When it comes to using climate models to assess the causes of the increased amount of moisture in the atmosphere, it doesn't much matter if one model

Total amount of atmospheric water vapor over the oceans on July 4, 2009. The scale is 10° x 10° latitude/longitude. These results are from operational weather forecasts of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF).

They all come to the same conclusion: Humans are warming the planet, and this warming is increasing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
In new research appearing in the Aug. 10 online issue of the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and a group of international researchers found that model quality does not affect the ability to identify human effects on atmospheric water vapor.
“Climate model quality didn't make much of a difference,” said Benjamin Santer, lead author from LLNL's Program for Climate Modeling and Intercomparison. “Even with the computer models that performed relatively poorly, we could still identify a human effect on climate. It was a bit surprising. The physics that drive changes in water vapor are very simple and are reasonably well portrayed in all climate models, bad or good.”
The atmosphere's water vapor content has increased by about 0.4 kilograms per cubic meter (kg/m_) per decade since 1988, and natural variability alone can't explain this moisture change, according to Santer. “The most plausible explanation is that it's due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases,” he said.
More water vapor - which is itself a greenhouse gas - amplifies the warming effect of increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.Previous LLNL research had shown that human-induced warming of the planet has a pronounced effect on the atmosphere's total moisture content. In that study, the researchers had used 22 different computer models to identify a human “fingerprint” pattern in satellite measurements of water vapor changes. Each model contributed equally in the fingerprint analysis. “It was a true model democracy,” Santer said. “One model, one vote.” But in the recent study, the scientists first took each model and tested it individually, calculating 70 different measures of model performance. These “metrics” provided insights into how well the models simulated today's average climate and its seasonal changes, as well as on the size and geographical patterns of climate variability.This information was used to divide the original 22 models into various sets of “top ten” and “bottom ten” models. “When we tried to come up with a David Letterman type 'top ten' list of models,” Santer said, “we found that it's extremely difficult to do this in practice, because each model has its own individual strengths and weaknesses.”
Then the group repeated their fingerprint analysis, but now using only “top ten” or “bottom ten” models rather than the full 22 models. They did this more than 100 times, grading and ranking the models in many different ways. In every case, a water vapor fingerprint arising from human influences could be clearly identified in the satellite data.
“One criticism of our first study was that we were only able to find a human fingerprint because we included inferior models in our analysis,” said Karl Taylor, another LLNL co-author. “We've now shown that whether we use the best or the worst models, they don't have much impact on our ability to identify a human effect on water vapor.”
This new study links LLNL's “fingerprint” research with its long-standing work in assessing climate model quality. It tackles the general question of how to make best use of the information from a large collection of models, which often perform very differently in reproducing key aspects of present-day climate. This question is not only relevant for “fingerprint” studies of the causes of recent climate change. It is also important because different climate models show different levels of future warming. Scientists and policymakers are now asking whether we should use model quality information to weight these different model projections of future climate change.
“The issue of how we are going to deal with models of very different quality will probably become much more important in the next few years, when we look at the wide range of models that are going to be used in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” Santer said.
Other LLNL researchers include Karl Taylor, Peter Gleckler, Celine Bonfils, and Steve Klein. Other scientists contributing to the report include Tim Barnett and David Pierce from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Carl Mears and Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems; Wolfgang Brüggemann of the Universität Hamburg; Nathan Gillett of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis; Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Peter Stott of the Hadley Centre; and Mike Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a national security laboratory, with a mission to ensure national security and apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. link....

