Climate

Scientists rule out natural causes for rapid melting

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Attribution of global glacier mass loss to anthropogenic and natural causes

independent.co.uk - by Steve Connor - August 14, 2014

The dramatic melting of the world’s mountain glaciers – from the Alps to the Himalayas – is mostly the result of man-made global warming rather than natural variability in the climate, a study has found. . .

. . . An assessment of about 200,000 glaciers in the world, some of which have been monitored since the mid 19th century, has found that about two thirds of the current rate of glacial melting is due to human influences on the climate.

Scientists found that while much of the melting a century or more ago was most probably due to natural variability in the climate, it is now primarily caused by anthropogenic global warming resulting from industrial greenhouse gases.

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Image: Not all cows get to spend their days with soft green grass under hoof. For many, the picture isn't so pretty, according to the book Farmageddon.

npr.org - July 31, 2014 - Barbara J. King

For Philip Lymbery, head of the U.K.-based Compassion in World Farming and his co-author Isabel Oakeshott, a visit to California's Central Valley amounted to an encounter with suffering.

In Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, Lymbery and Oakeshott write that the mega-dairies of the Central Valley are "milk factories where animals are just machines that rapidly break down and are replaced." At one huge dairy they visited, cows stood idly outdoors, some in shade and some in the sun.

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The National Climate Assessment summarizes the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. A team of more than 300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee produced the report, which was extensively reviewed by the public and experts, including federal agencies and a panel of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The Colorado River Basin lost nearly 53 million acre feet of freshwater over the past nine years, according to a new study based on data from NASA’s GRACE mission. This is almost double the volume of the nation's largest reservoir, Nevada's Lake Mead (pictured).  Image Credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation

nasa.gov - July 24, 2014

A new study by NASA and University of California, Irvine, scientists finds more than 75 percent of the water loss in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin since late 2004 came from underground resources. The extent of groundwater loss may pose a greater threat to the water supply of the western United States than previously thought.

This study is the first to quantify the amount that groundwater contributes to the water needs of western states. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water management agency, the basin has been suffering from prolonged, severe drought since 2000 and has experienced the driest 14-year period in the last hundred years.