global warming

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Though it may be a bit premature to heap too much praise upon duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza) -- after all, relatively little is still known about its properties -- the early signs, at least according to a team of Rutgers scientists, seem very promising. A team of plant biologists from Rutgers' Waksman Institute of Microbiology have convinced the DOE to focus resources on the genomic sequencing of the diminutive aquatic plant, claiming it holds immeasurable potential for f...

Image from suburbanbloke

The conclusions of a new report written by Australia's top climate scientists are grim: Heatwaves are expected to increase 10-fold while droughts will almost double in number and become more widespread -- possibly impacting an area twice as large as now. Rainfall is also projected to continue its long decline throughout the country.

The report's release prompted agriculture minister Tony Burke to compare the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO's (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) findings to "a disaster novel," according to <...

(Picture: Santa Cruz tourism office via La Nacion newspaper.) The Perito Moreno is one in a group of 48 glaciers located in the Andes, near the limits between Santa Cruz province and the Chilean frontier. Its break is a periodic event caused by the glacier's advance on the lake where it's located, and so far it had only happened during the summer, when the ice is weaker. This year, the process began last Friday and the glacier is abou...

Penguin life has gotten more precarious since this 1913 NOAA photo.

Penguin populations have been declining and shifting globally as a result of oil pollution, overfishing, guano mining (!) and increased coastal development, according to research by Dee Boersma from the University of Washington, published in the July-August edition of the journal BioScience.

Climate changes cause dramatic shifts
Boersma sees penguins as marine sentinels of the Southern Hemisphere. They depend on predictable climate for their breeding cycles and need high ocean productivity for the krill and fish they su...

Image from jpctalbot

At the risk of gross oversimplification, let me start by revealing the Climate Change Risk report's two main takeaways: Avoid living in most parts of Africa if you're especially risk averse (75 percent of the world's 20 most vulnerable countries are found there) and move to Canada to best hedge your bets.

The Comoros Islands: most at risk
The riskiest location by far, as

Good Computer, Bad Computer
The Global eSustainability Initiative has released a report showing that while information and communications technologies (ICT) use a lot of energy and have an impact on global warming, that impact might not be negative. It is true that electronic equipment worldwide is about on par with aviation for CO2 emissions with 830 million tonnes (or 2% of total), but the other side of the coin is that these technology could help avoid 7.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2020, or 500% more than what they caused.

How Computers Make us Greener
The most obvious way that electronic equipment c...

Image from Jesse Bikman

Can you imagine a future in which current record high temperatures will be considered "lovely and cool"? If not, you might want to get used to the idea, says Andreas Sterl, a climate modeler with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the author of an upcoming study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

As the AP's Seth Borenstein reports, Sterl's model predicts heat wave temperatures will rise twice as fast as regular average global temperatures by 2100....

Image courtesy of Richard Simmon/NASA

To put it succinctly: not a chance. Just because I know there are those who will gleefully point to this study as proof that global warming is all a big hoax (*cough* Senator James Inhofe *cough*), let me start off this post by quoting one of the study's authors, Noel Keenlyside: "We want to make very...

Photo courtesy elisfanclub on flickr

O.K. perhaps it's not news to you, and instead just a bit more evidence of man's effect on climate. Eons of air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice reveal how carbon dioxide ups and downs are in sync with rising and falling Earth temperatures, according to research presented in the journal Nature Geoscience - and hypothesizes how the recent surge of CO2 emissions has thrown that system, known as a feedback mechanism, out of whack.

Researcher Richard Zeebe measured CO2 in the air pockets in layers of Antarctic ice and found that amounts waxed and waned with known periods of cooling and warming on Earth. In the past C...

Let's start off this post with another round of good/bad news, shall we? The bad: According to new data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the North Pole could become ice-free this summer because of a record low in ice formation. The good news: Its ice expanded at a greater rate this winter than it did in 2007, and there is the possibility that a milder, more cyclonic atmospheric pattern this summer could help preserve it. ...

