#warming world

[abstract-eye]

© abstract-eye

[josefinalaventolera-blog]

[adalidda]

Mechanism discovered for plants to regulate their flowering in a warming world

Associate Professor Balasubramanian explained how two key basic cellular processes work together to reduce the levels of a protein that normally prevents flowering, allowing the plants to produce flowers in response to elevated temperature.

Check more at https://adalidda.net/posts/bD5z6SQNgah4CkuCx/mechanism-discovered-for-plants-to-regulate-their-flowering

[mucholderthen]

[newstfionline]

Despite winter chill, world still warming

By Cynthia Dizikes, Chicago Tribune, February 27, 2014

For winter-worn Chicagoans socked by snow, ice and arctic winds, global warming may seem a distant fancy.

It is not--and, in fact, that warming may be playing a role in this year’s relentless cold and snow, according to climate scientists.

“The story is so much bigger than just, ‘cold around here,’” said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University who has been studying how melting arctic ice may be contributing to persistent weather systems across the Northern Hemisphere, including this year’s oppressively frigid conditions.

While it might seem bizarre to Americans living east of the Rockies, the average temperature globally over land and sea for January 2014 was the highest since 2007 and the fourth-highest for any January since reliable record keeping began in 1880. It also marked almost 29 years with a global temperature above the 20th-century average, according to a monthly report released last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

So as the Midwest and East Coast were being walloped by the cold, most of the world experienced higher-than-average monthly temperatures, with parts of South America and Africa racking up record warmth.

The trend is consistent with climate change models, which suggest that the world, in general, will become warmer and wetter in the future.

“We’re kind of outliers in terms of what happened across the globe in

Since extreme cold outbreaks have become less common, when they do happen they seem more intense, Crouch said.

“It is more of a perception issue,” he said.

“We don’t expect our winters to get any less snowy for a long time,” said Katharine Hayhoe, director of the climate science center at Texas Tech University and lead author of a 2010 paper assessing the effects of climate change on Chicago and the Great Lakes.

Hayhoe likened climate change being described as “global warming” to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. In that story, the men touch different portions of the animal to understand what it is and come away in complete disagreement.

“We have a global issue that each one of us is experiencing differently at the local level where we live,” she said. “Global warming is a symptom of climate change, but for most of us, global warming--the warming of the entire planet--is not the symptom we see. The symptom we see is often more like weather weirding.”

For some areas of the world, that may mean a future marked by more rain or stronger hurricanes, while others may become hotter and drier.