New Research

[knocker]

Well the study is already in New Research.

 

http://www.cicero.uio.no/webnews/index_e.aspx?id=11909

[knocker]

Role of external factors in the evolution of the ozone layer and stratospheric circulation in 21st century

 

Abstract.

The chemistry-climate model (CCM) SOCOL has been used to evaluate the contributions of the main anthropogenic factors to the simulated changes of ozone and stratospheric dynamics during the 21st century. As the main anthropogenic factors we consider the atmospheric concentration of the greenhouse gases (GHG), ozone depleting substances (ODS) and sea surface temperature and sea ice (SST/SI). The latter is considered here as an independent factor because the majority of the CCMs prescribe its evolution. We have performed three sets of "time slice" numerical experiments for the years 2000, 2050, and 2100 taking into account all factors separately and all together. The total column ozone increase during the first half of the 21st century is caused by the ODS, especially in the middle and high latitudes of both hemispheres. In the tropics and the extra tropical region of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) the SST/SI forcing plays a very important role in the evolution of atmospheric ozone during the second half of the 21st century. The GHG affect the temperature and ozone mainly in the upper stratosphere and in the lower stratosphere of the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere (SH). In the lower tropical stratosphere of the NH, the long-term changes of the temperature, zonal wind and the meridional circulation are controlled mainly by the SST/SI. The strong contribution of the SST/SI to the ozone and circulation changes in the future implies that some differences between the results by different CCMs could be caused by the applied SST/SI rather than by the CCM's deficiencies. We suggest taking this issue into account for the planning of the future model evaluation campaigns.

 

 

http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/4697/2013/acp-13-4697-2013.pdf

[Hiya]

and in the same day:

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-acid-ocean-arctics-soaring-co2-leaves-fish-and-hunters-gasping-for-life-8606805.html?google_editors_picks=true

What are the actual figures for this acidification which is making the Ocean 'toxic'.

It seems a mischievously worded piece making sweeping statements such as that but read it properly and it's the usual 'threatens' and 'coulds'

The play on 'acid' alone is pure hyperbole since they mean slightly less alkaline in fact

Also what is this 'soaring Arctic CO2' in the title about.

Has it soared significantly more than the same gradual climb observed elsewhere?

In short it sounds like another soundbite propaganda piece to be spread around the net by the converted, purpose being what exactly?

To frighten schoolchildren to the cause presumably, because anyone with any maturity can see it for what it is.

It's just more of the endless negativity and carping that the alarmists are so fond of.

 

 

and in the same day:

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-acid-ocean-arctics-soaring-co2-leaves-fish-and-hunters-gasping-for-life-8606805.html?google_editors_picks=true

Quoting a percentage increase in acidity did make me raise an eyebrow. This isn't normal scientific practice, but since pH is a log scale it doesn't lend itself to pin up headline numbers, in addition they probably want things to increase rather than decrease for PR reasons. "35% increase in acidity" is just so much more sellable to the public than "a decrease in pH from [ca] pH 8.2 to pH 8.05". Edited May 9, 2013 by Hiya

[knocker]

It is important to remember the definition of alkalinity as the concentration of hydrogen carbonate and carbonate ions. It is not a measure of the pH or how alkaline sea water is. Once this is recognised, it is easy to appreciate that sea water alkalinity and acidity change in the same direction: where the the total dissolved inorganic carbon concentration (DIC) is high, so are alkalinity and acidity (low pH); conversely, where the DIC is low, so are alkalinity and acidity. 

Edited May 9, 2013 by knocker

[Gray-Wolf]

The other danger this study highlights is the speed of change? Most life will adapt (or relocate) if the pace of change is slow or 'natural'. The design of the critters/plants must have accounted for this over their evolution? Across the globe we are seeing populations crash due to the speed of change in their environment, some to the point of extinction.

 

Apply a slow loading to a branch and the bough will withstand it dump the same forcing over an instant and the bough breaks.

 

Should our current warming have a natural driver then why has nature not adapted to this 'long period' driver?

[Methuselah]

The other danger this study highlights is the speed of change? Most life will adapt (or relocate) if the pace of change is slow or 'natural'. The design of the critters/plants must have accounted for this over their evolution? Across the globe we are seeing populations crash due to the speed of change in their environment, some to the point of extinction.

