Aquatic ‘Dead Zones’ Contributing to Climate Change
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science oceanographer Dr. Lou Codispoti.
As oxygen-deprived waters increase, they emit more greenhouse gasses into atmosphere.
The increased frequency and intensity of oxygen-deprived “dead zones” along the world’s coasts can negatively impact environmental conditions in far more than just local waters. In the March 12 edition of the journal Science, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science oceanographer Dr. Lou Codispoti explains that the increased amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) produced in low-oxygen (hypoxic) waters can elevate concentrations in the atmosphere, further exacerbating the impacts of global warming and contributing to ozone “holes” that cause an increase in our exposure to harmful UV radiation.
“As the volume of hypoxic waters move towards the sea surface and expands along our coasts, their ability to produce the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide increases,” explains Dr. Codispoti of the UMCES Horn Point Laboratory. “With low-oxygen waters currently producing about half of the ocean’s net nitrous oxide, we could see an additional significant atmospheric increase if these ‘dead zones’ continue to expand.”
Although present in minute concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere, nitrous oxide is a highly potent greenhouse gas and is becoming a key factor in stratospheric ozone destruction. For the past 400,000 years, changes in atmospheric N2O appear to have roughly paralleled changes in carbon dioxide CO2 and have had modest impacts on climate, but this may change. Just as human activities may be causing an unprecedented rise in the terrestrial N2O sources, marine N2O production may also rise substantially as a result of nutrient pollution, warming waters and ocean acidification. Because the marine environment is a net producer of N2O, much of this production will be lost to the atmosphere, thus further intensifying its climatic impact. (more…)
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New Study Debunks Myths About Amazon Rain Forests
Arindam Samanta, the study's lead author from Boston University.
A new NASA-funded study has concluded that Amazon rain forests were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought,” said Arindam Samanta, the study’s lead author from Boston University.
The comprehensive study published in the current issue of the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters used the latest version of the NASA MODIS satellite data to measure the greenness of these vast pristine forests over the past decade.
A study published in the journal Science in 2007 claimed that these forests actually thrive from drought because of more sunshine under cloud-less skies typical of drought conditions. The new study found that those results were flawed and not reproducible. (more…)
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Prehistoric Response to Global Warming Informs Human Planning Today
UB anthropologist Ezra Zubrow and colleagues are investigating climate changes experienced by ancient societies living in remote Arctic regions.
Since 2004, University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow has worked intensively with teams of scientists in the Arctic regions of St. James Bay, Quebec, northern Finland and Kamchatka to understand how humans living 4,000 to 6,000 years ago reacted to climate changes.
“The circumpolar north is widely seen as an observatory for changing relations between human societies and their environment,” Zubrow explains, “and analysis of data gathered from all phases of the study eventually will enable more effective collaboration between today’s social, natural and medical sciences as they begin to devise adequate responses to the global warming the world faces today.”
This study, which will collect a vast array of archaeological and paleoenvironmental data, began with the Social Change and the Environment in Nordic Prehistory Project (SCENOP), a major international research study by scientists from the U.S., Canada and Europe of prehistoric sites in Northern Quebec and Finland. (more…)
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Carbon Emissions ‘Outsourced’ to Developing Countries
China is by far the largest "exporter" of carbon dioxide emissions, as seen in this map of the net flow of emissions embodied in trade among the major exporting and importing countries. Arrows indicate direction and magnitude of flow; numbers are megatons (millions of tons). (Steven Davis/Carnegie Institution for Science)
A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution finds that over a third of carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumption of goods and services in many developed countries are actually emitted outside their borders. Some countries, such as Switzerland, “outsource” over half of their carbon dioxide emissions, primarily to developing countries. The study finds that, per person, about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide are consumed in the U.S. but produced somewhere else. For Europeans, the figure can exceed four tons per person. Most of these emissions are outsourced to developing countries, especially China.
