WASHINGTON - Will 2010 be the warmest year on record? How do the recent U.S. "Snowmageddon" winter storms and record low temperatures in Europe fit into the bigger picture of long-term global warming? NASA has launched a new web page to help people better understand the causes and effects of Earth's changing climate.

The new "A Warming World" page hosts a series of new articles, videos, data visualizations, space-based imagery and interactive visuals that provide unique NASA perspectives on this topic of global importance.

The page includes feature articles that explore the recent Arctic winter weather that has gripped the United States, Europe and Asia, and how El Nino and other longer-term ocean-atmosphere phenomena may affect global temperatures this year and in the future. A new video, "Piecing Together the Temperature Puzzle," illustrates how NASA satellites monitor climate change and help scientists better understand how our complex planet works.

The new web page is available on NASA's Global Climate Change Web site at: http://climate.nasa.gov/warmingworld

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov

Source: NASA

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In the long run we will all be death, right? Maybe not, but what should humankind do in order to survive in the millennia to come? This question is not just something that has religion as its reference point, but actually science.

Human beings have been for quite some time on Earth; we have been around for a little more than a million years, which is a lot, especially if you consider candles on birthday cakes, but if we measure our stay against other things, it really isn't so much: dinosaurs ruled the planet for almost two hundred million years, then they don't even measure up to life's evolution on our planet, which is about twenty times older. We can't compare with the age of the solar system or the universe, so we really amount for very little in the general order of things: Carl Sagan once made a striking comparison, saying that if we could squeeze the history of the universe into one of our years, humankind would have appeared just on the final moments before the end of the last day. So, while our telescopes might seem big as we look out in the cosmos, if we took the inverse perspective, we would only see a very little planet.

From that perspective and once you consider all the factors involved in the very long evolution of life, it is almost a miracle that we still exist. Just consider this: It is estimated that about once every hundred million years, a meteor capable of annihilating the majority of all life forms on the planet strikes its surface, threatening even its structural integrity in geophysical terms. So, with life hanging here for almost 4.000 million years, maths say that we could have been wiped out 400 times, over and over.

If you live in a neighbourhood with a little bit of insecurity, thieves going around, and we have been shot, stabbed and attacked around four hundred times in our life, the thing to do would really be to do something about the problem. Then, since meteors could plausibly have the same effect on our lives - and cool, nifty new cars - than volleys of bullets, the right thing to do about those obnoxious pieces of rock would be to protect ourselves. And if you now live in fear, consider this too: There are threats that we are merely starting to understand now, such as solar flares, supernovae and black holes. None of these are in our immediate space-temporal vicinity, for now, but considering the lapses of time that we are talking about in our new perspective, it is highly probable that humankind will sooner or later confront such problems.

Nikolai Kardashev, a Russian astronomer, created a few decades ago a model to understand the progress of any civilisation in the cosmos based on the use that it makes of its energy. What we know today as the Kardashev scale establishes several criteria to define how available energy is used and thus, what could each civilisation, at each of its own evolutionary stages could eventually control. For example, according to that scale, a type I civilisation would control all the energy available in its own home planet. Thus, events such as typhoons and quakes could be ameliorated or even stalled completely. Such civilisation would be capable of surviving against all planetary catastrophes. According to Sagan, we are now approaching the definition of a type I civilisation: It is expected that we will control all the energy available on Earth in no more than two hundred years. We already have some degree of control over some forms of energy and we can, at least, forecast some catastrophic events such as extreme weather, floods and so on. We still can't accurately predict things like earthquakes, much less control them, but hopefully we will get there too. So, according to this and Sagan's opinion, we would be around a 0,80 in the Kardashev scale.

This means that a type I civilisation would be safe in principle, from all sorts of planetary catastrophes. In order to achieve further levels of survivability, such as leaving a solar system suffering from an incoming black hole or with a failing star, or even repairing their own sun, a civilisation would have to evolve further and the Kardashev scale predicts that too: things like interstellar travel would have to be fairly common among them and we are still a little bit further from there; this does not mean that we should do nothing about it because even the longest trek begins with a single step, and while this might seem a bit like science fiction, we should remember that just a little more than a century ago flying through the atmosphere seemed as unlikely as travelling to Proxima Centauri these days, yet humankind did it. Ultimately, our survival depends on having enough imagination.

Source: Andinia.com

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The climate may be 30 - 50 percent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide in the long term than previously thought, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience.

Projections over the next hundreds of years of climate conditions, including global temperatures, may need to be adjusted to reflect this higher sensitivity.

"Climate change is affecting water supplies for cities and farms; leading to more severe droughts, hurricanes, and floods; contributing to more intense forest fires; and putting coastal communities at risk," said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who is on his way to the global climate change conference convening this week in Copenhagen. "This study and the ongoing work of our USGS scientists will help us continue to build more precise long-term projections and to prepare for the impacts of climate change on our world."

A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol and including the U.S. Geological Survey, studied global temperatures 3.3 to 3 million years ago, finding that the averages were significantly higher than expected from the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at the time.

These underestimates occurred because the long-term sensitivity of the Earth system was not accurately taken into account. In these earlier periods, Earth had more time to adjust to some of the slower impacts of climate change. For example, as the climate warms and ice sheets melt, Earth will absorb more sunlight and continue to warm in the future since less ice is present to reflect the sun.

The U.S. Geological Survey provided the reconstruction of environmental conditions during this timeframe, known as the mid-Pliocene warm period. These data allowed the authors to test the Earth system's sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide.

"Earth is a dynamic system and climate models need to incorporate its multiple feedbacks as well as changes on both fast and long timescales," said Dr. Dan Lunt, who is with the University of Bristol and was the lead author of this article. "This comprehensive outlook allows us to see how sensitive the climate really is to atmospheric carbon dioxide, resulting in more accurate long-term projections."

"This research also emphasizes the importance of examining the past and acquiring real data to understand Earth's climate system," said USGS scientist Harry Dowsett. "Our research on the mid-Pliocene is the most comprehensive global reconstruction for any warm period, and scientists did so by examining fossils to determine sea surface and deepwater ocean temperatures, vegetation, sea ice extent, and other environmental characteristics during that timeframe."

Global average temperatures during the mid-Pliocene were about 3°C (5.5°F) greater than today and within the range projected for the 21st century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Therefore it may be one of the closest analogs in helping to understand Earth's current and future conditions.

To view the article, visit http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo706.html.

The USGS component of this research was through the Pliocene Research, Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping group. The primary collaborators in PRISM are Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Leeds, University of Bristol, British Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey. For more information about PRISM research, visit http://geology.er.usgs.gov/eespteam/prism/index.html.

Source: USGS

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