The Basic Physics of the Greenhouse Effect.
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Greenhouse Timeline:
. . 1750: Before Industrial Revolution, atmosphere holds 280 parts per million of heat-trapping CO2, later research determines.
. . 1898: Swedish scientist Svante Ahrrenius warns CO2 from coal and oil burning could warm the planet.
. . 1955: U.S. scientist Charles Keeling finds atmospheric CO2 has risen to 315 parts per million.
. . 1988: NASA scientist James Hansen tells U.S. Congress global warming "is already happening now."
. . 1992: Climate treaty sets voluntary goals to lower CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
. . 1995: U.N.-organized scientific panel says evidence suggests man-made emissions are affecting climate.
. . 1997: Treaty parties approve Kyoto Protocol mandating emission cuts by industrial nations, an approach rejected in advance by U.S. Senate.
. . 1998: Warmest year globally since record-keeping began in mid-19th century.
. . 2001: U.N. scientific panel concludes most warming likely due to man-made emissions; President Bush renounces Kyoto Protocol.
. . 2004: CO2 reaches record 379 parts per million; Russia gives crucial ratification to Kyoto Protocol.
. . 2005: Kyoto Protocol takes effect on Feb. 16.
Al Gore in NYC: "We're operating the planet like a business in liquidation."
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Nov 29, 06: LONDON -Gaia Scientist James Lovelock Predicts Planetary Wipeout. The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius, making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples' lives, he said. a traumatized earth might only be able to support less than a tenth of its 6.1 billion people.
. . "We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out", he told a news conference. "A hot earth couldn't support much over 500 million. ... Almost all of the systems that have been looked at are in positive feedback ... and soon those effects will be larger than any of the effects of CO2 emissions from industry and so on around the world", he added.
. . Scientists say that global warming due to carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport could boost average temperatures by up to 6C by the end of the century causing floods, famines and violent storms. But they also say that tough action now to cut carbon emissions could stop atmospheric concentrations of CO2 hitting 450 parts per million --equivalent to a temperature rise of 2C from pre-industrial levels-- and save the planet.
. . Lovelock said temperature rises of up to 8C were already built in and, while efforts to curb it were morally commendable, they were wasted. "It is a bit like if your kidneys fail you can go on dialysis --and who would refuse dialysis if death is the alternative. We should think of it in that context", he said. "But remember that all they are doing is buying us time, no more. The problems go on."
. . In London to give a lecture on the environment to the Institution of Chemical Engineers, he said the planet had survived dramatic climate change at least seven times. "In the change from the last Ice Age to now we lost land equivalent to the continent of Africa beneath the sea", he said. "We are facing things just as bad or worse than that during this century. There are refuges, plenty of them. 55 million years ago ... life moved up to the Arctic, stayed there during the course of it and then moved back again as things improved. I fear that this is what we may have to do."
. . Lovelock said the United States, which has rejected the Kyoto Protocol on cutting carbon emissions, wrongly believed there was a technological solution, while booming economies China and India were out of control. China is building a coal-fired power station a week to feed rampant demand, and India's economy is likewise surging.
. . If either suddenly decided to stop their carbon-fuelled development to lift their billions of people out of poverty, they would face a revolution, yet if they continued, rising CO2 and temperatures would kill off plants and produce famine, he said. "If climate change goes on course ... I can't see China being able to produce enough food by the middle of the century to support its people. They will have to move somewhere and Siberia is empty and it will be warmer then."
. . They stack up as follows: the warmest was 2005, then 2006, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004.
. . Over the past 30 years, the Earth has warmed by 0.6° C or 1.08° F. Over the past 100 years, it has warmed by 0.8° C or 1.44° F.
May 8, 07: A single large SUV is estimated to blow out more than 100 tons of CO2 over its lifetime.
A list of positive feedbacks [not yet in order.] Too much & too many will "explode" warming far out of control.
. . 1: The ocean, which has absorbed some excess CO2 from the atmosphere for centuries, may be saturated & losing that ability. [see May 16]
. . 2: Methane Clathrates on ocean floor.
. . 3: CO2 bound up in/under permafrost.
. . 4: CO2 bound up in peat bogs.
. . 5: Forest fires that increase in warmer/drier conditions.
. . 6: Rainforests thinning out, and contain less carbon.
. . 7: Like rainforests, coral reefs contain much carbon.
. . 8: A hotter atmospere holds more water vapor, itself a GH gas.
. . 9: Phytoplankton perform two-thirds of all the Earth's photosynthesis. Are they dying off? [may 16]
. . 10: Darker polar areas (land & sea) when ice melts off, absorbing solar heat.
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Jan 2, 08: Cold comfort: 2009 will be one of warmest years on record, say researchers.
Dec 16, 08: The year 2008 was the ninth warmest year since instrumental temperature measurements began in 1880, and all of the nine warmest years have occurred in the past 11 years, NASA reported.
. . By Britain's accounting, 2008 was the 10th warmest year on record dating back to 1850, and all 10 of the warmest years occurred since 1997.
. . The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration summarized these and other trends, including:
. . * The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season was the third costliest, after 2005 and 2004.
. . * The U.S. had nearly 1,700 tornadoes from January through November, which ranks second behind 2004 for the most tornadoes in a year since records began in 1953.
. . * Arctic sea ice in 2008 reached its second lowest level at the end of the melting season in September, following a record low in 2007. In 2008, the ice shrank to 1.74 million square miles, which was 0.86 million square miles below the average annual minimum from 1979 to 2000.
Dec 30, 08: Losses from natural disasters rose by 50% in 2008, underlining need for action on climate change, re-insurers Munich Re say.
Dec 24, 08: An ancient underground water basin the size of Libya holds the key to Australia avoiding a water crisis as climate change bites the drought-hit nation.
Dec 16, 08: The year 2008 was the ninth warmest year since instrumental temperature measurements began in 1880, and all of the nine warmest years have occurred in the past 11 years, NASA reported.
. . By Britain's accounting, 2008 was the 10th warmest year on record dating back to 1850, and all 10 of the warmest years occurred since 1997.
. . The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration summarized these and other trends, including:
. . * The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season was the third costliest, after 2005 and 2004.
. . * The U.S. had nearly 1,700 tornadoes from January through November, which ranks second behind 2004 for the most tornadoes in a year since records began in 1953.
. . * Arctic sea ice in 2008 reached its second lowest level at the end of the melting season in September, following a record low in 2007. In 2008, the ice shrank to 1.74 million square miles, which was 0.86 million square miles below the average annual minimum from 1979 to 2000.
Dec 23, 08: In the seclusion of his Maryland home, Ace has spent three years glued to the Internet, studying the Earth's climate cycles and careening from one epiphany to another —-a 69-year-old loner with the moxie to try to solve one of the greatest threats to mankind.
. . Now, backed by a computer model, the little-known inventor is making public a U.S. patent petition for what he calls the most "practical, nontoxic, affordable, rapidly achievable" and beneficial way to curb global warming and a resulting catastrophic ocean rise.
. . Spray gigatons of seawater into the air, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, and let Mother Nature do the rest, he says. The evaporating water, Ace said, would cool the Earth in multiple ways: First, the sprayed droplets would transform to water vapor, a change that absorbs thermal energy near ground level; then the rising vapor would condense into sunlight-reflecting clouds and cooling rain, releasing much of the stored energy into space in the form of infrared radiation.
. . The simulated evaporation of about one-half inch of additional water everywhere in the world produced immediate planetary cooling effects that were projected to reach nearly 1 degree F within 20 or 30 years, Caldeira said. "In the computer simulation, evaporating water was almost as effective as directly transferring . . . energy to space, which was surprising to me."
. . He proposes to install 1,000 or more devices that spray water 20 to 200 feet into the air, depending on conditions, from barren stretches of the West African coast, bluffs on deserted Atlantic Ocean isles, deserts adjoining the African, South American and Mediterranean coasts and other arid or windy sites. To maximize cloud formation, he'd avoid the already humid tropics, where most water vapor quickly turns to rain.
. . The spraying would be targeted mainly at higher, northern latitudes, where Ace thinks that air currents known as Ferrel Cells could deliver heavy snow to the Arctic , offsetting the melting of the polar icecap.
. . He suspects that deforestation is a major cause of global warming, not just because trees absorb CO2, but also because a large-leaf tree can wick up and evaporate hundreds of gallons of water in a single day. Ace said that the absence of tens of billions of trees, destroyed by southward-creeping glaciers thousands of years ago and again by man's recent timber cutting, has left the planet "slightly dehumidified", reducing cloud cover.
. . If fully deployed, the 15,800 cubic meters of sprayed water per second would be equivalent to the flow at the mouth of the Mississippi River and would require enough energy to power a medium-sized city. However, spraying only a portion of that amount for a decade would be enough to cool the equivalent of current man-made global warming.
. . Depending on its scale, the water evaporation scheme would cost anywhere from hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars a year, but Ace said it still would have "a net positive financial effect." It would prevent global warming-related damage, he said, and the extra rainfall would provide the cheapest way to transport water to drought-stricken regions, counteract desert expansions, increase natural irrigation for crops and boost the output of hydroelectric power plants. Added rainfall also would reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas levels, because cold raindrops carry more CO2 back to the oceans than is released when water evaporates, he said.
. . Caldeira's computer results could surprise many scientists because water vapor is a greenhouse gas widely recognized to be more powerful than CO2. The simulation suggests, however, that water vapor's cooling effects overwhelm its heat-trapping properties.
Dec 23, 08: A team of scientists has come up with a new definition of seawater which is set to boost the accuracy of projections for oceans and climate. Changes in salinity and temperature are major forces driving global currents as well as circulation patterns from the surface to the seabed.
. . Understanding exactly how much heat the ocean can absorb and accounting for tiny differences in salinity are crucial for scientists to figure how oceans affect climate and how that interaction could change because of global warming.
. . The new definition allows for the first time to accurately calculate ocean heat content and take into account small differences in salinity. Previous methods assumed the composition of seawater was the same around the globe.
. . Seawater is a mixture of 96.5% pure water with the remainder comprising salts, dissolved gases and other matter. McDougall said data from about 1,000 seawater samples showed global variations.
Dec 20, 08: The largest waves in the Pacific Northwest are getting higher by seven centimeters a year, posing an increasing threat to property close to the shore. And the strange part is: Scientists aren't sure why.
. . Oregon State researchers found that the danger to property from these larger extreme waves will outweigh the impacts of rising sea levels caused by global warming over the next several decades.
. . The current data suggests that wave heights are not increasing uniformly across the globe. However, many regions lack the right data to do proper analysis. Bigger wave heights off the coast of Oregon were first discovered just a few years ago.
. . Hameed said that linking the wave height increases to wind velocity changes in the global climate could give the work international impact —-particularly in places where detailed wave data isn't available.
Dec 19, 08: The Bush administration is trying to make sure in its final days that federal air pollution regulations will not be used to control the gases blamed for global warming.
Dec 18, 08: The US space agency is set to launch a satellite that can map in detail where CO2 is in the atmosphere. Nasa's Orbiting CO2 Observatory (OCO) will pinpoint the key locations on the Earth's surface where CO2 is being emitted and absorbed.
. . Nasa already has a CO2 detection instrument on its Aqua satellite but this looks at the greenhouse gas some five to 10km above the surface. OCO, on the other hand, will detail the concentration of CO2 close to the ground where its warming effect is most keenly felt. Scientists have calculated that nature cycles about 330 billion tons of CO2 every year.
. . The Earth is thought to be absorbing about 50% of the CO2 we put out --the majority of it going into the oceans. But science's description of the other major absorbers is poor.
. . OCO will be followed into orbit next year by a Japanese CO2 mission known as the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). Europe is considering two CO2 observatories -- A-SCOPE (Advanced Space CO2 and Climate Observation of Planet Earth) and a mission called BIOMASS-- which could fly in 2016.
Dec 17, 08: New climate change scenarios quantify the idea that oil is only a small component of the total global warming problem —-the real problem is coal.
. . But as the latest projections show, when it comes to global warming, oil is a bit player on a stage dominated by the massive amounts of coal burning, particularly in the US and China. "If we want to change the overall shape of the global warming curve and instead of having it go up, stabilize and eventually go down, we need to deal with coal", Caldeira said.
. . The real global warming culprit —-as James Hansen and his colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies have long argued-— is burning coal to generate electricity. "Oil and gas by themselves don't have enough carbon to keep us in the dangerous zone [of global warming] for very long."
. . Liquid fuels are so relatively insignificant that no matter what, nothing we put in our cars is likely to change the basic story of climate change. Even if oil ran out tomorrow and humans began converting coal in its solid form to a liquid you could put in a car — a worst-case scenario for environmentalists — the global warming contribution of that fuel is almost negligible.
. . Caldeira calculated that swapping out oil for liquified coal would only push the world to dangerous levels of global warming two years earlier than the world's best business-as-usual estimates. Either one is dwarfed by the CO2 emissions from traditional coal burned for electrical generation and industrial production.
. . "But the big problem is the huge amounts of coal that we're likely to burn this century and release into the atmosphere in the absence of policy."
Dec 17, 08: The per-capita CO2 emissions of American cities are almost twice as high as those of their European counterparts. Hardly surprising, since European cities are denser and more compact, homes are smaller, and people rely to a far greater extent on mass transit. So if Americans are to significantly reduce their CO2 footprint, we will have to do a lot more than switch to reusable shopping bags and recycle our soda cans.
. . In 1950, the global emission of CO2 was 6 billion tons a year. Thanks to population growth, urbanization, the expansion of wealth, and massive industrialization around the world, by 2008 this has increased fivefold to 30 billion tons a year. Assuming that nothing is done to reduce emissions, by 2058, they will be 60 billion tons a year. Thus, to reduce global warming, whose effects are already beginning to be felt, it will be necessary to take drastic measures just to stay at the present level, never mind actually making real progress. For example, to reduce the number of coal-fired generating plants, nuclear capacity in the US will have to be doubled. To reduce car emissions, either Americans will have to drive half as many miles per year or cars will have to be twice as efficient. Buildings will have to use 25% less electricity.
Dec 17, 08: Heat is more likely to kill an American than an earthquake, and thunderstorms kill more than hurricanes do, according to a "death map". Researchers who compiled the county-by-county look at what natural disasters kill Americans said they hope their study will help emergency preparedness officials plan better.
. . Heat and drought caused 19.6% of total deaths from natural hazards, with summer thunderstorms causing 18.8% and winter weather causing 18.1%. Earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes combined were responsible for fewer than 5% of all hazard deaths.
Dec 16, 08: Global average temperatures in 2008 fell to levels not seen since 2000, though it was still one of the 10 warmest years on record.
Dec 16, 08: Squid could become rarer in our oceans if current levels of ocean water acidification continue, research suggests.
Dec 16, 08: Best-selling author Thomas Friedman praised Barack Obama's new energy team and said the next US president had to insist on a radical environmental agenda to tackle global warming.
. . Friedman, whose new book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" is a call-to-arms to reduce US dependency on oil and coal, said Obama's nomination of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his new energy secretary was a "terrific" move.
. . He insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming.
Dec 15, 08: Australia said it plans to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by as little as 5% by 2020 —-a reduction that critics say undermines international efforts.
Dec 10, 08: Leaders will have to embrace tougher targets on reducing emissions if they want to prevent dangerous climate change, according to Al Gore. Speaking here at the UN climate conference, the former US presidential candidate said the "sclerotic" politics of today had to change.
. . His speech was met with rapturous applause by thousands of delegates. But environmental groups here criticised the EU's climate and energy package, agreed earlier in Brussels.
. . One of the reasons Mr Gore gave for his optimism was that a number of developing countries have come forward with firm pledges on restraining the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. He cited China's plan to improve energy efficiency, Brazil's intention of reducing deforestation and Mexico's adoption of emissions targets. "Today, no-one is saying that China is standing in the way", he said.
. . But he said the science mandated moving from a target of keeping atmospheric greenhouse gas levels below 450 parts per million (ppm) --a level that is regarded by many countries as a threshold above which climate impacts are likely to become severe-- to 350ppm, which would be much harder to achieve.
. . Mr Gore's words, though --and those of US Senator John Kerry-- may have begun to convince delegates that if EU leadership on climate is faltering, the US under Barack Obama is poised to take over.
Dec 10, 08: A prominent team of U.S.-based researchers predicted 14 tropical storms in the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season and said seven would develop into hurricanes.
Dec 9, 08: People in developing countries will need to make big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions if "dangerous" climate change is to be avoided, a report warns. Researchers at the Third World Network calculate that even if rich nations make deep cuts, the developing world will face per-capita reductions of 60%. It suggests this would pose challenges to these countries' development.
. . Meanwhile, another report warns that current proposals for cutting developed world emissions do not go far enough.
Dec 9, 08: Scientists studying the changing nature of the Earth's climate say they have completed one crucial task —-proving beyond a doubt that global warming is real. Now they have to figure out just what to do about it.
. . Scientific warnings of potential catastrophe have been the backdrop for talks among more than 10,000 delegates and environmentalists negotiating a treaty to control the emission of greenhouse gases, which have grown by 70% since 1970. The treaty, due to be completed in one year, would replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
. . Pachauri said he was concerned that negotiators were sparring and probing —-and leaving key decisions for the last moment.
. . The 2007 report cited a scientific consensus that global warming should be limited to 2 degrees C to avoid the worst scenarios. To contain global warming to that target, CO2 emissions must peak by 2015, then begin a rapid decline.
. . Pachauri now says governments should reconsider whether even that goal goes far enough, since it would still raise sea levels from between 40 cm to 1.4 meters.
Dec 9, 08: Australians were urged to eat camels to stop them wreaking environmental havoc, just months after being told to save the world from climate change by consuming kangaroos. [ They emit far less methane than cattle]
Dec 6, 08: An ancient technique of plowing charred plants into the ground to revive soil may also trap greenhouse gases for thousands of years and forestall global warming, scientists said.
. . Heating plants such as farm waste or wood in airtight conditions produces a high-CO2 substance called biochar, which can store the greenhouse gas CO2 and enhance nutrients in the soil. Soils containing biochar made by Amazon people thousands of years ago still contain up to 70 times more black carbon than surrounding soils and are still higher in nutrients
. . Lehmann estimated that under ambitious scenarios, biochar could store 1 billion tons of CO2 annually -- equivalent to more than 10% of global CO2 emissions, which amounted to 8.5 billion tons in 2007.
. . Under a conservative scenario, the technique could store 0.2 billion tons of CO2 annually, he said. That would still require heating without oxygen --called pyrolysis-- some 27% of global crop waste and plowing this into the soil.
Dec 5, 08: A newly-published Scottish bill to help tackle climate change could be a "world leader", environmental groups have claimed. The Scottish Government proposals would see an 80% reduction in the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It also sets out measures to tackle shipping and aviation emissions.
. . If backed by the Scottish Parliament, it would also allow ministers to establish a Scottish Committee on Climate Change, or similar body, to exercise advisory functions.
. . The bill sets out the role the forestry sector can play in reducing emissions, through areas like renewable energy measures and woodland creation. It also includes measures on energy efficiency, waste reduction, recycling and packaging.
. . And it gives ministers the powers to make retailers charge for the supply of plastic shopping bags, although it insists legislation will be a "last resort". Some shops already charge for such bags.
Dec 5, 08: The EU is trying to hammer out a final deal on a climate change package that is supposed to become law in the 27-nation EU early next year. The package focuses on three areas: emissions cuts, renewables and energy efficiency.
. . The EU's credibility is at stake as it aims to be a model in the run-up to a new global climate pact to be signed in Copenhagen in a year's time. That pact will succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.
. . But pressure is mounting from EU member states for other major polluters worldwide to adopt similar targets.
. . The ETS covers about 10,000 heavy industrial plants across the EU --notably power plants, oil refineries and steel mills-- which together account for almost half the EU's CO2 emissions, the commission says. The scheme will also include greenhouse gases other than CO2 - nitrous oxide and perfluorocarbons.
. . The EU package sets the goal of increasing renewable energy's share of the market to 20% by 2020, from around 8.5% today. Energy consumption is to be cut by 20% by 2020 through improved energy efficiency, the package says.
Dec 5, 08: Seven Western states will face more water shortages in the years ahead as climate change exacerbates the strains that drought and a growing population have put on the Colorado River, scientists say. "Clearly we're on a collision course between supply and demand."
. . Without fundamental shifts in water management, the result will be shortages and difficult decisions about who in the seven states the river serves will get water and who will go without.
. . One of the best approaches will be to drive down demand by finding better and more ways to conserve water. It's time to consider a "new normal" for shrinking water supplies in the Colorado River basin, Wegner said. That will require a sweeping re-evaluation of allocations, use, conservation, dams and legal obligations, he said.
Dec 3, 08: The arctic tundra emits the same amount of methane in winter as in the warmer months, a surprising finding that bolsters understanding of how greenhouse gases interact with nature, researchers said.
. . Scientists have long known that wetlands produce large amounts of methane and had thought it unlikely that greenhouse gases escaped from beneath frozen tundra.
. . Human activities such as burning of fossil fuels are pumping greenhouse gases linked to global warming into the atmosphere and scientists say it is imperative to understand all the sources for the emissions.
