Scientific American Topic - Global Warming

Seeking Transformational Energy Technologies

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:01:08 EST

[ This special issue podcast is longer than the usual 60 seconds. ]

Last week, the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for energy held its inaugural conference in Washington, D.C.--a direct response to a growing sense that the U.S. is losing its technology lead when it comes to the race for cleaner ways to produce and use energy. "We have a Sputnik moment right now. We are losing our technology leadership and we are falling behind."

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Fish Fry: How Will a Warming World Impact U.S. Trout Populations?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: A fisherman friend of mine told me that trout populations in the interior West of the U.S. are already shrinking due to global warming. Is this true? And what is the long term prognosis for the trout? --Jon Klein, Portsmouth, N.H. [More]

Climate change will impact infectious diseases worldwide, but questions remain as to how

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:30:00 EST

NEW YORK--As climatologists weather the IPCC controversy , another storm is brewing, and this one is filled with not with bloggers but with beasts, bugs and bacteria. It is the potential plague of infectious diseases --threatened to be made worse, many scientists propose, by projected changes in the Earth's climate . [More]

Climate Change Likely Caused Polar Bear to Evolve Quickly

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:35:00 EST

Climactic changes might currently be threatening the survival of polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ), but similar shifts appear to have played an important part in bringing the species into existence in the not too distant past. [More]

Cyber Bullying Intensifies as Climate Data Questioned

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST

The e-mails come thick and fast every time NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt appears in the press. [More]

Despite Climategate, IPPC Mostly Underestimates Climate Change

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:46:08 EST

Lost in the coverage of the so-called climategate email controversy is a key point about the IPCC’s track record of climate change estimates. James McCarthy is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment. He spoke February 21st at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego:

“If you were to go back and map the IPCC projection for sea level rise and temperature in 1990, look at it in 1995, look at it in 2000. In retrospect you would find that they were conservative. So we talk about errors. If you were to do two ledgers--here are IPCC overestimates, here are IPCC underestimates--over the 20 or so years that these assessments have been running, the underestimate ledger would be much larger than the overestimate. Even with glitches--clearly erroneous editing or sloppy editing that led to these erroneous statements that got us in trouble recently.”

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Is Ethanol from Corn Bad for the Climate?

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:50:00 EST

The Obama administration last week gave the green light to corn ethanol as a low-carbon renewable fuel – in apparent contradiction to California's declaration last summer that the biofuel's carbon footprint was too big to help the state mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. [More]

What Does Winter Weather Reveal about Global Warming?

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:30:08 EST

Snowpocalypse. Snowmageddon. Whatever your preferred appellation, this week's winter storms brought misery to denizens of the U.S. east coast and prompted some at least to question the scientific theory of climate change .

After all, shouldn't global warming deliver us from ice, snow and cold? The site of the Winter Olympics seems to think so, Vancouver experienced the warmest January on record and may have to import snow. Thirty-two people have died during an ongoing heat wave in Brazil. In fact, globally speaking, this January was the warmest in the last three decades.

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Romanticism undone: Invasive species, global warming taking toll on plants at Thoreau's Walden Pond

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:27:00 EST

Henry David Thoreau famously catalogued the plants around Walden Pond more than 150 years ago, and the information he gathered then is helping to illustrate the effects of invasive species and global warming on the area today. [More]

How to Reform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:01:00 EST

Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. Nuclear power plants cheaper than fossil fuel–fired ones. A chairman who might have financial conflicts of interest (and an interest in penning a racy, loosely autobiographical romance novel ). These are some of the mistakes currently argued to have been made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--a panel of more than 2,500 volunteer scientists and other experts from 154 countries tasked with assessing climate change. [More]

Denial of global warming threat to the American pika means no protection from U.S.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:31:00 EST

Despite documented threats posed to the American pika (Ochotona princeps ) by global warming, the rapidly disappearing mammalian species will not be protected under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) ruled last week. [More]

American Pika Denied Endangered Species Status

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:30:00 EST

The Fish and Wildlife Service has rejected a bid to extend endangered species protection to a rabbit-like creature that environmentalists say could be pushed to extinction by rising temperatures.

