Climate Articles
Science Explained: Greenhouse effect in a bottle
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is frequently in the news because its production from burning fossil fuels causes increased levels of the gas in the Earth's atmosphere.
CO2, along with a range of other greenhouse gases, is often implicated in global warming. But what is its role in the greenhouse effect?
Scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock from EADS Astrium visits the Royal Institution's new Young Scientist Centre to carry out a simple experiment that shows how CO2 traps heat.
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Climategate scientist cleared in inquiry, again
Cleared by one panel, Michael Mann - and climate science in general - continue to generate controversy.
A Pennsylvania State University investigation has found no substance behind allegations of academic misconduct by climate researcher Michael Mann, one of the central figures in the so-called 'Climategate' e-mail scandal.
It is the third formal inquiry to clear scientists involved in the scandal - which publicized more than 1,000 private e-mails from scientists expressing doubts about their data, refusing to share information and questioning the work of others.
The Penn State findings, released Thursday by a panel of five senior faculty members, concluded Mann never participated in research or other scholarly activity that "deviated from accepted practices within the academic community."
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Climate Scientist Cleared of Altering Data
An American scientist accused of manipulating research findings on climate science was cleared of that charge by his university on Thursday, the latest in a string of reports to find little substance in the allegations known as Climategate.
An investigative panel at Pennsylvania State University, weighing the question of whether the scientist, Michael E. Mann, had "seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities," declared that he had not.
Dr. Mann said he was gratified by the findings, the second report from Penn State to clear him. An earlier report had exonerated him of related charges that he suppressed or falsified data, destroyed e-mail and misused confidential information.
The new report did criticize him on a minor point, saying that he had occasionally forwarded to colleagues copies of unpublished manuscripts without the explicit permission of their authors.
The allegations arose after private e-mail messages between Dr. Mann and other scientists were purloined from a computer at the University of East Anglia, in Britain, and posted on the Internet. In one, a British researcher called a data-adjustment procedure Dr. Mann used a "trick."
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New York Times to media: Exonerations of climate science
and National Academy report should "receive as much circulation" as "the manufactured controversy known as Climategate"
Journalism in the greenhouse ... or the glass house?
There have since been several reports upholding the U.N.'s basic findings, including a major assessment in May from the National Academy of Sciences. This assessment not only confirmed the relationship between climate change and human activities but warned of growing risks - sea level rise, drought, disease - that must swiftly be addressed by firm action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
Given the trajectory the scientists say we are on, one must hope that the academy's report, and Wednesday's debunking of Climategate, will receive as much circulation as the original, diversionary controversies.
The New York Times had a great editorial today, "A Climate Change Corrective." Certainly the recent exonerations and NAS study deserve much, much, much more media attention.
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Much-vindicated Michael Mann and Hockey Stick get final exoneration from Penn State
- time for some major media apologies and retractions
"An Investigatory Committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials" has unanimously "determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities."
PANEL STICKS UP FOR AN INNOCENT MANN
His work "clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field…. Dr. Mann's work, from the beginning of his career, has been recognized as outstanding."
Few if any American climate scientists have been as falsely accused - and thoroughly vindicated - over both their academic practices and scientific results as Dr. Michael Mann.
Today, Penn State issued its final and complete exoneration (click here) of Dr. Michael Mann in the matter of his scientific practices "for proposing, conducting, or reporting research," primarily related to the famous - and thoroughly vindicated - Hockey Stick. We can be more confident than ever that the "Earth is hotter now than in the past 2,000 years"
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Final 'forensic' UK report on emails vindicates climate science and research underlying the Hockey Stick
Muir Russell investigation "did not find any evidence of behavior that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC" and says of CRU, "Their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt."
On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data or tamper with it.
On the allegation of biased station selection and analysis, we find no evidence of bias.
The overall implication of the allegations was to cast doubt on the extent to which CRU's work in this area could be trusted and should be relied upon and we find no evidence to support that implication.
On the allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process we find no evidence to substantiate this in the three instances examined in detail.
On the allegations that in two specific cases there had been a misuse by CRU scientists of the IPCC process, in presenting AR4 [the Fourth Assessment] to the public and policy makers, we find that the allegations cannot be upheld.
In particular, on the question of the composition of temperature reconstructions [in AR4], we found no evidence of exclusion of other published temperature reconstructions that would show a very different picture. The general discussion of sources of uncertainty in the text is extensive, including reference to divergence.
