U.S. scientists muzzled on warming

China's rivers runnin' dry...

China says climate change drying up major rivers
Mon Jul 16, 2007 - Guaranteeing water supplies to sustain its 1.3 billion people has a become a major concern in China, where decades of breakneck industrialization have befouled most of the country's rivers and lakes.

Chinese scientists have warned that rising temperatures are draining wetlands at the head of the country's two longest rivers, choking their flow and imperiling water supplies to hundreds of millions of people. The warning occurs as millions of people along central China's flood-ravaged Huai river, a major tributary of the Yangtze river, are bracing for more heavy rains this week.

Aerial photos and satellite images had shown wetlands on the frigid Qinghai-Tibet plateau, which feed the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, had shrunk more than 10 percent over the past four decades, the China Daily said on Monday, citing the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a key government think-tank. "The wetlands at the origin of the Yangtze have suffered the most, contracting by 29 percent," the paper said.

Wang Xugen, a CAS researcher, said the wetlands played a key role in regulating the flow of the rivers, which provide water for hundreds of millions of people and nearly half the country's farmland. "The shrinking of the wetland on the plateau is closely connected with the global warming," the paper quoted Wang as saying. Last month, CAS warned that rising temperatures could wipe out the plateau's glaciers by the end of the century, triggering more intense droughts, sandstorms and desertification across the country.

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Dead zone getting bigger...

O2 'dead zone' growing in Gulf
July 17, 2007 -- "Dead zone" is at the end of the Mississippi River system; When algae die, decay consumes oxygen; Zone would be the largest measured since mapping began in 1985

Researchers predict that the recurring oxygen-depleted "dead zone" off the Louisiana coast will grow this summer to 8,543 square miles -- its largest in at least 22 years. The forecast, released Monday by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, is based on a federal estimate of nitrogen from the Mississippi River watershed to the Gulf of Mexico. It discounts the effect storms might have. The "dead zone" in the northern Gulf, at the end of the Mississippi River system, is one of the largest areas of oxygen-depleted coastal waters in the world. Low oxygen, or hypoxia, can be caused by pollution from farm fertilizer, soil erosion and discharge from sewage treatment plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The pollution is carried downstream by the Mississippi and comes from throughout the United States. Excess nutrients can spur the growth of algae, and when the algae die, their decay consumes oxygen faster than it can be brought down from the surface. As a result, fish, shrimp and crabs can be forced to move or die, the consortium Web site says. Eugene Turner, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University who is involved with the report, said it's tough to determine whether fish are dying because of hypoxia or other factors, such as climatic effects.

However, "we really don't want to mess with this, to make it worse," he said. The dead zone usually begins forming in the spring and stays through summer and into the fall. Though the size of the dead zone has shrunk some years, on average it has steadily grown larger, Turner said. If the prediction stands, it would be the largest dead zone measured since mapping began in 1985, the report says. The consortium has scheduled an assessment of the dead zone for summer's end.

Source

Ski resorts a dying breed...

Snowless in a warming world, ski resort in French Alps bids adieu
July 19, 2007: Muddy slopes, slushy peaks, unused lifts - this town in the French Alps is living out the nightmare of many a ski resort in a century scientists say is doomed to keep getting warmer.

The city council of Abondance - its name a cruel reminder of the generous snowfall it once enjoyed - voted last month 9-6 to shut down the ski station that has been its economic raison d'etre for more than 40 years. The reason: not enough snow. Abondance is the French Alps' first ski station to fall apparent victim to global warming. It will almost certainly not be the last.

At 930 meters (3,051 feet), this station between Mont Blanc and Lake Leman falls in the altitude range climate scientists say has seen the most dramatic drop in snowfall in recent generations. The Alps as a whole, which pull in about 70 million tourists every year primarily for winter sports, are "particularly sensitive" to climate change, according to a study last winter by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

It calls climate change a serious threat to Alpine ski resorts and the regional economies that depend on them. The most recent World Cup ski circuit was badly hit by lack of snow, with several races in the Alps - even at high altitudes - called off. Last week, a commercial court in Lyon put the Transmontagne company, which operates mid-altitude resorts in France, Switzerland, Italy and Slovenia, under bankruptcy protection for the next six months. Warming weather is seen as a key reason for its financial woes.

More Snowless in a warming world, ski resort in French Alps bids adieu - International Herald Tribune

Britain been getting a lot of rain lately...