“Instead of looking at carbon dioxide emissions only in terms of what is released inside our borders, we also looked at the amount of carbon dioxide released during the production of the things that we consume,” says co-author Ken Caldeira, a researcher in the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology.
Caldeira and lead author Steven Davis, also at Carnegie, used published trade data from 2004 to create a global model of the flow of products across 57 industry sectors and 113 countries or regions. By allocating carbon emissions to particular products and sources, the researchers were able to calculate the net emissions “imported” or “exported” by specific countries. (more…)
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Methane Releases from Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated
A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.
The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”
Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition. (more…)
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New Estimate of Glacier Melt Less Than Previously Thought
NAU geographer Erik Schiefer in British Columbia studying glacier melt. (Photo by Karl Schiefer)
The melting of glaciers is well documented, but when looking at the rate at which they have been retreating, a team of international researchers steps back and says not so fast.
Previous studies have largely overestimated mass loss from Alaskan glaciers over the past 40-plus years, according to Erik Schiefer, a Northern Arizona University geographer who coauthored a paper in the February issue of Nature Geoscience that recalculates glacier melt in Alaska.
The research team, led by Étienne Berthier of the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography at the Université de Toulouse in France, says that glacier melt in Alaska between 1962 and 2006 contributed about one-third less to sea-level rise than previously estimated.
Schiefer said melting glaciers in Alaska originally were thought to contribute about .0067 inches to sea-level rise per year. The team’s new calculations put that number closer to .0047 inches per year. The numbers sound small, but as Schiefer said, “It adds up over the decades.” (more…)
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Researchers Evaluate Climate Fluctuations from 115,000 Years Ago
Russian and German researchers took sediment probes of four silted up lakes in Central and Eastern Europe in order to reconstruct the climate of the Eemian Interglacial 115,000 years ago. At this time the Eemian Interglacial ended and was followed by the Weichselian Glacial which ended 15,000 years ago. (Frank W. Junge/SAW)
At the end of the last interglacial epoch, around 115,000 years ago, there were significant climate fluctuations. In Central and Eastern Europe, the slow transition from the Eemian Interglacial to the Weichselian Glacial was marked by a growing instability in vegetation trends with possibly at least two warming events. This is the finding of German and Russian climate researchers who have evaluated geochemical and pollen analyses of lake sediments in Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Russia. Writing in Quaternary International, scientists from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the Saxon Academy of Sciences (SAW) in Leipzig and the Russian Academy of Sciences say that a short warming event at the very end of the last interglacial period marked the final transition to the ice age.
The Eemian Interglacial was the last interglacial epoch before the current one, the Holocene. It began around 126,000 years ago, ended around 115,000 years ago and is named after the river Eem in the Netherlands. The followed Weichselian Glacial ended around 15,000 years ago is the most recent glacial epoch named after the Polish river Weichsel. At its peak around 21,000 years ago, the glaciers stretched as far as the south of Berlin (Brandenburg Stadium). (more…)
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Researchers Measure Impacts of Changing Climate on Ocean Biology
A bongo net, used to capture plankton, is recovered aboard the Delaware II. (Credit: Jerry Prezioso, NOAA)
A three-year field program now underway is measuring carbon distributions and primary productivity in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean to help scientists worldwide determine the impacts of a changing climate on ocean biology and biogeochemistry. The study, Climate Variability on the East Coast (CliVEC), will also help validate ocean color satellite measurements and refine biogeochemistry models of ocean processes.
Researchers from NOAA, NASA and Old Dominion University are collaborating through an existing NOAA Fisheries Service field program, the Ecosystem Monitoring or EcoMon program. The EcoMon surveys are conducted six times each year by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) at 120 randomly selected stations throughout the continental shelf and slope of the northeastern U.S., from Cape Hatteras, N.C., into Canadian waters to cover all of Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine. This area is known as the Northeast U.S. continental shelf Large Marine Ecosystem.
