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CGD People in the News

Data show U.S. riding out worst storms on record
Staff: Kevin Trenberth

Trees Will Save Us From Global Warming? Scratch That
Staff: David Schimel [article]

Should engineers fix climate change?
Staff: Bette Otto-Bliesner

Hurricane Experts Available to Explain Storm Behavior, Impacts, and Possible Links to Global Warming - Tip Sheet
Staff: Kevin Trenberth

A changing climate of opinion?
Some scientists think climate change needs a more radical approach... Staff: Phil Rasch

Warming connection to storms stirs debate
The growing number of tropical storms and hurricanes this season is reviving the debate over whether global warming contributes to wicked weather... Staff: Kevin Trenberth

Purdue to Hold Green Week
Purdue University is marking Green Week with several events from September 15 to 19. Guest lectures are being organized by the Energy Center, Center for the Environment and the Purdue Climate Change Center. A town hall forum is also planned for September 19. Speakers include Jim Hurrell, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Staff: Jim Hurrell [related]

Shrinking Arctic Sea Ice Verges on New Record Low
Evidence that Earth's climate continues to heat up comes this week in the form of satellite data that shows the extent of Arctic sea ice this year has shrunk below the 2005 minimum to stand as the second-smallest since observations from space began 30 years ago... Staff: David Lawrence

Global Warming: Climate Change Hot Spots Mapped Across the United States
Taking some of the fuzziness out of climate models is revealing the uneven U.S. impact of future global warming; the most severely affected region may be emerging already... Staff: Jerry Meehl

Antarctic Climate: Short-Term Spikes, Long-Term Warming Linked to Tropical Pacific
Dramatic year-to-year temperature swings and a century-long warming trend across West Antarctica are linked to conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, according to a new analysis of ice cores conducted by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Washington (UW)... Staff: David Schneider [related] [related]

Climate change: What to expect
Climate change is one of the most serious threats to our environment, our economies and our lives. If the planet continues to heat up unchecked we will have to make some serious changes to our lifestyles... Staff: Jerry Meehl [related] [related]

Can't stand the heat? It may be time to try
Haven't liked Denver's heat wave? Get used to it, warns an atmospheric scientist. Denver's record-setting 19 consecutive days of 90-plus heat, and its record low through July of 3.28 inches of moisture, both are consistent with predictions that excessive heat and dry spells will be more common in the future in the American West.... Staff: Kevin Trenberth

Sun, storms, sun, storms... Pattern of pop-up rains is a pain as Gulf air and cold fronts collide
"Pop-up" doesn't adequately describe the sudden, violent thunderstorms that have rumbled through central Ohio recently. That's what experts call the weather pattern that will continue to play out across central Ohio this week... Staff: Kevin Trenberth

Melting Arctic ice could spur inland warming: study
If Arctic sea ice starts melting fast, polar bears and ring seals wouldn't be the only creatures to feel it: A study released on Tuesday suggests it could spur warmer temperatures hundreds of miles (km) inland. Staff: David Lawrence [press release] [related] [related] [related]

Climate models miss mark
Armed with newly synthesized logs of Antarctica's temperature over the last century, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research found that a computer simulation for the same time-period predicted a too-warm continent. Staff: David Schneider [related] [related]

In a New Climate Model, Short-Term Cooling in a Warmer World
After decades of research that sought, and found, evidence of a human influence on the earth's climate, climatologists are beginning to shift to a new and similarly daunting enterprise: creating decade-long forecasts for climate, just as meteorologists routinely generate weeklong forecasts for weather... The global climate will continue to be influenced in any particular decade by a mix of natural variability and the building greenhouse effect, said Kevin Trenberth.

Arctic Ice Suffered From Sunny Year
Last summer Arctic sea ice hit a record low -- by a long shot -- leaving scientists to puzzle out why. Now researchers are closer to an answer with new findings showing that an especially sunny year is partly to blame. Thinner ice is now more vulnerable to feedback cycles caused by increased sunshine, researchers believe... To examine one suspect -- increased sunshine -- Jennifer Kay and colleagues from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. and Colorado State University in Fort Collins used data from two members of NASA's string of atmosphere-monitoring satellites called the "A-train." [related] [related] [related] [related] [related] [related]

Return of the hockey stick
Paleoclimate researchers are mounting a new modelling exercise to assess their skills at reconstructing not the actual climate during the last millennium, but a pseudo climate generated by current global models... Caspar Ammann, a paleoclimatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has secured about $450,000 over three years from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the project. He says the exercise will be open to the entire paleoclimate community, including sceptics who have long questioned previous reconstructions.

Bad news beetles: Tree killers could add to global warming
Widespread insect infestations and tree deaths across Colorado and the Western Slope could contribute to global warming, a series of forestry and climate experts said Wednesday... Nonetheless, widespread die-offs cannot be good, according to Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Trenberth said as the trees die off and decay, they slowly will start to release the carbon dioxide they have stored during their lifetimes.

