#Greenland ice cores reveal warm climate of the pastin the period between 130000 and 115000 years ago Earth's climate was warmer than today.
In the last millions years Earth's climate has alternated between ice ages lasting about 100000 years and interglacial periods of 10000 to 15000 years.
The new results from the NEEM ice core drilling project in northwest Greenland led by the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen show that the climate in Greenland was around 8 degrees C warmer than today during the last interglacial
Past reveals knowledge about the climate The North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project or NEEM led by the Niels Bohr Institute is an international project with participants from 14 countries.
and as the layers gradually sink the snow is compresses into ice. This gives thousands of annual ice layers that like tree rings can tell us about variations in past climate from year to year.
The ice cores are examined in laboratories with a series of analyses that reveal past climate.
The content of the heavy oxygen isotope O18 in the ice cores tells us about the temperature in clouds
when the snow fell and thus of the climate of the past. The air bubbles in the ice are examined also.
The air bubbles are samples of the ancient atmosphere encased in the ice and they provide knowledge about the air composition of the atmosphere during past climates.
Past global warming The researchers have obtained the first complete ice core record from the entire previous interglacial period the Eemian
and reconstruct past climate history. The new findings show higher temperatures in northern Greenland during the Eemian than current climate models have estimated says Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen Niels Bohr Institute.
Intense melting on the surface During the warm Eemian period there was intense surface melting that can be seen in the ice core as layers of refrozen meltwater.
Meltwater from the surface had penetrated down into the underlying snow where it once again froze into ice.
and running out to sea in warm climate periods like the Eemianas we thought explains Dorthe Dahl-Jensen
This new knowledge about past warm climates may help to clarify what is in store for us
The study took into account the state of different breeds the multiple implications of their conservation the interaction with other animal species (wild and domestic) and the consequences of goat grazing from an environmental point of view.
it has an extraordinary capacity to adapt to the most difficult of environmental conditions in places where other domestic livestock species would not survive.
It is a reality that the grazing of these animals can cause damaging effects on the environment
but ecosystems become overloaded because of inadequate practices of handling ensures the scientist. According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United nations (FAO) nowadays the largest number of goats can be found in the poorest of countries and especially those
which have difficult environmental conditions and mountainous desert and semidesert regions. In poor regions poor communities are commonplace
and have certain similarities with hostile environments in other parts of the world. Many national and international projects have been carried out in less-favoured areas like the Asturian mountains
and a high risk of depopulation and abandonment of traditional activities ensure the researchers. The goat:
and their most fitting habitat is the main cause of the damaging effects that goats can cause on the environment.
For example the uncontrolled growth of the cashmere goat to increase production of its prized wool has meant in some cases that the ecosystems have become overloaded.
To counteract this the study also considers a large number of cases in which the species plays an important role in environmental conservation.
and in controlling exotic vegetation plagues that could put ecosystems at risk. We wanted to perform a global review taking into account very different regions of the world from the Himalayan peaks to tropical areas
and stress because they have to adjust to a new diet and a new environment.
the EWAS or environment-wide association study. Unlike the genome which is huge but finite (about 3 billion chemical units long) the environment contains an infinite number of substances from dietary micronutrients to synthetic pollutants to
which a person might be exposed over a lifetime. But increasing numbers of exposures are being cataloged by investigators--including for example scientists at the federal Centers for Disease Control
or without high blood-glucose levels--a defining marker of type-2 diabetes--in pursuit of differences between the two groups'exposures to myriad environmental substances.
The Stanford investigators learned that the NHANES contained data on numerous individuals'environmental exposures and for many of the same individuals their genomic compositions.
This enabled the researchers to perform a novel study pairing each of the 18 type-2-diabetes-implicated gene variants with each of the five suspect environmental substances to see how for individuals carrying a particular gene variant
But when they were paired off one by one with the environmental factors a couple of statistically robust results jumped out.
