Rekordtemperaturen und Überschwemmungen – Superlative in immer kürzeren Intervallen. Und der Mensch hat das zum größten Teil selbst zu verantworten.
Die Fakten sprechen eine deutliche Sprache: Die Erde erwärmt sich weiterhin in einem rasanten Tempo und die Meeresspiegel steigen stärker an als bisher prognostiziert. Das besagt der jüngste Report des sogenannten Zwischenstaatlichen Ausschusses für Klimaänderungen (IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), der am Freitag, dem 27. September in Stockholm veröffentlicht wurde. (more…)
IBM teams up with Johns Hopkins University and UC San Francisco to help public health officials model, predict and track the possible spread of infectious diseases
SAN JOSE, Calif., – 30 Sep 2013: Scientists from IBM are collaborating with Johns Hopkins University and University of California, San Francisco to combat illness and infectious diseases in real-time with smarter data tools for public health. The focus is to help contain global outbreaks of dengue fever and malaria by applying the latest analytic models, computing technology and mathematical skills on an open-source framework.
Vector-borne diseases, like malaria and dengue fever, are infections transmitted to humans and other animals by blood-feeding insects, such as mosquitoes, ticks and fleas. (more…)
WWF zum Klimabericht des IPCC: „Klimaschutz und Meeresschutz verbinden“ zum Klimabericht des IPCC: „Klimaschutz und Meeresschutz verbinden“
Der vom Menschen gemachte Klimawandel hat stärkere Auswirkungen auf die Weltmeere als bislang bekannt. Dies geht aus den heute in Stockholm vorgestellten Ergebnissen des Klimabericht des IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change) hervor. Die vom Menschen verursachten CO2-Emissionen wirken direkt auf die Ozeane: Die Meere werden saurer, weil das Meerwasser CO2 aus der Atmosphäre aufnimmt und sich daraus Kohlensäure bildet. (more…)
Berkeley Lab experts contribute to IPCC 5th Assessment Report.
Over the next century, most of the continents are on track to become considerably warmer, with more hot extremes and fewer cold extremes. Precipitation will increase in some parts of the world but will decrease in other parts. These are some of the conclusions reached by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist Michael Wehner and his co-authors on the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Wehner, a climate scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division, and William Collins, head of the Lab’s Climate Sciences Department, were lead authors on the IPCC report’s chapters on long-term climate change projections and climate models, respectively. They are among more than 200 lead authors from more than 30 countries in IPCC’s Working Group I. Their report released today provides a comprehensive assessment of the physical science basis of climate change. (more…)
Austin, TEXAS — It’s not the chicken or the egg, but marine scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have answered a basic question about red drum fish and their eggs that may eventually help save the state of Texas a lot of money in hatcheries management and make fish farming more environmentally friendly.
Every year the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department spends millions of dollars breeding red drum, a popular game fish, releasing between 20 and 30 million hatchery-raised fingerlings into eight different bays and estuaries along the coast. In order to maximize the numbers that survive to adulthood, the practice has been to provide adult fish a diet rich in fatty acids for nine months before breeding season. During breeding season, in order to save money and resources, the diet is less rich. (more…)
Scientists expect climate change and warmer oceans to push the fish that people rely on for food and income into new territory. Predictions of where and when species will relocate, however, are based on broad expectations about how animals will move and have often not played out in nature. New research based at Princeton University shows that the trick to more precise forecasts is to follow local temperature changes.
The researchers report in the journal Science the first evidence that sea creatures consistently keep pace with “climate velocity,” or the speed and direction in which changes such as ocean temperature move. They compiled 43 years of data related to the movement of 128 million animals from 360 species living around North America, including commercial staples such as lobster, shrimp and cod. They found that 70 percent of shifts in animals’ depth and 74 percent of changes in latitude correlated with regional-scale fluctuations in ocean temperature. (more…)
A study projects how climate change may affect virus-carrying mosquitoes across the southern U.S. Changes are expected to vary with region, and the southern states should see a trend toward longer seasons of mosquito activity and smaller midsummer mosquito populations
The varied influence of climate change on temperature and precipitation may have an equally wide-ranging effect on the spread of West Nile virus, suggesting that public health efforts to control the virus will need to take a local rather than global perspective, according to a study published this week in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (more…)
Under the microscope, they look like they could be from another planet, but these microscopic organisms inhabit the depths of our oceans in nearly infinite numbers.
To begin to identify where, when, and how much oceanic plankton can be found around the globe, a group of international researchers have compiled the first ever global atlas cataloguing marine plankton ranging in size from bacteria to jellyfish. The atlas was published on July 19, 2013, in a special issue of the journal Earth System Science Data. (more…)