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Scientific group: Cut carbon dioxide emissions in half

To curb global warming, we're going to have to crack down on greenhouse gases in a big way, says the American Geophysical Union.

The AGU, an organization that publishes and promotes geophysical research, issued a statement Thursday stating that, to avoid a 2-degree Celsius rise in average temperatures, carbon dioxide emissions will have to be cut in half during the century.

"In the next 50 years, even the lower limit of impending climate change--an additional global mean warming of 1 degree C above the last decade--is far beyond the range of climate variability experienced during the past thousand … Read more

Global warming worry: Accelerating pace of change

Correction at 3:30 p.m. PST Thursday: Blame my Rust Belt ignorance. The Ohio river that burned is the Cuyahoga.

SAN FRANCISCO--I've been spending some time at the the American Geophysical Union conference here, and I've had a recurring thought: When it comes to apocalyptic predictions, geophysicists have the Book of Revelations beat, hands down.

Sometime in the last few years, the idea that global warming is a reality and that it's caused in large measure by people has finally started sinking in. But perhaps because of the remaining skepticism, and more likely because of the … Read more

Record heat sweeps Arctic Sea, ice in 2007

SAN FRANCISCO--Warmth may not be an attribute you associate with a place where the sun doesn't shine in the winter and the sea freezes over, but all things are relative. And compared to earlier years, the Arctic was downright sweltering this year.

According to new research presented here at the the American Geophysical Union conference, the Arctic Ocean reached record high temperatures, arctic ice diminished to a record low, and ice melted on Greenland for a record number of days.

"In 2007, we had off-the-charts warming" of the Arctic Sea in the summer, said Mike Steele, an … Read more

Scientists tackle midrange weather forecasts

SAN FRANCISCO--Scientists are trying to peer a bit further into the future than the typical five-day weather forecasts available today.

Forecasting weather is a notoriously tough challenge that combines physics modeling, data collection, and computer processing--and unlike many scientific problems, pretty much everyone on the planet cares how well it's done. But forecasts today peter out after a few days, leaving a cloud of uncertainty (forgive me) that only lifts when it comes to predicting seasonal weather phenomena such as El Nino.

Scientists are now getting a handle on intermediate-term forecasts by computer models of a particular type of … Read more

Stanford eyes offshore wind farms for Calif.

SAN FRANCISCO--A Stanford research team has concluded that the ocean not far off the Northern California coastline is the most promising spot for an offshore wind farm to generate power.

Specifically, the researchers concluded that the sea off Cape Mendocino, roughly 150 miles northwest of San Francisco, was their top pick. Wind turbines there could supply 5 percent of California's electrical power needs, they projected.

The researchers plan to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference here Thursday.

There are a number of offshore wind farms--one to the west of Denmark springs to mind--but most of … Read more

Warming climate triples northern fire frequency

SAN FRANCISCO--Researchers have linked global climate change to a tripling in the frequency of large fires in major forests of Alaska and Canada.

Black spruce forests cover about 2.7 million square kilometers in Canada and Alaska--about a third of the area of the lower 48 states of the U.S., and fire records date back to the 1950s. Beginning around 1987, the rate that large wildfires struck the forest jumped from about once every 10 years to once every 3 years, said Eric Kasischke of the University of Maryland at College Park, speaking at the American Geophysical Union conference … Read more

Voyager 2 finds our solar system is squashed

Correction: The distance from the sun Voyager 2 is estimated to reach in 2020 is about 11 billion miles.

SAN FRANCISCO--Thirty years after launch but earlier than expected, Voyager 2 has left the cozy realm of our solar system, where the stream of particles from the sun dominates space.

You might think that space billions of miles from the sun is a placid, empty domain. In fact, Voyager 2 has been heading outward in the same direction as the solar wind, charged particles streaming from the sun, but things started to get a lot more complicated on August 30, when … Read more