ice close to the Antarctic continent, swam up to 2000 kilometres to find a meal. Seals were also observed diving as deep as 1200 metres.

A 90 second book review by Lee Arnold. A must-watch video.

Australia will create a wildlife corridor spanning the continent to allow animals and plants to flee the effects of global warming.

The 2,800-kilometer (1,740 mile) climate “spine,” approved by state and national governments, will link the country’s entire east coast, from the snow-capped Australian alps in the south to the tropical north — the distance from London to Romania.

“A lot of that forest and vegetation spine is already there. But there are still blockages,” David Lindenmayer, a professor of conservation biology, told Reuters of the plan.

“The effects of climate change will likely to be less severe in systems that have some resilience and that we haven’t gone in and buggered-up.”

The creation of the corridor was agreed by state and federal governments this year amid international warnings that the country — already the world’s driest inhabited continent
— is suffering from an accelerated Greenhouse effect.

According to a new NASA study, Arctic perennial sea ice has been decreasing at a rate of 9 percent per decade since the 1970s.

The photographs show the difference between 1979 and 2003.

The changes in Arctic ice may be a harbinger of global climate change, says Josefino Comiso, researcher at Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland.

In a recent Journal of Climate paper, Comiso notes that most of the recent global warming occurred over the last decade, with the largest temperature increase occurring over North America.

Researchers suspect the loss of Arctic sea ice may be caused by changing atmospheric pressure patterns over the Arctic that move sea ice around, and by warming Arctic temperatures that result from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.