. . After measuring atmospheric methane concentrations when the soil began freezing in late September, they found that the levels of the greenhouse gas increased significantly as the freeze began --about as much as in the summer months.
. . The findings do not change overall estimates of methane emission from high northern latitudes but do revise the view of the distribution of the greenhouse gas during the year.
Dec 1, 08: Brazil's environment minister has plans to reduce deforestation in the Amazon region by up to 70%, as UN climate talks begin.
Dec 1, 08: Venice has suffered its worst flooding in 22 years, leaving many parts of the historic Italian city neck-deep in water, reports said.
Dec 1, 08: Official advisers to the UK government --the Confederation of British Industry-- demand Britain slash greenhouse gases by a fifth of current levels by 2020.
Dec 2, 08: The UK government has been urged to speed up the pace of action on climate change by .
Nov 24, 08: UK transport emissions could be cut by a quarter by 2020 if the government shifted its policies, a report claims. The Campaign for Better Transport study urges ministers to focus on the biggest possible savings --by tackling lorries, vans, and long-distance commuters.
. . The government says it is moving freight off roads, and helping people make greener local travel choices. It also proposes an extra tax on air passengers, with proceeds redistributed among the entire population.
Nov 23, 08: Two hundred and fifty million years ago, Earth was emerging from a period of glaciation. The transition from icehouse to greenhouse was already stressing life, scientists think. Then magma began bursting through the crust of what is now Siberia. The eruption was tremendous, says Professor Elkins-Tanton. Over the course of maybe 1 million years, enough lava flowed to cover the continental US half a mile deep.
. . The crust through which it bubbled contained vast coal and limestone deposits from an earlier time. As it burned through this fossilized organic material, it released huge amounts of CO2. Today, by burning fossil fuels, humans are again releasing CO2 sequestered long ago, and at a similarly rapid rate.
. . The eruption and release of greenhouse gas was just the beginning. The warmer atmosphere heated the ocean surface, effectively capping the seas with a warmer layer. The result: The overturning of the ocean's water, which keeps deep waters oxygenated, likely stopped. Deeper waters became oxygen-depleted.
. . Meanwhile, erosion accelerated on land, dumping more fertilizers, like phosphorus, into the seas. High nutrient influx led to plankton blooms. As the organic matter decomposed, it sucked up what oxygen remained – the same process now observed in the world's dead zones. Widespread ocean anoxia (oxygen depletion) suffocated much oxygen-dependent marine life.
. . Then came the final blow. In waterways that are anoxic beyond a certain depth, like today's Black Sea, oxygen-dependent organisms live near the surface and oxygen-avoiding microbes live deeper. Scientists call the boundary between them the "chemocline." Organisms below the chemocline "breathe" sulfates, not oxygen. Just as oxygen-dependent organisms exhale CO2, these bacteria give off hydrogen sulfide, a gas toxic in high concentrations to many life forms, including plants and animals. The gas neatly explains one of the mysteries of the Permian die-off: how an extinction event that began at sea could have decimated life on land.
. . Scientists find molecular "signatures" of anaerobic organisms at what was the water's surface in end-Permian times. Lack of oxygen let sulfate-breathers rise from the ocean deep and spew hydrogen sulfide directly into Earth's atmosphere.
. . Hydrogen sulfide would have also eaten holes in the earth's protective ozone layer. Plants and animals either suffocated directly –-atmospheric oxygen levels plummeted to 15% (it's about 21% today)-– or succumbed to the combination of long-term stresses.
. . "It wasn't a linear warming." Says Professor Kump: "This shows us what could happen if we push the system too hard…. We don't know where the intermediate thresholds are." We're still some way from the atmospheric CO2 levels hypothesized at the end-Permian extinction – which were perhaps 10 times preindustrial levels, or 2,800 ppm.
. . according the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if trends continue we're still approaching 1,000 ppm of CO2 by 2100. That's not Permian-extinction levels, but it would be the highest CO2 concentration in 80 million years, and a level at which both ocean anoxia and lesser extinctions have occurred.
. . The end-Permian extinction 251 million years ago was the worst of earth's five mass extinctions. 90% of all marine life and 70% of terrestrial life disappeared. It took five million years, perhaps more, for the biosphere to recover.
Nov 15, 08: A new model of the Earth's climate suggests that human-made CO2 emissions may prevent the onset of the next ice age. Based on geological history, the Earth would be expected to enter a new ice age in 10,000 to 100,000 years.
. . Researchers say even small changes in CO2 levels right now could prevent this from happening. They say this may not be good news as the planet could change in ways that are unprecedented. "In the last 100,000 years, global CO2 levels increased by around 1.5 parts per million --but now we put out this much every year. The natural process is 100,000 times slower than the way humankind is changing CO2 levels."
Nov 14, 08: The fate of scores of new coal-burning power plants is now in limbo over whether to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The uncertainty resulted when an Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel rejected a federal permit for a Utah plant, leaving the issue for the Obama administration to resolve.
. . The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on CO2, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.
. . Environmentalists and lawyers representing industry groups said the ruling puts in question permits --some being considered, others approved but under appeal-- of perhaps as many as 100 coal plants. "It's going to stop everything while EPA mulls over what to do next" about how the federal Clean Air Act is to be used to control CO2, said David Bookbinder, a Sierra Club lawyer. "And that will be decided by the next administration."
. . The Supreme Court has told the EPA it must decide on whether CO2 endangers public health and welfare, and if it does it must be regulated.
Nov 13, 08: Thick brown clouds of soot, particles and chemicals stretching from the Persian Gulf to Asia threaten health and food supplies in the world, the U.N. reported, citing what it called the newest threat to the global environment.
. . The regional haze, known as atmospheric brown clouds, contributes to glacial melting, reduces sunlight, and helps create extreme weather conditions that impact agricultural production
. . The huge plumes have darkened 13 megacities in Asia --including Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Cairo, Mumbai and New Delhi-— sharply "dimming" the amount of light by as much as 25% in some places. Caused by the burning of fossil fuels, wood and plants, the brown clouds also play a significant role in exacerbating the effects of greenhouse gases in warming up the earth's atmosphere.
. . The brown clouds have also helped mask the full impact of global warming by helping to cool the earth's surface and tamp down rising temperatures by between 20 to 80%, the study said. That's because some of the particles that make up the clouds reflect sunlight and cool down the air.
. . The latest findings, conducted by an international collaboration of scientists over seven-plus years, are the most detailed to date on the brown cloud phenomenon, which is not unique to Asia. Other hotspots are seen in North America, Europe, South Africa and South America.
. . "The main message is that it's a global problem. This is not a problem where we point fingers at our neighbors. Everyone is in someone else's backyard."
. . The report also noted that health problems associated with particulate pollution, which include cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, are linked to nearly 350,000 premature deaths in China and India every year.
Nov 12, 08: Elevated levels of CO2 make forests grow more quickly. But unless forests are on fertile ground —-hard to come by because of development-— growth will be in leaves, needles, and fine roots, which die off and decompose in a year or two, releasing the CO2 back to the atmosphere.
. . Trends indicate the new wood growth from increased CO2 tapers off due to limitations of nitrogen —-fertilizer-— in the soil.
. . For more than a decade, the federal government has spent millions of dollars pumping elevated levels of CO2 into small groups of trees to test how forests will respond to global warming in the next 50 years. Some scientists believe they are on the cusp of receiving key results from the time-consuming experiments.
. . The U.S. Department of Energy, however, which is funding the project, has told the scientists to chop down the trees.
Nov 6, 08: Canada's prime minister said he hoped to work with US president-elect Barack Obama on a North American deal to curbing greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.
. . "It's almost essential for Canada to manage this problem in cooperation with the US because we share the same economy, we share the same continent. And we need a partner in the matters of the environment if we want to make real progress."
. . The US, said Harper, has not embraced an "aggressive" environmental agenda, but Obama was set to redouble US efforts on climate change, balancing these with economic and energy security concerns.
. . Canada is the largest oil supplier to the US, but its western Athabasca oil sands have been harshly criticized by environmentalists as a blight on the planet. At an estimated 173 billion barrels, the tar sands in northeast Alberta are the second-largest oil reserve in the world, behind Saudi Arabia, but extraction of bitumen is both costly and messy.
Nov 6, 08: rock found mostly in Oman can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas CO2 at a rate that could help slow global warming, scientists say.
. . When CO2 comes in contact with the rock, peridotite, the gas is converted into solid minerals such as calcite. Geologists said the naturally occurring process can be supercharged 1 million times to grow underground minerals that can permanently store 2 billion or more of the 30 billion tons of CO2 emitted by human activity every year.
. . Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth's mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. It also appears on the surface, particularly in Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that produces substantial amounts of CO2 in the production of fossil fuels.
. . They also calculated the costs of mining the rock and bringing it directly to greenhouse gas emitting power plants, but determined it was too expensive. The scientists say they have kick-started peridotite's CO2 storage process by boring down and injecting it with heated water containing pressurized CO2. They have a preliminary patent filing for the technique.
. . They say 4 billion to 5 billion tons a year of the gas could be stored near Oman by using peridotite in parallel with another emerging technique developed by Columbia's Klaus Lackner that uses synthetic "trees" which suck CO2 out of the air.
. . Big greenhouse gas emitters like the US, China and India, where abundant surface supplies of the rock are not found (small amounts in California), would have to come up with other ways of storing or cutting emissions.
. . Rock storage would be safer and cheaper than other schemes, Matter said. Many companies are hoping to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by siphoning off large amounts of CO2 from coal-fired power plants and storing it underground. That method could require thousands of miles of pipelines and nobody is sure whether the potentially dangerous gas would leak back out into the atmosphere in the future.
Nov 5, 08: This year's ozone hole over Antarctica was the fifth biggest on record, reaching a maximum area of 10.5 million square miles in September, NASA says.
Oct 30, 08: The rise in temperatures at Earth's poles has for the first time been attributed directly to human activities, according to a study. Scientists carried out a detailed analysis of temperature variations at both poles. Their study indicates that humans have indeed contributed to warming in both regions.
. . They stet up two sets of climate models. One set assumed that there had been no human influence the other set assumed there had. The best fit was with models that assumed that human activities including the burning of fossil fuels and depletion of ozone had played a part.
. . "You see a clear human fingerprint in the observed data. We really can't claim anymore that it's natural variations that are driving these very large changes that we are seeing in our in the climate system."
Oct 28, 08: Britain's Prince Charles urged the world today to fight climate change, saying that while the global credit crunch may be temporary, the effects of the "climate crunch" were irreversible. He called it a "level unprecedented in human experience."
. . The credit crunch is rightly a preoccupation of vast significance and importance", Charles said. "But we take our eye off the 'climate crunch' at our peril."
. . Rising sea levels would "threaten the survival of coastal cities such as Tokyo, London and indeed New York", the prince said. "With the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, three billion people living beside Asia's major rivers, the Ganges, Yellow River and Yangtze, would face flooding and then water shortages", he said. "Nothing less than an urgent, full-scale transformation to a low-CO2 society is needed."
. . Charles said that rich nations such as Britain and Japan needed to cut CO2 emissions by 70 to 80% by 2050.
Oct 28, 08: Oregon's governor unwrapped an ambitious 2009 legislative climate change package with proposals for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for homes and buildings by 2030, with benchmarks to be sure the goal is reached.
. . Gov. Ted Kulongoski also wants to replace the $1,500 tax credit on hybrid vehicles with a $5,000 credit on all-electric cars and to fund energy efficiency for 800 low-income homes a year. Oregon already is the highest per-capita user of hybrid cars in the nation.
. . Kulongoski almost certainly will have a Democratic House and Senate likely to lean toward his goals.
Oct 27, 08: Naturalist Henry David Thoreau might well be surprised that while much of the land around Walden Pond remains undeveloped, many of the plants he knew so well are gone, probably a result of climate change.
Oct 27, 08: A gas used in manufacture of flat panel televisions, computer displays, microcircuits, and thin-film solar panels is 17,000 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2, and it is far more prevalent in the atmosphere than previously estimated.
. . The powerful greenhouse gas nitrogen trifluoride, NF3, is at least four times more widespread than scientists had believed, according to new research.
. . Using new analytical techniques, a team made the first atmospheric measurements of nitrogen trifluoride, NF3. The amount of the gas in the atmosphere, which could not be detected using previous techniques, had been estimated at less than 1,200 metric tons in 2006. The new research shows the actual amount was 4,200 metric tons.
. . In 2008, about 5,400 metric tons of the gas was in the atmosphere, a quantity that is increasing at about 11% per year. This rate of increase means that about 16% of the amount of the gas produced globally is being emitted into the atmosphere.
. . Emissions of NF3 were thought to be so low that the gas was not considered to be a significant potential contributor to global warming. Nitrogen trifluoride was not covered by the Kyoto Protocol, which governs the emissions of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide as well as other fluoride compounds --sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, and perfluorocarbons.
. . Many industries have used the gas in recent years as an alternative to perfluorocarbons, which are also potent greenhouse gases, because it was believed that no more than 2% of the NF3 used in these processes escaped into the atmosphere.
Oct 25, 08: CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas that worries climate scientists. Airborne levels of two other potent gases —-one from ancient plants, the other from flat-panel screen technology-— are on the rise, too. And that's got scientists concerned about accelerated global warming.
. . The gases are methane and nitrogen trifluoride. Both pale in comparison to the global warming effects of CO2.
. . In the past couple of years, however, these other two gases have been on the rise, according to two new studies. The increase is not accounted for in predictions for future global warming and comes as a nasty surprise to climate watchers.
. . Methane is by far the bigger worry. It is considered the No. 2 greenhouse gas based on the amount of warming it causes and the amount in the atmosphere. The total effect of methane on global warming is about one-third that of man-made CO2.
. . Methane comes from landfills, natural gas, coal mining, animal waste, and decaying plants. But it's the decaying plants that worry scientists most. That's because thousands of years ago billions of tons of methane were created by decaying Arctic plants. It lies frozen in permafrost wetlands and trapped in the ocean floor. As the Arctic warms, the concern is this methane will be freed and worsen warming. Scientists have been trying to figure out how they would know if this process is starting.
Oct 23, 08: The UK government is facing a backbench rebellion over plans to exclude aviation and shipping from greenhouse gas targets.
Oct 17, 08: World leaders must deal with the threat of global climate change despite the spreading "cancer" of the global financial crisis, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said.
Oct 16, 08: The UK government has committed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the middle of this century. Climate Change and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said the current 60% target would be replaced by a higher goal. He told MPs the government would not "row back" on green issues in the light of the current economic crisis. He also warned the big energy companies they face a crackdown on "unfair" pricing policies
. . It came as European Union leaders agreed to stick to their plan to cut greenhouse gases. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said: "The deadline on climate change is so important that we cannot use the financial and economic crisis as a pretext for dropping it". He said changes to the climate were "happening much quicker than we anticipated or even feared a few years ago" and it was "right to step up the pace".
. . In a letter to Mr Miliband, Lord Turner said the tougher target would be "challenging but feasible", and could be achieved at a cost of 1% to 2% of GDP in 2050. He also said a cut of 80% on 1990 levels by 2050 should cover all the major greenhouse gases --not just CO2-- and all sectors of the UK economy, including shipping and aviation. "We are sitting on a bit of time bomb", says the RSPB's Graham Madge.
Oct 16, 08: To reach its global warming goals, California must cut greenhouse gas emissions by about four tons per person, which would require cleaner cars, more renewable energy and a cap on major polluters, according to a state plan.
. . It's the first comprehensive effort of any state to reduce greenhouse gases in the absence of federal regulation. An analysis released by the board last month suggested California's economy would grow faster under the proposal than if the state did nothing to cut emissions blamed for global warming.
. . Local governments also will be asked to build residential developments near public transportation, shops and businesses in an effort to reduce the number of miles Californians drive.
Oct 8, 08: The UK's existing water policy will fail to cope with future extreme weather events, a National Trust report warns.
Oct 6, 08: Businesses must change their attitude to environmental issues if the tide of ecological decline is to be halted. That was the message from Valli Moosa, president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, opening the World Conservation Congress. The former South African minister said all companies should have directors with environmental experience.
. . The 10-day IUCN congress in Barcelona will debate global environmental problems and potential solutions. The organization numbers almost all the world's governments, environment groups and business representatives among its members.
Oct 3, 08: The UK government has been urged to fund the next stage of a major European program to monitor the effects of global climate change from space. The trade body UKspace made the call ahead of a key ministerial meeting.
. . Britain entered Kopernikus, the world's biggest environmental monitoring project, at a quarter of the funding level preferred by industry. UK companies are understood to have lost out on lucrative contracts as a result.
. . The program will combine data from state-of-the-art satellites and hundreds of other sources to provide an accurate understanding of the land, oceans and atmosphere.
Oct 1, 08: An Australian government adviser on climate change has urged Australians to ditch beef and lamb for kangaroo steaks to help save the planet. Sheep and cows produce a high amount of environmentally unfriendly methane gas through belching and flatulence. But economist Ross Garnaut noted in a report on global warming that kangaroos produce virtually no methane.
. . In a 600-page study commissioned by the Australian government, Professor Garnaut calls for the agricultural industry to be included in the emissions trading scheme to be set up by 2010. This would mean landowners would have to buy permits for their greenhouse gas emissions if they go beyond the recommended limits.
. . The higher costs of farming sheep and cattle and their vulnerability to the effects of climate change, including water scarcity, could hasten a transition toward greater production of lower-emitting forms of meat, Prof Garnaut believes.
Sept 25, 08: Worldwide man-made emissions of CO2 jumped 3% last year. That means the world is spewing more than the worstcase scenario forecast by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007. Scientists said if the trend does not stop, it puts the world potentially on track for the highest predicted rises in temperature and sea level.
. . Still, it was large increases in China, India and other developing countries that spurred the growth of CO2 pollution to a record high of 8.47 billion metric tons. China emitted 1.8 billion metric tons last year, up 7.5% from the previous year.
. . Developing countries not asked to reduce greenhouse gases by the 1997 Kyoto treaty —-and China and India are among them-— now account for 53% of CO2 pollution. Developing countries surpassed industrialized ones in CO2 emissions in 2005.
. . What is "kind of scary" is that the worldwide emissions growth is beyond the highest growth in fossil fuel predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Sept 24, 08: Can a plague of beetles change the weather? That's one question researchers hope to answer in a four-year research program in western forests that are being infested by pine mountain beetles.
Sept 24, 08: Methane digesters are used to capture the methane from huge cattle operations. A side effect: the digesters create their own nitrogen/oxygen compounds which are a smog component.
Apr 23, 08: Major greenhouse gases in the air are accumulating faster than in the past despite efforts to curtail their growth. CO2 concentration in the air increased by 2.4 parts per million last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Wednesday, and methane concentrations also rose rapidly.
. . Since 2000, annual increases of two parts per million or more have been common, compared with 1.5 ppm per year in the 1980s and less than one ppm per year during the 1960s, NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory said.
. . Global concentration of CO2 is now nearly 385 parts per million. Preindustrial CO2 levels hovered around 280 ppm until 1850. Human activities pushed those levels up to 380 ppm by early 2006.
. . Rapidly growing industrialization in Asia and rising wetland emissions in the Arctic and tropics are the most likely causes of the recent methane increase. Methane in the atmosphere rose by 27 million tons last year after nearly a decade with little or no increase, he said.
. . Methane is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, but there's far less of it in the atmosphere. When related climate affects are taken into account, methane's overall climate impact is nearly half that of CO2.
Apr 24, 08: Levels of the greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere seem to be rising having remained stable for nearly 10 years. Concentrations rose by about 0.5% between 2006 and 2007. The rise could reflect melting of permafrost, increased industrialisation in Asia or drying of tropical wetlands.
. . The rise in CO2 levels was significantly higher than the average annual increase for the last 30 years. Noaa figures show CO2 concentrations rising by 2.4 parts per million (ppm) from 2006 to 2007. By comparison, the average annual increase between 1979 and 2007 was 1.65ppm. Concentrations now stand at 384 ppm, compared to about 280 ppm before the era of human industrialisation began.
. . Methane concentrations have been more or less stable since about 1999 following years of rapid increases. Industrial reform in the former Soviet bloc, changes to rice farming methods and the capture of methane from landfill sites all contributed to the levelling off. But the 2007 figure indicates that levels may be on the rise again.
Nitrous oxide is a gas that has a global warming potential 310 times greater than carbon dioxide.
Sept 23, 08: A wind of charged particles that stream constantly from the sun is at its lowest level ever recorded in the 50 years since spacecraft have made the measurement possible.
Sept 23, 08: For the past 15 years or so, the sun's overall output seems to be lower than normal, even when it was at the maximum for its cycle about eight years ago.
Sept 22, 08: Companies failing to tackle climate change could lower the value of their business, claims a report by the Carbon Trust.
Sept 19, 08: In 2003, more than half the U.S. population (or about 153 million people) lived along the Gulf and Southeastern U.S. coastline --an increase of 33 million people from 1980-- and that number is just expected to keep rising.
. . Studies have shown that every mile of wetlands reduces storm surge by about 3 to 9 inches and every acre reduces the cost of damages from a storm by $3,300. But the development boom in coastal areas has damaged these natural defenses, putting coastal residents even more at risk. Many hurricane experts have warned for years against destructive coastal development and imprudent policies that encourage people to build in coastal areas, but that often doesn't stop the building.
