...four-year study concluded that an increase in winds over the Southern Ocean is preventing it from absorbing more carbon and is causing the sea to release some of the gas that it had stored ... This is serious. All climate models predict that this kind of 'feedback' will continue and intensify during this century
As fossil fuel burning continues to pump carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air, the world's land plants will be unable to absorb as much of it as had been predicted ... limitations on the availability of nitrogen, a necessary nutrient, will likely translate to limitations on the ability of plants to absorb the extra CO2.
article
global large dams annually release about 104 million metric tons of methane to the atmosphere through reservoir surfaces, turbines and spillways ... calculations imply that the world's 52,000 large dams contribute more than four percent of the total warming impact of human activities.
article
The Arctic icecap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by a UN climate panel, a US ice expert says.
This means the ocean at the top of the world could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020, three decades sooner than the global panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
...
no doubt that this is caused in large part by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
article
From 1981-2002, fields of wheat, corn and barley throughout the world have produced a combined 40 million metric tons less per year because of increasing temperatures caused by human activities. There is clearly a negative response of global yields to increased temperatures.
The researchers compared historical records of the climate impact of changes in the sun's output with model projections of how a warmer climate driven by greenhouse gases would change rainfall patterns. They found that a warmer future climate likely will produce droughts in the same areas as those observed in ancient times, but potentially with greater severity ... The same model showed that greenhouse-gas warming has similar effects on the atmosphere, suggesting drier conditions may become more common in the subtropics. Rainfall could decrease further in already water-stressed regions such as the southwest United States, Mexico, parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and Australia.
article
Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years. The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land-use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture.
...
The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment Report (TAR), leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.
summary for policy makers
Global warming could push sea levels about 40 percent higher than current models predict ... observations of changes in sea level collected in the 20th century to make predictions for the 21st century ... results predict that by the end of the century sea level will rise between 20 and 55 inches (50 and 140 centimeters) above 1990 levels ... Reducing greenhouse gas emissions can impact such sea level rise.
article
The recent retreat of Arctic sea ice is likely to accelerate so rapidly that the Arctic Ocean could become nearly devoid of ice during summertime as early as 2040 ... We have already witnessed major losses in sea ice, but our research suggests that the decrease over the next few decades could be far more dramatic than anything that has happened so far.
article
Alarming new satellite data show that the warming of the world's oceans is reducing ocean life while contributing to increased global warming ... The ocean's food chain is based upon the growth of billions upon billions of microscopic plants. New satellite data show that ocean warming is reducing these plants –– thus imperiling ocean fisheries and marine life
article
Drought threatening the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the earth in the coming century because of global warming, according to new predictions from Britain's leading climate scientists.
Extreme drought, in which agriculture is effectively impossible, will affect nearly a third of the planet.
article
The total area of surface melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet for 2002 broke all known records for the island and the extent of Arctic sea ice reached the lowest level in the satellite record ... It is likely that sea ice extent will continue to decline over the 21st century as the climate warms. With these trends, we may see an approximate 20 percent reduction in the annual mean sea ice by 2050, and by then we might be approaching no ice at all during the summer months.
article
Ice Age evidence confirms that a doubling of greenhouse gases could drive up world temperatures by about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), causing havoc with the climate, a study showed on Friday.
The researchers made a novel check of computer climate forecasts about the modern impact of heat-trapping gases, widely blamed on use of fossil fuels, against ice cores and marine sediments from the last Ice Age which ended 10,000 years ago.
article
Sunspots alter the amount of energy Earth gets from the sun, but not enough to impact global climate change ... The difference in brightness between the high point of a sunspot cycle and its low point is less than 0.1 percent of the sun's total output ... If you run that back in time to the 17th century using sunspot records, you'll find that this amplitude variance is negligible for climate.
article
study
Global warming is causing Siberian lakes to bubble methane, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere at an alarming rate, scientists say. Because methane in the atmosphere warms the planet, the Russian pools are intensifying the climate change that boosted their belching in the first place. It all adds up to a feedback loop in which warming begets even more warming.
article
Climate change is affecting the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, and hurricane damage likely will continue to increase because of greenhouse warming ... future hurricane hazard mitigation efforts should reflect that hurricane damage will continue to increase, in part, due to greenhouse warming
article
If the world continues to get warmer, vast amounts of methane gas trapped in ice under the sea could belch up and worsen climate change ... The study measured the amount of methane that escaped to the atmosphere ... It found that virtually all of the methane escaping from the deep water reached the atmosphere, countering some theories that methane seeps out in tiny bubbles that harmlessly dissolve in the ocean ... rising temperatures could warm the oceans, creating a feedback loop
article
New data shows that Greenland's ice sheets are melting faster than before. Researchers interpreted the data from NASA satellites ... this melting will disrupt the ocean current in the northern hemisphere, which in turn will change the global climate system
article
Methane is an important greenhouse gas, and its atmospheric concentration has nearly tripled since pre-industrial times ... Remarkably, this growth rate has decreased markedly since the early 1990s, and the level of methane has remained relatively constant since 1999, leading to a downward revision of its projected influence on global temperatures ... Since 1999, however, they indicate that anthropogenic emissions of methane have risen again.
abstract
The increase in the number of large western wildfires in recent years may be a result of global warming ... part of the increase may be attributed to natural fluctuations, evidence also links it to the effects of human-induced climate warming
article
