Atmospheric

Acid Fog On Mars

Mars doesn't have much in the way of Earth-like weather, it does evidently share one kind of weird meteorology: acid fog.  Astronomer Shoshanna Cole of Ithaca College gathered data from instruments on the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and sugges ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 8 2015 - 9:09am

Kangaroos Are Methane Gas Producers

It's become common for vegetarians and environmental activists to criticize animals. Cows, for example, used to be criticized for carbon dioxide production, with manufactured claims like "it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef" bu ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 5 2015 - 7:30am

Drought Atlas Maps 2,000 Years Of Climate Change

The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals but an atlas based on scientific evidence uses tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 11 2015 - 11:05pm

Blood Rain In Spain

The rainwater that fell in some of the villages of Zamora, Spain last autumn brought along a green microalgae that turns a reddish color when in a state of stress.  Blood rain. It is not an isolated phenomenon.  Kerala, India got a blood rain in the summe ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 13 2015 - 7:20am

Earth's Ancient Climate More Sensitive To CO2 Than Previously Thought

Ancient climates on Earth may have been more sensitive to carbon dioxide than was previously thought, according to an analysis of nahcolite crystals found in Colorado's Green River Formation, formed 50 million years old during a hothouse climate. Sci ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 16 2015 - 2:13pm

Growth In CO2 Emissions Have Leveled Off

After a decade of rapid growth in global CO 2 emissions, spurred on by increases in China which offset declines in the US and Europe thanks to natural gas, increases have leveled off: 2012 saw only 0.8%, 2013 was 1.5% and 2014 was 0.5%. Last year, the wor ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 2 2015 - 7:31pm

Global Fossil-Fuel Emissions Could Decline In 2015, Thanks To Natural Gas

Carbon dioxide emissions have always been something of a guess because they rely on self-reported figures. The developed world has been transparent but it was only a few years ago that China admitted to under-counting its own emissions, telling a differen ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 7 2015 - 2:16pm

Plant Growth Is Enhanced By More CO2, But Food Webs Make Effects Unpredictable

Not much is predictable about climate, despite assurances by politicians and activists meeting in Paris, and one claim that global warming skeptics use- that more CO2 is good for plants- is also correct but also not predictable. Instead, inter-annual vari ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 12 2015 - 8:55am

Dozens Of Climate Models Overestimate Rainfall Increases Due To Global Warming

Most climate models overestimate the increase in global precipitation due to climate change, according to an analysus of over 25 models and found they underestimate the increase in absorption of sunlight by water vapor as the atmosphere becomes moister, a ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 11 2015 - 6:31am

Earth's Tilt Influences Climate Change

A study sheds new light on how the tilt of the Earth affects the world's heaviest rainbelt and ths the climate overall. Data from the past 282,000 years shows a connection between the Earth's tilt, called obliquity, that shifts every 41,000 year ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 19 2015 - 8:00am