Biology
Breach
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Climate
Chaos
December 7, 2013, from Dartmouth College
... The findings suggest more frequent logging or deforestation may better serve our planet and pocketbooks in high latitude areas where snowfall is common and timber productivity is low. Such a scenario could involve including snow cover/albedo in existing greenhouse gas exchanges like the Kyoto protocol or a cap-and-trade program or ecosystem services market in which landowners are paid to maintain snow cover and produce timber rather than conserve forests and store carbon. Previous studies have put a price on many ecosystem services -- or services that nature provides to humans that have both economic and biological value, such as drinking water and crop pollination -- but the Dartmouth study is the first to do so for albedo, or the surface reflection of incoming solar energy.
The findings contrast with the dominant paradigm that including forest climate mitigation services such as carbon storage on compliance markets will lead to the conservation of forests. Instead, the findings show that in some areas, it is better to have snow act as a natural mirror if you want to use forests for climate-related purposes.
December 7, 2011, from Reuters
The world's three biggest polluters China, the United States and India refused to move toward a new legal commitment to curb their carbon emissions Tuesday, increasing the risk that climate talks will fail to clinch a meaningful deal this week.
The European Union is leading efforts to keep alive the Kyoto Protocol, the world's only legal pact to tackle climate change, with a conditional promise to sign a global deal that would force big emitters to change their ways.
December 7, 2011, from Indiana Public Media
Senator Richard Lugar, R-Ind., is leading a charge to push the construction of an oil pipeline through Congress. The North American Energy Security Act would force the Obama administration to issue a construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days of the bill's passage.
Lugar says the pipeline, which would bring Canadian crude oil directly to gulf coast refineries, is a "shovel ready" jobs project that would also reduce America's dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East and Venezuela.
December 7, 2011, from Associated Press
Researchers in Chile released a series of time-lapse photos Wednesday showing the dramatic retreat of a glacier in Patagonia.
The Jorge Montt Glacier is shrinking faster than any other in Chile, with its snout retreating 1 kilometer (more than a half mile) between February 2010 and January 2011, glaciologist Andres Rivera said.
Rivera said that global warming is a factor and that the glacier also is melting especially quickly because it partly rests in the waters of a growing fjord.
December 7, 2009, from BBC
Nearly two-thirds of 24,071 people polled in 23 countries said climate change was a "very serious" problem -- up from 44 percent in a GlobeScan 1998 poll.
There was a roughly equal split between people who wanted their governments to push for rapid action on climate change and those favouring a gradual approach...The US and China buck the general trend, becoming less concerned about climate change over the past two years.
December 7, 2009, from Agence France-Presse
AROUND 60 families have already been forced away from the once idyllic fishing community of Khun Samutchine, as the sea that local people rely on for their livelihood advances inland by more than 20m a year.
"I live on somebody else's land, I can't escape the village because I'm too poor," Noo Wisuksin, 71, said as she pointed to the spot in the water where her home used to be decades ago.
She is one of 25 million people under threat in Thailand's vast Chao Phraya river delta, which is sinking because of river damming and the clearing of mangrove forests, as climate change pushes up sea levels.
December 7, 2009, from Kampala New Vision
Ice is melting away on the world's highest mountains. The Rwenzori in western Uganda, the Himalayas of India and the world's highest mountain, Everest, are losing their glaciers due to global warming and the resultant climate change... The scientists, in their latest report based on 95 years of collecting data, stated that the rapid melting of the Rwenzori ice-cap over the past century provides dramatic evidence of global warming.
Since 1912, 85 percent of the glacier has disappeared and the melting appears to be rising. Twenty-six per cent of the ice has disappeared since 2000. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of Ohio University, concludes that the primary cause of the ice loss is the increase in global temperature.
December 7, 2009, from University of Bristol, via EurekAlert
In the long term, the Earth's temperature may be 30-50 percent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this week.
The results show that components of the Earth's climate system that vary over long timescales -- such as land-ice and vegetation -- have an important effect on this temperature sensitivity, but these factors are often neglected in current climate models.... Lunt said, "We found that, given the concentrations of carbon dioxide prevailing three million years ago, the model originally predicted a significantly smaller temperature increase than that indicated by the reconstructions. This led us to review what was missing from the model."
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
December 7, 2009, from Scientific American
Overlooking the city of Stuttgart in southern Germany, a four-story modern glass house stands like a beacon of environmental sustainability. Built in 2000, it was the first in a series of buildings that are "triple-zero," a concept developed by German architect and engineer Werner Sobek, which signifies that the building is energy self-sufficient (zero energy consumed), produces zero emissions, and is made entirely of recyclable materials (zero waste). Since the construction of the first triple-zero home, Werner Sobek's firm of engineers and architects, based in Stuttgart, has designed and built five more in Germany, with a seventh planned in France. The energy used by these buildings, including the four-story tower where Sobek resides, comes from solar cells and geothermal heating.
The most recent addition to the triple-zero series raises the bar for energy efficiency: It produces more energy than it uses...
December 7, 2009, from National Geographic News
Nature has gone wireless in Ireland, where scientists have outfitted a major river with sensors that detect spikes in pollution in real time. Sensors recently placed at various points in the River Lee, near the city of Cork, send information on pollution levels back to a data center. Water managers can keep tabs on pollutants entering the river and, if need be, mount an immediate response.
Called the DEPLOY project, the program was developed as a cheaper alternative to sending out scientists to collect water samples several times a day. In addition, the technology can identify a disastrous influx of pollution, such as toxic industrial-chemical spills, before fish go belly up.
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