 

Apply a slow loading to a branch and the bough will withstand it dump the same forcing over an instant and the bough breaks.

 

Should our current warming have a natural driver then why has nature not adapted to this 'long period' driver?

But, that's assuming that all 'natural' drivers are 'long period'?

[Gray-Wolf]

Hi Pete! Sorry i was referring to the past 100yrs of change that some folk are claiming to be 'naturally driven' be it Uber long Cycle Solar variability or long period 'collisions 'of other earth bound forcings. All such forcings must have occurred hundreds of times over the past 55 million years but appear to leave no record of their impacts?

 

Future generations will see the tell tale signs of this warming around the globe so why don't we see evidence of past 'warmings' with similar reasons driving them?

 

Just the rate of extinction events through the period marks it as 'special' in the geologic record?

 

I digress, what I am saying is this rapid a  warming, and release of CO2 into the atmosphere, does not appear anywhere else in the geological record?

 

Even 55 million years ago CO2 hikes took thousands of years to rise to our present levels (and not just 100yrs!)  I think some folk forget this when they look at past warming where (we now know) warming and GHG's rise together (with a little lead from CO2). If you work over 1,000yr time scales then you'd see the impact of our current level of emmisions (and sea level rises/ice loss) but, as it is, folk seem to think it should have an 'instant' response and so ask about 'lack of warming or sea level rise (we seem to be seeing the ice loss?)

[knocker]

Climate variability and outbreaks of infectious diseases in Europe

 

Several studies provide evidence of a link between vector-borne disease outbreaks and El Niño driven climate anomalies. Less investigated are the effects of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Here, we test its impact on outbreak occurrences of 13 infectious diseases over Europe during the last fifty years, controlling for potential bias due to increased surveillance and detection. NAO variation statistically influenced the outbreak occurrence of eleven of the infectious diseases. Seven diseases were associated with winter NAO positive phases in northern Europe, and therefore with above-average temperatures and precipitation. Two diseases were associated with the summer or spring NAO negative phases in northern Europe, and therefore with below-average temperatures and precipitation. Two diseases were associated with summer positive or negative NAO phases in southern Mediterranean countries. These findings suggest that there is potential for developing early warning systems, based on climatic variation information, for improved outbreak control and management

 

 

http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130503/srep01774/pdf/srep01774.pdf

[knocker]

Contrail ice particles in aircraft wakes and their climatic importance

Abstract

[1] Measurements of gaseous (NO, NO_y, SO₂, HONO) and ice particle concentrations in young contrails in primary and secondary wakes of aircraft of different sizes (B737, A319, A340, A380) are used to investigate ice particle formation behind aircraft. The gas concentrations are largest in the primary wake and decrease with increasing altitude in the secondary wake, as expected for passive trace gases and aircraft-dependent dilution. In contrast, the measured ice particle concentrations were found larger in the secondary wake than in the primary wake. The contrails contain more ice particles than expected for previous black carbon (soot) estimates. The ice concentrations may result from soot induced ice nucleation for a soot number emission index of 10¹⁵ kg^-1. For a doubled ice particle concentration in young contrails, a contrail cirrus model computes about 60% increases of global radiative forcing by contrail cirrus because of simultaneous increases in optical depth, age and cover.

 

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50539/abstract

Edited May 9, 2013 by knocker

[knocker]

Ice-free Arctic may be in our future, say UMass-Amherst, international researchers

AMHERST, Mass., USA; COLOGNE, Germany; MAGADAN, Russia – Analyses of the longest continental sediment core ever collected in the Arctic, recently completed by an international team led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, provide "absolutely new knowledge" of Arctic climate from 2.2 to 3.6 million years ago.

 

"While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands. As if reading a detective novel, we can go back in time and reconstruct how the Arctic evolved with only a few pages missing here and there," says Brigham-Grette.

 

Results of analyses that provide "an exceptional window into environmental dynamics" never before possible were published this week in Science and have "major implications for understanding how the Arctic transitioned from a forested landscape without ice sheets to the ice- and snow-covered land we know today," she adds.