Ten Unnoticed Effects of Global Warming

The LiveScience Magazine has published a Top 10 global warming side-effects that not everyone knows about. Global warming is, actually, not only about ice melting in the Arctic and temperature rising. It could turn into very strange things. Here they are:
10. More aggravated and aggressive allergies (the "MAAAA")
People are experiencing more aggravated and aggressive allergy fits and, partly, experts blame the global warming. How are these things interrelated? Very simple: on one side there are changes in people's lifestyle, strengthened by pollution. The protection against allergens weakens and the results are allergies. On the other side - global warming. It made springs come earlier, thus plants bloom earlier too and produce more pollen. All of this results in a simple axiom: a longer spring equals a longer allergic season.
9. Change of the habitat
Small rodent forest animals are not to be seen on height we were used to see them for some time now. Probably, this happens because such animals as mice and squirrels move to higher elevations and, probably, this is also caused by global warming. A similar threat hangs over polar bears that live on sea ice, which gradually melts. What happens with this species, if their habitat disappears is not even a guess - it is a fact: they will disappear with the ice they live on.
8. The blooming ices
While everyone is concerned with the effects of the global warming across the places of human living, we forgot about those who live and bloom in the Arctic. Since the flora we used to see around us experienced difficulties, plants in the Arctic enjoy more and longer sun baths per year and since their usual habitat was 'under ice', they are eager to start s small forest on ice. Research has found higher levels of the form of the photosynthesis product chlorophyll in modern soils than in ancient soils. This fact demonstrates a small biological boom among the icy mountains.
7. Draining the lakes
Reports show at least 125 lakes disappeared in the Arctic, and only during the last few decades. Researches proved that the lakes have seeped through the soil. This happens due to the fact that the permafrost, a layer on the bottom of the lakes, which kept the waters in the basin, gradually melts. When the layer thawed out, the waters seeped into the soil. When these lakes disappear, the creatures, living in that lake, disappear too. A researcher compared this event with pulling the plug in the bathroom.
6. The Earth thawing underneath
Global warming is causing not only massive melting of the Arctic glaciers, but it makes the permanent frozen soils under the earth's surface thaw too. This process ends up in deformation of the grounds and no one can predict what form the upper layer of the earth would take. Among the after effects of these processes could be mentioned ruined building, railroads and highways.
5. "There will be only one"
Global warming tests everyone and if everything goes on as it does now, a natural selection will take place: "only the fittest will survive". With the early beginnings of springs and short winters plants bloom earlier (as mentioned in point 10), thus animals that wait until the plants' usual blooming time to start their migration might miss all the food. And only animals able to evolve and to reset their biologic clocks will make it to places of greenest grass and beautiful pastures. Ultimately, these species will be able to pass their genes to following generations, changing the genetic code according to current global situation.
Some traces of this kind of evolution can be already seen this year: in some regions, were the abnormal warm winter and an early spring have triggered a mass invasion of silkworm. These insects are eating everything green they see, thus destroying partly the crops and leaving forests leafless.
4. Lower density of the atmosphere
It is not a secret that emissions cause the most harm to our planet. The effects caused by carbon dioxide emissions do their dirty work even in the atmosphere's outmost layer. The air in the exosphere is very thin, yet still creating drag to slow down satellites, making engineering boost them up from time to time and bring them back on their orbit around the earth. However, the growing concentration of carbon dioxide in the exosphere makes this weak drag even weaker. When the carbon dioxide molecules collide in the lower layers of the atmosphere, they release heat, warming the air. Due to a smaller quantity of molecules in the upper layers, there is also less collision among molecules and the small amount of energy created radiates away. The conclusion is that with more carbon dioxide the more cooling occurs and the air settles in the exosphere. Thus the air concentration decreases, decreasing the drag with the satellites.
3. The growing mountains
After the beginning of the industrial era in the history of human race the mountains began a steadier growth. Although this fact might pass by unnoticed by hikers - it is a fact. The glaciers on top of the mountains have slowed down growth of the mountains with the immense weight of these masses of ice. Yet when they started to thaw, with the global warming as the main cause of this, the rocks are rebounding faster when there is nothing to push them down.
2. The memory doesn't remain
There are not so many 'live' monuments remaining, which prove the existence of ancient civilizations. These monuments are not as stable and strong as the engineering wonders of today. Thus the extreme weather and the rising waters might write the final lines in the book of history of these ancient monuments. The process has already started as floods have already damaged the amazing 600-year-old Sukhothai site - once the capital of the Thai kingdom.
1. Forests burning
Global warming means not only melting Arctic ices, but wild forests fires too. It was observed that over the past several decades more fires have deserted the countryside in the Western states of the USA. The forest fires are now more intense and they last for longer period of times. Experts say that the fact that now the spring come in the middle of the winter, the snow melts earlier, leaving longer periods for draught in the forests, which increases the risk of their ignition during this dry period.
Perhaps, people should not be so ignorant about this obvious problem of global warming, as even the leaders of the G8, on their last meeting in Germany, have intensively discussed the problem of global warming and harmful emission into the atmosphere. link....

Spectacular Melting Of The Largest French Glacier

Spot-5 satellite image: in this 3D view of the Lapparent nunatak (area of rock surrounded by ice), the position of the ice in 1963 and in 2001 has been localized. This has made it possible to estimate glacier thinning (blue arrows).

Located over 12 000 kilometers from the Alps, the Kerguelen Islands are home to the largest French glacier, the Cook ice cap (which had an area of around 500 km2 in 1963). By combining historical information with recent satellite data, the glaciologists at the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography (Université Paul Sabatier / CNRS / CNES / IRD) have observed increasingly rapid shrinkage of the ice.

