Currently browsing: Climate Change

Oregon again was recognized as a leader in efforts to stem climate change and ocean acidification and hypoxia (OAH).

As oceans warm due to climate change, scientists are trying to predict how marine animals -- from backboned fish to spineless jellyfish -- will react.

Natural disasters alone are not enough to motivate local communities to engage in climate change mitigation or adaptation, a new study from Oregon State University found.

For the Pacific Northwest, long-range outlooks suggest fire danger will rise to be above average in during the summer, particularly west of the Cascades where outlooks suggest a warmer than average summer, said the National Interagency Fire Center this week.

In an unusual new study, scientists say they have detected the fingerprint of human-driven global warming on patterns of drought and moisture across the world as far back as 1900.

Rising temperatures are well documented back at least that far, but this is the first time researchers have identified resulting long-term global effects on the water supplies that feed crops and cities

Despite significant snow in parts of Washington, water supply shortages are projected in the Methow, Okanogan and Upper Yakima basins, prompting Gov. Jay Inslee to declare a drought emergency in those watersheds.

During the marine heatwave of 2014-16, scientists from the University of California, Davis, noticed creatures typically seen only in places like Baja California, Mexico, showing up outside the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory. These included warm-water species of jellyfish, crabs, nudibranchs, fish and even dolphins and sea turtles.

In a recent study, University of Montana researchers explored the ways forest succession and climate variability interacted and influenced fires in Alaska's boreal forests over the past four centuries - from 1550 to 2015.

Total human carbon dioxide emissions could match those of Earth's last major greenhouse warming event in fewer than five generations, new research finds.

In one generation, the climate experienced in many North American cities is projected to change to that of locations hundreds of miles away--or to a new climate unlike any found in North America today.

Climate change is causing significant changes to phytoplankton in the world's oceans, and a new MIT study finds that over the coming decades these changes will affect the ocean's color, intensifying its blue regions and its green ones. Satellites should detect these changes in hue, providing early warning of wide-scale changes to marine ecosystems.

Tree rings tell the story of what’s happening physiologically as fire suppression makes forests more dense and less tolerant of drought, pests and wildfires, new research shows.

The ability to smell is critical for salmon. They depend on scent to avoid predators, sniff out prey and find their way home at the end of their lives when they return to the streams where they hatched to spawn and die.

Forests in the Pacific Northwest will be less vulnerable to drought and fire over the next three decades than those in the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada, computer modeling by researchers in Oregon State University’s College of Forestry shows.

The University of Washington’s College of the Environment has teamed up with Seattle visual analytics company Tableau Software to create a new, interactive visualization for historical observations of temperature and precipitation in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana, and for Washington snowpack.

The National Science Foundation announced that it has awarded a coalition of academic and oceanographic research organizations a five-year, $220 million contract to operate and maintain the Ocean Observatories Initiative.

University of British Columbia researchers studying the marine food web of the Northeast Pacific Ocean have found that the exposure and accumulation of chemical pollutants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and organic mercury, will be exacerbated under climate change.

Researchers from the Benton Conservation District, Yakama Nation, and U.S. Geological Survey are profiling cooler areas in the lower 100 miles of the Yakima River that may serve as safe havens for fish during warm weather.

More frequent El Niño events in the future may have surprising impacts on seabirds and some fish species, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

A natural parasite that can infect salmon, it has been thought that sea lice can be transferred from farmed salmon in net pens along Canada’s east and west coasts, but knowledge of whether and how that occurs is thin, according to a recent study.

New research shows that extreme climate variability over the last century in western North America may be destabilizing both marine and terrestrial ecosystems.

A new analysis of heat wave patterns appearing this week in Nature Climate Change concludes that climate change driven by the buildup of human-caused greenhouse gases will overtake natural variability as the main cause of heat waves in the western United States by the late 2020s and by the mid-2030s in the Great Lakes region.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are launching a major initiative to more effectively enable their extensive body of work on climate science, impacts, and response options to inform the public and decision makers.

Snowfall on a major summit in North America's highest mountain range has more than doubled since the beginning of the Industrial Age, according to a study from Dartmouth College, the University of Maine, and the University of New Hampshire.

An Idaho Climate Summit will be held at Boise State University, University of Idaho and Idaho State University and live streamed to other locations on Nov. 16-17.
An Idaho Climate Summit will be held at Boise State University, University of Idaho and Idaho State University and live streamed to other locations on Nov. 16-17.

A new analysis suggests that open-ocean aquaculture for three species of finfish is a viable option for industry expansion under most climate change scenarios – an option that may provide a new source of protein for the world’s growing population.

The University of Washington is the new host for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Northwest Climate Science Center.

NOAA Fisheries has announced more than $10 million in recommended grants through the 2017 Saltonstall-Kennedy (SK) Grant competition. The solicitation closed on December 9, 2016.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and California Gov. Edmund G. Brown, Jr. last week announced a request to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross for a declaration of a catastrophic regional fishery disaster and commercial fishery failure for salmon in their states.