Their data come from analyzing sediment cores collected in the winter of 2009 from ice-covered Lake El'gygytgyn, the oldest deep lake in the northeast Russian Arctic, located 100 km north of the Arctic Circle. "Lake E" was formed 3.6 million years ago when a meteorite, perhaps a kilometer in diameter, hit the Earth and blasted out an 11-mile (18 km) wide crater. It has been collecting sediment layers ever since. Luckily for geoscientists, it lies in one of the few Arctic areas not eroded by continental ice sheets during ice ages, so a thick, continuous sediment record was left remarkably undisturbed. Cores from Lake E reach back in geologic time nearly 25 times farther than Greenland ice cores that span only the past 140,000 years.

 

"One of our major findings is that the Arctic was very warm in the middle Pliocene and Early Pleistocene [~ 3.6 to 2.2 million years ago] when others have suggested atmospheric CO2 was not much higher than levels we see today. This could tell us where we are going in the near future. In other words, the Earth system response to small changes in carbon dioxide is bigger than suggested by earlier climate models," the authors state.

 

The new Lake E paleoclimate reconstructions and climate modeling are consistent with estimates made by other research groups that support the idea that Earth's climate sensitivity to CO2 may well be higher than suggested by the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

 

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-05/uoma-iam050313.php

Edited May 9, 2013 by knocker

[Polar Maritime]

[knocker]

Arctic sea ice reduction and European cold winters in CMIP5 climate change experiments

Abstrect

[1] European winter climate and its possible relationship with the Arctic sea ice reduction in the recent past and future as simulated by the models of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) is investigated, with focus on the cold winters. While Europe will warm overall in the future, we find that episodes of cold months will continue to occur and there remains substantial probability for the occurrence of cold winters in Europe linked with sea ice reduction in the Barents and Kara Sea sector. A pattern of cold-European warm-Arctic anomaly is typical for the cold events in the future, which is associated with the negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation. These patterns, however, differ from the corresponding patterns in the historical period, and underline the connection between European cold winter events and Arctic sea ice reduction.

 

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL053338/abstract

Edited May 9, 2013 by knocker

[Coast]

 

The climate of Tibet - Pole-land

 

The world’s third-largest area of ice is about to undergo a systematic investigation

 

OF ALL the transitions brought about on the Earth’s surface by temperature change, the melting of ice into water is the starkest. It is binary. And for the land beneath, the air above and the life around, it changes everything. That is the main reason climatologists are interested in the Earth’s north and south poles. The waxing and waning of the ice provides an unambiguous signal of what is going on—and it is a signal which can be read in rocks a billion years old almost as easily as it can be observed today. But the poles are only two examples. Another would be welcome. And there is one. 

 

Though the amount of ice on the plateau of Tibet and its surrounding mountains, such as the Himalayas, Karakoram and Pamirs, is a lot smaller than that at the poles, it is still huge. The area’s 46,000 glaciers cover 100,000 square kilometres (40,000 square miles)—about 6% of the area of the Greenland ice cap. Another 1.7m square kilometres is permafrost, which can be up to 130 metres deep. That is equivalent to 7% of the Arctic’s permafrost. Unlike the ice at the poles, the fate of this ice affects a lot of people directly. The area is known by some as Asia’s water tower, because it is the source of ten of the continent’s biggest rivers. About 1.5 billion people, in 12 countries, live in the basins of those rivers. Welcome, then, to the Earth’s “Third Poleâ€.

 

Until recently studies of the Third Pole were piecemeal—not surprising, given its remoteness, the altitude, the harsh weather and the fact that little love is lost between the countries among which it is divided. In 2009, however, Yao Tandong of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, in Beijing, Lonnie Thompson of the Ohio State University and Volker Mosbrugger of the Senckenberg World of Biodiversity, in Frankfurt, started an international programme involving these countries, called the Third Pole Environment (TPE). Last month, its fourth workshop met in Dehradun, India.

