Tag Archives | Climate change

seedbank

Grants to spur search for more robust crops

Climate change is having the most negative impact in the poorest regions of the world, already causing a decrease in yields of most major food crops due to droughts, floods, increasingly salty soils and higher temperatures. Now, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is undertaking a major effort to search seed collections for the traits that […]

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cirl

Warming Britain Attracting New Bird Species

Birds such as the Cirl Bunting and Dartford Warbler are becoming more common across a wide range of habitats in Britain as temperatures rise, while numbers of some northern species, such as the Fieldfare and Redwing, are falling, say researchers at Durham University. The researchers looked at twenty-five year population trends of 42 bird species […]

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earth_storms2

Climatologists Mull Side-Effects Of Ozone Hole Closure

Climatologists modeling possible weather patterns that may occur when the ozone hole closes – projected to be sometime in the second half of the 21st century – say that its closure may significantly affect the climate in the Southern Hemisphere, with flow-on effects that will be felt all over the planet. Thanks to the Montreal […]

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tibetan_plateau

Fifteen-Thousand-Foot Fossil Find Flummoxes Fossickers

At 15,000 feet above sea level on the desolate Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau, an international research team has found thick layers of lake sediment filled with plant, fish and animal fossils typical of far lower elevations and warmer, wetter climates. The fossils are relatively young (around 2 million years) leading the researchers to ponder what could have […]

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jupiter_spot (2)

Turbulent Times On Jupiter

Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, say that the increased turbulence and storms first observed on Jupiter more than two years ago are still raging, prompting a theory that Jupiter is in the throes of a major climate change. Examining the new images from the Hubble Space Telescope (the first since Jupiter emerged from […]

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anthropocene_small

Climate “Tipping Points” Identified

The latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes work by an international team of researchers in identifying small climatic changes that could have large long-term consequences on human and ecological systems. “Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change,” the report notes. […]

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glacier_sierra

California’s Water Supply Dwindling

Writing in Science Express, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography predict a bleak future for California’s water supply because of the dwindling amount of snow in the Sierras. They say the snowpack in the Sierras has shrunk by 20 percent and average temperatures there have increased by nearly […]

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glacier_alpine_is

Glacier Woes Overstated?

New research from the University of California – San Diego challenges the generally accepted belief that substantial ice sheets could not have existed on Earth during past super-warm periods. The study by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego provides strong evidence that a glacial ice cap, about half the size of […]

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war_on_science_small

Academics Mull Flow-On Effects Of Climate Change

Climate change may ultimately lead to wars and population decline, says a new study in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The new work is based on data from a period called the Little Ice Age, which occurred around 400 years ago. “Even though temperatures are increasing now, the same resulting conflicts may occur […]

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polar_clouds

Changing Climate Behind Polar Ice Clouds?

The wispy, luminescent clouds that have been shining against the deep blue of the northern sky may be a symptom of the world’s changing climate, say scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Known as noctilucent ice clouds, the researchers speculate that the relatively new phenomenon could be caused by a warming of the […]

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