The warming climate has dramatically reduced the size of 39 glaciers in Montana since 1966, some by as much as 85 percent, according to data released by the U.S. Geological Survey and Portland State University.

Current wildfire policy can’t adequately protect people, homes and ecosystems from the longer, hotter fire seasons climate change is causing, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Arctic sea ice in recent decades has declined even faster than predicted by most models of climate change. Many scientists have suspected that the trend now underway is a combination of global warming and natural climate variability.

As many as 90 percent of adult salmon and steelhead that enter some Northwest rivers will die before they can complete their spawning cycle.

Scientists say they have solved a puzzling break in continuity of ocean warming records that sparked much controversy after climate data was published in the journal Science in 2015.

In a study published Dec. 15 in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers from the University of Washington looked at the abstracts from more than 700 scientific papers about climate change to find out what makes a paper influential in its field. But instead of focusing on content, they looked at writing style, which is normally more the province of humanities professors rather than scientists.

Mountain glaciers have long been a favorite poster child of climate change. The near-global retreat of glaciers of the last century provides some of the most iconic imagery for communicating the reality of human-driven climate change.

In one of the most comprehensive studies to date, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have sequenced the genes of a harmful algae bloom, unveiling never-before-seen interactions between algae and bacteria that are thought to propagate their growth.

Incentives that are designed to enable smarter use of the ocean while also protecting marine ecosystems can and do work, and offer significant hope to help address the multiple environmental threats facing the world's oceans, researchers conclude in a new analysis.

The western-most region of the continental United States set records for low snowpack levels in 2015 and scientists, through a new study, point the finger at high temperatures, not the low precipitation characteristic of past “snow drought” years.

Climate change is producing conditions ripe for wildfires across the American West. Temperatures are rising, snowpacks are shrinking, and summers are heating up, drying out forests earlier in the season, according to a recent report.

A study led by researchers at the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration connects the unprecedented West Coast toxic algal bloom of 2015 that closed fisheries from southern California to northern British Columbia to the unusually warm ocean conditions -- nicknamed "the blob" -- in winter and spring of that year.

Washington State University researchers say the world’s reservoirs are an underappreciated source of greenhouse gases, producing the equivalent of roughly 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide a year, or 1.3 percent of all greenhouse gases produced by humans.

A team led by Washington State University will study how to better coordinate and manage the food, water and energy needs of the Columbia River basin and make the region more resilient to a changing climate as part of a $3 million grant cosponsored between the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Clues from prehistoric droughts and arid periods in California show that today’s increasing greenhouse gas levels could lock the state into drought for centuries, according to a study led by UCLA professor Glen MacDonald.

Five conservation groups gave notice last week that they will pursue a lawsuit against the federal Environmental Protection Agency if the agency fails to finalize a pollution budget under the Clean Water Act for the Columbia River and lower Snake River that it was near finalizing in 2003.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality this week released final guidance for federal agencies on how to consider the impacts of their actions on climate change in their National Environmental Policy Act reviews.

El Niño exerted powerful effects around the globe in the last year, eroding California beaches; driving drought in northern South America, Africa and Asia; and bringing record rain to the U.S. Pacific Northwest and southern South America.

A team of scientists from NOAA Fisheries and the University of California San Diego (Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Department of Economics) has for the first time attached a dollar value to several of the leading "ecosystem services" -- or natural benefits - provided by the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean, an immense region stretching west from the west coasts of North and South America.

Global carbon dioxide emissions are triggering permanent and alarming changes to ocean chemistry along the North American West Coast that require immediate, decisive action to combat, including development of a coordinated regional management strategy, a panel of scientific experts has unanimously concluded.

Unusually warm oceans can have widespread effects on marine ecosystems. Warm patches off the Pacific Northwest from 2013 to 2015, and a couple of years earlier in the Atlantic Ocean, affected everything from sea lions to fish migrations to coastal weather.

Juvenile sockeye salmon that enter the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia soon after emerging from the gravel of the Harrison River, a tributary of the Fraser River, are contributing a larger proportion of adults returning to the Fraser River basin than they did more than ten years ago.

It is now possible to estimate the influence of climate change on some types of extreme events, such as heat waves, drought, and heavy precipitation, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

At the rate humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere, the Earth may suffer irreparable damage that could last tens of thousands of years, according to a new analysis published this week.

Earth’s 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Last year was “by far” Washington State’s warmest ever recorded, according to meteorologist Nic Loyd of Washington State University.

The so-called “blob” of infamous warm ocean waters that has gripped the West Coast and shaken up its marine ecosystems in the past two years is battered, but not dead yet, NOAA scientists report.

Rising temperatures and late summer dryness are teaming up to push some types of forests beyond their ability to cope with stress, according to a new analysis of forest response to climate change across the Pacific Northwest.