Warming Tied to Extinction of Frog Species
by Juliet Eilperin (Staff Writer), Washington Post, January 12, 2006

Rising temperatures are responsible for pushing dozens of frog species over the brink of extinction in the past three decades, according to findings being reported by a team of Latin American and U.S. scientists. The study, published in the journal Nature, provides compelling evidence that climate change has already helped wipe out a slew of species and could spur more extinctions and the spread of diseases worldwide. It also helps solve the international mystery of why amphibians around the globe have been vanishing from their usual habitats over the past quarter-century—as many as 112 species have disappeared since 1980.

Will 2005 Be the Warmest Year on Record?
Nicholas Bakalar, National Geographic News, December 20, 2005

Two major meteorological organizations agree: 2005 was a very warm year, and if it didn't set a new record for high average temperatures, it came very close to doing so.

Last week the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), based in Geneva, Switzerland, reported that the global mean surface temperature in 2005 is estimated to be 58.06F (14.48C). That figure is 0.86F (0.48C) warmer than the average between 1961 and 1990. Although official figures will not be released until next February, 2005 is likely to be one of the hottest four years since record-keeping began in 1861. October and June of this year were the warmest those months have ever been.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also issued a preliminary annual report on weather in 2005, reporting a warmer than average mean temperature for the United States.  Jay Lawrimore, chief of NOAA's Climate Monitoring Branch, thinks that 2005 will be very close to 1998, the warmest year on record for the nation.  "In fact it’s likely to only be second warmest according to the data set we are currently using as our operational version," he said. "[But] an improved data set for global analyses currently undergoing final evaluation will likely show 2005 slightly warmer than 1998."

A Record Amazon Drought, and Fear of Wider Ills
Larry Rohter, New York Times, December 11, 2005

The Amazon River basin, the world's largest rain forest, is grappling with a devastating drought that in some areas is the worst since record keeping began a century ago. It has evaporated whole lagoons and kindled forest fires, killed off fish and crops, stranded boats and the villagers who travel by them, brought disease and wreaked economic havoc.

''There have been years before in which we've had a deficit of rainfall, but we've never experienced drops in the water levels of rivers like those we have seen in 2005,'' said Everaldo Souza, a meteorologist at the Amazon Protection System, a Brazilian government agency in Manaus, the nine-state region's main city. ''It has truly been without precedent, and it looks like it is only going to be December or January, if then, that things return to normal.''

Scientists say the drought is most likely a result of the same rise in water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean that unleashed Hurricane Katrina. They also worry that if global warming is involved, as some of them suspect, it may be the beginning of a new era of more severe and frequent droughts in the region that accounts for nearly a quarter of the world's fresh water.

Alarm over Dramatic Weakening of Gulf Stream
Ian Sample (science correspondent), Guardian, December 1, 2005

The powerful ocean current that bathes Britain and northern Europe in warm waters from the tropics has weakened dramatically in recent years, a consequence of global warming that could trigger more severe winters and cooler summers across the region, scientists warn today.  Researchers on a scientific expedition in the Atlantic Ocean measured the strength of the current between Africa and the east coast of America and found that the circulation has slowed by 30% since a previous expedition 12 years ago.

The current, which drives the Gulf Stream, delivers the equivalent of 1m power stations-worth of energy to northern Europe, propping up temperatures by 10C in some regions. The researchers found that the circulation has weakened by 6m tonnes of water a second. Previous expeditions to check the current flow in 1957, 1981 and 1992 found only minor changes in its strength, although a slowing was picked up in a further expedition in 1998. The decline prompted the scientists to set up a £4.8m network of moored instruments in the Atlantic to monitor changes in the current continuously.

CO2 "Highest for 650,000 Years”
By Richard Black (Environment Correspondent), BBC News, November 24, 2005
 
Current levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere are higher now than at any time in the past 650,000 years.

That is the conclusion of new European studies looking at ice taken from 3km below the surface of Antarctica.The scientists say their research shows present day warming to be exceptional.  Other research, also published in the journal Science, suggests that sea levels may be rising twice as fast now as in previous centuries.  The evidence on atmospheric concentrations comes from an Antarctic region called Dome Concordia (Dome C).

In a Melting Trend, Less Arctic Ice to Go Around
By Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, September 29, 2005

 The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in at least a century of record keeping, continuing a trend toward less summer ice, a team of climate experts reported yesterday.

 That shift is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, the team's members and other experts on the region said.The change also appears to be headed toward becoming self-sustaining: the increased open water absorbs solar energy that would otherwise be reflected back into space by bright white ice, said Ted A. Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which compiled the data along with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. ''Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold,'' Dr. Scambos said.

Loss of Soil Carbon "Will Speed Global Warming"
Tim Radford (science editor), Guardian,  September 8, 2005

England's soils have been losing carbon at the rate of four million tonnes a year for the past 25 years—losses which will accelerate global warming and which have already offset all the cuts in Britain's industrial carbon emissions between 1990 and 2002, scientists warn today.  The research dashes hopes that more carbon dioxide emissions might mean more vegetation growth and therefore more carbon removed from the atmosphere.

The unexpected loss of carbon from the soils—consistently, everywhere in England and Wales and therefore probably everywhere in the temperate world—means more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which means even more global warming, and yet more carbon lost from the soil.  "All the consequences of global warming will occur more rapidly. That's the scary thing: the amount of time we have got to do something about it is smaller than we thought," Guy Kirk, of Cranfield University, told the British Association Festival of Science, in Dublin.

"Global Warming Is Fueling Nastier Storms," Expert Says
By Dan Vergano, USA Today, July 31, 2005

Hurricanes have grown fiercer in recent decades, spurred by global warming, and even tougher storms are likely on the way, a researcher predicts.

In his new study, ocean climatologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests that the power of big ocean storms has increased and will continue to do so, even if their numbers stay the same.  The analysis, released online Monday by the journal Nature, confounds some past studies that had indicated that increasing average temperatures worldwide over this century—a United Nations climate panel has projected that temperatures will rise from 2 to 10 degrees worldwide by 2100—would have little effect on hurricanes.

"The best way to put it is that storms are lasting longer at high intensity than they were 30 years ago," says Emanuel.  In an analysis of sea surface temperatures and storms since 1930, he found that a combined measure of duration and wind speeds among North Atlantic hurricanes and North Pacific cyclones has nearly doubled since the 1970s. "I was quite surprised by the magnitude of the increase," he says by e-mail.