U.S. scientists muzzled on warming

Drought becoming a problem in China...

NE China's Worst Drought In 30 years Leaves More Than 1 Million Short Of Water
June 19, 2007 - The Northeast province of Liaoning is undergoing its worst summer drought in 30 years, leading to more than 1.2 million people spanning 14 cities short of drinking water.

A reported 88 small and medium-sized reservoirs located in the northwestern and central-southern parts of the province have dried-up. "Some crops could wither and die if the drought continues," said an official from the provincial water resources department.

Estimates report that the drought has hit 1.27 million people, 1.4 million hectares of cropland and 473,800 cattle.

So far, the authorities have only been able to move water to 88,500 of the affected population via water wagons. The provincial government has also made the move of allowing more than 500,000 workers dig extra wells to combat the drought.

AHN | NE China's Worst Drought In 30 years Leaves More Than 1 Million Short Of Water | June 20, 2007

Europe's winter getting warmer...

Freak winter is Europe's warmest for 700 years
20 June 2007 - Last autumn-winter season was Europe's warmest for more than 700 years, researchers say.

The last time Europeans saw similar temperatures to the autumn and winter of 2006-07, they were eating strawberries at Christmas in 1289, according to Jürg Luterbacher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and colleagues.

European climate measurements and temperature records stretch back several hundred years – UK records are the longest available, going back to 1659. Estimating historical temperatures beyond then involves scrutinising contemporary documents and diaries.

"People in churches, or doctors, wrote diaries, and usually they also included information about weather and climate. Climate historians can use and interpret this information and translate it into a temperature value," explains Luterbacher, who worked with climate historians to compare past and recent temperatures.

Early blooms

Poison Ivy Getting More Poisonous -- Global Warming to Blame?

Poison Ivy Thrives With Climate Change
June 26, 2007: New Data Strengthens Global Warming's Connection to Weed Growth; An increase in CO2 has created a plant that packs a powerful, itchy punch.

Helped along by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, one of summertime's itchiest pests -- poison ivy -- is thriving, according to a new study. The study examined how the increase of carbon dioxide in the past 50 years, brought on by climate change, has affected the growth of poison ivy.

The findings? "Even with a small change in CO2, poison ivy increased its biomass," said Lewis Ziska, the lead researcher in the study and a plant physiologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Md.

In other words, poison ivy plants are getting bigger faster. Although the amount of the rash-causing oil produced by the plant didn't increase significantly, the amount of the oil produced per plant did increase, according to the study.

More ABC News: Poison Ivy Getting More Poisonous -- Global Warming to Blame?

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Flooding causes havoc in Britain
June 26, 2007 -- Hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes in northern England as officials warned a dam could collapse following severe flooding that has killed three people.

A 68-year-old man and a teenager died in Sheffield and another man, in his 20s, was killed in Hull as torrential rain brought chaos to much of England and Wales. Police and local authority officials said Tuesday they had removed about 250 people from their homes near Rotherham in South Yorkshire after cracks appeared in the Ulley Dam.

"For the people in the area concerned, those who need to be moved have been," Chief Superintendent Matthew Jukes, the police commander for Rotherham, told BBC radio. He said it was difficult to tell if the wall would collapse. "The situation is really not getting any better and not getting any worse fortunately," he said.

"It does have some cracks in it and there is just a steady flow of water at the moment which we're quite able to deal with in terms of the emergency response." Structural engineers were working to shore up the dam and pump out water from a reservoir covering more than 30 acres four miles south of the town.

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Desertification A Global Problem That Could Affect 2 Billion People, U.N. Urges Action
June 28, 2007 - According to a United Nations policy report released on Thursday the process of desertification now affects 100-200 million people, and could potentially affect up to 2 billion people, or one third of the world's population.

Desertification could cause mass migrations as people fled countries where there was not enough food or water to sustain them, which would create international political instability, according to the report. Over the next 10 years, about 50 million people face being displaced by desertification, which could result in an "environmental crisis of global proportions," the report's author says.

"Already at the moment there are tens of millions of people on the move," Zafar Adeel the study's author told the New York Times. Based in Canada, Adeel is with the United Nations University. He said that the costs were "large." "There's internal displacement. There's international migration. There are a number of causes. But by and large, in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia this movement is triggered by degradation of land," Adeel added.

