January 30, 2009, 6:11 AM CT

What we don't know still hurts us

Knowledge gaps continue to hobble scientists' assessments of the environment, a Michigan State University researcher and his colleagues warn. Their warning follows sobering conclusions drawn from what they do know and could help set the global agenda for research funding in the years to come.

A worldwide 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment enlisted hundreds of researchers to develop a view of ecosystems through the lens of services those ecosystems provide humanity, said Thomas Dietz, director of the MSU Environmental Science and Policy Program and professor in sociology and crop and soil sciences. The MEA found about 60 percent of ecosystem services supporting life - including fresh water, fisheries, clean air, pests and climate - are being degraded or used unsustainably. The MEA projected continued deterioration at current rates.

But drawing conclusions is still limited by what scientists call discipline-bound approaches that don't fully describe the range of the Earth's dynamic and complex biophysical and social systems.

"In only a few cases are the abilities of ecosystems to provide human well-being holding steady, and in almost every case we're seeing declines in ecosystems underpinning human well-being," said Dietz, who was involved in the original MEA......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 21, 2009, 11:09 PM CT

Termite insecticide a potent greenhouse gas

An insecticide used to fumigate termite-infested buildings is a strong greenhouse gas that lives in the atmosphere nearly 10 times longer than previously thought, UC Irvine research has found.

Sulfuryl fluoride, UCI chemists discovered, stays in the atmosphere at least 30-40 years and perhaps as long as 100 years. Previous studies estimated its atmospheric lifetime at as low as five years, grossly underestimating the global warming potential.

The fact that sulfuryl fluoride exists for decades - coupled with evidence that levels have nearly doubled in the last six years - concerns study authors Mads Sulbaek Andersen, Donald Blake and Nobel Laureate F. Sherwood Rowland, who discovered that chlorofluorocarbons in aerosol cans and other products damage the ozone layer. That finding led to a worldwide ban on CFCs.

"Sulfuryl fluoride has a long enough lifetime in the atmosphere that we cannot just close our eyes," said Sulbaek Andersen, a postdoctoral researcher in the Rowland-Blake laboratory and main author of the study. "The level in the atmosphere is rising fast, and it doesn't seem to disappear very quickly".

This study appears online Jan. 21 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Kilogram for kilogram, sulfuryl fluoride is about 4,000 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat, though much less of it exists in the atmosphere......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 21, 2009, 11:02 PM CT

Mitigating volcanic hazards

The researchers, working with Steve P. Schilling, U.S. Geological Survey Cascades Volcano Observatory, looked at an existing procedure created by Schilling called LAHARZ, a geographical information system (GIS) method intended to map hazard zones for volcano-induced mudflows.

"The approach worked for water-saturated mud flows, we thought maybe it would work for hot pyroclastic flows," said Barry Voight, professor emeritus of geosciences. "So we looked at the eruption data and developed some new ways of forecasting areas of impact, especially for the ash hurricanes".

The scientists used data from eruptions of a variety of volcanoes including the Soufriere Hills Volcano, Montserrat; Mount Merapi, Indonesia; Mount Unzen, Japan, and Colima, Mexico to develop a predictive equation for mapping the hazard. The equation considered the cross sectional area of the flows, the area covered and the amount of material in the flow, and is embedded in the GIS.

"What we are doing is looking at the volcano to see, for each valley system, how far the hot flows of rock and ash can come," said Dannie Hidayat, post doctoral fellow in geosciences. "We can outline the area of potential surge damage and this can be used by decision makers on whether to evacuate or to put people on high alert to evacuate"......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 20, 2009, 7:18 PM CT

Global warming is for real

While the harsh winter pounding a number of areas of North America and Europe seemingly contradicts the fact that global warming continues unabated, a new survey finds consensus among researchers about the reality of climate change and its likely cause.

A group of 3,146 earth researchers surveyed around the world overwhelmingly agree that in the past 200-plus years, mean global temperatures have been rising, and that human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.

Peter Doran, University of Illinois at Chicago associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, along with former graduate student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, conducted the survey late last year.

The findings appear today in the publication Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union.

In trying to overcome criticism of earlier attempts to gauge the view of earth researchers on global warming and the human impact factor, Doran and Kendall Zimmerman sought the opinion of the most complete list of earth researchers they could find, contacting more than 10,200 experts around the world listed in the 2007 edition of the American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments.