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The Muir-Russell report
The long-awaited and surprisingly thorough Muir-Russell report (readable online version) was released this morning. We've had a brief read through of the report, but a thorough analysis of this and the supplemental information on the web site will have to wait for a day or so.
The main issue is that they conclude that the rigour and honesty of the CRU scientists is not in doubt. For anyone who knows Phil Jones and his colleagues this comes as no surprise, and we are very pleased to have this proclaimed so vigorously. Secondly, they conclude that none of the emails cast doubt on the integrity and conclusions of the IPCC, again, something we have been saying since the beginning. They also conclude as we did that there was no 'corruption' of the peer-review process. Interestingly, they independently analysed the public domain temperature data themselves to ascertain whether the could validate the CRU record. They managed this in two days, somewhat undermining claims that the CRU temperature data was somehow manipulated inappropriately. (Note that this exercise has been undertaken by a number of people since November – all of which show that the CRU results are robust).
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Tracking the Himalaya's Melting Glaciers
For those who know the Himalaya well - I have climbed to the summit of Mount Everest five times in the past three decades - the warming of this great mountain chain is something that we have come to experience personally. The Sherpas who live atop "the roof of the world" and the climbers who often return are acutely aware of how much temperatures have risen at high altitudes in recent years, and how extensively the snow and ice on the massive Himalayan glaciers has thinned and retreated.
But it wasn't until 2007, when I went back to Everest as part of a documentary for the Public Broadcasting Service series, Frontline, that I fully grasped the magnitude of the melting in this region, often called "The Third Pole" because of the massive volumes of ice in the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau. Trekking in Tibet, not far from the northern slope of Mount Everest, I carried with me a black-and-white photograph taken by the great English mountaineer, George L. Mallory, in 1921. It showed the ice-encrusted north face of Everest and, below it, the great river of ice known as the Main Rongbuk Glacier, flowing in a sweeping, S-shaped curve down a broad, stony valley.
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NASA: First half of 2010 breaks the thermometer - despite "recent minimum of solar irradiance"
Following fast on the heels of the hottest Jan-May - and spring - in the temperature record, it's also the hottest Jan-June on record in the NASA dataset [click on figure to enlarge].
It's all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming "because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect," as a recent NASA paper notes.
Software engineer (and former machinist mate in the US Navy) Timothy Chase put together a spreadsheet using the data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (click here). In NASA's dataset, the 12-month running average temperature record was actually just barely set in March - and then easily set in April and topped out in May.
It still seems likely that 2010 will be the hottest year on record, but NOAA now predicts that "La Niña conditions are likely to develop during July – August 2010." If the La Niña comes fast and deep (as in 1998 and 2007), that could make it a close call in the NASA dataset - and even more so in the satellite record, which is much more sensitive to ENSO ( El Niño Southern oscillation).
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The other carbon-dioxide problem
Acidification threatens the world's oceans, but quantifying the risks is hard
The waters of Kongsfjord, an inlet on the coast of Spitsbergen, sit nine contraptions that bring nothing to mind as much as monster condoms. Each is a transparent sheath of plastic 17-metres long, mostly underwater, held in place by a floating collar. The seawater sealed within them is being mixed with different levels of carbon dioxide to see what will happen to the ecology of the Arctic waters.
As carbon dioxide levels go up, pH levels come down. Acidity depends on the presence of hydrogen ions (the H in pH) and more hydrogen ions mean, counterintuitively, a lower pH. Expose the surface of the ocean to an atmosphere with ever more carbon dioxide, and the gas and waters will produce carbonic acid, lowering pH on a planetary scale. The declining pH does not actually make the waters acidic (they started off mildly alkaline). But it makes them more acidic, just as turning up the light makes a dark room brighter.
Ocean acidification has further chemical implications: more hydrogen ions mean more bicarbonate ions, and fewer carbonate ions. Carbonate is what corals, the shells of shellfish and the outer layers of many photosynthesising plankton and other microbes are made of. If the level of carbonate ions falls too low the shells can dissolve or might never be made at all. There is evidence that the amount of carbonate in the shells of foraminifera, micro-plankton that are crucial to ocean ecology, has recently dropped by as much as a third.
