Yes it's true , a cargo cult has melted 26% of the French Alps. Every year , 20,000 of them meet in San Francisco .  And this year the French came to report 26% of the French ice fields are gone in the last 40 years.  3 years ago the Swiss said the same thing about their ice fields., at the same meeting . This Fall  has been the warmest and driest in the Alps in 147 years.

For a cargo cult these guys make good on their predictions.

Val D'Isaster: World Cup skiing event cancelled due to lack of snow... as warm weather signals catastrophic season in Alps

Its slopes, seen here in these staggeringly barren photographs, have been badly affected by the warmest and driest autumn in the Alps for 147 years.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2068663/World-Cup-skiing-event-Val-dIsere-cancelled-lack-snow-.html#ixzz1furbmQO1

That was happening as the French cult members  flew to San Francisco to report the cult has managed to melt over 25% of the ice in France in the last 40 years -

Glaciers in the French Alps have lost a quarter of their area in the past 40 years, according to new research.

In the late 1960s/early 1970s, the ice fields slipping down Mont Blanc and the surrounding mountains of the European range covered some 375 sq km.

By the late 2000s, this area had fallen to about 275 sq km.

The research has been presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the world's largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.

French Alpine glaciers in retreat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16025568

Swiss officials began moving trout from a river this week to save them from plunging water levels, amid one of the worst droughts to hit the country in 150 years.

Gardner looked at more recent changes: during the years 2004 to 2009. Over that study period, he found, the glacier lost a volume equivalent to about 75 percent of Lake Erie, the majority of that loss happening between 2006 and 2009. In these years, the loss was four times what it had been in the late 1990s.

Studying remote glaciers
MODIS satellite true color image of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
MODIS satellite true color image of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
CREDIT: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response: http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/imagery/rapid/
View full size image

The Canadian Arctic Archipelago includes thousands of islands covering 550,000 square miles (1.4 million square kilometers), nearly the size of Alaska. It is home to one of the largest freshwater glacier ranges on Earth, which has 3½ times the volume of the combined Great Lakes.

Fort McKay, Alberta (CNN) -- Celina Harpe was 7 when her grandfather made a prediction that would forever change her life.

"I won't see it, I'm too old now, but it's going to be really bad," she recalls him saying on a warm summer night after returning from a moose hunt. The two were standing on a hill that overlooks the birch-and-spruce-lined river here in far northwest Canada.

"You see these plants and this water we've got? That's going to be all polluted. You're going to have to buy water -- and water is life.

"Mother Earth is going to be all torn up."

Starting this Earth Day, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will launch a series of 50 stories for 50 consecutive weekdays that will explore the many ways accelerating climate change is impacting or may impact fish and wildlife across America. No geographic region is immune.

Combined with other resource stressors, such as urbanization, invasive species and water scarcity, climate change is disrupting natural systems upon which wildlife and people depend. The series will cover 50 states, examining regional challenges posed by climate change.

Rising temperatures in the Pacific may be directly contributing to ongoing warming in Antarctica, a new study finds.

Heat rising from warm Pacific waters near the equator causes waves of warmth in the atmosphere — a phenomenon called the Rossby wave train, researchers report today (April 10) in the journal Nature Geoscience. The wave train brings warmer temperatures to West Antarctica during the winter and spring.

As noted some weeks ago, the Arctic stratosphere has been unusually cold this winter, resulting in a transformation of chlorine supplied by industrial compounds into other forms that aggressively remove ozone. Since then the ozone removal process gained additional momentum by the return of sunlight to the Arctic, which is needed for the chemical processes to occur. The current amount of ozone depletion above the Arctic is far beyond that recorded for any other spring, over the time when ozone has been measured by modern instrumentation.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 4, 2011) — An 18-year study of 27,000 individual trees by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientists finds that tree growth and fecundity--the ability to produce viable seeds--are more sensitive to climate change than previously thought.

The earthquake and tsunami affected six of the 28 oil refineries in Japan and immediately petrol rationing was introduced with a maximum of 20 litres per car (in some instances as low as 5 litres).

"The glaciers have lost a lot less ice up until 30 years ago than had been thought. The real killer is that the rate of loss has gone up 100 times above the long-term average. It's scary," said Professor Glasser, who carried out the study with the University of Exeter and Stockholm University. He pointed out the glaciers are at the same latitude in the southern hemisphere as the Alps are in the northern hemisphere. These are also known to be retreating and he suggested it is quite likely they are losing ice more rapidly than was thought: "If we looked at them, I'm pretty sure we would find they are also speeding up their loss rate."

Torrential rains in excess of 40 inches (1.016 meters) deluged Thailand's Malay Peninsula this week, triggering floods that have killed at least 17 people. The floods submerged 61 major highways, affected 840,000 people, and forced the helicopter rescue of thousands of stranded tourists. Late March is usually a fairly dry time of year for Thailand, but near-record cold air settled in over the region this week, dropping temperatures to 5 - 10°C (9 - 18°F) below average. Heavy storms accompanied the cold air, and downpours with rainfall rates of up to 2 inches/hour affected the region for many days in a row. Sea surface temperatures of the waters surrounding the flood regions were near average, but were plenty warm enough to supply copious moisture to feed the storms. Flood recovery will slowed by additional moderately heavy rains of 3 - 5 inches expected to fall over the flooded region during the next week, according to the latest precipitation forecast from the GFS model.