"It is imperative that effective policies and sustainable agricultural practices be put in place to reverse the decline of drylands," said Hans van Ginkel, a professor at the United Nations University, which produced the report. The report warned that otherwise global desertification, coupled with global warming, would become the "greatest environmental challenges of our times."

More AHN | Desertification A Global Problem That Could Affect 2 Billion People, U.N. Urges Action | June 28, 2007

Arctic waterholes drying up...

Ancient Arctic ponds evaporating
July 03, 2007 - ANCIENT ponds in the Arctic are drying up during the polar summer as warmer temperatures evaporate shallow bodies of water, Canadian researchers have said.

They say the evaporation of these ponds - some of which have existed for thousands of years - illustrates the rapid effects of global warming, threatening bird habitats and breeding grounds and reducing drinking water for animals. For 24 years, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, have been tracking ponds at Cape Herschel, located on the east coast of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, formerly the Northwest Territories of Canada.

Last year, when they went back to check, some of these 6000-year-old ponds had vanished. "We were surprised. We arrived in early to mid-July and the ponds we had been monitoring were dry. Some of them had dried up completely. Some were just about to lose the last remaining centimetres of water," Marianne Douglas, director of the Canadian Circumpolar Institute at the University of Alberta said today.

"It's really interesting to see how quickly it is happening. We could see this trend had started a while ago but at no time did we expect it to accelerate," she said in work published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She said a study of the fossilised sediments in these pools of water - which are less than 2m deep - showed climate changes beginning as long as 150 years ago. The researchers had thought these ponds were permanent. But change has come rapidly.

More Climate change causing ancient Arctic ponds to dry up | NEWS.com.au

[Martin]

More moisture for the enviroment = more stormy weather.

True, even tornadoes in New Zealand...

State of emergency declared after tornados hit New Zealand
Thursday 5th July, 2007 A state of emergency was declared Thursday evening in New Zealand's North Island area of New Plymouth after a series of tornados ripped through the region, according to reports.

Police said late Thursday that about seven tornados hit the region during an electrical storm about 5.30 p.m. The cyclones damaged about 50 houses, with many sustaining damage of up to 80 per cent, police said.

Police said roofs were blown off, trees toppled, and power lines damaged. Senior Sergeant Geoff Ryan told Radio New Zealand that extra emergency services were called in to the area, and ambulances were tending to several injured people.

Ryan said several state highways around the region have been closed.

State of emergency declared after tornados hit New Zealand

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Relentless Heat in the West: L.A., Vegas, Broil at 110+ Degrees
Jul 5, 2007 The blazing heat, combined with the dry winter, is worrying wildfire crews.

A heat wave sizzling across the West showed little sign of letting up Thursday, with Las Vegas forecast to tie a record high and even northern Idaho expected to top 100 degrees. "You can become dehydrated really quick before you know it. You step outside and, 'wow,'" said Charlie Schlott, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Las Vegas.

In Las Vegas, the temperature reached 100 by 9 a.m., well on its way to the forecast record high for the day of 116, according to the National Weather Service. The mercury last reached 116 on the date in 1985. Near-record highs were also forecast for Southern California, where the mercury was expected to top 115 in the desert. Thursday was expected to be the hottest day of the year so far in northeastern Oregon, with temperatures forecast to hit 107 in Hermiston and Pendleton.

A high of 101 was forecast in Spokane, Wash., and nearby Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which would exceed the record of 100 set in 1975. Friday's forecast didn't hold much relief from the nearly weeklong heat wave, either. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered the opening of state cooling centers in 13 counties, and the operator of the statewide power grid ask Californians to try to conserve energy to avoid brownouts. The high temperatures, combined with an extremely dry winter, also worried wildfire crews across the West.

More ABC News: Relentless Heat in the West: L.A., Vegas, Broil at 110+ Degrees

Chinese catchin' on to pollution and global warming...

