A Year of Weather Extremes : 2012

A Year of Weather Extremes - From unprecedented drought to killer cold, 2012 was a year of weather extremes.

In 2012, the United States suffered 11 weather-related events that cost $1 billion apiece, according to a preliminary list released Thursday (Dec. 20) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Economic losses for Hurricane Sandy and the yearlong drought are still being calculated, but NOAA estimates 2012 will surpass 2011 in terms of aggregate costs for disasters (exceeding $60 billion).

Severe weather disasters hit beyond the United States, too, as super typhoons slammed into Asia and a cold snap froze Europe's rivers. Globally, countries battled heat waves and droughts.

This GOES-13 satellite image was captured on Oct. 31 at 1240 UTC as Sandy's circulation was winding down over Pennsylvania. Sandy had been downgraded a remnant low pressure area.

The World Meteorological Organization projects 2012 to be the warmest year on record since 1850, even with the cooling effects of La Niña in the early months. And 2013 could be even hotter, the WMO estimates.

Cold lows and hot highs

Winter's extremes included January's record snowfall in Alaska, which hit as the rest of the country sauntered around in T-shirts. In February, Europe suffered through a cold snap that killed hundreds of people and froze the continent's rivers and canals, interrupting commerce.

An early, April start to tornado season raised fears of another devastating series of twisters, as happened in 2011. But this year, the funnels fizzled out. In the end, 2012 may go down as the year with the fewest tornadoes on record.

The combination of an ongoing drought and a crippling heat wave throughout the summer had lethal effects on people, animals and crops. Nebraska experienced its driest year since record keeping started more than a century ago, according to NOAA. Colorado suffered its worst fire season in more than a decade, with western wildfires charring 9.15 million acres (37,000 square kilometers) as of November, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Super storms

But 2012 may ultimately stand out in the history books mostly due to its continent-sized storms, which relentlessly pounded coastlines in the Atlantic and the Pacific.

In Asia, super typhoons swept across Korea, China and Japan like cars on a train, one after another, causing record flooding. Even into December, Super Typhoon Bopha destroyed homes in the Philippines, claiming more than 1,000 lives.

The Atlantic hurricane season produced 19 named storms, well above the yearly average of 12, according to a statement from NOAA. Two tropical storms, Alberto and Beryl, developed in Maybefore the season even officially began.

However, 2012 was the seventh consecutive year that no major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5) hit the United States. But Hurricane Sandy showed it doesn't take a big hurricane to make a major impact.

Sandy, which was a post-tropical cyclone when it made landfall, will go down in the record books as the second-costliest storm in U.S. history. Its tremendous storm surge, coupled with a high tide, wreaked havoc along the New Jersey and New York coastlines. Sandy registered the lowest barometric pressure in the history of the Northeast.

A higher number of named storms and hurricanes than predicted hit the Atlantic basin, in large part because El Niño, which likely would have suppressed overall storm activity, never materialized as anticipated by many climate models, NOAA said in a statement.

Yet several storms this year went largely unnoticed because they stayed out over the Atlantic. A persistent jet stream pattern over the eastern portion of the country helped steer many of this season's storms away from the United States, according to NOAA.

Outlook for 2013

Instead of El Niño, NOAA predicts that the neutral phase of the El Niño/ La Niña Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index will prevail through spring. Jokingly called "La Nada," it is the middle ground between El Niño and La Niña (the pattern associated with cool water in the equatorial Pacific).

The lack of a reliable weather pattern to hang a prediction on makes forecasting harder. The temperature outlook through March indicates above-normal temperatures for the southern half of the continental United States, except for coastal southern California, Florida and part of the southeast coast, according to the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center.

The center also predicts colder-than-normal temperatures in the northern Rocky Mountains, northern Great Plains and southern Alaska. ( LiveScience.com )

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A Memorable Year for Weather : 2012

A Memorable Year for Weather - Drought, wildfire, hurricanes, a deadly typhoon and cold snap — this year had a lot to offer in terms of weather news.

Weather historian Christopher C. Burt, who blogs for the meteorological website Weather Underground, has been keeping tabs on events this year, and the headliner is clear, he said: Unusually warm temperatures, most notably across the continental United States.

We take a look back at the most significant weather of 2012:

A striking image of Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn as Hurricane Sandy approaches on Oct. 29, 2012.

Record-breaking warmth:

The data for the last of the year isn't in yet, but this year looks "virtually certain" take the title of warmest year on record for the lower 48 states, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Burt follows temperature observations for 300 evenly disbursed U.S. cities or sites with records going back into the 19th century. Of these, 22 reached their all-time highs this year, most during the heat wave that hit much of the country in late June and early July. Only the Pacific Northwest did not share in this year's exceptional warmth, Burt said.

It was also a warm year for the planet, though not to quite the same degree. As of November, 2012 ranked as the eighth warmest for global average temperature, NOAA reported on Thursday (Dec. 20).

Burt also tracks temperatures for countries, and he noted all-time high records in July and August for five countries, three in Europe, one in Asia and one in Africa.

