New research using satellite technology has found that overall, despite deforestation, the earth is getting greener.
For the period 2003-12, we found that the total amount of vegetation above the ground has increased by about 4 billion tonnes of carbon.
Deforestation in the tropics in South America, Southeast Asia and elsewhere “has been offset by recovering forests outside the tropics, and new growth in the drier savannas and shrublands of Africa and Australia.” Continue reading The Earth is getting greener→
2011 is shaping as the 10th highest on record and are higher than any previous year with a La Niña event. The 13 warmest years have all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud:
“Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached new highs. They are very rapidly approaching levels consistent with a 2-2.4 degree Centigrade rise in average global temperatures which scientists believe could trigger far reaching and irreversible changes in our Earth, biosphere and oceans,” he said.
1. When discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented, including deluges, droughts, and heat waves.
2. Just because the tornado-warming link is more tenuous doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes.
These posts include a brief mention of a number of news items relating to climate change. They don’t preclude treating any of these topics at more length in a separate post.
They can also serve as an open thread so that we can keep each other informed on important climate news.
Rising sea levels and a series of unusually powerful hurricanes have aggravated the folly of building a tourist destination atop shifting sand dunes on a narrow peninsula.
The total number of Bornean orangutans is estimated to be less than 14 percent of what it was in the recent past (from around 10,000 years ago until the middle of the twentieth century) and this sharp decline has occurred mostly over the past few decades due to human activities and development.
The IPCC AR4 report put the net emissions from forestry at 17.4% of the total:
