Wilkins Ice Bridge Collapse- pictures
Satellites Show Arctic Literally on Thin Ice
Andrill Demonstrates Climate Warming Affects Antarctic Ice Sheet Stability
EU: Earth warming faster
Human-Made CO2 on Exponential Rise
Peer Review and the Science Versus Opinion Smackdown
Alaska's Coast Disappearing At Record Rates
The dam infrastructure problem
SHRINKING FORESTS: THE MANY COSTS
UN's State Of The World's Forests Reveals Deforestation Is Speeding Up
Depletion of Prey Fish may be Starving the Oceans
Oil Giants Loath to Follow Obama's Green Lead
More Australian Weather Records Tumble
Climate Change To Spur Rapid Shifts In Wildfire Hotspots, Analysis Finds
Caffeine Reduces Pain During Exercise, Study Shows
Aerosols May Drive A Significant Portion Of Arctic Warming
When Oceans Get Warmer Carbon Dioxide Uptake On Marine Plankton Will Be Reduced, Potentially Increasing Climate Change
Climate Change Leads To Major Decrease In Carbon Dioxide Storage
Report lists America's 10 most endangered rivers
Prize for 'Sun in the box' cooker
Plastic Found in One-Third of Leatherback Turtles
U.N. climate talks threaten our survival: Saudi Arabia
Retraining America's workforce
FreeGreen offers free house plans
Wilkins Ice Bridge Collapse
A narrow ice bridge connecting Charcot Island and Latady Island-the last remnant of the northern part of Antarctica's Wilkins Ice Shelf-broke apart in early April 2009. These photo-like images, from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), show the break-up of the ice bridge.
In the lower image, taken by the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite on March 31, 2009, the ice bridge was still intact. The ice appears to be smooth, an unbroken surface. Less than a week later, late on April 6, the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite captured the top image. The smooth bridge is gone, replaced by chunks of ice. The breakup was initially observed in radar imagery by the European Space Agency.
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Satellites Show Arctic Literally on Thin Ice
The latest Arctic sea ice data from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that the decade-long trend of shrinking sea ice cover is continuing. New evidence from satellite observations also shows that the ice cap is thinning as well.
Arctic sea ice works like an air conditioner for the global climate system. Ice naturally cools air and water masses, plays a key role in ocean circulation, and reflects solar radiation back into space. In recent years, Arctic sea ice has been declining at a surprising rate.
Scientists who track Arctic sea ice cover from space announced today that this winter had the fifth lowest maximum ice extent on record. The six lowest maximum events since satellite monitoring began in 1979 have all occurred in the past six years (2004-2009).
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Andrill Demonstrates Climate Warming Affects Antarctic Ice Sheet Stability
A five-nation scientific team has published new evidence that even a slight rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, one of the gases that drives global warming, affects the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The massive WAIS covers the continent on the Pacific side of the Transantarctic Mountains. Any substantial melting of the ice sheet would cause a rise in global sea levels.
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EU: Earth warming faster
OSLO/BONN (Reuters) - Global warming is likely to overshoot a 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) rise seen by the European Union and many developing nations as a trigger for "dangerous" change, a Reuters poll of scientists showed on Tuesday.
Nine of 11 experts, who were among authors of the final summary by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 (IPCC), also said the evidence that mankind was to blame for climate change had grown stronger in the past two years.
Giving personal views of recent research, most projected on average a faster melt of summer ice in the Arctic and a quicker rise in sea levels than estimated in the 2007 report, the most authoritative overview to date drawing on work by 2,500 experts.
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Human-Made CO2 on Exponential Rise
More People, More CO2
March 27, 2009 -- Human-produced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing exponentially, and has been for at least the last 50 years, according to a new study.
Using measurements of atmospheric CO2 from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, David Hofmann of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. and a team of researchers determined that humanity's contribution of the greenhouse gas has been growing at a steady 2.3 percent since recording began in 1958. At that rate, CO2 doubles every 30 years.
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Peer Review and the Science Versus Opinion Smackdown
Peer Review - a process by which something proposed (as for research or publication) is evaluated by a group of experts in the appropriate field. – Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Over the weekend, Brian Angliss posted a piece over at Scholars and Rogues on why scientific peer review matters. He wrote it in response to climate change deniers who like to argue that peer review is useless and therefore, just because climate science is peer reviewed, it isn't necessarily true.
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Alaska's Coast Disappearing At Record Rates
Talk of the Nation, March 27, 2009 - Reporting in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers find that a portion of the Alaskan coast is eroding at a rate of 45 feet per year. Chris Arp, a research ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage, explains why the coast is crumbling faster than before.
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The dam infrastructure problem
It's against this backdrop that the American Society of Civil Engineers recently said over 1,800 dams nationwide are deficient, and their failure could result in loss of life. That's almost a five-fold increase from 2001.
"There's a huge gap between what we've been able to repair and what we need to repair," said Brad Larossi, a dam safety manager who helped author the engineer society's report. "And the number has been growing dramatically."
The price tag to fix these worst-case dams is around $8 billion, said Larossi. Fixing all the dams that need repair - estimated at over 4,000 - would run closer to $50 billion.
