It would appear that the greater warming of daily minimum temperatures, as compared to daily maximum temperatures, has been a great boon to winter wheat production in Northern China… Read More
Streamflow Trends in Nepal Since the 1960s (11 December 2012)
How have they responded to the concomitant warming of the globe? Apparently (and quite obviously so), however unnatural or unprecedented the global warming of the past few decades may (or may not) have been, it has had next to no impact on the annual amount of water coursing through the many rivers and streams of Nepal… Read More
If Temperatures Rise, Can Earth’s Corals Take the Heat? (11 December 2012)
In a word, YES! In the concluding sentence of their paper’s abstract, Carilli et al. say their study indicates that “coral reefs in locations with more frequent warm events may be more resilient to future warming,” which suggests that taking a little extra heat every once in a while prepares corals to better deal with less frequent but more extreme heat waves when they inevitably do occur… Read More
Coral vs. Algal Competition As Influenced by Human Activity (11 December 2012)
Barrott et al. conclude that their data suggest that “human disruption of the reef ecosystem may lead to a building pattern of competitive disadvantage for corals against encroaching algae, particularly turf algae, potentially initiating a transition towards algal dominance.” And this extra pressure on Earth’s corals also makes them more susceptible to high-temperature-driven coral bleaching and the potential negative effects of ocean acidification… Read More
Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment and Pine Bark Beetles (12 December 2012)
Does the former phenomenon have any effect on what the latter creatures have for dinner? Yes. Elevated CO2 significantly increased resin flow in treatment trees by a whopping 140%, indicating that, in the future, pine trees “may become increasingly protected from bark beetle attacks in an elevated CO2 climate”… Read More
Carbon Dioxide and Cassava: Feeding the World’s Undernourished (12 December 2012)
What can the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration do to help? It would appear that the rise will likely play a major positive role in helping to provide the doubled global food needs of mankind that will prevail at the turn of the century, which is but a mere 38 years from now… Read More
Effects of Global Warming on Precipitation in Guangdong Province, China (12 December 2012)
Has the former phenomenon raised havoc with the latter, as climate alarmists often contend it has? No. Rather than becoming more extreme in the face of 1956-2000 global warming, Liu et al.’s analysis of the pertinent data suggest that precipitation in China’s Guangdong Province has become both less extreme and less variable. And the temporal precipitation patterns that do emerge upon proper analysis suggest that the primary player in their determination is the sun… Read More
The Result is Clear: A Weather Forecast Model has Trouble with Clouds (12 December 2012)
A new paper by Ahlgrimm and Forbes (2012) examines the impact of low clouds on surface short wave radiation in a numerical weather prediction model over the Southern Great Plains. They show that the model has a radiation bias in the shortwave down part of the full radiation budget in the region. They find that this is due to the model biases in deep convection, thick midlevel clouds, and low clouds in general. They also find that two particular meteorological situations produce a shortwave down bias. The implication is that the ECMWF would have a net warm bias in these situations. As cloud parameterizations eventually make their way into climate models, this kind of warm bias may contribute at least in part to the warmth of climate scenarios… Read More
Dr. Idso is the founder, former president, and currently chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