Over the last 40 years, the Cook ice cap has thinned by around 1.5 meters per year, its area has decreased by 20%, and retreat has been twice as rapid since 1991. Their work has been just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
The Kerguelen Islands are located in the southern Indian Ocean, and numerous glaciers cover the highest areas of the islands. The first studies carried out in this exceptional natural laboratory for French research showed an initially slow retreat of the Ampère glacier (one of the outlet glaciers of the Cook ice cap) between 1800 and 1965, subsequently becoming much faster. Since 1974, in situ monitoring of the Cook ice cap has no longer been carried out. However, observations made from space between 1991 and 2006 have enabled scientists to collect data from this relatively inaccessible area.
Glaciologists from the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography (LEGOS - Université Toulouse 3/CNRS/IRD/CNES) began their work by compiling a complete inventory of the glaciers on the Kerguelen Islands from an Institut Géographique National (IGN) map published in 1967. At that time, these glaciers covered over 700 km2, including 500 km2 for the Cook ice cap alone.
The scientists then used Spot and Landsat satellite images to update this inventory for the years 1991, 2001 and 2003, and to quantify glacial retreat. By 1991, the Cook ice cap covered a mere 448 km2, and by 2003 this had fallen to 403 km2. It has thus lost 20% of its area in 40 years, and it has been retreating twice as fast since 1991. In addition, the researchers estimated the volume loss (or mass balance) of the Cook ice cap over the last 40 years.
This mass balance accurately characterizes the response of the glacier to climatic variation (temperature, precipitation), and can be used to compare glacier response in various areas of the world. For instance, the Cook ice cap has thinned by as much as 300 to 400 meters in glacier tongues at low altitude, whereas variations in thickness appear to be smaller in high regions. On average, for the whole ice cap since 1963, thinning reached 1.5 metres per year, which is a very high value when compared to other glaciers in the world. In the last 40 years, the ice cap has lost about 22% of its volume. This thinning also appears to have been accelerating over the recent period.
The glaciers in the Kerguelen islands were already retreating in the 1960s, and their decline over the past 40 years cannot be attributed only to recent warming partly due to human activities. Part of this retreat can in fact be explained by a delayed response of these glaciers to the natural warming that followed the Little Ice Age (a cold period that ended between 1850 and 1900). However, the recent acceleration of ice wastage is doubtless connected to high temperatures and low precipitation since the beginning of the 1980s. link....

Climate-caused Biodiversity Booms And Busts In Ancient Plants And Mammals

A period of global warming from 53 million to 47 million years ago strongly influenced plants and animals, spurring a biodiversity boom in western North America, researchers from three research museums report in a paper recently published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Today, the middle of Wyoming is a vast desert, and a few antelope and deer are all you see," said lead author Michael Woodburne, honorary curator of geology at the Museum of Northern Arizona. "But 50 million years ago, when temperatures were at their highest, that area was a tropical rainforest teeming with lemur-like primates, small dawn horses and a number of small forest rodents and other mammals. In fact, there were more species of mammals living in the western part of North America at that time than at any other time."
Woodburne and co-authors Gregg Gunnell of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology and Richard Stucky of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science examined the records of ancient temperatures and information on the fossil plants and mammals that inhabited North America during the Eocene epoch and found that diversity increased and declined with rising and falling temperatures.
The Eocene began about 56 million years ago with a short period of increased warming, when many modern groups of mammals first appeared in North America, probably by emigrating from other areas. The period the researchers studied, called the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO), began about three million years later and included a long-term temperature increase coupled with a long-term rise in diversity.
During that time, as mean annual temperature warmed from about 60 degrees Fahrenheit to 73 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius to 23 degrees Celsius), vegetation changed, with many new plant forms appearing, and mammal diversity increased from 90 genera to an all-time high of 104 genera, the researchers found.
"This is also the part of the Eocene when we see the most new appearances of mammals due to evolutionary innovation, rather than immigration," said Stucky, who is curator of paleoecology and evolution at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Some 30 new rodents, carnivores, primates and artiodactyls (the group that includes sheep, goats, camels, pigs, cows, deer, giraffes and antelopes, among others) appeared on the scene.
But then, as temperatures declined again, the number of mammal genera dropped to a low of 84, with the complete loss of many mammalian groups that previously were well represented. Lower temperatures and a dryer climate continued to influence mammal and plant evolution as savanna habitats began to emerge.
Until this research, the consensus among paleontologists who study North American vertebrates was that climate played only a background role in supporting the evolution of mammals during the Paleocene and Eocene (65 million to 35 million years ago) and that only at the end of the Eocene, when Antarctic glaciations began, did Earth's climate deteriorate enough to cause observable changes in land mammal diversity.
"Our paper documents the fact that global change affected plants and animals on a wide scale," said Gunnell, an associate research scientist and vertebrate collection coordinator at the U-M Museum of Paleontology. "Some plants and animals flourished while others suffered."
When considering today's global warming, Woodburne said, "The question is, on which side of this picture will mankind be found?" link....

