Currently browsing: Climate Change

A new study has found a link between abrupt ocean warming at the end of the last ice age and the sudden onset of low-oxygen, or hypoxic conditions that led to vast marine dead zones.

A new report by the University of Washington synthesizes all the relevant research about the future of the Puget Sound region to paint a picture of what to expect in the coming decades and how best to prepare for that future.

A warming ocean that began long before the most recent El Niño is causing a West Coast drought, first in California and now in the Northwest.

Human activities, such as greenhouse gas emissions and land use, influenced specific extreme weather and climate events in 2014, including tropical cyclones in the central Pacific, heavy rainfall in Europe, drought in East Africa, and stifling heat waves in Australia, Asia, and South America, according to a new report released today.

After making an exhausting migration from river to ocean and back to river — often multiple years in a row — one species of Alaskan trout decides to call it quits and retire from migrating once they are big enough to survive off their fat reserves.

Every two to seven years, an unusually warm pool of water -- sometimes two to three degrees Celsius higher than normal develops across the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean to create a natural short-term climate change event. This warm condition, known as El Nino, affects the local aquatic environment, but also spurs extreme weather patterns around the world, from flooding in California to droughts in Australia.

An analysis of North Pacific ocean circulation over the past 1.2 million years has found that sea ice formation in coastal regions is a key driver of deep ocean circulation, influencing climate on regional and global scales.

Warming ocean temperatures a third of a mile below the surface, in a dark ocean in areas with little marine life, might attract scant attention. But this is precisely the depth where frozen pockets of methane 'ice' transition from a dormant solid to a powerful greenhouse gas.

While the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is the most important factor in determining how many salmon return from the ocean to streams in the Northwest, a series of other more regional environmental factors also influence that return, according to a recent study.

Oregon State University this fall will begin selecting graduate students for a new program to train cohorts of students that will tackle emerging issues in marine science.

The indications of climate change are all around us today but now researchers have revealed for the first time when and where the first clear signs of global warming appeared in the temperature record and where those signals are likely to be clearly seen in extreme rainfall events in the near future.

Climate change has a direct impact on Native American communities through disruption to local economies and traditional cultures. To help address these impacts, members of tribes from across the United States will convene at the University of Idaho’s McCall Field Campus in June 2016 for the first-ever National Tribal Climate Boot Camp.

A recalculation of the dates at which boulders were uncovered by melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age has conclusively shown that the glacial retreat was due to rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as opposed to other types of forces.

The University of Washington is a partner in a new effort to understand how changes to the Bering Sea’s biophysical environment — such as temperature, salinity, currents, nutrients and plankton — may impact fish stocks and fishing practices as the climate warms.

Continuing current carbon dioxide emission trends throughout this century and beyond would leave a legacy of heat and acidity in the deep ocean. These changes would linger even if the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration were to be restored to pre-industrial levels at some point in the future, according to a new Nature Climate Change paper from an international team.

Pink salmon that begin life in freshwater with high concentrations of carbon dioxide, which causes acidification, are smaller and may be less likely to survive, according to a new study from University of British Columbia.

Umatilla tribal leader N. Kathryn “Kat” Brigham was selected by leaders from the Warm Springs, Yakama, Nez Perce, and Umatilla tribes to lead the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission as its 2015-16 chair.

A new study published this week in the journal Science finds that the rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than that seen during the latter half of the 20th Century.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army finalized the Clean Water Rule this week to protect from pollution and degradation the streams and wetlands that form the foundation of the nation’s water resources.

The one common element in recent weather has been oddness.

The West Coast has been warm and parched; the East Coast has been cold and snowed under.

Amy Snover, director of the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington’s College of the Environment, has been named a White House Champion of Change.

For millions of years, large parts of the marine biotas of the North Atlantic and North Pacific have been separated by harsh climate conditions in the Arctic.

The year 2014 was the hottest on Earth in 134 years of record-keeping, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week, continuing a pattern of global warming that is attributed primarily to rising levels of greenhouse gases.

The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880, according to two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists.

An unchecked warming climate could trigger heart problems in Pacific juvenile salmon, prompting significant losses of chinook salmon stocks in less than a hundred years, according to a new study.