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SHRINKING FORESTS: THE MANY COSTS
Lester R. Brown
In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo "ordered the military and police to crack down on illegal logging, after flash floods and landslides, triggered by rampant deforestation, killed nearly 340 people," according to news reports. Fifteen years earlier, in 1989, the government of Thailand announced a nationwide ban on tree cutting following severe flooding and the heavy loss of life in landslides. And in August 1998, following several weeks of record flooding in the Yangtze River basin and a staggering $30 billion worth of damage, the Chinese government banned all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the basin. Each of these governments had belatedly learned a costly lesson, namely that services provided by forests, such as flood control, may be far more valuable to society than the lumber in those forests.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the earth's forested area was estimated at 5 billion hectares. Since then it has shrunk to just under 4 billion hectares, with the remaining forests rather evenly divided between tropical and subtropical forests in developing countries and temperate/boreal forests in industrial countries. Since 1990, the developing world has lost some 13 million hectares of forest a year. This loss of about 3 percent each decade is an area roughly the size of Greece.
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UN's State Of The World's Forests Reveals Deforestation Is Speeding Up
Despite the alarming conclusions of the UN's latest State of the World's Forests, the mainstream media has devoted surprisingly little attention to the report. Snowed under by other news developments as it may have been, global deforestation is by no means insignificant. It's taking place at shocking rates, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)'s bi-annual report reveals.
Despite people's awareness that forests are key to the survival of the planet and the human race, deforestation rates are ever increasing. The expansion of large palm oil and soy plantations has been the main reason why forests are disappearing and the world's biodiversity resources are shrinking.
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Depletion of Prey Fish may be Starving the Oceans
Rome, Italy -- Scientists are finding evidence of widespread malnutrition in commercial and recreational fish, marine mammals, and seabirds because of the global depletion of the small fish they need to survive, according to Oceana's new report, "Hungry Oceans: What Happens When the Prey is Gone?" These "prey fish" underpin marine food webs and are being steadily exhausted by heavy fishing, increasing demand for aquaculture feed, and climate change.
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Oil Giants Loath to Follow Obama's Green Lead
The Obama administration wants to reduce oil consumption, increase renewable energy supplies and cut carbon dioxide emissions in the most ambitious transformation of energy policy in a generation.
But the world's oil giants are not convinced that it will work. Even as Washington goes into a frenzy over energy, many of the oil companies are staying on the sidelines, balking at investing in new technologies favored by the president, or even straying from commitments they had already made.
Royal Dutch Shell said last month that it would freeze its research and investments in wind, solar and hydrogen power, and focus its alternative energy efforts on biofuels. The company had already sold much of its solar business and pulled out of a project last year to build the largest offshore wind farm, near London.
BP, a company that has spent nine years saying it was moving "beyond petroleum," has been getting back to petroleum since 2007, paring back its renewable program. And American oil companies, which all along have been more skeptical of alternative energy than their European counterparts, are studiously ignoring the new messages coming from Washington.
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More Australian Weather Records Tumble
The Big Dry Down Under just got a whole lot drier. The first three months of 2009 in the already parched Murray Darling basin had the least amount of rainfall since Australian weather records began 117 years ago.
This massive drainage ostensibly supports $9 billion in agriculture but has been hammered by what some are calling the worst drought in 1000 years. Authorities in Australia make no bones about the cause of this freaky weather.
"We've had big droughts before and big floods before, but what we didn't have was climate change," said Rob Freeman, the chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.
The Murray Darling is home to 2 million people who may not even have enough water to survive in the future. "I'd be loath to say that critical human needs will always be secure", warned Freeman.
The recent rainfall record was not the only smashed. Water inputs for three-year period ending March 2009 were less than half of the previous record from the great drought of 1943-1946.
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Climate Change To Spur Rapid Shifts In Wildfire Hotspots, Analysis Finds
ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2009) - Climate change will bring about major shifts in worldwide fire patterns, and those changes are coming fast, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with scientists at Texas Tech University.
Researchers used thermal-infrared sensor data obtained between 1996 and 2006 from European Space Agency satellites in their study of pyrogeography – the distribution and behavior of wildfire – on a global scale. They not only got a global view of where wildfires occur, but they determined the common environmental characteristics associated with the risk of those fires. They then incorporated those variables into projections for how future climate scenarios will impact wildfire occurrence worldwide.
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Caffeine Reduces Pain During Exercise, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Apr. 7, 2009) - Stopping to smell the coffee – and enjoy a cup of it – before your morning workout might do more than just get your juices flowing. It might keep you going for reasons you haven't even considered.
As a former competitive cyclist, University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Robert Motl routinely met his teammates at a coffee shop to fuel up on caffeine prior to hitting the pavement on long-distance training rides.
"The notion was that caffeine was helping us train harder … to push ourselves a little harder," he said.
The cyclists didn't know why it helped, they just knew it was effective.
"I think intuitively a lot of people are taking caffeine before a workout and they don't realize the actual benefit they're experiencing. That is, they're experiencing less pain during the workout," Motl said.