Over less than a decade the rates of land and water grabbing have increased dramatically said Paolo D'Odorico Ernest H. Ern Professor of Environmental sciences in the University of Virginia's College of Arts
D'Odorico said that in most cases where land has been acquired there is a switch from natural ecosystems--such as forests
and land with negative effects on the environment (whereas local smallholder farmers are often in a better position to be good stewards and managers of their land and water).
and Tanzania have the potential to become new breadbaskets because of either rain or river flow
and also help mitigate climate change. Research scientists Kevin Bowman of NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory Pasadena Calif. and Daven Henze of the University of Colorado Boulder set out to quantify down to areas the size of large metropolitan regions how the climate-altering impacts
of these chemical emissions vary around the world. The chemicals which are produced from sources such as planes factories
and subsequently transported by wind around our planet. Among these chemicals are nitrogen dioxide carbon monoxide and non-methane hydrocarbons.
Ozone was observed to be a more efficient greenhouse gas over hot regions like the tropics or relatively cloud-free regions like the Middle east.
even though Chicago has a level of ozone precursor emissions three times larger than the levels in Atlanta reducing emissions by 10 percent in the Atlanta region has the same impact on climate as reducing emissions by 10
This is because Atlanta is a much more efficient place than Chicago for affecting climate through ozone.
and combat climate change should be tailored for the regions in which they are to be executed.
One question that's getting a lot of interest in policy initiatives such as the United nations'Environment Programme Climate and Clean Air Coalition is controlling short-lived greenhouse gases like methane
and ozone as part of a short-term strategy for mitigating climate change Bowman said. Our study could enable policy researchers to calculate the relative health
and climate benefits of air pollution control and pinpoint where emission reductions will have the greatest impacts.
This is particularly important in developing countries like China where severe air pollution problems are of greater concern to public officials than climate change mitigation in the short term.
This information can be used to mitigate climate change while improving air quality. For more information on TES visit:
and resulting health implications more generally in primates living in habitats disturbed by human activities such as deforestation.
These results reveal that we do not know ye the behavior of those ecosystems that we aim to preserve.
The study by Chloe Inskip and her colleagues from the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology in Kent UK and Wildteam Bangladesh is the first to use participatory risk mapping (PRM)
Other issues recorded were related largely poverty including low incomes dependence on natural resources poor infrastructure and services and a lack of clean water together with soil erosion and weather.
#Climate changes effects on temperate rain forests surprisingly complexlonger warmer growing seasons associated with a changing climate are altering growing conditions in temperate rain forests
Research featured in the January 2013 issue of Science Findings--a monthly publication of the station--reveals a complex range of forest plant responses to a warming climate.
Although the overall potential for growth increases as the climate warms we found that plant species differ in their ability to adapt to these changing conditions said Tara Barrett a research forester with the station who led the study.
As forest managers consider climate impacts like these in the management of their forests scientists including Barrett
and research biologist David L. Peterson are communicating climate change science within the agency helping managers--in Alaska
In another research effort featured in the December 2012 issue of Science Findings Peterson summarized the scientific basis for climate change adaptation.
and have produced a climate change guidebook and Web portal for climate science information. The main objective is to get science in the hands of managers
if they grow diagonally compared with those that are allowed to grow naturally up towards the sky.
We've known for some time that environmental stresses can cause trees to naturally develop a slightly modified'reaction wood
The team then looked for the same effect with willows growing in natural conditions on Orkney Island off the northernmost coast of Scotland where winds are regularly so strong that the trees are bent constantly over at severe angles.
because they show that some willows respond more to environmental stresses such as strong winds by changing the composition of their wood in ways that are useful to us.
whose chemical contents were the precursors to Aspirin willows are seen now as important crops for energy and the environment.
Environmental groups also say that willow plantations are also attractive to a variety of wildlife making a positive impact on local biodiversity.
#Severe climate jeopardizing Amazon forest, study findsan area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of California continues to suffer from the effects of a megadrought that began in 2005 finds a new NASA-led study.
degradation due to climate change. An international research team led by Sassan Saatchi of NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory Pasadena Calif. analyzed more than a decade of satellite microwave radar data collected between 2000 and 2009 over Amazonia.
