General Climate News Public-Private Partnerships to solve the climate crisis More cooperation between government and business is the only road ahead to save the climate, according to former UN Climate Chief Yvo de Boer. He spoke at a Nordic Council seminar in Oslo on January 24, where he urged the Nordic countries to take the lead towards a global climate solution. The Nordic Council, January 24, 2012 Climate Balancing: sea-level rise vs. surface temperature change rates Engineering our way out of global climate warming may not be as easy as simply reducing the incoming solar energy. Designing the approach to control both sea level rise and rates of surface air temperature changes requires a balancing act to accommodate the diverging needs of different locations. ScienceDaily.com, January 18, 2012 UK Hydrological summary for December 2011 published - end of a remarkable year Meteorologically, 2011 was a remarkable year: it was the second warmest in the UK temperature record (from 1910) and was notable for extreme regional disparities in rainfall receipt – with continuing drought conditions in the English Lowlands contrasting dramatically with Scotland, which had its wettest year on record. NERC - Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, January 17, 2012 -
Climate change is altering mountain vegetation at the large scale Climate change is having a more profound effect on alpine vegetation than at first anticipated, according to a study carried out by an international group of researchers and published in the journal Nature Climate Change. NERC - Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, January 10, 2012 Geographical Patterns of Rainfall Extremes Using statistical analysis methods to examine rainfall extremes in India, a team of researchers has made a discovery that resolves an ongoing debate in published findings and offers new insights. The study reports no evidence for uniformly increasing trends in rainfall extremes averaged over the entire Indian region. It does, however, find a steady and significant increase in the spatial variability of rainfall extremes over the region. WaterLink International / Nature Climate Change, December 26, 2011 Climate sensitivity greater than previously believed Many of the particles in the atmosphere are produced by the natural world, and it is possible that plants have in recent decades reduced the effects of the greenhouse gases to which human activity has given rise. One consequence of this is that the climate may be more sensitive to emissions caused by human activity than we have previously believed. ScienceDaily.com, December 21, 2011 NASA: Climate change may bring big ecosystem shifts By 2100, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth's land surface and will drive the conversion of nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type -- such as forest, grassland or tundra -- toward another, according to a new NASA and university computer modeling study. ScienceDaily.com, December 19, 2011 -
Comparing emissions of greenhouse gases from perennial bioenergy and annual arable crops A new study, published in the scientific journal GCB Bioenergy, examined the impacts of cultivating bioenergy crops on nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide emissions from soil. The study concluded that two perennial bioenergy crops only emit less greenhouse gases than annual crops when they receive no or very low rates of nitrogen fertilizer. NERC - Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, December 13, 2011
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