New Zealanders have been issued with a stark warning to expect "surprises" by scientists who say they cannot keep up with extreme weather events linked to climate change.

Scientists opened a climate change conference in Wellington yesterday by stating that changes in climate being experienced around the globe were beyond their worst-case scenarios.

Several papers published in the journal Nature demonstrate that such extreme precipitation events in specific localities is the result of climate change and not an overactive imagination. The scientists studied the actual, observable precipitation patterns in the 20th century and then compared them to climate model simulations and a splash of probability to discover a close, predictive match up.

They claim that their results provide "first formal identification of a human contribution to the observed intensification of extreme precipitation." The scientists, led by Seung-Ki Min at the Climate Research Division from Environment Canada in Toronto, say that the global climate models may, in fact, be underestimating the amount of extreme weather events, "which implies that extreme precipitation events may strengthen more quickly in the future than projected and that they may have more severe impacts than estimated."

"One surprise we found was that the warm waters in the fjord are actually 1 degree Celsius warmer in winter, which by Greenland standards is a lot," Straneo says. "It raises the possibility that winter melt rates might be larger than those in the summer.

In Alaska, where the larch were largely devastated by a disease outbreak in the late '90s, vast swathes of forest are becoming inhospitable to the dominant white and black spruce.

"The climate has shifted. It's done, it's clear, and the climate has become unsuitable for the growth of the boreal forest across most of the area that it currently occupies," said Glenn Juday, a forestry professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2011) — The freshwater content of the upper Arctic Ocean has increased by about 20 percent since the 1990s, according to a new large-scale assessment. This corresponds to a rise of approximately 8,400 cubic kilometres and has the same magnitude as the volume of freshwater annually exported on average from this marine region in liquid or frozen form.

Russia's boreal forest -- the largest continuous expanse of forest in the world, found in the country's cold northern regions -- is undergoing an accelerating large-scale shift in vegetation types as a result of globally and regionally warming climate. That in turn is creating an even warmer climate in the region, according to a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology and highlighted in the April issue of Nature Climate Change.

There is no doubt that climate change is affecting many ecological events, such as flowering and reproduction seasons in animals. In the case of birdlife, there is growing evidence that this effect is particularly profound.

New research by the Royal Society of Biological Sciences has been shown that the frequency of spring rainfall is affecting the timing of breeding in the Mauritius Kestrel. The birds tend to breed later in wetter springs and since spring rainfall has increased by 60% since 1962, the kestrel is now breeding as late as September. As a result, fewer eggs and young chicks are making it through the cyclone season.

During the past 60 years, from 1948 to 2009, the trend in average annual temperatures for Canada as a whole has increased by 1.4 C.

And, according to a March 23 Statistics Canada report, the strongest warming trends were located in climatic regions that include the Arctic, which they've the Arctic Tundra; Arctic Mountains and Fiords; Mackenzie District; and Yukon and North British Columbia Mountains, shown in the map below.

Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: as Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén said, "No acts of God can be permitted." Fallible people have created its half-century history of a few calamities, a steady stream of worrying incidents, and many near-misses. America has been lucky so far. Had Three Mile Island's containment dome not been built double-strength because it was under an airport landing path, it may not have withstood the 1979 accident's hydrogen explosion. In 2002, Ohio's Davis-Besse reactor was luckily caught just before its massive pressure-vessel lid rusted through.

Regulators haven't resolved these or other key safety issues, such as terrorist threats to reactors, lest they disrupt a powerful industry. U.S. regulation is not clearly better than Japanese regulation, nor more transparent: industry-friendly rules bar the American public from meaningful participation. Many Presidents' nuclear boosterism also discourages inquiry and dissent.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 18, 2011) — An international research team involving ETH Zurich has compared the hot summers of 2003 and 2010 in detail for the first time. Last year's heatwave across Eastern Europe and Russia was unprecedented in every respect: Europe has never experienced so large summer temperature anomalies in the last 500 years.

Air masses exposed to ozone loss above the Arctic tend to drift southwards later. Hence, due to reduced UV protection by the severely thinned ozone layer, episodes of high UV intensity may also occur in middle latitudes. "Special attention should thus be devoted to sufficient UV protection in spring this year," recommends Rex.

The study, to be published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that the longer corn is exposed to temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), the more yields decline, according to Banziger.

That cocktail of problems -- rather than a single cause killing bees in hives that might be easier to fix -- may also threaten wild bees and other insects vital to pollinate crops such as soybeans, potatoes or apple trees.

"It's the tip of the iceberg we're seeing with the honey bees," Peter Neumann, a lead author of the study of "global honey bee colony disorders and other threats to insect pollinators," told Reuters.

The Central Weather Bureau (CWB) released a stark report Wednesday on how climate change has affected Taiwan over the last century.

According to CWB, Taiwan has experienced a warming effect that is twice the global average, which has translated to higher temperatures, greater rainfall, and more typhoons over the past 30 years.