Flood Season Begins Unusually Early In America's Heartland
The flood season in the nation's midsection started early this year, and there's no letup in sight, spurring federal, state and local officials to brace for what looks likely to be an unusually watery spring. At least 16 deaths were linked to heavy flooding across Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma and other states in March; another was tied to flooding Friday in Kentucky. Last week, snow that could set off more flooding blanketed parts of the Midwest. And Kentucky and parts of Arkansas and Missouri that are struggling to recover from previous deluges remained vulnerable to the threat of weekend rain... "If rain falls on top of snow, the risk of flooding is much greater than any other time of year," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Robot buoys are taking the ocean's pulse
...Riser's babies are torpedo-shaped robots designed to measure ocean temperature, salinity and currents and beam the data back via satellite. Scattered around the globe, the probes are part of the first worldwide network to monitor the 70 percent of the planet covered with water... "The Argo floats are creating a revolution in oceanography and our ability to do climate prediction," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "They must be kept going." [related] [related]

4 Dangerous assumptions
How big is the energy challenge of climate change? The technological advances needed to stabilize carbon-dioxide emissions may be greater than we think, argue Roger Pielke Jr, Tom Wigley and Christopher Green. The United Nations Climate Conference in Bali in 2007 set the world on a two-year path to negotiate a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Yet not even the most rosy-eyed delegate could fail to recognize that stabilizing atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations is an enormous undertaking. Here we address the magnitude of the technological changes required to meet that challenge. [related] [related] [related] [related] [related] [related] [related] [related]

4 Geoengineering Attack Plans to Fight Climate Change
The researchers sailing aboard Weatherbird II aren't studying global warming - they're trying to end it. The ship's three-year mission, funded by for-profit eco-renewal firm Planktos, is to seed oceans with iron-rich dust, which should trigger plankton blooms. More plankton means more carbon dioxide can be pulled out of the atmosphere and trapped in the seas. The project is the first large-scale effort in a controversial field, known as geoengineering, that aims to actively combat global warming. [Staff: Tom Wigley]

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat
Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them...Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

Scientists forecast a storm from climate change
The north Atlantic has always been prone to hurricanes...Some scientists believe this escalation in intensity is down to global warming. "Both observation and theory suggest that hurricanes are becoming more intense as the earth warms," says Kevin Trenberth...Some scientists have attributed this rise in sea temperature to a natural cycle of warming and cooling known as the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. But tests run on computer models at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where all possible contributing factors can be added or eliminated, conclude that the recent warming of the sea can be related to the dumping of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Nations should act now to reduce carbon emissions
Guest Commentary: Kevin Trenberth... As a scientist who has played a lead role in IPCC, I am puzzled by several things. Even now, it seems that most people do not appreciate the magnitude of the problem we face with global climate change. Often there is a sense that while it may be happening, if and when it gets serious, then we can do something!

Sun is not causing Earth to warm, says expert
Caspar Ammann: The question is if the sun or greenhouse gases are the primary driver of the trends over the last few decades... Caspar Ammann: What our satellites and radiosondes and rockets are telling us is that above the tropopause, temperatures are dropping, and a drop in temperatures, that does not fit with a change in solar radiation. But it fits very nicely with an increase in greenhouse gases.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
AN IN DEPTH Q&A WITH NOBEL LAUREATES SUSAN SOLOMON, BETH HOLLAND, BETTE OTTO-BLIESNER, LINDA MEARNS, PATY ROMERO-LANKAO AND KATHLEEN MILLER.Six Boulder women joined the ranks of Marie Curie and Mother Theresa as Nobel laureates when they received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The women were part of a team of a few thousand scientists that reviewed massive amounts of research and authored four esteemed reports on global warming. The reports silenced the debate about human contribution to global warming and presented policymakers worldwide with the science needed to implement changes to protect the earth and its citizens.

Global warming not always to blame for extreme winters
Whatever global-warming models may suggest about the futures of Earth's climate, one thing is certain: Global warming never promised to eliminate winter, especially for those living outside the tropics... Even when global warming becomes apparent - from decades to a century away - "winter will still happen, with cold spells and severe weather," says Gerald Meehl, a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "But the trend will be toward fewer cold spells and fewer severe weather events."

