• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
Celebrating our 1,000th edition. The climate news you need
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  FEATURED
BREAKING: UN Nature Summit, the ‘Paris Conference for Biodiversity’, Moves to Montreal in December June 19, 2022
‘LET’S SUE BIG OIL’: Legal Team Launches Class Action Campaign for B.C. Municipalities June 17, 2022
‘It Could Have Been Any of Us’, Colleague Says, After Brazil Confirms Murders of Bruno Pereira, Dom Phillips June 17, 2022
Infrastructure Gap a ‘Life and Death’ Matter as Northern Canada Warms June 17, 2022
Ban Fossil Fuel Ads Like Tobacco Promos, Doctors Urge Ottawa June 10, 2022
Next
Prev

Tree rings show El Niño's upsurge

July 2, 2013
Reading time: 3 minutes
Primary Author: Tim Radford

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New scientific findings support the evidence which links more frequent El Niño weather disruptions in the eastern Pacific to the build-up in greenhouse gas emissions.

London, 2 July – Climate change means just that: an unpredictable, moody weather system and volatile temperatures that vary on large and small scales, with unpredictable consequences for humans, their crops and their forests, according to three new studies.

Jinbao Li of the International Pacific Research Centre in Hawaii and colleagues report in Nature Climate Change that they looked at the evidence from a seven-century “almanac” inscribed in the growth rings of 2,222 trees from the tropics and mid-latitudes in both hemispheres.

Tree rings are records of annual change, of periods of drought, healthy rainfall, high and low temperatures and – once accurately dated and calibrated with each other – are accurate testimony of local weather long before humans started taking temperature and rainfall data.

The researchers used these dendrochronologies – the formal name for the science – to measure the behaviour of the Pacific Ocean’s wild card, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) for the past seven centuries.

El Niño – christened ‘The Child’ by Peruvian fishermen because it often arrives at Chjristmastide – tends to trigger droughts, floods and other weather disturbances worldwide: hurricanes ease in the north Atlantic during an El Niño year and in the Pacific winter storms shift southward, while California floods.

High-risk regions identified

By observing the pattern of events since about 1400 AD, the scientists confirmed that El Niño has been unusually active in the 20th century, a century in which carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began to rise and, with this, average planetary temperatures.

“This supports the idea that unusually high ENSO activity in the late 20th century is a footprint of global warming”, says Jinbao Li. His colleague and co-author Shan-Ping Xie, a meteorologist at the Centre, warned: “If this trend of increasing ENSO activity continues, we expect to see more weather extremes such as floods and droughts.”

In a separate study, an international team of researchers led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that the Amazon, the Mediterranean and East Africa might all expect severe change in a warming world – change that could affect the livelihoods of people in those regions.

Since about one in ten of the world’s population lives in such hotspots, this is an awful lot of possible disruption to crop yields, water availability, ecosystems and human health.

The research began with an examination of the story of climate so far, and a more detailed look at the predictions that follow from various climate models in specific sectors. These included, for example, precipitation patterns and the implications of drought for the Mediterranean.

The last straw

“What today is considered extreme could become the new normal”, said Qiuhong Tang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And Alex Ruane of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies said: “In the hotspot parts of Africa, for instance, even small temperature rises can lead to additional losses that many small farmers simply cannot afford.”

Disequilibrium for farmers will be echoed in the planet’s forests, and this state of woodland disturbance could become the norm, according to researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark. That is because plant communities react very slowly, they argue, in the American Journal of Botany, creating problems for long-term forest management.

“Our forests take an extremely long time to adapt”, says Jens-Christian Svenning. “We still have a small amount of small-leaved lime in Denmark which has held on since the warm period in the Bronze Age, i.e. about 3,000 years.

“Perhaps it will get another chance to spread when the summers once more get much warmer. However, such expansion would take a long time, as lime is not a particularly fast-growing tree, or particularly good at dispersing, even under optimum conditions.

“The climate will change considerably in the course of a single tree generation so we should not assume the forest we are looking at in a given place is suitable for the climate. Future climate will constantly shift, which will increasingly result in these strange situations of disequilibrium.” – Climate News Network



in Uncategorized

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

Jason Woodhead/Flickr
Pipelines / Rail Transport

Trans Mountain Pipeline On Track to Lose $600 Million, Parliamentary Budget Officer Finds

June 24, 2022
288
Ben_Kerckx/Pixabay
Petrochemicals & Plastics

Plastics Cited as ‘Fossil Industry’s Plan B’ as Guilbeault Announces Partial Ban

June 24, 2022
171
Erik Whalen/wikimedia commons
Severe Storms & Flooding

Yellowstone Park Reopens, But Flood Recovery Could Take Years, Cost Billions

June 24, 2022
60

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

Jason Woodhead/Flickr

Trans Mountain Pipeline On Track to Lose $600 Million, Parliamentary Budget Officer Finds

June 24, 2022
288
Ben_Kerckx/Pixabay

Plastics Cited as ‘Fossil Industry’s Plan B’ as Guilbeault Announces Partial Ban

June 24, 2022
171
zephylwer0/pixabay

North American Steel, Aluminium Giants Lumber Toward Green Transition

June 24, 2022
147
Nemaska Lithium/Facebook

Critical Minerals, Hydrogen Lead Ottawa’s Low-Carbon Industry Strategy

June 24, 2022
79
/PxFul

Canadian Farmers Offer Ottawa a Roadmap to Cut Agriculture Emissions

June 24, 2022
83
Bruce Reeve/Flickr

Opinion: Ontario’s New ‘Carbon Tax’ Looks Like the One Doug Ford Fought

June 7, 2022
1.5k

Recent Posts

Erik Whalen/wikimedia commons

Yellowstone Park Reopens, But Flood Recovery Could Take Years, Cost Billions

June 24, 2022
60
TAFE SA TONSLEY/Flickr

Clean Energy Investment to Exceed $1.4T This Year, Still Falls Short of Climate Goals: IEA

June 24, 2022
80
Cjp24/Wikimedia Commons

UK Green Shift Won’t Repeat Job Destruction of Deindustrialization, Report Finds

June 24, 2022
29
Pavlofox/Pixabay

Millions Face Famine as Climate Disasters, Ukraine War Slash Food Supplies

June 24, 2022
38
Chris Lim/Wikimedia Commons

China Has 9 Times the Wind, Solar Potential It Needs for Carbon Neutrality

June 24, 2022
54
willenhallwench / Pixabay

PG&E Risks Greenwashing with Definition of ‘Scope 4’ Emissions

June 24, 2022
44
Next Post
Baffin Island: As the Arctic warms

More storms, more heat says WMO

The Energy Mix

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Navigate Site

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Follow Us

No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}