Global Warming Health Threats

Global warming is already affecting human health around the world. The impact will be widespread, and plans to cope are needed now.Devastating heat waves sweeping across continents. Poisonous plants producing more potent toxins. Air quality plummeting on summer days. Disease-carrying insects swarming mountain villages.These scenarios aren't the recipe for a summer disaster movie. They're some of the widespread health consequences caused by global warming. And they're happening right now, all over the world. (For examples of climate-related health effects and what's being done to cope with them, explore the map at the right.)Scientists say that as earth's thermostat continues to climb, human health problems will only become more frequent. The threats range from emerging tropical diseases to life-threatening temperatures to an increase in allergies and asthma.

Feeling the Impact

Here are some examples of what's already happening due to global warming:

• In the summer of 2003, an intense heat wave was blamed for an estimated 35,000 deaths across large swaths of Europe. A study says that global warming has doubled the likelihood of heat waves of this magnitude.
• Scientists found in 2008 that poison ivy vines have grown 10 times denser near Savannah, Ga., over the last 20 years. Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes poison ivy to grow larger and produce stronger irritants.
• Six young men and boys were killed by fatal parasites in 2007 at Lake Havasu, Ariz., after they swam in water infested with a heat-loving amoeba. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expect more of these illnesses as global temperatures rise.
• Mosquitoes that carry malaria were found at never-before-seen elevations on Mount Kenya in 2006. As temperatures rise, higher elevations become more hospitable for mosquitoes -- and more dangerous for local inhabitants.

Future health problems can also be expected from sea-level rise, increased flooding and stronger storms, among other climate-related threats.

Action Needed Now

There is still time to avert the worst of the health threats by taking aggressive action now to cut global warming pollution. Even so, health care systems should begin preparing so that communities can be protected as temperatures rise.Local strategies already in the works include heat-wave warning systems and response plans for cities, improved infrastructure in vulnerable coastal areas, and green buildings that stay cool and save energy. But a greater local, national and international understanding of the health risks is needed. There's no time to wait.NRDC is working to research the links between global warming and health so that the public and policymakers can better understand the risks. We're also taking steps to prepare the public health system and promote solutions that will offer added health benefits by reducing both greenhouse gases and toxic pollution. link....

Biodiversity

Steps For Conserving Biodiversity- Something For Everyone

Steps for conserving biodiversity are not just something for national governments to legislate into action. There are many steps for conserving biodiversity that can be taken at local (both organizational and individual) levels.Let's first look at steps for conserving biodiversity that governments can take. First and foremost, they can acknowledge that the rights of local populations take precedence over development projects that strip an areas resources with little or no benefit to the people the area sustains. They can require businesses to recycle and reuse things. They can require megafarming corporations, lumber companies, and other agribusinesses to allow parts of their land to lie fallow for specific amounts of time, or require crop rotation so that the land is not depleted and has time to recover. They can set aside areas where no farming or cutting is done, to preserve at least some of our natural heritage. They can address pollution of our bodies of water by drug companies and penalize those who dump toxic wastes into our waters. They can regulate overfishing and farming of seafood.Additionally, governments should also be addressing the role played in the destruction of forests and biodiversity by international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, who act as if they were a law unto themselves. They can better supervise aid organizations to ensure that aid delivered actually gets into the hands of the people it is intended for.Steps for conserving biodiversity that locals can take include organizing to fight encroachment by megacorporations and to educate people to the particular threats to their areas. Such education would also include things that individuals can do to lessen their impact on the planet.Local businesses can enforce and encourage recycling measures, and not replace equipment just because there is something new and trendy on the market. They can encourage their employees to learn about biodiversity and fund internships within the communities they serve.Individuals can take many steps for conserving biodiversity. They can support local wildlife organizations, or volunteer at their local wildlife preserve or botanical garden. They can reduce their use of energy and gasoline. They can avoid using plastic grocery bags or recycle paper that has been used on one side only into scrap pads. While many of these steps for conserving biodiversity seem too small on their own to be effective, the cumulative effects are considerable. With education, these are things that can and should be done by us while we try to get our governments to take the steps they can. If an entire populace is practicing biodiversity conservation, it becomes that much harder to ignore. link....