Map showing how global warming will influence sea level in your city

By Aleks Buczkowski



This year, similarly to the previous one, will be the warmest year ever recorded. We may argue about the measurement methodology and accuracy but today no one doubts that climate change and global warming are facts rather than crazy theories of Al Gore. Ongoing 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris only confirms it.

We don’t know how this change will influence natural disasters, we can however quite precisely estimate how the rising sea level will affect places and cities we live in. Climate Central, an independent US-based environmental awareness organisation, used the latest PNAS data and created a really cool Google Maps mash-up which answers this question.

The project is called Mapping Choices and it lets you choose any city in the world to see what rising seas will do to it based on a range of projections about how high sea levels could increase. In addition the app lets you configure your view to compare side-by-side how different responses to curb pollution will impact the environment differently, resulting in a range of potential sea-level scenarios.

Click here for the Mapping Choices project.

In addition Climate Central created cool videos with visualizations of how the rising sea level will affect the landscape of cities around the world.

Scientists are not yet sure what will be the exact characteristics of the rising sea level. The estimations say about the level of between 4.2 meters and 10 meters until 2100. In theory it’s a lot of time. In practice our children or grandchildren may still witness it. Multiple countries including China and the US are critical about introducing policies to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions due to economic reasons but as Climate Central explains on its website that “the sea level rise we map may take centuries to play out, but we set it in motion today.” And we are obligated to future generations to do something about it.

Source: Geoawesomeness

Broadleaf trees show reduced sensitivity to global warming

The response of leaf unfolding phenology to climate warming has significantly reduced

The sensitivity of leaf unfolding phenology to climate warming has significantly declined since 1980s, according to a study recently published in the journalNature by an international collaboration of scientists. Earlier spring leaf unfolding is a frequently observed response of plants to climate warming. Many deciduous tree species require cold temperatures, in other words 'chilling', for dormancy release, and the warming-related reductions in chilling may counteract the advance of leaf unfolding in response to warming. Empirical evidence for this, however, was very limited.


To check whether warm winters have already attenuated the advance in spring phenology, an international team of researchers from China, Belgium, France, Spain, Switzerland and Germany investigated the change in the sensitivity of leaf unfolding to climate warming using long-term observations for seven dominant European tree species at 1245 sites in Central Europe.

Their analyses show that leaf unfolding occurred, on average, four days earlier per degree Celcius increase in spring temperature between 1980 and 1994, whereas this advance dropped to 2.3 days per degree between 1999 and 2013, a decrease of over 40 percent. "This lower sensitivity of trees to climate change likely reflects the reduced cold during winter that delays dormancy release. However, we could not fully exclude photoperiod and/or insolation as co-controlling mechanisms. These two factors may also become limiting when leaf unfolding dates occur too early in spring" said Yongshuo H. Fu, the first author of this study.

The study provides the first large-scale empirical evidence for a declining sensitivity of spring phenology to warming in mature trees for Central Europe. Professor Annette Menzel from the department of Ecoclimatology at Technical University of Munich who was also involved in the interational research said "The European PEP725 phenological database was a perfect basis to reveal that strong winter warming in the future may result in a slowdown in the advance of spring phenology."

Since plant phenology is a very important determinant of the carbon uptake and water balance of ecosystems, the declining temperature sensitivity of leaf unfolding might reduce the potential of forests to sequester even more carbon than they currently do. However, in the end it may be beneficial for the trees by reducing the risk of late spring frost damage, since extreme climatic events are projected to increase in future.



Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Technical University of Munich (TUM). Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


Journal Reference:
Yongshuo H. Fu, Hongfang Zhao, Shilong Piao, Marc Peaucelle, Shushi Peng, Guiyun Zhou, Philippe Ciais, Mengtian Huang, Annette Menzel, Josep Peñuelas, Yang Song, Yann Vitasse, Zhenzhong Zeng, Ivan A. Janssens. Declining global warming effects on the phenology of spring leaf unfolding. Nature, 2015; 526 (7571): 104 DOI:10.1038/nature15402

Source: Science Daily