. . Global ocean temperatures have risen by about 0.1 degrees C in the last 30 years. And hurricanes are fueled by the warm, moist air. Scientists have predicted that as global warming continues to heat up the ocean, hurricanes could become more frequent, more intense or both, and several scientists think that change is already evident.
. . Another recent study suggested that global warming could extend the hurricane season; as the warm water areas in the Atlantic expand, there could be more opportunities for storm formation, particularly early in the season.
Sept 18, 08: Mayor Richard M. Daley has announced a plan to dramatically slash emissions of heat-trapping gases, part of an effort to fight global warming and become one of the greenest cities in the nation.
. . The plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to three-fourths of 1990 levels by 2020 through more energy-efficient buildings, using clean and renewable energy sources, improving transportation and reducing industrial pollution. It's the first step toward cutting emissions to one-fifth of 1990 levels by 2050, as called for in the 1997 Kyoto global warming protocols, officials said.
. . Daley is one of about 800 mayors who have agreed to adopt that goal, and Chicago is the first to identify specific pollution sources and outline how it would achieve the reductions in a measurable way.
. . The City Council is expected to consider an ordinance that would update the city's energy code to require such things as better insulation, heating and cooling systems and windows in all commercial, industrial and residential buildings. The city also has an agreement with two coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions or shut down by 2015 and 2017. The plan also calls for expanding the number of green rooftops, increasing recycling and car-pooling and promoting alternative fuels.
. . Chicago emits 34.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year; including the six surrounding counties, that climbs to 103 million metric tons per year. If climate change is not addressed, summer heat indexes in Chicago could climb as high as 105 degrees —-similar to Mobile, Ala-— by the end of the century and there would be more frequent heavy rains and floods. Since 1980, Chicago's average temperature has risen approximately 2.6 degrees, 4 degrees in the winter.
Sept 18, 08: Plants are unlikely to soak up more CO2 from the air as the planet warms, research suggests. US scientists found that grassland took up less CO2 than usual for two years following temperatures that are now unusually hot, but may become common. The conclusion parallels a real-world finding from Europe's 2003 heatwave, when the continent's plant life became a net producer, not absorber, of CO2.
. . "So in the warm year, the temperature goes up and causes more evapotranspiration from the plants. But plants have evolved to 'know' that when it gets dry they should curb their water loss, so they reduce the apertures of their stomata (pores) to conserve water, and that constrains the amount of CO2 they can take up (by photosynthesis)."
. . A lot of faith is being placed in some circles in the capacity of trees and plants to maintain absorption of CO2 as concentrations of the gas rise, or even to use the extra CO2 to grow faster and absorb more of it.
Sept 17, 08: Parts of the sea-bed between Northern Ireland and Scotland could become a storage facility for CO2, according to a new study. A cross-border survey has been investigating the potential for underground CO2 capture and storage. Geologists from Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain have worked with economists and engineers to assess locations where CO2 could be stored safely underground.
. . It is European Union policy to promote CO2 capture storage technology through a series of demonstration projects and the UK government is expected to make an announcement of a pilot project later this year.
. . Economy Minister Arlene Foster said there were targets to reduce CO2 emissions. "Electricity generation from renewable or low-CO2 sources, such as wind, wave, tidal and geothermal, will assist in this reduction. However, fossil fuels such as gas, oil and coal, which emit high levels of CO2, will remain important components of our energy supply for years to come."
Sept 17, 08: Norway pledges $1bn to a new fund to help Brazil preserve its Amazon rainforest and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
BUZZZZZZZZZ. There are so many buzz phrases in Thomas Friedman's new book that it practically vibrates in your hand. Code Green. Day-trading for electrons. Green is the new red, white, and blue.
Sept 10, 08: Australia's coastline is being battered by extreme waves that are driven in part by climate change, scientists say.
Sept 9, 08: The former UK chief scientist says the climate challenge is so great, it demands the most brilliant minds tackle it.
Sept 9, 08: Failure to take urgent action to curb climate change is effectively violating the human rights of people in the poorest nations, an aid charity warns.
. . A report by Oxfam International says emissions, primarily from developed countries, are exacerbating flooding, droughts and extreme weather events. As a result, harvests are failing and people are losing their homes and access to water, the authors observe. They say human rights need to be at the heart of global climate policies.
. . Oxfam will submit its report, called Climate Wrongs and Human Rights, to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Sept 4, 08: Smog, soot and other particles like the kind often seen hanging over Beijing add to global warming and may raise summer temperatures in the American heartland by three degrees in about 50 years.
Sept 3, 08: The strongest tropical storms are becoming even stronger as the world's oceans warm, scientists have confirmed. Analysis of satellite data shows that in the last 25 years, strong cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons have become more frequent in most of the tropics. "The strongest effect (of rising ocean temperatures) is on the strongest storms."
. . Globally, a rise of 1C in sea surface temperature would increase the occurrence of strong storms by about one third, the researchers calculate.
Sept 2, 08: According to a new mass extinction scoring system, the latest will likely be the greatest in Earth's history. Developed by researchers at Istanbul Technical U, the system offers a way to quantify those times when more than half of all species disappeared.
. . In addition to the current mass extinction, this has happened at least five times: the End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian, End Triassic and End Cretaceous. The latter --marking the end of the Age of Dinosaurs-- receives the most attention, but scientists have been unable to decide which extinction was most significant.
. . That debate may finally be settled, though the answer is unsettling. "The current extinction resembles none of the earlier ones, and may end up being the greatest of all", writes A. M. Celal Sengor, Saniye Atayman and Sinan Ozeren in a study.
. . By multiplying the number of organismal groups that went extinct with the time it took, the researchers arrived at a metric called "greatness." According to this, the dinosaur-ending End Cretaceous event, possibly caused when asteroid strikes or volcanic explosions sheathed the Earth in ash, was twice as great as any previous extinction.
. . The Permian extinction event, caused 250 million years ago by the formation of the Pangea supercontinent and volcano-induced oceanic poisoning, placed third on the researchers' rankings --and it still encompassed the loss of 96% of Earthly life.
. . According to the researchers, the current global die-off --with species going extinct at rates 1,000 times faster than usual, if not more-- combines elements of both the End Cretaceous and the Permian. The global dominance of humans "represents a virtual Pangea formation", and human activities are a "global annihilating agent" comparable to any asteroid. "If unchecked, the current extinction threatens to be the greatest killer of all time."
Sept 2, 08: A new study by scientists behind the controversial "hockey stick" climate graph suggests their earlier work was broadly correct.
Aug 31, 08: The next U.S. president must show greater leadership than previous administrations in tackling climate change, the head of the United Nations said. "All the countries in the international community are looking for more and greater leadership from the US", U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said after a celebration to mark the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
. . The US has not done enough to turn talk into action, considering it is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, he said.
Aug 31, 08: If a Category 6 were created, it would be in the range of 176-196 mph. Hurricane Wilma, in 2005, had top winds of 175 mph.
. . But physics dictates there must be a limit. Based on ocean and atmospheric conditions on Earth nowadays, the estimated maximum potential for hurricanes is about 190 mph, according to a 1998 calculation by Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
. . This upper limit is not absolute, however. It can change as a result of changes in climate. Scientists predict that as global warming continues, the maximum potential hurricane intensity will go up. They disagree, however, on what the increase will be.
. . Emanuel and other scientists have predicted that wind speeds --including maximum wind speeds-- should increase about 5% for every 1 degree Celsius increase in tropical ocean temperatures.
. . Typhoon Nancy in 1961, in the Northwest Pacific Ocean, was said to have maximum sustained winds of 215 mph, according to the World Meteorological Organization's Commission on Climatology, a new clearinghouse for climate records set up at Arizona State U to settle the many disputes on weather and climate extremes.
Aug 28, 08: Thomas Friedman is about to dive into the green-tech fray. In his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the multi-Pulitzer-winning journalist says everyone needs to accept that oil will never be cheap again and that wasteful, polluting technologies cannot be tolerated. The last big innovation in energy production, he observes, was nuclear power half a century ago; since then the field has stagnated. "Do you know any industry in this country whose last major breakthrough was in 1955?" Friedman asks. According to the book, US pet food companies spent more on R&D last year than US utilities did. "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone", he says. Likewise, the climate-destroying fossil-fuel age will end only if we invent our way out of it.
Aug 21, 08: Eight scientific organizations urged the next U.S. president to help protect the country from climate change by pushing for increased funding for research and forecasting, saying about $2 trillion of U.S. economic output could be hurt by storms, floods and droughts.
. . Each year the US suffers billions of dollars in weather-related damages ranging from widespread events like Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the more recent droughts in the Southeast, to smaller, more frequent glitches like airline delays from storms, they said. More than a quarter of the country's economic output, about $2 trillion, is vulnerable to extreme weather, they added.
Aug 21, 08: This year appears set to be the coolest globally this century. Data from the UK Met Office shows that temperatures in the first half of the year have been more than 0.1 Celsius cooler than any year since 2000.
. . The principal reason is La Nina, part of the natural cycle that also includes El Nino, which cools the globe. Even so, 2008 is set to be about the 10th warmest year since 1850, and Met Office scientists say temperatures will rise again as La Nina conditions ease.
Aug 9, 08: Switching from beef to kangaroo burgers could significantly help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, says an Australian scientist. The methane gas produced by sheep and cows through belching and flatulence is more potent than CO2.
. . But kangaroos produce virtually no methane because their digestive systems are different. They have a different set of micro-organisms in their guts than cows and sheep. The country already produces 30 million kangaroos farmed by landholders in the outback.
July 22, 08: More than 700 scientists are attending a major conference to draw up an action plan to protect the world's wetlands. Rising temperatures are not only accelerating evaporation rates, but also reducing rainfall levels and the volume of meltwater from glaciers. Although only covering 6% of the Earth's land surface, they store up to an estimated 20% of terrestrial carbon.
. . Wetlands are essential to the planet's health. With hindsight, the problems in reality have turned out to be the draining of wetlands and other 'solutions' we humans devised."
. . Scientists warn that if the decline of the world's wetlands continued, it could result in vast amounts of CO2 being released into the atmosphere and "compound the global warming problem significantly". Data show that about 60% of wetlands have been destroyed in the past century, primarily as a result of drainage for agriculture.
July 21, 08: A "Green New Deal" is needed to solve current problems of climate change, energy and finance, a report argues. According to the Green New Deal Group, humanity only has 100 months to prevent dangerous global warming. Its proposals include major investment in renewable energy and the creation of thousands of new "green collar" jobs.
. . The authors say that that within "the very real timeframe of 100 months" the world will reach the point where the risk of "runaway" climate change becomes unacceptably high.
Hundreds of baby penguins swept from the icy shores of Antarctica and Patagonia are washing up dead on Rio de Janeiro's tropical beaches, rescuers and penguin experts said.
July 14, 08: Hurricane seasons have been getting longer over the past century and the big storms are coming earlier. The trend has been particularly noticeable since 1995, some climate scientists say. Further, the area of warm water able to support hurricanes is growing larger over time. The Atlantic Ocean is becoming more hurricane friendly, scientists say, and the shift is likely due to global warming.
July 11, 08: The Bush administration, dismissing the recommendations of its top experts, rejected regulating the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming today, saying it would cripple the U.S. economy.
July 10, 08: A long-running drought in Australia's main food-growing region, the Murray-Darling river basin, has significantly worsened.
July 8, 08: The European Parliament backs a law to include aviation in the CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) for cutting greenhouse gases.
July 8, 08: Gordon Brown is facing the prospect of another significant backbench rebellion --this time over climate change. More than 80 Labour MPs have signed an amendment to the Climate Change Bill, which would force ministers to promise greater cuts in carbon emissions. The bill commits Britain to make at least a 60% cut in CO2 emissions by 2050. The MPs want that to rise to 80%.
July 8, 08: Five of the biggest emerging economies have urged leading industrial nations to do more to combat climate change. Mexico, Brazil, China, India and South Africa challenged the Group of Eight countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80% by 2050. The joint statement from the G5 developing nations said: "It is essential that developed countries take the lead in achieving ambitious and absolute greenhouse gas emission reductions."
. . The so-called G5 countries threw down the gauntlet in a statement before they joined the G8 summit in Japan. Earlier, the G8 restated a lower target of 50% cuts over the same period, which environmentalists said was "pathetic". The five nations also urged developed countries to commit to an interim target of a 25-40% cut below 1990 levels by 2020.
July 8, 08: Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA officials maintains.
. . When six pages were cut from testimony on climate change and public health by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, the White House insisted the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science.
. . But Jason K. Burnett, until last month the senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, says that Cheney's office was deeply involved in getting nearly half of the CDC's original draft testimony removed.
. . "The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) ... any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change", Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
. . Cheney's office also objected last January over congressional testimony by Administrator Johnson that "greenhouse gas emissions harm the environment."
. . The EPA currently is examining whether carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, poses a danger to public health and welfare. The Supreme Court has said if it does, it must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
July 8, 08: Japan’s prime minister says the Group of Eight industrialized economies have endorsed cutting world greenhouse gases in half by 2050. Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda says the agreement was struck during the G-8 summit in northern Japan. Fukuda says the G-8 is also calling for individual countries to set mid-term targets for reducing the gases behind global warming.
July 6, 08: Japan says it will not negotiate on CO2 emissions until it sees what the new US president offers on climate change.
July 6, 08: Farmers in New Zealand criticise a bold plan by the government to make the country carbon neutral by 2040.
July 4, 08: The global food crisis will only worsen because of climate change, the U.N. climate chief, urging leaders of the world's richest countries meeting in Japan next week to set goals to reduce CO2 emissions.
July 3, 08: Scientists warned that if CO2 emissions continue along their current paths, coral reefs could vanish from the oceans, and would take millions of years to grow back.
July 3, 08: Environment ministers from the South Asian regional body, Saarc, have agreed on measures to tackle climate change. At a meeting in Bangladesh, they decided to share data on weather patterns and their experiences of dealing with natural disasters. The ministers say they want to speak with one voice in climate change talks.
. . Experts say tens of millions in the region could be at risk from rising seas, melting glaciers and increased likelihood of floods and droughts.
July 3, 08: The U.S. has done the least among the world's eight largest economies to address global warming, a study found.
Jun 26, 08: A high-ranking political appointee resigned from the Environmental Protection Agency after concluding there was no more progress to be made on greenhouse gases under the Bush administration. Jason Burnett, associate deputy administrator for about a year before his resignation took effect June 9, was the principal adviser on climate change issues to agency chief Stephen Johnson.
Jun 26, 08: California today took a major step forward on its global warming fight by unveiling an ambitious plan for clean cars, renewable energy and stringent caps on big polluting industries. The plan, which aims to reduce pollutants by 10% from current levels by 2020 while driving investment in new energy technologies that will benefit the state's economy, is the most comprehensive yet by any U.S. state. It could serve as a blueprint not only for the rest of the US, but also for other big polluting nations like China and India, planners and environmental groups said.
. . At a meeting in Sacramento on Thursday, CARB staff will present a series of proposals that would become law in 2012, with some measures going into effect two years earlier. The initiatives include implementing a cap-and-trade program on CO2 emissions that will require buildings and appliances to use less energy, oil companies to make cleaner fuels, and utilities to provide a third of their energy from renewable sources like wind and solar power.
. . The program will also encourage development of walkable cities with shorter commutes, high-speed rail as an alternative to air travel, and will require more hybrid and hydrogen-fueled vehicles both to move goods and people, CARB said.
. . CARB said its plan will reduce annual emissions per capita to 10 tons of CO2 per person by 2020 from 14 tons per person currently. That means the state's emissions will be about 30% below what they would have been without the plan, Nichols said.
Jun 25, 08: Extreme floods and droughts brought on by climate change can turn normally harmless infections into significant threats, international researchers said.
Jun 24, 08: To date, most CO2 tax proposals have advocated that the full environmental and social costs of climate change should be reflected in the introductory rate of a CO2 tax. Sweden deliberately did this in 1991 and now has a CO2 tax equivalent to $151 per barrel of oil. It has been a huge success and enabled the country to achieve a 9% reduction in its emissions while simultaneously achieving economic growth of 44% between 1990 and 2006.
. . If a government wanted to, it could give all of the CO2 tax it raised back to its citizens, on an equal per capita basis. This would not only make people sensitive to the cost of emissions but also create a reward for those who emitted less than their fair share. When the rebate cheque was sent out to everyone, once a year, it could also be accompanied, for example, with discounts on energy-saving home improvements.
. . Nobody enjoys paying taxes, but the brutal truth is that they work. They force you to value what was previously taken for granted, and provide the funds needed to achieve socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes or to correct market failures." ~Dr Matt Prescott
Jun 24, 08: Environmental groups have been warning for years that global climate change could make already-tense parts of the world even worse, and even spark whole new conflicts. Now, the nation's spies are saying pretty much the same thing.
. . The U.S. intelligence community has finished up its classified assessment of how our changing weather patterns could contribute to "political instability around the world, the collapse of governments and the creation of terrorist safe havens", Inside Defense reports. Congress was briefed on the report last week. And leading spies --including National Intelligence Council chairman Dr. Thomas Fingar and Energy Department intelligence chief Rolf Mowatt-Larsen-- will testify on the Hill about the 58-page document, "The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change Through 2030."
. . The authors mulled a spectrum of second- and third-order consequences for Washington policymakers to consider --including indirect security concerns like impacts on economies, energy, social unrest and migration. "Generally, the Earth's climate is changing, it has always been changing, so that's not anything but a blinding flash of the obvious", Engel added.
. . The nation's military leadership, at least, is paying closer attention. "Climate change and other projected trends will compound already difficult conditions in many developing countries. These trends will increase the likelihood of humanitarian crises, the potential for epidemic diseases, and regionally destabilizing population migrations", the Army says in its 2008 posture statement.
Jun 24, 08: Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world's only hope is drastic action.
. . James Hansen told Congress that the world has long passed the "dangerous level" for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth's atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made CO2 for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises.
. . "We're toast if we don't get on a very different path", Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, said.
. . Burning fossil fuels like coal is the chief cause of man-made greenhouse gases. Hansen said the Earth's atmosphere has got to get back to a level of 350 parts of CO2 per million. Last month, it was 10% higher: 386.7 parts per million.
Jun 20, 08: The world's developed countries should take the lead in the battle against global warming and push for halving global emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, a group of business leaders said.
. . The World Economic Forum, in proposals presented to Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, also urged the Group of Eight countries — which are holding a summit in Japan in July — to set nearer-term reduction goals.
Jun 19, 08: Droughts will get dryer, storms will get stormier and floods will get deeper with changing climate, a government research report said Thursday. Events that have seemed relatively rare will become commonplace, said the latest report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, a joint effort of more than a dozen government agencies.
. . There has been an increase in the frequency of heavy downpours, especially over northern states, and these are likely to continue in the future, Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said in a briefing.
. . For example, Karl said, by the end of this century rainfall amounts expected to occur every 20 years could be taking place every five years. The Southwestern drought that began in 1999 is beginning to rival some of the greatest droughts on record including those of the 1930s and 1950s, he added.
. . Gerald A. Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said there has been a trend toward increasing power in hurricanes since the 1970s in the Atlantic and western Pacific, a change that can be linked to rising sea surface temperatures.
. . It's not getting as cold at night as it did in earlier decades and there are fewer nights with frosts, a trend expected to continue into the future, Meehl said.
. . "A day so hot that it is experienced only once every 20 years would occur every three years by the middle of the century", under the mid-range projections of climate models, the report said. Researchers can use computer models of climate to separate out cause and effect of this warming, he explained —-looking at the effect of things like changes in solar radiation or volcanic eruptions-— and the result is to attribute climate warming to the burning of fossil fuels.
Jun 19, 08: Global warming is forcing 30 species of reptiles and amphibians to move uphill as habitats shift upward, but they may soon run out of room to run. The shift could cause at least two toad species and one species of gecko in Madagascar to go extinct by the end of this century, a biologist says.
. . Uphill movement is a predicted response to increased temperatures, researcher Christopher Raxworthy says. Earlier studies in Costa Rica have provided evidence of how tropical animals respond to climate change.
. . The results were dramatic. Among 30 species of geckos, skinks, chameleons and frogs, an average shift uphill of 19 to 51 meters was observed over the decade. When these results were compared with meteorological records and climate change simulations, the movement of animals could be linked to temperature increases.
Jun 13, 08: Planet Earth continues to simmer, with this year's spring the seventh warmest on record. The global ocean surface temperature for spring was 0.33 C above the 20th century mean of 61.0 3.1 C and ranked 10th warmest.
Jun 13, 08: One of Alaska's most eroded villages is getting more than $3 million in state aid to help it relocate to higher ground as Alaska tries to cope with the effects of global warming.
Jun 13, 08: U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson urged other Group of Eight industrialized nations to back a special fund of up to $10 billion to help developing countries fight global warming.
May 20, 08: The plunging cost of gene synthesis should help bio geeks deliver on another big promise: a new economy in which biochemical reactions replace industrial processes. J. Craig Venter's Synthetic Genomics is working with BP on microorganisms that produce cleaner alternatives to gasoline. Rival Amyris Biotechnologies is working on bugs that make jet fuel. Meanwhile, the genetic engineers are cooking up climate-friendly meat without feet: The first symposium on lab-grown animal flesh met in Norway in April.
