Climate Articles
The Truth About Glass Recycling
Before you deposit the next beer or wine bottle into your blue bin, here are a few things to know about recycling your favorite sand-based product:
1. It has the quickest turnaround of any curbside product, back on store shelves in as little as 30 days
2. There's a strong market for recycled glass, and the demand is not currently met
3. A good portion of glass that you place in your recycling bin is not actually recycled
What is Downcycling?
According to O-I Global, the leading glass manufacturer in North America, about 1.6 million tons of glass are downcycled, translating to almost 40 percent of the 4.2 million tons collected annually for recycling. Furthermore, this 4.2 million tons represents only 25 percent of total glass manufactured, as shown in the chart below.
Let's start by explaining what happens to all this glass that isn't reprocessed into new containers. To do this, we need to understand the concept of downcycling.
Downcycling is the process by which materials are recycled into a product of lesser-quality. An example for glass containers would be fiberglass or using it as an additive in concrete or ceramic tiles. The decision to downcycle glass is usually based on the quality of material, but who makes that call?
"This is most often the decision of the Material Recovery Facility (MRF)," says Paul Smith, O-I's Global Sourcing Manager of Cullet. "Aggregate use of glass is important but limited in application. The recycling rate through MRFs could improve."
Desert icon Joshua trees are vanishing, scientists say
The ancient plants are dying in the park, the southern-most boundary of their limited growing region, scientists say. Already finicky reproducers, Joshua trees are the victim of global warming and its symptoms -- including fire and drought -- plus pollution and the proliferation of non-native plants. Experts expect the Joshuas to vanish entirely from the southern half of the state within a century.
Read More...
Close Relationship Between Past Warming And Sea-level Rise
ScienceDaily (June 22, 2009) - A team from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS), along with colleagues from Tübingen (Germany) and Bristol presents a novel continuous reconstruction of sea level fluctuations over the last 520 thousand years. Comparison of this record with data on global climate and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels from Antarctic ice cores suggests that even stabilisation at today's CO2 levels may commit us to sea-level rise over the next couple of millennia, to a level much higher than long-term projections from the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Read More...
Ice Volume Of Switzerland's Glaciers Calculated
ScienceDaily (June 22, 2009) - Swiss glaciers have lost a lot of ice in recent years due to increased melting. As temperatures climb, so do the fears that the glaciers could one day disappear altogether. Until now it could only be estimated approximately how big the ice volume in the Swiss Alps actually is and how it has changed in recent years.
Read More...
Study warns of cataclysmic melting of glaciers
It's a little-known natural wonder along Baffin Island's rugged east coast, a spectacular, 110-km-long channel lined by towering cliffs that - despite its extreme remoteness - is a mecca for base-jumping enthusiasts from around the world.
But U.S. scientists who have reconstructed a cataclysmic glacial meltdown in prehistoric Canada say Nunavut's Sam Ford Fiord is also a sentinel of danger in the age of climate change, showing just how quickly the planet's massive coastal glaciers could disappear and send global sea levels surging.
Their study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, says the rapid melting of the fiord's colossal, kilometre-deep glacier about 9,500 years ago is proof that similar features found today in Greenland, Canada and Antarctica could be lost "in a geologic instant."
Read More...
CHILEAN GLACIERS MELTING AT UNPRECEDENTED RATES
NASA Scientists Reveal Patagonia Glaciers Are Losing Ice Mass In Higher Zones
The latest research expedition to the Southern Patagonia Ice Field revealed that alpine glaciers in the Chilean and Argentine Andes are disappearing at much faster rates than previously anticipated by the scientific community.
A preliminary analysis by a team of scientists from NASA and Chile's Valdivia-based Center of Scientific Studies (CECS), which commenced an expedition to the Ice Field in October 2008, sheds light on the alarming speed at which the glaciers are depleting.
The scientists discovered that the masses of ice in the Patagonia are melting in larger proportions and in much higher alpine zones than in any other part of the world, including Alaska and the Himalayas. Glacier ice accounts for around 75 percent of the world's fresh water.
"The loss of ice mass in the higher zones is the really new phenomenon," said Gino Casassa, a CECS glaciologist. "At least this is what we are seeing with the preliminary results which we have just received."
Read More...
'Climate change is already here'
Tiny island nations in the Pacific are now feeling the impact of rising sea levels linked to climate change-from disappearing coastal villages to washed-out shores, flooded streets and taro patches, landslides and contamination of drinking water-even as the rest of the world are still thinking that climate change is far off into the future.
"It's happening. Climate change is no longer a future thing. It's already here, it's already on our shores," said Joe Konno of the Federated States of Micronesia's National Office of Environment and Emergency Management during yesterday's opening of the 26th Pacific Islands Environment Conference at the Saipan World Resort.
