California Applications
Program/California Climate Change Center
CAP/CCCC Reading Room
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Last update: 13 January 2010
These recent articles concern climate and climate change issues
of interest to
California Applications Program (CAP) and/or California Climate
Change Center (CCCC) participants.
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Climate Change in the West -- AGU Fall 09 meeting blog
A battery of eight talks starting at 8 a.m. and covering none less but the serious
topic of climate change in the western United States can leave one a little
shell-shocked. But the speakers' broad reviews of the science helped catch generalists
up to speed and provided at least some hopeful news.
Michael Dettinger, a hydrologist with both the US Geological Survey and the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, UCSD in La Jolla, Calif., kicked off the session with an
overview of predictions for temperature and precipitation-related changes in the West.
Thirteen climate models unanimously predict a rise in temperatures over the next century.
The good news for California: due to its marine climate its temperature rise is projected
to be less than that of other states. The bad news: California's hydrology and water
supply is highly sensitive to even slight changes in warmth, because it depends on snowpack.
Small changes in temperature may cause snow to melt sooner, exacerbating winter floods and
summer droughts.
(AGU, December 2009)
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California's sinking delta
Efforts are under way to reverse the deterioration of a major water source, the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California, which is sinking.
Dennis Baldocchi often drives past the ruins of his grandmother's house on Sherman
Island, in northern California's Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Flooding gutted
the house when the island's levee broke 40 years ago. Today, grass grows through
the floors and chickens wander through.
To Dr. Baldocchi, the slanting hulk whispers an unsettling truth: The land that his
family farmed for three generations is sinking farther below sea level each year.
(The Christian Science Monitor, December 2009)
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Google offers a graphic glimpse of how climate change might affect California
Researchers and policymakers have long rued that it's hard to illustrate the perils
of global warming when its most serious impacts won't be visible for decades.
But thanks to the state Natural Resources Agency and Google, a graphic view of
climate change's potential effect on California -- based on scientific modeling -- is
now just a mouse-click away.
Do you want to know if global warming will wipe out the Sierra snowpack before your
great-great-grandchildren hit college?
(Los Angeles Times, December 2009)
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State braces for fourth year of drought
State water officials offered up their bleakest annual water supply prediction
ever Tuesday in what amounts to an early warning about the coming year.
Customers of the State Water Project, the state's largest water distribution
system, were told they may get as little as 5 percent of their requested Delta
water supply next year. That figure assumes very dry conditions, however, and the
number is almost certain to improve.
Last year, the state warned agencies early on to plan for 15 percent of their
supply but eventually increased the number to 40 percent.
(Contra Costa Times, December 2009)
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Climate scientist James Hansen hopes summit will fail
A leading scientist acclaimed as the grandfather of global warming has
denounced the Copenhagen summit on climate change next week as a farce.
James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Insitute for Space Studies,
told The Times that he planned to boycott the UN conference because it was
seeking a counter-productive agreement to limit emissions through a
"cap and trade" system.
(TimesOnline, December 2009)
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Climate change will burn Yosemite
Wild fires within California's world famous Yosemite National Park are set to
become more frequent and severe due to climate change.
New research has unpicked how this may happen; and it is not just that
warming temperatures directly trigger more fires.
They will also reduce the amount of snow that covers the forest in winter.
That lack of snow will then allow lightening strikes to trigger more fires,
which burn more intensely.
"People already expect more ignitions from hotter summers," says Dr James Lutz
of the University of Washington at Seattle, US, one of the study's authors.
That is because predicted higher temperatures will make vegetation more
flammable and allow larger fires to take hold.
(BBC Earth News, November 2009)
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Global warming blamed for aspen die-off across the West
By Nicholas Riccardi
From the hillsides of extinct volcanoes in Arizona to the jagged peaks of Idaho, aspen
trees are falling by the tens of thousands, the latest example of how climate change
is dramatically altering the American West.
Starting seven years ago, foresters noticed massive aspen die-offs caused by
parasitical insects, one of them so rare it is hardly even written about in
scientific literature. But with warming temperatures and the effects of a
brutal drought still lingering, the parasites are flourishing at the expense
of the tree, beloved for its slender branches and heart-shaped leaves that
turn a brilliant yellow in autumn.
What foresters have termed Sudden Aspen Decline affects more than just aesthetics.
Aspen trees provide a rich habitat for birds, elk, deer and other animals.
The grasses that sprout under them -- up to 2,000 pounds per acre --
hold water that is needed by metropolitan areas. The trees do not burn easily
and create natural firebreaks in forests already ravaged by the pine bark beetle --
another parasite that is thriving because of global warming.
(The Los Angeles Times, October 2009)
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Puget Sound area emerging as wine region, thanks to warmer climate
Tom Miller rolls his metal stool down the row inch by inch, his long, leathery
fingers pushing through the vines to clip grapes off by the bunch.
