"Ozone is blowing across the Pacific Ocean from Asia, hanging over the United States and potentially worsening the West Coast's air pollution, a new study has shown.

By examining 100,000 ozone observations in the free troposphere, a region two to five miles above the ground, a University of Colorado scientist discovered that baseline ozone - the amount not emitted by local vehicles and industries - has grown 29 percent during springtime months since 1984.

Tougher pollution laws in recent decades have reduced most big U.S. cities' ground-level ozone, a gas that helps create smog, but it has mysteriously risen in rural areas where there are few cars and factories to produce it. The reason, according to the study published in Thursday's edition of Nature, may be that Americans are unwittingly importing their air pollution from China and other Asian nations."

MNN.com

(Sources: Los Angeles Times, Associated Press)

The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: "If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments."

January 5, 2009

Average temperatures across North America dropped in 2008-which may seem to contradict global warming theory.

Not so, scientists say. The cooling, caused by natural changes in global air circulation, temporarily masked the effects of global warming, which is getting worse, a new study says.