Global Warming: November 2006

Gaia scientist Lovelock predicts planetary wipeout

Sunlight is shown over a cloud-covered Earth surface in this image taken by crew members onboard the Shuttle Discovery March 18, 1989. The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples' lives, a controversial climate scientist said on Tuesday. FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY (NASA/Handout/Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) - The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples' lives, a controversial climate scientist said on Tuesday.

Growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions doubles since 1990s

The growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions has more than doubled since the close of the 1990s as countries have failed to reign in use of fossil fuels, says a new report from the Global Carbon Project, a group involved in scientific research on the impact of carbon on the planet. The finding was announced at the Annual Science Meeting at Tasmania’s Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station.

Global Warming Could Doom Male Crocodiles

Rising temperatures could force the birth of more female crocodiles and fewer males, an expert said today. The scenario could cause some croc populations to disappear.

Crocodile gender is determined by temperature during incubation. Nest temperatures of 89.6 to 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit (32-33 Celsius) result in males. Anything warmer or cooler produces females. Temperatures typically vary from the top of a nest to the bottom, producing both genders.

Arctic gull recorded in Southern Calif.

A small white gull with an ordinary name had bird watchers flocking to the Salton Sea for what they call a "mega-rarity."

The Salton Sea, a 35-mile-long lake stretching across the Imperial and Riverside county line, is a popular stop for birds heading south, and Guy McCaskie, co-author of "Birds of Salton Sea," believed he spotted a Ross' gull there a week ago.

The appearance of the arctic bird nearly 100 miles east of San Diego would be the first reported in California and would place it hundreds of miles farther south than it had ever been seen.

The gull, which normally breeds in Siberia or Greenland, rarely appears south of Alaska, and is only spotted in even the northern part of the lower 48 states every few years.

Global warming said killing some species

Seagulls in flight, June 2003. Nearly three quarters of all bird species in northeast Australia and more than a third in Europe could become extinct unless efforts to stop global warming are stepped up, a report said.(AFP/File/Marcel Mochet)

Animal and plant species have begun dying off or changing sooner than predicted because of global warming, a review of hundreds of research studies contends.

These fast-moving adaptations come as a surprise even to biologists and ecologists because they are occurring so rapidly.

At least 70 species of frogs, mostly mountain-dwellers that had nowhere to go to escape the creeping heat, have gone extinct because of climate change, the analysis says. It also reports that between 100 and 200 other cold-dependent animal species, such as penguins and polar bears are in deep trouble.

"We are finally seeing species going extinct," said University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan, author of the study. "Now we've got the evidence. It's here. It's real. This is not just biologists' intuition. It's what's happening."

Iceberg spotted from New Zealand shore

In the photo relaesed by the New Zealand Defense Department, an iceberg drifts off the coast of New Zealand in this Nov 3, 2006. The icebergs - two large ones and several smaller chunks - have sparked overseas interest as people clamour to view a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence that are now only a 30 minute helicopter flight from the southern city of Dunedin. (AP Photo/New Zealand Defense Department, HO)

An iceberg has been spotted from the New Zealand shore for the first time in 75 years, one of about 100 that have been drifting south of the country.

The giant ice chunk was visible Thursday from Dunedin on South Island but has since moved away, driven by winds and ocean currents. The flotilla of icebergs — some as big as houses — were first spotted south of New Zealand early this month.

Last year, icebergs were seen in the country's waters for the first time in 56 years. But the last time one was visible from the New Zealand shore was June 1931, said Mike Williams, an oceanographer at the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research.

Human Deaths from Animal Diseases on the Rise

An estimated 50 million people caught diseases from animals such as dogs, cattle, chickens and mosquitoes between 2000 and 2005, according to a new study. Some 78,000 of them died.

The finding reveals the global urgency for doctors to stay vigilant when it comes to zoonotic illnesses—those transmitted by non-human animals.

By reviewing past studies, virologist Jonathan Heeney of the Biomedical Primate Research Center in The Netherlands found the diseases responsible for the majority of zoonotic illnesses seem to be increasing.

Weather disasters could cost 1 trillion dollars in a year

Driven by climate change, weather disasters could cost as much as a trillion dollars in a single year by 2040, financial experts warned at the UN's conference on global warming.

"Most insurance and re-insurance companies have no doubt that the rising tide of losses from weather-related disasters is linked with climate change," said Thomas Loster of German reinsurance giant Munich Re on Tuesday.

"The possibility of a one-trillion-dollar-loss year is one scenario out of many, but whatever the precise figures the losses are already large and set to increase."