UK floods prove to be relentless
Monday 23rd July, 2007 - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged more funds to tackle some of Britain's worst flooding for nearly 60 years and has made safety and protection his first priorities.

Thousands of people have become homeless in the U.K with entire towns succumbing to the rushing and rising waters. Mr Brown says he wants to make sure defences against further flooding are in place and money is made available to people caught out by rising floodwaters.

Mr Brown has rejected criticism that his government had failed to anticipate the latest floods and said the U.K, like every other industrialised country, was coming to terms with issues surrounding climate change. Mr Brown earlier flew over the county of Gloucestershire, where 70,000 homes have had water supplies cut and up to 140,000 homes may be affected in the coming days.

More than 40,000 homes in the area have had their electricity supplies cut by the shutdown of a power station. Severe flood warnings remain in force. Large parts of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire are under water with river levels still rising.

UK floods prove to be relentless

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Humans 'affect global rainfall'
Monday, 23 July 2007, Human-induced climate change has affected global rainfall patterns over the 20th Century, a study suggests.

Researchers said changes to the climate had led to an increase in annual average rainfall in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. But while countries such as Canada, Russia and northern Europe had become wetter, areas including India and parts of Africa had become drier, they added. The findings will be published in the scientific journal Nature on Thursday.

Climate models have, for a number of years, suggested that human activity has led to changes to the distribution of rain and snow across the globe. However, the computer models have been unable to pinpoint the extent of our influence, partly because drying in some regions have cancelled out moistening in others.

Making the link

The team of scientists from Canada, Japan, the UK and US used the patterns of the changes in different latitude bands instead of the global average. "While our study shows a human influence on rainfall at the global scale, the role of human influence in the UK flooding remains uncertain" - Dr Nathan Gillett, Research co-author

More BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Humans 'affect global rainfall'

Ozone smog and climate change...

Smog to accelerate global warming: scientists
Jul 25, 2007 - Ozone smog will accentuate global warming this century, for it will damage plants and trees that help soak up carbon emissions, a study to be published on Thursday says. Its authors fear a major factor in the climate-change equation has been badly overlooked.

"Carbon sinks" -- the famous ability of vegetation to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas -- are being damaged by ozone, they say. As a result, more CO2 will build in the atmosphere instead of being taken up by the land, which in turn will stoke global warming and thus worsen climate change. In the stratosphere, a thin, naturally-occurring level of ozone is a vital shield for life on Earth, providing a shield against DNA-damaging ultraviolet.

But at ground level, it is a man-made pollutant, brewed in a reaction between fossil-fuel gases and sunlight. Ozone has long been known to be a risk to health by damaging the airways, but recent research has also highlighted its damaging effect on vegetation. The gas enters plants through respiratory pores, called stomata, in the leaves. It then produces byproducts that crimp efficiency in photosynthesis, leaving a plant that is weak and undersized.

Efforts to figure out how fast-rising levels of ozone will affect forests have been hampered by a nasty confounding factor. High levels of CO2 and ozone cause stomata to close, which means the plant takes in less of the CO2 that it needs to grow -- but also less of the ozone that damages it. Published in the British scientific journal Nature, the new study seeks to unravel these intertwining factors.

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Erosion may send Alaska oil wells into the ocean
Wed Jul 25, 2007 - Old Alaskan oil wells could be swallowed by the ocean as rising temperatures speed up erosion of the state's Arctic coastline.

The disappearance of sea ice that shields against storm-waves, and of permafrost that holds shorelines together, is eating away at the coast of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study. Erosion rates have risen steeply along the coastline of the reserve -- where the administration of President George W. Bush wants to increase oil drilling -- possibly due to warmer weather, the study showed.

"Coastal erosion has more than doubled along a segment of the Arctic Alaska coast during the past half century," it said, adding the land loss was being magnified by the conversion of freshwater "thermokarst" lakes into saltwater bays as they become inundated with waters from the Arctic Ocean. "There's a warming trend in Alaska, and that's documented," said John Mars, primary author of the study. "We think that that is related to what we're seeing."

The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the reserve, has identified about 30 old oil exploration wells that need to be cleaned and plugged before the sea claims them. "Hopefully we'll get all of these wells before anything happens," said Sharon Wilson, spokeswoman for the BLM's Alaska regional office.

CLEANING UP

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Global warming = more hurricanes...

Hurricane count doubles
Mon 30 Jul 2007 - A DRAMATIC increase in the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms can be fully explained only by global warming, scientists said yesterday.

