Atmospheric CO2 Helps Oak Trees Recover from Natural Disasters

Published February 6, 2014

Following massive aboveground destruction caused by both fires and hurricanes, atmospheric CO2 enrichment is able to bring scrub-oak ecosystems back from the brink of death, so to speak, to once again flourish, as the life-giving gas stimulates root production and the acquisition of needed-but-scarce soil nutrients… Read More

Modelling Decadal to Centennial Climate in the Equatorial Pacific (4 Feb 2014)

It might just be too difficult to do with any dependable and/or useful degree of accuracy, as the authors of this paper write their findings “imply that the response of the tropical Pacific to future forcings may be even more uncertain than portrayed by state-of-the-art models because there are potentially important sources of century-scale variability that these models do not simulate.” Such uncertainties must be adequately addressed before model projections can be taken seriously… Read More

Four Decades of “Global Warming” on the Island of Oahu, Hawaii (4 Feb 2014)

The trend in the diurnal temperature range “shows a decline during the past 39 years with a stronger decreasing trend during the recent 25 years.” What might such declines portend for the island’s inhabitants?… Read More

Arctic Copepods Getting Acidified … Under Sea Ice … in the Dark! (4 Feb 2014)

Noting that marine species “living across a range of physicochemical conditions, are likely capable of surviving change,” the findings of this study suggest Arctic copepods will likely survive future ocean acidification conditions… Read More

Including the Stratosphere in Models of Global Climate Change (5 Feb 2014)

When “quantifying uncertainty in past and future climate change predictions, it [is] important to consider the systematic errors introduced by the choices made on how the upper atmosphere is represented in the model”… Read More

Can Migrating Corals Outpace Ocean Warming and Acidification? (5 Feb 2014)

Several lines of evidence suggest that they can. In the words of the authors of this study, “contrary to expectations, the combined impact of ocean surface temperature rise and acidification leads to little, if any, degradation in future habitat suitability across much of the Atlantic and areas currently considered ‘marginal’ for tropical corals, such as the eastern Equatorial Pacific”… Read More

Modelling the Asian Summer Monsoon: Another Revealing Analysis (5 Feb 2014)

There exists a long list of problems in modelling the Asian Summer Monsoon, leaving the scientists who authored this study to state, “given the multitude of physical processes and interactions that influence the monsoon, it is no wonder that simulation and prediction of the monsoon remain grand challenge problems”… Read More