Tiempo Climate Newswatch

There are at least 800,000 malnourished children in Niger and 2.5 million people living on less than one meal a day, according to relief workers. The crisis is a result of drought last year, late rains this year and swarms of locusts that have destroyed crops and grazing land. Oxfam estimates that more than four million people face starvation across the Sahel region of West Africa.

United Nations researchers predicted the food crisis in autumn 2004, but aid has proved slow to arrive. "It was very clear from October last year. We monitor this region very closely due to its vulnerability. The warnings were given very early,” says Jean Senahoun of the Global Information and Early Warning System in Rome. "Over the last few days, the world has finally woken up, but it took graphic images of dying children for this to happen," commented United Nations Under-Secretary-General Jan Egeland. "More money had been received over the last ten days than over the last ten months."

More information

• ENS
• New Scientist
• allAfrica
• Guardian

• IRIN
• Background, FEWS
• Latest news, allAfrica

Scientists studying the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf have derived evidence from sediment cores showing that the ice mass had previously been stable for close to 10,000 years. According to the research team's leader, Robert Gilbert of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, "the disintegration of Larsen B is almost certainly a response to human-induced global warming."

"The breaking up of Larsen B alone will not change sea level, but other glaciers previously restricted by the ice shelf have surged forward, lowering their surfaces," notes Gilbert. With lower elevations, however, come warmer temperatures, increasing melt and greater loss of ice to the sea. "So that is having and will have an effect on global sea levels. As more ice is lost there may be a greater impact on sea level than previously predicted," he concludes.

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• Scientific American
• Earth Times

• New Zealand Herald
• The Australian

A new climate model suggests that the planet may be limited in its ability to absorb increasing emissions of carbon dioxide. "If we maintain our current course of fossil fuel emissions or accelerate our emissions, the land and oceans will not be able to slow the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the way they're doing now," warns Inez Y. Fung at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.

Carbon dioxide is being cycled far faster than expected in the Amazonian Basin, according to a recent study. Most of the carbon released as carbon dioxide from rivers and wetlands has spent as little as five years, rather than decades or centuries, locked in the trees, plants and soils of the area. " River breath is clearly happening much faster than anyone realized," says Jeff Richey of the University of Washington in the United States.

More information

• Science Daily
• PhysOrg
• Research paper (0.7Mb download), PNAS

• Science Daily
• Link to research paper, SciDevNet