It's an early autumn morning at the top of the Olympic Peninsula, and Miller
is doing something climate scientists believe would have been difficult, if not
impossible, 50 years ago: harvesting grapes to make wine that people actually
want to buy.
No matter whether they realize it, researchers say, Miller and a small explosion
of new Western Washington wine-grape growers appear to be capitalizing on small
climate shifts that are reshaping the global wine-growing map.
(The Seattle Times, October 2009)
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Climate change and warfare --
Cool heads or heated conflicts?
The starkest views of climate change paint war as a looming threat. The idea
that violence will erupt as drought and rising sea levels displace people from
their homes is, in part, why the Nobel prize for peace was awarded in 2007 to
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. Yet a newly published
study analysing the historical connection between war and climate throws into
question the assumption that rising temperatures and violence go hand in hand.
(The Economist, October 2009)
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Both of the World's Ice Sheets May Be Shrinking Faster and Faster
The two great ice sheets - Greenland's and Antarctica's - have had plenty of
press lately, what with galloping glaciers and whole lakes of meltwater plunging
into ice holes in minutes. Surveys of ice-sheet volume made from planes and
satellites have quantified these losses, but those assessments have been spotty
in time, space, or both. Shrinkage accelerated from the 1990s into the 2000s,
but researchers couldn't be sure what would come next.
Now the latest analysis of the most comprehensive, essentially continuous
monitoring of the ice sheets shows that the losses have not eased in the past few
years. More ominously, losses from both Greenland and Antarctica appear to have
accelerated during the past 7 years.
(Science Magazine, October 2009)
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Monsoons and Meltdowns
What do periods of weak low-latitude rainfall have to do with the meltdown of
great ice sheets? Cheng et al. show that this counterintuitive association
contains a hot clue about the much-debated causes of the ice age cycles that end
every 100,000 years or so in a collapse of the great Northern Hemisphere ice
sheets (a glacial termination). Understanding this collapse is relevant to human
affairs both past and future, because the collapse typically causes a subsequent
period of unusual climatic stability and warmth (an interglacial period), exemplified
by the past 11,700 years of relatively stable climate in which human agriculture
and civilization have flourished.
(Science Magazine, October 2009)
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Hijacked by climate change?
By Richard Black:
As the UN climate summit in Copenhagen approaches, exhortations that "we
must get a deal" and warnings that climate change is "the greatest
challenge we face as a species" are to be heard in virtually every
political forum.
But if you look back to the latest definitive check on the planet's
environmental health - the Global Environment Outlook (Geo-4), published
by the UN two years ago - what emerges is a picture of decline that goes
way, way beyond climate change.
Species are going extinct at perhaps 1,000 times the normal rate, as key
habitats such as forests, wetlands and coral reefs are plundered for
human infrastructure.
(BBC News, August 2009)
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Beetles, wildfire: Double threat in warming world
From Charles J. Hanley (AP) reporting in Haines Junction, Yukon Territory: A veil of
smoke settled over the forest in the shadow of the St. Elias Mountains, in a
wilderness whose spruce trees stood tall and gray, a deathly gray even in the greenest
heart of a Yukon summer.
"As far as the eye can see, it's all infested," forester Rob Legare said, looking
out over the thick woods of the Alsek River valley.
Beetles and fire, twin plagues, are consuming northern forests in what scientists say
is a preview of the future, in a century growing warmer, as the land grows drier,
trees grow weaker and pests, abetted by milder winters, grow stronger.
Dying, burning forests would then only add to the warming.
It's here in the sub-Arctic and Arctic — in Alaska, across Siberia, in northernmost
Europe, and in the Yukon and elsewhere in northern Canada — that Earth's climate is
changing most rapidly. While average temperatures globally rose 0.74 degrees
Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century, the far north experienced warming
at twice that rate or greater.
(AP, August 2009)
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Ocean Temperatures Are Highest on Record
Average temperatures of waters at the ocean surface in July were the highest ever recorded,
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. The agency said the average sea
surface temperature was 1.06 degrees higher than the 20th-century average of 61.5 degrees.
(The New York Times, August 2009)
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Pachauri's call for 350ppm is breakthrough moment for climate movement
Rajendra Pachauri is the U.N.'s top climate scientist. He leads the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which every five years produces the authoritative
assessment of climate science. Its last report, in 2007, helped set the target of 450
parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a target that many environmental
groups and national governments have adopted as their goal for Copenhagen.
As many of you know, that number is out of date. When Jim Hansen and other scientists looked
at phenomena like the Arctic ice melt of the last two summers, they produced new data
demonstrating that 350 ppm is the bottom line. But it's been hard to get that news out to
the powers that be. So today it comes as enormous and welcome news that Pachauri, from
his New Delhi office, said that 350 was the number.