Summer in March:

One notable heat wave this year hit the Great Lakes, Midwest, northern New England, New Brunswick and Novia Scotia in March, bringing scores of record-breaking temperatures for this time of year. In "The Nation's Icebox," International Falls, Mich., the low temperature during this heat wave — which bottomed out at 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.6 degrees Celsius) on March 20 — tied the previous high for that date, according to the Weather Underground.

Hottest month on record in the U.S.: Until this year, July 1936, during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, held the record for hottest month on record in the lower 48 states going back to 1895, but this July's heat surpassed even that record, surprising Burt, who told LiveScience in July, "1936 is probably unassailable frankly."

Drought:

The unusually warm weather contributed to drought across much of the country this year, in some places, such as Texas, for the second consecutive year. While devastating, particularly to agriculture, this year's drought has not been unprecedented. It is the most extensive since the 1930s, affecting over half of the country for a majority of the year, NOAA reported on Dec. 20.

A fiery year:

In turn, drought and heat this year contributed to the third worst wildfire season for the western United States, where more than 9 million acres (3.6 million hectares) burned. Colorado and Oregon saw some of the worst fires.

Big storms:

Hurricane Isaac made landfall at the end of August in southeastern Louisiana, seven years after Hurricane Katrina's arrival, which flooded New Orleans. This time, however, the city, with its fortified protection system, was spared the devastation. Later in the year, Superstorm Sandy, a hybrid hurricane and winter storm, pummeled the East Coast, bringing an unprecedented storm tide to The Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. A sustained cluster of violent thunderstorms, called a derecho event, over central, eastern and northeastern states also made NOAA's list of billion-dollar-plus disasters; 28 people died as a result of these storms in late June and early July.

Biggest killers:

The deadliest weather event of the year goes to Typhoon Bopha, which struck the Philippines in early December. The death toll has surpassed 1,000, with hundreds more missing, including fishermen who were out to sea when the typhoon — a tropical cyclone in the western Pacific or Indian Oceans — struck, according to media reports. But by comparison, the deadliest recorded tropical cyclone hit Bangladesh in November 1970, killing half-a-million people, Burt said. The cold wave that hit central and eastern Europe early in the year ranked as the second deadliest event of 2012, killing 824 people, Burt said.

Cold, but not unprecedented:

In spite of its severity, this cold wave failed to set records. In fact, Burt said he is not aware of any significant cold records that were set during 2012. However, the coldest temperature for the year worldwide was recorded on Sept. 16 at Vostok, Antarctica, at minus 119.6 degrees F (minus 84.2 degrees C), according to Burt.

A slow year for tornados:

After the devastation caused by tornados in 2011, this year has been relatively quiet. In fact, 2012 is on track to have the lowest tornado death count in a couple of decades, Burt said.

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Asteroid Dust Could Fight Climate Change on Earth

Asteroid Dust Could Fight Climate Change on Earth — To combat global warming, scientists in Scotland now suggest an out-of-this-world solution — a giant dust cloud in space, blasted off an asteroid, which would act like a sunshade for Earth.

The world is warming and the climate is changing. Although many want to prevent these shifts by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat from the sun, some controversially suggest deliberating manipulating the planet's climate with large-scale engineering projects, commonly called geoengineering.

 

Scientists propose a dust cloud made of asteroid material could help to cool Earth. Here, an artist's depiction of what a spacecraft spewing asteroid dust might look like.

Instead of altering the climate by targeting either the oceans or the atmosphere, some researchers have suggested geoengineering projects that would affect the entire planet from space. For instance, projects that reduced the amount of solar radiation Earth receives by 1.7 percent could offset the effects of a global increase in temperature of 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C). The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has noted climate models suggest average global temperatures will likely rise by 2 to 11.5 degrees F (1.1 to 6.4 degrees C) by the end of this century.

"A 1.7 percent reduction is very small and will hardly be noticeable on Earth," said researcher Russell Bewick, a space scientist at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. "People sometimes get the idea of giant screens blocking the entire sun. This is not the case ... as [the device] is constantly between the sun and the Earth, it acts merely as a very light shade or filter."

Shading Earth

One proposal to shade the Earth from the sun would place giant mirrors in space. The main problem with this concept is the immense cost and effort needed either to build and launch such reflectors or to construct them in outer space — the current cost to launch an object into low Earth orbit runs into thousands of dollars per pound. Another would use blankets of dust to blot out the sun, just as clouds do for Earth. These offer the virtue of simplicity compared with mirrors, but run the risk of getting dispersed over time by solar radiation and the gravitational pull of the sun, moon and planets. [Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas]

Now instead of having a dust cloud floating by itself in space, researchers suggest an asteroid could essentially gravitationally anchor a dust cloud in space to block sunlight and cool the Earth.

"I would like to make it clear that I would never suggest geoengineering in place of reducing our carbon emissions," Bewick told LiveScience. Instead, he said, "We can buy time to find a lasting solution to combat Earth’s climate change. The dust cloud is not a permanent cure, but it could offset the effects of climate change for a given time to allow slow-acting measures like carbon capture to take effect."

