Nat-n-Bio

The Medieval Warm Period in Southeast Uruguay … and Beyond (8 May 2012) The results of this paper add to the ever-expanding body of empirical findings testifying to the reality of the millennial-scale cycling of the planet’s climate, which after the passing of the Little Ice Age that followed the Medieval Warm Period is likely what has most recently ushered in the Current Warm Period… Read More Global Warming, Graminoid Grasses, and the Grazing Geese of Greenland (8 May 2012) How have rising temperatures impacted the grasses? … and how has the result impacted the geese? According[...] 

After two weeks of closed door negotiations, a U.N. preparatory committee has failed to reach consensus on a global plan of action, titled “The Future We Want,” to be adopted by a summit meeting of world leaders mid-June in Brazil. In an effort to break the deadlock, the PrepCom will give another shot at the zero draft when it holds an unscheduled five-day session beginning May 29. This will be a last ditch attempt to finalise the draft action plan. –Thalif Deen, IPS News, 7 May 2012 Representatives from governments negotiating the outcome document for the United Nations Sustainable[...] 

A new study using satellite mapping technology reveals there are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than previously thought. The results provide an important benchmark for monitoring the impact of environmental change on the population of this iconic bird, which breeds in remote areas that are very difficult to study because they often are inaccessible with temperatures as low as -58 degrees Fahrenheit. Recently reporting in the journal PLoS ONE, an international team of scientists describe how they used Very High Resolution satellite images to estimate the number of penguins at each[...] 

Joint letter from 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts to the current NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence about global warming. Joint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence HOUSTON, TX – April 10, 2012. 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question. The[...] 

The debate about climate change and its impact on polar bears has intensified with the release of a survey that shows the bear population in a key part of northern Canada is far larger than many scientists thought, and might be growing. The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as[...] 

The relatively pleasant global climate of the last 10,000 years is largely thanks to higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide By David Biello  | April 4, 2012 ICE MELT: Carbon dioxide likely trapped the extra heat responsible for the end of the last Ice Age, according to a new analysis. Image: Courtesy of Michele Koppes, University of British Columbia Roughly 20,000 years ago the great ice sheets that buried much of Asia, Europe and North America stopped their creeping advance. Within a few hundred years sea levels in some places had risen by as much as 10 meters—more than if the ice sheet[...] 

More peer-reviewed science contradicting the warming-alarmist “scientific consensus” was announced yesterday, as a new study shows that the well-documented warm period which took place in medieval times was not limited to Europe, or the northern hemisphere: it reached all the way to Antarctica. The research involved the development of a new means of assessing past temperatures, to add to existing methods such as tree ring analysis and ice cores. In this study, scientists analysed samples of a crystal called ikaite, which forms in cold waters. “Ikaite is an icy version of limestone,” explains[...] 

New UK Met Office global temperature data confirms that the world has not warmed in the past 15 years. Analysis by the GWPF of the newly released HadCRUT4 global temperature database shows that there has been no global warming in the past 15 years – a timescale that challenges current models of global warming.   The graph shows the global annual average temperature since 1997. No statistically significant trend can be discerned from the data. The only statistically acceptable conclusion to be drawn from the HadCRUT4 data is that between 1997 – 2011 it has remained constant, with[...] 

En la conferencia “Planeta bajo presión” –26 al 29 de marzo en Londres–, 3.000 expertos propondrán abordar los problemas ecológicos con una visión de conjunto, en lugar de tratar sus distintos aspectos de manera aislada. En junio, cuando tenga lugar la Cumbre de la Tierra en Río de Janeiro, Brasil –promovida bajo el nombre Río+20–, se celebrarán los veinte años de la primera Conferencia de Desarrollo Sustentable de las Naciones Unidas, un encuentro del cual surgió el Programa 21 y que preparó el camino para las convenciones de la o­nU alusivas al clima y a la biodiversidad.[...] 

by Eric Dennis The most frustrating thing about being a scientist skeptical of catastrophic global warming is that the other side is continually distorting what I am skeptical of. In his immodestly titled New York Review of Books article “Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong,” economist William Nordhaus presents six questions that the legitimacy of global warming skepticism allegedly rests on. Is the planet in fact warming? Are human influences an important contributor to warming? Is carbon dioxide a pollutant? Are we seeing a regime of fear for skeptical climate scientists? Are the[...]