The bureau said that while global temperatures have risen 0.65 degrees Celsius.

The 15-month study, conducted by the National Research Council, accepts the scientific consensus that the climate is changing and that the effects are being felt now. Of particular consequence to American naval forces – the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard – are the melting polar ice cap, rising seas and increasingly frequent severe storms and droughts that could lead to famine, mass migration and political instability.

The report from research council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, builds on previous work by the Pentagon, State Department, the intelligence community and independent research groups that have concluded that climate change is a "threat multiplier" that adds new and unpredictable dangers to global physical and political stability.

In 2006, Colombia produced more than 12 million 132-pound bags of coffee, and set a goal of 17 million for 2014. Last year the yield was nine million bags.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study — the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass — suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.

In the report, major cities - particularly Sydney - are shown to be under much more immediate threat from sea level rises than previously predicted. It warned that there had already been a three-fold increase in inundation events in Sydney, according to data taken from Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour.

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"The increase in incidence of extreme sea level events for some of Australia's largest cities is a factor of 1000, and for Sydney it is 10,000," the report said.

"For a multiplying factor of 100, events with a current occurrence of once every hundred years would occur every year.

The Fraser River is heating up because of climate change and an increasing number of salmon are dying in the warmer water from diseases or parasites or are simply dropping dead from cardiac collapse, a federal judicial inquiry has been told.

Scott Hinch, an expert witness on aquatic ecology, told the Commission of Inquiry Into the Decline of Sockeye Salmon in the Fraser River that sometimes 50 per cent of the salmon that return to the river die before they reach the spawning beds.

THE CONDITION of the coral reef at Point Vernon has shocked the Hervey Bay Bleachwatch group that monitors the health of the coral.

The group recently surveyed the coral and saw that silt and nutrients deposited after January's flooding of the Mary River had caused significant damage to the fringing coral reef on the eastern shores of Point Vernon.

Soft corals were the most significantly affected along with sponges and other marine invertebrates.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- As carbon dioxide levels have risen during the last 150 years, the density of pores that allow plants to breathe has dwindled by 34 percent, restricting the amount of water vapor the plants release to the atmosphere, report scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and Utrecht University in the Netherlands in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (now online).

A small colony of emperor penguins on an island off the West Antarctic Peninsula is gone, and the most likely culprit is loss of sea ice caused by warming. Although it has been predicted that penguins could suffer greatly because of global warming, this is the first time the disappearance of a colony has been documented.

The researchers, however, caution that their study is hampered by a lack of long-term information on emperor penguins, both at this site and in general, and their environment.

Most important, the fate of coffee in Costa Rica could be a bellwether for food production — and prices — globally, as farmers around the world cope with mudslides, droughts and creeping changes in temperature.

Almost all coffee grows in the tropics, and in general, tropical species are more sensitive to climate change, said Joshua Tewksbury, the Walker professor of natural history at the University of Washington. There are more species there, they can withstand only a narrow band of temperatures, and they are not likely to adapt well to change.

Warmer ocean temperatures cause significant melting of Greenland's glaciers
At a talk last December at the world's largest conference on climate change, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, glacier expert Eric Rignot of UC-Irvine implicated ocean warming as a key reason for the calving of the Petermann Glacier's ice island. The ocean waters near the glacier have warmed by 1 - 2°C over the past three years, he said, and all of the periphery of Greenland has seen ocean heat increases in recent years, with the result that 20 - 80% of all the mass lost by Greenland's glaciers in recent years could be attributed to melting of the glaciers by warmer waters attacking them from beneath. Ocean temperatures along the southwest coast of Greenland (60N to 70N, 60W to 50W) computed from the UK Hadley Center data set during 2010 were 2.9°C (5.2°F) above average--a truly remarkable anomaly, and far warmer than the previous record of 1.5°C above average set in 2003.

Of the areas with valid data, 11 percent show a trend toward earlier blooms, while only 1 percent showed later blooms. These locations have a "striking similarity" to the patterns of decrease in early summer sea ice, they write.

In some areas, the change was quite dramatic. For example, in the Baffin Sea, southwest of Greenland, the peak bloom moved from September to early July.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - This winter's heavy snowfalls and other extreme storms could well be related to increased moisture in the air due to global climate change, a panel of scientists said on Tuesday.

This extra moisture is likely to bring on extraordinary flooding with the onset of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, as deep snowpack melts and expected heavy rains add to seasonal run-off, the scientists said in a telephone briefing.

Awareness is increasing of a fundamental problem looming, in which rising demand departs from flattening supply, leading to a shortage in the supply of the global economy's life blood. Until now, false reassurance that we can carry on as we are has come from two factors. First, that there is still oil and second, that new oil fields are still being discovered.

And, of course, there is still oil and small, new amounts are being found. But the situation is like knowing there are 10 mouths to feed tomorrow, yet only food stores enough for eight. Worse, each day, less food is replaced than the amount eaten, while the number of mouths to feed increases.

The researchers say that lodgepole pine will be gone from almost all of the Pacific Northwest and wiped out in 83 per cent of its range in B.C. by 2080. That's within the lifetime of seedlings now being planted in the wake of the mountain pine beetle epidemic.