. . When it's 0 degrees outside, you've got to raise the indoor thermometer to 70 degrees. In 110-degree weather, you need to change the temperature by only 40 degrees to achieve the same comfort level. Since air-conditioning is inherently more efficient than heating (that is, it takes less energy to cool a given space by 1 degree than to heat it by the same amount), the difference has big implications for greenhouse gases.
. . In the Northeast, a typical house heated by fuel oil emits 13,000 pounds of CO2 annually. Cooling a similar dwelling in Phoenix produces only 900 pounds of CO2 a year. Air-conditioning wins on a national scale as well. Salving the summer swelter in the US produces 110 million metric tons of CO2 annually. Heating the country releases nearly eight times more CO2 over the same period.
. . Over its lifetime, a tree shifts from being a vacuum cleaner for atmospheric CO2 to an emitter. A tree absorbs roughly 1,500 pounds of CO2 in its first 55 years. After that, its growth slows, and it takes in less CO2. Left untouched, it ultimately rots or burns and all that CO2 gets released.
. . A well-managed tree farm acts like a factory for sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, so the most climate-friendly policy is to continually cut down trees and plant new ones. Lots of them. A few simple steps: Clear the oldest trees and then take out dead trunks and branches to prevent fires; landfill the scrap. Plant seedlings and harvest them as soon as their powers of CO2 sequestration begin to flag, and use the wood to produce only high-quality durable goods like furniture and houses. It won't make a glossy photo for the Sierra Club's annual report, but it will take huge amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
. . The truth is that when it comes to greenhouse gases, organics can be part of the problem. Take milk. Dairy cows raised on organic feed aren't pumped full of hormones. That means they produce less milk per Holstein —-about 8% less than conventionally raised cattle. So it takes 25 organic cows to make as much milk as 23 industrial ones. More cows, more cow emissions. But that's just the beginning. A single organically raised cow puts out 16% more greenhouse gases than its counterpart. That double whammy —-more cows and more emissions per cow-— makes organic dairies a cog in the global warming machine.
. . If you really want to adopt a climate-friendly diet, cut out meat entirely. Researchers at the U of Chicago showed that the meat-intensive diet of the average American generates 1.5 more tons of greenhouse gases per year than the diet of a vegetarian.
. . But even organic fruits and veggies are a mixed bushel: Organic fertilizers deliver lower-than-average yields, so those crops require more land per unit of food. And then there's the misplaced romanticism. Organic isn't just Farmer John; it's Big Ag. Plenty of pesticide-free foods are produced by industrial-scale farms and then shipped thousands of miles to their final destination. The result: refrigerator trucks belching CO2.
. . 2007, photovoltaic factories in the People's Republic tripled production, grabbing 35% of the global market and making China the world's number one producer. How about rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, critical for superefficient electric vehicles? Chinese manufacturers will soon rule that world, too. Windmills? "Prepare for the onslaught of relatively inexpensive Chinese turbines", says Steve Sawyer, head of the Global Wind Energy Council. His forecast: China will produce enough gear to generate 10 gigawatts of power annually by 2010 — more than half the capacity that the whole world installed in 2007.
. . What a cool idea: Instead of reducing our own CO2 emissions, we'll pay other people to reduce theirs. Win-win!
. . Not so fast. CO2 offsets —-and emissions-trading schemes, their industrial-scale siblings-— are the environmental version of subprime mortgages. They both started from some admirable premises. Developing countries like China and India need to be recruited into the fight against greenhouse gases. And markets are a better mechanism for change than command and control. But when those big ideas collide with the real world, the result is hand-waving at best, outright scams at worst. Moreover, they give the illusion that something constructive is being done.
. . A few fun facts: All the so-called clean development mechanisms authorized by the Kyoto Protocol, designed to keep 175 million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere by 2012, will slow the rise of CO2 emissions by ... 6.5 days. (That's according to Roger Pielke at the U of Colorado.)
. . But many economists favor a simpler way: a tax on fossil fuels. A CO2 tax would eliminate three classes of parasites that have evolved to fill niches created by the global climate protocol: cynical marketers intent on greenwashing, blinkered bureaucrats shoveling indulgences to powerful incumbents, and deal-happy Wall Streeters looking for a shiny new billion-dollar trading toy. Back to the drawing board, please.
. . There's no question that nuclear power is the most climate-friendly industrial-scale energy source. You can worry about radioactive waste or proliferating weapons. You can complain about the high cost of construction and decommissioning. But the reality is that every serious effort at CO2 accounting reaches the same conclusion: Nukes win. Only wind comes close — and that's when it's blowing. A UK government white paper last year factored in everything from uranium mining to plant decommissioning and determined that nuclear power emits 2 to 6% of the CO2 per kilowatt-hour as natural gas, the cleanest of the fossil fuels.
. . Embracing the atom is key to winning the war on warming: Electric power generates 26% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and 39% of the US' — it's the biggest contributor to global warming.
. . World oil markets are doing the US a favor by imposing a form of tax that challenges energy profligacy and disregard for the planet's future. A gas price threshold has now been reached to influence behavior. SUV sales are down. Mass transit ridership and carpooling are up. More people want to live closer to work.
. . What do these lifestyle-altering trends signal? That Congress must impose a "CO2" tax on fossil-fuel use, from electric utilities to home furnaces to gas-guzzling vehicles. Such a tax is a better tool than the alternative favored in Congress: a "cap and trade" system that would force only industries to curb greenhouse gases while allowing cleaner companies to sell permits to more polluting ones. The system is complex, inflexible, and easily abused.
. . A CO2 tax (with progressive rebates for the poor) would directly make lawmakers accountable for taking action on global warming, while providing revenue for innovation in clean energy. In a February report, the Congressional Budget Office found a CO2 tax would be five times more effective in reducing CO2 emissions than a cap-and-trade market.
. . Sweden has had one since 1991. While it has not been perfectly implemented, the Nordic nation of 9.2 million people has seen a 9% drop in CO2 emissions – more than required under the Kyoto treaty – while maintaining a healthy economy and becoming a "clean tech" leader. A German environmental group finds Sweden has done the most of all countries to protect the climate. It also helps that the country relies on nuclear and hydro power for all its electricity.
. . Sweden, of course, has done more than simply tax fossil fuel. It's created bicycle lanes, encouraged "green" cars and buses, favored heat pumps over oil furnaces, put a toll on driving in Stockholm, and invested in renewable energies and recycling of waste heat, among other steps. The government now taxes vehicles based on CO2 emissions rather than weight, helping Sweden become the leader in Europe in reducing CO2 emissions from new cars.
. . The initial reason for a CO2 tax was Sweden's dependency on imported fossil fuel. Now its success in improving national energy security has made it a global model for achieving climate security. Most of all, Swedes still welcome the tax. Americans can accept a similar sacrifice rather than trying to roll back prices at the pump.
Jun 9, 08: Bamboo is widely regarded as one of the planet's fastest-growing plants—some species can grow up to three feet in a single day. That means that the plants can be harvested and regrown in a jiffy: A bamboo plant reaches full maturity within three to five years, versus 40 to 50 years for many species of hardwood trees. If culled correctly, so that a viable portion of the stalk and roots remain, the bamboo needn't be replanted; it can simply regenerate.
. . According to bamboo advocates, this rapid cycle translates into increased CO2 sequestration, since fast growing trees (such as the eucalyptus) absorb it more quickly than the likes of oaks and pines. (Though it's technically a grass, bamboo is usually compared to trees because of its woodlike properties.) The World Wildlife Federation estimates that an acre of bamboo can store 6.88 metric tons of carbon per year, about 70% more than an acre of hardwoods. If that bamboo is turned into flooring or furniture that won't rot due to the treatments applied, then that CO2 can remain fixed for decades. The plant will grow in a variety of climates and soils and can flourish unaided by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or gas-guzzling machinery.
. . But bamboo's environmental edge can evaporate if the stuff is heedlessly grown. Given the recent vogue for bamboo among Western consumers, producers in Asia (specifically China's Hunan Province) have been aggressive with their planting, often at the expense of old woodlands and their attendant ecosystems. To goose their yields, these plantations employ plenty of fertilizers and pesticides, thereby negating one of bamboo's primary advantages. And when the bamboo is converted into planks, the factories often use glues with high levels of formaldehyde, which can have serious health consequences for consumers
. . If you live in California, shipping bamboo from China may result in less fossil-fuel consumption than, say, trucking in maple flooring from the Northeast.
. . Some of the greenest bamboo doesn't come from monoculture plantations but, rather, from operations such as Madagascar Bamboo, which harvests naturally occurring plants from the edges of farms. (The farmers used to think of the bamboo as a valueless annoyance.) Also look into whether the floors use low-formaldehyde glue.
Jun 10, 08: Scientists at Lincoln U are looking at ways to reduce emissions of nitrous oxide, a gas that has a global warming potential 310 times greater than carbon dioxide. "Over half of our greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture and of that, one-third is nitrous oxide", explained soil scientist Professor Keith Cameron. "It comes predominantly from animal urine deposits on the pasture and on the soil."
. . Dr Harry Clark, an animal scientist for Ag Research, says it is a myth that flatulence from cattle and sheep is the nation's main source of methane emissions. "About 99% of the methane comes from the breath."
Jun 9, 08: Japan will aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80% by 2050. Announcing the target, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said Japan could match the EU in cuts over the next 10 years, but did not set targets on this timescale. Mr Fukuda also announced the setting up of a trial national CO2 market which could help establish a global scheme.
Jun 9, 08: Natural carbon dioxide vents on the sea floor are showing scientists how carbon emissions will affect marine life. Dissolved CO2 makes water more acidic, and around the vents, researchers saw a fall in species numbers, and snails with their shells disintegrating.
. . The UK scientists suggest these impacts are likely to be seen across the world as CO2 levels rise in the atmosphere. Some of the extra CO2 emitted enters the oceans, acidifying waters globally.
. . Corals construct their external skeletons by extracting dissolved calcium carbonate from seawater and using it to form two minerals, calcite and aragonite. Molluscs use the same process to make their shells. As water becomes more acidic, the concentration of calcium carbonate falls. Eventually there is so little that shells or skeletons cannot form.
. . The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that without measures to restrain carbon dioxide emissions, ocean pH is likely to fall to about 7.8 by 2100.
Jun 5, 08: Evidence of serious flaws in the multi-billion dollar global market for CO2 credits has been uncovered by a BBC World Service investigation. The credits are generated by a United Nations-run scheme called the Clean Development Mechanism.
. . Arguably, this defeats the whole point of the CDM scheme, set up under the Kyoto climate change protocol, as these projects are getting money for nothing. In one case, a company is earning truly staggering sums of money from the CO2 credits it is receiving --perhaps as much as $500m (£250m) over a period of 10 years-- for a project it says it would have carried out without the incentive of the CDM.
Jun 3, 08: Destruction of the Amazon seems to be on the upswing, and Brazil's new environment minister has wasted no time in aiming at a villain: Cattle.
Jun 2, 08: A government watchdog says NASA's press office "marginalized, or mischaracterized" studies on global warming between 2004 and 2006. The NASA inspector general's report called it "inappropriate political interference." The report found that the agency's top management wasn't part of censorship, nor were career officials. It blamed "political appointees."
Jun 2, 08: President Bush weighed in against a Senate bill that would require dramatic cuts in climate-changing greenhouse pollution, cautioning senators "to be very careful about running up enormous costs." [the biggest cost by far is doing nothing.]
Jun 2, 08: High-resolution satellite images have revealed the "rapid deforestation" of Papua New Guinea's biodiversity rich rainforests over the past 30 years.
. . An international team of researchers estimates that the current rate of loss could result in more than half of the nation's tree cover being lost by 2021. They added that the main threats came from commercial logging and burning. The images also showed that trees in protected areas were being felled at the same rate as unprotected regions.
. . Although it only accounts for less than 0.5% of the Earth's land cover, the heavily forested island nation is home to an estimated 6-7% of the planet's species. "Commercial logging operations are extracting more than 2.6% of the accessible resources yearly and causing the release of about 22 million tons of CO2." Dr Ash warned: "It takes centuries, not decades, for rainforests to recover from such changes."
May 29, 08: Under a court order and four years late, the White House today produced what it called a science-based "one-stop shop" of specific threats to the US from man-made global warming.
May 29, 08: Global temperatures did not dip sharply in the 1940s as the conventional graph shows, scientists believe. They say an abrupt dip of 0.3C in 1945 actually reflects a change in how temperatures were measured at sea. The researchers say this does not affect estimates of long-term global warming.
May 29, 08: Methane reserves deep in the ocean and in arctic permafrost might trigger runaway global warming. But they've also got the potential to provide huge amounts of power, a possibility that is attracting the interest of energy companies. Hydrate is found in oceans across the world, where the gas is trapped in icy structures below the seabed, and also lies beneath the Arctic's permafrost.
. . They're also a tempting target for energy production. The Gulf of Mexico is estimated to hold more than 6,500 trillion cubic feet of hydrate in sandstone reservoirs, currently the best candidates for commercial exploitation, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service. If only 5% of that hydrate could be tapped, it would yield more than 300 trillion cubic feet of gas. By comparison, the US' reserve of conventional natural gas is currently estimated at 211 trillion cubic feet.
. . While methane hydrates have previously been too expensive to extract on a commercial scale, the increasing price of oil -- now more than $130 per barrel -- means the hydrates might soon become a profitable energy source. Chevron has been involved in the gulf research, and BP is exploring for hydrates in Alaska. Japanese engineers reportedly pumped hydrates from a test well in Canada's Northwest Territories this last winter.
May 29, 08: While cities are hot spots for global warming, people living in them turn out to be greener than their country cousins. Each resident of the largest 100 largest metropolitans areas is responsible on average for 2.47 tons of CO2 in energy consumption each year, 14% below the 2.87 ton U.S. average, researchers at the Brookings Institution say in a report. Their greater use of mass transit and population density reduce the per person average.
. . Metropolitan area emissions of CO2 are highest in the eastern U.S., where people rely heavily on coal for electricity, the researchers found. They are lower in the West, where weather is more favorable and where electricity and motor fuel prices have been higher.
. . Lexington, Ky., had the biggest per capita CO2 footprint: Each resident on average accounted for 3.81 tons of CO2 in their energy usage. At the other end of the scale was Honolulu, at 1.5 tons per person.
. . About 6.6 billion tons of CO2 are released into air annually in the US.
May 28, 08: A new paper presents the worst-case scenario for runaway climate change that could leave the Earth entirely ice-free within a generation. If global temperatures continue to rise, massive amounts of methane gas could be released from the 10,000 gigaton reserves of frozen methane that are currently locked in the world's deep oceans and permafrost. Passing this climate tipping point would result in runaway global warming that would be far worse and more rapid than scientists' current estimates.
. . The new paper suggests that exactly this type of cascading release of methane reserves rapidly warmed the Earth 635 million years ago, replacing an Ice Age with a period of tropical heat. The study's lead author suggests it could happen again, and fast --not over thousands or millions of years, but possibly within a century. "This is a major concern because it’s possible that only a little warming can unleash this trapped methane."
. . Kennedy's work in Nature examined a rapid period of deglaciation that occurred 635 million years ago looking for the "trigger" to the explosion of warming across the globe that occurred. In his study's scenario, methane frozen together with water in what's known as a clathrate (or gas hydrate) became destabilized at lower latitudes and began to release methane gas. The warming this gas induced began a cascade of clathrate destabilization running up towards the poles, acting as a runaway feedback mechanism that rapidly changed the earth's climate from glacial to tropical.
. . Not all scientists accept that methane ice is a major threat to the climate. Larry Smith, a professor in UCLA's department of earth and space sciences, said that earlier research had allayed many of the fears that methane clathrates would destabilize and release their methane.
. . Larry Smith, an expert in permafrost, noted that permafrost temperatures are continuing to rise across the Northern Hemisphere. That led the UN to warn earlier this year that clathrates are a major climate wild card. Last month, Russian scientists presented evidence that the destabilization of hydrates is already occurring in the Arctic Ocean.
May 28, 08: A panel of marine scientists warned that the Pacific Coast's increasing acidity could disrupt food chains and threaten the Pacific Northwest's shellfish industry.
May 28, 08: Global warming will likely drain more water from the Great Lakes and pose added pollution threats to the region's vulnerable ecosystem, environmental groups said in a report.
May 26, 08: Environment chiefs from the world's top industrial countries pledged "strong political will" toward cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, declaring that developed nations should take the lead.
May 25, 08: European and developing countries urged the US and Japan to commit to deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 —-a step they say is needed to defuse a coming ecological disaster.
. . The calls at a meeting of environment ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized nations in Japan coincided with rising concern that momentum is draining from U.N.-led efforts to force a new climate change agreement by a December 2009 deadline.
May 24, 08: Higher atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas methane noted last year are probably related to emissions from wetlands, especially around the Arctic. Scientists have found indications that extra amounts of the gas in the Arctic region are of biological origin.
. . Global levels of methane had been roughly stable for almost a decade. Rising levels in the Arctic could mean that some of the methane stored away in permafrost is being released, which would have major climatic implications.
. . The gas is about 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, though it survives for a shorter time in the atmosphere before being broken down by natural chemical processes.
. . The researchers also match methane levels with wind direction, so they can see where the gas is being produced. This analysis also implies a source in the Arctic regions, rather than one further afield such as the additional output from Asia's rapid industrialization. "In boreal regions, it was warmer and wetter than usual, and microbes there produce methane faster at higher temperatures."
. . Dr Dlugokencky also suggested that the drastic reduction in summer sea ice around the Arctic between 2006 and 2007 could have increased release of methane from seawater into the atmosphere. A further possibility is that the gas is being released in increasing amounts from permafrost as temperatures rise.
. . Methane concentrations had been more or less stable since about 1999 following years of rapid increases, with industrial reform in the former Soviet bloc, changes to rice farming methods and the capture of methane from landfill sites all contributing to the levelling off.
. . A particularly pertinent question is whether methane is being released from hydrates on the ocean floor. These solids are formed from water and methane under high pressure, and may begin to give off methane as water temperatures rise. The amount of the gas held in oceanic hydrates is thought to be larger than the Earth's remaining reserves of natural gas.
. . In collaboration with other British institutions, Dr Fisher's team will begin work this summer sampling water near hydrate deposits to look for indications of gas emerging.
May 22, 08: Destruction of the Amazon is again on the upswing despite a recent crackdown on illegal logging, Brazil's new environment minister said.
May 20, 08: NASA and France are preparing to launch a new satellite next month to map Earth's rising sea levels and study their link to global climate change.
May 19, 08: A decision on whether CO2 endangers public health as a greenhouse gas will probably be made by the next administration, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said. Johnson has been criticized by congressional Democrats and environmentalists for not moving fast enough to decide the pivotal climate issue. He would not expect the complex regulation to be completed in less than a year, leaving a final rule to his successor.
. . The Supreme Court more than a year ago concluded CO2 from burning fossil fuels was a pollutant because it is a major source of global warming and directed the EPA to decide if it endangered public health and welfare. If so, the court said, it must be regulated. Johnson noted that major EPA regulations often take several years to complete.
. . Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley called the EPA's pace of action "a shameful dereliction of duty."
. . On another matter, Johnson indicated that he was not prepared to provide all the documents sought by a House committee investigating White House involvement in recent EPA decision on a new health standard for smog.
May 18, 08: Fewer but more intense hurricanes may form in the Atlantic Ocean as the globe warms toward the end of this century, according to a new study that counters predictions of more frequent cyclones due to climate change.
May 15, 08: Prince Charles says halting logging in the rainforest is the single greatest solution to climate change.
May 14, 08: Major changes in the Earth's natural systems are being driven by global warming, according to a vast analysis. Glacier and permafrost melting, earlier spring-time, coastal erosion and animal migrations are among the observations laid at the door of man-made warming. The research involves many scientists who took part in last year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
May 8, 08: In a study, ornithologists from the U of Oxford tracked the egg-laying times of great tits in Wytham, England. Since the mid-1970s, temperatures in Wytham have risen steadily, hastening the start of spring by two weeks. The birds have followed suit, timing their breeding to coincide with earlier hatches of their favorite food source, a species of moth caterpillar.
. . The birds' adaptation appears to be based in what's known as phenotypic plasticity -- the ability of a creature to respond to changes in its environment -- rather than natural selection favoring birds with earlier breeding times.
. . Great tits walk a fine line. If they lay their eggs just a few days late, the winter moth caterpillars on which they rely for springtime sustenance will have already hatched and departed when their chicks are hungriest. But some environmental cue --most probably temperature-related, though the researchers aren't sure-- triggers timely egg-laying.
. . The findings in Wytham run contrary to those in another great-tit population in the Netherlands. Though they experienced similar weather patterns, the Dutch birds failed to lay their eggs on time.
May 7, 08: Climate Counts (.com) released its second annual scorecard this morning, ranking many of the world's largest companies based on their commitment toward reversing climate change. According to the organization, an impressive 84% of the companies included in the study have improved their scores since the study was first conducted in June of last year.
. . IBM led the electronics pack with an impressive 77 out of 100, pushing last year's leader, Canon, into second place at 74.
. . 1. How well does the company measure its climate footprint?
