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Climate Change is Killing the Oceans’ Microscopic ‘Lungs’
Steve Connor, Independent (UK) via Common Dreams
Global warming has begun to change the way microscopic plant life in the oceans absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – a trend that could lead to a dramatic increase in the heating power of the greenhouse effect.
Satellite data gathered over the past 10 years has shown for the first time that the growth of marine phytoplankton – the basis of the entire ocean food chain – is being adversely affected by rising sea temperatures.
Scientists have found that as the oceans become warmer, they are less able to support the phytoplankton that have been an important influence on moderating climate change.
The fear is that as sea temperatures continue to rise as a result of global warming, the loss of phytoplankton will lead to a positive-feedback cycle, where increases in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere leads to warmer oceans, and warmer oceans lead to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.
A team of American scientists used a Nasa satellite to study global concentrations of phytoplankton over the past two decades to see how ocean productivity – as measured by the density of chlorophyll, the pigment of photosynthesis – changes with sea temperatures.
The result was a clear link between warmer oceans and decreases in ocean productivity, said Michael Behrenfeld, professor of botany at Oregon State University and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
(7 Dec 2006)
Alps experiencing warmest time in 1,300 years
Associated Press via MSNBC
VIENNA, Austria – Europe’s Alpine region is going through its warmest period in 1,300 years, the head of an extensive climate study said Tuesday.
“We are currently experiencing the warmest period in the Alpine region in 1,300 years,” Reinhard Boehm, a climatologist at Austria’s Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics said.
Boehm based his comments on the results of a project conducted by a group of European institutes between March 2003 and August 2006. Their aim was to reconstruct the climate in the region encompassing the Rhone Valley in France to the west, Budapest, Hungary to the east, Tuscany, Italy to the south and Nuremberg, Germany to the north over the past 1,000 years.
(5 Dec 2006)
In the rice paddies of Sri Lanka, a new enemy: salt
Raekha Prasad, The Guardian
Rice is Sri Lanka’s staple food and paddy farming is the livelihood of 1.8 million families. But the changing climate is wiping out rice crops. Tales of rising temperatures and heavier rains are backed up by the country’s scientists, who have recorded some of the world’s biggest leaps in surface temperatures.
(9 Dec 2006)
Vast African lake levels dropping fast
CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP via Yahoo
At Jinja pier the rusty red hull of a Lake Victoria freighter sat barely afloat in water just six feet deep — and dropping. “The scientists have to explain this,” said ship’s engineer Gabriel Maziku.
Across the bay, at a fish packing plant, fishermen had to wade ashore with their Nile perch in flat-bottomed boats, and heave the silvery catch up to a jetty that soon may be on dry land and out of reach entirely. Looking on, plant manager Ravee Ramanujam wondered about what’s to come.
“Such a large body of water, dropping so fast,” he said.
At 27,000 square miles, the size of Ireland, Victoria is the greatest of Africa’s Great Lakes — the biggest freshwater body after Lake Superior. And it has dropped fast, at least six feet in the past three years, and by as much as a half-inch a day this year before November rains stabilized things.
(9 Dec 2006)
North Pole ice could vanish by 2040
AFP via Sydney Morning Herald
The ice sheet covering the North Pole and Arctic Ocean could recede and disappear completely in the northern summer months by 2040, researchers said today.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the Arctic’s future ice cover will undergo periods of relative stability followed by abrupt retreat, said a team of scientists of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Canada’s McGill University.
Only a small portion of the permanent ice pack would cling in the summer season around the northern coastline of Greenland and Canada, the researchers said in the Geophysical Research Letters magazine.
(12 Dec 2006)
