Atmospheric

Hurricane Formation... And Control?

This time of year, hurricanes take over the news coverage. Hurricane season is one of those annual events nobody really looks forward to. And yet, there they come, year after year. This has spurred some people to question whether or not hurricanes can pot ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Aug 29 2011 - 9:48am

CLOUD And The Cosmic Ray Climate Change Blow Up

When I saw some preliminary results in Nature about CERN's CLOUD experiment a while ago, I didn't regard it as interesting enough to write about.   Seriously, does anyone not think the Sun impacts the climate by now? I know, I know, in the 1990s ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Aug 31 2011 - 12:41pm

Rossby Waves- What Russian Fires And Pakistan Floods Have In Common

Planetary waves, named Rossby waves because they were discovered by  Carl-Gustav Rossby in the 1930s, are intriguing natural phenomena that travel from East to West. A new NASA study suggests two of the most destructive natural disasters of 2010 were compl ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 31 2011 - 12:14pm

Clouds Don't Cause Climate Change, Says Texas A&M Professor

Clouds amplify climate change, says Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor Andrew Dessler, rebutting recent claims by some that clouds are a root cause of climate change (for an analysis of the study that led to the concern, go here). Dess ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 6 2011 - 12:49pm

Greenland: 800,000 Years Of Sudden Climate Change

What did Greenland look like over the last 800,000 years?   Hard to know for sure but one thing is certain; it changed often, and quickly. Drill cores taken from Greenland's vast ice sheets show that Earth's climate is capable of very rapid trans ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2011 - 1:57pm

The City And The Little Boy's Lungs

One evening last spring, Peter nearly stopped breathing. He was riding in the car with his mother, April, who was taking the 11-year-old boy back from a visit to the ER for one of his chronic asthma attacks. He seemed to be getting better — and then his t ...

Article - Greg Critser - Sep 28 2011 - 11:34am

Lake Agassiz- Prehistoric Glacial Lake Offers Insight On Climate Change

8,000 years ago, which is basically yesterday in geological time, a now-vanished glacial lake covered a huge expanse of today's Canadian prairie and the rich farmland in the Red River Valley. As big as Hudson Bay, the lake was fed by melting glaciers ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 8 2011 - 1:30pm

Pollution May Weaken Winds And Increases Cyclones In Arabian Sea

Prevailing wind shear patterns prohibit cyclones in the Arabian Sea from becoming major storms but a new study says winds are weakening and that has enabled the formation of stronger cyclones in recent years-- including storms in 2007 and 2010 that were t ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2011 - 10:31am

Developing Countries Keep Global CO2 Emissions Rising

Estimates show that 2010 was by far a record year for CO 2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion and cement manufacture. Globally 9,139 Teragrams, a teragram is a million metric tons, of oxidized carbon (Tg-C) were emitted from these sources. Converted to ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 5 2011 - 4:28pm

Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum- The Methane Hypothesis

During the last decade, the almost singular focus on CO2 has been something of a puzzle; leaving out methane, with 23X the warming impact of CO2, seemed like a mistake.  ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 9 2011 - 11:47am