This paper estimates the effects of humidity and temperature on mortality rates in the United States (c. 1973-2002) in order to provide an insight into the potential health impacts of climate change. I find that humidity, like temperature, is an important determinant of mortality. Coupled with Hadley CM3 climate-change predictions, I project that mortality rates are likely to change little on t...

The paper summarises activities within a broad-based research program for the reconstruction of the evolution of Italian climate in the twentieth century. The main result of the program is that Italian climate is becoming warmer and drier with an increase of both heavy precipitation events and long dry spells. Most of the observed signals appear to be due to changes in atmospheric circulation c...

John Balbus Climate change is not just a problem for rivers and reservoirs that are running dry, or forests and grasslands that are seeing an increased incidence of wildfire, or Arctic wildlife stressed by rapidly changing ecosystems. It’s a problem for human health, too, as John Balbus discusses with host Ashley Ahearn. It can be tricky to attribute specific health effects to climate change, w...

Varved sediments from a lake near the present forest-prairie border in northwestern Minnesota provide an annual record of climate change for the last 10,400 years. Climate-sensitive mineral, chemical, and biological components show that the mid-Holocene dry interval between 8500 and 4000 years ago is asymmetrical and actually consists of two distinct drier pulses separated by a moister interval...

16 The focus of this paper is to understand the multi-decadal oscillatory component of 17 variability in the Okavango River system, in southwestern Africa, and its potential 18 evolution through the 21 st century under climate change scenarios. Statistical analyses 19 and hydrological modelling are used to show that the observed multi-decadal wet and 20 dry phases in the Okavango River and Delt...

Land degradation impacts on several critical environmental issues such as food security, diminishing quality and quantity of fresh water resources, preservation of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, and global climate change. Land degradation is responsible for soil erosion and can eventually lead to desertification. The International Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) defines des...

Understanding the effects of global climate disruption on biodiversity is important to future conservation efforts. While taxonomic diversity is widely studied, functional diversity of plants, and recently animals, is receiving increasing attention. Most studies of mammals are short-term, focus on temperate habitats, and rely on traits described in the literature rather than generating traits f...

Climate is one of the single most important factors affecting watershed ecosystems and water resources. The effect of climate variability and change has been studied extensively in some places; in many places, however, assessments are hampered by limited availability of long-term continuous climate data. Weather generators provide a means of synthesizing long-term climate data that can then be ...

To better characterize the climate variability of the last millennium in the high Andes, we analyzed the pollen content of a 1150-yr-old sediment core collected in a bog located at 3800 m a.s.l. in the páramo in the eastern Cordillera in Ecuador. An upslope convective index based on the ratio between cloud transported pollen from the Andean forest to the bog (T) and Poaceae pollen frequencies, ...

Performance of a gas turbine mainly depends on the inlet air temperature. The power output of a gas turbine depends on the flow of mass through it. This is precisely the reason why on hot days, when air is less dense, power output falls. The objective here is to assess the advanced systems applied in reducing the gas turbine intake air temperature and examine the merits from integration of the ...