The new research found that all glacial regions lost mass from 2003 to 2009, with the biggest ice losses occurring in Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the Himalayas.

The glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic sheets lost an average of roughly 260 billion metric tons of ice annually during the study period, causing the oceans to rise 0.03 inches, or about 0.7 millimeters per year.

The study compared traditional ground measurements to satellite data from NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, missions to estimate ice loss for glaciers in all regions of the planet.

"For the first time, we've been able to very precisely constrain how much these glaciers as a whole are contributing to sea rise," said geography Assistant Professor Alex Gardner of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., lead study author. "These smaller ice bodies are currently losing about as much mass as the ice sheets."

A paper on the subject is being published in the May 17 issue of the journal Science.

"Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it," said CU-Boulder Professor Tad Pfeffer, a study co-author.

"But it's like a little bucket with a huge hole in the bottom: it may not last for very long, just a century or two, but while there's ice in those glaciers, it's a major contributor to sea level rise," said Pfeffer, a glaciologist at CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research

ICESat, which ceased operations in 2009, measured glacier changes using laser altimetry, which bounces laser pulses off the ice surface to determine changes in the height of ice cover. The GRACE satellite system, still operational, detects variations in Earth's gravity field resulting from changes in the planet's mass distribution, including ice displacements.

GRACE does not have a fine enough resolution and ICESat does not have sufficient sampling density to study small glaciers, but mass change estimates by the two satellite systems for large glaciated regions agree well, the scientists concluded.

"Because the two satellite techniques, ICESat and GRACE, are subject to completely different types of errors, the fact that their results are in such good agreement gives us increased confidence in those results," said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, a study co-author and fellow at the university's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Ground-based estimates of glacier mass changes include measurements along a line from a glacier's summit to its edge, which are extrapolated over a glacier's entire area. Such measurements, while fairly accurate for individual glaciers, tend to cause scientists to overestimate ice loss when extrapolated over larger regions, including individual mountain ranges, according to the team.

Current estimates predict if all the glaciers in the world were to melt, they would raise sea level by about two feet. In contrast, an entire Greenland ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by about 20 feet, while if Antarctica lost its ice cover, sea levels would rise nearly 200 feet.

The study involved 16 researchers from 10 countries. In addition to Clark University and CU-Boulder, major research contributions came from the University of Michigan, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, Trent University in Ontario, Canada, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies in Boulder, NASA's ICESat satellite was successfully operated from the CU-Boulder campus by a team made up primarily of undergraduates from its launch in 2003 to its demise in 2009 when the science payload failed.

The students participated in the unusual decommissioning of a functioning satellite in 2010, bringing the craft into Earth re-entry to burn up. ICESat's successor, ICESat-2, is slated for launch in 2016 by NASA.

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST Beijing, China (SPX) May 15, 2013 - A recent study indicated that the urbanization in eastern China has significant impact on the observed surface warming and the temporal-spatial variations of urbanization effect have been comprehensively detected.

This work was led by YANG XiuQun, professor of meteorology in the Institute for Climate and Global Change Research, School of Atmospheric Sciences at Nanjing University. The article entitled "Urbanization and heterogeneous surface warming in eastern China" was published in Chinese Science Bulletin, 2013, No. 12.

Urbanization, as one of the most significant processes in land use/cover change, can not only alter surface vegetation distribution, but also affect surface energy and water balance.

Some previous studies indicated that urbanization has little impact on surface warming. However, recent investigations have suggested that urbanization plays an essential role in regional climate change.

China has been experiencing intensive urbanization since the 1980s. Due to close ties in social and economic aspects, single cities have expanded to form distinctive city clusters in eastern China, such as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Pearl River Delta (PRD) city clusters.

Combining the social needs with scientific issues, Professor YANG XiuQun and his group dedicate to explore the climatic effect of urbanization in eastern China from observation and simulation perspectives.

The objective of their work is to estimate the effect of urbanization on surface air temperature (SAT) change, detect the seasonal variation of urban warming in different regions, and analyze the impact of urbanization on maximum and minimum temperatures.

With the homogeneity-adjusted SAT data at 312 stations in eastern China for 1979-2008 and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) nighttime light data, the spatial heterogeneities of the SAT trends on different scales are detected and the impact of urbanization in eastern China on surface warming is analyzed.