The climate study team will participate in three annual EcoMon cruises aboard the 155-foot NOAA Fisheries Survey Vessel Delaware II, based at the NEFSC’s laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. The most recent cruise returned to Woods Hole on February 18.
Findings from the climate impact project, funded by NASA, will help scientists better understand how annual and decadal-scale climate variability affects the growth of phytoplankton, which is the basis of the oceanic food chain. The project will also examine organic carbon distributions along the continental margin of the East Coast and collect data for ocean acidification studies. (more…)
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The Mass Media’s Role in Climate Change Skepticism
Maxwell Boykoff, a University of Colorado at Boulder professor and fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
Mass media have been a key vehicle by which climate change contrarianism has traveled, according to Maxwell Boykoff, a University of Colorado at Boulder professor and fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES.
Boykoff, an assistant professor of environmental studies, presented his research today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego. He spoke during a panel discussion titled “Understanding Climate Change Skepticism: Its Sources and Strategies.”
Boykoff’s segment was titled “Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change” and discussed prominent pitfalls.
“One problem occurs when outlier viewpoints are not individually evaluated in context,” said Boykoff. “A variety of influences and perspectives typically have been collapsed by mass media into one general category of skepticism. This has been detrimental both in terms of dismissing legitimate critiques of climate science or policy, as well as amplifying extreme and tenuous claims.”
Such claims are amplified when traditional news media position noncredible contrarian sources against those with scientific data, in a failed effort to represent opposing sides, said Boykoff. (more…)
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Ice Shelves Disappearing on Antarctic Peninsula
This image shows ice-front retreat in part of the southern Antarctic Peninsula from 1947 to 2009. USGS scientists are studying coastal and glacier change along the entire Antarctic coastline. The southern portion of the Antarctic Peninsula is one area studied as part of this project. (U.S. Geological Survey)
Ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide.
Research by the U.S. Geological Survey is the first to document that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. The USGS previously documented that the majority of ice fronts on the entire Peninsula have also retreated during the late 20th century and into the early 21st century.
The ice shelves are attached to the continent and already floating, holding in place the Antarctic ice sheet that covers about 98 percent of the Antarctic continent. As the ice shelves break off, it is easier for outlet glaciers and ice streams from the ice sheet to flow into the sea. The transition of that ice from land to the ocean is what raises sea level.
“This research is part of a larger ongoing USGS project that is for the first time studying the entire Antarctic coastline in detail, and this is important because the Antarctic ice sheet contains 91 percent of Earth’s glacier ice,” said USGS scientist Jane Ferrigno. “The loss of ice shelves is evidence of the effects of global warming. We need to be alert and continually understand and observe how our climate system is changing.” (more…)
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Geoengineering Solutions to Environmental Problems Could Miss Mark
Arizona State University engineering professor Brad Allenby.
The adage says that to discover the right solutions to a problem you first have to ask the right questions.
As Arizona State University engineering professor Brad Allenby sees it, our search for technological solutions to large-scale environmental problems sometimes gets off on the wrong track largely because we’re posing the wrong questions.
Particularly in the debates about how to respond to atmospheric greenhouse gas buildup, climate change and humankind’s impact on the global environment, Allenby says, “We are often framing the discussion from narrow and overly simplistic perspectives, but what we are dealing with are systems that are highly complex. As a result, the policy solutions we come up with don’t match the challenges we are trying to respond to.”
Allenby will offer his recommendations for reframing the approach to such challenges in his Feb. 19 presentation, “Technological Change and Earth Systems: A Critique of Geoengineering,” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Allenby is a professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, a part of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. (more…)
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Ocean Geoengineering Scheme No Easy Fix for Global Warming
This map displays simulated additional surface warming (in Celsius) for the year 2100 caused by the temporary use of artificial upwelling in the green areas for the time period 2011-2060. (IFM-GEOMAR)
Pumping nutrient-rich water up from the deep ocean to boost algal growth in sunlit surface waters and draw carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere has been touted as a way of ameliorating global warming. However, a new study led by Professor Andreas Oschlies of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel, Germany, pours cold water on the idea.