. . 2. How much has the company done to reduce its climate footprint?
. . 3. Does the company explicitly support (or suggest a desire to block) progressive climate change legislation?
. . 4. How clearly and comprehensively does the company publicly disclose its climate protection efforts?
May 7, 08: Koalas are threatened by the rising level of CO2 pollution in the atmosphere because it saps nutrients from the eucalyptus leaves they feed on, a researcher said. They also found that the amount of toxicity in the leaves of eucalyptus saplings rose when the level of CO2 within a greenhouse was increased. Some eucalyptus species may have high protein content, but anti-nutrients such as tannins bind the protein so it cannot be digested by koalas.
. . Out of more than 600 eucalyptus species in Australia, koalas will only eat the leaves of about 25, Hume said. Changing the toxicity levels in the trees could further reduce the varieties that koalas find palatable. "Koalas produce one young each year under optimal conditions, but if you drop the nutritional value of the leaves, it might become one young every three or four years."
May 5, 08: The world can reach a significant new climate change pact by the end of 2009 if current talks keep up their momentum, the head of the United Nations climate panel said. The UN began negotiations on a sweeping new pact in March after governments agreed last year to work out a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol by the end of next year. "If this momentum continues, you will get an agreement that is not too full of compromises", said Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.
. . Without a deal to cap greenhouse gas emissions around 2015, then halve them by 2050, the world will face ever more droughts, heatwaves, floods and rising seas, according to the U.N. panel.
. . The next talks, to be held in Germany in June, will address funding technology to mitigate climate change --a key demand from developing countries who say rich countries should foot much of the bill. Getting the private sector on board with a well regulated CO2 emissions trading system is key to long-term financing, according to delegates.
. . The UN calculates global warming will cause a 30% decline in crop yields in central and south Asia by 2050 and decrease freshwater availability for over a billion people. Faced with such threats, China is switching over to renewable energy sources which are expected to provide more than 30% of its power needs by 2050.
May 5, 08: Plant-hardiness zones are based on a single number: the average of the lowest temperature recorded each winter for a period of time. An average that includes the 1970s would make most areas look colder than an average based only on the 1990s.
. . That's where the controversy comes in. During the past two decades, three versions of the map that shows 11 major plant-hardiness zones have been prepared for the Department of Agriculture: the 1990 official version that remains in effect; the 2003 update the agency rejected that reflected a warming trend; and a new map that the USDA says is coming within a year.
. . The 1990 map doesn't show, for example, that the Southern magnolia, once limited largely to growing zones ranging from Florida to Virginia, now can thrive as far north as Pennsylvania. Or that kiwis, long hardy only as far north as Oklahoma, now might give fruit in St. Louis.
. . Nurseries commonly offer money-back guarantees on plants. Analysts say many in the industry are worried that adjusting the climate maps would encourage customers in cooler areas to increasingly buy tender, warm-weather plants unlikely to survive a cold snap.
. . The agency's delay in releasing an updated map has led another group to release its own climate map. In 2006, the Arbor Day Foundation put out a map based on data from 1991 to 2005 that shows a significant northward movement of warm zones for plants and crops.
. . The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says 11 of the 12 warmest years since 1850 came between 1995 and 2006.
May 5, 08: The Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s was arguably one of the worst environmental disasters of the 20th century. New computer simulations reveal the whipped-up dust is what made the drought so severe. Scientists have known that poor land use and natural atmospheric conditions led to the rip-roaring dust storms in the Great Plains in the 1930s. Climate models in the past few years also have revealed the effect of sea surface temperatures on the Dust Bowl.
. . Using computer simulations, Cook, Seager and Ronald Miller of LDEO found the "black blizzards" exacerbated the drought and pushed it northward into the Great Plains. The airborne dust particles reflected sunlight back into space, leading to cooler surface temperatures. As temperatures dipped, so did evaporation. "You basically cut off the moisture source to clouds and precipitation", Cook said.
. . Following the Dust Bowl disaster, agencies enacted land-use rules to reduce soil erosion and prevent further such catastrophic dust storms in the US. Even so, the researchers say, global warming and an increased pressure to expand agriculture in light of a possible food crisis are creating conditions ripe for dust storms in other regions worldwide.
May 5, 08: Substituting chicken, fish or vegetables for red meat can help combat climate change, a new study suggests. In fact, putting these foods on the dinner table does more to reduce CO2 emissions than eating locally grown food, researchers report.
. . The idea is that food grown locally requires less fuel for shipping to the store. The new study does not argue that point. Yet few studies have compared greenhouse gas emissions from food production to those of transportation.
. . The production phase is responsible for 83% of the average U.S. household's greenhouse-gas burden with regard to food, while transportation accounts for only 11%, the new study found. The production of red meat, the researchers conclude, is almost 150% more greenhouse-gas-intensive than chicken or fish.
. . "We suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household's food-related climate footprint than 'buying local'", the researchers write. "Shifting less than one day per week's worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more greenhouse-gas reduction than buying all locally sourced food."
May 1, 08: The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted. A new computer model developed by German researchers suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming. However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say.
. . The key to the new prediction is the natural cycle of ocean temperatures called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is closely related to the warm currents that bring heat from the tropics to the shores of Europe. The cause of the oscillation is not well understood, but the cycle appears to come round about every 60 to 70 years.
. . His group's projection diverges from other computer models only for about 15-20 years; after that, the curves come back together and temperatures rise. Dr Wood cautions that this kind of modelling is in its infancy; and once data can be brought directly from the Atlantic depths, that may change the view of how the AMO works and what it means for the global climate. He emphasizes that even if the Kiel model proves correct, it is not an indication that the longer-term climate projections of the IPCC and many other institutions are wrong.
May 1, 08: Low-oxygen zones where sea life is threatened or cannot survive are growing as the oceans are heated by global warming, a new study warns.
. . Oxygen-depleted zones in the central and eastern equatorial Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans appear to have expanded over the last 50 years, researchers report. Continued expansion of these zones could have dramatic consequences for both sea life and coastal economies.
. . Computer climate models had predicted a decline in dissolved oxygen in the oceans under warmer conditions. Warmer water simply cannot absorb as much oxygen as colder water.
Apr 29, 08: Climate change is already affecting the prospects for children in the world's poorer countries, according to Unicef. The UN children's agency says that increases in floods, droughts and insect-borne disease will all affect health, education and welfare. "Those who have contributed least to climate change --the world's poorest children-- are suffering the most", said David Bull, executive director of Unicef UK.
. . The eight Millennium Goals include such targets:
. . 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
. . 2: Achieve universal primary education
. . 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
. . 4: Reduce child mortality
. . 5: Improve maternal health
. . 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
. . 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
. . 8: Develop a global partnership for development
Progress has been good in some parts of the world, but earlier this month the World Bank warned some targets were likely to be missed; sub-Saharan Africa was likely to miss all eight, the Bank said.
Apr 27, 08: Before humans began burning fossil fuels, there was an eons-long balance between CO2 emissions and Earth's ability to absorb them, but now the planet can't keep up, scientists said. The finding relies on ancient Antarctic ice bubbles that contain air samples going back 610,000 years.
. . Climate scientists for the last 25 years or so have suggested that some kind of natural mechanism regulates our planet's temperature and the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Those skeptical about human influence on global warming point to this as the cause for recent climate change. This mechanism, known as "feedback", has been thrown out of whack by a steep rise in CO2 emissions from the burning of coal and petroleum for the last 200 years or so, said Richard Zeebe, a co-author of the report.
. . In the ancient past, excess CO2 came mostly from volcanoes, which spewed very little of the chemical compared to what humans activities do now, but it still had to be addressed. This antique excess CO2 --a powerful greenhouse gas-- was removed from the atmosphere through the weathering of mountains, which take in the chemical. In the end, it was washed downhill into oceans and buried in deep sea sediments, Zeebe said.
. . Zeebe analyzed CO2 that had been captured in Antarctic ice, and by figuring out how much CO2 was in the atmosphere at various points in time, he and his co-author determined that it waxed and waned along with the world's temperature. "When the CO2 was low, the temperature was low, and we had an ice age", he said. And while Earth's temperature fell during ice ages and rose during so-called interglacial periods between them, the planet's mean temperature has been going slowly down for about 600,000 years.
. . Since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, ushering in the widespread human use of fossil fuels, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by 100 parts per million. That means human activities are putting CO2 into the atmosphere about 14,000 times as fast as natural processes do, Zeebe said. And it appears to be speeding up: the U.S. government reported last week that in 2007 alone, atmospheric CO2 increased by 2.4 parts per million.
. . The natural mechanism will eventually absorb the excess CO2, Zeebe said, but not for hundreds of thousands of years.
Apr 25, 08: NASA's top climatology expert wants Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to oppose construction of the Big Stone II power plant near Milbank, saying it would only exacerbate global warming by its CO2 emissions.
. . In a letter, Dr. James Hansen told Pawlenty that coal emits more greenhouse gases than any other major electricity source and suggested that coal use should be eliminated unless or until technology is available with near-zero emissions. "It's going to become clear very soon that such coal-fired power plants are simply not compatible with the climate that has existed the last several thousand years", said Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "It's a very bad decision to build any new coal-powered plants that do not capture the CO2."
. . The plant is being designed so that it can be fit with technology to capture CO2 emissions once that technology is developed --in probably eight to 10 years, Sharp said. But Hansen said continuing to put CO2 into the atmosphere until then is dangerous. A substantial fraction of those gases will remain in the atmosphere more than 1,000 years. "And because our climate has only partially responded to what we put in there already, it makes for a very dangerous situation", Hansen said. "There is more warming in the pipeline than what has actually occurred already. That puts us in danger of reaching tipping points in the climate system."
Apr 24, 08: The rule of unintended consequences threatens to strike again. Some researchers have suggested that injecting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere might help ease global warming by increasing clouds and haze that would reflect sunlight. After all, they reason, when volcanoes spew lots of sulfur, months or more of cooling often follows. The result, over the next few decades, would be to destroy between one-fourth to three-fourths of the ozone layer above the Arctic.
. . But a new study warns that injecting enough sulfur to reduce warming would wipe out the Arctic ozone layer and delay recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by as much as 70 years. And while one study worries that fixing climate will destroy ozone, another raises the possibility that recovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica will worsen warming in that region.
. . A full recovery of the ozone hole could modify climate in the Southern Hemisphere and even amplify Antarctic warming, scientists from the U of Colorado at Boulder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA report in a paper.
. . Although temperatures have been rising worldwide, there has been cooling in the interior of Antarctica in summer, which researchers attribute to the depletion of ozone overhead. "If the successful control of ozone-depleting substances allows for a full recovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica, we may finally see the interior of Antarctica begin to warm with the rest of the world."
. . The massive 1815 eruption of Tambora in what is now Indonesia produced such a strong cooling that 1816 became known as the "year without a summer" in New England, where snow fell in every month of the year.
Apr 24, 08: China called on the international community to increase the flow of technology to developing countries to help them fight climate change. Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang said developed nations "need to establish a mechanism for technological transfer" of environmentally friendly technology so developing countries can afford them. China has pledged to raise energy efficiency but has declined to sign up to internationally agreed emissions reductions.
Apr 24, 08: An outbreak of mountain pine beetles in British Columbia is doing more than destroying millions of trees: By 2020, the beetles will have done so much damage that the forest is expected to release more CO2 than it absorbs, according to new research.
. . The study, led by Werner Kurz of the Canadian Forest Service, estimates that over 21 years trees killed by the beetle outbreak could release 990 megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere —-roughly equivalent to five years of emissions from Canada's transportation sector.
. . The outbreak has affected about 33 million acres, or about 51,562 square miles, of lodgepole pines. Bark beetles also have killed huge swaths of pines in the western US, including about 2,300 square miles of trees in Colorado.
. . When dead trees start to decompose, that releases CO2 into the atmosphere", Kurz said. That could exacerbate global warming that contributed to the outbreaks in the first place. Warmer temperatures have allowed beetles to survive farther north and at higher elevations. "This is the kind of feedback we're all very worried about in the carbon cycle —-a warming planet leading to, in this case, an insect outbreak that increases CO2 into the atmosphere, which can increase warming", said Andy Jacobson, a CO2 cycle scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Apr 23, 08: Nearly 900 scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency have experienced political interference in their work in the last five years, the Union of Concerned Scientists reported.
. . The nonprofit environmental organization said its investigation of EPA was in line with previous probes of other U.S. agencies which found "significant administration manipulation of federal science. Our investigation found an agency in crisis", said Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Distorting science to accommodate a narrow political agenda threatens our environment, our health and our democracy itself."
. . 889 scientists, or 60%, said they had personally experienced at least one instance of political interference in the last five years; 394 said they experienced frequent or occasional "statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists' findings."
. . More than one-fifth, or 285, said they had experienced "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome", the report said. Nearly 100 scientists said the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was the main offender.
. . "OMB and the White House have, in some cases, compromised the integrity of EPA rules and policies; their influence, largely hidden from the public and driven by industry lobbying, has decreased the stringency of proposed regulations for nonscientific, political reasons", one scientist wrote in response to the investigation.
. . U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who chairs the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called on EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to respond to questions about the report at a committee hearing in May.
. . The EPA has come under fire recently for its standard for ground-level ozone, which critics claim is too high. The agency is also in a court fight with 18 U.S. states over its failure to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new cars and trucks, more than a year after the Supreme Court ruled EPA had the power to do so.
Apr 23, 08: European and Japanese leaders at their annual summit in Tokyo have called for "ambitious and binding" targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Their statement says curbing climate change will need mobilization of "unprecedented investments and finance" mainly from the private sector. It accepts that a Japanese plan to explore separate targets for different types of industry is "useful".
Apr 22, 08: California, which puts out more greenhouse gases than any other state, is promising to share ideas and research to help China cut back on its own emissions, which rival those of the U.S. as the world's largest. Despite its output, California is leading efforts to curb emissions. The state's top environmental official is in Beijing to sign an agreement with the United Nations to help China's efforts.
. . According to the four-page agreement to be signed on Earth Day, the state also would mobilize public agencies and encourage private entities in California to support climate change projects in China. "America has to lead, and we are doing so with or without Washington", Schwarzenegger said in a news release. "California is not waiting for the federal government to take action."
Apr 21, 08: An orbiting CO2 measurment satellite set to be launched in the next few months. The Vulcan project will also help track the effects of CO2 sinks, terrain or natural systems that absorb at least some fo the CO2 going into the atmosphere.
. . Vulcan shows power plant emissions, industrial emissions, vehicle emissions. And they animate the data showing how it happens, obviously much more emission during the day and heaviest emissions on the two coasts and industrial centers along the Gulf Coast and in Midwest.
Apr 20, 08: It's no longer enough to live a greener life —-now people are being encouraged to be environmentally friendly when they leave the Earth too. Cardboard coffins, clothes sewn from natural fibers, a burial plot in a natural setting. Green funerals attempt to be eco-friendly at every stage.
. . In London, those in the business showcased their products and services at the Natural Death Center's Green Funeral Exhibition. Some may expect green funerals to be as cheap as a do-it-yourself project, while others might brace for price hikes similar to those fair trade food.
. . But, funeral directors say green funerals —-like any-— run the gamut. An eco-funeral can be more complicated than it sounds. The Natural Death Center provides a handbook that suggests environmental targets for cemeteries.
. . In a green funeral, bodies are not embalmed and are dressed in pure fiber clothes. Green campaigners say refrigeration or dry ice is a good alternative to formaldehyde, which can seep into the water system.
. . Biodegradable coffins also differ from the traditional mahogany. Coffins on display included one made from wicker and decorated with flowers. Cardboard coffins biodegrade within three months. Marble tombstones are frowned upon. Jeremy Smite, a funeral director at Green Endings, notes that shipping and mining produce CO2 and that marble is not a renewable resource. For cremations —-which account for 70% of British funerals--— a person's ashes and the remains of the eco-friendly coffin are placed in bamboo, glass or ceramic urns. New legislation in Britain requires reductions in the mercury content of plastics and treatments used in coffins starting in 2010.
. . Small details are important for green funerals, such as using smaller cars instead of limousines in funeral processions.
Apr 18, 08: California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger predicted today that an international deadlock over how to deal with global warming will end once President Bush leaves office, while a leading expert warned of dire consequences if urgent action is not taken.
. . Schwarzenegger said all three president candidates would be great for the environment and predicted progress after one is inaugurated. Schwarzenegger has been at odds with the Bush administration over a 2002 California law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. EPA blocked the law from taking effect in California and 16 other states, saying global warming is not unique to the state and that emission goals should be set nationally.
. . Bush called for a halt in the growth of greenhouse gases by 2025, acknowledging the need to head off serious climate change. The plan came under fire immediately from environmentalists and congressional Democrats who favor mandatory emission cuts, a position also held by all three presidential contenders.
. . Esty said the 18 states that signed a declaration committing themselves to action together produce as much emissions as Europe's four biggest economies. Among other things, the declaration says the states recommit themselves to the effort to stop global warming and call on congressional leaders and presidential candidates to work with them to establish a comprehensive national climate policy. "Rewarding and encouraging meaningful and mandatory federal and state climate action is the key to success", the declaration states.
Apr 18, 08: French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the fight against climate change needs massive new amounts of private investment and globally regulated "green" markets to succeed. About 90% of the money for fighting global warming will come from the private sector over the long term, Sarkozy said at climate talks in Paris with the world's biggest polluters.
. . Mobilizing a few hundred million euros, or dollars, is not enough, he said, adding that the international community must "massively redirect financial flows toward this new low-CO2 economy."
. . A CO2 trading market —-or "cap-and-trade" system-— works much as any commodities market does, except that traders earn their fees selling a ton of CO2 instead of corn or copper. Countries that agree to reduction targets are given permits for allowable CO2 emissions, and the permits are passed on to businesses. Companies can choose to cut their emissions by retrofitting a factory and selling their permits for a profit —-or continuing to pollute and buying additional units of CO2 on the open market.
Apr 18, 08: Research has thrown further doubt on the notion that cosmic rays are a major influence on the Earth's climate. The idea that modern global warming is due to changes in cloudiness caused by solar influences on cosmic rays is popular with "climate skeptics".
. . But scientists found changes in cosmic ray flux do not affect cloud formation --the second such report in a month. "Whereas global mean temperatures have been rising steadily over the last 30 years, we see that the cosmic ray flux has been steady."
Apr 18, 08: Abdul Majid has been forced to move 22 times in as many years, a victim of the annual floods that ravage Bangladesh, a country of 140 million people crammed into an area of 142,080 sq km. [that's 1000 people in each sq km... average!] There are millions like Majid, 65, in Bangladesh and in the future there could be many millions more if scientists' predictions of rising seas and more intense droughts and storms come true.
. . "Bangladesh is already facing consequences of a sea level rise, including salinity and unusual height of tidal water", said Mizanur Rahman, a research fellow with the London-based International Institute for Environmental Development.
. . Experts say a third of Bangladesh's coastline could be flooded if the sea rises one meter in the next 50 years, creating an additional 20 million Bangladeshis displaced from their homes and farms. This is about the same as Australia's population. Saline water will creep deeper inland, fouling water supplies and crops and livestock will also suffer, experts say.
. . In a taste of what the future might look like, Bangladesh suffered two massive floods and a cyclone last year that together killed about 4,500 people, made at least two million homeless and destroyed 1.8 million tons of rice.
Apr 18, 08: Planet Earth continues to run a fever. Last month was the warmest March on record over land surfaces of the world and the second warmest overall worldwide. For the US, however, it was just an average March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported.
. . NOAA's National Climatic Data Center said high temps over much of Asia pulled the worldwide land temperature up to an average of 4.9 degrees Celsius, 1.8 C warmer than the average in the 20th century. While Asia had its greatest January snow cover this year, warm March readings caused a rapid melt and March snow cover on the continent was a record low.
. . Global ocean temperatures were the 13th warmest on record, with a weakening of the La Nina conditions that cool the tropical Pacific Ocean. Overall land and sea surface temperatures for the world were second highest in 129 years of record keeping, trailing only 2002.
. . For the month, nine states from Oklahoma to Vermont were much wetter than average, with Missouri experiencing its second wettest March on record.
Apr 16, 08: The jet stream —-America's stormy weather maker-— is creeping northward and weakening, new research shows. That potentially means less rain in the already dry South and Southwest and more storms in the North. And it could also translate into more and stronger hurricanes since the jet stream suppresses their formation. The study's authors said they have to do more research to pinpoint specific consequences.
. . From 1979 to 2001, the Northern Hemisphere's jet stream moved northward on average at a rate of about 1.25 miles a year. The authors suspect global warming is the cause.
. . Two other jet streams in the Southern Hemisphere are also shifting poleward, the study found. The study's authors and other scientists suggest that the widening of the Earth's tropical belt —-a development documented last year-— is pushing the three jet streams toward the poles.
. . Climate models have long predicted that with global warming, the world's jet streams would move that way. "That works out to about 18 feet per day", Caldeira said. "If you think about climate zones shifting northward at this rate, you can imagine squirrels keeping up. But what are oak trees going to do?
. . Dian Seidel, a research meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who wrote a study about the widening tropical belt last year, said she was surprised that Caldeira found such a small shift. Her study documented that the tropical belt was bulging at a much faster rate. Caldeira said his figures represent the minimum amount of movement.