Results show that the urbanization can induce a remarkable summer warming in YRD city cluster region and a winter warming in BTH city cluster region.

The YRD warming in summer primarily results from the significant increasing of maximum temperature, with an estimated urban warming rate at 0.132-0.250 C per decade, accounting for 36%-68% of the total regional warming.

The BTH warming in winter is primarily due to the remarkable increasing of minimum temperature, with an estimated urban warming rate at 0.102-0.214 C per decade, accounting for 12%-24% of the total regional warming.

The study finds that urbanization has considerable influence on the regional climate change. Therefore, a more reasonable urban planning should be considered in order to mitigate regional surface warming.

In addition, the climatic effect of urbanization features obvious temporal-spatial differences, which may be associated with the variation of regional climatic background and the change of anthropogenic heat release.

Detection and assessment of the climatic effect of urbanization is of great significance for further understanding the relationship between urban development and climate change.

Wu K, Yang X Q. Urbanization and heterogeneous surface warming in eastern China. Chin Sci Bull, 58(12):1363-1373, doi: 10.1007/s11434-012-5627-8

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST Geneva (AFP) May 14, 2013 - After seeing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere surpass a historic threshold last week, the world should brace for the new peak level to soon become the global annual average, the World Meteorological Organization warned Tuesday.

"At the current rate of increase, the global annual average CO2 concentration is set to cross the 400 parts per million threshold in 2015 or 2016," the UN agency said in a statement.

Climate scientists last week measured 400.03 parts per million of CO2 at a Hawaii station considered the global benchmark site for atmospheric observations -- marking the first time in human history that the level has clearly surpassed the symbolic 400 ppm threshold.

This level has not existed on Earth in three to five million years -- a time when temperatures were several degrees warmer and the sea level was 20 to 40 meters (22 to 44 yards) higher than today, experts say.

Several other stations in the Arctic and on the Canary Islands have over the past year also reported daily mean values exceeding the 400 ppm mark, but the benchmark Hawaii measurement sparked particular alarm, with the UN's climate chief Christiana Figueres warning Monday the world had "entered a new danger zone".

Before the industrial revolution, when man first started pumping carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, CO2 levels were about 280 ppm -- rising steadily since records began in the 1950s.

The WMO pointed out Tuesday that the average annual amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 390.9 ppm in 2011, or 140 percent above the "balanced" pre-industrial level, and stressed there had been an average increase of 2.0 ppm each year for the past decade.

The 400 ppm symbolic threshold had been expected to be breached for some time, but campaigners say it should nevertheless serve as a wake-up call in efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and thus global warming.

The UN is targeting a maximum temperature rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) on pre-industrial levels for what scientists believe would be manageable climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which informs policy makers, has said atmospheric CO2 must be limited to 400 ppm for a temperature rise of 2-2.4 degrees Celsius (3.6 and 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit).

Many scientists however believe we are heading towards warming levels of between 3.0 and 4.0 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST New Haven, Conn. (UPI) May 9, 2013 - After the cold winter of 2012-13, the percentage of Americans who believe global warming is occurring has dropped 7 points since last fall, a poll indicates.

Researchers at Yale University and George Mason University said the drop was likely influenced by the relatively cold winter and an unusually cold March just before their survey, Climate Change in the American Mind, was conducted.

"Some people think weather and climate are the same thing," Yale research scientist Anthony Leiserowitz said. "When they experience cold weather or a big snowstorm, they think that perhaps global warming isn't happening.

"When they experience a heat wave, they are more likely to say it is happening. Recent weather experiences can thus influence the opinions of some members of the public."

In the survey of a random sample of 1,045 adults aged 18 and up interviewed April 8-15, 63 percent said they believe global warming is happening.

Forty-nine percent of survey respondents said they believe global warming is caused mostly by human activities, a decrease of 5 points since fall 2012 but similar to levels stretching back several years, the researchers said.

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST Paris (AFP) May 12, 2013 - More than half of common species of plants and a third of animal species are likely to see their living space halved by 2080 on current trends of carbon emissions, a climate study said on Sunday.

Output of man-made greenhouse gases is putting Earth on track for four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100 compared with the pre-industrial 18th century, it said.

