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Butterflies Booking It North as Climate Warms
Posted by Mother Jones: Julia Whitty on January 31st, 2013
Mother Jones: Butterflies from the southern US that used to be rare in the northeast are now appearing there on a regular basis. The trend correlates to a warming climate report the authors of a paper in Nature Climate Change.
Subtropical and warm-climate butterflies--including the giant swallowtail (photo above) and the zabulon skipper (photo below)--showed the sharpest population shift to the north. As recently as the late 1980s these species were rare or absent in Massachusetts.
At the same time southern...
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Forecast: Hotter climate models likely right
Posted by Mother Jones: Julia Whitty on November 10th, 2012
Mother Jones: More than two dozen major climate models are being used to forecast global warming from rising greenhouse gas emissions--notably how much warming will occur when atmospheric carbon dioxide doubles from preindustrial times. At current rates that unhappy milestone will be reached well before 2100. So which models are more accurate?
"Because we have more reliable observations for humidity than for clouds, we can use the humidity patterns that change seasonally to evaluate climate models," says co-author...
America Hit With Record Devastation From Wildfires
Posted by Mother Jones: Julia Whitty on August 21st, 2012
Mother Jones: The National Interagency Fire Center reports [2] that 2012 just broke the record for most acreage burned by wildfires as of this date (see chart below). The previous record was set in 2006, another mega drought year.
Year-to-date statitstics for acreage bruned by wildfires, with more lands having burned in 2012 than any previous year: National Interagency Fire Center [2]Year-to-date statistics for acreage burned by wildfires: National Interagency Fire Center
That's nearly 7 million acres—or...
Climate Change Driving Salmon Evolution
Posted by Mother Jones: Julia Whitty on July 11th, 2012
Mother Jones: Pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha): NOAA | Fisheries ServiceTwo of our hottest-button topics--climate change and evolution--are now linked by genetic research on migrating salmon.
The results, published in a new paper in the science journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, report on groundbreaking evidence that climate change is driving the evolution of pink salmon in Alaska.
DNA data clearly show a genetic selection for earlier migrating fish during the last three decades.
This is particularly...