Science News

The European Union’s climate change chief says a global deal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions may not be possible before 2011.

Hedegaard told the European Parliament on Tuesday that “remaining differences between parties may delay agreement on this until next year.”

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard says it would be risky to expect a legally binding deal to emerge from the planned December U.

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A recent poll suggests that high-profile controversies regarding climate science are weakening public confidence in the validity of global warming, And that could endanger congressional efforts to pass climate legislation.

Weve seen some pretty significant changes over the past year, says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change.

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Global warming is raising the danger from typhoons, Taiwan experts warned Monday, saying the island may be hit in a year or two by a powerful storm like the one which killed more than 700 last August.

“A typhoon as powerful as Morakot is very likely to strike Taiwan in a year or two,” said Wang Chung-ho, a research fellow at the Institute of the Earth Sciences at Taiwans top academic body Academia Sinica.

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Back in the Pliocene era, between 5 million and 3 million years ago, the average global temperature was about 7F warmer than it is today, yet atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were about the same. If carbon dioxide were the sole factor in warming, that wouldn’t make any sense. It isn’t, of course; there are several other contributors, including the brightness of the sun and the location of the continents (whose positions dictate, among other things, where ice caps can form) - but these were all pretty much the same in the Pliocene as well.

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The pace of global warming continues unabated, scientists said on Thursday, despite images of Europe crippled by a deep freeze and parts of the United States blasted by blizzards.

Understanding the overall trend is crucial for estimating consumption of energy supplies, such as demand for winter heating oil in the U.

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The number of hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical storms globally is likely to either fall or remain flat over the course of the 21st century. But an increasing proportion of the storms are likely to hit the highest levels of intensity because of the projected effects of global warming, an international team of scientists concludes.

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Top researchers now agree that the world is likely to get stronger but fewer hurricanes in the future because of global warming, seeming to settle a scientific debate on the subject. But they say there’s not enough evidence yet to tell whether that effect has already begun.

“We’ve really come a long way in the last two years about our knowledge of the hurricane and climate issue,” said study co-author Chris Landsea, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration top hurricane researcher.

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Scientists have made lots of projections over the past few years about how warming temperatures and a changing climate will affect the planet. Real-world measurements have confirmed at least some of them: sea level is clearly rising, for instance, and the ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is shrinking and thinning - in the latter case, faster than anyone had expected just a few years ago.

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This article was updated at 2:57 p.m. ET

Climate scientists are on the defensive, and theyre not backing down.

Eroding confidence in climate science punctuated by a pair of blizzards has global warming skeptics across the United States calling for a sharp rollback to years of political and industrial efforts to curb greenhouse emissions thought to contribute to global warming.

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forshifting the goalposts in the global climate negotiations to give people invulnerable African and small island nations a better chance of surviving theimpacts of worldwide climate change

Speakingelegantly and in stark terms, the tag-team climate evangelists put the world onnotice: the survival of their and many other nations is now at risk, and only a fair, ambitious, and legally binding agreement toreduce the worlds greenhouse gas emissions can save them.

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