Even under low-emissions greenhouse gas scenarios, the probability of very large wildfires increases by at least 30 percent by 2100 in the West, according to a new study published in Climatic Change and led by Natasha Stavros of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Rocky Mountain region showed the largest increase in probability, followed by the…
Month: December 2014
Connecting Causes and Impacts of Climate Change
Here’s what we know about climate change in a nutshell: Human influence on the climate system is clear Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive…
Warmer Temperatures Could Boost Plant Growth on Rangelands
East of the Cascade mountains, hundreds of thousands of cattle graze the vast rangelands. This economically vital agricultural region of the Pacific Northwest could become more productive as a result of climate change, a new study finds. Climate models show that rangelands in the interior West — including eastern Oregon and Washington as well as…
Finding New Ways to Link Weather Events to Climate Change
From Hurricane Sandy to this year’s drought in California and Oregon, extreme weather is now frequently associated with climate change in the popular imagination. For researchers, attributing these individual events to climate change has been tricky, though not impossible. How can researchers know whether a given event is attributable to human-caused climate change? That is,…
Temperature Records Occur in Clusters
Studying the details of temperature fluctuations is essential to understanding how both individual organisms and whole ecoregions will adapt under climate change. But many studies could be missing an important nuance. Most studies examining long-term changes in temperature tend to focus on trends in the mean, or average temperature, as well as on the highest…
The Climate CIRCulator 