Climate Science

EDMONTON - New research suggests that this week's restrictions on withdrawing water from the Athabasca River for oilsands use are a preview of what the industry will face under climate change.

Alberta's energy regulator has suspended a total of 73 temporary industry licences to take water from the Athabasca because of low flows.

A recent paper published in the journal Climate Change suggests such disruptions will become more common and increase by up to 40 per cent by mid-century.

Global climate models aren’t given nearly enough credit for their accurate global temperature change projections. As the 2014 IPCC report showed, observed global surface temperature changes have been within the range of climate model simulations.

As a drought tightens its grip on the Pacific Northwest, burning away mountain snow and warming rivers, state officials and Native American tribes are becoming increasingly worried that one of the region’s most precious resources — wild salmon — might disappear.

Native Americans, who for centuries have relied on salmon for food and ceremonial rituals, say the area’s five species of salmon have been declining for years, but the current threat is worse than anything they have seen.

It’s time to stop waffling and say that the evidence is pretty strong … multi-meter sea level rise is an issue for today, not for the next millennium

Dr. James Hansen, formerly Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where he directs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions.

It has been widely discussed — but not yet peer reviewed. Now, though, you can at least read it for yourself and see what you think.

A leading climate scientist gave an alarming warning that limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius may not prevent a catastrophic sea level rise that would leave major coastal cities from Miami to Mumbai at risk of drowning.

“I think that the major implication of that will be that we hand young people a climate system where it’s not possible to avoid a large sea level rise,” said Hansen, who went on to slam the two-degree target agreed upon at the 2009 Copenhagen talks as being “pulled out of a hat.”

In 2014, the most essential indicators of Earth’s changing climate continued to reflect trends of a warming planet, with several  markers such as rising land and ocean temperature, sea levels and greenhouse gases ─ setting new records.  These key findings and others can be found in the State of the Climate in 2014 report released online today by the American Meteorological Society (AMS).

Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can't really talk about it.

The incident was small, but Jason Box doesn't want to talk about it. He's been skittish about the media since it happened.