The idea would be to place an asteroid at Lagrange point L1, a site where the gravitational pull of the sun and the Earth cancel out. This point is about four times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

The researchers suggest outfitting a near-Earth asteroid with a "mass driver," a device consisting of electromagnets that would hurl asteroid-derived matter away from the giant rock. The mass driver could serve both as a rocket to push the asteroid to the L1 point and as an engine to spew out sun-shielding dust. [5 Reasons to Care About Asteroids]

The researchers calculate that the largest near-Earth asteroid, 1036 Ganymed, could maintain a dust cloud large enough to block out 6.58 percent of the solar radiation that would normally reach Earth, more than enough to combat any current global warming trends. Such a cloud would be about 11 million-billion pounds (5 million-billion kilograms) in mass and about 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) wide.

Ganymed has a mass of about 286 million-billion lbs. (130 million-billion kg). An asteroid of this size might make one think of disaster movies, such as "Armageddon"; however, "rather than destroying the Earth, it could be used to help mankind," Bewick said.

Asteroid dust challenges

The main challenge of this proposal would be pushing an asteroid the size of Ganymed to the sun-Earth L1 point.

"The company Planetary Resources recently announced their intention to mine asteroids," Bewick said. "The study that they base their plans on reckons that it will be possible to capture an asteroid with a mass of 500,000 kilograms (1.1 million lbs.) by 2025. Comparing this to the mass of Ganymed makes the task of capturing it seem unfeasible, at least in everything except the very far term. However, smaller asteroids could be moved and clustered at the first Lagrange point."

Safety is another concern.

"A very large asteroid is a potential threat to Earth, and therefore great care and testing would be required in the implementation of this scenario," Bewick said. "Due to this, the political challenges would probably match the scale of the engineering challenge. Even for the capture of much smaller asteroids, there will likely be reservations from all areas of society, though the risks would be much less."

Also, there's no way to fully test this dust cloud on a large scale to verify its effectiveness before implementing it, "something that is common to all geoengineering schemes," Bewick said. "On the global scale, it is not possible to test because the test would essentially be the real thing, except probably in a diluted form. Climate modeling can be performed, but without some large-scale testing, the results from these models cannot be fully verified."

Still, if geoengineers did use asteroids to generate clouds, they could drastically reduce how much dust the projects spew out "should any catastrophic climate response be observed," Bewick said, "with the cloud dispersing naturally over time." ( LiveScience.com )

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Doomsday For Millions, And It's Not The Only One

Doomsday For Millions, And It's Not The Only One - A "supervolcano" might sound like something out of a sci-fi fantasy film, but one supervolcano lies hidden near Pompeii, Italy, where thousands were killed in 79 A.D., and it could potentially kill millions.

"These areas can give rise to the only eruptions that can have global catastrophic effects comparable to major meteorite impacts," Giuseppe De Natale, head of a drilling project to monitor the molten "caldera" in the area west of Naples known as Campi Flegrei, told Reuters. (A caldera is cauldron formed by land that has collapsed after a volcanic eruption, according to Yahoo! News.)

"Fortunately, it is extremely rare for these areas to erupt at their full capacity, as it is extremely rare for large meteorites to hit the earth," De Natale told Reuters. "But some of these areas, in particular the Campi Flegrei, are densely populated and therefore even small eruptions, which are the most probable, fortunately, can pose risks for the population."

The looming danger calls to mind the 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius eruption that buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under a thick, suffocating layer of volcanic ash.

A supervolcano has a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8, which means the measured deposit for the eruption is greater than 240 cubic miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

And the supervolcano near Pompeii is not the only one.

The Yellowstone Caldera, located under Yellowstone Lake, is the largest supervolcano in North America. California and New Mexico also have them. Other supervolcanoes around the world are located in Indonesia, Japan, and Siberia, according to the Discovery Channel. There are even significant calderas that have not been well studied in Ethiopia and Bolivia.

The real danger of a supervolcano is the ash, which -- in large enough quantity -- can collect in the atmosphere and block out the sun, causing severe global climate changes, as ABC News' Lee Dye describes:

Such an event could make thermonuclear war or global warming seem trivial, spewing untold tons of ash into the atmosphere to block sunlight. The result would be many years of frigid temperatures, wiping out millions of species. A super-volcano that erupted 250 million years ago is now believed to have created the greatest mass extinction the world has ever seen, wiping out up to 95 percent of all plant and animal species. Some renegade scientists believe it was a volcano, not an asteroid, that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Dye goes on to detail a new study from Vanderbilt University researchers which states that a supervolcano eruption could happen just a few hundred years after the volcano forms. Thus, working on a very "short fuse."

Back in 2005, Stephen Sparks of the University of Bristol told LiveScience of the potential doomsday effects of a supervolcano.

"In super eruptions the magma chamber is huge," Sparks said. "When the magma erupts the overlying rocks collapse into the chamber, which has reduced its pressure due to the eruption. The collapse forms the huge crater." The eruption shoots ash and chemicals into the air. "The whole of a continent might be covered by ash, which might take many years -- possibly decades -- to erode away and for vegetation to recover," he added.

