Tag Archives: climate feedbacks

´Fewer wildfires in North America during Little Ice Age – due to climate cooling, not population decline´

Because cooler climates also tend to have lower evaporation, they tend to be moister climates, with not only moist air, but also moister (dead) biomass – and we all know wet twigs don’t burn too well…

Photo of the day: the old climate versus the new, according to Nature Geoscience study

The picture below shows Pinyon pine forests in New Mexico – and the progressive consequence of the large drought that hit western North America between 2000-2004. The left image is from 2002 and already shows some browning of pine trees halfway … Continue reading →

Trees starting to grow in the Arctic due to climate change could cause carbon dioxide release

Carbon stored in Arctic tundra could be released into the atmosphere by new trees growing in the warmer region, exacerbating climate change, scientists have revealed.

The Arctic is getting greener as plant growth increases in response to a warmer climate. This greater plant growth means more carbon is stored in the increasing biomass, so it was previously thought the greening would result in more carbon dioxide being taken up from the atmosphere, thus helping to reduce the rate of global warming.

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Largest known sea level rise took less than 350 years

Ocean level rise is known as one of the most disquieting effects of global warming, with more than three billion people living on the coast or less than 200 kilometres land inward and one tenth of the world population living … Continue reading →

Albedo increase by geoengineering could disrupt global rainfall patterns

A geoengineering solution to climate change could lead to significant rainfall reduction in Europe and North America, a team of European scientists concludes. The researchers studied how models of the Earth in a warm, CO2‑rich world respond to an artificial reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface. The study is published today in Earth System Dynamics, an Open Access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

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Painting the skies a bright white with geoengineering

Clouds in the skyOne idea for fighting global warming is to increase the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, scattering incoming solar energy away from the Earth’s surface. But scientists theorize that this solar geoengineering could have a side effect of whitening the sky during the day. New research from Carnegie’s Ben Kravitz and Ken Caldeira indicates that blocking 2% of the sun’s light would make the sky three-to-five times brighter, as well as whiter. Their work is published June 1st in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

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New source of methane discovered: the Arctic Ocean

It has been know for some time that large quantitites of methane lie hidden in reservoirs under the permafrost layers on the tundra and in clathrates on the continental shelve. It is neither a secret that those large quantities of … Continue reading →

Brightening rooftops and pavements can cool the Earth by 0.07 degrees

Imagine a world where the rooftops and pavements of every urban area are resurfaced to increase the reflection of the Sun’s light rays. Well, this is exactly what a group of Canadian researchers have simulated in an attempt to measure the potential effects against global warming. Continue reading →

Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum caused by thawing permafrost?

In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward.

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