"Even though lodgepole pine is a hardy species, it's very susceptible to climate change, so it is going to be pushed out of the space where it grows very well," Coops, a professor at the UBC Faculty of Forestry, said in an interview.

In Thailand, where he visited reefs last summer, nearly all were hit by bleaching.

Andrew Baird, a scientist at the Australian Research Council's Coral Reef Studies center, said he just returned from Indonesia's Aceh province, where nearly 100 percent of corals died at most sites. He said the total loss of coral cover could range from 50 percent to 80 percent.

"This is as bad as I have ever seen," Baird said. A similar level of bleaching is likely in Thailand and India, but it isn't nearly as bad elsewhere, he said.

Although the mountain pine beetle epidemic has largely run its course in north-central Colorado, insect and disease activity continued to stress the state's forests in 2010.

"From dying walnut trees in cities along the Front Range to spruce beetles attacking high-elevation forests in southwest Colorado, we continue to have concerns about forests throughout the state," said Jeff Jahnke, state forester and director of the Colorado State Forest Service.

Water demand in many countries will exceed supply by 40 per cent within 20 years due to the combined threat of climate change and population growth, scientists have warned.

A new way of thinking about water is needed as looming shortages threaten communities, agriculture and industry, experts said.

In the next two decades, a third of humanity will have only half the water required to meet basic needs, said researchers.

The researchers concluded that some of these forces have been at work since at least 1980, and by around 2020 will have decreased the Pacific Northwest range of lodgepole pine by 8 percent. After that, continued climatic changes are expected to accelerate the species' demise. By 2080, it is projected to be almost absent from Oregon, Washington and Idaho, some of the areas facing the most dramatic changes.

"For skeptics of climate change, it's worth noting that the increase in vulnerability of lodgepole pine we've seen in recent decades is made from comparisons with real climatic data, and is backed up with satellite-observations showing major changes on the ground," said Richard Waring, an OSU distinguished professor emeritus of forest science.

"This is already happening in some places," Waring said. "Bark beetles in lodgepole pine used to be more selective, leaving the younger and healthier trees alone.

"Now their populations and pheromone levels are getting so high they can more easily reach epidemic levels and kill almost all adult trees," he said. "Less frost, combined with less snow favors heavier levels of bark beetle infestation. We're already seeing more insect attack, and we project that it will get worse."

As an example, Schmidt points to an E&E paper that claimed that the Sun is made of iron. "The editor sent it out for review, where it got trashed (as it should have been), and [Boehmer-Christiansen] published it anyway," he says.

The journal also published a much-maligned analysis suggesting that levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide could go up and down by 100 parts per million in a year or two, prompting marine biologist Ralph Keeling at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California to write a response to the journal, in which he asked: "Is it really the intent of E&E to provide a forum for laundering pseudo-science?"

ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2011) — How severe can climate change become in a warming world? Worse than anything we've seen in written history, according to results of a study recently appearing in the journal Science.

An inquiry by a federal watchdog agency found no evidence that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated climate data to buttress the evidence in support of global warming, officials said on Thursday.

Nearly all of Australia's coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, will suffer from overwhelming climate change in less than two decades, a new report warns.

Global environmental think tank, the World Resources Institute (WRI) has released research into climate change impacts on the world's reefs called Reefs at Risk Revisited.

(Reuters) - Ancient megadroughts that lasted thousands of years in what is now the American Southwest could offer a preview of a climate changed by modern greenhouse gas emissions, researchers reported on Wednesday.

The scientists found these persistent dry periods were different from even the most severe decades-long modern droughts, including the 1930s "Dust Bowl." And they determined that these millennial droughts occurred at times when Earth's mean annual temperature was similar to or slightly higher than what it is now.

Sometime in the next 20 years, Arctic soil that has been frozen since the last ice age will begin thawing in response to rapidly warming polar temperatures and start releasing a vast reservoir of carbon into the atmosphere. A new study puts the first numbers and dates on these "irreversible" permafrost emissions, and it looks like enough to kick the global warming trend into another gear.

The carbon is released by the decay of roots and other organic material exposed to the atmosphere after thousands of years of being locked away in the deep freeze of permanently frozen Arctic dirt.

LIMA — A glacier on Peru's Huaytapallana Moutain shed half its surface ice in just 23 years, officials said Wednesday, reinforcing concerns of climate change's growing threat to fresh water resources.

"Recent scientific studies indicate that between June 1983 and August 2006, the glacier has lost 50 percent of its surface ice," Erasmo Meza, manager of natural resources and the environment in the central Andean region of Junin, told the official Andina news agency.

In its report published yesterday, Munich Re found that the 960 natural disasters that resulted in financial losses in 2010 "far exceeded" the number of disasters in recent years. Last year had the second-highest number of "loss-related natural catastrophes" since the insurance company began keeping track in 1980, and natural disasters racked up $2.5 trillion in losses in the past 30 years. At the top of the heap is Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which racked up $145 billion in losses along the Gulf Coast, about half of which had been insured.

"You see these big eruptions throughout Earth's history," says Schaller. "But it's always been unclear what they can do to the atmosphere. It turns out, they may do a lot."