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Ocean acidification may make fish foolhardy
Rising carbon dioxide may rob fish larvae of their ability to sense predators and survive
Baby fish become confused and reckless in acidified water, a new study shows. This leads to higher death rates and may mean that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, which causes ocean acidification, will reduce the number of fish in the ocean.
"It shows we should be concerned with even minor changes in aquatic ecology, because it's going to have dramatic effects on the survival of fish," says Grant Brown, a freshwater behavioral ecologist at Concordia University in Montreal who was not involved in the study. "There are very fine-scale, yet extreme critical effects going on."
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are projected to rise over the next century from fossil fuel burning. As carbon dioxide enters the Earth's atmosphere, some of it is absorbed into oceans. The CO2 dissolves, as it does in carbonated beverages, and makes water more acidic. Acidic water is known to hinder the ability of oysters and other marine life to build calcium carbonate shells, but effects on fish are less well-known.
Marine ecologist Philip Munday of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and his colleagues showed previously that very acidic water interferes with the sense of smell of clown fish. The larvae of clown fish and other coral reef fish rely on their sense of smell to stick close to home and avoid predators.
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Eruption Corruption
Q: Did carbon dioxide emissions from the volcanic eruption in Iceland negate five years' worth of effort to control CO2?
A: Not even close. Carbon dioxide emissions from the volcano were small relative to human activity, and partially offset by the shutdown of European air travel.
FULL ANSWER
This isn't the first time this type of claim has come up - scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey addressed similar rumors during the 2007 eruption of Kilauea in Hawaii. It's true that erupting volcanoes do emit some carbon dioxide, one of the "greenhouse gases" that contributes to global climate change. But according to USGS, human activities release at least a hundred times more CO2 every year than all the world's volcanoes combined. Published estimates of the gas emissions from all volcanoes in the world range from 123 million to 378 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Humans haven't produced that little since the 19th century.
Carbon dioxide isn't a major output of volcanic eruptions. In the case of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which began erupting in March 2010 and entered an explosive phase in April 2010, one study found that less than 15 percent of the gas given off in the pre-explosive phase was CO2 – the majority was water vapor. For some other volcanoes, the proportion of CO2 is even lower.
Still, that accounted for 150,000 to 300,000 tons of CO2 per day at the height of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, according to wire reports. But the European Union's air travel, which was shut down for days during the eruption, accounts for 3 percent of the EU's total CO2 emissions, which according to the European Environment Agency was about 4,089 billion tons in 2008. That means air travel in Europe gives off about 340,000 tons of CO2 per day. The shutdown of air travel in much of Europe during the first week of the explosive eruption would have offset, if not greatly outpaced, the CO2 Eyjafjallajokull produced during that time.
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Arctic Ice July 2010
In about a week the National Snow and Ice Data Center - NSIDC - will be publishing its analysis of June's sea ice. I expect them to report another record loss of sea ice.
My prediction for July is that Arctic sea ice loss will accelerate.
Measuring ice behaviour
Ice is a material with mechanical properties. In order to understand what it is doing at any moment and what it will do in future, one must understand its properties. Sea ice is a special case of ice as a particulate material. The fluidity of a particulate mass is a matter of basic physics which is independent of scale. Particle size can range from microns to kilometers, it is all one to the laws of physics.
In the absence of a force tending to produce clumping, particles on a fluid surface tend to spread out. Imagine a swimming pool topped off with a foot thickness of polystyrene beads. You have to remove a lot of beads before you can see water. In the absence of air or water movement causing the beads to pile up, they will spread out. It will be a very long time before removal of the beads reduces their distribution per unit of water area to 15%.
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Scrubbing CO2 from Atmosphere Could Be a Long-Term Commitment
ScienceDaily (July 2, 2010) - With carbon dioxide in the atmosphere approaching alarming levels, even halting emissions altogether may not be enough to avert catastrophic climate change. Could scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air be a viable solution?
A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution suggests that while removing excess carbon dioxide would cool the planet, complexities of the carbon cycle would limit the effectiveness of a one-time effort. To keep carbon dioxide at low levels would require a long-term commitment spanning decades or even centuries.
Previous studies have shown that reducing carbon dioxide emissions to zero would not lead to appreciable cooling, because carbon dioxide already within the atmosphere would continue to trap heat. For cooling to occur, greenhouse gas concentrations would need to be reduced. "We wanted to see what the response would be if carbon dioxide were actively removed from the atmosphere," says study coauthor Ken Caldeira of Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology. "Our study is the first to look at how much carbon dioxide you would need to remove and for how long to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations low. This has obvious implications for the public and for policy makers as we weigh the costs and benefits of different ways of mitigating climate change."