 

No longer poles apart

 

One question on everyone’s mind is whether the glaciers are retreating, as is happening in parts of the real polar regions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report in 2007 foolishly suggested that the Himalayas’ glaciers could disappear as early as 2035. Given the amount of ice they contain, it would take weather gods armed with blow torches to melt them that quickly, and this suggestion was rapidly discredited. Last year a study published in Nature by Thomas Jacob of the University of Colorado, in Boulder, showed that glaciers in the Himalayas and Karakoram had lost little ice between 2003 and 2010, and that those on the Tibetan plateau itself were growing.

 

Many glaciologists, however, take issue with this conclusion. As Tobias Bolch of the University of Zurich explained to the workshop, Dr Jacob’s article was based on seven years of measurements by a satellite mission called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). This used orbiting gravimeters to try to measure changes in ice cover from effects on the local gravitational field. According to Dr Bolch that approach suffered from two problems. One was the coarse resolving power of the satellites’ instruments. These could not detect changes in features less than 200km across. This is enough to study large regions with homogenous surfaces, such as the Arctic and the Antarctic (which GRACE did in fact do). But mountainous terrain has complex topography.

 

The second, more serious problem is that the satellites cannot tell the difference between solid and liquid water. If a glacier melts, but the water stays put as a lake, GRACE will see no change. Since the Tibetan plateau contains a lot of “closed†catchments, from which meltwater cannot easily escape, large amounts of melting could happen without GRACE detecting them.

 

Indeed, a survey by Dr Yao and his colleagues shows the area of the glacial lakes on the plateau has increased by about 26% since the 1970s. Dr Bolch suspects that GRACE has mistaken these expanding lakes for growing glaciers. Using another satellite, called ICESat, which employs lasers to measure not only the areas of glaciers, but also the elevations of their surfaces, Dr Bolch and his colleagues conclude that, far from advancing, many of Tibet’s glaciers are in headlong retreat.

 

But not all of them. What he saw supports work by Dr Yao and Dr Thompson, who have studied field reports and satellite photographs of more than 7,100 glaciers, collected over the past 30 years—not just the seven covered by GRACE. This study suggests a lot of regional variation.

 

Dr Yao and Dr Thompson found that some glaciers are indeed advancing. Most of these are in the Karakoram and the Pamirs, in the region’s west. But glaciers in the eastern Himalayas and the east of the Tibetan plateau are retreating fast. Those in the middle of the plateau are shrinking too, though less rapidly. The net effect is a big loss of ice over the period in question.

 

 

To try to work out what is going on, Dr Yao and Dr Thompson looked at weather records. Over the decades the Indian monsoon, which brings snow to the southern part of the plateau and the eastern and central Himalayas, has been getting weaker—though no one is sure why. The westerlies that bring snow to the Karakoram and the Pamirs have, however, been getting stronger. Westerlies are caused by hot air rising from the oceans and moving north (because heat travels from warm regions to cold ones) and east (because of the Coriolis force caused by the Earth’s rotation). Global warming means there is more hot air to rise, hence stronger westerlies.

 

The effects on glacier growth of these changes in wind strength are amplified by the season. The monsoon arrives in summer. The westerlies arrive in winter. A warming climate is more likely to stop summer snow accumulating than it is winter snow. Taken together, changes in wind strength and air temperature neatly account for what is going on. And it is not only glaciers that are melting. According to Wu Qingbai of the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, in Lanzhou, Tibet’s permafrost has been disintegrating rapidly for the past two decades.

 

A Himalayan task

 

One outcome of the workshop, then, has been to establish that the overall ice cover of the Third Pole, like that of the two real poles, is shrinking. Another is to show how precarious and piecemeal data about the area are. Its role as the source of so many rivers means that absence of data matters. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, of which both Dr Yao’s and Dr Wu’s institutes are part, has therefore set up a fund of 400m yuan ($65m) for research on the Third Pole and, crucially, a quarter of this is earmarked for work outside China.

 

The TPE’s researchers will now monitor a set of bellwether glaciers every six months. They will set up observatories to measure solar radiation, snowfall, meltwater and changes in the soil, as well as air temperature, pressure, humidity and wind. And they plan to take cores from the ice on the Tibetan plateau. These will let them reconstruct the area’s climate over the past few hundred thousand years. Together, these data will give them a better grip on how much—and why—the Third Pole is changing.