The unprecedented speed of warming will be a shock for many species, as it will badly affect the climatic range in which they can live, it warned.

Investigators from Britain's University of East Anglia looked at 48,786 species and measured how their range would be affected according to models of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Fifty-five percent of plants and 35 percent of animals could see their living space halved by 2080 at current emission growth for CO2, they found. The figures take into account the species' ability to migrate into habitat that may open up as a result of warming.

The species most at risk are amphibians, as well as plants and reptiles, and regions that would lose most are Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, Amazonia and Australia, the paper said.

Lead researcher Rachel Warren said the estimates "are probably conservative" as they were based only on the impact of rising global temperatures.

Other symptoms of climate change -- storms, droughts, floods and pests, for instance -- would amplify the problem.

"Animals in particular may decline more as our predictions will be compounded by a loss of food from plants," Warren said in a press release.

"There will also be a knock-on effect for humans because these species are important for things like water and air purification, flood control, nutrient cycling and eco-tourism."

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, said there was a ray of light.

If carbon emissions peak in 2016 -- and decline by three to four percent annually thereafter -- this would limit 2100 warming to 2 C (3.6 F), avoiding around 60 percent of the projected impact from business-as-usual emissions.

But if the peak is delayed until 2021, emissions would have fall yearly by six percent to achieve 2 C (3.6 F) warming, which would need a costlier effort to rein in energy use.

Alternatively, if emissions peak by 2030 and then are reduced at five percent annually to limit warming to around 2.8 C (5 F), the loss of climatic range would be reduced by 40 percent compared with business-as usual.

UN members have adopted the 2C target in world climate talks, which aim to conclude a new treaty on carbon emissions by 2015 and have it ratified by 2020.

But the negotiations have been making poor progress, and the yearly rise in emissions, driven especially by the burning of coal in big developing countries, has led many scientists to conclude that warming of 3 or 4 C (5.4-7.2 F) is probable by century's end.

The new study says that loss of climate range would be bound to boost the risk of species extinction.

The Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that 20-30 percent of species would be at increasingly high risk of extinction if warming exceeds two or three C (3.6-5.4 F) above pre-industrial levels.

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST Beijing (UPI) May 13, 2013 - Urbanization in eastern China has a significant impact on the observed surface warming that plays an essential role in regional climate change, scientists say.

Intensive urbanization in China since the 1980s has not only altered surface vegetation distribution but has also affected surface energy and water balance, research leader Yang XiuQun of the School of Atmospheric Sciences at Nanjing University said.

Writing in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin, the researchers said they set out study the effect of urbanization on surface air temperature change, detect the seasonal variation of urban warming in different regions, and analyze the impact of urbanization on maximum and minimum temperatures.

Findings showed urbanization induced summer warming in the Yangtze River Delta region and a winter warming in the city cluster of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the researchers said.

The finding that urbanization has considerable influence on regional climate change means urban planning must take that into account and efforts made to mitigate surface warming, they said.

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST Paris (AFP) May 13, 2013 - The world has entered a "new danger zone" with levels of Earth-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere never experienced by humankind, the UN's climate chief warned Monday.

When it breached the CO2 threshold of 400 parts per million (ppm) last week, the world "crossed an historic threshold and entered a new danger zone," Christiana Figueres said in a statement urging policy action.

The level measured by US monitors has not existed on Earth in three to five million years -- a time when temperatures were several degrees warmer and the sea level was 20 to 40 meters (22 to 44 yards) higher than today, experts say.

Before the Industrial Revolution, when man first started pumping carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, CO2 levels were about 280 ppm -- rising steadily since records began in the 1950s.

The 400 ppm symbolic threshold had been expected to be breached for some time, but campaigners say it should nevertheless serve as a wake-up call in efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions through fossil fuel use.

"The world must wake up and take note of what this means for human security, human welfare and economic development," said Figueres, who oversees global negotiations aimed at limiting warming-induced climate change.

"In the face of clear and present danger, we need a policy response which truly rises to the challenge."

Negotiators under the auspices of the United Nations are seeking by 2015 to develop a new, global climate treaty to take effect by 2020.

Nations are simultaneously attempting to find short-term solutions pre-2020 to closing the growing gap between agreed carbon emission targets and the actual curbs required to contain warming.

