Planet Earth: The summer melting season in the Antarctic Peninsula has lengthened over the last 60 years, new research shows. This is contributing to sea-level rise, and may be linked to the rapid break-up of ice shelves in the area. The Antarctic Peninsula, a mountainous finger of land pointing northwards towards South America, is warming much faster than the rest of Antarctica. Temperatures have risen by almost 3°C since the 1950s -- three times faster than the global average. Scientists think this...

Guardian: Just nine per cent of the millions of tonnes of fish caught by China's giant fishing fleet in African and other international waters is officially reported to the UN, say researchers using a new way to estimate the size and value of catches. Fisheries experts have long considered that the catches reported by China to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO) are low but the scale of the possible deception shocked the authors. "The study shows the extent of the looting of Africa, where...

ScienceDaily: Last September, at the end of the northern hemisphere summer, the Arctic Ocean's icy cover shrank to its lowest extent on record, continuing a long-term trend and diminishing to about half the size of the average summertime extent from 1979 to 2000. During the cold and dark of Arctic winter, sea ice refreezes and achieves its maximum extent, usually in late February or early March. According to a NASA analysis, this year the annual maximum extent was reached on Feb. 28 and it was the fifth lowest...

ScienceDaily: More useful projections of sea level are possible despite substantial uncertainty about the future behavior of massive ice sheets, according to Princeton University researchers. In two recent papers in the journals Nature Climate Change and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers present a probabilistic assessment of the Antarctic contribution to 21st-century sea-level change. Their methodology folds observed changes and models of different complexity into unified...

ScienceDaily: If the sheet of ice covering Greenland were to melt in its entirety tomorrow, global sea levels would rise by 24 feet. Three million cubic kilometers of ice won't wash into the ocean overnight, but researchers have been tracking increasing melt rates since at least 1979. Last summer, however, the melt was so large that similar events show up in ice core records only once every 150 years or so over the last four millennia. "In July 2012, a historically rare period of extended surface melting...

ScienceDaily: A huge pool of warm water that stretched out from Indonesia over to Africa and South America four million years ago suggests climate models might be too conservative in forecasting tropical changes. Present in the Pliocene era, this giant mass of water would have dramatically altered rainfall in the tropics, possibly even removing the monsoon. Its decay and the consequential drying of East Africa may have been a factor in Hominid evolution. Published in Nature today, the missing data for this...

Scientific American: The last time the Earth enjoyed greenhouse gas levels like those of today was roughly 4 million years ago, during an era known as the Pliocene. The extra heat of average temperatures as much as 4 degrees Celsius warmer turned the tropical oceans into a nice warm pool of bathwater, as noted by new research published in Nature on April 4. By analyzing the ratio of magnesium and calcium in the shells of microscopic animals found in long cores of mud from the deep ocean, the researchers confirmed...

Bloomberg: Judy Aiello and her husband, Michael, settled 20 years ago at the New Jersey shore in a 1950s-era development with their backyard on a lagoon leading to Manahawkin Bay. Five months after Hurricane Sandy sent a surge of water through the Beach Haven West neighborhood, about 35 miles north of Atlantic City, the Aiello house is more of a construction zone than a home. Damaged exterior siding lets in rain, and most of the floors are newly placed plywood, minus carpet or tile. Governor Chris Christie,...

Radio Australia: Religious leaders in the Pacific have been told they aren't doing enough to fight climate change. In Fiji religious leaders have gathered for a summit and the region's leading scientists were also there to make presentations. Taholo Kami is the Regional Director for the Oceania Program of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. He says he told the summit that religious leaders in the region focus too much on the after-life, and not enough on the state of the planet here and...

New Scientist: Call it a tale of two poles. While sea ice in the Arctic is vanishing fast, the extent of Antarctic ice has increased. Good explanations for the growth of ice in the Southern Ocean have been hard to find, but now the problem may have been cracked. Counter-intuitively, it seems global warming may be cooling southern surface waters. Nobody predicted that the fate of ice at each pole would take such different paths in just 30 years, with Arctic sea ice dropping more than 15 per cent, even as Antarctic...

