Category — Global warming

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.

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Sea levels will rise by several metres by the end of the century due to rapidly increasing greenhouse gas concentrations according to research from a group of esteemed international scientists.

Led by James Hansen from NASA’s Goddard Institute, the group warns that the Earth is ‘perilously’ close to entering a new era of dangerous runaway climate change.
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The United Nations Environment Programme reports that temperatures in Africa over the last 100 years show that the continent of Africa has been warming through the 20th century at the rate of about 0.05°C per decade with slightly larger warming in the June-November seasons than in December-May (Hulme et al., 2001)

By the year 2000, the five warmest years in Africa had all occurred since 1988, with 1988 and 1995 being the two warmest years. This rate of warming is not dissimilar to that experienced globally, and the periods of most rapid warming-the 1910s to 1930s and the post-1970s-occur simultaneously in Africa and the world.

These graphs need a serious analysis by sceptics. [The Editor]

The delicate interplay between the oceans and atmosphere is changing with catastrophic consequences reports the BBC.

Entire marine ecosystems have been wiped out, devastating populations of sea birds and larger marine mammals. 
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Agence France Press reports that world temperatures in January were the highest ever recorded for that month of the year, US government scientists said.

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.53°F (0.85°C) warmer than the 20th-century average of 53.6°F (12°C) for January based on preliminary data, NOAA said.

The figures surpass the previous record set in 2002 at 1.28°F (0.71°C) above average.

Land surface temperature was a record 3.40°F (1.89°C) warmer than average, while global ocean surface temperature was the fourth warmest in 128 years, about 0.1°F (0.05°C) cooler than the record established during the very strong El Nino climate phenomenon in 1998.

New Zealand must become the world’s first greenhouse gas-neutral country, the country’s prime minister has said, outlining a series of ambitious environmental targets. 

In a speech opening a new session of parliament, Helen Clark pledged big emission cuts and compulsory targets for biofuels to replace gasoline. 

Climate change, she said, posed as big a threat to the world as the threat of nuclear holocaust had done during the Cold War. 

Her agenda, she said, would put New Zealand on a course to be the first country to be sustainable — economically, socially, environmentally and culturally.

“We have to make a stand for our world, and for our own sake”Helen Clark, New Zealand prime minister.

“I believe we can aspire to be carbon neutral in our economy and way of life,” she said. In her speech Clark said New Zealand could set an example for the world on climate change as it did in the 1980s with its nuclear-free policies.

A cinematic lesson:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change published February 2.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science.

It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

Ten months before Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans underwater, Queen Elizabeth II had a private conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair about George W. Bush.

The Queen’s tradition of meeting once a week with Britain’s elected head of government to discuss matters of state—usually on Tuesday evenings in Buckingham Palace and always alone, to ensure maximum confidentiality—goes back to 1952, the year she ascended the throne. In all that time, the contents of those chats rarely if ever leaked.

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