HOME |
RSS | 
Tuvalu, in the South Pacific, is made up of nine small islands with a population of 11,000. It is estimated that the entire atoll will be uninhabitable in about 50 years due to climate change. Already the citizens are feeling the effects, as high tide floods the neighborhoods like never before. Sixty-four-year-old Ioane Malologa said,
“I have already advised my children. I got four daughters and one only son. … They’ve been well educated, and now they all got jobs in the government. Well that’d be okay for their life at the moment but … I have advised them — it is better to migrate.”
This sentiment is not held by all. Though encouraging his children to migrate, Malologa himself wants to stay in Tuvalu. While most Tuvaluans have family living abroad, largely in New Zealand and Fiji, many people I met there wanted to stay in Tuvalu as long as possible. But in a country where land is precious and scarce, coastal erosion, flooding, and increasingly severe weather patterns, eking out a living here is now difficult.
Read more and see a gallery of photos at The Atlantic. Link -via Look At This
(Image credit: Amelia Holowaty Krales)
Yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado are gaining weight and producing more offspring compared to thirty years ago. The difference is attributed to climate change.
In the Rocky Mountains, these marmots usually hibernate for seven to eight months of the year, which make the summer months “a very busy time for them,” Arpat Ozgul, of the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London and lead author of the new paper, said in a prepared statement. “They have to eat and gain weight, get pregnant, produce offspring and get ready to hibernate again.”
But as the Colorado summers have grown longer, so too has the time the marmots have to do all of these things—and do them better. This extra preparation (and reproduction) time means that “they are more likely to succeed and survive,” said Ozgul, whose results were published online July 21 in the journal Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).
As the marmots grow bigger, other species are not doing as well. The number of tall bluebells and tenacious wolverines has declined. Link -via Dave Barry’s Blog
Well I’m a polar bear and my name is Bjorn
and I’ve been a polar bear since the day I was born.
Welcome to my kingdom and the world that I roam
the circumpolar arctic, the place that I call home.
Written by science teacher Tom Rugg. Complete lyrics are available at the YouTube link. This video is part of the BBC Wales’ series Green Season. Link -via Arbroath
Just when you thought that the world is safe from the One World Government that is meeting in Copenhagen, here comes another menace: black carbon. Okay, okay. We know it more commonly as soot, but you have to admit it sounds much cooler when you say "black carbon."
A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.
In fact, the new research, by NASA’s William Lau and collaborators, reinforces with detailed numerical analysis what earlier studies suggest: that soot and dust contribute as much (or more) to atmospheric warming in the Himalayas as greenhouse gases. This warming fuels the melting of glaciers and could threaten fresh water resources in a region that is home to more than a billion people.
Lau explored the causes of rapid melting, which occurs primarily in the western Tibetan Plateau, beginning each year in April and extending through early fall. The brisk melting coincides with the time when concentrations of aerosols like soot and dust transported from places like India and Nepal are most dense in the atmosphere.
"Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally," said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play."
A true danger or just another bogeyman? You decide: Link
Photo: Justin Ries
Yay for global warming! New study by marine geologist Justin Ries shows that if carbon dioxide emissions increase to extreme levels, we’ll get giant lobsters:
A new study published in the journal Geology shows that if carbon dioxide emissions reach extreme levels, the changes in the world’s oceans might result in lobsters 50 percent bigger than normal.
Lobsters can take carbon from the water and use it to build their exoskeletons, says marine geologist Justin Ries, who oversaw the study. The theory, he tells NPR’s Guy Raz, is that lobsters are able to convert the extra carbon into material for building up their shells.
As the world looks to Copenhagen for solutions to a changing climate, China’s vice-minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission has expressed a viewpoint that has generally been overlooked or ignored – that it may be more effective to limit world population growth than to limit CO2 emissions per se.
As a result of the family planning policy, China has seen 400 million fewer births, which has resulted in 18 million fewer tons of CO2 emissions a year, Zhao said.
The UN report projected that if the global population would remain 8 billion by the year 2050 instead of a little more than 9 billion according to medium-growth scenario, “it might result in 1 billion to 2 billion fewer tons of carbon emissions”.
Research at the London School of Economics has suggested that money expended on family planning reduces CO2 emissions more efficiently than money expended on hybrid vehicles or solar and wind power.
Link.
Otters are fascinating species and the giant otter is no exception. These endangered critters are in serious danger of extinction, but veterinarian Lucy Spelman and other scientists are working to protect them. The process of rescuing these adorable animals is detailed on the Adventures in Climate Change website.
Link Via Discovery News Image by Lucy Spelman
Climate change may be serious stuff for many of us, but for Al Gore, it’s seriously profitable. He’s about to become the world’s first "carbon" billionaire:
Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy as Mr Gore. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.
Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming sceptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first "carbon billionaire," profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.
Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, has claimed that Mr Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.
Mr Gore had said that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is.
Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event in which participating bloggers post about a particular issue to raise awareness and trigger global discussion that will – hopefully – bring about positive change. This year’s topic is climate change – which, shall we say, is a wee bit controversial.
We’ll get to some Neatorama-worthy posts on the blog today, but first I’d like to ask YOU what you think about global warming/climate change. Do you believe that it is happening? Or is it just a passing hysteria, much like the concern over global cooling in the 1950s to 1970s?
[poll=14]
It’s an open mike – let’s hear your opinion.