“Computer simulations show that climatic benefits of the proposed geo-engineering scheme would be modest, with the potential to exacerbate global warming should it fail,” said study co-author Dr Andrew Yool of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS).
If international governmental policies fail to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide to levels needed to keep the impacts of human-induced climate change within acceptable limits it may necessary to move to ‘Plan B’. This could involve the implementation of one or more large-scale geo-engineering schemes proposed for reducing the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere. (more…)
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Understanding Global Climate Change Through New Breakthroughs in Polar Research
Headquarters of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge. (William M. Connolley / GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2)
The latest findings from research on Antarctica’s rich marine life are presented this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Marine Biologist Huw Griffiths from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is involved in a major international investigation into the distribution and abundance of Antarctica’s vast marine biodiversity – the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML).
Griffiths presents results from the census – which began in 2005 – and describes how the investigation provides the benchmark for future studies on how the extraordinary and diverse range of sea-floor creatures living in Antarctica’s chilly waters will respond to predicted environmental change.
More than 6,000 different species living on the sea-floor have been identified so far and more than half of these are unique to the icy continent. A combination of long-term monitoring studies, newly gathered information on the marine life distribution and global ocean warming models, enable the scientists to identify Antarctica’s marine ‘biodiversity hotspots’.
Griffiths describes how krill populations (the shrimp-like invertebrates eaten by penguins, whales and seals) are reducing as a result of a decrease in sea-ice cover. A much smaller crustacean (copepods) is dominating the area once occupied by them. This shifts the balance of the food web to favour predators, like jellyfish, that are not eaten by penguins and other Southern Ocean higher predators. Sea-ice reduction is also affecting penguins that breed on the ice. (more…)
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Geoengineering and the Carbon Cycle Before Humans
Geoengineering — deliberate manipulation of the Earth’s climate to slow or reverse global warming — has gained a foothold in the climate change discussion. But before effective action can be taken, the Earth’s natural biogeochemical cycles must be better understood.
Two Northwestern University studies, both published online recently by Nature Geoscience, contribute new — and related — clues as to what drove large-scale changes to the carbon cycle nearly 100 million years ago. Both research teams conclude that a massive amount of volcanic activity introduced carbon dioxide and sulfur into the atmosphere, which in turn had a significant impact on the carbon cycle, oxygen levels in the oceans and marine plants and animals.
Both teams studied organic carbon-rich sediments from the Western Interior Seaway, an ancient seabed stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, to learn more about a devastating event 94.5 million years ago when oxygen levels in the oceans dropped so low that one-third of marine life died.
The authors of the first paper, titled “Volcanic triggering of a biogeochemical cascade during Oceanic Anoxic Event 2,” reveal that before oxygen levels dropped so precipitously there was a massive increase in oceanic sulfate levels. Their conclusion is based on analyses of the stable isotopes of sulfur in sedimentary minerals from the central basin of the Western Interior Seaway, located in Colorado. (more…)
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Climate Change Will Lead to Fewer Traffic Accidents in UK
Anna Andersson at the Department of Earth Sciences Centre, Physical Geography, University of Gothenburg. (Credit: Gothenburg University)
Climate change will lead to fewer traffic accidents in West Midlands, UK. Research from the University of Gothenburg estimates climate change to decrease the number of days with temperatures below zero degrees in West Midlands. It will also reduce the number of traffic accidents – and the need for winter road maintenance may decrease by almost 40 percent.
A study lead by Anna Andersson explores the link between winter road conditions and traffic accidents in Sweden and in West Midlands, UK. Andersson considers four different types of slipperiness, from snowy and icy roads to above-zero temperatures with slippery ice patches, and how climate change may affect these conditions in the next 90 years.
Andersson concludes that by the 2080s, West Midlands will have an average of 28 frosty days per year compared to today’s 69. Theoretically, this will reduce the number of traffic accidents by 43%. It may also lead to a decrease in the need for winter road maintenance by 38%.