Scientists in the U.S. say that the chance of another catastrophic volcanic eruption at Yellowstone is slim, with a precise yearly probability of 1 in 730,000 or 0.00014 percent, according to the USGS. Buildup preceding such a disaster could be detectable with new technology weeks or months before the action eruption.

In Italy, scientists are monitoring the conditions at Campi Flegrei and some even say that the eruptions seem to be weakening over time, according to research included in the Smithsonian. ( huffingtonpost.com )

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Global warming skeptic's about-face Professor comes to a new conclusion.

Global warming skeptic's about-face Professor comes to a new conclusion - He finally came around to what other climate scientists have been spouting for years. Richard A. Muller, a physics professor at the University of California-Berkeley, announced over the weekend that his much-publicized investigation into climate data has found that humans' production of carbon dioxide is causing the world to slowly warm up. And this process could speed up dramatically in the coming years.

Muller's conclusions attract special attention because of his vocal self-styling as a converted climate change skeptic. Muller criticized global warming studies for sloppy and self-serving data selection and a lack of transparency that obscured errors; he then lambasted fellow scientists for circling the wagons and calling any climate change deniers wrong. Muller says he's still upset that the American Physical Society declared the evidence for warming "incontrovertible" a few years ago in an official statement.

Richard Muller and his daughter Elizabeth Muller in 2011. (Paul Sakuma/AP)

"We don't do things in science that are incontrovertible," Muller said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Muller took matters into his own hands and embarked on his own investigation into the data with his daughter Elizabeth and a team of scientists two years ago. His Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project attracted funding from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, the nonprofit outfit of a wealthy businessman who denies that global warming is happening. Three years later, Muller ended up surprising himself when his research confirmed everything those same studies that drew his skepticism concluded, and then some. Muller says his study's results are more reliable than many previous ones because he intentionally avoided the data pitfalls he objected to, such as only using a portion of the global temperatures available.

Muller's study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but he says he plans to do so at some point. One climate scientist, Benjamin D. Santer, told the Los Angeles Times he thinks posting the study online and not in a journal is in "the spirit of publicity, not the spirit of science" and may do more to hurt the global warming cause than help it. But Muller wants to get feedback on his methods and to share his results with everyone, avoiding what he sees as a secrecy and lack of transparency that surrounded earlier climate change studies.

Though Muller is now entirely convinced that the Earth is warming due to man-made causes, he still expresses disdain for people who try to raise passions around the issue by pointing to local weather events, such as the drought scorching up America's Midwest right now, as proof of the phenomenon. (He attributes the drought to La Niña, a temporary cooling of the ocean.) The effects of global warming on local weather patterns are unknown, and even as two-thirds of the world has heated up, another one-third has shown a gradual cooling over the past 250 years, he says. The overall effect is a troubling global warming, but Muller has no patience for simplifications that stray from the truth.

"I'm personally very worried," he says of global warming. Muller says that so far the warming has been "tiny," but that everything points to the process speeding up. "I personally suspect that it will be bad."

Muller is now wading into another controversy, by endorsing the process of natural gas extraction called fracking for developing countries, which tend to rely more on coal. Coal production creates more carbon dioxide, but fracking has also drawn its share of environmentalist critics.

"I believe the only kind of action that is sustainable is that which is profitable, and fortunately we can do that," he says. "We can become much more energy efficient." ( The Lookout )

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Why doesn't Generation X care about climate change?

Why doesn't Generation X care about climate change? - Scientists are surprised to learn that Americans born between 1961 and 1981 are increasingly indifferent to rising temperatures

Over the past several years, the U.S. has seen temperatures soar during the summer months, and several Obama administration officials have linked recent severe weather patterns to climate change. The perceived effects of global warming are clearly worrying to many Americans. And yet, a new survey suggests that Generation X — generally Americans born between 1961 and 1981 — is growing increasingly unconcerned about climate change. Here, a guide to the survey:

Apparently unmoved by images of lone polar bears adrift on melting ice, 51 percent of Generation Xers admitted to not following climate change closely at all. Photo: Thinkstock/iStockphoto

Who is Generation X?

They're the Americans who "grew up with MTV, Nirvana, and the dot-com bubble," says The Atlantic. These individuals are better educated than their parents and work longer hours. They sit on their children's school boards and are often active in their communities. "But, when it comes to climate change, Gen Xers voice a resounding 'meh.'"

What did the survey find?

A University of Michigan study polled roughly 3,000 adults in an ongoing series, and in the most recent iteration, found a "small but statistically significant" decline in Gen X's attitude toward climate change, says Wendy Koch at USA Today. In the most recent survey, just 16 percent said they followed the issue "very" or "moderately closely," which is a 22 percent drop from 2009. People who said they did "not closely" follow the issue in 2009 were at 45 percent; in the most recent results that percentage climbed to 51 percent. So not only do fewer Gen Xers pay attention to climate change, but more and more are completely indifferent to the issue.

Why is this?