The UN is targeting a maximum temperature rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) on pre-industrial levels for what scientists believe would be manageable climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which informs policy makers, has said atmospheric CO2 must be limited to 400 ppm for a temperature rise of 2-2.4 deg C (3.6 and 4.3 deg F).

Last Friday, however, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's monitoring centre in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, released data showing the daily average CO2 over the Pacific Ocean was 400.03 ppm as of May 9.

A separate monitor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, measured 400.08 ppm.

"We still have a chance to stave off the worst effects of climate change, but this will require a greatly stepped-up response," Figueres said Monday.

Global climate negotiations have been making poor progress and the yearly rise in emissions has led many scientists to conclude that warming of 3 or 4 C (5.4-7.2 F) is probable by century's end.

The next round of high-level talks are to take place in Warsaw, Poland in December, with a stock-taking session scheduled for Bonn, Germany in June.

Last year's meeting in Doha, Qatar, saw the 27-nation European Union, Australia, Switzerland and eight other industrialised nations sign up for binding emission cuts until 2020 under an extension of the Kyoto Protocol.

Together, the countries represent only 15 percent of global emissions.

The United States, China and India, the world's biggest emitters of CO2, have no binding targets.

On Sunday, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said more than half of common plant species and a third of animal species are likely to see their living space halved within seven decades on current CO2 emission trends.

Output of man-made greenhouse gases is putting Earth on track for warming of 4 deg C (7.2 deg F) by 2100, it said.

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST Washington (AFP) May 10, 2013 - The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, US monitors announced Friday, sparking new calls for action to scale back greenhouse gases.

Climate scientists say the threshold is largely symbolic and has been expected for some time, but warn that it serves as an important message that people need to reverse the damage caused to the environment by the heavy use of fossil fuels.

The Earth has not seen these levels of CO2 in three to five million years, long before humans existed, in a time when temperatures were several degrees Celsius warmer and the sea level was 20-40 meters (yards) higher than today, experts say.

"We are creating a prehistoric climate in which human societies will face huge and potentially catastrophic risks," said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

"Only by urgently reducing global emissions will we be able to bring carbon dioxide levels down and avoid the full consequences of turning back the climate clock."

Data showing that the daily average CO2 over the Pacific Ocean was 400.03 ppm as of May 9 was posted online by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's monitoring center in Mauna Loa, Hawaii.

A separate monitor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California concurred, with its measurements showing atmospheric carbon dioxide at 400.08 ppm.

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, said the main concern is the speed with which the concentrations of CO2 are rising.

"There is no precedent in Earth's history for such an abrupt increase in greenhouse gas concentrations," Mann, who has authored two books on climate change, told AFP.

"It took nature hundreds of millions of years to change CO2 concentrations through natural processes such as natural carbon burial and volcanic outgassing," he said.

"What we are doing is unburying it. But not over 100 million years. We're unburying it and burning it over a timescale of 100 years, a million times faster."

Experts have long expected the 400 ppm threshold would be passed.

"In itself the value 400 ppm of CO2 has no particular significance for the physics of the climate system," said Joanna Haigh, atmospheric physicist and head of the department of physics at Imperial College London.

"However, this does give us the chance to mark the ongoing increase in CO2 concentration and talk about why it's a problem for the climate."

Haigh said that unless swift action is taken, "the planet will warm by more than two degrees Celsius, which is the temperature threshold that scientists are worried about."

Pre-industrial measurements of CO2 were about 280 ppm. Greenhouse gases have risen steadily since records began in the 1950s, and are likely to soar by the end of the century, said the Grantham Institute's director Brian Hoskins.

"We'll certainly see them rise higher than they are now. Given current human activity, levels of CO2 could be near 800 ppm by end of century," he said.

"Unless as a society we devise ways to remove CO2 directly from atmosphere, such as through negative emissions technologies, we're going to be stuck with a very slow decrease of CO2 from peak levels, and everybody will have to deal with the implications of global warming."

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST Manchester, UK (SPX) May 07, 2013 - University of Manchester scientists, writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, have shown that natural emissions and manmade pollutants can both have an unexpected cooling effect on the world's climate by making clouds brighter.