To a non-geologist, it might seem that any volcanic eruption might affect the atmosphere, but it's important to understand even the largest eruptions of individual volcanoes seem puny beside the events Schaller studies – a million cubic kilometers of lava pouring out of fissures in the earth's surface in less than 20,000 years.

"Mt. St. Helens in 1980, Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 – those were big eruptions," Kent says. "Lots of ash and aerosols, but hardly a ripple in atmospheric CO2."

Kent added that the famous Krakatoa eruption in 1883 occurred before regular measurements of atmospheric CO2, which began in 1958. But ice core data from that time show no detectable perturbation of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The soil lies cracked and broken in China's Shangdong Province, thirsting for rains that will not come. China's key wheat producing region, lying just south of Beijing, has received just 12 millimeters (1/2 inch) of rain since September, according to the Chinese news service Xinhua. If no rains come during the remainder of February, it could become the worst drought in 200 years. The latest precipitation forecast from the GFS ensemble model predicts the possibility of rains of around 1/2 inch for Shandong Province early next week, but these rains would help only a little. A longer-range 2-week forecast from the operational GFS model shows little or no rain for the region from late next week well into March. Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) projects that spring in Eastern China has an enhanced probability of being dry, with only a 20% - 25% chance that the region will see above average precipitation, and a 40% - 45% chance of below average precipitation. So the great drought will likely continue, and China's ability to feed itself may be greatly challenged this year.

Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem.

The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there's a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them.

After I wrote about online astroturfing in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them.

Three-quarters of the world's coral reefs are at risk due to overfishing, pollution, climate change and other factors, says a major new assessment.

Reefs at Risk Revisited collates the work of hundreds of scientists and took three years to compile.

The biggest threat is exploitative fishing, the researchers say, though most reefs will be feeling the impact of climate change within 20 years.

Dr Karell told BBC News that the brown owls, which used to form 30% of the tawny owl population in Finland, now make up 50%.

"Its survival has improved as winters have become warmer," he said. "In other words, climate-driven selection has led to an evolutionary change in the population."

Darwin, Australia suffered its greatest 24-hour rainfall in its history [last] Wednesday, when a deluge of 13.4 inches (339.4 mm) hit the city when Tropical Cyclone Carlos formed virtually on top of city and remained nearly stationary. Carlos has now dissipated, and brought only an additional 1.50″ (38 mm) of rain yesterday to Darwin. Over the past four days, Carlos has dumped a remarkable 26.87″ (682.6 mm) of rain on Darwin (population 125,000), capital of Australia's Northern Territory.

It's enough to make you grab a tissue: Minneapolis has tacked 16 days to the ragweed pollen season since 1995; LaCrosse, Wisc. has added 13 days, Winnipeg and Saskatoon in Canada have added 25 and 27 days, respectively.

BEIJING (AFP) – Thick smog blanketing Beijing went "beyond" measurable pollution levels on Monday, the US embassy said, as a Chinese official warned people to stay indoors and avoid outdoor activities.

The independent assessment by the embassy said pollution was either hazardous or "beyond index," meaning that air quality had plunged below the worst level on the scale.

The Beijing Environmental Bureau said air quality in most of the city was at level five -- the worst rating.

The state spends roughly $11 million per year dealing with permafrost-affected roads and has for about eight years, he said.

ASPEN — The outlook for forests in western North America is grim: White pines in majestic Yellowstone National Park face obliteration; two-thirds of aspen forests, including many in the Roaring Fork Valley, are likely doomed; and bark beetle infestations will intensify with climate change.

The grim outlook was delivered Friday by scientists at the "Forests at Risk" conference in Aspen. More than 400 conservationists, U.S. Forest Service workers and curious folks attended the conference presented by For the Forests, an Aspen nonprofit.

"There wasn't much good news in anything any of you had to say," moderator Renee Montagne of National Public Radio told a panel featuring the first four presenters at the conference.

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- Climate change could prolong toxic algal outbreaks by 2040 or sooner, posing a health threat to humans, a new study suggests.

Using cutting-edge technologies to model future ocean and weather patterns, a team of U.S. researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the University of Washington looked at blooms of Alexandrium catenella, more commonly known as "red tide," which produces saxitoxin, a poison that can accumulate in shellfish.

CYCLONE Carlos exploded like a "hand grenade" over Darwin, weather experts said. Authorities called the storm a "one-in-500-year event".

And Met Bureau regional director Andrew Tupper said the cyclone was so unusual, he wanted to turn it into a case study.

"The system really went feral," he said.

The seminar was organized by For the Forest, an Aspen organization formed in response to infestations of bark beetles killing lodgepole pine on the hills surrounding the ski town.

Aspen sits in the heart of the White River National Forest, which is seeing a barrage of threats. Entire stands of aspen are dying due to a phenomenon called sudden aspen decline. Beetles are killing off vast swaths of pine and, more recently, spruce. Massive wildfires have scorched thousands of acres. All events have different causes, scientists agreed, but climate change is a common denominator, creating weaker trees and more-robust insects and disease.

One- to two-thirds of Earth's permafrost will disappear by 2200, unleashing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, says a study by researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

"The amount of carbon released is equivalent to half the amount of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age," said NSIDC scientist Kevin Schaefer. "That is a lot of carbon."