According to a new NOAA-sponsored study, natural oceanic and atmospheric patterns are the primary drivers behind California's ongoing drought.

Off the West Coast of the United States, methane gas is trapped in frozen layers below the seafloor. New research from the University of Washington shows that water at intermediate depths is warming enough to cause these carbon deposits to melt, releasing methane into the sediments and surrounding water.

As the Earth warmed coming out of the last ice age, the rate of plankton production off the Pacific Northwest coast decreased, a new study has found, though the amount of organic material making its way to the deep ocean actually increased.

Crop producers and scientists hold deeply different views on climate change and its possible causes, a study by Purdue and Iowa State universities shows.

Since 1900, sea surface and land-based surface temperatures in the northeastern Pacific Ocean have risen up to 1 degree Centigrade with most of that temperature rise occurring by 1940.

In findings of relevance to both conservationists and the fishing industry, new research links short-term reductions in growth and reproduction of marine animals off the California Coast to increasing variability in the strength of coastal upwelling currents — currents which historically supply nutrients to the region's diverse ecosystem.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is taking public input on state status reports and listing recommendations for tufted puffins and Steller sea lions.

The annual mean temperature in the Pacific Northwest has warmed by about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit since the early 20th century – a gradual warming trend that has been accelerating over the past 3-4 decades and is attributed to anthropogenic, or human, causes.

A new model analyzing how birds in western North America will respond to climate change suggests that for most species, regional warming is not as likely to influence population trends as will precipitation changes.

A new article by researchers from the University of Montana, the U.S. Geological Survey and Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks asserts that climate warming is increasing the hybridization of trout – interbreeding between native and non-native species – in the interior western United States.

The second of three major reports associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report series is now available for download at http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced this week the creation of the first ever Regional Hubs for Risk Adaptation and Mitigation to Climate Change at seven locations around the country.

The Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington this week released its “state of knowledge report,” which chronicles observed climate change, future scenarios and effects on flora and fauna, including human activities, across the state of Washington.

Although few people live in the western tropical Pacific Ocean region, the remote waters there affect billions of people by shaping climate and air chemistry worldwide.

A late summer deluge soaked the Pacific Northwest but precipitation has been considerably less than recent decades’ average ever since as the region heads into what is its all-important wintertime snow/water supply accumulation period, according to latest issue of the PNW Climate Impacts and Outlook produced by the Climate Impacts Resource Consortium.

A new assessment of shoreline change along the Pacific Northwest coast from the late 1800s to present found that while the majority of beaches are stable or slightly accreting (adding sand), many Oregon beaches have experienced an increase in erosion hazards in recent decades.

A special issue of the journal Conservation Biology released this week includes a paper written by a team of authors from the University of Washington-based Climate Impacts Group, the U.S. Geological Survey, NOAA, and Stony Brook University on strategies for choosing and using climate change scenarios for ecological impacts assessments and conservation decisions.

Climate change has increased concern over possible large and rapid changes in the physical climate system, which includes the Earth's atmosphere, land surfaces, and oceans. Some of these changes could occur within a few decades or even years, leaving little time for society and ecosystems to adapt.

As part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, the Obama Administration has announced an interagency National Drought Resilience Partnership http://www.drought.gov/drought/ to help communities better prepare for future droughts and reduce the impact of drought events on livelihoods and the economy.

Changes are already happening to Earth's climate due to the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and large-scale agriculture. As changes get more pronounced, people everywhere will have to adjust.

Maximizing returns on financial investments depends on accurately understanding and effectively accounting for weather and climate risks, according to a new study by the American Meteorological Society Policy Program.

The leaders of British Columbia, California, Oregon and Washington signed the Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy this week, committing their governments to a strategic alignment to combat climate change and promote clean energy.

Plastic litter is one of the most significant problems facing the world's marine environments. Yet in the absence of a coordinated global strategy, an estimated 20 million tons of plastic litter enter the ocean each year.

Nutrient enrichment and climate change are posing yet another concern of growing importance: an apparent increase in the toxicity of some algal blooms in freshwater lakes and estuaries around the world, which threatens aquatic organisms, ecosystem health and human drinking water safety.