However, the total number of accidents is not determined entirely by the number of below-zero days per year, since the road conditions are in fact the most dangerous at temperatures close to zero.
‘Roads can still be dangerous when the temperature rises above zero. When we don’t think it’s slippery, and even the thermometer tells us it’s not slippery, we tend to drive as if it were summer roads. But temperatures around zero often lead to slippery spots, increasing the risk for accidents’, says Andersson, at the Department of Earth Sciences.
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Team Finds Subtropical Waters Flushing Through Greenland Fjord
Fiamma Straneo from the physical oceanography department at Woods Hole Oceaonographic Institution, at work on the deck of the Arctic Sunrise. (© Greenpeace/ Nick Cobbing)
Waters from warmer latitudes — or subtropical waters — are reaching Greenland’s glaciers, driving melting and likely triggering an acceleration of ice loss, reports a team of researchers led by Fiamma Straneo, a physical oceanographer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
“This is the first time we’ve seen waters this warm in any of the fjords in Greenland,” says Straneo. “The subtropical waters are flowing through the fjord very quickly, so they can transport heat and drive melting at the end of the glacier.”
Greenland’s ice sheet, which is two-miles thick and covers an area about the size of Mexico, has lost mass at an accelerated rate over the last decade. The ice sheet’s contribution to sea level rise during that time frame doubled due to increased melting and, to a greater extent, the widespread acceleration of outlet glaciers around Greenland.
While melting due to warming air temperatures is a known event, scientists are just beginning to learn more about the ocean’s impact — in particular, the influence of currents — on the ice sheet.
“Among the mechanisms that we suspected might be triggering this acceleration are recent changes in ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which are delivering larger amounts of subtropical waters to the high latitudes,” says Straneo. But a lack of observations and measurements from Greenland’s glaciers prior to the acceleration made it difficult to confirm. (more…)
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Chemists Create Synthetic ‘Gene-Like’ Crystals for Carbon Dioxide Capture
UCLA chemists Omar M. Yaghi and Hexiang Deng led a team that created three-dimensional synthetic DNA-like crystals that have a sequence of information which is believed to code for carbon capture. The discovery, published in the journal Science, could result in a new way to capture heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions and could lead to cleaner energy. (CNSI, UCLA–Department of Energy Institute of Genomics and Proteomics)
UCLA chemists report creating a synthetic “gene” that could capture heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to global warming, rising sea levels and the increased acidity of oceans.
The research appears in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science.
“We created three-dimensional, synthetic DNA-like crystals,” said UCLA chemistry and biochemistry professor Omar M. Yaghi, who is a member of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA and the UCLA–Department of Energy Institute of Genomics and Proteomics. “We have taken organic and inorganic units and combined them into a synthetic crystal which codes information in a DNA-like manner. It is by no means as sophisticated as DNA, but it is certainly new in chemistry and materials science.”
The discovery could lead to cleaner energy, including technology that factories and cars can use to capture carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere.
“What we think this will be important for is potentially getting to a viable carbon dioxide–capture material with ultra-high selectivity,” said Yaghi, who holds UCLA’s Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Physical Sciences and is director of UCLA’s Center for Reticular Chemistry. “I am optimistic that is within our reach. Potentially, we could create a material that can convert carbon dioxide into a fuel, or a material that can separate carbon dioxide with greater efficiency.” (more…)
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Researchers Propose Rethinking Renewable Energy Strategy
Mechanical engineering professor Joshua Pearce. (Courtesy Queen's University /Tyler Ball)
Researchers at Queen’s University suggest that policy makers examine greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions implications for energy infrastructure as fossil fuel sources must be rapidly replaced by windmills, solar panels and other sources of renewable energy.
Their recommendations could be used to help policy makers restructure renewable energy production in a way that will optimize greenhouse gas emission reductions.