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Rising Seas Endanger Wetland Wildlife
For scientists in a remote corner of coastal North Carolina, ignoring global warming is not an option
When a buttermilk moon rises over Alligator River, listen for red wolves. It's the only spot in the world where they still howl in the wild. Finer boned than gray wolves, with foxier coloring and a floating gait, they once roamed North America from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. By the mid-1970s, because of overhunting and habitat loss, just a few survived. Biologists captured 17 and bred them in captivity, and in 1987 released four pairs in North Carolina's Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.
Today more than 100 red wolves inhabit the refuge and the surrounding peninsula-the world's first successful wolf reintroduction, eight years ahead of the better-known gray wolf project in Yellowstone National Park. The densely vegetated Carolina refuge is perfect for red wolves: full of prey such as white-tailed deer and raccoons and practically devoid of people.
Perfect, except it may all be underwater soon.
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Excess Nitrogen Favors Plants That Respond Poorly to Rising CO2
ScienceDaily (July 3, 2010) - As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, so does the pressure on the plant kingdom. The hope among policymakers, scientists and concerned citizens is that plants will absorb some of the extra CO2 and mitigate the impacts of climate change. For a few decades now, researchers have hypothesized about one major roadblock: nitrogen.
Plants build their tissue primarily with the CO2 they take up from the atmosphere. The more they get, the faster they tend to grow -- a phenomenon known as the "CO2 fertilization effect." However, plants that photosynthesize greater amounts of CO2 will also need higher doses of other key building blocks, especially nitrogen. The general consensus has been that if plants get more nitrogen, there will be a larger CO2 fertilization effect. Not necessarily so, says a new paper published in the July 1 issue of Nature.
Adam Langley and Pat Megonigal, two ecologists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, conducted a four-year study on plants growing in a brackish Chesapeake Bay marsh. In 2006 they began feeding sedge-dominated plots a diet rich in CO2 and nitrogen. Just as atmospheric CO2 levels are rising, so is nitrogen pollution in estuaries due farming, wastewater treatment and other activities. Because the sedge has previously shown a large CO2 fertilization effect, Langley and Megonigal expected that adding nitrogen could only enhance it.
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Measuring the Melting Arctic Sea Ice
A new satellite will measure to the centimeter just how far gone, or going, the Arctic ice cap really is.
While the world's eyes focus on the catastrophe in the Gulf, climatologists are tracking a decades-old cataclysm at the top of the world - dwindling Arctic sea ice.
This year is projected to surpass 2007's summer sea ice minimum, when sailboats were seen navigating their way through large cracks in polar ice floes.
"Where Arctic ice used to be 3- to 5-meters thick in most places, now it's tough to find ice that's over 3-meters thick," explained Ignatius Rigor, a climatologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "Most of the Arctic is covered by 2-year-old ice. It used to be covered by ice that was 30 years old."
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High Above the Earth, Satellites Track Melting Ice
The surest sign of a warming Earth is the steady melting of its ice zones, from disappearing sea ice in the Arctic to shrinking glaciers worldwide. Now, scientists are using increasingly sophisticated satellite technology to measure the extent, thickness, and height of ice, assembling an essential picture of a planet in transition.
After carbon dioxide, the substance most crucial in determining how climate change will play out over the next century and beyond isn't a greenhouse gas - it's the solid state of the molecule H20. Summer melt in the sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean exposes heat-absorbing seawater to the sun, accelerating global warming in a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Summer melting in the land-based ice that covers Greenland is increasingly responsible for the sea-level rise that has already begun to endanger many thousands of miles of coastline. Glaciers moving more rapidly to the sea, in both Greenland and Antarctica, threaten to raise sea level even higher, while disappearing mountain glaciers around the world could choke off water supplies to many hundreds of millions of people.
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NASA Satellite Adds Carbon Dioxide to Its Repertoire
ScienceDaily (July 7, 2010) - A NASA-led research team has expanded the growing global armada of remote sensing satellites capable of studying carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas driving changes in Earth's climate.