Scientists expect climate change and warmer oceans to push the fish that people rely on for food and income into new territory.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality received as many as 20,000 comments, pro and con, about the potential consequences if a proposal to build and operate a coal export terminal at Port of Morrow on the Columbia River gets approval.

Marine species are migrating toward the poles as much as 12 times faster than land-based species as a result of the warming climate, according to a new study by an international team of scientists.

Predicted increases in temperature and drought in the coming century may make it more difficult for conifers such as ponderosa pine to regenerate after major forest fires on dry, low-elevation sites, in some cases leading to conversion of forests to grass or shrub lands, a report suggests.

Climate change has been impacting global fisheries for the past four decades by driving species towards cooler, deeper waters, according to University of British Columbia scientists.

Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell this week announced the members of a newly created federal advisory committee who will provide guidance about the Interior Department’s climate change adaptation science initiatives.

Using data from 73 sites around the world, scientists have been able to reconstruct Earth’s temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age, revealing that the planet today is warmer than it has been during 70 to 80 percent of the time over the last 11,300 years.

A University of British Columbia study of American attitudes toward climate change finds that local weather – temperature, in particular – is a major influence on public and media opinions on the reality of global warming.

Public acceptance of climate change’s reality may have been influenced by the rate at which words moved from scientific journals into the mainstream, according to anthropologist Michael O’Brien, dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri.

Scientists have cast doubt on the widely held perception that there has been a global increase in jellyfish.

Changes in ocean and climate systems could lead to smaller fish, according to a new study led by fisheries scientists at the University of British Columbia.

The National Wildlife Federation, and the Association of Northwest Steelheaders, have joined what is certain to be a long environmental harm vs. economic benefit debate over proposed new facilities aimed at boosting coal exports from the region.

The sea level off most of California is expected to rise about one meter over the next century, an amount slightly higher than projected for global sea levels, and will likely increase damage to the state's coast from storm surges and high waves, says a new report from the National Research Council.

The oceans have warmed in the past 50 years, but not by natural events alone.

New research by a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and international collaborators shows that the observed ocean warming over the last 50 years is consistent with climate models only if the models include the impacts of observed increases in greenhouse gas during the 20th century.

A new analysis of streams in the western United States with long-term monitoring programs has found that despite a general increase in air temperatures over the past several decades, streams are not necessarily warming at the same rate.

A survey on the loss in the Northern Hemisphere of large predators, particularly wolves, concludes that current populations of moose, deer, and other large herbivores far exceed their historic levels and are contributing to disrupted ecosystems.

How do we understand what's happening today by looking back millions of years?

Scientists are looking at what climate conditions were like 3.3 to 3 million years ago, during a geologic period known as the Pliocene, and they are confident in the accuracy of their data.

The oceans may be acidifying faster today than they did in the last 300 million years, according to scientists publishing a paper this week in the journal Science.

As oceans warm due to climate change, water layers will mix less and affect the microbes and plankton that pump carbon out of the atmosphere – but researchers say it’s still unclear whether these processes will further increase global warming or decrease it.

Wetland restoration is a billion-dollar-a-year industry in the United States that aims to create ecosystems similar to those that disappeared over the past century. But a new analysis of restoration projects shows that restored wetlands seldom reach the quality of a natural wetland.

Rising human carbon dioxide emissions may be affecting the brains and central nervous system of sea fishes with serious consequences for their survival, an international scientific team has found.

Resource managers at the nation’s 155 national forests now have a set of guidelines to help them manage their landscapes for resilience to climate change.

Nitrogen derived from human activities has polluted lakes throughout the Northern Hemisphere for more than a century and the fingerprint of these changes is evident even in remote lakes located thousands of miles from the nearest city, industrial area or farm.

Sockeye salmon are evolving through natural selection to deal with a warming climate, according to a study by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A new study suggests that the rate of global warming from doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be less than the most dire estimates of some previous studies – and, in fact, may be less severe than projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007.

In order to separate human-caused global warming from the "noise" of purely natural climate fluctuations, temperature records must be at least 17 years long, according to climate scientists.

Fish and other sea creatures will have to travel large distances to survive climate change, international marine scientists have warned.