(Guardian, August 2009)
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Rising Ocean Acidity Erodes Alaska's Fisheries
The Arctic's increased vulnerability to climate change is not limited to higher
temperatures and melting permafrost.
New research from the University of Alaska Fairbanks suggests Arctic oceans
are particularly susceptible to acidification, with potentially dire consequences
to Alaska's rich crab and salmon fisheries.
"Everything is acting in unison on the environment - it's not just the ice loss
or the warming or the acidification," said UAF chemical oceanographer Jeremy
Mathis. "The Arctic is taking a multilateral hit."
(Scientific American, August 2009)
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As Arctic Ocean warms, megatonnes of methane bubble up
It's been predicted for years, and now it's happening. Deep in the Arctic Ocean,
water warmed by climate change is forcing the release of methane from beneath
the sea floor.
Over 250 plumes of gas have been discovered bubbling up from the sea floor
to the west of the Svalbard archipelago, which lies north of Norway. The
bubbles are mostly methane, which is a greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide.
(NewScientist, August 2009)
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Bubblin' plume
An oceanographic survey has discovered a 1,400-meter-tall plume rising from the
seafloor off the coast of California. Water samples taken at the site, about 32
kilometers northwest of Cape Mendocino, indicate that the feature isn't
mineral-rich water spewing from a hydrothermal vent, but researchers aren't
yet sure exactly what the feature is made of.
(ScienceNews, August 2009)
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Climatic Changes Lead to Declining Winter Chill for Fruit and Nut Trees
in California during 1950-2099
Winter chill is one of the defining characteristics of a location's suitability for the
production of many tree crops. This academic article from PLoS ONE investigates
observed historic and projected future changes in winter chill in California,
quantified by two different chilling models (chilling hours and dynamic model).
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How the climate bill hits your wallet
Lawmakers are set to debate a sweeping energy bill Friday (June 26, 2009).
This is how it may affect you.
Cutting greenhouse gases --
Reducing greenhouse gases is the main aim of the sweeping energy bill currently up
for debate in the House.
An 80% reduction is what most scientists say is needed to avoid the worst effects
of global warming.
Putting the nation on track to meet this goal by 2050 will cost the average American
household $175 a year by 2020, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Under the bill, polluters would have to pay to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
something they currently do for free. Plus, the amount they can emit would decline each year.
(CNN, June 2009)
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High human impact ocean areas along US West Coast revealed
Climate change, fishing and commercial shipping top the list of threats to the
ocean off the West Coast of the United States. "Every single spot of the ocean
along the West Coast," said Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the National
Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of
California at Santa Barbara, "is affected by 10 to 15 different human activities
annually."
(e! Science News, May 2009)
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Yosemite's largest trees vanishing
Climate change appears to be taking its toll on the oldest and largest firs
and pines in California's Yosemite National Park, research said.
The number of large-diameter trees fell by 24 percent between the 1930s
and 1990s in all types of forests in Yosemite, said James Lutz of the
University of Washington in Seattle.
(TerraDaily, May 2009)
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Climate change, water shortages conspire to create 21st century Dust Bowl
Dust storms accelerated by a warming climate have covered the Rocky Mountains
with dirt whose heat-trapping properties have caused snowpacks to melt weeks
earlier than normal, worrying officials in Colorado about drastic water
shortages by late summer.
Snowpacks from the San Juan Mountains to the Front Range have either completely
melted or will be gone within the next two weeks, said Tom Painter,
director of the Snow Optics Laboratory at the University of Utah and a
leading expert on snowmelt.
The rapid melting is linked to a spate of intense dust storms that kick up
dirt and sand that in turn are deposited on snow-topped mountains. The dust
darkens the snow, allowing the surface to absorb more heat from the sun. This
warms the snow -- and the air above it -- significantly, studies show.
(The New York Times, May 2009)
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North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020
From the Climate Progress Blog: The north pole poised
to be largely ice-free by 2020:
"It's like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the
egg shell is now just cracking completely".
It's the ice thickness, stupid.
The Arctic ice cover, which has endured for at least 100,000 years, will be
all but gone within a decade according to a volume-based projection by a
leading British scientist, the BBC reports. At the same time, "a gruelling
73-day" survey of sea-ice thickness found "the average thickness of the
sea ice was 1.774 m" [5.8 feet].
One surveyor said the data "seems to suggest it was almost all first-year ice."
(Climate Progress Blog, May 2009)
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Newsletter of the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI) - April 2009
Click above for the 56 page newsletter on Global Change in Mountain Regions
from The Mountain Research Initiative (MRI). This newsletter (published twice
a year) is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It covers a
wide range of subjects, activities and scientific communications. 8 science
articles are available, covering topics including a report on a high altitude
interdisciplinary field campaign, a forest dynamics network and incorporating
climate change projections into watershed management.