Weather map interface lets you feel the wind
Climate researchers can now physically experience the complex data on their maps using a computer system that lets them "feel" wind speeds and other weather features using a joystick that simulates touching objects. The system converts climate data into forces that a person can feel using a haptic device in the form of a robotic arm with a joystick on the end. CEVIZ is "very intriguing," Strand says, "I'd like to try it out." As well as helping researchers explore their data, it could also be to help people explore weather reports, he adds. [related]

Climate-Cooling Plan Goes Up in Dust
Proposals to mask global warming by mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions have hit a little snag: Far more dust could be needed than expected... What's more, the modeling showed that size matters. Twice as many large sulfate particles -- like those created by volcanoes -- would be needed to do the same cooling as smaller manmade particles... Also, such geo-engineered cooling does nothing to halt the ongoing increasing carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning which causes other problems -- like making the oceans more acidic. As Rasch adds, "geoengineering is not a complete solution" and he would prefer that we cut emissions. [related]

Dusty Wild West blamed on early settlers
The American west's dusty portrayal in movies and literature is no exaggeration - after the first settlers arrived, dust levels in the region soared... The team reckons the advent of large-scale agriculture and railway building must have kicked up the dust (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo133). "Looking at their data, it's almost like a switch was flipped," says Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

GW leading to fiercer hurricanes
...Kevin Trenberth said that, though climate change could not be blamed for the increases in hurricanes, it was definitely leading to wetter, powerful and more dangerous hurricanes.

Study finds hurricanes no worse today: Research looks at effect past hurricanes would have now
If the same hurricane that plowed into Miami in 1926 were to swamp south Florida's coast today, it would cause around $150 billion worth of damage -- dwarfing the $80 billion in losses caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 -- according to new research by a professor at the University of Colorado...Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, agrees that people who build on the coast should be aware of the risks they take, but he thinks Pielke is underestimating the role climate change will play in future coastal destruction.

Sustainable Mountain Living group to present education series
The Sustainable Mountain Living group (SML) will sponsor a series of four presentations on the topics of (1) the impending limits on world oil supplies, (2) world population growth and its consequences, (3) climate change, and (4) planning and preparing to meet these challenges.

Unpacking interplay of solar variability and climate change
It's widely known that the ultimate driver of the earth's climate system, the sun, has a variable output. The final speaker, Dr. Casper Ammann from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, changed that. His message, which he repeated a number of times, is that the increase in temperatures since the 1950s isn't due to the sun and, even if the next solar activity cycle doesn't arrive at all, temperatures are likely to continue to rise.

Giving Earth an Umbrella
Spraying millions of metric tons of sulfate particles into the atmosphere could reverse some human-caused global warming, a new study shows. But the simulations also reveal that the technique, which mimics the short-term cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, could chill the planet if overdone...But the models also suggest that the scheme could go too far: Adding excess sulfur could increase ice in Antarctica, "overcompensating" for warming, says Rasch, which could affect ecosystems and the global ocean-atmosphere system in a myriad of ways that scientists haven't studied.

Solar evidence points to human causes of climate change
It's getting harder and harder to blame the sun for causing the gradual increase in global temperatures that are now being seen in the climate record, scientists said today...In essence, Ammann added, it's now very clear that the atmospheric changes being seen now - global warming - "have nothing to do with changes in solar activity. It's greenhouse gases. It's not the sun that is causing this [climate] trend."

Ocean "Thermostat" May Be Secret Weapon Against Warming
A natural but mysterious "ocean thermostat" may be limiting seawater warming in at least one Pacific Ocean locale. The phenomenon may help protect some of the world's largest and most ecologically diverse coral reefs from the effects of climate change, a new study says. [related]

 

'Ocean thermostat can save coral'
Researchers suggest that natural processes appear to be regulating sea surface temperatures in a region of the western Pacific Ocean..."Computer models of Earth's climate show that sea surface temperatures will rise substantially this century," Gokhan Danabasoglu says. [related]

 

A new theory erupts: Mimicking effects of a volcano could cool global warming Here's an interesting concept: Fight climate change by inoculating the atmosphere with millions of tonnes of air pollutants.

Geophysicists Urge Steep Cuts in Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The American Geophysical Union says massive reductions in greenhouse gases will be needed-and scientists should speak up about it.

Scientific Group Releases New Statement on Climate Change
The world's largest society of Earth and space scientists has released a new statement on climate change that unequivocally names human activity as the cause of global warming..."The facts are well-established now that the Earth's climate is warming," said Bette Otto-Bliesner of National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado at a press conference today in Washington, D.C., held to release the statement.

Social Footprint Pilot at Ben & Jerry's Completed
The Center for Sustainable Innovation (CSI) announced today the successful completion of an initial pilot of its Social Footprint Method at Ben & Jerry's, the well-known ice cream maker headquartered in South Burlington, Vermont...The specific standard used at Ben & Jerry's was based on the so-called WRE350 scenario, a climate model that specifies a normative pattern of emissions required to stabilize CO2 concentrations to safe levels by 2150. The safe level specified in the WRE350 plan is 350 parts per million (ppm), as compared to present levels of approximately 385 ppm, and pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm. WRE350 was developed by Tom M. L. Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, Richard Richels, Director of Global Climate Change Research at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, and James A. Edmonds, a Senior Staff Scientist and Technical Leader of Economic Programs at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's (PNNL) Joint Global Change Research Institute

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