Some scientists have argued from observations that global warming will alter clouds in ways that will largely counter warming by greenhouse gases. But the overwhelming majority of climate scientists sides
Two new studies point to random, wind-induced circulation changes in the ocean--not global warming--as the dominant cause of the recent ice losses through the glaciers draining both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.
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.
Of the dozens of forecasting techniques proffered by government, academic, and private-sector climatologists, all but two are virtually worthless, according to a new study.
Two new model studies project a modest increase or even a decrease in the frequency and intensity of Atlantic tropical cyclones.
A new paper shows that regional and even global temperatures are being temporarily held down by a natural jostling of the climate system, driven in large part by vacillating ocean currents.
Almost 6 years ago, a paper in Science warned of an unheralded environmental peril. Melted snow and ice seemed to be reaching the base of the great Greenland ice sheet, lubricating it and accelerating the sheet's slide toward oblivion in the sea, where it was raising sea level worldwide (12 July 2002, p. 218). Now a two-pronged study-both broader and more focused than the one that sounded the alarm-has confirmed that meltwater reaches the ice sheet's base and does indeed speed the ice's seaward flow. The good news is that the process is more leisurely than many climate scientists had feared.
Clouds have always given climate modelers fits. The clouds in their models are crude at best, and in the real world, researchers struggle to understand how clouds are responding to-and perhaps magnifying-greenhouse warming; But two new studies now show that much of the worry about clouds' role in the warming has been misdirected.
In a research by paleoceanographer Andre Bornemann of Leipzig University in Germany and his colleagues analyzed apparently unaltered Foraminifera picked from sediment core drilled from Demerara Rise beneath the western equatorial Atlantic. Following a classic technique, the researchers measured oxygen isotopes in the forams' shells. They found a sharp shift toward the heavier oxygen-18 isotope in both surface and bottom dwelling forams from 91.2 million years ago.
<p>Assigning blame for regional climate disasters is hard, but scientists have finally implicated the greenhouse in a looming water crisis.</p>
Climate scientists are used to skeptics taking potshots at their favorite line of evidence for global warming. It comes with the territory. But now a group of mainstream atmospheric scientists is disputing a rising icon of global warming, and researchers are giving some ground.