The newest addition is the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) instrument on NASA's Aura spacecraft, launched in 2004. TES measures the state and composition of Earth's troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere, located between Earth's surface and about 16 kilometers (10 miles) in altitude. While TES was not originally designed to measure carbon dioxide, a team led by Susan Kulawik of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has successfully developed and validated a TES carbon dioxide tool.
Kulawik's team analyzed three years of carbon dioxide data from TES and compared them to other carbon dioxide data sources. These sources included the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft, aircraft and ground station samples, and two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration carbon dioxide research tools: GLOBALVIEW-CO2 and CarbonTracker. The TES data were found to be in good agreement with the other data. The TES study appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
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Biologist Warns Of Danger From Rising Sea Levels
In his new book, Flooded Earth, Peter D. Ward argues that even if humans stopped all carbon dioxide emissions today, the oceans will still rise up to 3 feet by 2050, wreaking havoc on many coastal cities and their infrastructure. In the worst case scenario, Ward tells host Guy Raz, the world may see water levels rise as much as 65 feet by 2300 causing massive human migration and a spread of tropical diseases.
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Report: Oceans' deteriorating health nearing 'irreversible'
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WASHINGTON - A sobering new report warns that oceans face a "fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation" not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather.
The report, in Science magazine, doesn't break a lot of new ground, but it brings together dozens of studies that collectively paint a dismal picture of deteriorating ocean health.
"This is further evidence we are well on our way to the next great extinction event," said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia and a co-author of the report.
John Bruno, an associate professor of marine sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the report's other co-author, isn't quite as alarmist, but he's equally concerned.
"We are becoming increasingly certain that the world's marine ecosystems are reaching tipping points," Bruno said, adding, "We really have no power or model to foresee" the impact.
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Rutgers study shows 4 'dead zones' along N.J. coast
The ocean waters close to the New Jersey shoreline are relatively healthy, but problems remain, including four "dead" zones from Sandy Hook to Cape May with seriously low dissolved oxygen levels, according to scientists at Rutgers University.
The bays, meanwhile, are suffering serious degradation from a multitude of sources, including shoreline bulkheads and the flush of nutrients after rainstorms, researchers said.
Rising water temperature over the past decade has virtually wiped out some important cooler-water commercial species, such as surf clams, from the Jersey coast, while southern species unheard of in New Jersey 15 years ago have moved in. Some of the new arrivals, including the Atlantic croaker, now appear off the Jersey coast in numbers that make them a viable commercial fish, while others, such as the sea nettle - a stinging jellyfish - pose a serious nuisance for swimmers at bayside beaches.
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Melting ice fields pose serious threat to water supply in Asia
LOCAL PEOPLE selling trinkets and prayer flags at the Karola Pass in Tibet are looking nervously at the glacier behind, which has melted halfway up the mountain because of global warming. The ice fields at the roof of the world are shrinking.
"It keeps getting smaller," said one man, dressed in traditional Tibetan garb, anxiously eyeing the spectacular natural phenomenon that is his livelihood.
Meanwhile, in the Tibetan provincial capital, Lhasa, the Lalu wetland reserve, known as the "lung of Lhasa", is also shrinking because of global warming and pressure from developers. It generates oxygen for a city starved of air because of its height.
Lalu is the largest and highest natural wetland in the world, covering 12.2sq kms (4.7sq miles), and the Chinese Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has introduced a 15.5 billion yuan (€1.82 billion) plan to help protect it from destruction.
"Tibet is on the Qinghai plateau and the ecological environment is very vulnerable," said Gyanpel, director general of the Tibetan Environmental Protection Department.
The temperature in Tibet has risen by up to one-third of a degree every 10 years between 1961 and 2008, which is well ahead of the rest of the world, and nowhere is this more obvious than at the Karola glacier. Ice on the Qinghai plateau is retreating at the rate of seven per cent every year. There are fears that in 25 years, 80 per cent of the glacial area in Tibet and surrounding areas could be gone.
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A message to science educators and students about global climate change
A recent poll of earth scientists found that 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that data clearly demonstrate the earth is warming and that human activity is contributing to rising temperatures (EOS v. 90 Number 3, p. 22 - those who don't have access to Eos, see this CNN story). In contrast, the same poll found that only 82 percent of earth scientists agree that human activity is contributing to climate change. Many of the 18 percent who disagreed are undoubtedly science educators. This poll and my own experience suggest that a significant percentage of university and high school science educators who are not climatologists remain skeptical about human-induced climate change because they haven't taken an in-depth, unbiased look at the data. Then they pass their skepticism on to their students.
