This week’s article was on how 2016 was showing record high global temperatures. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the months of January, February and March have already exceeded that highs from 2015. In addition, this March has also been the 11^th consecutive month to show record high temperatures since the 1800’s. This continuous increase in temperatures have alerted the NOAA, NASA and Japan’s Meteorological Association because they have all came up with similar results on the earth’s rising temperature. After this realization, the organizations have gone to the United Nations to raise awareness of the global climate change. They have also discovered that the terms signed in the last treaty has not have the significant effects that were expected. The organizations brought up the example of this year’s El Nino Phenomenon. It brought heavier rains and warmer temperatures. Also, scientist predict is will release larger amounts of heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere which will cause irregular weather patterns.

In addition to El Nino, the Artic has also been showing record high temperature that have been about 6 degrees higher than normal. This can lead to record melting of Artic sea ice in the upcoming months. Dr. Trenberth, a scientist in the NOAA, says these new occurrences do not represent a “new normal” and it hard to predict how these changes will effect long term changes in the global climate. Overall, the rising global temperatures should be taken seriously and be closely monitored because no one is exactly sure how it will directly affect our species and all the ones that share this planet.

Schlossberg, Tatiana. “2016 Already Shows Record Global Temperatures.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 19 Apr. 2016. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

This week’s article was about how climate change has been affecting the Kariba damn in Lake Kariba, Zambia. This specific damn has always been a seemingly limitless source of electricity to Zambia and it neighbors but things have been changing. Over the last server months, a severe drought that has been magnified by climate change has cut water levels to record lows. The damn is producing so little power that blackouts have been occurring and hurting the nation’s businesses. The problem is that for the past decade, Africa has been seeing much growth, but this drought is crippling multiple economies so bad that they have to reach out to the International Monetary fund for help. After seeing this issue, even David Kaluba, The coordinator of the government’s Interim Climate Change Secretariat said climate change is causing major issues in Zambia. In addition, the problem will not stop here. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change, Africa is expecting to warm up faster than the global aver over the next decades. This means that Zambia is going to need to find new ways to produce electricity for its ever growing population.

The main purpose of this article was to show how climate change has been killing coral which is leading to negative effects in the water ecosystems. Kim Cobb, a researcher from the Georgia Institute of Technology was sampling coral in in the Kiritimati Islands when she was something strange. She saw that an entire coral was covered with “red brown fuzz”.  The “red brown fuzz” was algae that grew on top of dead coral. All this coral is dying due to the mass bleaching that is occurring around the world. Some scientist believe that severe heat stresses that came from multiple weather events such as the pass El Nino is causing this problem. According to data that was college by the same scientist, this passed El Nino has threatened more than a third of the Earth’s coral reefs and many may not recover.
This is a big problem because coral reefs are an essential part of the ocean’s ecosystems. They provide food and shelter for a quarter of all marine species. In addition, people that feed off these ecosystems will also be effected because the fish they hunt will disappear which mean that will have to find a new food source. Since the bleaching is still occurring and will not be over for the several months, scientists don’t know how this will exactly affect the ocean’s ecosystem. All they know is that this will have a negative effect on the oceans and this bleaching needs to be closely observed.

Australia is the home of the Great Barrier Reef and the world’s largest coral reef eco system. It homes thousands of organisms but as of Tuesday March 29, 2016, the Australian Research Council says it might be in a little of bit of trouble. The reef is currently experiencing the worst bleaching event in history. In addition, the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce took an aerial survey and documented more than 500 coral reefs spanning 2,485 miles were experiencing severe bleaching.

Bleaching is when coral is exposed to stresses such as warmer-than-average waters for prolonged periods of time. Then after the coral will appeared to white or “bleached”. This can be a problem for the current ecosystem because it can harm the organisms that live there. It can be dangerous for global ecosystems because it can affect food chains all around the world.

http://www.livescience.com/54272-great-barrier-reef-worst-coral-bleaching.html

This article was about how global warming effects are coming sooner than anticipated and will be much more dangerous than earlier predicted. Leading scientist of the world say the will be much stronger than modern time storms and with the melting of polar ice sheets, the drowning of major coastal cities is a high possibility . These finding were released last Tuesday in the European Science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. In addition, former NASA climate scientist, James E. Hansen is afraid that “we’re in danger of handing young people a situation that’s out of their control”.

The theory that led these scientists to believe in such dramatic events are the following. First, burning fossil fuels at a dangerous pace and poring heat trapping gasses into the atmosphere will cause a quick climate change. Then this will cause ice sheets in Green land and Antarctica to melt rapidly. This in turn will cause coastal cities to flood. The prediction of this event was to be a couple of centuries away but scientists think it may just be a couple of decades away. There are some scientists in the world that doubt theories like these but many are on board with this theory.

The article this week involved the strongest El Nino in a generation. In Asuncion Paraguay there was extensive rainfall which disrupted the lives of many South Americans. This El Nino also affected farmers in India, they were forced to stop farming because the monsoons did not hit the fields hard. This dramatic change in weather put 60 million people at risk for malnutrition, water and mosquito borne disease and other illnesses.  This article went into great depth on the effects of El Nino in different parts of the world. In addition, it compared previous El Ninos to current ones. Overall, El Nino has been getting worse over the years due to the change in the world’s climate.