Record North Sea Temp

A man jumps into the cold North Sea water with a beer. The North Sea's water temperature rose to a record average of 2.4 degrees Celsius in October compared to the same period between 1963-1993 in the latest climate-change spinoff, a new German study found.(AFP/ANP/File/Ed Oudenaarden)

Kenya appeals for help as flood devastation spreads

Displaced people walk through the rising water in Dadaab, Kenya. Kenya has appealed for aid to help hundreds of thousands of people hit by devastating and deadly floods across the country triggered by unusually heavy seasonal rains.(AFP/File/Frederic Courbet)

Kenya has appealed for aid to help hundreds of thousands of people hit by devastating and deadly floods across the country triggered by unusually heavy seasonal rains.

As rains continued to pound north and coastal Kenya, authorities made a national appeal for 562,072,500 million shillings (7.9 million dollars) to help about 300,000 people who are affected by the floods, which have so far killed 23 people.

"We are launching an appeal to assist 300,000 beneficiaries for three months. The appeal is based on the current situation in which many districts, especially the coastal regions has been badly hit," Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) secretary general Abbas Gulled told a press conference on Wednesday.

Wild and weird weather baffles Australia

Wild and weird weather has hit Australia, with a combination of drought, storms, bushfires, snow and record low temperatures baffling a population usually heading for the beach at this time of year.

Icy winds shrieking up from the South Pole had Sydney residents shivering on the way to work Thursday as the country's most populous city recorded its coldest overnight November temperature in more than a century.

The mercury dropped to just 8.3 degrees Celsius (47 degrees Fahrenheit), the lowest since November 1905, but with the wind-chill factor "I think the temperature was around two degrees," said Bureau of Meteorology weatherman Rob Webb.

Ice-melt isolates remote communities in Canada

Graphic shows the region of northern Ontario represented by Nishnawbe Aski Nation, where 34 Aboriginal communities are accessible only by air for most of the year. Bulk goods are shipped in the winter over frozen rivers and lakes, but the shipping season is shrinking as average temperatures rise. (Graphic/Reuters)

Aboriginal communities in Ontario's far north are becoming increasingly isolated as rising temperatures melt their winter route to the outside world and impede their access to supplies.

"The ice doesn't have its solid blue color any more," said Stan Beardy, the grand chief of Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which represents Ontario's remote First Nations. "It's more like Styrofoam now, really brittle."

"With the toxic waste moving north, and global warming, we don't have that solid ice anymore, and that's why we have problems with winter roads when it's mild."

Scientists: Climate change fueling fires

Global warming could stoke ferocious wildfires that will be more difficult and costly to fight and might drastically alter the environment in parts of the world, some scientists warn.

Approximately 1,000 scientists and forestry officials who gathered in San Diego for an international wildfire meeting that began Monday urged policymakers to consider the effects of global warming when managing wildfires.

The wildfire season that just ended in the U.S. was the most severe — and expensive — on record with more than 89,000 fires scorching 9.5 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The U.S. Forest Service spent $1.5 billion fighting those fires — about $100 million over budget.

Diseases appear on rise with temperature

A warmer world already seems to be producing a sicker world, health experts reported Tuesday, citing surges in Kenya, China and Europe of such diseases as malaria, heart ailments and dengue fever.

"Climate affects some of the most important diseases afflicting the world," said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum of the World Health Organization. "The impacts may already be significant."

Less polar bear cubs surviving in Alaska

Far fewer polar bears cubs are surviving off Alaska's northern coast, a federal government report released Wednesday has concluded.

The study of polar bears in the south Beaufort Sea, which spans the northern coasts of Alaska and western Canada, also found that adult males weigh less and have smaller skulls than those captured and measured two decades ago.

The study does not directly blame the changes on a decline in sea ice. However, fewer cubs and smaller males are consistent with other observations that suggest changes in sea ice may be adversely affecting polar bears, the study said.

Icebergs becoming tourist attraction

Two icebergs drifting off the New Zealand coast have attracted massive interest from sightseers as well as sparking fresh warnings to shipping after their 13,500 kilometre journey from Antarctica.

The icebergs were about 100 kilometres (60 miles) off the Otago coast in the south-east of the country Wednesday, the closest sighting off New Zealand for 75 years, The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) said.

Helicopters have been taking scientists and sightseers out to view the massive slabs of ice. One is about 500 metres (1,600 feet) long, 50 metres wide and 60 metres high, while the other has a 100 metre high peak and is about 300 metres long.

Insomniac Russian Bears

A four-month-old bear cub looks around as it is released for the first time outside a family farm some 400 km west of Moscow, April 12, 2005. Insomniac bears are roaming the forests of southwestern Siberia scaring local people as the weather stays too warm for the animals to fall into their usual winter slumber. (Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)

Global warming

Typhoon gathers strength off Philippines

MANILA (AFP) - Residents in the northern Philippines are bracing themselves for another battering two weeks after super typhoon Cimaron tore through the region leaving a trail of destruction and at least 19 dead.