Apr 16, 08: A Bush plan to cap greenhouse gases by 2025 was dismissed as too little, too late by some delegates at 17-nation climate talks in Paris while others welcomed it as a first firm U.S. emissions ceiling.
. . "The president gave a disappointing speech", German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in a statement issued in Berlin headlined "Gabriel criticizes Bush's Neanderthal speech. Losership, not Leadership."
. . Many delegates at the U.S.-led climate talks said far faster action was needed to avert the worst effects of global warming. Most other developed nations are trying to cut emissions below 1990 levels.
Apr 15, 08: Sea levels could rise by up to one-and-a-half meters by the end of this century, according to a new scientific analysis. This is substantially more than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast in last year's landmark assessment of climate science. Sea level rise of this magnitude would have major impacts on low-lying countries such as Bangladesh. The findings were presented at a major science conference in Vienna.
. . The research group is not the first to suggest that the IPCC's forecast of an average rise in global sea levels of 28-43cm by 2100 is too conservative. The IPCC was unable to include the contribution from "accelerated" melting of polar ice sheets as water temperatures warm because the processes involved were not yet understood.
. . Last year, German researcher Stefan Rahmstorf used different methodology but reached a similar conclusion to Dr Jevrejeva's group, projecting a sea level rise of between 0.5m and 1.4m by 2100. "Eighty to 90% of Bangladesh is within a meter or so of sea level."
Apr 9, 08: The Olympic Torch will generate 5,500 tons --yes, tons-- of CO2 during its worldwide tour as Chinese officials shuttle it around the globe aboard a jet that burns 5.4 gallons of fuel per mile. {couldn't they just SHIP it around?!]
Apr 4, 08: Back in the late 1990s, Henry Derwent had the unenviable job of selling a British government proposal that markets be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
. . The idea was to create a system in which energy-intensive companies would buy and sell pollution permits, giving them a financial incentive to cut their CO2 emissions. It was a tough sell. Environmentalists condemned it as morally reprehensible and business leaders said it was bad economics. Even an investment bank refused to take part because it would sully its reputation.
. . But these days, Derwent is feeling vindicated. The British set up a CO2 trading market in 2002, followed by the European Union in 2005. New Zealand's system is expected later this year. The US plans a regional greenhouse gas initiative in the nine Northeast states by 2009 [NOT the Feds], and Australia wants a national system by 2010. All global warming bills in the U.S. Congress include an emissions trading mechanism.
Apr 4, 08: Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said. It's likely that La Nina would continue into the summer. El Nino warms the planet when it happens; La Nina cools it.
. . This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend-- and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years. The WMO points out that the decade from 1998 to 2007 was the warmest on record.
. . "When you look at climate change, you should not look at any particular year", he said. "You should look at trends over a pretty long period and the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming. La Nina is part of what we call 'variability'. There has always been and there will always be cooler and warmer years, but what is important for climate change is that the trend is up."
Apr 3, 08: Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity. The research contradicts a favoured theory of climate "sceptics", that changes in cosmic rays coming to Earth determine cloudiness and temperature. The idea is that variations in solar activity affect cosmic ray intensity. But Lancaster U scientists found there has been no significant link between them in the last 20 years. The UK team explain that they used three different ways to search for a correlation, and found virtually none.
Apr 14, 08: Organizers hope a gathering of governors this week will be as effective in addressing climate change as a similar event that launched the conservation movement a century ago.
Apr 12, 08: The global fight against climate change after the Kyoto pact expires will fail unless rich countries can come up with creative ways to finance clean development by poorer nations, a U.N. official said.
Apr 11, 08: Scientists predicted that climate change in coming decades will cause more flooding in the Northern Hemisphere and droughts in some southern and arid zones. In addition, they said that some areas around the Mediterranean, parts of southern Africa, northeastern Brazil and the western U.S. region will likely suffer water shortages which could lead to a food crisis.
. . An IPCC report presented at the meeting said the decline of water quantity and quality would lead to shortages of water for drinking and agriculture. Millions of Africans could be afflicted by such water problems by 2020, unless action is taken to mitigate climate change, experts said. While the proportion of heavy rainfalls will very likely increase, so will the areas simultaneously affected by extreme droughts. She said that in the U.S, "there's a high likelihood of the west getting drier."
Apr 9, 08: Food riots which have struck several impoverished countries could spread with shortages and high prices set to continue for some time, the head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.
. . A combination of high oil and fuel prices, rising demand for food in a wealthier Asia, the use of farmland and crops for biofuels, bad weather and speculation on futures markets have pushed up food prices, prompting violent protests in a handful of poor states.
. . Jacques Diouf, director general of the Rome-based FAO, said during a trip to India that there was a growing risk of social instability in countries where families spent more than half their income on food. "We have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso", he told reporters in New Delhi.
. . Rice prices in Thailand, the world's biggest rice exporter, have doubled since the start of this year after India heavily restricted and then banned the export of non-basmati rice to ensure it had enough to feed its people.
. . In Manila, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo unveiled a series of measures to boost rice production as troops armed with M-16 rifles supervised the sale of subsidized grain and the government threatened to jail hoarders for life.
Apr 9, 08: A top government health official said that climate change is expected to have a significant impact on health in the next few decades, with certain regions of the country —-and the elderly and children-— most vulnerable to increased health problems.
. . Howard Frumkin, a senior official of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gave a detailed summary on the likely health impacts of global warming at a congressional hearing. But he refrained from giving an opinion on whether carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, should be regulated as a danger to public health.
. . "The CDC doesn't have a position on ... EPA's regulatory decisions", said Frumkin, determined to avoid getting embroiled in the contentious issue over whether the Environmental Protection Agency should regulate CO2 under the federal Clean Air Act.
. . Among them, the prospects of more heat waves that are of special danger to the elderly and the poor; more incidents of extreme weather posing a danger of drought in some areas and flooding in others; increase of food-borne and waterborne infectious diseases; more air pollution because of higher temperatures; and the migration into new areas of vector-borne and zoonotic diseases such as Lyme disease, West Nile virus, malaria or dengue fever as seasonal patterns change.
. . Frumkin's testimony focused in greater detail and more directly on the likely human health risk of global warming than testimony given last October by the agency's director, Julie Gerberding, before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
. . It was later learned that the White House had heavily edited Gerberding's testimony, deleting whole sections of the prepared remarks including one entitled "Climate Change is a Public Concern." But Solis, who chaired the hearing, said she suspected that "a layer of screening" continues to limit what CDC officials are allowed to say.
. . The president has asked Congress for $8.8 billion for the CDC during the 2009 fiscal year, $412 million less than Congress provided this year.
Apr 9, 08: A noted hurricane researcher predicted that rising water temperatures in the Atlantic will bring a "well above average" storm season this year, including four major storms. The updated forecast by William Gray's team at Colorado State U calls for 15 named storms in the Atlantic in 2008 and says there's a better than average chance that at least one major hurricane will hit the US.
. . An average of 5.9 hurricanes form in the Atlantic each year. The 2007 Atlantic season saw 15 named storms, six of which became hurricanes. Two were major storms.
Apr 9, 08: Gore, who won a Nobel prize for his work to combat rising temperatures, is also a superdelegate. Obama, the Democratic front-runner, says he keeps in regular contact with Gore and has pledged to make him a major player on global warming in an Obama administration. "I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem", Obama said.
. . Clinton told reporters she did not know whether Gore wanted to get back into government but was sure the American people would welcome it.
. . Gore's spokeswoman, Kalee Kreider, declined to comment on the Obama offer and was complimentary about the presidential candidates, including Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
. . "Everybody in Europe is watching the election very closely", said Mahi Sideridou of the environmental group Greenpeace in Brussels. "No matter which party wins ... we're pretty sure that we're going to see a huge shift in policy making in climate change."
Apr 2, 08: UK home-owners are not prepared to make the changes needed to live in "zero CO2" homes, according to a report. People felt the eco-friendly buildings would require extra maintenance and that they would have to cut back on certain appliances, it added.
. . The National House-Building Council (NHBC) Foundation study said buyers also feared the homes would cost more. The government has set a target that all new homes in England must have no net CO2 emissions by 2016.
. . Despite widespread media coverage of climate change, the study found that energy efficiency was not a major factor when it came to choosing a new home. Instead, it said, most respondents would prefer a better kitchen or bathroom. NHBC chief executive Imtiaz Farookhi said the results came as no surprise. "What has happened since the Stern Review is that there has been a general understanding of global warming and CO2 emissions."
. . From May 2008, new houses in England will have to be assessed against the new Code for Sustainable Homes.
. . The six-star rating system grades a building's environmental performance, which includes energy and water consumption. In order for a property to be of a standard that is likely to meet the government's "zero CO2" definition, Mr Farookhi said it would have to receive a five- or six-star rating. The group of MPs warned that without addressing the issue, the government would not meet its 2050 target of cutting CO2 emissions by 60% from 1990 levels.
. . Housing Minister Caroline Flint announced that home-owners would no longer need planning permission to install microgeneration technologies, such as solar panels, provided it had "no impact on others". However, the relaxation of the planning rules did not include micro wind turbines, which first had to be cleared by the European Union.
Apr 2, 08: A group of state attorneys general is taking the EPA back to court to try to force it to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that rebuked the Bush administration for inaction on global warming. The high court decided a year ago that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to take action.
. . But 17 states and others said in a court filing that the EPA has not issued a decision on regulation. Their court filing seeks to compel the EPA to act within 60 days. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said the EPA is failing to deal with the dangers of global warming.
Apr 2, 08: CO2 emissions from Europe's heavy industry sectors rose by 1.1% in 2007, say CO2 market analysts.
Mar 31, 08: Former Vice President Al Gore launched a three-year, multimillion-dollar advocacy campaign calling for the U.S. to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
. . The Alliance for Climate Protection's campaign will combine advertising, online organizing and partnerships with grassroots groups to educate the public about global warming and urge solutions from elected officials. Some advertisements will feature bipartisan pairs, such as the Rev. Al Sharpton with Pat Robertson and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with former Speaker Newt Gingrich
. . The Alliance will initially spend $300 million over three years, although Zoi said more could be spent in the future. Some of the money for the campaign comes from Gore himself. Zoi said he contributed his personal profits from the book and movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," a $750,000 award from his share of the Nobel Peace Prize and a personal matching gift. She declined to provide the total amount.
Mar 27, 08: Scientists can't be certain global warming is to blame, but the evidence is damning. Now, a new calculation of government temperature data shows that over the past five years, average annual temperatures in the Colorado River basin —-the heart of the West-— have risen by 2.2 degrees, or about twice as fast as the global rate.
. . It says the West is heating up faster than any other region in the continental U.S. with more catastrophic wildfires among the consequences. The report, "Hotter and Drier: The West's Changed Climate", crunched numbers kept by NOAA's Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nev. "It's already begun. We are already seeing the effects, and scientists are telling us it's going to get markedly worse", said Stephen Saunders.
. . The consequences, though, are plain to see. In Yellowstone National Park, aerial photographs show vast orange-needled forests of whitebark pine that were green just three years ago. Yellowstone grizzly bears depend heavily on the fatty seeds of the whitebark pine for food. Colorado's signature aspen stands also are drying up, leaving them vulnerable to fungus.
. . The Rocky Mountain snowpacks that melt earlier in spring leave less water for summer irrigation and heat up trout streams. Glaciers, which provide consistent stream flows during summer, are melting. The glaciers at Montana's Glacier National Park could melt entirely by 2022, U.S. Geological Survey researchers have calculated. Montana, Idaho and Wyoming had their hottest Julys on record last summer, while Phoenix had 47 days of 109 degrees or hotter.
. . Powell and Mead reservoirs, meanwhile, are half-empty. The reservoirs collect water from the Colorado River, supplying much of the booming Southwest. If they keep drying up, it could shred the Colorado River Compact of 1922, an agreement that allocates fixed amounts of water among seven states. The upper basin states have the water, but lower basin states including California have senior water rights —-a crisis in the making, said Bradley H. Udall.
Mar 27, 08: Around the same time the American West started heating up five years ago, Colorado started losing its lodgepole pine forests to a beetle infestation. "The population built up rapidly and exploded. It takes out the mature trees", said Ingrid Aguayo, an entomologist for the Colorado State Forest Service, which estimates that about 60% of the lodgepole pines have turned red and brown.
Mar 27, 08: It's not only our CO2 footprint we should worry about. Experts are looking for solutions to our growing water footprint, as urban populations explode and the demand for biofuels adds stress on water for farmland.
. . Nearly half the people on Earth, about 2.5 billion, have no access to sanitation, many of them in urban slums. The world's cities are growing by 1 million people a week, and soon their aging water systems will not cope.
. . Now scientists have begun calculating a water footprint, the amount of water needed to produce goods or services. A report published this month says it takes 70-400 times as much water to create energy from biofuels as it does from fossil fuels.
. . It said the production of crude oil requires slightly more than one cubic meter of water for one unit of energy, compared with 61 cubic meters to grow biomass in Brazil —-mostly sugar used for ethanol-— for the same amount of energy. The water footprint of biomass grown in the Netherlands is 24 cubic meters, the report said.
. . The pilot projects range from turning rooftops into gardens, capturing and recycling rain, recharging underground water reservoirs with waste water, and swapping traditional flush sanitation for dry toilets.
. . The English city of Birmingham is monitoring the effects of green roofs to reduce flooding during storms, to cut energy needs and to study how to capture run-off to reduce water needs in the buildings or surrounding areas.
. . A project in Tel Aviv, Israel, channels treated waste water into the aquifer through the natural filtering system of the soil, and is testing whether it can be reused for drinking water.
. . Accounting for population growth, some 500,000 new people every day would have to be connected to a sanitation system to meet the U.N. target. Waterless toilets, using either chemicals or composting, are being tested in Ghana, Kenya, Peru, Egypt and elsewhere. They also enhance the possibility of separating human waste, using liquid waste as a rich source of nutrients for crops, Amy said. "If we captured all the urine in Africa, it could match all the nitrogen and phosphates used for agriculture", he said.
. . Howe said standard mechanisms consume about 25% of all residential water —-drinking water that is literally flushed down the toilet. "It takes a lot of energy and money to bring in the water, to treat it, to put into the toilet, to treat it again, and to put it into the river system."
Think your family going green won't make a difference? Wrong, says a U.S. study that shows one household ditching paper statements for Web transactions would save 24 square feet of forest a year.
Mar 25, 08: Australian grape growers reckon they are the canary in the coalmine of global warming, as a long drought forces winemakers to rethink the styles of wine they can produce and the regions they can grow in.
. . The three largest grape-growing regions in Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth, all depend on irrigation to survive. The high cost of water has made life tough for growers. Some say they probably won't survive this year's harvest, because of the cost of keeping vines alive. Water prices surged above A$1,000 a megaliter last year from around A$300.
. . Recent rains have bypassed the country's parched inland wine regions, and have fallen half-way through the harvest in eastern Australia, too late to help the berries and instead causing a mildew-like disease. Industry groups estimate up to 1,000 winegrowers out of around 7,000 may be forced to leave the industry this year because their vineyards are no longer financially viable.
. . A landmark study found these areas would warm by 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2030. Last year was one of the warmest on record for southern Australia, where all of the nation's winegrowing regions lie, as well as one of the driest.
. . The southern island state of Tasmania is also attracting attention as a region that could dramatically boost its grape cultivation, with its mild weather closer to that of New Zealand than the parched mainland.
. . Indeed, wine-growers in neighboring New Zealand are upbeat about a future that includes climate change, because higher temperatures are expected to make cold areas of New Zealand more temperate and better suited to grape growing.
Mar 24, 08: A new study predicts water circulation in Lake Tahoe is being dramatically altered by global warming, threatening the lake's delicate ecosystem and famed clear waters.
Mar 19, 08: The capital's famous cherry trees are primed to burst out in a perfect pink peak about the end of this month. Thirty years ago, the trees usually waited to bloom till around April 5.
. . In central California, the first of the field skipper sachem, a drab little butterfly, was fluttering about on March 12. Just 25 years ago, that creature predictably emerged there anywhere from mid-April to mid-May.
. . On March 9, when allergist Dr. Donald Dvorin set up his monitor, maple pollen was already heavy in the air. Less than two decades ago, that pollen couldn't be measured until late April.
. . Blame global warming. The fingerprints of man-made climate change are evident in seasonal timing changes for thousands of species on Earth, according to dozens of studies and last year's authoritative report by the Nobel Prize-winning international climate scientists. More than 30 scientists told The Associated Press how global warming is affecting plants and animals at springtime across the country, in nearly every state.
. . What's happening is so noticeable that scientists can track it from space. Satellites measuring when land turns green found that spring "green-up" is arriving eight hours earlier every year on average since 1982 north of the Mason-Dixon line. In much of Florida and southern Texas and Louisiana, the satellites show spring coming a tad later, and bizarrely, in a complicated way, global warming can explain that too, the scientists said.
. . Biologists also foresee big problems. The changes could push some species to extinction. That's because certain plants and animals are dependent on each other for food and shelter. If the plants bloom or bear fruit before animals return or surface from hibernation, the critters could starve. Also, plants that bud too early can still be whacked by a late freeze.
. . The young of tree swallows —-which in upstate New York are laying eggs nine days earlier than in the 1960s-— often starve in those last gasp cold snaps because insects stop flying in the cold, ornithologists said. U of Maryland biology professor David Inouye noticed an unusually early February robin in his neighborhood this year and noted, "Sometimes the early bird is the one that's killed by the winter storm."
. . You can even taste it in the honey. Bees, which sample many plants, are producing their peak amount of honey weeks earlier. The nectar is coming from different plants now, which means noticeably different honey —-at least in Highland, Md., where Wayne Esaias has been monitoring honey production since 1992. Instead of the rich, red, earthy tulip poplar honey that used to be prevalent, bees are producing lighter, fruitier black locust honey.
. . In Washington, seven of the last 20 Cherry Blossom Festivals have started after peak bloom. This year will be close, the National Park Service predicts. Last year, Knoxville's dogwood blooms came and went before the city's dogwood festival started. Boston's Arnold Arboretum permanently rescheduled Lilac Sunday to a May date eight days earlier than it once was.
. . The journals of Henry David Thoreau help scientists in New England investigate global warming's effect on the timing of spring. Thoreau carefully documented the dates the blueberry bushes bloomed.
. . But even stronger evidence is a photo from May 30, 1868, of a cemetery in Lowell, Mass. In 1868 —-and it was not the coldest year on record in those days—- the trees were barren. On the same date in 2005, a picture of the same trees in the same place. In this photo, everything is in bloom.
Mar 19, 08: Japanese households and businesses could end up paying more than $500 billion to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 11% over the next decade, the trade and industry ministry said.
Mar 14, 08: Former British prime minister Tony Blair urged the world's top greenhouse gas emitters to launch a revolution to fight climate change and said he'll work to sell a new global framework to slash CO2 emissions. The average American emits the equivalent of about 24 tons of CO2 a year. In China, the figure is about four tons.
. . Blair told a gathering of G20 nations, ranging from top CO2 emitter the US to Indonesia and South Africa, that the call to action was clear and urgent and believed part of the solution was a renaissance for nuclear power.
. . The talks in Chiba are billed as a dialogue, not a negotiation, and ministers are meeting to discuss ways to curb CO2 emissions, technology transfer, funding schemes for developing nations to pay for clean energy as well as adaptation.
. . Blair said U.N.-led talks launched in Bali last December were the right forum to work on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol by the end of 2009 that binds all nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
. . Blair said the report would focus on the effectiveness of CO2 cap-and-trade systems, global sectoral deals in polluting industries, generation of funds for research and development, technology transfer and deforestation, among other issues.
Mar 14, 08: China, India and other developing nations must join industrialized countries in reducing greenhouse gas emissions if the world is to avert a global warming disaster, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said. "The dilemma is this: how to cut a deal that has both the developed and developing in it, recognizing that the obligations on the one can't be the same as the obligations of the other."
Mar 11, 08: Flooded roads and subways, deformed railroad tracks and weakened bridges may be the wave of the future with continuing global warming, a new study says. Climate change will affect every type of transportation through rising sea levels, increased rainfall and surges from more intense storms, the National Research Council said in a report. Complicating matters, people continue to move into coastal areas, creating the need for more roads and services in the most vulnerable regions.
. . The report cites five major areas of growing threat:
. . • More heat waves, requiring load limits at hot-weather or high-altitude airports and causing thermal expansion of bridge joints and rail track deformities.
. . • Rising sea levels and storm surges flooding coastal roadways, forcing evacuations, inundating airports and rail lines, flooding tunnels and eroding bridge bases.
. . • More rainstorms, delaying air and ground traffic, flooding tunnels and railways, and eroding road, bridge and pipeline supports.
. . • More frequent strong hurricanes, disrupting air and shipping service, blowing debris onto roads and damaging buildings.
. . • Rising arctic temperatures thawing permafrost, resulting in road, railway and airport runway subsidence and potential pipeline failures.
The nation's transportation system was built for local conditions based on historical weather data, but those data may no longer be reliable in the face of new weather extremes, the report warns.
