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Drought Bites as Amazon’s ‘Flying Rivers’ Dry Up
Posted by Truthdig: None Given on September 14th, 2014
Truthdig: The unprecedented drought now affecting São Paulo, South America’s giant metropolis, is believed to be caused by the absence of the “flying rivers”-the vapour clouds from the Amazon that normally bring rain to the centre and south of Brazil. Some Brazilian scientists say the absence of rain that has dried up rivers and reservoirs in central and southeast Brazil is not just a quirk of nature, but a change brought about by a combination of the continuing deforestation of the Amazon and global warming....
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Warming Threatens Cut Crop Yields
Posted by Truthdig: None Given on August 2nd, 2014
Truthdig: Projecting the impact of climate change on global food production is no easy task. A warming climate might result in better crop yields in one region, but cause drought and crop failure in another.
A new US study, published in the journal Environmental Letters, assesses the odds of a major slowdown in global food production over the next 20 years.
Overall, the study’s authors say, the likelihood of a sharp drop in yields of crops vital to food supply, such as wheat and maize, is “not very high”-but...
El Nino Blows Hot and Cold
Posted by Truthdig: None Given on May 26th, 2014
Truthdig: El Niño, the mysterious meteorological phenomenon that periodically upsets global weather patterns, bringing catastrophic flooding to the arid lands of North and South America, and forest fires to South-east Asia, turns out to be more complicated than anyone had thought.
Sandra Banholzer and Simon Donner, environmental scientists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, report in Geophysical Research Letters that some El Niño events don’t turn up the planetary thermostat, and...
Climate Change ‘Causes Wild Weather’
Posted by Truthdig: None Given on February 28th, 2013
Truthdig: The cause of much of the recent extreme weather across the world is climate change triggered by human activities, scientists say.
The Earth has experienced a range of severe regional weather extremes in recent years, including the heat waves of 2011 in the US and 2010 in Russia, a year that also brought the unprecedented Pakistan floods.
Behind these distinct events, though, there is a common physical cause, according to a team at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany....