June 30, 2013 ? Spawning droughts, floods, and other weather disturbances world-wide, the El Ni?o -- Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impacts the daily life of millions of people. During El Ni?o, Atlantic hurricane activity wanes and rainfall in Hawaii decreases while Pacific winter storms shift southward, elevating the risk of floods in California.
The ability to forecast how ENSO will respond to global warming thus matters greatly to society. Providing accurate predictions, though, is challenging because ENSO varies naturally over decades and centuries. Instrumental records are too short to determine whether any changes seen recently are simply natural or attributable to human-made greenhouse gases. Reconstructions of ENSO behavior are usually missing adequate records for the tropics where ENSO develops.
Help is now underway in the form of a tree-ring record reflecting ENSO activity over the past seven centuries. Tree-rings have been shown to be very good proxies for temperature and rainfall measurements. An international team of scientists spearheaded by Jinbao Li and Shang-Ping Xie, while working at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, has compiled 2,222 tree-ring chronologies of the past seven centuries from both the tropics and mid-latitudes in both hemispheres. Their work is published in the June 30, 2013 online issue of Nature Climate Change.
The inclusion of tropical tree-ring records enabled the team to generate an archive of ENSO activity of unprecedented accuracy, as attested by the close correspondence with records from equatorial Pacific corals and with an independent Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction that captures well-known teleconnection climate patterns.
These proxy records all indicate that ENSO was unusually active in the late 20th century compared to the past seven centuries, implying that this climate phenomenon is responding to ongoing global warming.
"In the year after a large tropical volcanic eruption, our record shows that the east-central tropical Pacific is unusually cool, followed by unusual warming one year later. Like greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols perturb the Earth's radiation balance. This supports the idea that the unusually high ENSO activity in the late 20th century is a footprint of global warming," explains lead author Jinbao Li.
"Many climate models do not reflect the strong ENSO response to global warming that we found," says co-author Shang-Ping Xie, meteorology professor at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa and Roger Revelle Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego. "This suggests that many models underestimate the sensitivity to radiative perturbations in greenhouse gases. Our results now provide a guide to improve the accuracy of climate models and their projections of future ENSO activity. If this trend of increasing ENSO activity continues, we expect to see more weather extremes such as floods and droughts."
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/li4efH1FPxs/130630145025.htm
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Zynga cast a long shadow when its stock tanked by about 75 percent in the first year after going public. But that apparently isn’t scaring off other contenders in the gaming industry from an IPO. Over the past two weeks, I had heard from several sources in the industry that King — the maker of mega-hit Candy Crush Saga — had changed its internal thinking around an IPO. The astounding success of Candy Crush blew through all of the company’s 2013 financial targets in a single month, the company’s CEO Riccardo Zacconi told me back in March at the Game Developers Conference back in San Francisco. Candy Crush has done so well on virtual currency transactions that they’ve even stopped doing advertising. Then The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the company had hired J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group AG, and Bank of America Corp. to handle an IPO. It definitely isn’t the first time they’ve thought seriously about this. In early 2012, the company had restructured for a possible IPO, hunted for a Silicon Valley-based board member, and put its financial reporting more in line with generally accepted accounting principles. But they pulled back. Publicly, the company hasn’t changed its tune about keeping its options open. King’s chief marketing officer Alex Dale told me a few days ago before the Journal story ran: “There are no current plans for that. What we did do is organize the company in such a way that were we to decide to do that, we were set up to do it. We would keep the option open, if you like.” The company says it has nothing extra to add today. Still, honestly I’m a bit surprised. As I wrote last week, I’m skeptical that the venture model works for many (but not all) gaming companies. And I’m even more skeptical that public investors, ruled by “animal spirits,” are equipped to value gaming companies. They’ll bid up a stock when there’s a hit: just look at Gung-Ho’s ridiculous 6,700 percent one-year return to a $14.6 billion market cap because of Puzzle & Dragons. Then they’ll oversell on misses. (See Zynga.) Companies that have hits on generally don’t need the cash. The success of comparable companies like Finland’s Supercell on iOS would suggest that King is probably pulling in around $2 to 3 million per day from its Match-3 game. That
