Australian journalist Amber Jamieson thought AGU’s Climate Q&A Service , which re-launched in October to provide journalists quick responses from scientists to questions about climate change, provided a great, but under-used opportunity. So she solicited questions from readers of her blog, Rooted, and sent them to AGU’s climate scientists for…[Read more]

Crude oil from a spill can remain trapped for decades under a beach’s surface. A 2001 survey of beaches along Alaska’s Prince William Sound estimated that about 100 tons of oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill remained in the beaches’ lower layers, and much of it is still there, researchers say. A new study of one of those [...]

Climate change will exacerbate air quality problems, says  Jeffrey Stehr, atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland, by increasing heat that causes some pollutants to form, and changing air circulation patterns. He says researchers from different disciplines have begun collaborating more to understand better what these long-term…[Read more]

Members of the United Nations are in growing agreement that to avoid the worst affects of climate change, the world will need to limit the rise in global average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius. What will it take to meet that target? The AVOID Programme was started in the United Kingdom to provide policy-makers with answers [...]

The rate of global groundwater depletion has been on the rise, warning of a potential disaster for an increasingly globalized agricultural system says Marc Bierkens of Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In an upcoming study , Bierkens and his colleagues find that not only is global groundwater extraction outstripping its natural…[Read more]

The Amazon rainforest has a very strong metabolism for absorbing carbon dioxide, says Paolo Artaxo of the Department of Applied Physics at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, but it is being impacted by deforestation, which releases carbon stored in the trees. It’s difficult to tell whether the forest acts as a net sink or [...]

Earth’s climate is jumpy. Tens of thousands of years ago, the planet suffered more than two dozen episodes of abrupt warming, with global temperatures soaring by as much as a few degrees Celsius in as little as a decade . Many scientists are worried that an abrupt climate change could happen again, and that by continuing to emit [...]

Carbon dioxide releases by hurricanes are significant, but offset by ocean cooling and phytoplankton growth A hurricane’s passage over warm ocean waters can drive a significant amount of carbon dioxide from the waves to the sky. The violent winds associated with a passing storm can dramatically increase the gas exchange between the ocean and…[Read more]

After the United Nation’s climate change conference in Copenhagen at the end of last year, most of the world’s big carbon dioxide emitters—including the United States, the European Union, and China—signed the “Copenhagen Accord,” saying they would not allow Earth to warm any more than an average of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above [...]

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Responding to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico has required hundreds of ships and steady air traffic – both of which depend on having accurate weather forecasts to operate safely. Unfortunately, meteorologists haven’t have the ability to track weather conditions as well over the water as they do on land, which can lead to [...]

Guest Post by Ed Adams, geology educator Several years ago, I started teaching summer field classes for teachers in need of additional science credits for their endorsements. To facilitate the exchange of information and to provide a repository of data links for my students, I created a series of web pages. This enabled my students, some [...]

Between the recent oil spill and Hurricane Katrina, it might seem that New Orleans is a magnet for disasters. A new study suggests that could be true – researchers have found that coastal cities could actually attract hurricanes. Johnny Chan and Andie Au-Yeung of the City University of Hong Kong wanted to improve forecasts of [...]