Mar 10, 08: Leaders of the influential Southern Baptist community in the US have declared their churches have a duty to stop climate change. In a statement, senior figures in the movement said evidence of man-made global warming was "substantial". Southern Baptists are the largest protestant group in the country. They follow other religious figures, including British bishops and leaders of US evangelical denominations, in backing action to curb climate change. The Southern Baptist Convention has a membership of more than 16 million people.
. . The 40-odd signatories of the statement, A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change, include several of its most influential figures. "Our cautious response... in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed. We can do better." A second factor is the belief that climate impacts will fall disproportionately on the poor, and that Christians in rich nations have a duty to prevent this if they can.
. . Some Islamic leaders have also warned that environmental issues threaten the natural world and the future well-being of human society.
. . While the traditional Republican line on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage has great appeal for many churchgoers, religious leaders who preach involvement in environmental protection and global poverty believe their congregations may increasingly find policies to favor in the Democrat camp.
Mar 10, 08: An EU report says climate change will have a growing impact on global security, multiplying existing threats such as shortages of food and water. It warns that climate change could cause millions of people to migrate towards Europe as other parts of the world suffer environmental degradation. States that are "already fragile and conflict prone" could be over-burdened, the report says.
. . The stark warning from the report drawn up by EU foreign affairs chief Javier Solana is that climate change is not just a threat in itself --it is "a threat multiplier". It says shortages of food and water, even radicalization and state failure are likely to get worse if no action is taken. Africa is likely to be especially at risk, which means migration could intensify, both within Africa itself and towards Europe.
. . The report also highlights the Arctic as a possible area of future conflict. With the melting of the polar icecaps, new waterways and trade routes are opening up. The region is rich in untapped oil and gas resources, and last year Russia staked its claim by planting a flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole.
Mar 5, 08: The UK Treasury has "continually demonstrated a lack of ambition and imagination" when it comes to green taxes, a report by MPs has concluded. The Commons Environmental Audit Committee says there is little sign that ministers have acted on the recommendations of the Stern Review.
. . They also call for a rise in air taxes, especially on long-haul flights. Failure to act would undermine the government's environmental credibility, warned the MPs. The committee of 16 MPs said green taxes, as a proportion of all taxes, has declined from its peak of 9.7% in 1999 to 7.6% in 2006.
. . The MPs also warned that spending on environmental solutions had "fallen far short of the step-change required. The Treasury has increased funding for CO2-reduction technology, including backing a pilot CO2 Capture and Storage (CCS) power plant", Mr Yeo observed. "But this still falls painfully short of the scale of investment that is required to decarbonize the economy." He added: "The Treasury must introduce a financial mechanism to ensure that CCS technology is fitted to all new fossil fuel power stations in the UK."
. . Friends of the Earth called on Chancellor Alistair Darling to use this year's Budget to deliver on his green promises. "We've had enough of half measures and green spin. The chancellor must put climate change at the heart of next week's Budget and make it cheaper and easier for people to go green."
. . Mr Darling will deliver this year's Budget on 12 March.
Mar 5, 08: The world must respond to climate change and other environmental challenges now while the cost is low or else pay a stiffer price later for its indecision, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said.
. . A new report by 30-nation organization looks at "red light issues" in the environment, including global warming, water shortages, energy, biodiversity loss, transportation, agriculture and fisheries.
. . It recommends that governments create policies such as "green taxes" that encourage sound, environmentally friendly technologies and practices. The rich world must help poor countries develop without spewing pollution by providing them with technology and expertise, it says.
. . The report includes a model of the impact on the environment if no steps are taken, compared to the result if the report's policy recommendations are adopted worldwide. Economic growth would be nearly the same in both cases, but with a much healthier environment if the recommendations are adopted, it says.
Mar 4, 08: Millions of years before the dinosaurs were apparently killed by an asteroid hitting our planet, the Earth experienced another mass extinction that was far more devastating. The cause for that, paleontologist Peter Ward says, was actually homegrown: Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) in the oceans and atmosphere turned the sky green and choked off oxygen for plants, animals and marine life.
. . Ward says that global warming caused by humans could reproduce the same hydrogen sulfide gas conditions that killed more than 90% of life during the Permian period, when the extinction occurred. And we might just do it faster than nature did.
. . Ward, who published a book about the extinctions last year called Under a Green Sky, is involved in a project with Arizona State University to design a $60 million atmosphere chamber to reproduce the Earth's atmospheric conditions from the Permian period--as well as any other period they want -- and recreate the die-off with plants grown in the chambers. The aim is to see what kinds of signs are left behind so they can then look for them in nature today and see what they tell us about evolution.
. . Step one is: there's an enormous release of flood basalts coming out of cracks in the earth, and huge amounts of magma from the deep Earth comes out. These things go on for millions of years, and the volume of lava is extraordinary. It may have covered an area the size of the continental U.S.
. . Now, the lava doesn't kill much. But as the lava comes out, carbon dioxide bubbles out with it and a lot of carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere to the point that we estimate the carbon dioxide levels hit 3,000 parts per million. [Current levels are about 380 ppm.]
. . This causes the oceans and the planet to warm, and once you do that you stop ocean currents. Once you stop currents, you lose oxygen in the ocean, because it's circulation that keeps the ocean oxygenated. This allows a type of bacteria to take over that creates hydrogen sulfide. Animal life cannot live in water that has a lot of hydrogen sulfide in it. When you have concentrations of greater than 80 ppm of hydrogen sulfide, or you get up to 200 ppm, which is easily done, you'll kill every animal [in the ocean]. Eventually so much hydrogen sulfide leaks into the atmosphere that it kills animals and plants.
. . It was over 90% extinction, not just of land animals but of ocean animals and plants. Only 50% [of species] in the asteroid-dinosaur stage died. So this was way, way worse. It occurred slowly, over thousands of years. We still do not know precisely how long.
. . hydrogen sulfide was the cause of up to 12 mass extinctions. Every mass extinction except the dinosaur extinction seems to have been caused by this. It's all about when the Earth decides to spit out these big burps of magma that come to the surface. But a big mass extinction from global warming has not happened in 100 million years.
. . But we've had these mass extinctions [from H2S] when carbon dioxide has hit 1,000 ppm. We have not hit that [level] for 100 million years. But we are currently at 380 ppm --and climbing rapidly at 2 ppm a year and accelerating-- and this is the highest CO2 I think in the last 40 million years. The only time [these extinctions] ever happened in the past is when these big flood basalts happened. But now we're making it happen far faster than the flood basalts ever did. This is a unique event in the history of the planet.
. . I think sea-level rise is a more imminent danger. The thing that we have to do is, we have to save the ice caps, because if the ice caps go, (the H2S scenario) is the inevitable next step. One thousand ppm (of CO2) is all it would take to get rid of all the ice caps on the planet. We'll be at 1,000 in 200 years or less. Which means good-bye ice caps on planet Earth, which means 240 feet of sea level, which means good-bye San Francisco, Seattle, New York and on and on.
. . But if losing the ice caps makes us uncomfortable [because of rising water], the hydrogen sulfide is going to make us extinct. In 500 years, I can see a world where everyone will be wearing gas masks. Those that have them will live; those that don't will die. We humans are here for the long haul, and if we do not stop heating our atmosphere, we will suffer a very nasty fate.
. . Right now off the coast of Namibia there is hydrogen sulfide coming out. Fisheries went in and killed off all the anchovies and sardines. Then the plankton comes up, and there are no fish to eat them and they go to the bottom and rot. That rotting produces hydrogen sulfide and it rises to the surface and is causing all kinds of havoc. Where I live [Washington state] we have hydrogen sulfide hot spots coming from the old logging camps. All the wood waste that was buried in the last two or three centuries is now rotting to the point that well-diggers have to [carry] a gas mask because if they puncture one of these hydrogen sulfide bubbles it will kill them.
Mar 1, 08: A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining CO2 to produce fuel.
. . Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. "We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy", Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore. "We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock."
. . Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. The next step is life forms that feed on CO2 and give off fuel such as methane gas as waste, according to Venter. Organisms already exist that produce octane, but not in amounts needed to be a fuel supply.
. . The limiting part of the equation isn't designing an organism, it's the difficulty of extracting high concentrations of CO2 from the air to feed the organisms, the scientist said
. . Scientists put "suicide genes" into their living creations so that if they escape the lab, they can be triggered to kill themselves.
Feb 28, 08: Scientists say they have made a key breakthrough in understanding the genes of plants that could lead to crops that can survive in a drought. Researchers in Finland and the US say they have discovered a gene that controls the amount of CO2 a plant absorbs.
. . They absorb the gas through tiny pores on their leaves called stomata and these pores also release water vapor. It also controls the amount of water vapor it releases into the atmosphere. Scientists have been trying to find the gene that controls the response of the stomata for decades.
. . They have found a crucial genetic pathway that controls the opening and closing of these pores. The researchers say that this understanding could allow them to modify plants so that they continue to absorb CO2 but reduce the amount of water released into the atmosphere. It could be commercialised within the next 20 years.
Feb 28, 08: A senior European official has described America's latest offer on climate change as far too little, far too late. The US climate chief James Connaughton told the BBC that President Bush was ready this year to sign up to an international long-term goal of huge emissions cuts by 2050.
. . But European climate experts are angry that the White House still refuses to set a date for halting its growth in emissions. One government official said: "This is nowhere near enough. The rest of the world only cares about tangible US emissions reductions. Until they come up with firm figures for reductions, the rest is meaningless."
. . Another EU official said there was nothing new in the American offer --but he said the US was becoming much smarter in its presentation of climate change policy, emphasising what it was prepared to do rather than what it would refuse to do.
. . One EU official said: "Frankly, we have had global climate policy held up by the White House for years. President Bush won't be in office to sign off the next climate agreement so we really no longer really care what he thinks."
Feb 27, 08: Traumatic climate cooling may have launched wars in the past, like the Little Ice Age of the mid-sixteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. Cold-induced stresses on agriculture led to wars, famines, and population declines, an international team of researchers believes. Now, they warn that future climate change that turns up the heat could also increase conflicts.
Feb 27, 08: The sea-level rise that accompanies climate change will reduce the freshwater supply in many coastal communities by 50% more than previously thought, as sea water infiltrates groundwater, and renders it brackish and undrinkable.
Feb 26, 08: In tightly-packed cities with a distinct lack of trees such as Tokyo, planting trees on the roofs of buildings is a common practice. In fact, every new medium-sized building in Tokyo is required to plant gardens on the roof. The problem? Soil is heavy and dense.
. . Suntory, maker of whiskies, beers and many other fine beverages, developed a new synthetic called Pafcal that's lighter and more solid. Less than half as much Pafcal than soil is needed to sustain plant growth, and a tree grown in the stuff can reduce the surrounding temperature by as much as 18 degrees F.
Feb 26, 08: It's one of the world's strangest and smallest sea creatures, growing to no bigger than the size of a lentil. But the tiny pteropod, with its translucent shell, could help scientists understand how marine animals will respond to the stresses of climate change. Dr Gretchen Hofmann plans to sequence the animal's genome. She hopes to find genes and molecular pathways that might predict how shelled creatures will respond to warmer, more acidic oceans.
. . "It's a tiny, very fragile shell and we know that their ability to survive and form this shell is very threatened by climate change conditions in the ocean, a situation that's called ocean acidification. Currently, ocean pH is about 8.1, and some of the emission scenarios suggest that ocean pHs could go down to 7.8, which is very drastic if you're a little pteropod living out on the ocean", says Dr Hofmann.
Feb 25, 08: Experts in solar science, climate modeling and atmospheric science met in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to discuss the possible link between variability in solar energy output and global warming here on Earth.
. . We do know that that our sun is a variable star: “It varies by about one-tenth of 1%” in energy output, according to David H. Hathaway, a sunspot specialist from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunstville, Alabama. But that doesn't seem enough to explain observed climate change. In fact, according to Casper M. Ammann, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in the years since 1950, “there is no observed trend in solar radiation. The 11-year sunspot cycle has not been significantly abnormal."
. . In essence, he added, it’s now very clear that the atmospheric changes being seen now —-global warming—- “have nothing to do with changes in solar activity. It’s greenhouse gases. It’s not the sun that is causing this [climate] trend.”
. . The Earth’s atmosphere --and its relationship to the sun’s energy output-- is so complex that even as warming began, “up until 1960 we couldn’t see it.” But now, he said, since warming has been confirmed, the world’s climate scientists “are probably not overestimating the problem. It’s probably worse than the estimates.”
. . Ammann did add, however, that there is reason to hope that the most dire consequences can be avoided. Although it’s clearly too late to avoid the heating of the earth’s atmosphere, “we can substantially cut [it]” by severely reducing the amounts of CO2 going into the air. “It is absolutely achievable”, he said —-if by mid-century, societies can generate enough will to make the necessary changes.
Feb 25, 08: If the sun remains this quiet for another a year or two, it may indicate the star has entered a downturn that, if history is any precedent, could trigger a planetary cold spell that could bring massive snowfall and severe weather.
Feb 25, 08: With spreading water shortages, you’d think a good heavy rain would be, well, heaven-sent. But there are now 25 million acres of impervious surfaces nationally -—equivalent to a parking lot the size of Virginia -—where rainfall runs off rather than soaking in. The rushing streamlets carry fertilizers, pesticides, eroded soil and organic material into storm sewers, and from there into waterways. Many cities (746 of them across the country) have old sewer systems that can overflow in heavy storms, contributing to local drinking water problems and to the giant dead zone that forms each summer in the Gulf of Mexico.
. . Cities are starting to subsidize the cost of rain barrels for residents, while sales of paving stones that let water seep through gaps nearly doubled in 2005, to 17.8 million sq. ft.
. . [In .15"/hour rain, my house's roof runs off 500 gallons/hour.]
. . The amount of water devoted to nourishing lawns and gardens far outweighs other uses. While this can be true even in rainy Seattle, the numbers are particularly striking in the driest regions: In Scottsdale, Ariz., two-thirds of a home’s water usage goes to outdoor plants.
Feb 25, 08: The US is ready to accept "binding international obligations" on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, officials say, if other nations do the same. The comments came in a news conference in Paris given by James Connaughton and Daniel Price, environmental and economics advisers to President Bush.
. . There was no indication of how much the US might be prepared to cut emissions. But the Bush administration is clearly looking for some kind of binding commitment from major developing countries such as China, India and Brazil.
. . The notion that major developing countries might take on binding targets might prove politically difficult, suggested Philip Clapp, deputy managing director of the Pew Environment Group. "The White House knows that taking a binding target of comparable size [to that taken by the US or EU] is neither a negotiating option nor a physical possibility for the Chinese government. It's become increasingly apparent that the Bush administration is willing to agree to a target that would take effect 40 years from now, and wants to portray that as a major accomplishment. A binding commitment that doesn't take effect for 40 years is really just shuffling the problem off one more time."
Feb 20, 08: Increasingly, trees are the new must-have for American cities. Some prodded by environmental awareness, some by regulatory edict, they're stepping up tree plantings in hopes of improving air quality, reducing energy consumption and easing storm water flows. And a four-man team of scientists at the U of Vermont is helping urban planners and foresters gauge the existing "tree canopy" in their cities and set realistic goals for increasing it.
Feb 18, 08: Sony Cuts CO2 Footprint. The company has beat its timeline for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and will continue to promote green operations.
Feb 18, 08: Black carbon is composed of very fine particles of carbon that can be released into the air in aerosol form. They are generally generated by burning some type of biomass, like firewood.
. . V. Ramanathan of the UC-San Diego La Jolla, said that reducing black carbon could play an important role in reducing global climate change here at the AAAS annual meeting. Ramanathan said that a mere 10% reduction in black carbon would be equivalent to eliminating 25 gigatons of CO2 emissions. For scale, the world produces about 8 gigatons of CO2 equivalent per year.
. . Black carbon makes ice and snow packs dirty, reducing the reflectivity (aka albedo) of those materials. That makes them absorb more heat and melt more quickly, which is the kind of feedback loop that practically defines the climate change problem.
. . But the most exciting thing about the professor's talk was that reducing black carbon is an obvious win-win. And the types of reductions he's seeking can be accomplished with current technologies. Ramanathan said that 50-60% of black carbon emissions in India come from rural cooking. The exposure to the smoke with black carbon particulates was directly responsible for 1 million deaths. So, reducing black carbon is a public health and global warming win.
. . Towards that end, Ramanathan is running a pilot in Andira Pradesh, India, called Project Surya. With a host of available technologies, he is attempting to create a smokeless village. Importantly, he's also deploying 2000 environmental sensors to make sure that the technology they are implementing is actually making an impact. He did note, however, that reducing black carbon would not be enough to stop climate change and merely could "buy us five or ten years" while we bring other, CO2 reducing technologies online.
Feb 18, 08: Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, spoke on the science of this process, known as ocean iron fertilization at a symposia addressing the feasibility of this type of CO2 sequestration at the AAAS annual meeting. His talk came a wekk after Planktos, one of two iron fertilization startups, indefinitely suspended its operations (as Earth2Tech cleverly put it, "Planktos Dead in the Water").
. . You need to know three things from Buesseler's talk, which was based on looking at twelve fertilization experiments. One, putting iron in the ocean does increase plankton numbers. Two, scientists don't really have any idea how much of the CO2 the organisms eat actually drops from the surface into the depths, which is the key to sequestration. It could be anywhere from 2-50%, which is almost like saying, "It could work or it could not work." Three, the leading scientists in the field don't have enough confidence to say that ocean iron fertilization could have any real impact on stopping or even slowing climate change.
Feb 18, 08: Australia should have ratified the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions years ago instead of becoming isolated on the issue along with the United States, two former Cabinet officials said.
Feb 16, 08: U.N. experts say just 2 to 4% of forest cover remains in Haiti, down from 7 to 9% in 1981. And despite millions invested in reforestation, such efforts have mostly failed because of economic pressures and political turmoil.
. . For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development embarked on an ambitious $22.8 million project in the 1980s to plant some 30 million trees that could provide income for peasants. But the project focused on trees that can be made into charcoal for cooking, and nearly all were eventually cut down.
. . "Everything has been studied and all the solutions are already known," said Mousson Finnigan, the head of the Organization for the Rehabilitation of the Environment. "But when it comes to implementation, it becomes a place where everybody's fighting for the money. They're not fighting for results."
. . While the Dominican Republic still has some of the most impressive forests in the Caribbean, parts of Haiti now resemble a moonscape of denuded mountains billowing dust. Hillsides are blasted away to make bricks for the capital of Port-au-Prince.
. . Without trees to anchor the soil, erosion has reduced Haiti's agricultural land, making the island more vulnerable to floods each hurricane season. More than 100 Haitians died in last year's floods, including dozens killed when a river jumped its banks during a gentle but steady rain unrelated to any tropical system. And in 2004, Tropical Storm Jeanne killed some 3,000 people in the coastal city of Gonaives alone.
. . And yet the trees keep falling. Orange fires can still be seen in the hills above the capital as farmers clear land at night. At the La Saline market, charcoal vendors arrive each day with mountains of bags, their faces coated with black dust.
Feb 13, 08: With thousands of scientists who study the earth gathered in San Francisco for the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting, news is flying about climate change, and it's bad.
. . One, ice melt in Greenland is accelerating beyond scientists' expectations, says Konrad Steffen, a UC-Boulder scientist. That acceleration means that the IPCC probably underestimated the impacts of Greenland ice melt on global sea level rises. New understanding of glacial activity could mean that sea level rise estimates will double or triple over the next five years. Two, U of Illinois atmospheric scientists have revised their models to better incorporate nitrogen availability, which impacts plants abilities to serve as "CO2 sinks" that remove CO2 from the air. Crops treated with fertilizer should be OK, but forests' ability to take in CO2 could be limited.
Feb 13, 08: The risk of a fatal heatwave in the UK within ten years is high, but overall global warming may mean fewer deaths due to temperature, a report says. A seriously hot summer between now and 2017 could claim more than 6,000 lives, the Department of Health report warns. But it also stresses that milder winters mean deaths during this time of year --which far outstrip heat-related mortality --will continue to decline.
. . There is at present a 25% chance that by 2017 south-east England will see a severe heatwave which could cause 3,000 immediate deaths and the same number of heat-related deaths throughout the summer. However, even 6,000 deaths pales in comparison with the number of cold-related deaths, which in the UK currently average about 20,000 per year.
. . It is also a mixed picture when it comes to the health impact of air pollution. As a result of regulations, levels of several key pollutants are likely to decline over the next 50 years, but the concentration of ozone may well increase. This is associated with breathing difficulties, particularly for asthmatics and those with existing lung problems, and could lead to 1,500 extra hospital admissions and deaths every year.
. . Skin cancer meanwhile is also likely to increase, although there are studies which suggest greater exposure to sunlight may prevent other forms of cancer.
. . While vector-borne diseases may not be the problem once thought, food-borne ones remain an issue: improved food hygiene will be necessary to prevent a 14.5% increase in food poisoning by bacteria such as Salmonella, which is affected by rising temperature.
. . Heavy rain over a short period can certainly increase the amount of bacteria in surface drinking water, while increasing temperatures may stop current disinfection methods from working properly --a challenge which needs to be addressed.
