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In contrast to West Antarctica where several large glaciers have been losing ice for decades, East Antarctica glaciers have exhibited little evidence of ice loss but NASA’s latest detailed maps of East Antarctica ice velocity and elevation show that a number of glaciers have begun to lose ice over the past decade.
Between 2005 and 2017 the U.S. economy as measured by real GDP expanded by about 20 %. Over this same period, emissions from power generation dropped which is evidence of a decoupling between economic growth and power generation.
Atmospheric methane concentration plateaued leading up to 2006, but began to rise again in 2007. The source of the increase has been widely debated, but using satellite imagery a recent study has found that the increase can be ascribed to increased fossil fuels and livestock sources in roughly equal measure.
Based on the latest results from WHO air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk, linked to 12% of all global deaths. Citizen scientists can contribute to measuring air pollution using a low cost sensor measuring atmospheric particulate matter and share the measurements via open source geospatial web mapping software.
A reanalysis of the effect of black carbon emissions has found that it is second only to carbon dioxide emissions in its warming impact on the climate. Together carbon dioxide, black carbon, and methane emissions represent the anthropogenic sources with the largest impact on Earth’s climate.
During the last deglaciation there was several episodes of rapid and substantial sea level rise. A recent study has found that during one of these, sea level rose by about 17 meters over a period that does not exceed 350 years, but could be as low as a century.
June 5, 2017
Approximately 800,000 years ago something changed in the Earth’s climate system that led to the climate then following a series of approximately 100,000 year cycles. Small, predictable changes in the Earth’s orbit about the Sun act as triggers for the glacial and interglacial periods, but other factors such as ice sheet volume, CO2 concentration, and biological feedback mechanisms are also involved.
Read more.June 5, 2017
From 2011 until early 2017, EnvironmentCounts was published using TikiWiki. This link will take you to more than a hundred additional EC articles.
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A recent study presents evidence that regional warming over the Arctic Ocean can affect mid-latitude Northern Hemisphere continental weather. This study shows that there are two key Arctic regions where regional warming can induce distinguishable cold winters over northern continents. Warming over the Barents–Kara Sea region is likely to lead to East Asian cooling, whereas northern North America cooling is closely related to warming over the East Siberian–Chukchi Sea region.
From 2011 until early 2017, EnvironmentCounts was published using TikiWiki. This link will take you to more than a hundred additional EC articles.
It is known that orbital forcing is involved in glacial/deglacial cycles but is insufficient by itself to explain the glacial/deglacial cycles. This study argues that a biological feedback mechanism kicks in when a threshold is reached and together with orbital forcing results in the sustained and rapidly increasing CO2 and surface temperature of a deglaciation.
Improved data coverage and analysis has made it possible to reconstruct temperature profiles across most ocean basins and at all depths to 6000 meters (m) from 1960 to 2015. The reconstructions reveal accelerating heating in the upper layers above 2000 m. Ocean warming is stronger since the late 1980s compared to the 1960s to the 1980s.