IOL Scitech: There are simple, inexpensive ways to cut back on two major pollutants – soot and methane – and taking action now could slow climate change for years to come, international scientists said on Thursday. When it comes to fending off global warming, the focus often is on harmful carbon emissions from burning fossil [...]
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Dawn: PAKISTAN’S climate change policy whose draft took more than a year to be readied is now under print and may be presented to the federal cabinet for approval in a few weeks. The draft will unveil an action plan to mitigate adverse effects of extreme weather events as witnessed in 2010 and again in [...]
Alertnet: Risks from extreme weather are growing quickly in some unexpected places around the world as the planet heads towards temperature rises at least double what scientists consider safe, authors of a German climate risk index said on Tuesday. Pakistan, Guatemala and Colombia ranked highest on the Germanwatch 2010 risk index, which looks at deaths [...]
An extensively peer-reviewed study published last December in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics indicates that observed climate changes since 1850 are linked to cyclical, predictable, naturally occurring events in Earth’s solar system with little or no help from us. The research was conducted by Nicola Scafetta, a scientist at Duke University and at [...]
Nature: China’s Yangtze River is receiving less water as climate warms. Chinese researchers have revealed that the amount of water entering the Yangtze River near its source on the Tibetan plateau has fallen by 15% over the past four decades, despite a 15% increase in glacial melt and increased rainfall over the same period. Wang [...]
Hockystick: A paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters predicts less 21st century ‘greenhouse’ warming than the IPCC [transient climate response of 1.3-1.8C with a midpoint of 1.5C vs. IPCC's 1-3C with a midpoint of 2C]. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L01704, 5 PP., 2012 doi:10.1029/2011GL050226 Key Points Estimates of TCR and 21st century warming are [...]
NDRC: Climate change promises to have a very big impact on water supplies in the United States as well as around the world. A recent study commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading environmental group, and carried out by the consulting firm Tetra Tech found that one out of three counties across [...]
Times of India: The greatest problem facing India is global warming. War, internal subversion and a global economic meltdown are all very serious threats, but they can be stopped or contained. Global warming, on the other hand, seems unstoppable and uncontainable. The outcome of the Durban summit on climate change suggests it is already too [...]
Nature: Where political leadership on climate change is lacking, scientists must be prepared to stick their heads above the parapet. Consider the following as a statement of national ambition: “The Federal Climate Change Action Plan presents a strategy for launching a transformation in public attitudes and behavior towards climate-change risk. Key state, industry and nonprofit [...]
Himalayan Times: Claims glacial retreat is not happening. Ask a question about melting glaciers and pocket $500. “Glacier-hard cash in your pocket… all you have to do is attend a movie screening, ask a question and send us a video,” Steven Milloy, climate change denier wrote on the US-based website junkscience.com. After the US Department [...]
Kuenselonline: Environment Large types of glaciers in the Bhutan Himalaya are covered with rock debris at the lower part. Terminus of those glaciers is surrounded by huge moraines, which were formed by rocks flowing down with glacier ice during the Little Ice Age. Glaciers have expanded, and their surfaces have reached at the height of [...]
David Archer, the author of “The Long Thaw” and a Realclimate.org contributor, has weighed in at length on questions and assertions about the greenhouse risk posed by methane released from warming Arctic seabeds and tundra. I encourage you to have a look in relation to the string of recent posts here aiming to restore some [...]
Mission to reduce chances of glacial lake’s outburst fails to achieve target. The Thorthormi glacial lake in northern Bhutan is considered the country’s likeliest climate-induced disaster. The lake, perched at a height of more than 4,400 metres, is swelling because of melting ice, and is in danger of bursting its wall. Efforts by the Bhutanese [...]
Deccan Herald: Because of the high political and economic stakes involved in climate change, the research limitations that lead to an erroneous conclusion like the vanishing of Himalayan glaciers, won’t be taken lightly. But these are only natural in research process. As an editorial in the January 21 issue of ‘Nature’ suggests, “Climate science like [...]