Feb 12, 08: Lake Mead, a key source of water for millions of people in the southwestern US, could go dry by 2021, a new study finds. (It's near Las Vegas, held by Boulder/Hoover dam). The study concludes that natural forces such as evaporation, changes wrought by global warming and the increasing demand from the booming Southwest population are creating a deficit from this part of the Colorado River system.
. . Along with Lake Powell, which is on the border between Arizona and Utah, Lake Mead supplies roughly 8 million people in the cities of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego, among others, with critical water supplies.
. . The study’s findings indicated that there is a 10% chance that Lake Mead could be dry by 2014 and a 50% chance that reservoir levels will drop too low to allow hydroelectric power generation by 2017.
. . Currently, Lake Mead —-located in Nevada and Arizona-— is half-full, as is Lake Powell, thanks to a recent string of dry years, researchers say. Both lakes help manage water resources for more than 25 million people in seven states.
. . Researchers said that if Lake Mead water levels drop below 1,000 feet, Nevada would lose access to all its river allocation, Arizona would lose much of the water that flows through the Central Arizona Project Canal, and power production would cease before the lake level reached bottom.
Feb 12, 08: La Nina Pacific cooling may last to mid-year: U.N. A sea-surface cooling in the Pacific, which may have contributed to strong hurricanes in the US and a freeze-up in China, could last at least until mid-year, the U.N. weather body WMO said.
Feb 11, 08: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged all nations to join private companies, civic groups and individuals this year in sustaining "the unprecedented momentum" to fight global warming. "If 2007 was the year when climate change rose to the top of the global agenda, 2008 is the time we must take concerted action", Ban said at the start of a two-day U.N. General Assembly debate to generate support for a new treaty by 2009 to fight global warming.
. . "The conference delivered what it set out to do", Ban said. "Now the real work begins. The challenge is huge. We have less than two years to craft an agreement on action that measures up to what the science tells us."
. . To avoid the worst, the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020 —-and by at least half by 2050. "This is just as important as stopping nuclear proliferation. This is just as important as stopping terrorism", New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in the keynote address.
. . The new agreement would replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The debate follows a recent report by the secretary-general which said global warming could cost the world up to $20 trillion over two decades for cleaner energy sources and do the most harm to people who can least afford to adapt.
Feb 11, 08: A U.S. team of scientists wanted to determine what was the Earth’s temperature several billions years ago. But because most of the team was composed of biologists, the researchers took an unusual approach. Instead of analyzing rock formations or measuring isotopes in fossils, they’ve ‘resurrected’ a variety of genes and proteins that existed several billion years ago. And they found that ‘the Earth endured a massive cooling period between 500 million and 3.5 billion years ago’, a result in full agreement with previous to geologic studies. They say that even if the Earth was very hot in the beginning, the environment cooled progressively by 30 °C during 3 billion years.
. . After scanning multiple databases, the scientists struck gold with a protein called elongation factor, which helps bacteria string together amino acids to form other proteins. Each bacterial species has a slightly different form of the protein: Bacteria that live in warmer environments have resilient elongation factors, which can withstand high temperatures without melting. The opposite is true for bacteria that live in cold environments. Armed with information about when bacterial species evolved, the scientists rebuilt 31 elongation factors from 16 ancient species. By comparing the heat sensitivity of the reconstructed proteins, they were able to discern how Earth’s temperature changed over the ages.
Feb 5, 08: The UK Treasury Committee has called for a new ministerial post to co-ordinate the fight against global warming. A cross-governmental approach to climate change was essential, said MP John McFall, the committee's chairman. The department was set up to encourage joined-up policy-making across the wide number of departments involved in addressing climate change. The government wants a 60% CO2 reduction by 2050.
Feb 4, 08: Researchers suggest spring is likely to arrive early in the UK.
Feb 4, 08: What farmers choose to grow over vast tracts of land could have an effect on regional weather patterns. A NASA-funded study will attempt to figure out exactly what the impact is.
Feb 1, 08: Heavy sediment deposited in the Mississippi River delta in the last ice age has caused New Orleans to sink and will continue to drag down coastal Louisiana bit by bit for hundreds of years, according to a new study.
. . The weight of glacial period sediments has caused coastal Louisiana to sink between .04 inches and 0.3 inches a year and will continue to do so for hundreds of years, the study said. New Orleans, it said, will sink about 0.17 inches a year, or nearly three feet over the next 200 years. Parts of the city are 5-10 feet below sea level *now.
Feb 1, 08: A meeting of delegates from the nations that emit the most pollutants ended without concrete targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, but participants praised what they saw as a new willingness by the United States to discuss possible solutions.
. . Delegates from 16 nations, plus the European Union and the UN, gathered in Hawaii this week at the invitation of the U.S. to discuss what should be included in a blueprint for combatting climate change. Among the topics were energy-efficient technologies, ways rich countries could help developing countries and countering deforestation.
. . "Of course, we want more. We hope in the next weeks after these discussions that we'll be able to deliver more", LaLonde said. "But it's a good start." Others drew blue chalk lines along Honolulu city streets to show where high tide would be after decades of global warming and rising sea levels.
Jan 31, 08: Climate change could cause severe crop losses in South Asia and southern Africa over the next twenty years, a study in the journal Science says. The findings suggest southern Africa could lose more than 30% of its main crop, maize, by 2030. In South Asia, losses of many regional staples, such as rice, millet and maize could top 10%, the report says.
. . The effects in these two regions could be catastrophic without effective measures to adapt to climate change. The majority of the world's one billion poor depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Yet, said lead author David Lobell, it is also "the human enterprise most vulnerable to climate change". The scale and speed of the effects on agriculture surprised the scientists.
Jan 31, 08: The UK's carbon emissions fell by just 0.1% last year, and the government has admitted it must do more to tackle climate change. The figures would have been worse if the UK's share of pollution from global flights and shipping had been included.
. . Analysis of the figures highlights key trends: emissions from homes went down, while road transport emissions went up. UK aviation pollution increased overall but emissions from domestic flights went down as some switched to rail.
. . The UK has made big cuts in greenhouse gases other than CO2, so it is still on track to go well beyond its Kyoto commitments. But ministers are getting worried by their inability to make substantial cuts in the main greenhouse gas CO2.
Jan 31, 08: Human activity such as driving and powering air conditioners is responsible for up to 60% of changes contributing to dwindling water supplies in the arid and growing West, a new study finds. Those changes are likely to accelerate, says the study, portending "a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States."
. . The study is likely to add to urgent calls for action already coming from Western states competing for the precious resource to irrigate farms and quench the thirst of growing populations. Devastating wildfires, avalanches and drought have also underscored the need.
Jan 31, 08: A water crisis in the Western United States is primarily due to manmade global warming, and it could force difficult choices for the region as farmers, residents and biofuel producers fight for their share of water.
. . 60% of the changes in the West's water cycle are due to increased atmospheric greenhouse gases, write scientists. Small increases in winter air temperature, the research found, reduce the amount of snow falling in mountains. In turn, snow packs that previously acted as time-release water storage provide less water as they melt in the spring.
. . "All of our infrastructure has been set up to take advantage of climate the way it was, but things are changing." Pederson declined to disclose specific investments, but he said the solution would be a combination of new technologies in desalination, water conservation technologies like greywater recycling and low water-volume toilets improving the water grid.
. . Dilapidated infrastructure wastes between 25 and 40% of all water, Pederson said. "Most infrastructure is made of ductile iron with a lifespan of 50 to 100 years", he said. "And most of it was put into the ground well before 50 to 100 years ago."
Jan 31, 08: A call for a ban on outdoor heaters has been backed by the European Parliament. MEPs voted to endorse a report that says a timetable should be set to phase out patio heaters, as well as standby modes on televisions. The report also calls on the European Commission to restrict electrical appliances to a maximum one watt standby, or phase out the standby mode altogether.
. . Fiona Hall told the BBC that figures she had seen showed that if a car was run for a year, it would emit three tons of CO2, while the figure for an outdoor heater would be four tons.
Jan 30, 08: When the water in the hurricane breeding grounds of the Atlantic warms one degree in the dead of summer, overall hurricane activity jumps by half, according to a new study.
. . Scientists have long known that hurricanes get their enormous energy from warm waters, so the warmer the water, the more fuel a storm has to either start up or get stronger. The study calculates how much storm frequency and strength is due to warmer sea water.
. . Saunders found a distinct numerical connection between the ups and downs of water temperatures and how nasty hurricane season gets. That helps explain why hurricanes have been so much worse in the past dozen years, and even why 2007 — with waters slightly cooler than normal —-was an exception and not that bad a hurricane year.
. . They found that changes in wind patterns caused a bigger shift in hurricane activity, but he concentrated his analysis on what sea temperature did to storms.
. . Saunders calculated that for every one degree Fahrenheit increase:
. . • Overall hurricane activity —-a combination of frequency and hurricane strength — increases 49%.
. . • The number of intense hurricanes, with winds over 110 mph, increases 45%.
. . • The number of hurricanes of any size increases 36%.
. . • The number of tropical storms increase 31%.
For example, 2005 was the most active hurricane season on record, and Atlantic water temperatures were the warmest, about 1.4 degrees above normal. That hurricane season set a new high with 28 storms and 13 hurricanes. Seven of the hurricanes were major storms.
. . In 1971, when the water temperatures were the coolest, there were 13 storms and six hurricanes, including one major one.
Jan 27, 08: While Nokia has joined the World Wildlife Fund's Climate Savers Program, Intel plans to buy 1.3 billion kilowatt hours a year of renewable energy certificates. That will make Intel the largest corporate buyer of green energy in the U.S.
. . Buying renewable energy certificates is not, however, the same as directly buying and using renewable energy. Intel is making the purchase through Sterling Planet, a company that will then distribute the investment to a variety of green energy producers across the U.S. The producers use wind, solar, hydroelectric, and biomass sources to produce energy that they then feed into the power grid. Those producers rely on the buyers of certificates to help fund their businesses, so Intel's investment is important to their success, said Matt Clouse, director of the Green Power Partnership at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Jan 27, 08: The methane in cow farts contributes to a surprisingly-high 5% of all global warming gasses out there, with methane being 22 times more potent at capturing atmospheric heat than CO2. The good news? A couple of Japanese scientists seem to have stumbled upon a way to neutralize this problem.
. . Costing about $1 per day per cow, some simple food additives that include a blend of nitrates and the amino acid cysteine could greatly suppress the methane production in a cow's stomach, making their emissions much more earth-friendly.
Jan 27, 08: Humans have altered Earth so much that scientists say a new epoch in the planet's geologic history has begun. Say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene. Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made epoch:
. . * Vastly altered sediment erosion and deposition patterns.
. . * Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature.
. . * Wholesale changes in biology, from altered flowering times to new migration patterns.
. . * Acidification of the ocean, which threatens tiny marine life that forms the bottom of the food chain.
The idea, first suggested in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, has gained steam. The paper calls on the International Commission on Stratigraphy to officially mark the shift.
. . In a separate paper last month in the journal Soil Science, researchers focused on soil infertility alone as a reason to dub this the Anthropocene Age. As an example, they said, agriculture in Africa "has so degraded regional soil fertility that the economic development of whole nations will be diminished without drastic improvements of soil management."
Jan 22, 08: A $180m (£90m) five-year project to revive sub-Saharan Africa's depleted soils has been launched in Nairobi. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa's (AGRA) Soil Health Program will work with 4.1 million farmers to regenerate 6.3m hectares of farmland. "Currently, farm yield in Africa is one-quarter of the global average, and one-third of Africans face chronic hunger."
. . Researchers said the poor conditions meant that farmers were more likely to clear forests and savannahs as they searched for arable land. "It can reduce the pressure to clear new land for agriculture, which in turn can assist in countering deforestation, conserving biodiversity and triggering improved management of Africa's wealth of natural and nature-based assets."
Jan 22, 08: Ecotimber's Buchner says half the timber sold in America is illegally harvested. From some countries in Latin America and Asia the wood “exported” is 80% illegal.
Jan 22, 08: Brazil has agreed on emergency measures to stem deforestation as government figures revealed a sharp increase in the rate of clearances in the Amazon. The steps were announced after an emergency cabinet meeting chaired by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The measures include sending extra federal police and environmental agents to stop farmers and cattle ranchers illegally felling any more rainforest. In the last five months of 2007, 3,235 sq km were lost.
. . People or businesses who buy anything produced on the deforested land could face fines, she said. The plan involves a 25% rise in the police force assigned to the region. The authorities will also monitor areas of deforestation, with the aim of stopping crop planting and cattle raising there.
Jan 22, 08: The world's climate is "clearly out of balance and is warming", the world's largest society of Earth and space scientists has said in a statement. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) warned that changes to the Earth's climate system were "not natural". Changes in temperature, sea level and rainfall were best explained by the increased concentration of greenhouse gases from human activities, it added.
. . The union called for carbon emissions to be cut more. It warned that the world faced a tough challenge over the coming 50 years: "Even the lower limit of impending climate change --an additional global mean warming of 1.0C above the last decade-- is far beyond the range of climate variability experienced during the past 1,000 years.
Jan 22, 08: European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has announced "historic" plans to make Europe "the first economy for the low-carbon age". He said Europeans wanted "a vision and a plan of action" against climate change and the measures would cost 3 euros (£2.10) a week for every citizen. The aim would be a 20% cut in the EU's greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, which could rise to 30% with a global deal.
. . He told the European Parliament there was a cost, "but it was manageable". Mr Barroso put the figure at 60bn euros a year until 2020: "a real commitment, but not a bad deal." It would mean a rise in electricity prices of 10-15%, but there would be less reliance on energy imports.
. . Each country has been given a national target for renewable energy. The UK's is 15%. Sweden which already has a thriving renewables industry has been given a tougher figure of 49%.
. . The target of powering 10% of Europe's road transport with biofuels has been retained. But the Commission has drawn up a set of criteria designed to ensure the fuels used bring carbon savings of at least 35% compared to petrol or diesel, without causing other environmental problems.
. . Before the commission's proposals are adopted, they will have to be endorsed by MEPs and member states. The final package might not come into force before the end of 2009.
Jan 22, 08: Global warming could reduce how many hurricanes hit the US, according to a new federal study that clashes with other research. The new study is the latest in a contentious scientific debate over how man-made global warming may affect the intensity and number of hurricanes.
. . In it, researchers link warming waters, especially in the Indian and Pacific oceans, to increased vertical wind shear in the Atlantic Ocean near the US. Wind shear —-a change in wind speed or direction-— makes it hard for hurricanes to form, strengthen and stay alive. With every degree Celsius that the oceans warm, the wind shear increases by up to 10 mph, weakening storm formation, said study author Chunzai Wang.
. . Critics say Wang's study is based on poor data that was rejected by scientists on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They said that at times only one in 10 North Atlantic hurricanes hit the U.S. coast and the data reflect only a small percentage of storms around the globe. Hurricanes hitting land "are not a reliable record" for how hurricanes have changed, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Jan 22, 08: Western winters are getting shorter because of dust kicked up by urban and agricultural development, a University of Utah researcher said. Thomas Painter said that disturbed particles from the Colorado Plateau mix with snow, limiting the heat it can reflect. As a result, today's snowpacks melt about a month earlier than they once did. Painter's research affirms longtime anecdotal claims that the dirtier snow is, the faster it melts.
. . Painter said dust's effects on snow are a global problem. The disappearance of central Asia's Aral Sea, for example, magnifies ecological devastation by sending plumes of dust off the dry lake bed. The dust blows east and settles in China's Tienshan mountain range.
Jan 22, 08: The president of the European Commmission has threatened to impose carbon tariffs on imports unless the US agrees to a global climate change deal. Jose Manuel Barroso wants to protect energy-intensive sectors such as aluminium, steel and cement. He says there is no point these industries cutting emissions in Europe if they lose business to countries with more lax rules on carbon emissions.
. . He said foreign firms should be forced to purchase the same EU carbon allowances European firms would have to buy, thereby levelling the industrial playing field.
Jan 21, 08: A Swedish university has received $590,000 in research funds to measure the greenhouse gases released when cows belch. About 20 cows will participate in the project. Researchers believe the level of methane released depends on the type of food they eat.
. . The cows involved in the study will have different diets and wear a collar device measuring the methane level in the air around them. He said 95% of the methane released by cows comes out through the mouth.
Jan 19, 08: The level of the Mediterranean Sea is rising rapidly and could increase by up to half a meter in the next 50 years, scientists in Spain have warned. A study by the Spanish Oceanographic Institute says levels have been rising since the 1970s with the rate of increase growing in recent years. It says even a small rise could have serious consequences in coastal areas. Scientists noted that sea temperatures had also risen significantly by 0.12 to 0.5C since the 1970s. The Nobel Prize-winning IPCC predicted a maximum sea level rise of 81cm this century.
Jan 18, 08: Invoking executive privilege, the Environmental Protection Agency refused to provide lawmakers with a full explanation of why it rejected California's greenhouse gas regulations.
Jan 18, 08: Green groups have accused the European Union of planning for failure in global climate change negotiations. Europe's leaders promised last year to cut greenhouse gases by 20% by the end of the next decade, or by 30% if other big polluters made similar efforts.
. . But a draft document shows that the European Commission is asking member states to just plan for the lower figure for the time being. Campaigners say the lower target could harm the EU's leadership on the issue.
. . The draft document makes it clear that the EU will wait until a new global climate deal is settled before deciding on its final target. This could take two or more years. So member states are being asked to plan for a 20% cut by 2020. The Commission sees this as a rational negotiating position, but green campaigners fear that any delay in planning for a 30% reduction will put it out of reach.
Jan 17, 08: Texans' fondness for large, wasteful vehicles has helped make the Lone Star State the biggest carbon polluter in the nation.
Jan 12, 08: Earlier blooms. Less snow to shovel. Unseasonable warm spells. Signs that winters in the Northeast are losing their bite have been abundant in recent years and now researchers have nailed down numbers to show just how big the changes have been.
. . A study of weather station data from across the Northeast from 1965 through 2005 found December-March temperatures increased by 2.5 degrees. Snowfall totals dropped by an average of 8.8 inches across the region over the same period, and the number of days with at least 1 inch of snow on the ground decreased by nine days on average. Stations in New England showed the strongest decreases in winter snowfall, about 3 inches a decade.
Jan 3, 08: Last year was the second warmest on record in the UK, according to figures released by the Met Office.
. . Since UK-wide records began in 1914, nine of the 10 warmest years have happened since 1989. 2007 was no exception, despite a natural weather event known as La Nina, which usually reduces global temperatures. The year was also characterized by relatively warm conditions at night, bringing fewer frosts --18 days fewer than normal for the UK overall, and warmer sea temperatures.
. . The UK's top 10 warmest years on record (in order) are 2006, 2007, 2003, 2004, 2002, 2005, 1990, 1997, 1949 and 1999.
. . Globally, there is a similar trend --the top 10 being 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2001, 1997 and 1995.
. . One idea being tested is to give people a "utility channel" on their TVs that shows their homes' real-time energy consumption and how the monthly electric bill would be trimmed by certain tweaks —-like turning up the fridge a few degrees.
Jan 3, 08: A Stanford U scientist has provided the first direct link between rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and increased human mortality, a finding that could bolster efforts by California and 15 other states to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.
. . The study by Mark Jacobson shows the added air pollution caused by each 1 degree C increase in temperature caused by CO2 leads to about 1,000 additional deaths in the U.S. and many more cases of respiratory illness and asthma. Jacobson estimates as many as 20,000 air-pollution related deaths may occur worldwide each year with each 1 degree Celsius increase.
. . Jacobson says his research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, has tremendous implications for California because six of the 10 U.S. cities with the worst air pollution are located there. (The Stanford Report doesn't cite a source for this, but it jibes with a 2004 survey by the American Lung Association.) Jacobson says his research found more than 30% of the 1,000 additional deaths attributed to rising temperatures would occur in California. That may bolster the state's efforts to regulate CO2 emissions from automobiles.
. . The federal government will open up nearly 46,000 square miles off Alaska's northwest coast to petroleum leases next month, a decision condemned by enviromental groups that contend the industrial activity will harm northern marine mammals.
. . The Minerals Management Agency planned the sale in the Chukchi Sea without taking into account changes in the Arctic brought on by global warming and proposed insufficient protections for polar bears, walrus, whales and other species that could be harmed by drilling rigs or spills, according to the groups.
. . The lease sale in an area slightly smaller than the state of Pennsylvania was planned without information as basic as the polar bear and walrus populations.
Jan 2, 08: There's more to the recent dramatic and alarming thawing of the Arctic region than can be explained by man-made global warming alone, a new study found. Nature is pushing the Arctic to the edge, too.
. . There's a natural cause that may account for much of the Arctic warming, which has melted sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers, according to a study in the journal Nature. New research points a finger at a natural and cyclical increase in the amount of energy in the atmosphere that moves from south to north around the Arctic Circle.
. . Rune Graversen, the Nature study co-author and a meteorology researcher at Stockholm U in Sweden, said a shift in energy transfer explains the thawing more, including what's happening in the atmosphere, but does not contradict consensus global warming science.
. . Oceanographer James Overland, who reviewed Graversen's study for Nature, said the research dovetails with an upcoming article of his which concludes that the Arctic thawing is a combination of the two. "If we didn't have the little extra kick from global warming then we wouldn't have gone past the threshold for the change in sea ice", said Overland, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's lab in Seattle.
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