What these science educators need to realize is that they are teaching their students to be skeptical not about one scientific theory, but the entire scientific process. If science educators don't accept the overwhelming consensus of scientific experts, why should their students or the public? My concern isn't so much whether students learn and accept the scientific consensus on global warming; it is that students will conclude that science isn't a legitimate source of knowledge, and shouldn't play a role in public policy decisions. Science educators who express opinions rather than demonstrate facts undermine the scientific process. The best approach is for educators to present the facts and let students draw their own conclusions.
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Global warming raises new E. coli concerns
GUELPH - Temporary closures like Toronto's waterfront Budapest Park and associated Sunnyside Beach last week to protect against potentially dangerous organisms doesn't surprise local environmental scientist Jack Trevors, who is calling for increased vigilance against a key indicator bacteria, E. coli.
The organism at the heart of the Walkerton tragedy a decade ago represents a rising threat as the world warms, the University of Guelph environmental sciences professor said Monday, warning further study is critical to meeting any risk.
"We need to know a lot more about this," said Trevors, who with colleagues in Europe published a review of research into Escherichia coli in the International Society for Microbial Ecology's June journal edition.
The review paper concludes the public may be at increasing risk as E. coli, which contaminates water and soil, finds an inviting environment in a warming planet.
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Where Oaks Die, Blueberries Live In Ever-Changing Forest
For Polly Hill Arboretum director Tim Boland, the swift demise of his oak forest that spans the arboretum property has been literally startling.
"I'd be outside in the collections this winter and I would just hear wha-BAM!" The trees, ravaged by a plague of caterpillar infestation that lasted just over three years from 2005 to 2008, are now hollowed and rotting, teetering toward collapse. "I used to think these trees would stand for the next 10 years or so. They won't. Within the next three to four years they'll all be down," Mr. Boland said.
If anything has been more impressive than the forest's destruction, however, it has been its regeneration.
From afar, the damage is astounding. From North Road looking east, the swath of dead wood looks like some hoary frost, a Narnia of defoliated trees ensconced in summer greenery. From an ecological perspective though, this landscape of devastation is deceiving.
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Soybean Yields to Drop on Climate, Ozone, U.S. Researcher Says
July 8 (Bloomberg) -- Climate change and pollution may cut yields for soybeans and other crops by 2050 unless plants are adapted, the University of Illinois said, citing research.
Tests showed crops grown in open fields benefitted less than expected from higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air, the university said in a report published yesterday. The yield increase was only half of that assumed by the United Nations' climate-change panel to predict world food supply in 2050, according to the report.
The world must grow 70 percent more food by 2050 to feed a rising population, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization says. One assumed positive aspect to climate change has been that higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will stimulate photosynthesis and boost yields, the researchers said.
"More research in these areas is critical," Don Ort, professor of crop science at the University of Illinois, said in a statement. "How top-producing areas fare with climate change will be very important in determining global food security for the future."
The university studied how soybeans in open fields grew in higher carbon dioxide and ozone levels, in research funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy and the Illinois Council on Food and Agriculture Research.
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Data shows water's key role in plant CO2 uptake
CLIMATE MODELS will have to be changed after research into the uptake of carbon dioxide by plants was published. It shows the availability of water is more important to plant carbon uptake than temperature. The findings help to explain contradictions between model predictions and measurements on the ground.
It has to do with the Earth's natural cycle of breathing in and out carbon dioxide, according to scientists at a press conference at the Euroscience Open Forum in Turin to announce the research.
The details are in two research papers published this morning by the journal Science in its online publication Sciencexpress. Teams at the Max Planck Institute in Germany led the research, which involved scientists from 10 other countries around the world.
The institute's Christian Beer and colleagues used models and field data to measure the amount of carbon "inhaled" by the Earth's global plant life. Plants take up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and take a large volume of carbon out of the atmosphere. Carbon mainly as carbon dioxide is blamed for global warming.
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Methane releases in arctic seas could wreak devastation
Potential impacts include dead zones, acidification, shifts at the base of the ocean's food chain
Massive releases of methane from arctic seafloors could create oxygen-poor dead zones, acidify the seas and disrupt ecosystems in broad parts of the northern oceans, new preliminary analyses suggest.
