Last Updated:
February 28, 2007

GCRIO Program Overview

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Our extensive collection of documents.

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Archives of the
Global Climate Change Digest
A Guide to Information on Greenhouse Gases and Ozone Depletion
Published July 1988 through June 1999

Item #d99jun22

Weathervane Digital Forum on Global Climate Policy. The Weathervane site at http://www.weathervane.rff.org/ is an online forum designed to provide the news media, legislators, opinion leaders, and the interested public with analysis and commentary on U.S. and global policy initiatives related to climate change. It is published by Resources for the Future and focuses on the international negotiations that are to decide on goals and actions under the Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is designed to track the potential direction of climate-change policy by providing timely, useful, and objective information bearing on the ongoing international negotiations and debate within the United States.

Item #d99jun23

Sea-Ice Concentrations. The National Snow and Ice Data Center, an information and referral center supporting polar and cryospheric research, distributes snow and ice data on the World Wide Web at http://www-nsidc.colorado.edu/. Its catalog contains data on brightness temperatures, climate, education, elevation, GIS, glaciers, great lakes, hydrology, ice cores, icebergs, meteorology, modeling, ocean, permafrost/frozen ground, paleoclimates, polar atmosphere, radiation, remote sensing data/satellite imagery, sea ice, snow, soils, and vegetation. These data include Nimbus-7 observations, QuickTime movies of Arctic and Antarctic monthly mean sea-ice concentrations, and related datasets. MPEG images of the changes in sea-ice concentrations from 1978 to 1996 are also available at http://graupel.colorado.edu/~smith/Public/sea_ice_movies/.

Item #d99jun24

Tiempo Bulletin and Climate Cyberlibrary. The Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has published Issue 31 of the bulletin Tiempo: Global Warming and the Third World at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/tiempo/floor0/recent/. This issue includes articles on the Fourth Conference of the Parties, capacity strengthening, and the global temperature in 1998. It has also prepared a website at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/tiempo/profiles.htm that provides climate, current weather, emissions, climate- change activities, health, development, business, tourism, historical, and environmental information about each nation in the world.

Item #d99jun25

Carbon Sequestration vs Renewables. The U.S. Department of Energy has published the report Carbon Sequestration: State of the Science on the Web at http://www.fe.doe.gov/sequestration. Billed as a “working report for roadmapping future research and development,” the site offers registration for e-mail updates and asks for reader comments and queries. The report concludes that renewable energy alone will not be able to significantly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and that carbon sequestration must be looked to “to provide a fundamentally new approach for dealing with climate change.” Indeed, the report states that “various energy options, such as increased use of wind, solar and other renewable energy sources and greater energy efficiencies may not, on their own, be sufficient to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” The report reviews the research needs of technologies for separating and capturing CO₂ from energy systems and sequestering it in the oceans; in geologic formations; and in terrestrial ecosystems, such as forests, vegetation, soils, and crops.

Item #d99jun26

USGS Data Integrator. The USGS has brought up the Geodata Explorer at http://dss1.er.usgs.gov. The Geodata Explorer is an interactive program that provides scientific-decision-making support on energy and land-management issues. It provides map coverages and data sets (up to 82 data layers plus GIS tools) from USGS investigations. The Java 1.2 Plugin is required.

Item #d99jun27

Societal Aspects of Weather. Pielke’s Societal Aspects of Weather pages has been brought up on the Web by the University Center for Atmospheric Research at http://www.dir.ucar.edu/esig/socasp. It primarily provides links to Web sources on the societal (life, death, profit, and loss) aspects of weather. It also contains a sampling of the most useful resources of relevant weather data. It is approachable from several directions. The user group section refers to the users of weather research, information, and data (e.g., in the insurance industry, emergency management/hazards planning, agriculture, or the media) and links to sites of interest to each specific group. The phenomena section organizes information under the headings of El Niño, tornadoes, extreme temperatures, flood, tropical cyclone, winter, and lightning. The section on community and research tools organizes information by resource type, covering people and organizations, bibliographic resources, and a Virtual Journal and WeatherZine.

Item #d99jun28

Atmospheric Chemistry. Introduction to Atmospheric Chemistry, http://www.science.yorku.ca/cac/intro.html, gives a basic introduction to the subject, including discussions about atmospheric chemistry, global warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, and acidic deposition. It also serves to introduce the study of atmospheric chemistry at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Item #d99jun29

Paleo Perspective. NOAA’s Paleoclimatology Program has put together the Paleo Perspective on Global Warming Website at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo.html/globalwarming/home.html, which is divided into sections that (1) describe climate and climate variability and (2) present instrumental and paleoclimatic data (from corals, tree rings, lake sediments, pollen, and ice cores) that tell us how the Earth’s temperature has changed during the past millennium. The site highlights the importance of paleoclimatic research and shows how paleoclimatic research relates to global warming and other climate changes.