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Flood Risk in Europe Expected to Double by 2050
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on March 3rd, 2014
Climate News Network: The catastrophic floods that soaked Europe last summer and the United Kingdom this winter are part of the pattern of things to come. According to a new study of flood risk in Nature Climate Change annual average losses from extreme floods in Europe could increase fivefold by 2050. And the frequency of destructive floods could almost double in that period.
About two-thirds of the losses to come could be explained by socio-economic growth, according to a team led by Brenden Jongman of the University...
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Tree roots ‘are natural thermostat.’
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on February 20th, 2014
Climate News Network: Trees have become a source of continuous surprise. Only weeks after researchers demonstrated that old forest giants actually accumulate more carbon than younger, fast-growing trees, British scientists have discovered that the great arbiters of long-term global temperatures may not be the leaves of an oak, a pine or a eucalypt, but the roots. The argument, put by a team from Oxford and Sheffield Universities in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, begins with temperature. Warmer climates mean...
Study sheds light on effects of clouds on warming
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on January 18th, 2014
Climate News Network: Australian and French scientists believe they have cracked one of the great puzzles of climate change and arrived at a more accurate prediction of future temperatures.
One of the great unknowns of climate science is what effect clouds have in accelerating or slowing warming. A new study sheds light on their possible impact.
The news is not good, according to Steven Sherwood of Australia's Centre for Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. If carbon emissions...
Florida’s mangroves head northwards
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on December 31st, 2013
Climate News Network: The mangroves of Florida are on the move. Mangrove forests in the north of the state have doubled in area in the last 28 years, thanks not to global warming as such, but because the number of sharply frosty days has dropped.
The discovery is in itself not a surprise – mangrove growth is limited by temperature – but once again it confirms a pattern of climate change and species migration in response to man-made global warming.
Kyle Cavanaugh and colleagues report in the Proceedings of the National...
Natural Defenses Can Best Protect Coasts Says Study
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on December 29th, 2013
Climate News Network: It isn't just the catastrophic storms and tropical cyclones that threaten disaster for the world's coastal cities. Simple, insidious things like sea level rise, coastal subsidence and the loss of wetlands could bring the sea water coursing through city streets in the decades to come.
Aerial photo of Mantoloking, N.J., after Hurricane Sandy. Many cities are on low-lying coastal plains or on river estuaries and are therefore at risk as sea levels rise because of global warming.
Jonathan Woodruff...
Some lose, some win in warming world
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on December 25th, 2013
Climate News Network: nd now for the good news: climate change could actually make life better for some creatures. The ibex in the Swiss Alps may find an extra spring in its step. The roly-poly pika of the American northwest might find it has gained an edge over its predators because it is adapted to a high fibre diet. The news is not uniformly good: climate change is already taking its toll of Arctic peregrine falcons and chinstrap penguins on the Antarctic peninsula. But change is not always for the worse. A team...
European Cities Hesitant to Adapt to Climate Change
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on December 8th, 2013
Climate News Network: European governments might have national targets to meet the demands of climate change. Many European cities, however, may not be in the mood.
Diana Reckien of Columbia University in the U.S. and 11 European colleagues report in the journal Climatic Change that one in three cities have no plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and seven out of 10 cities have no formal plans to adapt to climate change.
Sunrise on the waterfront at Liverpool, a city with a big stake in tackling climate change....
Reducing sunlight ‘will not cool Earth.’
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on December 8th, 2013
Climate News Network: Two German scientists have just confirmed that you can’t balance the Earth’s rising temperatures by simply toning down the sunlight. It may do something disconcerting to the patterns of global rainfall.
Earlier this year a US-led group of scientists ran sophisticated climate models of a geo-engineered world and proposed the same thing. Now Axel Kleidon and Maik Renner of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, have used a different theoretical approach to confirm the conclusion,...
What Happens When the World Dries Out
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on November 3rd, 2013
Climate News Network: A warmer, drier world will be bad news for those people who already live on the edge. Higher temperatures will do more than evaporate the soil moisture: they will alter the natural soil chemistry as well.
Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, in Seville, Spain, and fellow scientists report in Nature that they looked at soil samples from 224 dryland ecosystem plots in every continent except Antarctica.
Drylands matter: they account for more than 40 percent of the planet's...
History Shows Weather Patterns May Head North
Posted by Climate News Network: Tim Radford on September 29th, 2013
Climate News Network: As the world warms, weather patterns will change. The already arid Middle East and American West will get even drier, and so will the well-watered Amazon region. Monsoon Asia and equatorial Africa, wet already, will get even rainier, according to new research from Columbia University in the U.S.
The oceanographer Wallace Broecker and his colleague Aaron Putnam of the university's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory warn in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that such things happened...