“The energy industry is expanding so rapidly that the dynamic nature of greenhouse gas emissions could pass a tipping point in the climate system if we’re not careful,” says Mechanical and Materials Engineering Professor Joshua Pearce, lead researcher on the study.
Pearce, Colin Law and Renee Kenny propose using dynamic life-cycle analyses for determining carbon-neutral growth rates that will not dramatically increase the level of GHG emissions as the energy industry expands.
This means, for example, weighing the benefits of dramatically increasing wind power against the increase in GHG emissions when the materials used to build the windmill are mined and when it is manufactured – not just after it’s been erected.
It also means decreasing production in some of the most polluted areas of the world, including China. (more…)
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Research Challenges Models of Sea Level Change During Ice-Age Cycles
by Gary Galluzzo
Theories about the rates of ice accumulation and melting during the Quaternary Period — the time interval ranging from 2.6 million years ago to the present — may need to be revised, thanks to research findings published by a University of Iowa researcher and his colleagues in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science.
Jeffrey Dorale, assistant professor of geoscience in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, writes that global sea level and Earth’s climate are closely linked. Data he and colleagues collected on speleothem encrustations (see photo right), a type of mineral deposit, in coastal caves on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca indicate that sea level was about one meter above present-day levels around 81,000 years ago. The finding challenges other data that indicate sea level was as low as 30 meters — the ice equivalent of four Greenland ice sheets — below present-day levels.
He said the sea level high stand of 81,000 years ago was preceded by rapid ice melting, on the order of 20 meters of sea level change per thousand years and the sea level drop following the high water mark, accompanied by ice formation, was equally rapid.
“Twenty meters per thousand years equates to one meter of sea level change in a 50-year period,” Dorale said. “Today, over one-third of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the coastline. Many of these areas are low-lying and would be significantly altered — devastated — by a meter of sea level rise. Our findings demonstrate that changes of this magnitude can happen naturally on the timescale of a human lifetime. Sea level change is a very big deal.” (more…)
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Radical New Directions Needed in Food Production to Deal with Climate Change
Nina Federoff, science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Yields from some of the most important crops begin to decline sharply when average temperatures exceed about 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 Fahrenheit. Projections are that by the end of this century much of the tropics and subtropics will regularly see growing season temperatures above that level, hotter than the hottest summers now on record.
An international panel of scientists writing in the Feb. 12 edition of the journal Science is urging world leaders to dramatically alter their notions about sustainable agriculture to prevent a major starvation catastrophe by the end of this century among the more than 3 billion people who live relatively close to the equator.
Specifically they urge world leaders to “get beyond popular biases against the use of agricultural biotechnology,” particularly crops genetically modified to produce greater yields in harsher conditions, and to base the regulations of such crops on the best available science.
“You’re looking at a 20 percent to 30 percent decline in production yields in the next 50 years for major crops between the latitudes of southern California or southern Europe to South Africa,” said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.
He is a coauthor of a Perspectives article in Science that urges food production experts, scientists and world leaders to begin thinking in dramatically different ways to meet food needs in a significantly warmer world. Lead author is Nina Federoff, science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. (more…)
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Alternative Futures of a Warming World
Lead author Richard Moss, a scientist with the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
An international team of climate scientists will take a new approach to modeling the Earth’s climate future, according to a paper in 11 February Nature. The next set of models will include, for the first time, tightly linked analyses of greenhouse gas emissions, projections of the Earth’s climate, impacts of climate change, and human decision-making.
This approach will influence the next international scientific assessment undertaken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It will provide the framework for thousands of individual scientific studies on climate impacts and adaptation, climate modeling, and changes in the way societies generate and use energy.
“This is an open-ended approach that enables us to compare the environmental and socio-economic effects of different potential responses to climate change,” said lead author Richard Moss, a scientist with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who performs climate change impacts research at the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Md. Moss has been a long-time contributor to the IPCC, previously directed the office of the US Global Change Research Program, and served as vice president for climate programs at the World Wildlife Fund.
