UT Researchers' Work Reveals 220-year Hurricane History

KNOXVILLE -- New research by two University of Tennessee professors could help us better understand hurricanes by looking to an unusual source: tree rings.

By analyzing the rings of trees in areas that are hit by hurricanes, UT professors Claudia Mora and Henri Grissino-Mayer have found that the oxygen isotope content in a ring will vary if the tree was hit by a hurricane during that year.

Their research is being published in this week's early online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the world's most cited multidisciplinary scientific journals.

There has been a significant increase in the number of hurricanes hitting the Southeast since the mid-1990s, and scientists have sought to determine the cause for the upswing. Some question exists about whether the increase is part of a regularly occurring cycle of activity, or whether it is being brought about by a cause such as global climate change.

The problem facing this analysis is that the current documented history of hurricane activity in the Southeast dates back only about 100 years -- not enough time to establish a cycle that might last many decades at a time.

By looking at older trees, Mora and Grissino-Mayer have been able to create a record of hurricane activity dating back 220 years, more than double the current record.

"We think this can shed light on whether we're looking at a long-term pattern, or something that could be caused by human activity," said Mora, professor and head of UT's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Journal: Agency blocked hurricane report

WASHINGTON - A government agency blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disputed the Nature article, saying there was not a report but a two-page fact sheet about the topic. The information was to be included in a press kit to be distributed in May as the annual hurricane season approached but wasn't ready.

"The document wasn't done in time for the rollout," NOAA spokesman Jordan St. John said in responding to the Nature article. "The White House never saw it, so they didn't block it."

The possibility that warming conditions may cause storms to become stronger has generated debate among climate and weather experts, particularly in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster

Millions of anchovies die on Spain beach

MADRID, Spain - Millions of anchovies — a protected species in Europe — have died in northern Spain after an unexplained mass beaching, officials said Friday.

The fish, all juveniles, were found stranded along large stretches of Colunga beach, 35 miles east of the port city of Gijon, a normally pristine seaside landscape in the verdant province of Asturias.

"More than three tons have been found so far, and our main — untested — hypothesis at the moment is that they tried to flee from predators and accidentally beached," said Luis Laria, chief coordinator of a marine protection unit working with the government.

A factor that may have disoriented the fish is unusually high water temperatures off Colunga in the high 70s, Laria said, adding that such a mass beaching of anchovies is unprecedented in northern Spain.

Scientists issue strongest coral warning

This 2006 handout file photo, provided by the U.S. Geological Survey, shows a bleached elkhorn coral near St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Scientists have issued their strongest warning so far this year that unusually warm Caribbean Sea temperatures threaten coral reefs that suffered widespread damage last year in record-setting heat. (AP Photo/U.S. Geological Survey, file)

CHARLOTTE AMALIE, U.S. Virgin Islands - Scientists have issued their strongest warning so far this year that unusually warm Caribbean Sea temperatures threaten coral reefs that suffered widespread damage last year in record-setting heat.

Waters have reached 85 degrees around the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico — temperatures at which coral can be damaged if waters do not cool after a few weeks — said Al Strong, a scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch, in a telephone interview Monday.

The warning issued Saturday by NOAA urges scuba-dive operators and underwater researchers in the U.S. Caribbean territories to look for coral damage and use caution around the fragile reefs, which are easily damaged by physical contact.

Global temperature highest in millennia

WASHINGTON - The planet's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences.

The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.

The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of about 4 miles per decade in the last half of the 20th century.

Exxon Mobil accused of misleading public

LONDON - Britain's leading scientific academy has accused oil company Exxon Mobil Corp. of misleading the public about global warming and funding groups that undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

The Royal Society said Wednesday that it had written to Exxon asking it to halt support for groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change."

The Sept. 4 letter was sent to Esso U.K., Exxon's British arm, by the society's official spokesman, Bob Ward.

The letter said Exxon had given $2.9 million to 39 groups that "have been misinforming the public about the science of climate change."

Climate change pulls warm-water fish north: experts

LONDON (AFP) - A warm-water Atlantic triple fin fish has for the first time been caught off the coast of Britain, in another sign of species migrating north as global temperatures rise, experts have said.

The triple fin fish is usually found off the coasts of Africa, South America and the Mediterranean, but was caught by fisherman Michael Roberts in the Bristol Channel, where he was hoping to catch salmon and sea trout, they said Tuesday.

The two-feet (0.6 meter) long mature adult was handed in to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, where expert Julian Carter said that its discovery was another indication of the warming of British waters.

He was using a stake net off the shore at Peterstone, between Cardiff and Newport on the south Wales coast.

