Mammal body size decreased significantly during two ancient global warming events, say paleontologists from the University of Michigan who believe that similar changes are possible in response to human-caused climate change. Researchers have long known that mammals became much smaller during a period of warming called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), about 55 million years […]
Spawning droughts, floods, and other weather disturbances, the El Niño – Southern Oscillation affects the daily lives of millions of people. El Niño is a band of warm ocean water that develops approximately every 5 years off the western coast of South America. During El Niño, Atlantic hurricane activity wanes and rainfall in Hawaii decreases […]
New evidence put forward by Georgia Institute of Technology atmospheric scientists links increasingly heavy snowfalls in the Northern Hemisphere to declining summer ice cover in the Arctic. Records show that since the level of Arctic sea ice set a new record low in 2007, significantly above-normal winter snow cover has been seen in large parts […]
Using a new global aerosol model and two decades of meteorological data, University of Leeds climatologists have discovered a feedback effect related to the ozone hole’s closure that could actually increase warming in the southern hemisphere. The hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic was once regarded as one of the biggest environmental threats, […]
Emissions trading schemes, zero-emission vehicles and massive carbon sequestration projects aren’t even worth bothering with, claims a controversial new study that crunched the numbers and found the only way the warming trend will stop is for the world economy to collapse. “It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed […]
No one knows exactly how much Earth’s climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new Rice University study suggests that scientists’ best predictions about global warming might be incorrect. The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period […]
A new study of pollution-filled “brown clouds” over south Asia has found that they enhance solar heating of the lower atmosphere by about 50 percent. The researchers, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, say the combined heating effect of greenhouse gases and the brown clouds, which contain soot, trace metals and other particles, is enough […]
The dwindling icecap of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro (pictured) has assumed something like iconic status for those seeking to dramatically illustrate the supposed effects of human-induced global warming. But an article penned by two researchers in the current edition of American Scientist asserts that global warming has nothing to do with the decline of Kilimanjaro’s icecap. […]
The global warming debate has until now focused almost entirely on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, but scientists at the University of California – Irvine, suggest that a lesser-known problem – dirty snow – could explain the Arctic warming attributed to greenhouse gases. Dirty snow is created when particulate matter from exhausts, smoke […]
New England residents may dread the severe winters that the region often suffers, but they might be surprised to learn that those winters appear to be getting milder and shorter. At least, that’s according to research in the journal Climatic Change, which suggests that the total number of days of ice on the region’s rivers […]