In the past 100 years, the average number of tropical cyclones forming in the Atlantic each year has doubled. Of these, roughly 55 per cent have been powerful enough to be categorised as hurricanes. The new evidence suggests rising sea surface temperatures, largely attributed to global warming, are almost certainly spawning more cyclones.

Scientists identified three periods since 1900 during which the frequency of hurricanes and tropical storms increased dramatically and then remained at a higher level. The first, between 1900 and 1930, saw an average of six major Atlantic cyclones per year, of which four were hurricanes and two were tropical storms. From 1930 to 1940, the annual average rose to ten, consisting of five hurricanes and five tropical storms.

In the final period, from 1995 to 2005, the average was 15 storms, eight of which were hurricanes, and the pattern may continue. The increases correlate closely with sea surface temperatures, which have risen by about 0.7C in the past 100 years, said the scientists.

Scotsman.com News - International - Hurricane count doubles

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Heavy rain and floods displace millions in Asia
Sunday 29th July, 2007 Several people have been killed by heavy rain and floods across South Asia, while over one million have been left stranded by rising waters.

Flooding in Nepal, India's northern states and Bangladesh has been caused by a weekend of torrential rain and melting snow from the Himalaya mountains. With the situation worsening, armies been deployed to assist the displaced populations.

In India's large city of Guwahati in Assam, it is believed 250,000 people are now without homes. Officials in Bihar's capital, Patna, said more than two million people in 10 districts were stuck in their homes and farms.

Eight more were killed in northern Uttar Pradesh state, mostly in house collapses. The military in neighbouring Bangladesh, where the river flows south to the Bay of Bengal, was also carrying out relief operations, with at least 200,000 people in danger from rising flood waters.

More Heavy rain and floods displace millions in Asia

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Pollution causing glacier melt in China...

Himalayan glaciers being lost to Asian Brown Cloud pollution
August 02, 2007 - THE haze of pollution that blankets southern Asia is accelerating the loss of Himalayan glaciers, bequeathing an incalculable bill to China, India and other countries whose rivers flow from this source.

In a study released by the British journal Nature, the investigators say the so-called Asian Brown Cloud is as much to blame as greenhouse gases for the warming observed in the Himalayas over the past half century. Rapid melting among the 46,000 glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, the third-largest ice mass on the planet, is already causing downstream flooding. But long-term worries focus more on the danger of drought, as the glaciers shrink.

The report triggered an appeal from UN Environment Program chief Achim Steiner, who urged the international community "to ever greater action" on tackling climate change. Researchers led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, used an innovative technique to explore the Asian Brown Cloud.

The plume sprawls across South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. It spews from tailpipes, factory chimneys and power plants, forests or fields that are being burned for agriculture, and wood and dung which are burned for fuel. Emissions of carbon gases are known to be the big drivers of global warming, but the role of particulate pollution, such as brown clouds, is unclear.

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China Blames Climate Change for Extreme Weather
August 2, 2007 - China blamed global warming on Wednesday for this year's weather extremes, which have led to more than 700 deaths from flooding and left more than seven million with little access to water.

Such extremes are likely to get worse and more common in the future, said Song Lianchun, head of the China Meteorological Administration's Department of Forecasting Services and Disaster Mitigation.

"It should be said that one of the reasons for the weather extremes this year has been unusual atmospheric circulation bought about by global warming," Song told a news conference carried live on the central government Web site.

"These kind of extremes will become more frequent, and more obvious. This has already been borne out by the facts," he said. "I think the impact on our country will definitely be very large." Some parts of China have had too much rain, and others too little this summer.

About 7.5 million people are suffering from drought in a wide swathe of the country which includes Jiangxi and Hunan in the south to Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces in the northeast, Xinhua news agency said.

More Planet Ark : China Blames Climate Change for Extreme Weather

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Lake Superior drying up...

Lake Superior changes mystify scientists
Deep enough to hold the combined water in all the other Great Lakes and with a surface area as large as South Carolina, Lake Superior's size has lent it an aura of invulnerability. But the mighty Superior is losing water and getting warmer, worrying those who live near its shores, scientists and companies that rely on the lake for business.

The changes to the lake could be signs of climate change, although scientists aren't sure. Superior's level is at its lowest point in eight decades and will set a record this fall if, as expected, it dips three more inches. Meanwhile, the average water temperature has surged 4.5 degrees since 1979, significantly above the 2.7-degree rise in the region's air temperature during the same period. That's no small deal for a freshwater sea that was created from glacial melt as the Ice Age ended and remains chilly in all seasons.

