Tag: climate change

  • Global Warming Speeds Up Methane Emissions From Freshwater

    British scientists have identified yet another twist to the threat of global warming. Any further rises in temperature are likely to accelerate the release of methane from rivers, lakes, deltas, bogs, swamps, marshlands and rice paddy fields. [caption id="attachment_327188" align="alignnone" width="500"] Most of the methane in freshwater systems is produced by an important group of microbes called…

  • Plants of the Colorado Rockies Show Impact of Climate Change

    For almost 40 years, field scientists strapped on cross-country skis, shouldered backpacks with supplies and set out over three miles of snow and rocks to a field station near a meadow high in the Rocky Mountains as soon as the snow began melting. Every other day, they counted each flower they found, identified the plant…

  • Geoengineering is Not the Answer to Climate Change

    Because nature doesn’t always behave the same in a lab, test tube or computer program as it does in the real world, scientists and engineers have come up with ideas that didn’t turn out as expected. DDT was considered a panacea for a range of insect pest issues, from controlling disease to helping farmers. But…

  • Study Finds Greenland Glaciers Losing 10 Billion Tons of Ice Per Year

    The glaciers of northeast Greenland, long thought to be the most stable part of the massive Greenland ice sheet, are melting at an accelerating pace, losing roughly 10 billion tons of ice annually for the past decade, say researchers from the U.S. and Denmark. [caption id="attachment_326643" align="alignnone" width="400"] This map shows major ice drainages in Greenland, along…

  • NASA: Earth Could Warm 20 Percent More Than Earlier Estimates

    NASA says we should expect the planet to become even warmer than researchers thought in the past. According to new research, Drew Shindell, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, says the planet could become 20 percent warmer than previous estimates. The image included in a briefing on the study shows temperature-increase estimates…