Such a cascade of geochemical and ecological ills could result if global warming triggers a widespread release of methane from deep below the Arctic seas, scientists propose in the June 28 Geophysical Research Letters.
Worldwide, particularly in deeply buried permafrost and in high-latitude ocean sediments where pressures are high and temperatures are below freezing, icy deposits called hydrates hold immense amounts of methane (SN: 6/25/05, p. 410). Studies indicate that seafloor sediments beneath the Kara, Barents and East Siberian seas in the Arctic Ocean, as well as the Sea of Okhotsk and the Barents Sea in the North Pacific, have large reservoirs of the planet-warming greenhouse gas, says study coauthor Scott M. Elliott, a marine biogeochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
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We're having a heat wave. New daily high temperature records beat new cold records by nearly 5 to 1 in June
How hot is it? So hot that June "breaks the record for the warmest average temperature observed for any calendar month in Miami"
"We're getting a dramatic taste of the kind of weather we are on course to bequeath to our grandchildren," says Tom Peterson, Chief Scientist for NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.
An "excessive heat warning" has been issued this week for parts of the East Coast, home of the status quo media, so please send me examples of coverage - good or bad. Also, drink plenty of fluids and stay cool!
I got a call last week from a Florida reporter. Did I know that it was so hot that Miami set the all-time monthly temperature record in June? Was all the strange weather part of some longer-term pattern?
No and yes. He directed me to the National Weather Service summary for Miami here. And I pointed out to him that NASA reported that globally it was easily the hottest spring - and Jan-May - in the temperature record (and NOAA, too).
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Warmer Ecosystems Could Absorb Less Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
LONDON, UK - Research by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London has found that a predicted rise in global temperature of 4°C by 2100 could lead to a 13 percent reduction in ecosystems' ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
Writing in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the scientists describe a new model to predict how the carbon storage capacity of ecosystems would respond to future global warming. They tested their predictions against data collected from experimental ponds which were warmed to simulate global warming, revealing a 13 percent reduction in the amount of CO2 absorbed by the warmed ecosystems.
Lead author of the Philosophical Transactions paper, Gabriel Yvon-Durocher from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences said: "The beauty of this model is in its simplicity. We made our prediction based on just two parameters – the 'activation energies' for photosynthesis and respiration, and the increase in temperature which exactly predicted the changes observed in our experiment."
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Record-Breaking Heat
The intense heat wave that is gripping the crowded metropolitan corridor and toppling records from Washington, DC to Boston, with temperatures hovering near or just above 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the first full week of July, is raising questions about whether events like this are likely to become more common and/or severe as the climate warms in response to greenhouse gas emissions.
The short answer: yes and yes, but with an important caveat. No individual extreme weather event - including this heat wave - can be caused by climate change. Rather, what climate change does is shift the odds in favor of certain events.
As Climate Central detailed last summer, a small amount of global warming could have a large effect on weather extremes - including extreme heat events, which are forecast to be become more frequent, more intense, and longer lasting (see the US Climate Change Science Program report).
Extreme weather and climate events can cause significant damages, and heat waves are considered public health emergencies. According to the Centers for Disease Control, heat is the number one weather-related killer in the US. Hot temperatures contribute to increased emergency room visits and hospital admissions for cardiovascular disease, and can cause heat stroke and other life-threatening conditions.
Events such as the Chicago heat wave of 1995 and the 2003 European heat wave, which killed an estimated 40,000 people, have proven especially deadly to vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and persons with respiratory illnesses (See "Report on Excess Mortality in Europe During Summer 2003"). Other societal impacts of extreme heat include livestock mortality, increases in peak energy demand, crop damage, and increased demand for water, as detailed in a report of the US Global Change Research Program.
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Beijing hits a near-record 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia break 100 degrees and set new daily highs. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and Riyadh, on July 6 it was 113 and 111 degrees, warmer than average but still cooler than in Kuwait, which set the day's world temperature high at 122 degrees.
The heat has been so intense in China that a plague of locusts is ravaging grasslands and farmlands from Inner Mongolia, and security officials are warning of outbreaks of violence.
Yes, we're suffering a global heat wave. No, it's not the apocalypse. But it may be a further sign of climate change.
"You can't say any one heat wave is caused by global warming. But you can say that what global warming does is it makes events just like this more likely," says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change.
