NASA Warns of Climate Change’s Impact on the Amazon
A team of scientists led by the agency found that an area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of California continues to suffer from a mega-drought that began eight years ago. The new study shows the severe dry spell in 2005 caused far wider damage than previously estimated and its impact persisted longer than expected until an even harsher dro… Read More
Global Food Crisis Will Worsen as Heat Waves Increase
The world's food crisis, where 1 billion people are already going hungry and a further 2 billion people will be affected by 2050, is set to worsen as increasing heat waves reverse the rising crop yields seen over the last 50 years, according to new research.… Read More
What’s Causing Australia’s Heat Wave?
It is very unusual to have such widespread extreme temperatures — and have them persist for so long. On those two metrics alone, spatial extent and duration, the last two weeks surpasses the only previous analogue in the historical record (since 1910) — a two-week country-wide hot spell during the summer of 1972-1973.… Read More
Drought Shrinks Slightly; NOAA Issues Gloomy Outlook
A new federal drought outlook issued on Thursday projects that the drought conditions are likely to remain entrenched through April, and that the drought may even worsen from the Plains to the Rockies and into the Southwest, along with another area of persistent and expanding drought in the Southeast, including southern Georgia and the Florida Panh… Read More
Energy, Water, Land Intertwined & Threatened, Says Report
Water resources, energy and land use are so mutually dependent that climate-related disruptions to any one of them could lead to economically devastating ripple effects — especially as a growing population puts increasing strains on all three. That’s one conclusion of a recent report issued by a federal advisory committee charged with assessing how… Read More
2012 Global Temps Rank in Top 10 Hottest On Record
NASA and NOAA independently keep track of Earth’s surface temperatures, and their records, along with other independent datasets generated in other countries, all show a clear warming trend during the latter half of the 20th century, which studies show is due in large part to manmade emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.… Read More
Black Carbon Second Only to CO2 in Heating the Planet
No discussion of climate change can get very far without focusing on greenhouse gases — pollutants including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides and more, which are trapping heat and driving the planet’s temperature upward. But according to a report published Tuesday in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, the second most … Read More
Southwest Faces Looming Threats From Climate Change
The American Southwest, which is already the hottest and driest region of the nation, is likely to become even hotter and drier in the next few decades thanks in part to the ongoing effects of human-generated greenhouse gases. That’s the verdict of the draft National Climate Assessment report, the product of a federal advisory committee charged … Read More