Climate change 'genocide' threatens Kenyan herders: aid groups

People of the region, the epicenter of a cycle of killer drought and floods that have hit east Africa in recent years, are on the front line of a war not of their making, struggling for survival against climate change, they say.

"Governments meeting at the UN climate change conference only have to look to a few hundred miles north to see how climate change is having an immediate and devastating effect on people's lives," said British-based charity Oxfam.

For centuries, tribes like the Turkana, hardy livestock-dependent herders who inhabit the region's stark moonscape, have lived and adapted to natural disasters, persisting and often thriving despite the vagaries of Mother Nature.

But now, facing increasingly erratic weather patterns, their traditional culture may be on the verge of extinction due to the failure of far-away developed nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

Climate change threatens agricultural crisis: U.N.

Immediate steps are needed to avert a potential catastrophe as climate change dries up water resources in drought affected areas, hitting poor farmers, a United Nations report said on Thursday.

The vast majority of the world's malnourished people, estimated at about 830 million people, are small farmers, herders and farm laborers, pointing to devastating effects from global warning and requiring a tripling of yearly farming aid to poor countries.

"Climate change threatens to intensify water insecurity on an unparalleled scale," the annual U.N. Human Development Report said.

"Even with drastic reductions in carbon emissions, past emissions mean that the world now has to live with dangerous climate change."

Scientists say millions could flee rising seas

Nations must make plans to help tens of millions of "sea level refugees" if climate change continues to ravage the world's oceans, German researchers said on Thursday.

Waters are rising and warming, increasing the destructive power of storms, they said, and seas are becoming more acidic, threatening to throw entire food chains into chaos.

"In the long run, sea level rises are going to be the most severe impact of global warming on human society," said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, presenting a report by German scientists at a major United Nations climate change meeting.

Climate change melting fabled African glaciers

Climate change is melting a legendary ice field in equatorial Africa and may soon thaw it out completely, threatening fresh water supplies to hundreds of thousands of people, a climate expert said on Thursday.

The fabled, snow-capped Rwenzori mountains -- dubbed the "Mountains of the Moon" in travel brochures -- form part of the Uganda/Democratic Republic of the Congo border and are one of Uganda's top tourist destinations.

But warmer temperatures are melting the glaciers sitting on their peaks, with some scientists predicting the ice could be gone within two to three decades.

Venice mayor: Flood barriers a mistake

A government plan to build moveable flood barriers to protect the famous city of canals during high tides is a mistake, the mayor of Venice said Saturday.

The government has approved a $5.5 billion project to build hinged barriers in the seabed just off Venice. The barriers could be raised to ease the effect of high tides, which frequently flood St. Mark's Square.

The project is dubbed "Moses" after the Biblical figure who parted the Red Sea.

Some environmentalists have protested the plans, initially approved by former Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government, for fear the barriers could turn Venice into a stagnant pond by interfering with the natural flow of water.

Great Plains wilt and worry as drought eases elsewhere

DENVER — As much of the West recovers from several years of drought, severe dryness lingers on the Great Plains, playing havoc with agriculture, commerce and hydroelectricity production.

The effects are widely scattered in regional pockets from Texas to the Dakotas. Winter wheat in Kansas and northern Oklahoma is in jeopardy from record warmth, wind and lack of rain. Livestock herds in Wyoming and other cattle states have shrunk because rangeland is too parched to graze.

Electric rates, lake recreation and commercial barges are affected by lack of water in the Missouri River, whose headwaters areas in the Rockies have suffered years of drought.

Venice

A dog advances on a flooded terrace facing San Marco square in Venice, October 2006. Rising sea levels and ocean temperatures, floods and other calamities linked to global warming threaten natural and manmade cultural sites around the world, ncluding Venice, the United Nations has said.(AFP/File/Sebastiano Casellati)

Expert says oceans are turning acidic

The world's oceans are becoming more acidic, which poses a threat to sea life and Earth's fragile food chain, a climate expert said Thursday.

Oceans have already absorbed a third of the world's emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming, leading to acidification that prevents vital sea life from forming properly.

"The oceans are rapidly changing," said professor Stefan Rahmstorf on the sidelines of a U.N. conference on climate change that has drawn delegates from more than 100 countries to Kenya. "Ocean acidification is a major threat to marine organisms."

Global Warming Could Trigger Insect Population Boom

A rise in the Earth’s temperature could lead to an increase in the number of insects worldwide, with potentially dire consequences for humans, a new study suggests.

New research shows that insect species living in warmer areas are more likely to undergo rapid population growth because they have higher metabolic rates and reproduce more frequently. The finding has scientists concerned that global warming could give rise to more fast-growing insect populations and that we could see a spike in the number of six-legged critters.