Scientists and businesses are increasingly turning to an innovative strategy to fight rising emissions: turning waste carbon dioxide into a commodity. Now researchers at Newcastle University have unveiled a new technology to capitalize on this trend; the team, led by organic chemistry professor Michael North, has developed a method of converting carbon dioxide into cyclic carbonates -- compounds wi...

Image courtesy of D&J Huber via flickr

A festering problem Lloyd reported on last year -- the invasion of British Columbia's forests by voracious mountain pine beetles -- has taken a drastic turn for the worse, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Werner Kurz of Natural Resources Canada found that the beetles are turning large tracts of forests into carbon sou...

Image courtesy of NASA

Talk about a lose-lose proposition: According to a new article published in the journal Science, a proposed geo-engineering scheme to inject sulfate particles into the stratosphere to mitigate the impact of global warming could damage the ozone layer. Yet another article, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, has determined that allowing for a complete recovery of the ozone layer could actually intensify global warming's ...

Are Greenland's days already numbered? And, if so, can anything be done to avert the looming disaster posed by a massive sea level rise? The simple answer is that though Greenland's fate is not yet set into stone (at least when it comes to a specific date), the present melting trends do not bode well.

Calling Greenland's potential collapse another climate "tipping point" would be doing it fair justice -- after all, scientists have estimated that were its ice sheet (which holds one-twentieth of the world's ice) to melt completely, global sea levels would jump 7 meters. As

Image courtesy of the World Economic Forum via flickr

Topping a Nobel Peace Prize-winning performance won't be easy, but the IPCC is hoping to do just that with its next report, set to be released no later than 2013, by honing in on two key themes: practicality and precision. Meeting last week in Budapest, Hungary, the government delegates to the multilateral organization agreed to several procedural changes that would help streamline the process -- and ensure the next report is released on time.

Science's Eli Kintisch

Author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman spoke at Brown University about globalization, energy and green technology. He said that the federal government needs to put a price on carbon, set regulations and pour money into research and development and let American ingenuity meet the market force for clean energy. “I do believe clean power is going to be the next great global industry, I know that for sure. ”

Before he started his speech, he got pied by two "environmental activists" who said: “Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face because of his sickeningly cheery appl...

The announcement last month that ClimateCare had been bought by JP Morgan signaled the Wild-West climate offset business has reached a milestone - it's now a business big enough ($9.4 billion in offsets traded last year) for the traditional financial services industry to get involved. Another milestone: Kyoto CDM offset projects now number over 1,000 and have offset 135 million tonnes of CO2 (the picture is of a Cambodian cook stove efficiency project). It may be a while before t...

In an exclusive interview with the British newspaper The Sun, Al Gore finally revealed what many had long been hoping for: a proper sequel to his game-changing 2006 documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Lamenting that relatively little - aside from a more receptive public mindset - had changed since the release of his first film, Gore said that only concerted action from the world community could now prevent the worst excesses of global warming.

"I have to say the situation has not improved since I made the movie in 2006. Sure, awareness has grown and more p...

It's generally accepted that increasingly acidified oceans could prove disastrous for most forms of marine life. We say most - coral reefs, certain phytoplankton species and larger organisms - because oceanographers are still hard at work studying the effects of higher carbon dioxide levels on individual species. Many, in fact, have now concluded that higher levels of dissolved carbon dioxide could help some species thrive over others. ...

It's a distinction most governments would probably be glad to do without: A new report published by Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor at Purdue University and the leader of Vulcan, a carbon dioxide inventory project, has ranked the 20 worst emitting counties in the U.S. Not surprisingly, the top 3 counties included the cities of Houston and - wait for it - Los Angeles. Of note was the fact that most regions of the United States were represented in the ranking - only the Pacific Northwest seems to have avoided this fate. ...

1st of February 2007: Participate in the biggest mobilization of Citizens Against Global Warming!

More than 20 years ago, with the nuclear superpowers poised for Armageddon, scientists calculated that smoke from burning cities could block sunlight, leading to drastic global cooling, or "nuclear winter."