Situation Report

noaa.gov - August 2013

CLICK HERE - Highlights

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS)
CLICK HERE - State of the Climate in 2012

CLICK HERE - State of the Climate in 2012
(258 page .PDF report)

2012 was one of the 10 warmest years on record globally

The end of weak La Niña, unprecedented Arctic warmth influenced 2012 climate conditions

August 6, 2013

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reuters.com - by Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito - TOKYO | Aug 5, 2013

(Reuters) - Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an "emergency" that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country's nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, told Reuters.

Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co are only a temporary solution, he said.

Tepco's "sense of crisis is weak," Kinjo said. "This is why you can't just leave it up to Tepco alone" to grapple with the ongoing disaster.

"Right now, we have an emergency," he said.

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NASA finds thickest parts of arctic ice cap melting faster. Image: Flickr/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

submitted by Neal Lipner

Climate change is occurring 10 to 100 times faster than in the past and ecosystems will find it hard to adjust

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH REPORT - Abstract - Changes in Ecologically Critical Terrestrial Climate Conditions

scientificamerican.com - by Anne C. Mulkern and ClimateWire - August 2, 2013

The climate is changing at a pace that's far faster than anything seen in 65 million years, a report out of Stanford University says.

The amount of global temperature increase and the short time over which it's occurred create a change in velocity that outstrips previous periods of warming or cooling, the scientists said in research published in today's Science.

If global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next century, the rate will be about 10 times faster than what's been seen before, said Christopher Field, one of the scientists on the study. Keeping the temperature increase that small will require aggressive mitigation, he said.

This may soon be what a day in the park looks like. Reuters/Jitendra Prakash

theatlanticcities.com - by Roberto A. Ferdman - July 30, 2013

Sea levels, as we know, are incredibly sensitive to rises in global temperatures. A study released earlier this month revealed that the increase of a mere degree celsius could lead global sea levels to rise by as much as two meters. But according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the implications are especially grim for the US. At the current rate of carbon emissions, over 1,700 cities, including New York, Boston and Miami, will be “locked in” by greenhouse gas emissions by this century’s end.

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