The consequences could be more serious than just a few extra bug bites each summer. “If they’re crop species, we could count on needing to use more pesticides and it could be very costly,” said Melanie Frazier, a doctoral student at the University of Washington and lead author of the study.

Malaria surge in Kenyan highlands may be tied to global warming

Warmer temperatures linked to global warming may be responsible for surge in malaria cases in Kenya's highlands, once largely free of the mosquitos that carry the disease.

Amid continuing debate over the health consequences of climate change, specifically the spread of vector-borne afflictions like malaria, scientists reported growing cases in the highlands that correspond to higher temperatures.

"Malaria is the most climate-sensitive, vector-borne disease affecting most of the African population," said Andrew Githeko, a researcher with Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) Tuesday.

Expert says Australian drought is 'worst in 1,000 years'

The drought ravaged Gayngaru wetlands of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Australia, already the world's driest inhabited continent, is in the grip of its worst drought in 1,000 years, a leading expert told the country's political leaders at a crisis summit.(AFP/File/Torsten Blackwood)

Australia, already the world's driest inhabited continent, is in the grip of its worst drought in 1,000 years, a leading expert told the country's political leaders at a crisis summit.

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard and premiers of the three worst-hit states were presented with the bleak assessment at the meeting in Canberra by an expert on the country's most significant river system, participants said.

The drought has already been described variously as the worst in living memory, the worst in a century and the worst since white settlement more than two centuries ago.

Climate change: Greenland and Antarctica aren't poles apart, says study

The shear face of the massive B-15A iceberg stretches for 150 kms across McMurdo Sound after it broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antartica in 2001. Greenland and Antarctica are at opposite ends of the planet but their climate systems appear to be linked by a remarkable ocean current, according to a study appearing.(AFP/NSF-HO/File)

Greenland and Antarctica are at opposite ends of the planet but their climate systems appear to be linked by a remarkable ocean current, according to a study appearing.

The paper, coincidentally published as a key UN conference on climate change unfolds in Nairobi, also sheds light on man-made climate change, for it implies that Antarctica's ice could eventually start to melt because of localized warming in the far North Atlantic.

The evidence comes from a 2,500-metre (8,125-feet-) deep ice core, drilled in blood-freezing chill by European scientists at Dronning Maud Land, on the part of Antarctica that faces the South Atlantic.

With its compacted layers of ice and telltale concentrations of methane in trapped air bubbles, the core yields a compelling picture of snowfall and atmospheric temperatures going back 150,000 years.

Even better than that, it can be matched with cores of similar amplitude drilled in the Greenland icesheet.

Put together, the cores provide the first solid evidence to back a theory that millennial scale climate changes that have unfolded in the far north and south of the Atlantic are not isolated, local events, but linked.

Water flow in China's Yellow River hits record low

BEIJING (Reuters) - Water levels in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, China's second longest, have hit a historic low, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday, after a senior official warned that China might run out of water by 2030.

Africa's global warming hotspots hit poorest: report

Rwanda, Burundi, large tracts of southern Niger and Chad, and most of Ethiopia are the most vulnerable parts of a continent that could be the biggest loser from global warming, researchers said on Tuesday.

Africa has contributed least to greenhouse gases that cause climate change but its underdevelopment means it is also least prepared to deal with the consequences.

Many of the areas identified as most at risk from rising temperatures are among the continent's poorest.

"The situation is alarming, not only in relation to climate change," said Mario Herrero of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), launching a report.

Icebergs near NZ after drifting from Atlantic

In this undated photo released by the New Zealand Defense Force, an iceberg is observed from a New Zealand Air Force P3 Orion maritime surveillance airplane on routine fisheries patrol in the southern ocean. A maritime warning has been issued after approximately 100 icebergs were discovered near Auckland Islands, 260 kilometers (160 miles) south of the South Island of New Zealand Friday, Nov. 3, 2006. The largest iceberg about 2 kilometers by 1.5 kilometers (1.2 by 0.9 miles) and more than 130 meters (425 feet) high were found floating in a major ocean shipping lane. (AP Photo/New Zealand Defense Force,HO)

Scores of icebergs have floated to within about 300 km (186 miles) of New Zealand, with the largest measuring about 1.8 km (1.1 miles) in length and standing some 120 meters (360 feet) above water.

National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research oceanographer Mike Williams said on Wednesday the icebergs were likely part of a larger piece of ice which broke off the Ronne Ice Shelf, located southeast of the Falkland Islands, six years ago.

The original iceberg, named A-43, was 167 km (104 miles) long 32 km (20 miles) wide.

Williams said about 100 icebergs, first detected by New Zealand's air force on Friday, had drifted eastward, south of Africa and Australia, in the dominant Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

"It's a natural but a rare phenomenon. It requires a lot of rare occurrences to happen simultaneously," he said.