Everest Journal: Ngozumpa glacier in Nepal is melting away at a rapid pace and retreating at its edges because of global warming. The Nepalese Himalayas have been warming considerably more than the global mean temperature in recent decades. Glaciers in most of the region are showing signs of shrinking, thinning, and retreating, which is giving [...]
The Interdependent: In the birthplace of the potato, things are heating up. Over the past decade, the Quechua farmers working at the El Parque de la Papa, outside Cusco, Peru, started noticing that the potato varieties they used to grow at lower altitudes can now only be cultivated much higher up the mountainside. “Temperate zones [...]
It is obvious that the ongoing NATO terror wars in Islamic world led by USA-UK terror twins have deadly accelerated the dangerous climate change manifested in unpredictable weather conditions. The Climate Summits have become routine meetings of world leaders to enjoy the finer things of life, and not to redress such vital problems. As a [...]
Sudhirendar Sharma: By strange coincidence two unrelated developments had surfaced at the time when environment ministers from several countries were mulling over reams of text to resolve the climate conundrum at the port city of Durban in early December - one, that the branded chocolates were getting costly and two, diapers sales were plummeting across [...]
Bangkok Post: Rising, warming and increasingly acidic seas threaten the very survival of Pacific island countries. The retreat of glaciers and snowfields in the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau jeopardise these “water towers” on which one billion Asians depend for dry season and drought year flows. More than 450 million Asians live within the low-elevation coastal [...]
Korea Herald: Rising, warming and increasingly acidic seas threaten the very survival of Pacific island countries. The retreat of glaciers and snowfields in the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau jeopardize these “water towers” on which one billion Asians depend for dry season and drought year flows. More than 450 million Asians live within the low-elevation coastal [...]
Nepali Times: Since 2007, Jean Marc Hero has been bringing students from Griffith University in Australia to Nepal to take part in expeditions that focus on learning about environmental research and teaching methods. The Program for Planned Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research (PPBio) aims to establish an international monitoring system that measures biodiversity and the long [...]
Nature: Forest-monitoring project has measured 150,000 trees and provided researchers with reams of data. One of the biggest citizen-science projects ever conducted concludes this monthafter five years of data collection. The wealth of information gathered will help researchers to understand how climate change is affecting forests. The effort has been coordinated by Earthwatch, an environmental [...]
Chikagoist: Notre Dame researchers want to turn your house into a power plant. No, not like the Fisk coal plant in Pilsen. In fact, their vision is quite the opposite, turning every building into a passive solar collector with little more than a paintbrush. And in Chicago, with our monumental skyline and sprawling neighborhoods, the [...]
Bhutan Today: Spearheaded by the Department of Geology and Mines (DGM), the government, to cope up with the changing climate scenario, has carried out numerous mitigation measures to curb any disaster in waiting – including GLOFS. According to sources from DGM most of the major river basins in Bhutan are categorized as debris cover glacier [...]
Pakistan Today: The need of the hour is to ensure policy planning and proper implementation to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change while pursuing an ambitious agenda to tackle climate change impacts on the country. This was observed at a day-long Climate Change Conference held on Thursday at the Makli Gymkhana in the coastal [...]
Andy Revkin thinks so. In a recent Dot Earth post, he writes that the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should either stop straying from a “just the facts” communications strategy or step down. The offense, in Revkin’s mind, is Pachauri’s participation in a not-all-that-funny attempt at a joke begun by Richard Branson [...]
Green Conduct: The last COP in Durban ended in a success for the UNFCCC process, but has more nebulous implications for the climate itself, with Kyoto put on artificial respirator and a more comprehensive agreement being pushed back to a later date. The most significant progress at Durban for climate change adaptation came in the [...]
TG Daily: By 2100, nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems – forest, grassland or tundra, for example – will have moved from one type to another. According to a modeling study from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth’s land [...]
