Climate Live – Moss that has existed for 400 million years, soon to be extinct

Too few green areas mean that you cannot handle the downpours. Here a flood in Gävle. Photo: LOTTE FERNVALL

After heavy downpours and persistent rain, Sweden’s major cities are now planning to divert large amounts of water.

In July 2013, the floors of the operating rooms at Ryhov in Jönköping were filled with water, sewage in Östersund is suspected to be behind the fact that 20,000 people fell ill after floods, writes TT.

Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, among others, are now planning to divert the torrential water masses to places where it cannot damage hospitals, roads or embankments, according to Erik Karlsson, strategist for pipeline networks and asset management at Swedish Water.

One way could be to remove downpipes, which are not dimensioned for large amounts of water. If the rainwater ends up directly on the ground, it can be more easily led away to green areas or collected in rain barrels.

In Malmö, parts of Söderkullaparken have been sunk to handle large amounts of surface water. In Stockholm, they want to direct water flows to Rålambshovsparken.

– There are also plans to sink parts of Humlegården in Stockholm to collect the water, says Erik Karlsson to TT.

Even in Gothenburg, plans are being made to be able to delay water flows so that properties are not damaged.

The annual rings of the pine trees have been measured using a new method. Photo: AFTONBLADET

In recent decades, temperatures have been significantly warmer than any other period in the last 1,200 years.

This is reported by researchers from the University of Gothenburg in the scientific journal Nature after a new time series based on the trees’ annual rings.

Researchers from the University of Gothenburg, together with an international team, have used a new method to measure the cell wall thickness of the cells in the annual rings and interpret the annual rings of the trees.

– Each individual cell in each annual ring records climate information from the time it was formed. By analyzing hundreds, sometimes thousands of cells per ring, we can get very good information about the climate, says researcher Jesper Björklund at the Swiss Federal Research Institute, WSL, in a press release.

According to the study, the temperatures in the climate models and the new time series from the annual rings agree well.

– This means that there are now two independent accounts of the regional climate that provide evidence that the medieval phase was not as warm as we previously thought. Instead, both show that the current warming is unprecedented, at least for the last millennium. It clearly shows the important role of greenhouse gas emissions in the Scandinavian temperature variations, says Jesper Björklund.

For the time series, the researchers measured the cell walls of 50 million cells. They come from 188 living and preserved dead pine trees (pinus sylvestris) from Sweden and Finland, whose annual rings together cover a period of 1,170 years.

When Svalbard’s glaciers melt at an increasingly rapid rate, sources of methane gas are exposed, which disappear into the atmosphere and contribute to increased greenhouse gases. Photo: Gabrielle Kleber/Cambridge University

As the glaciers melt on Svalbard, researchers have discovered large deposits of leaking groundwater sources that emit methane gas. The study made at University of Cambridge and the University Center in Svalbard, suggest that these methane emissions are likely to increase as Arctic glaciers retreat and more sources are exposed. These and other methane emissions from melting ice and frozen ground in the Arctic can exacerbate global warming.

“These sources are a significant and potentially growing cause of methane emissions – one that has been missing from our estimates of the global methane budget until now,” said Gabrielle Kleber, lead author of the research from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. Air temperatures are rising twice as fast as the Arctic average. She compares Svalbard to the canary in the global warming coal mine,

– Since it is warming faster than the rest of the Arctic, we can get a preview of how the potential methane release could affect the region.

A man cools off in a fountain in Madrid in the 40-year heat. Photo: Manu Fernandez / AP

According to a study by the EU Climate Observatory, July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, states France24.

July 2023 was marked by heat waves and fires worldwide and was 0.33 degrees higher than the record in July 2019 when the average temperature was 16.63 degrees.