Tag: global warming

Frequent Rainstorms Predicted with Climate Change Environment 

Frequent Rainstorms Predicted with Climate Change

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By Neha Jain @lifesciexplore If you live in California, you might recall the powerful winter rainstorm of 2014, dubbed the “storm of the decade.” While it offered some respite from the prolonged drought in the region, it dumped several inches of rain—in some Bay Area counties average annual rainfall was doubled—which caused widespread flooding and power outages. Until now such intense rainstorms have been rare. But in the future, Californians may need to clutch their umbrellas and slip on their rain boots more often because such monster rainstorms might become the…

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What Happens When Antarctica Melts? Environment 

What Happens When Antarctica Melts?

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By Kate Stone Between December 2001 and February 2002, the Antarctic continent underwent a season of intense melting. Aside from the loss of ice, what really happens when Antarctica melts? New research reveals that the changes range from sped-up microbial food webs to shifting penguin populations. The clash of two climatic cycles, the Southern Annular Mode and the El Niño Southern Oscillation, produced an unusually warm and windy spring season across Antarctica back in 2001–2002. This climate event melted glaciers including the Totten Glacier, thinned lake ice, and caused startling…

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global warming Environment Science Videos 

Global Warming: What’s Really Warming the Earth?

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Dr. Joe Hanson explores the possible causes of global warming in this episode of It’s Okay To Be Smart.   References and Further Reading July 2016 is hottest on record NOAA’s State of the Climate July 2016 Bloomberg’s climate change data viz project Solar activity and temperature show opposite trend Milankovitch cycles (I left out eccentricity because it operates on scales so long that it doesn’t affect short-term climate change) Connecting climate models with actual temperature changes NASA Goddard’s Gavin Schmidt explains the history of the instrumental temperature record Last time…

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Tracking Climate Change Through Hibernating Toads Environment Zoology 

Tracking Climate Change Through Hibernating Toads

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By Neha Jain @lifesciexplore Have you ever wondered how animals are coping with warming temperatures? Our warming planet affects the migration, reproduction, and hibernation of animals that depend on the seasons to regulate these behaviors.  For example, new research finds that Fowler’s toads in Canada are emerging out of hibernation earlier each spring as the climate warms. Hibernating Toads Even though David Green, a professor at McGill University, Canada, had been studying Fowler’s toads for the past 25 years, the discovery of the toads’ early emergence from hibernation was quite…

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Climate Change, GotScience.org Environment 

Climate Change: Why Don’t We Worry More?

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“If we could invent one risk that bypasses all of our psychological alarm systems, global climate change would be it,” a psychologist explains. You’ve seen the projections, read the articles about record annual temperatures, rolled your eyes at climate change deniers. You know the threat of global warming is real. At least intellectually. But are you really worried about it? Probably not as worried as you know you should be. We asked social psychologist Sander van der Linden of Princeton University why it’s so hard for our brains to perceive climate…

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A woman in the village of Karech, in rural India, prepares a meal on a traditional three-stone hearth. Courtesy of H.S. Udaykumar and University of Iowa Environment Health 

Small Metal Stove Grate Makes Big Impact

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An inexpensive metal stove grate insert for primitive cookstoves, created by a University of Iowa research team, may decrease global warming and potentially save many lives. By Kate Stone The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 2.7 billion people worldwide still rely on wood fires to cook their food, and more than 4 million die each year from illnesses connected to household air pollution caused by that method of cooking. The insert decreases wood consumption by about 60 percent, and further testing  conducted in a national lab in India found…

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more heat waves to come Environment 

More Heat Waves Predicted in Next 20 Years

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By Kate Stone Scientists have developed a new method to more accurately measure and predict heat waves, and the results are frightening. More Heat Waves to Come The researchers have shown that heat waves are likely to increase both in severity and number during the next two decades. “Even if global mean temperatures don’t increase too much, we’ll see more extreme heat events. These will be hotter, longer, and more frequent,” explains Simone Russo from the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy. The new metric is called the Heat…

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The Amazon Rainforest (Photo courtesy of Ron Gold via Flikr) Environment 

Braving the Amazon to Study Climate Change

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By Jonathan Trinastic (@jptrinastic) Scientists may not be known as the most courageous folk. They deserve such recognition, given their history of challenging established doctrine, venturing into the Arctic to spy glacial melting, and even sticking a needle in their eyes to better understand optics (thanks Mr. Newton!). Now, a team of researchers, construction workers, and engineers join this cadre of brave scientific brethren, navigating the malaria-carrying mosquitoes, blood-sucking leeches, and poisonous frogs deep within the Amazon rainforest to gain a clearer picture of how climate change and deforestation are affecting…

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