Konno showed conference participants pictures of disappearing coastlines and a washed out graveyard on one of the atolls in the FSM to dramatize his point.
Read More...
Climate change shortens fishing season
MANILA, Philippines--The rapidly changing weather pattern blamed on global warming is hurting the fishing industry, depriving fishermen and their families not only of income but also their own places to live.
However, the government seems unprepared to respond to the effects of global warming as well as to its impact on the population, mostly the poor, who are at risk, civil society groups said on Wednesday.
In a study conducted three months ago on Camiguin Island, the umbrella group NGOs for Fisheries Reform (NRF) found that fishermen suffered from twin effects of global warming: "We found the social and economic impact of climate change on coastal communities," NRF's Dennis Calvan said.
Fishermen on the island would usually go out to sea from January to May. But the fishing season has become shorter as heavy rains and strong waves now begin as early as late March or early April, Calvan said.
But their pockets are not the only ones hurting: Families living near the sea are also displaced by the rising sea level. "There are settlements near the shores which are now reached by the sea," Calvan said.
Read More...
Climate change threatens state's irrigation industry
But with Nebraska now the nation's leading irrigation state, a new federal report raises concerns that climate change could have a long-term impact on the state's groundwater reserves.
Last year, Nebraska farmers achieved a total corn production of 1.39 billion bushels. Of that, 960 million bushels were grown on irrigated acres. The average irrigated acre had a yield of 184 bushels, compared to 130 bushels per acre for dryland corn. Of the 8.8 million acres of corn planted last year in Nebraska, irrigated acres accounted for 5.36 million.
State farmers also had 2.24 million acres of soybeans under irrigation out of 4.9 million acres harvested last year.
The report could put pressure on Nebraska to put further limitations on irrigation development in the state.
According to the report, projected increases in temperature, evaporation and drought frequency add to concerns about the region's declining water resources.
The federal report said that most of the region's water comes from the High Plains aquifer (also referred to by the name of its largest formation, the Halala aquifer), from which water withdrawals already outpace recharge. Rising temperatures, faster evaporation rates, and more sustained drought brought on by climate change will add more stress to overtaxed water resources, the report said.
Read More...
Evolution faster when it's warmer
Climate could have a direct effect on the speed of "molecular evolution" in mammals, according to a study.
Researchers have found that, among pairs of mammals of the same species, the DNA of those living in warmer climates changes at a faster rate.
These mutations - where one letter of the DNA code is substituted for another - are a first step in evolution.
The study, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, could help explain why the tropics are so species-rich.
DNA can mutate and change imperceptibly every time a cell divides and makes a copy of itself.
But when one of these mutations causes a change that is advantageous for the animal - for example, rendering it resistant to a particular disease - it is often "selected for", or passed down to the next few generations of that same species.
Such changes, which create differences within a population but do not give rise to new species, are known as "microevolution".
Read More...
Study: Southwest temps could rise 4 to 10 degrees by 2090
LAKE TAHOE - With Lake Tahoe temperatures up by a 2-degree average since 1939, scientists are studying how warmer weather could affect the lake's environment and ecology.
“There is definitely global warming going on,” said Jim Ashby, a climatologist with the Western Regional Climate Center out of Reno. “The question is how much of the rise (in temperature) is due to global warming and how much is due to development.”
While Lake Tahoe has not seen as dramatic of an increase in temperature as Reno, temperatures have increased from an average of 42.37 degrees between 1939 to 1948, to 44.62 degrees between 1999 and 2008, according to WRCC data.
Tahoe is a prime place to compare temperatures to determine the effects of global warming because it is not an urban area, Ashby said. Because it does not have dense development, the temperature increases in Tahoe are more likely to be reflective of global warming trends, he said.
Read More...
Mountain snow melts earlier, changing growth patterns, due to blowing dust
Throughout memory the warmth of spring has begun the mountain snowmelt, bringing life-giving water to greening plants so they can blossom and renew their species.
But now, scientists say, the timing is being thrown off by desert dust stirred as global warming dries larger areas and human activity increases in those regions.
This dust darkens the surface of winter snows, warming it by absorbing sunlight that the white surface would have reflected. That causes the snow to melt earlier than in the past, running off before the air has warmed enough to spur plant growth, researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It is striking how different the landscape looks as result of this desert-mountain interaction," Chris Landry, director of the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies in Silverton, Colo. and a co-author of the report, said in a statement.
The researchers established test plots in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. Some plots were left alone to collect snow and dust naturally, others had extra dust added and a third group had naturally arriving dust removed.
Read More...