Warming strikes a note in China
Sunday, July 8, 2007 - A growing middle class seeing dangers of pollution

Millions of Chinese got their first exposure to Western-style environmentalism Saturday when the Live Earth concert played to a nation whose stunning economic boom is becoming a global-warming nightmare. The concert location in Shanghai was the most visually spectacular of the Live Earth sites around the world -- at the foot of the Oriental Pearl Tower, an ultra-modern, 1,535-foot-tall structure that resembles a colossal spaceship hovering over the city.

As the tower's colored lights illuminated the swirling mists of a thunderstorm in garish, candy hues, the event fairly screamed out to be called a harbinger of the future. Just what sort of future, however, is far from clear. The big question for China -- along with the other nations hosting Live Earth concerts -- is whether the event will spur support for meaningful action to cut energy use and, in so doing, reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

In China, the stakes are far higher than elsewhere. International studies have shown that China has overtaken the United States as the world's leading source of greenhouse gases and that its emissions are rising at a rate that far outstrips any potential cutbacks by wealthy nations. But China's leaders so far have refused to consider binding limits for the country's emissions, saying that wealthy nations should bear all responsibility for cutbacks. And among the Chinese public, which is rapidly gaining the trappings of prosperity, there has been little support for going green -- until now.

"We're seeing a new level of public engagement on the environment and climate change," said Li Lin, director of conservation strategy for the Chinese branch of Worldwide Fund for Nature, one of the local co-sponsors of the Shanghai event. Market research firms say their surveys have found rising consumer interest in the environment and public health. "The Chinese, especially the young, are coming up on environmental concern in quite a big way," said P.T. Black, president of Jigsaw International, a Shanghai firm that does market research throughout China for major multinational corporations.

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There will be wars and rumors of wars...

Could Global Warming Lead To Global Warring?
9 July 2007 - By looking at temperature fluctuations and reduced agricultural production in eastern China's past, David Zhang from the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues say they can predict the geopolitics of global warming's future.

They found that warfare frequency in eastern China, and the southern part in particular, significantly correlated with temperature oscillations. Almost all peaks of warfare and dynastic changes coincided with cold phases. Looking to the future and applying their findings, Zhang and colleagues suggest that shortages of essential resources, such as fresh water, agricultural land, energy sources and minerals may trigger more armed conflicts among human societies.

Zhang and his team looked at the impact of climate change on warfare frequency over the last millennium in eastern China. The agricultural production in the region supports the majority of the Chinese population. The authors reviewed warfare data from 899 wars in eastern China between 1000 and 1911, documented in the Tabulation of Wars in Ancient China. They cross-referenced these data with Northern Hemispheric climate series temperature data for the same period.

Temperature fluctuations directly impact agriculture and horticulture and, in societies with limited technology such as pre-industrial China, cooling temperatures hugely impact the availability of crops and herds. In times of such ecological stress, warfare could be the ultimate means of redistributing resources, according to Zhang and his team. The authors conclude that “it was the oscillations of agricultural production brought by long-term climate change that drove China’s historical war-peace cycles.” They recommend that researchers consider climate change part of the equation when they consider the reasons behind wars in our history.

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Glaciers shrinking in China...

Tianshan glaciers shrinking fast - China scientist
Thursday July 12, 2007- Glaciers in the Tianshan mountains of Xinjiang, near China's western border, are shrinking at "alarming speeds", the Xinhua news agency said on Thursday, citing a local scientist.

The No.1 glacier in the Tianshan mountains has lost 20 million cubic meters of ice in the past four decades, and split in half in 1993. The eastern and western sections are receding by 3.5 meters and 5.9 meters every year, said Wang Feiteng, an assistant researcher with the Tianshan Mountain glacier monitoring station under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

"Like the hard drive of a computer, glaciers record how the environment has changed. Warm weather has been the major cause of the glacier's retreat," Xinhua cited Wang as saying. China has about 46,000 glaciers, totalling 60,000 square kilometers, primarily in Tibet and Xinjiang.

The total glacier area in Xinjiang, home to two-fifths of China's glaciers, has shrunk by 20 percent and snow lines have receded about 60 meters since 1964. CAS statistics show the internal temperature of the glaciers has risen by 10 percent in the last two decades, Xinhua said.

More Tianshan glaciers shrinking fast - China scientist