The observations included measurements of rainfall from NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and measurements of the moisture content
While rainfall levels gradually recovered in subsequent years the damage to the forest canopy persisted all the way to the next major drought
Recent Amazonian droughts have drawn attention to the vulnerability of tropical forests to climate change. Satellite and ground data have shown an increase in wildfires during drought years
Large-scale droughts can lead to sustained releases of carbon dioxide from decaying wood affecting ecosystems and Earth's carbon cycle.
In effect the same climate phenomenon that helped form hurricanes Katrina and Rita along U s. southern coasts in 2005 also likely caused the severe drought in southwest Amazonia Saatchi said.
An extreme climate event caused the drought which subsequently damaged the Amazonian trees. Saatchi said such megadroughts can have long-lasting effects on rainforest ecosystems.
Our results suggest that if droughts continue at five-to 10-year intervals or increase in frequency due to climate change large areas of the Amazon forest are likely to be exposed to persistent effects of droughts
and corresponding slow forest recovery he said. This may alter the structure and function of Amazonian rainforest ecosystems.
The team found that the area affected by the 2005 drought was much larger than scientists had predicted previously.
Observations from ground stations show that rainfall over the southern Amazon rainforest declined by almost 3. 2 percent per year in the period from 1970 to 1998.
Climate analyses for the period from 1995 to 2005 show a steady decline in water availability for plants in the region.
Previous studies using conventional optical satellite data produced contradictory results likely due to the difficulty of correcting the optical data for interference by clouds and other atmospheric conditions.
In contrast Quikscat's scatterometer radar was able to see through the clouds and penetrate into the top few meters of vegetation providing daily measurements of the forest canopy structure
http://winds. jpl. nasa. gov/index. cfm. You can follow JPL News on Facebook at:
#Heat waves, storms, flooding: Climate change to profoundly affect U s. Midwest in coming decadesin the coming decades climate change will lead to more frequent and more intense Midwest heat waves while degrading air and water quality and threatening public health.
Intense rainstorms and floods will become more common and existing risks to the Great lakes will be exacerbated.
Those are some of the conclusions contained in the Midwest chapter of a draft report released last week by the federal government that assesses the key impacts of climate change on every region in the country
and analyzes its likely effects on human health water energy transportation agriculture forests ecosystems and biodiversity.
Three University of Michigan researchers were lead convening authors of chapters in the 1100-plus-page National Climate Assessment which was written by a team of more than 240 scientists.
University of Michigan aquatic ecologist Donald Scavia was a lead convening author of the Midwest chapter.
Dan brown of the School of Natural resources and Environment was a lead convening author of the chapter on changes in land use and land cover.
Rosina Bierbaum of SNRE and the School of Public health was a lead convening author of the chapter on climate change adaptation.
Missy Stults a research assistant with Bierbaum and a doctoral student at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban planning was a contributing author on the adaptation chapter.
which is the third federal climate assessment report since 2000. The report stresses that climate change is already affecting Americans that many of its impacts are expected to intensify in coming decades
and that the changes are driven primarily by human activity. Climate change impacts in the Midwest are expected to be as diverse as the landscape itself.
Impacts are already being felt in the forests in agriculture in the Great lakes and in our urban centers said Scavia director of the Graham Sustainability Institute and special counsel to the U-M president on sustainability issues.
In the Midwest extreme rainfall events and floods have become more common over the last century
and those trends are expected to continue causing erosion declining water quality and negative impacts on transportation agriculture human health and infrastructure according to the report.
Climate change will likely worsen a host of existing problems in the Great lakes including changes in the range and distribution of important commercial and recreational fish species increases in invasive species declining beach health and more frequent harmful
In agriculture longer growing seasons and rising carbon dioxide levels are likely to increase the yields of some Midwest crops over the next few decades according to the report though those gains will be increasingly offset by the more frequent occurrence of heat waves droughts and floods.
In the long term combined stresses associated with climate change are expected to decrease agricultural productivity in the Midwest.
The draft National Climate Assessment report is available at http://ncadac. globalchange. gov. A summary of associated technical input papers is available at www. glisa. umich. edu. Story Source:
Presenting their findings in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters researchers have found that at current consumption levels in the communal areas of Lowveld South africa reserves of fuelwood could be exhausted totally within 13 years.
A limitation of the study which was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (grant RO1 ES012358) Quandt said is that data were collected only in eastern North carolina
Kristin Powell a graduate student in the lab of Tiffany Knight associate professor of biology and director of the Environmental Studies Program in Arts & Sciences together with consulting ecologist Jon Chase think they've located one
To test for scale dependence in the field they then chose three study sites from very different ecosystems across the United states each straddling an invasion front:
because you've found every species that's present in that ecosystem type Knight says. At an invaded site you reach that plateau later
Invasive plants have negative impacts on plant communities at smaller scales--the scales that are crucial for necessary ecosystem services like water management and nutrient cycling.
and increase the abundances of these native species so that they can contribute to critical ecosystem services
#Climate events drive High-Arctic vertebrate community into synchrony: Extreme weather potent force for Arctic overwintering populationsclimate change is known to affect the population dynamics of single species such as reindeer
or caribou but the effect of climate at the community level has been much more difficult to document.
Now a group of Norwegian scientists has found that extreme climate events cause synchronized population fluctuations among all vertebrate species in a relatively simple high arctic community.
These findings may be a bellwether of the radical changes in ecosystem stability that could result from anticipated future increases in extreme events.
The findings are published in the 18 january issue of Science. The Norwegian scientists with lead authors from the Centre for Conservation Biology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) wanted to know how climate
and weather events influenced an overwintering vertebrate community on the high arctic island of Spitsbergen Svalbard at 78 degrees N latitude.
They chose this simple ecosystem because it is composed of just three herbivores in the winter--the wild Svalbard reindeer (Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus) the Svalbard rock ptarmigan (Lagopus muta hyperborea)
and the sibling vole (Microtus levis) and one shared consumer the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus). The community's population fluctuations were driven mainly by rain-on-snow events the researchers found.
Rain-on-snow is an extreme climatic occurrence that causes icing on the deep-frozen arctic tundra.
and sibling vole populations causing extensive simultaneous population crashes in all three species in the winter and spring after the extreme weather.
We have known for a long time that climate can synchronize populations of the same species but these findings suggest that climate
and particularly extreme weather events may also synchronize entire communities of species says lead author Brage Bremset Hansen from NTNU's Centre for Conservation Biology.
Svalbard's relatively simple ecosystem which lacks specialist predators combined with large weather fluctuations from year to year
and strong climate signals in the population dynamics of herbivores are the likely explanations for how such clear climate effects can be observed at the ecosystem level.
In other more complex systems he says community-level effects of climate can be present
but are masked likely by other factors that tend to obscure the synchronizing effects of climate
which thus complicates the picture. Extreme rain-on-snow events are rare in most of the Arctic compared with Svalbard where the climate is oceanic and mild for the latitude.
However because the frequency of such rain-on-snow events leading to icing is linked closely to a rapidly warming arctic climate the authors warn that changes in winter climate
and extreme events may have important implications for ecosystem functioning and stability in the circumpolar Arctic in the future.
Previous studies have shown that rain-on-snow and icing can also cause vegetation damage and reduce survival of soil microbiota says Hansen.
But more importantly we suspect that the strong effects of icing on the overwintering vertebrate community have the potential to indirectly influence other species and cascade throughout the food web.
Animals make choices based upon their knowledge of the environment and their own phenotype to maximize their ability to reproduce
The question says UCSB Bren School of Environmental science & Management Professor and LCA expert Roland Geyer is
. and published in the Dec 26 issue of the journal Environmental science & Technology showed photovoltaics (PV) to be much more efficient than biomass at turning sunlight into energy to fuel a car.