“This comparative evaluation is extremely important to determine the technical, policy and economic requirements for reaching whatever society decides is a safe level of climate change. We hope to provide decision-makers with better tools to help people deal with a shifting climate,” he said. (more…)
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Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptic’s Position
by Warren Meyer, climate-skeptic.com
Once upon a time, Al Gore had a PowerPoint deck. Several years ago, I came to the conclusion that Gore’s presentation was deeply flawed, so I made my own PowerPoint deck in response, and have been updating it ever since. Here is the most recent version
Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptics Position (studio version) from Warren Meyer on Vimeo.
Then, Al Gore made a movie from his PowerPoint deck. He won an Oscar and a Nobel prize for his movie. Those are a bit out of my reach, so I will have to settle for actually being right. My previous movie showed my PowerPoint deck presented to a live audience, and can still be found online here. I felt the sound quality could be improved and the narration could be tighter, so I went into the “studio” to create a tighter version. The product of this is what I believe to be my best effort yet at explaining, in a comprehensive but simple manner, the science of the skeptic’s position to laymen.
Warren Meyer is the author of the web-site climate-skeptic.com, a site he originally started to help report climate developments in layman’s terms, particularly the science of the skeptic’s position. Warren has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University, where his studies focused on the control and stability of dynamic systems, issues at the very heart of the climate debate. He also has extensive experience with forecasting of dynamic and complex systems, with an MBA from Harvard University and years of experience with planning and forecasting at several Fortune 50 companies. Currently Warren runs a company called Recreation Resource Management, based in Phoenix, whose business is the private management of public parks and recreation.
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New Facility Expected to Clarify Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change
Chippewa National Forest bog.
Scientists hope to get a glimpse of the future with a proposed experiment facility in northern Minnesota that would allow them to adjust temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide across a broad range of possibilities projected by climate models.
Researchers believe that the experimental facility, proposed to be built in a high-carbon spruce bog within the Chippewa National Forest, would provide answers to key questions about the effects climate change could have on vegetation and ecosystems while addressing critical uncertainties related to the carbon cycle. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working in cooperation with the Department of Agriculture, are hopeful that construction of the facility could begin in December 2011.
Scientists are calling the multi-year experiment SPRUCE, which stands for Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Climatic and Environmental change. The carefully selected 20-acre site is located in a representative black spruce bog forest about 25 miles from Grand Rapids in the Forest Service Northern Research Station’s Marcell Experimental Forest.
“The experimental site includes an ecosystem considered especially vulnerable to climate change and thought to be near its tipping point with respect to logical projections of climate change,” said Paul Hanson, a member of ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division and the lead researcher for the project. (more…)
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Oceans Reveal Further Impacts of Climate Change
Antarctic marine biologist Jim McClintock.
The increasing acidity of the world’s oceans - and that acidity’s growing threat to marine species - are definitive proof that the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is causing climate change is also negatively affecting the marine environment, says world-renowned Antarctic marine biologist Jim McClintock, Ph.D., professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Biology.
“The oceans are a sink for the carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere,” says McClintock, who has spent more than two decades researching the marine species off the coast of Antarctica. Carbon dioxide is absorbed by oceans, and through a chemical process hydrogen ions are released to make seawater more acidic.
“Existing data points to consistently increasing oceanic acidity, and that is a direct result of increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere; it is incontrovertible,” McClintock says. “The ramifications for many of the organisms that call the water home are profound.”
A substance’s level of acidity is measured by its pH value; the lower the pH value, the more acidic is the substance. McClintock says data collected since the pre-industrial age indicates the mean surface pH of the oceans has declined from 8.2 to 8.1 units with another 0.4 unit decline possible by century’s end. A single whole pH unit drop would make ocean waters 10 times more acidic, which could rob many marine organisms of their ability to produce protective shells - and tip the balance of marine food chains.
“There is no existing data that I am aware of that can be used to debate the trend of increasing ocean acidification,” he says. (more…)
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