Dawn: There is now near consensus in the international climate community that Asia will be the most severely affected continent because of the changes associated with global warming. And Bangladesh, the Maldives, parts of India and almost all of Pakistan are likely to suffer the most. Bangladesh and the Maldives will be hurt because of [...]
National Geographic: Wind is a form of solar energy created by interactions between atmospheric heating, irregularities in the earth’s surface and the earth’s rotation. Wind is a clean energy source that is endlessly renewable and remarkably reliable. It does not pollute the air or cause acid rain like fossil fuels. (See References 1) Advances in [...]
The Nations: Over one billion migrants across the globe have remitted an estimated $ 404 billion in the ongoing year while they face a plethora of problems amid largely negative public opinion and related social, political and economic factors, says an annual report. The World Migration Report 2011, released by the International Organisation for Migration [...]
Walesonline: The public must not be misled into believing that a series of cold winters are evidence that climate change is a myth, an award-winning Welsh scientist has warned. Professor Michael Hambrey spoke out as it was announced he became part of a select group of researchers to have received two awards from the Queen [...]
Daily Times: Millions of people are affected in the Himalayan Indian-Tibetan border country because of reduced rainfall and crops. Combining surface and satellite data, and high resolution computer climate models, it is clear that these trends will become progressively more serious The main aim of the UN Climate Summit at Durban, which concluded unsuccessfully, was [...]
IPS- Global warming will melt far less of the glaciers of Central Asia than of those in other mountain ranges, shielding the people who depend on them for water from the effects of climate change for several decades at least, scientists say. The mountains in and around the Himalayas are so high, unlike in the [...]
A half-century record of history has melted away from the Naimona’nyi glacier in southwestern Tibet, highlighting the changes coming to glaciers across the Himalayas. Ice cores from glaciers capture a detailed history of the atmosphere and climate from the time when the snow and ice fell. They record dust, ash and even minute amounts of [...]
SciDevNet: A string of high-altitude research stations across Asia could shed light on how climate change is affecting one of the world’s largest ice masses. Spearheaded by the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the initiative is building state-of-the-art research facilities across South Asia, including in Nepal, Pakistan and [...]
BBC News SA: Stunning images from high in the Himalayas – showing the extent by which many glaciers have shrunk in the past 80 years or so – have gone on display at the Royal Geographical Society in central London. Between 2007 and 2010, David Breashears retraced the steps of early photographic pioneers such as [...]
CBS News: A half-century record of history has melted away from the Naimona’nyi glacier in southwestern Tibet, highlighting the changes coming to glaciers across the Himalayas. Ice cores from glaciers capture a detailed history of the atmosphere and climate from the time when the snow and ice fell. They record dust, ash and even minute [...]
Scientific American: The latest research shows that climate talks must lead to more aggressive action to avoid the catastrophic effects of global warming. By 2020, human activity could produce some 55 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases per year, up from roughly 36 billion metric tons currently. All the accumulating gas is enough to raise [...]
Hindustan Times: Senior scientists at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WITG), Dehradun, Uttarakhand (India) has rejected the Global Warming Theory and told that the Himalayas are quite safer zone on earth, where Global Warming has no role in controlling the conditions. In an exclusive chat with HT, Director WIHG Dr AK Dubey has said [...]
The Telegraph: Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the international scientific body on climate change, has said the Himalayan glaciers were “undoubtedly” melting. Speaking at the latest round of UN talks on tackling global warming, Dr Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said more research was needed on the state of [...]
Zee News: (Durban) The US today shocked observers at the climate change conference here by saying that the 2 degree Celsius limit for increase in the Earth’s temperature is not like a “national target” but only a “guidance”. The 2 degree limit to global temperature rise was agreed in previous climate talks in Bali in [...]
Science Daily: Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased by 49 per cent in the last two decades, according to the latest figures by an international team, including researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia. Published December 4 in the journal Nature Climate Change, the new [...]