The report, funded by the National Science Foundation, cites the complexity of the climate-change issue, the distraction of the tough economy, and "issue fatigue," or being bombarded with too much information, as reasons for Gen X's laissez-faire attitude. Climate change has also become highly politicized, says The Atlantic — many people simply stick to their party lines. Somewhat surprisingly, though, Gen X parents cared about global warming even less than Gen Xers without children, even though their children would have to deal with it in the future. "I think it's really just... that running a family these days is a very time-consuming task," says report author Jon D. Miller.

Are scientists really surprised?

It's an "interesting and unexpected profile," Miller tells PhysOrg. "Few issues engage a solid majority of adults in our busy and pluralistic society, but the climate issue appears to attract fewer committed activists — on either side — than I would have expected." ( theweek.com )

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Generation X Is Lukewarm On Global Warming

Generation X Is Lukewarm On Global Warming - Gen Xers are surprisingly blasé about climate change. A survey in 2009 found members of Generation X were largely disengaged from climate change. Two years later, these American adults became slightly more so, a follow-up survey has revealed.

Americans in this age group generally are not well-informed about climate change, nor are they highly concerned about or paying much attention to it, both surveys indicated.

Generation X Is Lukewarm On Global Warming

"We found a small but statistically significant decline between 2009 and 2011 in the level of attention and concern Generation X adults expressed about climate change," said researcher Jon Miller of the University of Michigan in a statement. "In 2009, about 22 percent said they followed the issue of climate change very or moderately closely. In 2011, only 16 percent said they did so."

The survey data comes from the university's Longitudinal Study of American Youth, which includes responses from approximately 4,000 Gen Xers, born between 1961 and 1981. Interestingly, this generation is the "most scientifically literate and best-educated generation in American history," Miller writes in his report, "Climate Change: Generation X Attitudes, Interest, and Understanding."

Miller said he was surprised by the lack of committed activists on either side of what is usually seen as a heated public debate over human-caused global warming. In 2011, the largest chunk of respondents, 67 percent, said they aren't certain global warming is happening. Meanwhile, 23 percent were concerned or alarmed, and at the other end, 10 percent are not worried or don't believe it is happening.

Better educated adults were more concerned about climate change, although 12 percent of those who ranked as highly scientifically literate were dismissive or doubtful.

Political affiliation also mattered. Zero conservative Republicans were alarmed, while only 10 percent were concerned. Meanwhile, only 5 percent of liberal Democrats were dismissive or doubtful.

Climate change is forecast to have dramatic long-term consequences that could affect future generations, including rising sea levels and more extreme weather, yet Gen Xers with children at home were not more concerned about global warming than those who did not.

"Climate change is an extremely complex issue, and many Generation X adults do not see it as an immediate problem that they need to address," Miller said. ( LiveScience.com )

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Climate 'causes leaves to narrow'

Climate 'causes leaves to narrow' - Leaves are getting narrower on some plant species as a result of changes to the climate, a study has suggested.

A team of Australian researchers studies specimens from the wild and from herbarium collections stretching back more than 120 years.

Analysis of the herbarium samples found that leaf width had decreased by two millimetres.

The findings of the study, described as the first of its kind, appear in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

Lead author, Greg Guerin, from the University of Adelaide, said the team chose narrow-leaf hopbush (Dodonaea viscosa subsp. angustissima) as it appeared to display different leaf characteristics in different climates.

"We followed this up by examining exciting herbarium collections before beginning to gather [field] data," he told BBC News.

The researchers looked at more than 250 herbarium specimens collected from one region: Flinders Ranges, southern Australia's largest mountain range.

Dr Guerin observed: "Historical herbarium collections provide immediate access to wide sampling throughout a geographic region and through time.

"You just can't replicate that kind of sampling, covering hundreds of kilometres... from one region over 130 years."

To support this data, the team gathered 274 field samples from a mountain, collecting specimens at every 50m drop in altitude.

"This gave us information on variation within populations and the local influence of altitude on leaf shape and size," Dr Guerin explained.

The analysis revealed a two-millimetre decrease in leaf width over 127 years across the region.

Between 1950 and 2005, the team added, there had been a 1.5C (2.7F) increase in the maximum temperatures in the region but there had been little change in rainfall patterns.
Next steps

Dr Guerin said: "The next step is to test whether similar patterns are emerging in other species and in other regions."

He acknowledged that because the study was the first of its kind, there was no comparable data at this stage.

"We chose a likely candidate species - one that appeared to vary in leaf shape with latitude - but given that the first species we tested revealed strong change over time, it may well be that similar shifts are occurring more widely."

Dr Guerin said that the shift in leaf shapes could, in some cases, have wider ecological consequences.

"The study is a new example of significant climate change responses to date," he said.

"We now know that every degree of warming is ecologically significant and generating ecological disequilibrium.

"There is some good news here in that some Australian plant species may have the potential to respond to and cope with increasing temperatures."

But he warned that other species might be less well suited to adapt.

"These species may rely more heavily on tracking favourable climate through migration.

"A recent study by a student in our group (the Andy Lowe laboratory) looked at the climate change sensitivity of a habitat-restricted plant species endemic to the same Flinders Ranges region in South Australia.