#In the eastern U s.,spring flowers keep pace with warming climate, blooming up to a month earlierusing the meticulous phenological records of two iconic American naturalists Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold scientists have demonstrated that native plants in the eastern
United states are flowering as much as a month earlier in response to a warming climate. The new study is important
because it gives scientists a peek inside the black box of ecological change. The work may also help predict effects on important agricultural crops which depend on flowering to produce fruit.
which climate change has accelerated explains Stan Temple a co-author of the study and an emeritus UW-Madison professor of wildlife ecology.
and flowering dates and the trend toward climate-driven early blooming it is the first to suggest that the trend in flowering plants may continue beyond
The work thus has important implications for predicting plant responses to changing climate essential for plants such as fruit trees which are highly susceptible to the vagaries of climate and weather.
Importantly the results give scientists a peek into the subtleties of ecological change in response to climate change.
Earlier blooming exposes plants to a greater risk of experiencing cold snaps that can damage blossoms
A second data set of flowering times for 23 species in southern Wisconsin was compiled by Leopold a renowned wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin and author of A Sand County Almanac.
Leopold and Thoreau had no idea their observations would help us understand responses to human-caused climate change says Temple.
#Tree and human health may be linkedevidence is increasing from multiple scientific fields that exposure to the natural environment can improve human health.
of a major change in the natural environment on human health. In an analysis of 18 years of data from 1296 counties in 15 states researchers found that Americans living in areas infested by the emerald ash borer a beetle that kills ash trees suffered from an additional
Understanding the environmental impact of widespread biofuel production is unanswered a major question both in the U s
while providing substantial climate and--if managed properly--conservation benefits. This also is the first study to show that grasses
The results of the study that focused on tigers were published in Ecology and Evolution and the results from the study that tracked leopards were published in Diversity and Distributions.
and lead author of the Ecology and Evolution paper. These habitats and corridors in India are threatened by infrastructural developments
's Conservation Ecology Center. The other authors are Thomas Wood in the Department of Environmental science and Policy at George Mason University and H. S. Panwar former director of Project Tiger India and Wildlife Institute
of India. The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute plays a key role in the Smithsonian's global efforts to understand
This region of the icy continent is thought to be vulnerable to regional climate warming and changes in ocean circulation.
and glacier retreat in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica. The team concludes that the rapid changes observed by satellites over the last 20 years at Pine Island
and Thwaites glaciers may well be exceptional and are unlikely to have happened more than three or four times in the last 10000 years.
Their work centred on Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers which drain ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into Pine Island Bay.
Lead author Dr Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand from BAS says As snow and ice builds up on the vast Antarctic Ice Sheet the ice flows from the centre of the continent through glaciers towards the sea where it often forms floating ice shelves and eventually breaks off as icebergs.
The floating ice shelves hold back the ice on land. A critical issue for us is to understand how the'grounding line'--the position where the ice sitting on land (glaciers) begins to float (ice shelves)--has retreated landward over time.
Satellite data are available only for the last 20 years and show that since 1992 the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers have experienced significant thinning (melting) flow acceleration
and rapid landward retreat of their grounding lines with that of Pine Island Glacier having retreated up to 25 km.
It's possible that the grounding lines may retreat even further inland over coming decades.
Our study has revealed that episodes of fast glacier retreat similar to that observed over recent decades can only have occurred very rarely during the previous 10000 years.
which was carved into the sea bed by the glaciers during past ice sheet advances. These locations gave us the best chance to collect the tiny skeletons
Then by dating the type of sediment material deposited at a core site in the open ocean (after the grounding line had moved further landward) we were able to calculate the average rate of glacier retreat over time.
Over the last two decades the melting of West Antarctic glaciers has contributed significantly to sea-level rise (recent studies have suggested that continued melting would raise global sea level by up to 0. 3 mm a year.
Some of the radiocarbon dating work was undertaken at the Natural Environment Research Council Radiocarbon Facility (Environment.
The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI.
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