Earlier springs are having a wide impact, the study shows

Springtime in the UK is starting on average 11 days earlier than 30 years ago, causing natural food chains to become disrupted, a study suggests.

Predators seem to be slower than organisms further down the food chains to respond to the seasonal shifts, according to a team of UK researchers.

The findings are based on more than 25,500 records of 726 marine, terrestrial and freshwater species.

The study has been published in the journal Global Change Biology.

"If biological events at different levels within the food chains are changing at different rates, it is possible that we are seeing a de-synchronisation," explained lead author Stephen Thackeray, an ecologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH).

The Baltic Sea is especially vulnerable to pollution

The Russian military allegedly dumped nuclear waste into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, according to a report on Swedish television.

Radioactive material from a military base in Latvia is thought to have been thrown into Swedish waters.

For many the biggest shock is that the Swedish government may have known at the time and done nothing about it.

The partly enclosed Baltic Sea is known as one of the most polluted seas in the world.

But now it seems it was also used as a dumping ground for Russian nuclear waste and chemical weapons.

According to a report on Swedish television, Russian boats sailed out at night to dump barrels of radioactive material, from a military base in Latvia, into Swedish waters.

And even though the Swedish government at the time reportedly knew this, no action was taken to find the waste.

The current government in Stockholm now wants the politicians who were then in charge to explain why they did nothing to find the barrels.

The Baltic Sea is semi-enclosed, so it takes a long time to flush out toxins. This makes it particularly vulnerable to pollution.

And after years of untreated waste from Russia's cities and heavy industries, scientists say that the Baltic is in danger of becoming a dead sea.

Next week high-ranking politicians from those countries bordering the Baltic, including Russia, are due to attend a summit in Helsinki to discuss how to save it.

But if reports about Soviet nuclear waste being dumped prove true, then Russia will have even more accusations of pollution to answer.

source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8499762.stm

Much has been written - not least on this website - and much more surely will be written over the coming months about supposed inconsistencies, errors, misjudgements and poor practice among climate scientists.

How many "scandals" do we now have with the suffix "-gate" attached to them? At least five, by my count, with the most embarrassing surely being the projection that the mighty Himalayan glaciers could largely be gone within a human generation.

The latest -gate - detailed in a series of articles in The Guardian by environment journalist Fred Pearce - concerns a set of temperature data from China that was used in a 1990 paper in Nature to estimate the likely impact of progressive urbanisation on temperatures recorded at weather stations.

The paper is one of several cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in reaching its conclusion that:

"Urban heat island effects are real but local, and have not biased the large-scale trends."

The implication of The Guardian's article is that Chinese scientists contributing data for that paper had not taken as much care as they should have done to document and allow for the fact that some of the weather stations had been relocated over the course of the study period, possibly affecting their readings; and that at some stage the paper's lead author, Professor Phil Jones, had been made aware of the issue by an independent UK researcher, Douglas Keenan, but did not seek to publicise or remedy it.

Neither satellites nor ground observations give a complete picture

The vice-chairman of the UN's climate science panel has admitted it made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

The Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC) included the date in its 2007 assessment of climate impacts.

A number of scientists have recently disputed the 2035 figure, and Jean-Pascal van Ypersele told BBC News that it was an error and would be reviewed.

But he said it did not change the broad picture of man-made climate change.

The issue, which BBC News first reported on 05 December, has reverberated around climate websites in recent days.

It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing Georg Kaser, University of Innsbruck Himalayas glacier deadline 'wrong'

Some commentators maintain that taken together with the contents of e-mails stolen last year from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, it undermines the credibility of climate science.

Dr van Ypersele said this was not the case.

"I don't see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report," he said.

"Some people will attempt to use it to damage the credibility of the IPCC; but if we can uncover it, and explain it and change it, it should strengthen the IPCC's credibility, showing that we are ready to learn from our mistakes."

As world leaders prepare to meet in Copenhagen to discuss climate change - how did the Earth's climate arrive at its current state and how do scientists delve into the secrets of our planet's past?

The layers of ice laid down each year in Antarctica and Greenland store a record of the Earth's climate. Bubbles of air trapped in the ice as it froze can be analysed to give details on temperature at the time it froze, and on atmospheric concentrations of gases.

The oldest ice core so far extracted belongs to the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (Epica). It allows scientists to look back 800,000 years.

The Southern Ocean is the world's most important feeding ground for whales

Sea levels are likely to rise by about 1.4m (4ft 6in) globally by 2100 as polar ice melts, according to a major review of climate change in Antarctica.

Conducted by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), it says that warming seas are accelerating melting in the west of the continent.

ozone loss has cooled the region, it says, shielding it from global warming.

Rising temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula are making life suitable for invasive species on land and sea.

The report - Antarctic climate Change and the Environment - was written using contributions from 100 leading scientists in various disciplines, and reviewed by a further 200.

Rising seas: A tale of two cities

SCAR's executive director Dr Colin Summerhayes said it painted a picture of "the creeping global catastrophe that we face".

"The temperature of the air is increasing, the temperature of the ocean is increasing, sea levels are rising - and the Sun appears to have very little influence on what we see," he said.

SCAR's report comes 50 years to the day after the Antarctic Treaty, the international agreement regulating use of the territory, was opened for signing, and a week before the opening of the potentially seminal UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

The "ClimateGate" affair - the publication of e-mails and documents hacked or leaked from one of the world's leading climate research institutions - is being intensely debated on the web. But what does it imply for climate science? Here, Mike Hulme and Jerome Ravetz say it shows that we need a more concerted effort to explain and engage the public in understanding the processes and practices of science and scientists.

Practising scientists know that they do not simply follow a rulebook to do their science, otherwise it could be done by a robot

As the repercussions of ClimateGate reverberate around the virtual community of global citizens, we believe it is both important and urgent to reflect on what this moment is telling us about the practice of science in the 21st Century.

In particular, what is it telling us about the social status and perceived authority of scientific claims about climate change?

We argue that the evolving practice of science in the contemporary world must be different from the classic view of disinterested - almost robotic - humans establishing objective claims to universal truth.

Climate change policies are claimed to be grounded in scientific knowledge about physical cause and effect and about reliable projections of the future.

As opposed to other ways of knowing the world around us - through intuition, inherited belief, myth - such scientific knowledge retains its authority by widespread trust in science's reassuring norms of objectivity, universality and disinterestedness.

These perceived norms work to guarantee to the public trustworthy scientific knowledge, and allow such knowledge to claim high authority in political deliberation and argumentation; this, at least, is what historically has been argued in the case of climate change.

What distinguishes science from other forms of knowledge?

On what basis does scientific knowledge earn its high status and authority?

What are the minimum standards of scientific practice that ensure it is trustworthy?

For an open, enquiring and participative society, these are questions that have become much more important in the wake of ClimateGate.

They are also questions that scientists should continually be asking of themselves as the political and cultural worlds within which they do their work rapidly change.

Doing science in 2010 demands something rather different from scientists than did science in 1960, or even in 1985.