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May 22 | News
The
first global analysis of carbon stored in seagrasses has revealed a
surprising figure. While a typical terrestrial forest stores about
30,000 metric tons of carbon per square kilometer, most of which is in
the form of wood, coastal seagrasses can account for 83,000 metric tons
of carbon per square kilometer. Their global impact is significant as
well.
May 21 | News
According
to a recent computational study, pollution is warming the atmosphere by
intensifying summer thunderstorm clouds. The effect, say researchers,
outweigh any cooling factors provided by clouds, and global climate
models don't see this effect because thunderstorm clouds simulated in
those models do not include enough detail.
May 15 | News
A
former U.K. government advisor and chemical engineer recently published
an article that discussed how dispersing sub-micrometer
light-scattering particles into the upper atmosphere could help to
combat climate change. Author Peter Davidson says the effect would
replicate the cooling that occurred after the 1991 eruption of Mount
Pinatubo.
May 15 | News
According
to predictions made by climate researchers with the Alfred Wegener
Institute for Polar and Marine Research, the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf
fringing the Weddell Sea in Antarctica may start to melt rapidly in this
century and no longer act as a barrier for ice streams draining the
Antarctic Ice Sheet. They claim this finding refutes previous
assumptions that climate change would not affect the Weddell Sea.
May 9 | News
Americans' support
for government action on global warming remains high but has dropped
during the
past two years, according to a new survey by Stanford University researchers in
collaboration
with Ipsos Public Affairs. Political rhetoric and cooler-than-average
weather
appear to have influenced the shift, but economics doesn't appear to
have
played a role.
May 3 | News
Existing
historical climate records are typically biased to the high latitudes,
where polar ice and ocean sediments lock in the atmosphere’s past. Yet a
main driver of climate variability today is El Niño, which is a
completely tropical phenomenon. Scientists at the California Institute
of Technology believe they have found the ice core of the tropics,
however.
May 3 | News
To
help predict the rate at which plants respond to changing climate
conditions, researchers use experiments that manipulate the temperature
surrounding small plots of plants to gauge how specific plants will
react to higher temperatures. But wild plants are leafing out and
flowering sooner each year than predicted by results from these
experiments, according to data from a major new archive of historical
observations.
Apr 30 | News
According
to recent research into how wind turbines affect local weather, large
wind farms in certain areas in the United States appear to affect local
land surface temperatures, especially at night. The warming trend was
spatially matched to the locations of wind farms, and caused warming by
nearly three-quarters of a degree Celsius.
Apr 25 | News
Seeking
out statistical techniques that had not previously been applied to
finding the current rate of sea level rise and the rates of ice sheet
melting, scientists in Canada have developed a new method to distinguish
sea-level fingerprints. The technique relies on the fact that the
historical pattern for each ice sheet is unique and is preserved.
Apr 13 | News
Albedo
is measured on a scale ranging from 0 for a non-reflecting, perfectly
black surface to 1 for a perfectly white surface. A new estimate
developed by researchers in Canada suggests that increasing the
reflectance—commonly known as albedo—of every urban area by 0.1 will
give a carbon dioxide offset between 130 and 150 billion tons.
