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Ministers Unable to Reach Agreement at Climate Change Conference
Expect to resume talks next year in Bonn
Environment ministers and diplomats from more than 180 countries suspended their intensive negotiations 25 November after failing to reach agreement on guidelines for reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gases believed responsible for global warming.

Conference delegates have been meeting at the Netherlands Congress Center in The Hague for two weeks -- culminating in a last-ditch, all-night session on the final day -- in an effort to hammer out detailed rules for implementing a climate change treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, three years ago.

Conference officials said, however, that the delegates were so close to reaching an accord that they have agreed to resume the conference early next year.

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global change research
Patterns of Global Climate Change Over Recent Centuries
Historical patterns reported by NOAA and university scientists
For the first time, year-by-year patterns of global temperature over the past few centuries have now been revealed. Evidence from ice cores, tree rings, corals, historical records and sediments in lakes was used by a team of university and NOAA scientists to obtain the yearly maps, extending the history of global climate to a time before people began taking measurements with weather instruments. Writing in the online journal Earth Interactions, the scientists note that their work highlights periods of unusual climatic conditions, such as the period of "dry fogs" that were reported by Benjamin Franklin in the 1780s. The new study shows that the hazy conditions Franklin described from his home (at that time, in Paris) were related to a cold episode that affected all of Europe for several years following the eruption of a volcano in Iceland (Laki) in 1784. Other major eruptions have had similar climatic effects. After the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, temperatures in North America and Europe fell sharply, and cool conditions prevailed for several years.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Full story available here.

global change research
Global Warming: Lessons Taught by Snails and Crabs
If you think that global warming is some far-off problem for future generations to worry about, consider what George Somero has to say. As acting director of Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, Somero has to walk only a few dozen steps from his lab to the waters of Monterey Bay, where he and other marine biologists have found disturbing signs that higher ocean temperatures have transformed wildlife populations in the Pacific. "The effects of global warming already seem evident," says Somero, the David and Lucile Packard Professor in Marine Science at Stanford. Somero points to a three-year study conducted in the 1930s, when Stanford graduate student Willis Hewatt counted and identified all of the marine invertebrates living in a 95-square-yard section of intertidal shoreline near the marine lab located in Pacific Grove, Calif.

The study was all but forgotten until 1993, when researchers decided to re-survey the same area to determine if the types of invertebrate species present at Hopkins had shifted during the past few decades. Scientists counted everything from limpets to crabs and discovered that marine populations had changed dramatically in just 60 years. "There was a significant decrease in northern species -- those that tend to occur to the north of Monterey Bay, but eight out of nine southern species increased in abundance," says Somero. "The overall message in these data," he notes, "is that cold-loving species tended to move out, and warm-loving species moved in."

global change research
Regional Carbon Dioxide Fluxes Since 1980 Modeled
A group of researchers from France and the U.S. have applied an inverse model to 20 years of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements to infer yearly changes in the regional carbon balance of oceans and continents. The model indicates that global terrestrial carbon fluxes were approximately twice as variable as ocean fluxes between 1980 and 1998. According to their paper, published in the 17 November issue of Science magazine, tropical land ecosystems contributed most of the interannual changes in Earth's carbon balance over the 1980s, whereas northern mid- and high-latitude land ecosystems dominated from 1990 to 1995. The authors also report that strongly enhanced uptake of carbon was found over North America during the 1992-1993 period compared to 1989-1990.

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