"The species had low adaptive capacity because of a combination of low genetic diversity and small, isolated populations.

"This is a problem because its current climate niche is predicted to shrink over this century." (bbc.co.uk )

READ MORE - Climate 'causes leaves to narrow'

Why Early Earth Didn't Freeze Over Still a Mystery

Why Early Earth Didn't Freeze Over Still a Mystery - Global warming gases cannot explain why Earth was not frozen billions of years ago when the sun was cooler, researchers say.

In the Archean Eon about 2.5 billion to 4 billion years ago, before the first advanced life appeared on the planet, the sun was only about 70 percent as bright as it is today. This means the amount of heat felt on Earth was much less, and Earth's surface should have been frozen.

However, ancient rocks at Isua near the southwest coast of Greenland indicate liquid water and even life was present on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago. "So Earth's climate had to be somewhere between the freezing point and boiling point of water, and probably pretty close to the temperature we have today, which sustains life," said researcher Emily Pope, an isotope geochemist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

The contradiction between the cold Earth that apparently should have existed and the temperate Earth that apparently did exist is known as the "faint young sun paradox." Until now, the most popular explanation for this enigma was that there was a higher concentration of "greenhouse gases" such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than today. These gases absorb heat from the sun, helping warm the planet.

"Just like the average temperature of Earth is getting higher today because there are more greenhouse gases than there were before the Industrial Revolution, or even before the invention of agriculture, the presence of high concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane should have kept the early Earth warm," Pope said.

For greenhouse gases to explain the faint young sun paradox, their concentrations would need to have been extremely high, hundreds to thousands of times as much as today.

"If levels of carbon dioxide were that high, they would be recorded in ancient soils and sediments in the rock record," Pope said. "If levels of methane were that high, they would actually form a kind of organic haze in the atmosphere that blocks the sun's rays and would counteract its properties as a greenhouse gas."

Now scientists analyzing relatively pristine 3.8-billion-year-old rocks from Isua find no evidence that greenhouse gas levels were high enough to explain the faint young sun paradox, further deepening the mystery, Pope told LiveScience.

Specifically, researchers looked at serpentine mineral deposits, which form when ancient seawater interacts with deep ocean crust (the outer layer of Earth). These deposits record details of the water such as the hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios found within, which rely in part on ocean size. Isotopes are atoms of the same element, like hydrogen, with differing numbers of neutrons. Light hydrogen isotopes are more likely to be found in the air and escape into space than heavier ones; the smaller the oceans, the more their waters will have slightly lower concentrations of light isotopes.

The rocks suggest that the oceans were up to 26 percent larger in the past. These shrunk over time to present-day volumes — seawater became trapped in newly formed continental rocks, and hydrogen that is one of the key ingredients of water instead escaped to outer space.

The rate of hydrogen loss to space is linked to atmospheric levels of methane and carbon dioxide; both these greenhouse gases can interact with hydrogen and other gases such as oxygen in complex ways. The hydrogen loss rate the researchers estimated based on these findings suggests that concentrations of these greenhouse gases were nowhere near high enough to reconcile the faint young sun paradox.

"We have new concrete data that characterizes the early oceans," Pope said. "This will hugely help our ability to put realistic constraints on our models of how Earth's oceans and atmosphere first evolved."

An alternative explanation for the faint young sun paradox is that early in Earth history, there were fewer continents because a number had not formed yet; less land mass would have meant less cloud cover, because there weren't biologically generated particles such as pollen and spores that could behave as seeds around which the clouds could form.

"The result was that the planet, covered mostly by oceans, was darker, and like an asphalt road on a hot day, could absorb a lot more heat, enough to keep the Earth clement," Pope told ( LiveScience.com )

READ MORE - Why Early Earth Didn't Freeze Over Still a Mystery

Ice dam collapses at Argentine glacier

Ice dam collapses at Argentine glacier - An ice dam at Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier collapsed early Sunday, creating an impressive spectacle not seen since July 2008, although few tourists were actually awake to experience the moment.

Several tons of ice fell off the 60-meter (200 foot) ice dam into Lago Argentina at the national park in southern Santa Cruz province.

The Perito Moreno glacier is seen after the rupture of a massive ice wall near the city of El Calafate in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, southern Argentina, March 4, 2012. The glacier, a massive tongue of ice in the Santa Cruz province that covers 250 square kilometres (97 square miles), advances yearly into a lake, known as Lago Argentino. As Perito Moreno moves forward, it cuts off a river feeding the lake. Water builds up pressure and slowly undermines the ice, forming a tunnel until ice comes tumbling down. The phenomenon repeats itself at irregular intervals, with the last major ice falls occurring in 2008. REUTERS/Andres Arce (ARGENTINA - Tags: ENVIRONMENT)

Some 5,000 tourists had been in the park Saturday awaiting the ice show, park rangers said, but the slight movement of ice which began Wednesday turned into an avalanche at around 4:00 am (0700 GMT), leaving visitors disappointed.