Similar fingerprinting studies have found human-caused greenhouse gas emissions triggered changes in more than a dozen other ecological ways: temperatures on land, the ocean's surface, heat content in the depths of the oceans, temperature extremes, sea level pressure, humidity at ground level and higher in the air, general rainfall amounts, the extent of Arctic sea ice, snowpack levels and timing of runoff in the western United States, Atlantic Ocean salinity, wildfire damage, and the height of the lower atmosphere.

All those signs say global warming is here, said Xuebin Zhang, a research scientist for the Canadian government and co-author of the Northern Hemisphere study. "It is affecting us in multiple directions."

Most of the 10 outside climate experts who reviewed the papers for The Associated Press called the research sound and strong.

PARIS (AFP) – Global warming driven by human activity boosted the intensity of rain, snow and consequent flooding in the northern hemisphere over the last half of the 20th century, research released Wednesday has shown.

The Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts will be particularly hard hit. Miami, New Orleans, Tampa, Fla., and Virginia Beach, Va. could lose more than 10 percent of their land area by 2100.

The research is the first analysis of vulnerability to sea-level rise that includes every U.S. coastal city in the lower 48 with a population of 50,000 or more.

Already living in a damp climate, Germans should expect a lot more precipitation and extreme weather by 2040, experts from the German Weather Service (DWD), the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) warned this week.

In the days that followed, floodwaters began draining into the oceans through and marine biologists grew increasingly concerned. Because lying in the path of the fresh floodwater was the Great Barrier Reef - the world's largest coral reef system.

Within days post-disaster monitoring began, in a collaborative effort lead by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) with the involvement of institutions such as James Cook University (JCU) in Northern Queensland and the state government's Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) to check the changed environmental conditions, such as temperature or salinity.

Because carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere at a rate that has never been experienced, Kiehl could not estimate how long it would take for the planet to fully heat up. However, a rapid warm-up would make it especially difficult for societies and ecosystems to adapt, he says. If emissions continue on their current trajectory, "the human species and global ecosystems will be placed in a climate state never before experienced in human history," the paper states.

Tropical Cyclone Bingiza roared ashore over Northern Madagascar early today as a dangerous Category 3 hurricane with 115 mph winds. Recent microwave imagery from NASA's TRMM satellite shows that Bingza had a large region of heavy rains of 0.4 - 0.7 inches per hour in the eyewall and inner spiral bands at landfall. Rainfall amounts of up to 8 inches are being predicted along Bingza's path over northern Madagascar for the coming 24 hours by NOAA's automated tropical cyclone rainfall prediction system. Rains of this magnitude are capable of causing dangerous flooding in Madagascar, and the storm's winds and storm surge likely caused serious damage in the moderately populated area where the storm came ashore. Bingiza will weaken today as it traverses the island, but is expected to re-intensify once it emerges over the Mozambique Channel between Africa and Madagascar on Tuesday, where sea surface temperatures are about 0.4°C above average. As the storm skirts the western coast of Madagascar Tuesday and Wednesday, the island will receive additional very heavy rains on its mountainous slopes. Madagascar suffers from extensive deforestation, and a storm like Bingiza is capable of causing very dangerous floods.

Still, the main threat to coral reefs remains climate change. Because weak cyclones are a regular feature of coral reef systems, it's the increase in intensity rather than frequency that is cause for concern, says Katharina Fabricius, principal research scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS).

Between 1970 and 2005 Australia's Great Barrier Reef saw 116 cyclones cross its path, none of which were category five. Since 2006, three cyclones -- Larry, Hamish, and now Yasi – have tackled the coastline with category-five strength, dislodging large coral heads, the older corals in the reef.

"Reefs take 10 years in the most favorable conditions, and up to 50 years in deeper water to recover, so the presently high frequency of disturbance doesn't give the reefs sufficient time to recover, and consequently coral cover is declining," Fabricius told Discovery News.

China has announced a billion dollars in emergency water aid to ease its most severe drought in 60 years, as the United Nations warned of a threat to the harvest of the world's biggest wheat producer.

Beijing has also promised to use its grain reserves to reduce the pressure on global food prices, which have surged in the past year to record highs due to the floods in Australia and a protracted dry spell in Russia.

The desperate measures were evident at Baita reservoir in Shandong – one of several key agricultural provinces afflicted by four months without rain. With nearby crops turning yellow, a mechanical digger cut a crude, open-cast well into the dried-up bed of the reservoir. Muddy water from the five-metre deep pit was pumped up to the surface via a hose that snaked past a fishing boat stranded on the cracked earth.

Experts, including Abbassian, have said the initial cause of the "price shock" was a drought that devastated Russian crop yields early last year and subsequently led Moscow to impose a ban on grain exports, squeezing global wheat supplies.

But then came Saskatchewan's record-setting rains, preventing farmers from even planting wheat on millions of acres of drenched agricultural land.

"What is typically the driest province was never wetter," Environment Canada noted in its year-end review of the country's Top 10 weather stories of 2010, which placed Saskatchewan's "Summer of Storms" at No. 6.