 

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21577341-worlds-third-largest-area-ice-about-undergo-systematic

 

[Methuselah]

They'd better hurry up with that, Coast...it'll all be gone, in another 25 years'! 

[Coast]

They'd better hurry up with that, Coast...it'll all be gone, in another 25 years'! 

 

Well as they said in the article, "it would take weather gods armed with blow torches to melt them that quickly"

[Gray-Wolf]

That was before they knew the Weather Gods had a 20yr head start on them though!!!

 

In some ways some good does come out of the Deniers push to discredit with climate science forced to review all evidence and have  latest techniques employed to gain better insights into what is occurring.

 

The next one will be the 162yr Greenland melt cycle....eventually the deniers will shut up as everything they utter, once it's had it's day in the Sun, turns out to help show AGW's growing impacts!

Edited May 10, 2013 by Gray-Wolf

[Polar Maritime]

Didn't know where to put this, hope it's in the correct thread..

 

 

Common source for Earth and Moon water

Chemical fingerprints of lunar rocks suggest both bodies already had their water at birth.

Measurements of the chemical composition of Moon rocks suggest that Earth was born with its water already present, rather than having the precious liquid delivered several hundred million years later by comets or asteroids. And in finding a common origin for the water on Earth and the Moon, the results highlight a puzzle over the leading theory for the formation of Earth's satellite.

 

http://www.nature.com/news/common-source-for-earth-and-moon-water-1.12963

[Polar Maritime]

Carbon dioxide passes symbolic mark

 

Daily measurements of CO2 at a US government agency lab on Hawaii have topped 400 parts per million for the first time.

The station, which sits on the Mauna Loa volcano, feeds its numbers into a continuous record of the concentration of the gas stretching back to 1958.

The last time CO2 was regularly above 400ppm was three to five million years ago - before modern humans existed.

Scientists say the climate back then was also considerably warmer than it is today.

Carbon dioxide is regarded as the most important of the manmade greenhouse gases blamed for raising the temperature on the planet over recent decades.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22486153

 

Edited May 10, 2013 by Polar Maritime

[knocker]

At least I will not be around to see what we are doing to the planet.

 

Large-scale expansion of agriculture in Amazonia may be a no-win scenario

 

Abstract

Using simplified climate and land-use models, we evaluated primary forests' carbon storage and soybean and pasture productivity in the Brazilian Legal Amazon under several scenarios of deforestation and increased CO₂. The four scenarios for the year 2050 that we analyzed consider (1) radiative effects of increased CO₂, (2) radiative and physiological effects of increased CO₂, (3) effects of land-use changes on the regional climate and (4) radiative and physiological effects of increased CO₂ plus land-use climate feedbacks. Under current conditions, means for aboveground forest live biomass (AGB), soybean yield and pasture yield are 179 Mg-C ha^−1, 2.7 Mg-grains ha^−1 and 16.2 Mg-dry mass ha^−1 yr^−1, respectively. Our results indicate that expansion of agriculture in Amazonia may be a no-win scenario: in addition to reductions in carbon storage due to deforestation, total agriculture output may either increase much less than proportionally to the potential expansion in agricultural area, or even decrease, as a consequence of climate feedbacks from changes in land use. These climate feedbacks, usually ignored in previous studies, impose a reduction in precipitation that would lead agriculture expansion in Amazonia to become self-defeating: the more agriculture expands, the less productive it becomes.

 

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024021/pdf/1748-9326_8_2_024021.pdf

Edited May 10, 2013 by knocker

[knocker]

Some interesting links here.

 

http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/index.php/2013/05/10/the-last-time-atmospheric-co2-was-at-400-parts-per-million-humans-didnt-exist/#.UY1YpC0vgqY.twitter

[Polar Maritime]

Meteorite crater reveals future of a globally warmed world

Lake sediments recorded the climate of the Arctic during the last period when CO2 levels were as high as today

 

Satellite view of lake El'gygytgyn the largest unglaciated deep lake in the Arctic, located in central Chukotka, in north-east Siberia, Russia. Photograph: Landsat 7/NASA

The future of a globally warmed world has been revealed in a remote meteorite crater in Siberia, where lake sediments recorded the strikingly balmy climate of the Arctic during the last period when greenhouse gas levels were as high as today.

