News Archive

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced a new World Wide Web site for its Global Change Research Program. The website is designed to provide a portal through which scientists, resource managers, and the public can access information about the program and its partners. EPA's goal is to make the Global Change Research Program completely transparent to the public, and to make products and data produced by the program readily accessible, including products from EPA researchers in its laboratories and centers, as well as from its grantees and collaborators. The new website is available at http://www.epa.gov/globalresearch/.

global change news
Global Warming Talks End Without Deal
Talks resumed in Ottawa fail to bridge U.S. and EU positions
The United States and Europe failed on Thurday (8 December) to bridge major differences after two days of talks aimed at salvaging a pact to curb global warming. Officials from both sides stressed that much progress had been made in closing the gap between the European Union and the "umbrella group" consisting of the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. However, according to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Sandalow, "Much remains to be done." His sentiments were echoed by the EU side. "There is certainly a big gap to be bridged between us and the umbrella group of countries," said James Currie, the European Union's director-general for the environment. The Ottawa meeting was the first time the two sides had made contact since last month's dramatic collapse of U.N.-sponsored talks in The Hague to set a global strategy on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It is left to member governments to decide how to proceed and it appears that a proposed meeting in Oslo next week is considered unlikely.

global change research
Climate Clues from the Cariaco Basin
The sediment record in the Cariaco Basin off of Venezuela exhibits annual layering that occurred during anoxic episodes that spanned periods of tens of thousands of years. According to recent reports in Science magazine, this record is now providing new clues to climate change. The abundance ratio of radioactive ¹⁴C to stable ¹²C in the atmosphere is a function of the strength of the exchange of CO₂ between the atmosphere and the ocean because more vigorous exchange better mixes the atmospheric inventory of "younger" carbon with the "older" carbon in the ocean. Thus, estimates of atmospheric ¹⁴C/¹²C can provide important information about the strength of ocean circulation in the past. Hughen et al. analyzed Cariaco Basin sediments to create a high-resolution ¹⁴C record for the period between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago that extends the radiocarbon calibration curve thousands of years beyond the upper limit possible using tree rings. They show that the climate cooling event called the Younger Dryas was primarily the result of a sudden change in ocean circulation. Ice cores from Greenland contain a record of large and abrupt periods of local warming (called "interstadials") that lasted for thousands of years during the last glacial period, but additional evidence is needed to determine if these changes were regional or global. Peterson et al. how that the sedimentary record from the Cariaco Basin contains evidence of sudden, dramatic changes in the hydrologic cycle of the tropical Atlantic during the last 90,000 years. Their record, which is tightly coupled to the record of climate reversals found in Greenland ice, supports the idea that the tropics played an important role in forcing climate change during the last glacial cycle, and helps reinforce the case that interstadials were global in extent.

publications
Great Lakes Regional Assessment Report Released
The Great Lakes Regional Assessment Team announced on 30 November the release of their summary report for the Great Lakes region -- Preparing for a Changing Climate: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. The report is based on information from the EPA-sponsored assessment of the potential consequences of climate change for the Great Lakes region and follows closely the release of the first U.S. National Assessment report on 11 November 2000. The Great Lakes assessment was one of 19 regional assessments and six sectoral assessments in the National Assessment process that was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990 and that was organized by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).

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global change news
Too Little, Too Late, at the Climate Talks
Under pressure from too many complex issues, too many divergent views, and too little time to forge consensus, international negotiations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions collapsed last week. The most obvious bone of contention was whether the United States, the world's biggest source of humanmade greenhouse gases, should be allowed to meet much of its obligation without actually cutting its own emissions. The United States softened its controversial stance in the final hours, but European negotiators found even the scaled-back U.S. position unacceptable. Although the negotiators headed for home with nothing tangible to show for their efforts, they say the rule-setting process is not over, just suspended.

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