Clouds are made of water droplets, condensed on to tiny particles suspended in the air. When the air is humid enough, the particles swell into cloud droplets. It has been known for some decades that the number of these particles and their size control how bright the clouds appear from the top, controlling the efficiency with which clouds scatter sunlight back into space.

A major challenge for climate science is to understand and quantify these effects which have a major impact in polluted regions.

The tiny seed particles can either be natural (for example, sea spray or dust) or manmade pollutants (from vehicle exhausts or industrial activity). These particles often contain a large amount of organic material and these compounds are quite volatile, so in warm conditions exist as a vapour (in much the same way as a perfume is liquid but gives off an aroma when it evaporates on warm skin).

The researchers found that the effect acts in reverse in the atmosphere as volatile organic compounds from pollution or from the biosphere evaporate and give off characteristic aromas, such as the pine smells from forest, but under moist cooler conditions where clouds form, the molecules prefer to be liquid and make larger particles that are more effective seeds for cloud droplets.

"We discovered that organic compounds such as those formed from forest emissions or from vehicle exhaust, affect the number of droplets in a cloud and hence its brightness, so affecting climate," said study author Professor Gordon McFiggans, from the University of Manchester's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences.

"We developed a model and made predictions of a substantially enhanced number of cloud droplets from an atmospherically reasonable amount of organic gases.

"More cloud droplets lead to brighter cloud when viewed from above, reflecting more incoming sunlight. We did some calculations of the effects on climate and found that the cooling effect on global climate of the increase in cloud seed effectiveness is at least as great as the previously found entire uncertainty in the effect of pollution on clouds."

Nature Geoscience paper, 'Cloud droplet number enhanced by co-condensation of organic papers,' by Gordon McFiggans et al

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST Berlin (UPI) May 8, 2013 - German Chancellor Angela Merkel this week called for a redoubling of efforts to forge a new U.N. agreement on climate change by 2015.

Speaking Monday at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin, Merkel warned the representatives of 35 countries in attendance that "waiting is not an option" for reaching a deal to cut the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

"If we do nothing, the road is even more complicated," she said. "Doing nothing also means that everything is much more expensive."

While acknowledging much has been accomplished and praising "individual initiatives" such the development of solar power in Saudi Arabia and the containment of rain forest destruction in Brazil, Merkel asserted pressure must be kept up on "all states" to do more to protect the climate.

"The path to a really combat climate change turns out to be a very complicated one," the German leader said.

She called for a new U.N. treaty replacing the Kyoto Protocol to be reached by 2015 and put in place by 2020, using as a base the 2009 U.N. conference in Copenhagen where the world's nations agreed to a target of limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius more than 1990 levels.

Voluntary commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren't enough, she said, asserting that even if all industrialized countries emitted no more carbon dioxide, the goal wouldn't be achieved.

"The only way is a new, binding agreement for all countries," she said.

The Petersberg meeting, established as a personal initiative by Merkel, is in effect a warm-up to the annual U.N. Climate Conference, which this year will be in Poland. It was co-hosted by German Environment Minister Peter Altmaier and Polish counterpart Marcin Korolec.

Europe will continue to be a pioneer she said, endorsing the European Commission's goal of establishing new binding greenhouse gas reduction and renewable energy goals by 2030.

But, she warned, EU members are facing declining economic growth and that must be taken into account when setting the targets, which currently envision a 40 percent cut in carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2030.

Merkel, who has been hotly criticized by environmentalists for not taking a strong stance on repairing the European Union's faltering emissions trading system, said it is "not taboo" to discuss reforming the market-based system, through which polluters buy emission allowances.

The German chancellor remained mostly silent as the European Parliament last month debated and ultimately rejected a bid to take 900 million of the allowances off the market as a way to boost their record-low prices -- Altmaier supported the move but Minister of Economics Philipp Rosler opposed it because it would raise costs for energy consumers.

Merkel said Germany must first complete reforms to its Renewable Energy Sources Act -- which seek to rein in quickly rising taxes paid by consumers to support the development of wind and solar power -- before propping up the ETS can be addressed.

"If the reform of the Renewable Energy Sources Act succeeds, then we can turn to the emissions trading in Europe again," she said.

]]> Sat, 18 MAY 2013 00:32:36 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D