The warming of the American pika's mountain habitat in California's Sierra Nevada and in parts of nine other Western states has shrunk the tiny mammal's population and could eliminate part of its range, but federal biologists say new studies suggest the pika will adjust to warmer homes or migrate to cooler areas upslope.

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Wolverine No Match for Climate Change

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:00:08 EST

Forget polar bears or penguins. The charismatic megafauna suffering most from climate change may well be the wolverine--a vicious predator known for its uncanny strength and tenacity. Making it the perfect inspiration for the X-Me n superhero.

The actual wolverine's super powers extend mostly to a tolerance for Arctic chill and supersized feet to permit quicker movement on snow. Those big feet might be hurting the largest member of the weasel family as snowpack declines across much of North America.

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The Bigger Kahuna: Are More Frequent and Higher Extreme Ocean Waves a By-Product of Global Warming?

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EST

Armand Thibault looked out over the Pacific's rumbling winter waves from his balcony in Neskowin, Ore. "The predicted high tide today is a 10.1 [feet]," he relayed via YouTube on Friday, January 29. "I'm very glad we don't have a storm surge behind this one. Tomorrow is supposed to be a 10.2, so it should be interesting." [More]

Is Water Vapor in the Stratosphere Slowing Global Warming?

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:00:00 EST

Earth's stratosphere is a cold, dry place, above the troposphere--the bottom layer of the atmosphere we breathe on a daily basis. Ruled by winds and hosting everything from bacteria to long-distance jet travel, about the only way that water gets into this high-altitude layer 10 kilometers above the Earth's surface is when it billows up from the humid tropics, rising from the troposphere via the atmospheric interface known as the tropopause. But since 2001 there has been less water vapor in a narrow, lower band of the stratosphere thanks to cooler temperatures in the tropopause, and that may just be holding back global warming at ground level, according to new research published online in Science on January 28. [More]

Fixing the Global Nitrogen Problem (preview)

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST

Billions of people today owe their lives to a single discovery now a century old. In 1909 German chemist Fritz Haber of the University of Karlsruhe figured out a way to transform nitrogen gas--which is abundant in the atmosphere but nonreactive and thus unavailable to most living organisms--into ammonia, the active ingredient in synthetic fertilizer. The world’s ability to grow food exploded 20 years later, when fellow German scientist Carl Bosch developed a scheme for implementing Haber’s idea on an industrial scale.

Over the ensuing decades new factories transformed ton after ton of industrial ammonia into fertilizer, and today the Haber-Bosch invention commands wide respect as one of the most significant boons to public health in human history. As a pillar of the green revolution, synthetic fertilizer enabled farmers to transform infertile lands into fertile fields and to grow crop after crop in the same soil without waiting for nutrients to regenerate naturally. As a result, global population skyrocketed from 1.6 billion to six billion in the 20th century.

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Scrutinizing Swamp Gas: Model Helps Predict Global Wetland Greenhouse Emissions

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST

Methane ranks only behind water vapor and carbon dioxide among principal greenhouse gases , in terms of its abundance and global warming potential. Even though it is less abundant and has a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, methane in the atmosphere accounts for nearly 20 percent of the heating effect of greenhouse gases compared with carbon dioxide's 50 percent. And similar to CO2, methane in the atmosphere emanates from both anthropogenic and natural sources. [More]

How Fast Are Himalayan Glaciers Melting?

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 07:00:08 EST

The village of Brep in Pakistan doesn't exist in the same place anymore. That's because a torrential flood forced the community to move after a lake formed by glacial meltwater burst its bounds and leveled the town.

Glacial lake outbursts have become a yearly occurrence across the high mountain region stretching from Afghanistan to Bhutan sometimes called the Roof of the World.

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Copenhagen Accord Was an "Important Step Forward," Says U.S. Climate Negotiator

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:30:00 EST

Lead U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern said Thursday the Copenhagen Accord represents the best way forward for a binding global climate deal but that success likely rests with a smaller group of major emitters working outside the unwieldy, multi-national United Nations process. [More]

What Would Failure to Combat Climate Change Quickly Mean?

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:15:00 EST

BOULDER, Colo. – Turns out climate policy has some tipping points. [More]