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Archive for January 8th, 2012
Study finds a better way to gauge the climate costs of land use changes
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on January 8th, 2012
Physorg: "We know that forests store a lot of carbon and clearing a forest releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change," said University of Illinois postdoctoral researcher Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, who pioneered the new approach with plant biology and Energy Biosciences Institute professor Evan DeLucia. "But ecosystems provide other climate regulation services as well."
The climate effects of a particular ecosystem also depend on its physical attributes, she said. One...
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Climate change is altering mountain vegetation at large scale, European research says
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on January 8th, 2012
Physorg: With the publication of "Continent-wide response of mountain vegetation to climate change," scheduled for Advance Online Publication (AOP) in Nature Climate Change on 8 January, researchers from 13 countries report clear and statistically significant evidence of a continent-wide warming effect on mountain plant communities.
The findings are "clearly significant," says Ottar Michelsen, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and one of the article's co-authors. "You can...
Climate change is altering mountain vegetation at large scale
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on January 8th, 2012
EurekAlert: Climate change is having a more profound effect on alpine vegetation than at first anticipated, according to a study carried out by an international group of researchers and published in Nature Climate Change. The first ever pan-European study of changing mountain vegetation has found that some alpine meadows could disappear within the next few decades.
Led by researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna, biologists from 13 different countries in Europe analysed...
Study finds a better way to gauge the climate costs of land use changes
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on January 8th, 2012
PhysOrg: Tropical rainforests have an even greater climate cooling impact when biophysical attributes, such as evapotranspiration, are included in calculations. Other eco-regions, such as boreal forests, have less climate cooling potential when biophysical attributes are also considered. Credit: Kristina Anderson-TeixeiraThose making land use decisions to reduce the harmful effects of climate change have focused almost exclusively on greenhouse gases – analyzing, for example, how much carbon dioxide is released...
2011 was the driest year on record in Texas
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on January 8th, 2012
Reuters: It's official: 2011 was the driest year on record in Texas, according to the National Weather Service. It was also the second-hottest ever.
That won't surprise Texans who lived through a year in which wildfires roared through the Lone Star State, cattle went thirsty and many Fourth of July fireworks shows were canceled.
The weather service said the average rainfall in Texas in 2011 was 14.89 inches. The previous record of 14.99 inches of average rainfall was set in 1917.
The average temperature...