Science

PLANKTON SAY: "GOOD NIGHT"

Oread Daily http://oreaddaily.blogspot.com/

While Australia sizzles, much of Europe, North America, China and Asia has been subjected to snowstorms and freezing weather disrupting trade and transport with climate deniers chortling that global cooling is here.

South east Australia has just sizzled through another heatwave. Of course it is just weather which has a natural variability. One weather event can't be pinned down as the result of climate change. Climate change is about trends and averages. And the trend is its getting warmer, we're sizzling.

The concentration of methane in the atmosphere is rising, according to measurements made by the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) at its Baring Head Station near Wellington.

Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas whose affect on climate is 21 times stronger than Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and is the second most important contributor to global warming behind carbon dioxide. It is produced naturally mainly by biological breakdown of organic substances in oxygen-deficient conditions, such as the digestive system of ruminant animals and the decay of plant material in swamps or landfills. It is also prevalent in fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas (which is mainly methane).

Human civilization could be in for a hot ride as new research just published in Nature Geoscience from Yale University Geologists indicates global temperature increase may be more sensitive to atmospheric CO2 than previously indicated.

Geologists from Yale University reconstructed CO2 concentrations for the past five million years to estimate Earth-system climate sensitivity.

Letter to Editor Defending Scienc

2009 is likely to be the fifth warmest year on record according to the World Meteorological Organisation, with the current decade being the warmest on record, eclipsing the 1990s, which in turn was warmer than the 1980s.

Higher temperatures caused by the changing climate are likely to have a devastating effect on crop yields. Corn, soybeans and cotton are the largest three crops by production value in the US which will be affected by extreme heat. Above a certain threhold - 29 degrees - damaging effects have been described as 'damaging large' by a report by Agricultural Economists published in August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Greed, Green and Grains Blog