'Human face' of climate change: Arctic communities forced to adapt their work, diet and decision making. Five years of social science research in Canada's arctic has taught one University of Guelph geography professor a thing or two about climate change's "human face. " Barry Smit is the Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Change, and since 2005 he's studied how Arctic communities have tried to adapt to the rising temperatures caused by major shifts in global weather patterns.
The human dimension of climate change has long been understudied, says Smit, who is taking part this week in a panel discussion on the environment and economy at the first ever Canada Research Chairs conference in Toronto. Over the course of two research projects - one with ArcticNet and another with the International Polar Year project - Smit has seen first-hand how Canada's Inuit have dealt with changing ice levels, wind speed, migration routes, and so on. "It's already affecting the people who live there," says Smit about the impact of global warming.
"The ice is their highway. Geologists show unprecedented warming in Africa's Lake Tanganyika; Valuable fish stocks at risk. Lake Tanganyika, the second oldest and the second-deepest lake in the world, could be in for some rough waters. Geologists led by Brown University have determined the east African rift lake has experienced unprecedented warming during the last century, and its surface waters are the warmest on record.
That finding is important, the scientists write in the journal Nature Geoscience, because the warm surface waters likely will affect fish stocks upon which millions of people in the region depend. The team took core samples from the lakebed that laid out a 1,500-year history of the lake's surface temperature. The data showed the lake's surface temperature, 26 degrees Celsius (78.8°F), last measured in 2003, is the warmest the lake has been for a millennium and a half. The research grew out of two coring expeditions sponsored by the Nyanza Project in 2001 and 2004. Lake Tanganyika, one of the richest freshwater ecosystems in the world, is divided into two general levels. PHOTOS: "Alarming" Amazon Drought—River Hits New Low.
Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island - Climate Change, Environment. As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves.
The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented. It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.
Don't believe in global warming? That's not very conservative. Few causes unite the conservatives of the newly elected 112th Congress as unanimously as their opposition to government action on climate change. In September, the Center for American Progress Action Fund surveyed Republican candidates in congressional and gubernatorial races and found that nearly all disputed the scientific consensus on global warming, and none supported measures to mitigate it. For example, Robert Hurt, who won Tom Perriello's House seat in Virginia, says clean-energy legislation would fail to "do anything except harm people. " The tea party's "Contract From America" calls proposed climate policies "costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation's global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.
" Even conservatives who once argued for action on climate change, such as as Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Rep. But it's conservatives who should fear climate change the most. Let's start with costs.