Like freight trains loaded with water vapor, atmospheric rivers are long, narrow bands whose winds funnel huge amounts of moisture through the sky. When they hit coasts, these rivers can drop their moisture as rain and cause destructive flooding, as in January 2005 when more than 20 inches of rain soaked southern California, killing 14 people and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

It's not the heat that might get us with climate change—it's the humidity, so to speak.

The risk of sea level rise due to melting land ice is one of the most recognized—if controversial and hard to predict—threats posed by global warming. Other potential impacts from global warming include increasingly powerful storms and floods of the sort that have ravaged Australia this past month and a half (while recognizing scientists can't yet fingerprint individual weather events as caused by warming).

AMHERST, Mass., Feb. 10 -- Using new, high-resolution global ocean circulation models, University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientist Alan Condron, with Peter Winsor at the University of Alaska, report this week that massive glacial meltwaters assumed to have flooded the entire North Atlantic 8,200 years ago, drastically cooling Europe, instead flowed thousands of miles further south. "These results dramatically affect our understanding of what causes climate change," Condron says.

The events unfolded when the Laurentide ice sheet, which covered much of Hudson Bay in Arctic Canada, gradually melted during a warm period about 8,200 years ago. The resulting glacial Lake Agassiz catastrophically broke through a kilometers-long ice dam at the bottom of the bay, suddenly dumping thousands of cubic kilometers of fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean.

In fact, our physical understanding of climate tells us global warming will cause the water cycle to grow more intense. This means both more heavy downpours and more intense drought. As temperatures rise, the ground dries out faster, causing droughts to get worse. So we find ourselves swinging from one extreme to another, like an ever deepening rollercoaster ride.

Wait a minute, scoffs the sceptic. How can global warming cause droughts and floods? Aren't you just trying to blame everything on climate change? But increased drought and heavy downpours aren't just predictions from a climate model. They're happening in the real world.

Madrid - The day is filled with sunlight, but the mountains near Madrid are no longer visible, having faded into the dark smog that hangs above the Spanish capital as pollution levels soar.

Madrid and Spain's second-largest city Barcelona exceed the European Union's safe contamination limits by far, according to Paco Segura from the environmentalist group Ecologistas en Accion.

In Madrid, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels as high as 380 micrograms per cubic metre have been measured in some places over the past week, while the EU limit only allows for a maximum of 200 micrograms during 18 hours in an entire year, Segura told the German Press Agency dpa.

Lough's study looked at coral rings over three periods of roughly 100 years each. She said rainfall in the late 17th century and into the 18th century was probably a bit above the long-term average and was reasonably variable. She said the next 100 years from 1785 to 1884 was a bit drier and less variable.

"Then we seem to see a signal from the end of the 19th century up until 1981 of more rainfall but also more variability, so that the wet years tend to be wetter and dry years drier and that the frequency of such extremes increases."

Subsequent weather records over the past 30 years backed up the move towards more extremes, she said, with the past several years in Townsville being very wet. Townsville is in northeast Queensland, which was badly affected by Cyclone Yasi last week.

"This reconstruction provides a new insight into rainfall in northeast Queensland," said study author Janice Lough, a climate scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, in Queensland, Australia. "These coral samples, which date from 1639 to 1981, suggest that the summer of 1973 to 1974 was the wettest in 300 years. This summer is now being compared with that record-setting one."

"The pessimistic scenario shows that Bordeaux's climate, by 2050, will no longer favour Cabernet and Merlot," the backbone varietals of the region's red wines, said Jean-Pascal Goutouly, a researcher at the National Institute for Agricultural research (INRA).

"We are currently on the most pessimistic curve -- that's the emergency," he told winemakers from some of the region's most prestigious chateaux.

Residents of Australia's biggest city, Sydney, sweltered through a sixth straight day of more than 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) heat on Saturday, the longest stretch on record.

The weather bureau said temperatures have been in the mid- to high-30s since last Sunday, the most enduring heatwave since records began 153 years ago in 1858.

Coral growth has slowed markedly on the reef since 1990 and parts of it have suffered severe bleaching due to rising sea temperatures and acidity that kill its plant-like organisms, leaving just the white limestone skeleton.

Overall, both this and cyclone damage are symptoms of worsening and dangerous climate change, said John Merson, from the University of New South Wales.

"I think probably more damage is being done (to the reef) by the rising temperature in the ocean which is causing the cyclone, as well as the reef to be damaged," said Merson.

"The other question is the complete lack of attention being given to the fact that we have a category five cyclone because we have climate change, yet we completely ignore this factor in the whole thing.

"The same thing -- the heating of the water -- is going to increase coral bleaching which will knock out the reef in the long term anyway."

In January, Arctic sea ice covered 13.6 million square miles of ocean, nearly 20,000 square miles below the previous record low in January 2006 and some 490,000 square miles below the 1979-2000 average.

The drivers for January's record low extent, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, included a natural climate pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation, as well as residual heat from the Arctic Ocean, captured and retained during the previous melt season.

Washington, D.C. - infoZine - On Friday, Jan. 28 in Antarctica, a research team investigating the last 100,000 years of Earth's climate history reached an important milestone completing the main ice core to a depth of 3,331 meters (10,928 feet) at West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS). The project will be completed over the next two years with some additional coring and borehole logging to obtain additional information and samples of the ice for the study of the climate record contained in the core.