A weather buoy on the western side recently recorded an "amazing" 75 degrees, "as warm a surface temperature as we've ever seen in this lake," said Jay Austin, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota at Duluth's Large Lakes Observatory. Water levels also have receded on the other Great Lakes since the late 1990s. But the suddenness and severity of Superior's changes worry many in the region. Shorelines are dozens of yards wider than usual, giving sunbathers wider beaches but also exposing mucky bottomlands and rotting vegetation.

On a recent day, Dan Arsenault, a 32-year-old lifelong resident of Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, watched his two young daughters play in mud on the southeastern coast where water was waist deep only a few years ago. A floatation rope that previously designated the swimming area now rests on moist ground. "This is the lowest I've ever seen it," said Arsenault.

Superior still has a lot of water. Its average depth is 483 feet and it reaches 1,332 feet at the deepest point. Erie, the shallowest Great Lake, is 210 feet at its deepest and averages only 62 feet. Lake Michigan averages 279 feet and is 925 feet at its deepest. Yet along Superior's shores, boats can't reach many mooring sites and marina operators are begging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dredge shallow harbors. Ferry service between Grand Portage, Minn., and Isle Royale National Park was scaled back because one of the company's boats couldn't dock.

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Global warming causing worse monsoons than usual in India...

Helicopters Drop Food to 2 Million
Aug 4, 2007 -- Helicopters dropped food to almost 2 million marooned Indian villagers on Saturday as the death toll from unusually heavy monsoon rains and floods in South Asia rose to more than 225.

The food drops to 2,200 villages cut off by flooding aimed to help desperate residents in the worst-hit eastern parts of India's Uttar Pradesh state. Umesh Sinha, the state relief commissioner, also said nearly 280,000 acres of rice paddy crops had been destroyed. In India's northeastern Assam state, flooding forced rhinos from their habitat at the Kaziranga National Park and their panicked charges killed one person and injured two others, wildlife officials said.

At least 229 people have been killed in India and neighboring Bangladesh, and 19 million driven from their homes in recent days. The South Asian monsoon season runs from June to September as the rains work their way across the subcontinent, a deluge that scatters floods and landslides across the region and kills hundreds of people every year. The number of dead in Bangladesh rose to 81 Saturday, up from 65 a day earlier, the country's information ministry said. Raging floodwaters have battered 38 out of 64 districts in the delta nation of 145 million people.

Fakhruddin Ahmed, head of Bangladesh's military-backed interim government, visited the northwestern district of Sirajganj on Saturday. Despite the devastation, he said the government had enough food and medicine to distribute and foreign assistance wasn't yet needed. One person looking for that help was 45-year-old Aleya Begum, who took shelter on an embankment with more than 50 other families after their homes washed away in Pabna, 75 miles north of the capital, Dhaka.

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[waltky]

Don't alcoholics usually twist things around?

Scientists Say Administration Twists Findings
August 5, 2007 - Science vs. politics gets down and dirty; Scientists Say Bush Administration Muzzles Them on Stem Cells, Climate, Birth Control

Malicious, vindictive and mean-spirited. These are words that might surface in divorce court. But they have been lobbed in the course of a different estrangement: the standoff between the Bush administration and the nation's scientific community. The relationship, which has been troubled since the dawn of the Bush presidency, hit a new low last month when Richard Carmona, surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, lashed out at his former colleagues in testimony before a House committee.

Joined by former surgeons general C. Everett Koop and David Satcher, Carmona said public health reports are withheld unless they're filled with praise for the administration. "It was Surgeon General Koop who pointed out and still says today … 'Richard, we all have fought these battles, as have our predecessors going back over a century, but we have never seen it as partisan, … as vindictive, as mean-spirited as it is today, and you clearly have it worse than any of us had.' "

Though Koop, who served under President Reagan, and Satcher, who was appointed by President Clinton, also spoke of political interference, it was Carmona's testimony that took lawmakers and scientists by surprise. He was, after all, the man who gave the president a hug before TV cameras when he was named surgeon general. Carmona's statements crystallized the schism between the president and many of the nation's scientists, touching off conversations within and outside the administration on how bad things have gotten, who is to blame and what this means for the future.

More ABC News: Scientists Say Administration Twists Findings