Waves in the North Atlantic ocean seem to be getting higher. In the 1960s, the average reported height was about 7 feet. It has since increased to 9 - 10 feet. The climate of the Earth is constantly changing, and maybe that of the ocean is too. No reason is apparent for this increase, however, […]

If some predictions of sea level rises associated with climate change were to come true, some island nations such as the Maldives and Marshall Islands, which are just barely above sea level now, could have some serious problems. Also, populated river deltas such as those of the Bengal, Nile, and Niger rivers could be threatened.

El Nino was once thought to be a purely local phenomenon occurring in the waters off Peru and Ecuador. Climate researchers have found the event covers a vast part of the world’s largest ocean and in turn affects weather patterns globally. Just a few of the weather disturbances linked to El Niño are as follows:
The […]

El Niño, a Spanish-language term referring to the Christ child, is also the name for an unusual warming of the surface waters of large parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Reappearing every several years, and peaking around Christmas time (thus the name), climatologists have found that it can have a profound impact on global weather […]

La Nina is the opposite of El Nino, referring to a period of cold surface waters in the Pacific. The two temperature states oscillate back and forth. The result is the Southern Oscillation, a term first used in 1932 by Sir Gilbert Walker in attempts to predict the year-to-year fluctuations in India’s monsoon rainfall. He […]

The average American’s use of energy in all its forms results in 20 tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere each year. A citizen of Kansas, on the average, is responsible for 50 times the CO emissions of a resident of Pakistan. If you are a lawyer, you might be doing even more than […]

Milankovitch, a Yugoslavian geophysicist, proposed in the 1920s that changes in the Earth’s spatial relationship to the sun can significantly influence the amount and distribution of the sun’s energy reaching our planet. In other words, the Earth’s orbital changes can influence climate. There are many factors, including changes in the com position of the Earth’s […]

It is estimated that during the last ice age, 18,000 years ago, so much water was bound up in the polar ice caps that sea level was some 400 feet lower than it is today. We know that sea level changes significantly over long periods of time in response to climate fluctuations.
There is evidence that […]

Yes. Unless human activities such as pollution and deforestation intervene, the most likely long-term changes in global climate will be a slide back into ice age conditions within several thousand years. Those with good memories might even remember that before the greenhouse effect/global warming flap began, the media frenzy about climate concerned the impending ice […]

Studies of ice cores from the world’s thickest glaciers (some 10,000 feet tall) have suggested that past climatic regimes have changed much more frequently—and much more rapidly—than previously suspected. Some changes on the scale of ice ages appear to have occurred during less than the course of an average human life span and, in one […]