climate change

From LiveScience
Summer ice melt has increased tenfold over the last millennium in the Antarctic Peninsula, with most of the melt occurring during the last several decades in conjunction with global warming, new research suggests.
Rapid melt can destabilize glaciers and ice shelves (the tongues of glaciers that float on the ocean), suggesting that there could be [...]

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…governments keep their climate promise

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From the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration State of the Climate report
2012 global temperatures 10th highest on record
2012 was also warmest “La Niña year” on record
The globally-averaged temperature for 2012 marked the 10th warmest year since record keeping began in 1880. It also marked the 36th consecutive year with a global temperature above the [...]

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20-Year-Old Report Successfully Predicted Warming
Time has proven that even 22 years ago climate scientists understood the dynamics behind global warming well enough to accurately predict warming, says an analysis that compares predictions in 1990 with 20 years of temperature records. …
… 22 years ago, scientists understood one crucial factor:
“The prediction basically depended on how much [...]

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As the UN climate talks in Doha stutter, there’s real science being done in San Francisco. 20 000 scientists have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Stephan Lewandowsky reports
The program for a single day of this meeting consists of a 50-page broadsheet that lists literally thousands of events: you can follow [...]

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At the UN climate talks, a delegate from the Seychelles tells it like it is:
“The Doha caravan seems to be lost in the sand,” he told a joint news conference. “As far as ambition is concerned, we are lost.
“We’re past the mitigation (emissions cuts) and adaptation eras. We’re now right into the era of loss [...]

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From the BBC
The results show that the largest ice sheet - that of East Antarctica - has gained mass over the study period of 1992-2011 as increased snowfall added to its volume.
However, Greenland, West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula were all found to be losing mass - and on a scale that more than compensates [...]

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From the Methodist Church:
Exactly four years ago, campaigners were thrilled when the Climate Change Act was made law on Nov 26th 2008. The UK became the first country to set out legally binding and far reaching targets to reduce carbon emission by 2050. The Labour government was proud to show international leadership in tackling [...]

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The Conversation: Straw man science: keeping climate simple
Straw man climate science marries facts with errors of omission. Comforting numbers are presented with logical fallacies. Any uncertainty is confused with complete uncertainty. Uncertainty about “how” is confused with uncertainty about “if”. Dissent by a tiny minority is confused with a lack of scientific consensus.
Straw man [...]

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The United Nations Environment Programme has warned that cuts to CO2 emissions are happening too slowly to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 2C. The Third Emissions Gap Report 2012 suggests that meeting that target is still possible, but only with concerted international action.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said: [...]

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BBC News: Climate change evident across Europe
The effects of climate change are already evident in Europe and the situation is set to get worse, the European Environment Agency has warned.
In a report, the agency says the past decade in Europe has been the warmest on record.
“Every indicator we have in terms of giving us an [...]

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If you have an hour, this PBS documentary on the politics of climate change is well worth the time.

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The US National Research Council has produced a series of videos to explain the evidence for climate change in an accessible way. I haven’t watched them yet, but I’m confident they’ll be worth the time. Here’s the first — the rest are linked from it.

h/t RealClimate
(Still not in a position to do anything about comment [...]

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FP.com: How climate change denial has benefited from the recession
In a paper published in May in the journal Global Environmental Change, University of Connecticut political scientist Lyle Scruggs laid out the case that the economy — not Climategate, not Fox News — explains the decline in concern over the issue. More than 30 years of [...]

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One of the arguments against taking action on climate change is that it will cost the economy, either in direct costs, growth foregone, or both. ‘Skeptics’ rarely address the question of the costs of not taking action, I think because of the assumption that those costs will come in the future and we’ll find a [...]

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The extent of the arctic summer ice cap is a key indicator of our warming world. And it looks as though it is shrinking faster than many anticipated. Satellite evidence reveals that the 2012 melt has set a new record, leaving the ice sheet covering less than half the area it occupied 40 years ago. [...]

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Worst US drought since 1956
The US is currently suffering its widest drought since 1956, according to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
On Monday, NOAA reported that by the end of June 55% of the continental US was in a moderate to extreme drought.
Crops including corn and soybeans have been hit by [...]

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From Desdemona Despair
1000-year records of southern hemisphere background concentrations of CO2 parts per million (ppm – orange), N2O parts per billion (ppb – blue) and CH4 (ppb – green) measured at Cape Grim Tasmania and in air extracted from Antarctic ice and near surface levels of ice known as firn.
Global CO2, methane (CH4), and nitrous [...]

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Good article from a former ’skeptic’
I’m a moderate Republican - a fan of small government, light regulation and market solutions. A serial entrepreneur, I founded companies that invented 3-D television weather graphics and the first app on a cell phone. I’m a Penn State meteorologist. My day-job since 1979: tracking weather for TV news.
If you [...]

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