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Aerosols May Drive A Significant Portion Of Arctic Warming
ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2009) - Though greenhouse gases are invariably at the center of discussions about global climate change, new NASA research suggests that much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols.
Emitted by natural and human sources, aerosols can directly influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation. The small particles also affect climate indirectly by seeding clouds and changing cloud properties, such as reflectivity.
A new study, led by climate scientist Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, used a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to investigate how sensitive different regional climates are to changes in levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and aerosols.
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When Oceans Get Warmer Carbon Dioxide Uptake On Marine Plankton Will Be Reduced, Potentially Increasing Climate Change
ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2009) - The global ocean plays a central role in Earth's climate system and has considerably slowed down climate change by taking up about one third of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted through human activities.
To what extent this will continue in the future depends on a variety of physical and chemical processes - and, as marine scientists from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) together with colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (Bremerhaven, Germany) and the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research (Warnemünde, Germany) have now shown in an experiment with natural plankton communities, also depends on biological factors.
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Climate Change Leads To Major Decrease In Carbon Dioxide Storage
ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2009) - The North Atlantic Ocean is one of the Earth's tools to offset natural carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, the 'carbon sink' in the North Atlantic is the primary gate for carbon dioxide (CO2) entering the global ocean and stores it for about 1500 years. The oceans have removed nearly 30 per cent of anthropogenic (man-made) emissions over the last 250 years. However, several recent studies show a dramatic decline in the North Atlantic Ocean's carbon sink.
Concerned by this decline, a group of international scientists, including Helmuth Thomas, professor of oceanography at Dalhousie University, spent the last two years investigating the world's largest carbon sink. They weren't sure what was causing the decrease, whether it was man-made or natural reasons.
"There were massive changes in the coastal carbon cycle, and it was similar throughout the ocean," says Dr. Thomas, who wrote about the study in Global Biogeochemical Cycles.
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Report lists America's 10 most endangered rivers
(CNN) -- Rivers are the arteries of our infrastructure. Flowing from highlands to the sea, they breathe life into ecosystems and communities.
But many rivers in the United States are in trouble.
Rivers in Alaska, California and the South are among the 10 most endangered, according to a report released Tuesday by American Rivers, a leading river conservation group.
The annual report uses data from thousands of rivers groups, local governments, environmental organizations and citizen watchdogs to identify waterways under imminent threat by dams, industry or development.
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Prize for 'Sun in the box' cooker
A cheap solar cooker has won first prize in a contest for green ideas.
The Kyoto Box is made from cardboard and can be used for sterilising water or boiling or baking food.
The Kenyan-based inventor hopes it can make solar cooking widespread in the developing world, supplanting the use of wood which is driving deforestation.
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Plastic Found in One-Third of Leatherback Turtles
April 9, 2009 -- Leatherback turtles are ancient creatures with a modern problem: Plastic.
A new study looked at necropsy reports of more than 400 leatherbacks that have died since 1985 and found plastic in the digestive systems of more than a third of the animals. Besides plastic bags, the turtles had swallowed fishing lines, balloon fragments, spoons, candy wrappers and more.
Plastic was probably not the cause of death in most cases. Nevertheless, the study is an important wake-up call for a growing garbage problem.
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U.N. climate talks threaten our survival: Saudi Arabia
BONN, Germany (Reuters) - United Nations climate talks threaten Saudi Arabia's economic survival and the kingdom wants support for any shift from fossil fuels to other energy sources such as solar power, its lead climate negotiator said.
Contrasting interests of different countries are challenging faltering climate talks, meant to forge by December a new global deal in Copenhagen to curb man-made climate change.
Small island states say their survival is threatened by rising seas. But Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, says it could suffer from any pact which curbs oil demand by penalizing carbon emissions.
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Retraining America's workforce
With the national unemployment rate continuing to trudge upward and dismal economic news stealing the headlines daily, a record number of Americans are deciding to hit the books. Post-secondary education is luring thousands of laid-off workers with the promise of readying them for jobs in the highly touted "green" jobs sector.
The global environmental goods and services sector is expected to double by 2020 to become a $2.7 billion market, according to a 2008 United Nations Environment Programme study. And the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that in the next 10 years, the construction industry alone must recruit and train almost 250,000 workers annually to meet demand-a figure that doesn't include new jobs created by retrofitting and weatherizing existing buildings.
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FreeGreen offers free house plans
The idea of "open source" was once the domain of software geeks and hackers working with freely available and imminently changeable software, such as the operating system Linux. A couple of Bostonians with backgrounds in architecture and green building consulting believe that providing open source-both for free and with a cost-green building plans will become a profitable business.
Charlestown-based FreeGreen.com, which co-founder and CEO, David Wax insists is an information and media company, not a green building one, first offered its own green building design plans for free in April 2008. Almost a year later, it opened the site to architects who wanted to upload their own designs, allowing them to price each design as they saw fit. Wax says the open source side of the business serves two purposes. First, FreeGreen.com is now stocked with much more fresh content than its staff could ever hope to generate. The site also brought more architects into the FreeGreen fold.
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