Mongabay: Efforts to monitor the world's forests and other ecosystems got a big boost in February with the launch of Landsat 8, NASA's newest earth observation satellite, which augments the crippled Landsat 7 currently orbiting Earth (technically Landsat 8 is still named the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) and will remain so until May when the USGS turns control of the satellite over to NASA). Last week Landsat 8/LDCM sent back its first image, showing the meeting of the Great Plains with the Front...

New Scientist: Australia has been warned: it's time to adapt to a changed climate. The extreme weather that has rocked the country over the last couple of years is a result of human-induced climate change, and will only get worse without immediate drastic action, according to the Climate Commission, an independent advisory body set up by the Australian government. "Climate change is making many extreme events worse in terms of their impacts on people, property, communities and the environment," says climate...

United Press International: The maritime ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico is still feeling the effects of the 2010 oil spill, a report from the National Wildlife Federation said. A federal court in New Orleans is examining issues related to the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. A well below the Deepwater Horizon oil rig failed, causing an explosion on the rig, which caught fire and sink. The explosion killed 11 rig workers and led to the worst offshore incident of its kind in the industry's history. The NWF said dolphin...

New York Times: An environmental coalition on Monday charged that coal and coal dust spilled from railroad hoppers is polluting the scenic Columbia River Gorge, and pledged to sue mining companies and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad if they do not halt the spills. Representatives of the Sierra Club and other conservation groups said they were invoking a clause in the Clean Water Act that permits lawsuits if those accused of polluting do not remedy environmental problems within 60 days. Each coal train...

Nature: It is a whopper of a catch, in more ways than one: China is under-reporting its overseas fishing catch by more than an order of magnitude, according to a study published on 23 March. The problem is particularly acute in the rich fisheries of West Africa, where a lack of transparency in reporting is threatening efforts to evaluate the ecological health of the waters. “We can’t assess the state of the oceans without knowing what’s being taken out of them,” says Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist...

Daily Mail: Climate change experts have been trying for years to explain why the sea ice in Antarctica is expanding. Now scientists claim to have found the answer -- global warming. They believe the paradoxical shift is caused by water melting from beneath the Antarctic ice shelves and re-freezing back on the surface. A Pod of orcas amongst the breaking sea ice, Ross Sea, Antarctica 2009. Researchers now believe the ice is increasing The frozen sea around the South Pole has been steadily growing,...

Bloomberg: Australia is facing increased risks of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, wild fires and drought spurred by climate change, according to a report released today by the nation’s Climate Commission. Key food-growing regions across Australia’s southeast and southwest are likely to experience more droughts in the future, the commission said in a statement accompanying the report. The number of record hot days in Australia has doubled since the 1960s and a long-term drought is affecting the...

Ecologist: It all started after the civil war in our country when most of the houses were burned, leaving people homeless. When people were finally ready to rebuild their homes, contracts were given to Chinese and Senegalese construction companies which led to a huge demand for sand. Now, sand mines have become a place where otherwise unemployed young people can find work. It began slowly on the beaches close to Freetown, Hamilton and Lakka with companies in need of sand to make asphalt for road building...

Christian Science Monitor: The amount of land in the high Arctic covered by trees and upright shrubs could increase by up to 52 percent by midcentury, warming the region to levels climate scientists had previously not expected to see there until 2100. That's the take-home message from a new study that looks at statistical ties between climate and vegetation types to estimate how the Arctic's landscape could change with global warming. The impact of the vegetation changes on the region's climate not only would be felt at...

Fiji Times: FOREIGN Affairs permanent secretary Amena Yauvoli hopes the government and the public are committed to the implementation of the National Climate Change Policy which was launched in March last year. Mr Yauvoli, who spoke at the opening of the National Climate Change Co-ordination Committee meeting in Suva last week, said the climate change unit provided the co-ordination for the implementation of all climate change-related activities. "The important roles of climate change unit are to provide...