This article was focusing on a 12 year long project named ANDRILL. The goal of the project is to keep track of the stability of the ice sheets in Antarctica because the ice sheets are like a cork to a champagne bottle, they hold because huge land based flows of artic ice on the Antarctic continent. 100 scientists from all over the world work on this project because if the ice sheets melt, it can raise sea levels by 180ft. This can be a huge concern for everyone in the world. To get more information about the topic the scientist set 90 tons of drilling equipment on a floating piece of ice. Then they started drilling and collecting rocks that were potentially 20 million years old. The scientists were interested in the carbon dioxide levels in the samples because this can help them predict how fast the ice sheets will melt. Also, they were looking to see if they could relate different time period trends to our current trend. This would help with learning what would be coming in the future. In addition, since the ice sheets are cooled by the air and sea, a small change in temperature can also easily melt them. Overall, the scientist know the ice sheets are melting faster than they would like but the only thing we can do as humans is to be informed and create climate models to predict how much ice is going to melt.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160223143620.htm

The article “Study: Rising seas slowed by increasing water on land” was a study released by NASA on how liquid storage’s on land affect the rate of sea level rise.

The study began its origin in Pasadena, California with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The data was collected using NASA’s satellite. What the scientist found was that Earth’s continents were soaking up 3.2 trillion tons of water in its lakes, soils and underground aquifers. This means that rising sea levels are actually decreasing by 20%. Another way this phenomenon is observed is by looking at the water cycle or hydrologic cycle. There have been persistent regional changes within soil moisture and lake level which indicate that the Earth is absorbing more water than the melting rate of the ice sheets and glaciers. This has not been scientifically proven yet with definite numerical values but scientist at NASA believe this adds to the lack of sea level rise.

The article also goes in depth about a second study that was done in 2002 with NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate experiment sector. They had twin satellites that provided the scientist with a distance between the two satellites that could help with quantifying land liquid storage trends. Also, it provides data with Earth’s gravitational pull that can estimate the amount of water on Earth’s surface. With these two studies, it is clear to NASA that at this point in time Earth’s continents are slowing down the rising of sea levels.

http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2398/

This article was about two studies that showed how altering the densities of forest can change the temperature in that area and the carbon cycle. To get a full scope on the temperature change timeline, Kim Naudts, a scientist who studies climate change gathered 250 years of data on forest management. In addition, she gathered data on different tree species and where they are located around the world. What she found was that when you convert broad-leaved forests into coniferous forest, you can see large changes in evapotranspiration and albedo.  Therefore, the author concludes for the first study that “climate framework should account for land management practices in addition to land cover when trying to mitigate warming”.

The second study was focused on global forest and how they affect fluxes of energy and water between planet earth and the atmosphere. This study used satellite data of surface temperatures and variations in forest coverage around the planet. Their analysis showed that deforestation is causing an increase in maximum and average land temperatures. The only outlier that did not seem to match this trend was the forest in the northern latitudes. In conclusion, these two studies showed how global forest affect carbon cycles and global temperatures.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160204150713.htm

The article I chose for the second blog was ” Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat”. In 1979 NASA put up a satellite that would be used to measure the ice caps. In 2012, they reviewed the data from the satellites and learned that the total polar ice extent has remained above the 1979 average. These findings can conclude that global warming in not causing the ice caps to melt. There was a period of time in 2005 that the ice caps were melting and receding at approximately 10 % of the 1979 measurements. The last update to the data was in may 2015, and that data showed that the ice caps were 5 % greater than the 1979 average.

What does this all mean? It means that originally we thought that global warming was melting the ice caps and raising sea temperatures. In reality, the ice caps melt and then grow at their own rate. There was a large amount of ice in 1979, and then in 2005 they drastically started to melt but it leveled out again by 2012. Now in 2015 we have more ice caps then ever before.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2015/05/19/updated-nasa-data-polar-ice-not-receding-after-all/#5c251c9132da

In the article, the phenomenon of climate change was discussed with a focus on the rising temperatures of lakes around the world. This is an important issue that needs to be analyzed because as the temperatures increase, there is major risk in effecting fresh water supplies and various ecosystems around the world. Also, fresh water is used for manufacturing, energy production and irrigation to crops, so if the temperatures continue to rise, there will be an effect on certain properties within different ecosystems and that can hurt humans and animals of all kinds.

To analyze these trends, scientist collected twenty five year of satellite temperature and ground measurement data from 235 lakes around the world. What they found was that the lakes of the world have a rising temperature of 0.61 degrees every decade and that is significantly higher than the rising temperatures of the oceans and the atmosphere. In addition, the rising temperatures of the lakes also will increase algal blooms. This is an issue because algal blooms can rob the water of oxygen and can be toxic to the fish and animals that use those certain lake. The rising temperatures also effect emissions of methane and greenhouses gases. They are predicted to go up by 4% by the end of the decade.  

From the analysis of the lakes, it has become clear to scientist that these changes that they observe are unavoidable and already taking place. Scientist have to come up with ways to help ecosystems adapt to these changes because it is impossible to reverse the changes. This problem is something that needs more attention or else many communities and ecosystems will be negatively affected over the next few decades.

http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2378/