Tag Archives: climate projection

Temperature swings may be bigger threat to life than increased warmth

Insects may thrive in the warmer average temperatures predicted by climate models but are threatened by greater temperature variation also anticipated in many areas around the globe, a Yale-led study predicts in the Jan. 29 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

“There has been some thought that many species will do better because of rising average temperatures,” said David Vasseur, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who headed the study. “But when coupled with greater temperature variations, the story changes.” (more…)

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Today’s worst watershed stresses may become the new normal, study finds

Nearly one in 10 U.S. watersheds is “stressed,” with demand for water exceeding natural supply, according to a new analysis of surface water in the United States.  What’s more, the lowest water flow seasons of recent years—times of great stress on rivers, streams, and sectors that use their waters—are likely to become typical as climates continue to warm.

“By midcentury, we expect to see less reliable surface water supplies in several regions of the United States,” said the study’s lead author, Kristen Averyt, associate director for science at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This is likely to create growing challenges for agriculture, electrical suppliers and municipalities, as there may be more demand for water and less to go around.” (more…)

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Climate Change Threatens Giant Pandas’ Bamboo Buffet–and Survival

China’s endangered wild pandas may need new dinner reservations–and quickly, based on models that indicate climate change may kill off swaths of bamboo that pandas need to survive

In this week’s Nature Climate Change, an international journal, scientists from Michigan State University (MSU) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences provide comprehensive forecasts of how changing climate may affect the most common species of bamboo that carpet the forest floors of prime panda habitat in northwestern China. Even the most optimistic scenarios show that bamboo die-offs would effectively cause prime panda habitat to become inhospitable by the end of the 21st century.

The scientists studied possible scenarios of climate change in the Qinling Mountains in Shaanxi Province. At the northern boundary of China’s panda distributional range, the Qinling Mountains are home to about 275 wild pandas, which account for about 17 percent of the remaining wild population. The Qinling pandas, which have been isolated because of thousands of years of human habitation around the mountain range, vary genetically from other giant pandas. The geographic isolation of these pandas makes them particularly valuable for conservation, but vulnerable to climate change. (more…)

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Statistical Analysis Projects Future Temperatures in North America

COLUMBUS, Ohio – For the first time, researchers have been able to combine different climate models using spatial statistics – to project future seasonal temperature changes in regions across North America.

They performed advanced statistical analysis on two different North American regional climate models and were able to estimate projections of temperature changes for the years 2041 to 2070, as well as the certainty of those projections.

The analysis, developed by statisticians at Ohio State University, examines groups of regional climate models, finds the commonalities between them, and determines how much weight each individual climate projection should get in a consensus climate estimate. (more…)

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