Q: People often blame unseasonal weather on climate change. Could you please explain the difference between weather and climate? A: Weather is what we see hourto-hour and day-to-day, and weather forecasts can tell us if it will rain, say, tomorrow afternoon, but because the weather is innately chaotic, forecasts for longer than 10 days are extremely poor. Climate is different. It is an average ...

[1] In maritime mountainous regions, the phase of winter precipitation is elevation dependent, and in watersheds receiving both rain and snow, hydrologic impacts of climate change are less straightforward than in snowmelt‐dominated systems. Here, 29 Pacific Northwest watersheds illustrate how distribution of seasonal snow, transient snow, and winter rain mediates sensitivity to 20th century war...

West Africa is known to be particularly vulnerable to climate change due to high climate variability, high reliance on rain-fed agriculture, and limited economic and institutional capacity to respond to climate variability and change. In this context, better knowledge of how climate will change in West Africa and how such changes will impact crop productivity is crucial to inform policies that ...

Combustion of fossil fuels causes carbon emissions which contribute to global climate change. But combustion processes are also responsible for sulphur emissions and sulphate aerosols o set part of the global warming problem since they increase locally the albedo of the Earth's atmosphere. However, sulphate aerosols contribute to the regional acidi cation and acid rain problem. Integrated asses...

INTRODUCTION In Zambia, agriculture continues to be an important source of livelihood, supporting about 70% of the population. The country’s agriculture sector is dominated by small scale rural farmers, who largely depend on rain for crop production, mainly due to the absence of irrigation equipment in most rural communities. Thus any change in climate, mostly manifested as an increase in frequ...

T he holiday season here in the United States was ushered in by a long-awaited report, heralded as laying out the administration's research agenda for climate change. It should interest those in the United States who may have been expecting something meaningful from their government, along with those in Europe and elsewhere who have come to expect disappointment. The draft strategic plan for th...

The introduction of the U.S. SO2 allowance-trading program to address the threat of acid rain as part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 is a landmark event in the history of environmental regulation. The program was a great success by almost all measures. This paper, which draws upon a research workshop and a policy roundtable held at Harvard in May 2011, investigates critically the desig...

Das, T., et al. (2011). "Potential increase in floods in California's Sierra Nevada under future climate projections." Climatic Change 109: 71-94. California's mountainous topography, exposure to occasional heavily moisture-laden storm systems, and varied communities and infrastructures in low lying areas make it highly vulnerable to floods. An important question facing the state-in terms of pr...