1 May 2015, The Conversation: One in six species faces extinction as a result of climate change.The Earth is on course to lose up to one in six of all its species, if carbon emissions continue as they currently are. This global extinction risk masks very large regional variations. Up to a quarter of South American species may be doomed. These are some of the findings of a comprehensive piece of new research conducted by evolutionary ecologist Mark Urban and published in Science. Read More here
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“…The ICECAP (International Collaboration for Exploration of the Cryosphere through Aerogeophysical Profiling) project – a collaboration between US, British and Australian Antarctic researchers – has been mapping the East Antarctic ice sheet to look for changes….And it turns out that East Antarctica needs careful watching. The project is giving us a new look at the underside of the ice sheet in East Antarctica, and causing significant concerns for future increases in sea level. One of the project’s major recent discoveries is that the terrain under the region’s biggest and most important glacier may make it more vulnerable to melting than we thought….” Read More here
29 April 2015 Climate News Network: High anxiety that mountain peaks are warming faster. Scientists call for international efforts to determine why temperatures on high-altitude mountains appear to be rising faster than in nearby lowlands. Temperatures could be climbing on mountains − with new research suggesting that the highest altitudes may be warming at a rate greater than expected.Members of the Mountain Research Initiative collective report in Nature Climate Change that they found evidence that mountain peak regions were warming faster than the surrounding plateaus and lowlands.The study − by Nick Pepin, leader of the Environmental Processes and Change Research Group at Portsmouth University in the UK, and colleagues from the US, Switzerland, Canada, Ecuador, Pakistan, China, Italy, Austria and Kazakhstan − comes with more than the usual set of health warnings. Read More here
27 April 2015, Climate News Network: Well drilling has deep impact on Great Plains’ health. Loss of vegetation on North America’s vast rangelands as a result of a huge increase in oil and gas wells invokes memories of the 1930s Dust Bowl disaster. Oil wells and natural gas may have made individual Americans rich, but they have impoverished the great plains of North America, according to new research. Fossil fuel prospectors have sunk 50,000 new wells a year since 2000 in three Canadian provinces and 11 US states, and have damaged the foundation of all economic growth: net primary production − otherwise known as biomass, or vegetation. Brady Allred, assistant professor of rangeland ecology at the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation, and colleagues write in the journal Science. Read More here