Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

Climate Change Could Have Wide-Ranging Effects in the Arctic, Study Says

The earlier snowmelt, itself a product of a warming climate, is one of the “positive feedback” factors that accelerate warming in the far north, said Terry Chapin, a professor of ecology at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“Each of these changes seems to trigger other changes that mean more changes will occur,” said Chapin, the study’s lead author.

The National Science Foundation-funded study published in the online journal Science Express found spring snowmelt had been occurring about 2 1/2 days earlier per decade, exposing dark ground to solar heat earlier in the season.

Heat absorbed by the ground releases energy into the local atmosphere, about three watts per cubic meter each decade, a change that is heating the local atmosphere and adding incrementally to global warming, Chapin said.

“This heat is added to the atmosphere, so the atmosphere in the north becomes warmer and is mixed with the global atmosphere,” Chapin said.

Summer warming will be amplified two to seven times if trees and bushes continue their northern migration into Alaska’s Arctic, the study also said.

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Pa. Trial Will Ask Whether ‘Alternatives’ Can Pass as Science

When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans’ closest cousins.
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Evolution’s repeated power to predict the unexpected goes a long way toward explaining why so many scientists and others are practically apoplectic over the recent decision by a Pennsylvania school board to treat evolution as an unproven hypothesis, on par with “alternative” explanations such as Intelligent Design (ID), the proposition that life as we know it could not have arisen without the helping hand of some mysterious intelligent force.

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On a clear day, San Joaquin looks like a bucolic farming community, complete with almond groves, cornfields and orange trees. But most of the time the valley — trapped between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges, with two major highways running north to south through it — is smoggy, filled with air that has fostered widespread respiratory disease.

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