(MRI News, April 2009)
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Adventures of Junior Raindrop (1948) -- TeacherTube Video
This 7.5 minute clip features animation of Junior Raindrop and his involvement
in the water cycle. Film segments are included showing how human activities
(timber, ranch, fire) can alter the landscape so rain can have a devastating
effect.
(TeacherTube, March 2009)
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David Rutledge: Hubbert's Peak, the Coal Question, and Climate Change
A 52-minute video of David Rutledge, Caltech's Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical
Engineering, presenting a Watson Lecture called "Hubbert's Peak, the Coal Question,
and Climate Change." Rutledge discussed whether oil, natural gas, and coal
resources will be sufficient in the future, and explained efforts to predict the
changes in climate that will result from consuming these fossil fuels.
(Caltech Today Streaming Theater, March 2009)
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Climate researchers seek citizen scientists
Valerie Hilt's yard brims with hollyhocks, hellebores and hyacinths. But it's her
lilac bush that landed the Port Angeles great-grandmother in the annals of science.
For 35 springs, Hilt has logged the date when the first leaf unfurls on the 20-foot-tall
shrub. She also takes note of the first fragrant blossom and other milestones, like peak bloom.
"It doesn't take any great amount of time," she said. "I'm always outside looking around
anyway."
Hilt, 70, is one of the last remaining lilac watchers in a network that once included
2,500 volunteers across the Western U.S. Their handwritten postcards grew into a powerful
database that researchers have used to document how rising temperatures are hastening the
onset of spring.
(The Seattle Times, March 2009)
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4 Top Science Advisers Are Named by Obama
In his selection of four top scientific advisers, President-elect Barack
Obama has signaled what are likely to be significant changes in policies
governing global warming, ocean protections and stem cell research.
"It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and
worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and
technology," Mr. Obama said in a radio address on Saturday, when he
announced the appointments.
John P. Holdren, a physicist and environmental policy professor at
Harvard, will serve as the president's science adviser as director of the
White House Office of Science and Technology. Jane Lubchenco, a marine
biologist from Oregon State University, will lead the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, which overseas ocean and atmospheric studies and
performs much of the government's research on global warming.
(The New York Times, December 2008)
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Has the Arctic melt passed the point of no return?
Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic
region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at
least a decade before it was predicted to happen.
Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the
region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn
because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is
accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic
amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another
10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that
the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards
ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.
The Arctic is considered one of the most sensitive regions in terms
of climate change and its transition to another climatic state will
have a direct impact on other parts of the northern hemisphere, as
well more indirect effects around the world.
(The Independent, December 2008)
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Too late? Why scientists say we should expect the worst
As ministers and officials gather in Poznan one year ahead of the Copenhagen
summit on global warming, the second part of a major series looks at the
crucial issue of targets
At a high-level academic conference on global warming at Exeter University
this summer, climate scientist Kevin Anderson stood before his expert audience
and contemplated a strange feeling. He wanted to be wrong. Many of those in the
room who knew what he was about to say felt the same. His conclusions had
already caused a stir in scientific and political circles. Even committed green
campaigners said the implications left them terrified.
Anderson, an expert at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester
University, was about to send the gloomiest dispatch yet from the frontline of the
war against climate change.
Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and
the corporate promises, he would say, carbon emissions were soaring way out of
control - far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year's report from
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review. The battle
against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for
things to get very, very bad.
"As an academic I wanted to be told that it was a very good piece of work and
that the conclusions were sound," Anderson said. "But as a human being I
desperately wanted someone to point out a mistake, and to tell me we had got
it completely wrong."
Nobody did. The cream of the UK climate science community sat in stunned silence
as Anderson pointed out that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than
anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the
developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out, he said, that most
of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at
best, and "dangerously misguided" at worst.
(The Guardian, December 2008)
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Gwynne Dyer: Four harsh truths about climate change (commentary)
About two years ago, I realized that militaries in various countries were starting
to do climate-change scenarios in-house-scenarios that started with the
scientific predictions about rising temperatures, falling crop yields, and
other physical effects, and then examined what that would do to politics
and strategy.
The scenarios predicted failed states proliferating because governments
couldn't feed their people; waves of climate refugees washing up against
the borders of more fortunate countries; and even wars between countries
that share rivers. So I started interviewing everybody I could get access
to, not only senior military people but scientists, diplomats, and politicians.
(Straight.com, December 2008)
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California bulks up defenses against tide of global warming
California is building a second line of defense against global warming,
one that will prepare the state for a harsher environment while the
other continues to cut climate-changing emissions.
The two-front approach acknowledges that rising sea levels, bigger floods,
greater loss of species and other harsh effects of warming are inevitable,
if not already occurring - no matter the state's success in slashing
greenhouse gases.
(The Sacramento Bee, November 2008)