Category Archives: The Science

PLEA Network

5 April 2016, The Conversation, This summer’s sea temperatures were the hottest on record for Australia: here’s why. The summer of 2015-2016 was one of the hottest on record in Australia. But it has also been hot in the waters surrounding the nation: the hottest summer on record, in fact.

Graph above: Difference in summer sea surface temperatures for the Australian region relative to the average period 1961-1990.Australian Bureau of Meteorology  While summer on land has been dominated by significant warm spells, bushfires, and dryness, there is a bigger problem looming in the oceans around Australia. This summer has outstripped long-term sea surface temperature records that extend back to the 1950s.  We have seen warm surface temperatures all around Australia and across most of the Pacific and Indian oceans, with particularly warm temperatures in the southeast and northern Australian regions. Read More here

PLEA Network

4 April 2016, Science Daily, Water cycle instability is here to stay posing major political and economic risks. Adaptation to new risks: A vital necessity for development policies. The current instability and unpredictability of the world water cycle is here to stay, making society’s adaptation to new risks a vital necessity when formulating development policies, a UN water expert warns. Robert Sandford, the EPCOR Chair for Water and Climate Security at the United Nations University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), says long-term water cycle stability “won’t return in the lifetime of anyone alive today.” “What we haven’t understood until now is the extent to which the fundamental stability of our political structures and global economy are predicated on relative stability and predictability of the water cycle — that is, how much water becomes available in what part of the year. As a result of these new water-climate patterns, political stability and the stability of economies in most regions of the world are now at risk.” Ontario Lieutenant-Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell, a former Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, and UN Under Secretary-General David Malone, Rector of UN University, are among several expert speakers joining Sandford in Ottawa Tuesday April 5 at UNU-INWEH’s day-long 20th anniversary public seminar, “Water: The Nexus of Sustainable Development and Climate Change.” The seminar will focus on national policy changes needed worldwide to achieve global water security — a pre-requisite for reaching the new global Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, agreed upon by world leaders in September 2015. Read More here

PLEA Network

30 March 2016, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change (report). The science of extreme event attribution has advanced rapidly in recent years, giving new insight to the ways that human-caused climate change can influence the magnitude or frequency of some extreme weather events. Confidence is strongest in attributing types of extreme events that are influenced by climate change through a well-understood physical mechanism—for example, the more frequent heat waves that are closely connected to human-caused global temperature increases. Confidence is lower for other types of events, such as hurricanes, whose relationship to climate change is more complex and less understood at present. For any extreme event, the results of attribution studies hinge on how questions about the event’s causes are posed, and on the data, modeling approaches, and statistical tools chosen for the analysis. Read More here

PLEA Network

31 March 2016, Climate News Network, Science grapples with climate conundrums. New research illustrates that reactions of people, plants and animals to the changing climate are a key factor in unravelling the complexities of global warming. The evidence of a series of new studies shows that climate change is keeping the gurus guessing. Even when the grasslands become hotter and drier, the grass may still be green. And when summer temperatures rise and yields fall, it isn’t just because heat takes a toll of the crops, it is also because the farmers have decided to plant less, and plant less often. As economies slump, demand drops and oil prices plummet, then carbon dioxide emissions, paradoxically, start to soar again. And, against all intuition, you shouldn’t recharge an electric car at night when prices are low, because that could increase greenhouse gas emissions. Each study is a reminder that climate change is not a simple matter of atmospheric physics. The wild card, every time, is how people, plants and animals react to change. Read More here