Ray Wills information on climate change in Western Australia

Ray Wills - Understanding climate change.

Here are some resources on the internet to check out ...

An enormous amount of scientific research has established that during the Earth's 4.5 billion-year history, the climate has varied and changed on a wide range of time scales, due to natural causes and without human activities impacting.

While the Earth's climate is dynamic and climate change is normal and continuous, another enourmous body of research, has empirically and theoretically well-established the enhanced greenhouse effect. Human impact is now overwhelming variation in the natural syste .

The data I use is from a range of science publications like Science and Nature as well as more specialist science journals and websites – all publically available data. Some produce continuous data streams like the NASA and WMO cluster of research groups – dedicated science websites like NASA ( http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/), NOAA (http://www.noaa.gov/), the NASA millenium program (http://www.osd.noaa.gov/goes_R/goesrsounder.htm), the WMO (http://www.wmo.ch/).

And of course the IPCC (www.ipcc.ch including ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html).

In terms of regional variations - these are outlined by the IPCC in detail in 2001, the updates yet to be released in the most recent analysis from IPCC in 2007. In terms of pollution, particulates act in global dimming, so the pollution over India for example slows the impact of warming (but also interferes with the monsoon, as it does in Indonesia). One impact as we actully clean up air pollution is that it frees up the expression of warming in thos places (as it did in Europe and North America in the 1980s as we acted to reduce acid rain caused from SO2 from motor vehicles which led to increased warming in those areas).

Climate belt shifts are described in http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/wg2SPMfinal.pdf - states:

Because average temperatures are expected to rise more near the north and south poles than near the equator, the shift in climate zones will be more pronounced at higher latitudes.
In the mid-latitude regions (45° to 60°), present temperature zones could shift by 150–550 km.
Since each of today's latitudinal climate belts is optimal for particular crops, such shifts could strongly affect agricultural and livestock production.
Efforts to shift crops poleward in response could be limited by the inability of soil types in the new climate zones to support intensive agriculture as practiced today in the main producer countries.

Lots of this information is now really well documented via wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), including the main page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warminghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming.

There are some great animations of plate tectonics on-line - these are just a few of the options

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/geology/tectonics.html

http://www.scotese.com/newpage13.htm

http://www2.nature.nps.gov/geology/usgsnps/animate/pltecan.html

Locally in Western Australia IOCI (http://www.ioci.org.au/) are coordinating a lot of work between in particular CSIRO (http://www.dar.csiro.au/information/climatechange.html)and Australian Bureau of Meterology (http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/)

A numeric counter system at http://www.worldometers.info/ but this just uses a simple algorithm on annual stats to consider accumulated change over the year based on the date on your computer.

The shareware Earthbrowser software which interrogates global earth servers for a raft of environmental info including the US locations.

http://www.earthbrowser.com/

Earthbrowser is great – much simpler than GoogleEarth - a smaller footprint tho’ as a consequence less detailed maps - but even that's getting better with recent releases - well worth paying the shareware fee and supporting the author!

The University of Alaska at Anchorage has produced a report, "Estimating Future Costs for Alaska Public Infrastructure At Risk from Climate Change."

The full report is at http://www.iser.uaa.alaska.edu/Publications/JuneICICLE.pdf.

An executive summary is at http://www.iser.uaa.alaska.edu/Publications/Juneclimatefinal.pdf.

We need to work on Estimating Future Costs for Western Australia from Climate Change.

A brilliant site with an array of inspiring talks by people working on solutions to many things including climate change can be found at http://www.ted.com

OTHER REFERENCES

www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/publications/nbccap-brochure/pubs/nbccap-brochure.pdf

eied.deh.gov.au/biodiversity/publications/nbccap/background.html

http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/impacts/overview/

www.greenhouse.gov.au/impacts/overview/pubs/overview3.pdf

www.soe.wa.gov.au/report/fundamental-pressures/climate-change.html

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/index.html