Only a group of rangers witnessed the collapse, which created a crash heard several kilometers away, accelerated by heavy rainfall overnight.

"The noise was very great, it was coming down in buckets," said park ranger Carlos Corvalan.

Perito Moreno, one of the biggest tourist attractions in Argentina, is one of the largest glaciers on the Patagonian ice cap.

The glacier has a travel speed of 1.7 meters (5.5 feet) per day in its central part and periodically creates an ice dam which collapses from the pressure of the advancing glacier.

The glacier was named after one of the first explorers in Argentine Patagonia. ( AFP )

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Where Is It Snowing This Winter? Hawaii

Where Is It Snowing This Winter? Hawaii - Snow may be lacking from most of the United States, but one state had a snowy Presidents Day: Hawaii.

Snow covered the tops of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, two of the five volcanoes that form Hawaii, as seen in photos from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Mauna Kea is nearly 14,000 feet (4,200 meters) above sea level, making it the highest peak in Hawaii (if measured from the seafloor, it's the tallest mountain in the world). This mountain is known for snow — its name means "white mountain" in Hawaiian. According to Hawaiian mythology, Poli'ahu, a goddess of snow, lives here. Mauna Loa is slightly shorter.

The summits' temperatures often dip well below freezing during the winter, and sometimes even into the summer. Even a June snowfall on Mauna Kea is possible. In June 2011, Mauna Kea had its first June snowfall in decades, according to Ryan Lyman, a forecast climatologist at the Mauna Kea Weather Center.

"It's the first June snow event we've had in probably close to 30 years," Lymantold Life's Little Mysteries at the time, "but there have been episodes in July and August as well as late May."

Snowstorms can form atop the mountain when cold air in the upper atmosphere comes down from the mid-latitudes and mixes with hot air rising from the land that is heated throughout the day. When warm surface air hits the cold air in the upper atmosphere, a thunderstorm can form, dumping snow on the summit.

That formula could return today (Feb. 21). The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather advisory until 6 p.m. local time for the Big Island summits above 1,000 feet (300 m). Snow showers with up to 2 inches (5 centimeters) of accumulation and brief periods of freezing rain are expected. ( LiveScience.com )

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Delhi's air as dirty as ever despite some reforms

Delhi's air as dirty as ever despite some reforms — A decade ago, plans for a metro and clean-fuel buses were hailed as New Delhi's answer to pollution. But air in the Indian capital is as dirty as ever — partly because breakneck development has brought skyrocketing use of cars.

Citywide pollution sensors routinely register levels of small airborne particles at two or sometimes three times its own sanctioned level for residential areas, putting New Delhi up with Beijing, Cairo and Mexico City at the top of indexes listing the world's most-polluted capitals.

Sunrises in India's capital filter through near-opaque haze, scenic panoramas feature ribbons of brown air and everywhere, it seems, someone is coughing.

In this Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011 photo, India Gate, the war memorial, is seen through haze in New Delhi, India. A decade ago, plans for a metro and clean-fuel buses were hailed as New Delhi's answer to pollution. But air in the Indian capital is as dirty as ever - partly because its continued development has brought skyrocketing use of cars. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

A woman on a motorcycle covers her face from smoke coming from burning garbage dump in Jammu December 7, 2009. The biggest climate meeting in history, with 15,000 participants from 192 nations, opened in Copenhagen on Monday with hosts Denmark saying an unmissable opportunity to protect the planet was "within reach". REUTERS/Mukesh Gupta (INDIAN-ADMINISTERED KASHMIR ENVIRONMENT SOCIETY TRANSPORT)

"My family is very worried. Earlier, the smoke and dust stayed outside, but now it comes into the house," said 61-year-old shopkeeper Hans Raj Wadhawan, a one-time smoker now being treated for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the Delhi Heart and Lung Institute.

"I can see the air is bad again, and I can feel it in my chest."

New Delhi could lay some of the blame on its own success. Its recently minted middle class adds 1,200 cars a day to the 6 million on roads already snarled with incessantly honking traffic. Generous diesel subsidies promote the use of diesel-powered SUVs that belch some of the highest levels of carcinogenic particles, thanks to their reliance on one of the dirtiest-burning fuels and low Indian emissions standards.

"The city has lost nearly all of the gains it made in 2004 and 2005," said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director of research at the Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment.

New Delhi has undergone head-spinning expansion as Indian economic reforms in the 1990s ushered in two decades of record growth. Once a manageable capital of 9.4 million where cows, bicycles and bullock carts ruled the road, New Delhi today is a gridlocked metropolis and migrant mecca now home to 16 million. Authorities have scrambled to deal with everything from rocketing real estate prices to overflowing garbage dumps.

Efforts to clean the air, it seems, have only just begun.

The capital saw some success after a 1998-2003 program removing power plants from the city center and adopting compressed natural gas, CNG, for running buses and rickshaws. The buses had run on diesel, and the rickshaws on gasoline and highly polluting kerosene. Of all possible fuels, CNG releases the smallest amounts of particulate matter.