Indeed, 2010 is set to be one of the world's hottest years on record, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the first five months of the year was the warmest on record, and 1.22 degrees F warmer than the 20th century average, the NOAA states in its May 2010 State of the Climate Global Analysis.
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Nitrogen Pollution Alters Global Change Scenarios from the Ground Up
EDGEWATER, MD - As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, so does the pressure on the plant kingdom. The hope among policymakers, scientists and concerned citizens is that plants will absorb some of the extra CO2 and mitigate the impacts of climate change. For a few decades now, researchers have hypothesized about one major roadblock: nitrogen.
Plants build their tissue primarily with the CO2 they take up from the atmosphere. The more they get, the faster they tend to grow-a phenomenon known as the "CO2 fertilization effect." However, plants that photosynthesize greater amounts of CO2 will also need higher doses of other key building blocks, especially nitrogen. The general consensus has been that if plants get more nitrogen, there will be a larger CO2 fertilization effect. Not necessarily so, says a new paper published in the July 1 issue of Nature.
Adam Langley and Pat Megonigal, two ecologists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, conducted a four-year study on plants growing in a brackish Chesapeake Bay marsh. In 2006 they began feeding sedge-dominated plots a diet rich in CO2 and nitrogen. Just as atmospheric CO2 levels are rising, so is nitrogen pollution in estuaries due farming, wastewater treatment and other activities. Because the sedge has previously shown a large CO2 fertilization effect, Langley and Megonigal expected that adding nitrogen could only enhance it.
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NOAA-Supported Scientists Predict "Larger Than Average" Gulf Dead Zone
SILVER SPRING, MD - The northern Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone, an underwater area with little or no oxygen known commonly as the "dead zone," could be larger than the recent average, according to a forecast by a team of NOAA-supported scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Louisiana State University, and the University of Michigan.
Scientists are predicting the area could measure between 6,500 and 7,800 square miles, or an area roughly the size of the state of New Jersey. The average of the past five years is approximately 6,000 square miles. It is the goal of a federal state task force to reduce it to 1,900 square miles. The largest dead zone on record, 8,484 square miles, occurred in 2002.
This forecast is based on Mississippi River nutrient flows compiled annually by the U.S. Geological Survey. Dead zones off the coast of Louisiana and Texas are caused by nutrient runoff, principally from agricultural activity, which stimulates an overgrowth of algae that sinks, decomposes, and consumes most of the life-giving oxygen supply in the water. It is unclear what impact, if any, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill will have on the size of the dead zone.
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Why is global warming a problem?
The cost and benefits of global warming will vary greatly from area to area. For moderate climate change, the balance can be difficult to assess. But the larger the change in climate, the more negative the consequences will become. Global warming will probably make life harder, not easier, for most people. This is mainly because we have already built enormous infrastructure based on the climate we now have.
People in some temperate zones may benefit from milder winters, more abundant rainfall, and expanding crop production zones. But people in other areas will suffer from increased heat waves, coastal erosion, rising sea level, more erratic rainfall, and droughts.
The crops, natural vegetation, and domesticated and wild animals (including seafood) that sustain people in a given area may be unable to adapt to local or regional changes in climate. The ranges of diseases and insect pests that are limited by temperature may expand, if other environmental conditions are also favorable.
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New Rules Issued on Coal Air Pollution
WASHINGTON - Acting under federal court order, the Obama administration proposed new air-quality rules on Tuesday for coal-burning power plants that officials said would bring major reductions in soot and smog from Texas to the Eastern Seaboard.
The Environmental Protection Agency is issuing the rules to replace a plan from the administration of President George W. Bush that a federal judge threw out in 2008, citing numerous flaws in the calculation of air-quality effects.
Gina McCarthy, head of the E.P.A.'s air and radiation office, said the new rules would reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides by hundreds of thousands of tons a year and bring $120 billion in annual health benefits. Those benefits, Ms. McCarthy said, include preventing 14,000 to 36,000 premature deaths, 23,000 nonfatal heart attacks, 21,000 cases of acute bronchitis, 240,000 cases of aggravated asthma and 1.9 million missed school and work days.
The rule would substantially reduce the unhealthy smog that shrouds American cities, especially during heat waves like the one now enveloping much of the East.
The cost of compliance to utilities and other operators of smog-belching power plants would be $2.8 billion a year, according to E.P.A. estimates.
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