Last year's drought in the Amazon raises concerns about the region's capacity to continue absorbing carbon dioxide, scientists say.

Researchers report in the journal Science that the 2010 drought was more widespead than in 2005 - the last big one - with more trees probably lost.

The 2005 drought had been termed a "one in a century" event.

Manila - Philippine President Benigno Aquino III ordered Thursday a moratorium on the cutting down of trees in the country's fast dwindling forests.

Under Executive Order 23, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources was prohibited from issuing and renewing logging contracts throughout the country.

Monsoons that brought flooding to Pakistan last July could have been predicted days in advance if data from computer models had been processed, researchers say.

Five days before the rains began, computer models at a European weather-forecasting center were giving indications downpours were imminent, an American Geophysical Union release said Monday.

A study led by the University of Zaragoza (UNIZAR) has studied precipitation trends in Spain's 10 hydrological basins over the 1946 to 2005 period. The results show that precipitation has declined overall between the months of March and June, reducing the length of the rainy season. The rains are heavier in October in the north west of the country.

"Nothing happens unexpectedly, everything has an indication,
we just have to observe the connections."
Zsolt Boszormenyi
Head of RSOE EDIS

This thread is for reports for February, if you have one, please post in in the comments . If not please don't comment off topic, I will delete it.
Want to know what one is , here's a recent one -
Kuri Bay, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, has recorded its wettest month on record ............
1,240 millimetres of rain , 48.81 inches in 26 days.

All Cyclone & Typhoon graphics / reports come from the - JTWC

The public's belief in global warming as a man-made danger has weathered the storm of climate controversies and cold weather intact, according to a Guardian/ICM opinion poll published today.

Asked if climate change was a current or imminent threat, 83% of Britons agreed, with just 14% saying global warming poses no threat. Compared with August 2009, when the same question was asked, opinion remained steady despite a series of events in the intervening 18 months that might have made people less certain about the perils of climate change

ABNORMALLY hot sea temperatures at Ningaloo Reef are bleaching the area's coral, environmental officers say.

Ocean surface temperatures at the reef have been 3C higher than average since October and peaked at 29C in the past two weeks - the 'trigger level' for bleaching.

The Department of Environment and Conservation detected the patches of bleached corals using satellite imaging.

Canada's Anticosti Island has produced the first clear evidence that the planet's second-largest mass extinction -- the sudden disappearance of 75 per cent of all marine species on Earth about 450 million years ago -- was caused by a rapid, five-degree plunge in ocean temperatures.

The year 2011 started with more than a million people living in the eastern part of Sri Lanka displaced by the floods; at least 40 people have died. Such is the devastation caused by the floods that the economic cost could amount to 500 million USD. The end of 2010 noted the heaviest rain in 18 years in the western part of Sri Lanka, leaving 36,000 families homeless and submerging the country's Parliament under four feet of water. If you recall, the first quarter of 2010 recorded the warmest days in Sri Lanka. Overall, the frequency of droughts, heavy rains, floods, earth slides has increased geometrically. So called 'natural disasters' seem to be happening at very short time intervals.

The phenomenon is not unique to Sri Lanka. Let's take a quick tour of the world in disaster.

The freeze-thaw cycle is another enemy.

"We're expecting those to get worse and expand farther across the state," he said.

In Fairbanks, fall traditionally turns to winter quickly and temperatures typically remain below the freezing mark until April. But lately, the transition has lasted longer.

"We get snow, and it warms up," Coffey said.

Irregular warm spells during early winter cause events like the freezing rain storm in November that blanketed Fairbanks in ice.

These events force planners to manage roads differently.

"One thing we're implementing next winter in Fairbanks is an anti-icing program," Coffey said. "That's something that has never had to happen in the Interior before."

The Arctic is responding more rapidly to global warming than most other areas on our planet. Northward-flowing Atlantic Water [AW] is the major means of heat advection toward the Arctic and strongly affects the sea ice distribution. Records of its natural variability are critical for the understanding of feedback mechanisms and the future of the Arctic climate system, but continuous historical records reach back only ~150 years. Here, we present a multidecadal-scale record of ocean temperature variations during the past 2000 years, derived from marine sediments off Western Svalbard (79°N). We find that early–21st-century temperatures of Atlantic Water entering the Arctic Ocean are unprecedented over the past 2000 years and are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming….

Belgium-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).

The CRED found that the summer heatwave in Russia was the second deadliest disaster of the year, leaving 55,736 people dead according to figures it compiled from insurers and media reports of official sources.

Spring is sooner recognised by plants than by men, states the Chinese proverb – a point that has been backed by science. Researchers have found that the behaviour of plants and the animals that feed on them shows spring is arriving earlier every year. It also appears that this advance is accelerating, according to Dr Stephen Thackeray of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, in Lancaster.

"We have measured the date of the arrival of spring according to the behaviour of more than 700 species of British animals and plants – including life forms such as plankton on lakes – and we have found that, on average, spring arrived 11 days earlier in the middle of the past decade than it did in the middle of the 70s," he says. "And the rate of change is getting greater."