Business Live Zambia: Negative perceptions of business strategies toward climate change have hurt the potential for profit, said UNFCCC boss Christiana Figueres. A panel of business leaders and investors echoed this sentiment at the World Climate Summit (WCS), an industry-focused side event at COP17. “Over the years we’ve boxed ourselves in to a very difficult [...]
Nature: Independent study quantifies human influence on global warming. Natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years, reports a pair of Swiss climate modellers in a paper published online today. Most of the observed warming — at least 74 % [...]
BBC News: As ministers begin arriving at the UN climate talks in South Africa, new science is showing the challenges they face in trying to curb global warming. Using a new methodology, a Swiss team has calculated that about three-quarters of the warming seen since 1950 is down to human influences. A second report says [...]
Hydropower dams in Himalayas, marketed as clean energy that will earn developers cash credits under carbon-offsetting Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme, appear to fall well short of their goals in Himachal Pradesh where global climate change mitigation goals conflicts with local sustainable development, as a study by German researchers has found out. Recently published in [...]
It’s intrinsically scary: 7 billion people, growing to 9 billion. Can we feed them all? Already, obviously, we don’t. But climate change could make global food insecurity much, much worse. This week, coinciding with the opening of the United Nations’ climate talks in Durban, we’ve seen Oxfam warn that extreme weather threatens food security – [...]
IPS News-DURBAN: Global climate change can now be observed from space. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) launched a new technology that can survey the world’s forests via satellites and provide a more accurate, global picture of common threats to the environment, such as deforestation, degradation or illegal logging. Using a remote sensing surveying [...]
Hindustan Times: The union cabinet on Thursday approved India’s tough stance on climate change issues despite rural development minister Jairam Ramesh cautioning against the country being seen as a “deal breaker” at the Durban climate talks. Environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan had proposed at the cabinet headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that India should not [...]
The WeekEnd Leader: He made the glaciers move from the Himalayas and come closer home. By bringing glaciers to his village, Norphel Chewang helped Ladakh farmers till the land in summer – a privilege nature denied them. While Mahesh Bhatt captures the fabulous images in his camera, Anita Pratap catches up with the engineer. Chewang [...]
The goal of holding global warming to 2C will be missed if the world’s largest economies insist on delaying negotiations. When psychologists identified the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance – the ability to believe two contradictory things at the same time – they might have been describing the world of international climate change negotiations. Only this [...]
Soham Baba, leader of the Soham Baba Mission Foundation, says more efforts are needed to preserve nature than to destroy it. Speaking at the Inkosi Luthuli International Convention Centre, he stressed that climate change effects have drastically changed the livelihoods of the Himalayas. He vows to continue fighting on behalf of the indigenous people, saying [...]
Good Environment: This graph from the Energy Information Administration communicates the reality of renewable energy in America better than any other single source. Renewable energy covers only a small slice, 8 percent, of the country’s needs. And despite the focus on biofuels and solar power, the chart shows that more than a third of that slice [...]
Guardian: US environmental research centre predicts no agreement to keep climate change treaty in place beyond 2012.One of the most respected environmental research centres in the US has written off the chances that the UN climate summit in Durban will extend the life of the world’s only legal climate change treaty in any meaningful way. [...]
DW-World.De: Despite the cooling effects of a La Nina event, 2011 is likely to end among the 10 hottest years on record, according to a World Meteorological Organization report released on the sidelines of climate talks in Durban. The past decade has been the hottest on record, according to a report released on the sidelines [...]
The Oxfam is taking the note through its campaign called ‘Hungry for action at the UN Climate Change Conference’. The campaigners say that when there is no food how people are going to survive on this planet, so we need to be aware of the facts and should take immediate actions towards adaptation and mitigation [...]
The New York Times: With its massive chalk-white face of ice and snow, Thorthormi glacier in northern Bhutan looms high against a bright blue sky, nearly 4,450 meters above sea level. At the glacier’s base, a wide lake of murky water completes the dramatic scene at the rooftop of the world. But the beauty of [...]