But just a few years later pollution levels are back up, with levels of airborne particles smaller than 10 micrometers — called PM10s — often near 300 per cubic meter, three times the city's legal limit of 100 — and well above the World Health Organization's recommended limit of 20.

The tiny particulate matter, sometimes called black carbon or soot, is small enough to lodge in people's lungs and fester over time. WHO says the stuff kills some 1.34 million people globally each year.

Studies on the Indian capital put the number of such deaths in the thousands.

It worsens in the dry winters, as winds die down and pollution pools over the Delhi plains. Vehicular smog mixes with smoke from festival-season fireworks as well as countless illegal pyres of garbage burned by homeless migrants to stay warm as temperatures near freezing. And the booming construction scene, free for a few months from monsoons, sends up clouds of dust.

"Our biggest challenge is the vehicles, but building roads is not the answer," Roychowdhury said. "We badly need second-generation action to restrain this increasing auto dependence."

But so far India's diesel subsidies, billed as aid for poor rural farmers who need the fuel for generators and tractors, have only boosted its market for vehicles, and the worst-polluting kind.

Diesel cars, which in 2000 accounted for 4 percent of India's market, now make up 40 of new car sales, and are soon expected to hit 50 percent.

It's an odd automotive trend for today's world. In the United States, where markets set fuel prices, the popularity of diesel is nearly naught. China taxes diesel and petrol fuels at the same rate, while neighboring Sri Lanka sets high duties on diesel cars.

Indian car owners now spend more on diesel than the agricultural sector and benefit from 100 billion rupees, or about $1.86 billion, in direct diesel subsidy, according to the Center for Science and Environment.

Environmentalists call the diesel policy an incentive to pollute. And with the capital's 16 million residents now living on some of the world's most lung-challenging air, city authorities seem to agree and say more action is needed to clean up the air.

The city recently proposed a raft of reforms to bring down PM10 levels by boosting public transportation and discouraging drivers from taking out their cars. Ideas floated include taxing diesel vehicles, increasing parking rates that are now lower than bus fares, and introducing a London-like congestion charge for driving in the city center.

Delhi also is expanding its metro, and wants to auction off its 17 bus routes to replace a chaotic system that has dozens of single owner-operators working independently — and inefficiently.

But whether the changes are made, and how effective they would be in persuading people to give up their cars, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, at least 3,000 Delhi residents will die each year from pollution-related causes, out of the city's 100,000 annual deaths, according to a recent study by The Energy Resources Institute in New Delhi and the U.S.-based health Effects Institute. Other studies have put the number of pollution-related deaths at 10,000 a year or higher.

Thousands more will develop asthma, chronic bronchitis or other respiratory ailments.

Unsurprisingly, most patients and victims live near the city's biggest roads.

"The number of respiratory diseases is definitely on the rise. Even in children we are finding more respiratory problems," said Dr. Vinod Khetarpal, president of the Delhi Medical Association. "With the introduction of CNG, it had come down quite drastically. But now it's back up again. Cars seem to be our new vice." ( Associated Press )

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Fire and rain: Fed scientists point to wild April

Fire and rain: Fed scientists point to wild April – April was a historic month for wild weather in the United States, and it wasn't just the killer tornado outbreak that set records, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

April included an odd mix of downpours, droughts and wildfires. Six states — Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia — set records for the wettest April since 1895. Kentucky, for example, got nearly a foot of rain, which was more than three times its normal for the month, NOAA reported.Top Popular Science

Yet the U.S. also had the most acres burned by wildfire for April since 2000. Nearly 95 percent of Texas has a drought categorized as severe or worse, exacerbated by the fifth driest April on record for the Lone Star state.

Add to a record 305 tornadoes from April 25-28, which killed at least 309 people and the most tornadoes ever for all of April: 875. The death toll and total tornado figures are still being finalized.

Much of the southern and eastern United States were near record hot for April, while northwestern states were cooler than normal. Overall, the month was warmer than normal for the nation, but not record-setting.

The odd mix of massive April showers and bone-dry drought can be blamed on the cooling of the central Pacific Ocean, which causes storm tracks to lock in along certain paths, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.

"It's very consistent with La Nina; maybe we've had more extremes," Halpert said. "It's a shift of the jet stream, providing all that moisture and shifting it away from the south, so you've seen a lot of drought in Texas."

U.S. scientists also looked for the fingerprints of global warming and La Nina on last month's deadly tornadoes, but couldn't find evidence to blame those oft-cited weather phenomena.

NOAA research meteorologist Martin Hoerling tracked three major factors that go into tornadoes — air instability, wind shear and water vapor — and found no long-term trends that point to either climate change or La Nina. That doesn't mean those factors aren't to blame, but Hoerling couldn't show it, he said.

Climate models say that because of changes in instability and water vapor, severe thunderstorms and maybe tornadoes should increase in the future. But it may take another 30 years for the predicted slow increase to be statistically noticeable, said NOAA research meteorologist and tornado expert Harold Brooks.

But Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, said the preliminary study that Hoerling conducted was flawed and too simplified. He said there is evidence of an increase in instability in the atmosphere happening now. ( Associated Press )

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