Unchecked burning of fossil fuels has driven carbon dioxide to levels not seen for 3m years when, the sediments show, temperatures were 8C higher than today, lush forests covered the tundra and sea levels were up to 40m higher than today.

"It's like deja vu," said Prof Julie Brigham-Grette, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the new research analysing a core of sediment to see what temperatures in the region were between 3.6 and 2.2m years ago. "We have seen these warm periods before. Many people now agree this is where we are heading."

"It shows a huge warming – unprecedented in human history," said Prof Scott Elias, at Royal Holloway University of London, and not involved in the work. "It is a frightening experiment we are conducting with our climate."

The sediments have been slowly settling in Lake El'gygytgyn since it was formed 3.6m years ago, when a kilometre-wide meteorite blasted a crater 100km north of the Arctic circle. Unlike most places so far north, the region was never eroded by glaciers so a continuous record of the climate has lain undisturbed ever since. "It's a phenomenal record," said Prof Peter Sammonds, at University College London. "It is also an incredible achievement [the study's work], given the remoteness of the lake." Sixteen shipping containers of equipment had to be hauled 90km over snow by bulldozers from the nearest ice road, used by gold miners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/09/meteorite-crater-global-warming

[knocker]

Late Miocene decoupling of oceanic warmth and atmospheric carbon dioxide forcing

Deep-time palaeoclimate studies are vitally important for developing a complete understanding of climate responses to changes in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (that is, the atmospheric partial pressure of CO₂, p_co2)¹. Although past studies have explored these responses during portions of the Cenozoic era (the most recent 65.5 million years (Myr) of Earth history), comparatively little is known about the climate of the late Miocene (~12–5 Myr ago), an interval with p_co2 values of only 200–350 parts per million by volume but nearly ice-free conditions in the Northern Hemisphere^{2, 3} and warmer-than-modern temperatures on the continents⁴. Here we present quantitative geochemical sea surface temperature estimates from the Miocene mid-latitude North Pacific Ocean, and show that oceanic warmth persisted throughout the interval of low p_co2 ~12–5 Myr ago. We also present new stable isotope measurements from the western equatorial Pacific that, in conjunction with previously published data^{5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}, reveal a long-term trend of thermocline shoaling in the equatorial Pacific since ~13 Myr ago. We propose that a relatively deep global thermocline, reductions in low-latitude gradients in sea surface temperature, and cloud and water vapour feedbacks may help to explain the warmth of the late Miocene. Additional shoaling of the thermocline after 5 Myr ago probably explains the stronger coupling between p_co2, sea surface temperatures and climate that is characteristic of the more recent Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs^{11, 12}.

 

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7401/full/nature11200.html

[knocker]

MEDICANE RISK IN A CHANGING CLIMATE^†

Abstract

[1] Medicanes or “Mediterranean hurricanes†are extreme cyclonic windstorms morphologically and physically similar to tropical cyclones. Owing to their potential destructiveness on the islands and continental coastal zones, medicane risk assessment is of paramount importance. With an average frequency of only 1–2 events per year and given the lack of systematic, multidecadal databases, an objective evaluation of the long-term risk of medicane-induced winds is impractical with standard methods. Also, there is increasing concern about the way these extreme phenomena could change in frequency or intensity as a result of human influences on climate. Here we apply a statistical-deterministic approach that entails the generation of thousands of synthetic storms, thus enabling a statistically robust assessment of the current and future risk. Fewer medicanes but a higher number of violent storms are projected at the end of the century compared to present, suggesting an increased probability of major economic and social impacts as the century progresses.

 

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrd.50475/abstract

Edited May 12, 2013 by knocker

[Gray-Wolf]

I did wonder about this years season throwing up a few 'rogues' that swing north pretty much after falling off Africa? Should ice loss mess with positioning of steering currents then we could see another year of either 're-curves' or just coast hugging TS's heading north?

[Interitus]

400ppm CO2 also confirmed at the AEMET Izana observatory on Tenerife http://izana.aemet.es/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=320%3Athe-co2-has-surpassed-the-threshold-of-400-ppm&catid=10%3Anews&Itemid=49〈=en