"It is the first record of such a fish in UK (United Kingdom) waters," Carter said. "It is a very warm water fish."

Polar bears drown, islands appear in Arctic thaw

OSLO (Reuters) - Polar bears are drowning and receding Arctic glaciers have uncovered previously unknown islands in a drastic 2006 summer thaw widely blamed on global warming.

Signs of wrenching changes are apparent around the Arctic region due to unusual warmth -- the summer minimum for ice is usually reached between mid-September and early October before the Arctic freeze extends its grip.

"We know about three new islands this year that have been uncovered because the glaciers have retreated," said Rune Bergstrom, environmental adviser to the governor of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago about 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole.

Arctic ice melting rapidly, study says

This satellite image released by NASA shows the concentration of Arctic sea ice in 2005....

Arctic sea ice in winter is melting far faster than before, two new

NASA studies reported Wednesday, a new and alarming trend that researchers say threatens the ocean's delicate ecosystem.

Scientists point to the sudden and rapid melting as a sure sign of man-made global warming.

"It has never occurred before in the past," said NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso in a phone interview. "It is alarming... This winter ice provides the kind of evidence that it is indeed associated with the greenhouse effect."

Report links global warming, storms

Note from Chris on this post. If you look back in the archives of this blog you will see it was one of the first sources on the internet to make the connection between hurricanes and climate change.

For the past 13 months, researchers have debated whether humanity is to blame for a surge in hurricanes since the mid-1990s or whether the increased activity is merely a natural cycle that occurs every several decades.

Employing 80 computer simulations, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other institutions concluded that there is only one answer: that the burning of fossil fuels, which warms the climate, is also heating the oceans.

Humans, Ben Santer, the report's lead author, told The Chronicle, are making hurricanes globally more violent "and violent hurricanes more common" -- at least, in the latter case, in the northern Atlantic Ocean. The findings were published Monday in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Climate change seen pushing plants to the brink

LONDON (Reuters) - Thousands of plant species are being pushed to the brink of extinction by global warming, and those already at the extremes are in the greatest danger, a leading botanist said on Tuesday.

Paul Smith, head of Britain's Millennium Seed Bank, said the drylands of the world which cover 40 percent of the earth's surface and are home to more than one-third of the population faced the bleakest future.

"In the southern hemisphere the plants can either go up or south. But in South Africa's Cape they can't do either, so the 8,000 unique species of fijnbos (indigenous vegetation) there are a real worry," he told Reuters on a visit to London's Kew Gardens.

In Rockies Meadow, Early Spring Gives Some Experts Chills

For nearly three decades scientists have carefully watched a Rocky Mountain meadow spring to life.

The meadow is nestled at about 9,500 feet (2,900 meters) above sea level between towering, snowcapped peaks a few miles outside the resort town of Crested Butte, Colorado. The field has been home to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL, pronounced "rumble") for 75 years.

Until about 2000, the high-altitude meadow seemed to be resisting the pull of global warming, even though spring seemed to be blooming earlier at lower reaches. Due to heavier-than-usual snowfalls, the meadow was remaining blanketed in white even after the ever warmer spring temperatures arrived.

Since 2000, however, the meadow seems to be catching up with the lower altitudes. It is bursting back to life earlier too now, due to an ongoing drought that has reduced snowfall in the area. It could be the start of a new long-term pattern that sees the meadow more in sync, seasonally speaking, with down-mountain areas. That pattern may be more than just a symptom of global warming. It could even help accelerate climate change, some scientists say.

Drought Causing Record Forest Destruction in U.S. Southwest

Soil-scorching droughts are nothing new to the U.S. Southwest. But the one that hit the region in 1999—and still persists—has been different from past droughts: It has been hotter.

It has also caused what is arguably the most extensive die-off of trees ever documented by modern science.

Upward of 45 million piñon pine trees have died in New Mexico in the last three years, according to the U.S. Forest Service. New Mexico, which claims the short, nut-bearing piñon as its state tree, has been hardest hit by the drought.

Climate change ups Europe infectious disease threat

"There are already very clear signals that infectious diseases are changing as a result of climate change," he said.

Ice core evidence of human impact on CO2 in air

NORWICH (Reuters) - Air from the oldest ice core confirms human activity has increased the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere to levels not seen for hundreds of thousands of years, scientists said on Monday.

Bubbles of air in the 800,000-year-old ice, drilled in the Antarctic, show levels of CO2 changing with the climate. But the present levels are out of the previous range

Double Hurricanes

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite image shows Tropical Storm Kristy (L) and Hurricane John. The hurricane has moved along Mexico's Baja California peninsula, lashing local resort towns with gusting wind and driving rain.(AFP/NOAA)