Experts in academia and government research centers were e-mailed invitations to participate in the on-line poll conducted by the website questionpro.com. Only those invited could participate and computer IP addresses of participants were recorded and used to prevent repeat voting. Questions used were evaluated by a polling expert who checked for bias in phrasing, such as suggesting an answer by the way a question was worded. The nine-question survey was short, taking just a few minutes to complete......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 15, 2009, 7:43 PM CT

Strategic farming practices and global warming

Scientists say that strategic farming practices might be part of the solution for curbing global warming. As per calculations reported online on 15 January in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, by planting crop varieties that better reflect sunlight back out to space, summertime temperatures could be reduced by more than one degree Celsius throughout much of central North America and mid-latitude Eurasia. That reduction is equivalent to seasonally offsetting about 20 percent of regional warming due to the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere expected by the end of this century.

The scientists emphasized that such a plan could be achieved without disrupting food production, either in terms of yield or the types of crops grown.

" We propose choosing between different varieties of strains of the same crop species in order to maximize solar reflectivity rather than changing crop type, eventhough the latter could also produce climatic benefits," said Andy Ridgwell of the University of Bristol. "We see this as akin to the choices that are regularly made for other properties of a crop, such as choosing wheat varieties more suited for bread and biscuit making rather than pastry and cakes, for instance".

Society has so far remained unwilling to make the drastic reductions in fossil fuel use needed to cut carbon dioxide emissions, Ridgwell explained. Therefore, researchers are looking for alternatives that might help avert "dangerous" climate change. One set of strategies, called "geoengineering," envisages the creation of novel technological devices that will act as artificial trees to extract carbon dioxide from the air and planetary-scale engineering schemes to manipulate the earth's energy budgetfor instance, injecting reflective aerosols into the atmosphere or constructing a sunshade in space......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 8, 2009, 10:18 PM CT

Half of world's population could face climate-induced food crisis

Rapidly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century and, without adaptation, will leave half the world's population facing serious food shortages, new research shows.

To compound matters, the population of this equatorial belt from about 35 degrees north latitude to 35 degrees south latitude is among the poorest on Earth and is growing faster than anywhere else.

"The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn't take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures," said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.

Battisti is main author of the study in the Jan. 9 edition of Science He collaborated with Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment, to examine the impact of climate change on the world's food security.

"This is a compelling reason for us to invest in adaptation, because it is clear that this is the direction we are going in terms of temperature and it will take decades to develop new food crop varieties that can better withstand a warmer climate," Naylor said.

"We are taking the worst of what we've seen historically and saying that in the future it is going to be a lot worse unless there is some kind of adaptation"......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 8, 2009, 9:40 PM CT

Floods to become commonplace by 2080

Flooding like that which devastated the North of England last year is set to become a common event across the UK in the next 75 years, new research has shown.

A study by Dr Hayley Fowler, of Newcastle University, predicts that severe storms - the likes of which currently occur every five to 25 years across the UK - will become more common and more severe in a matter of decades.

Looking at 'extreme rainfall events' - where rain falls steadily and heavily for between one and five days - the study predicts how the intensity of these storms may change in the future.

Dr Fowler observed that across the UK, the amount of rain falling during one of these extreme events was likely to increase by up to 30 per cent by 2080. This increase is most likely to occur in autumn, winter and spring when the ground is already saturated, posing the biggest threat of flooding.

Dr Fowler, Reader in Climate Change Impacts at Newcastle, explained: "Predicting how extreme rainfall might change a number of years in the future is very difficult because events can be quite localised, particularly in the summer.

"You only have to think about how difficult it is for the Met office to predict the weather two or three days in advance - the overall picture for the country tends to stay the same but local weather patterns can change quite dramatically......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 8, 2009, 9:38 PM CT

Sea level rise of 1 meter within 100 years

New research indicates that the ocean could rise in the next 100 years to a meter higher than the current sea level which is three times higher than predictions from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. The groundbreaking new results from an international collaboration between scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, England and Finland are reported in the scientific journal Climate Dynamics

As per the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the global climate in the coming century will be 2-4 degrees warmer than today, but the ocean is much slower to warm up than the air and the large ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are also slower to melt. The great uncertainty in the calculation of the future rise in the sea level lies in the uncertainty over how quickly the ice sheets on land will melt and flow out to sea. The model predictions of the melting of the ice sheets are the basis for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's predictions for the rise in sea level are not capable of showing the rapid changes observed in recent years. The new research has therefore taken a different approach.



Looking at the direct correlation

"Instead of making calculations based on what one believes will happen with the melting of the ice sheets we have made calculations based on what has actually happened in the past. We have looked at the direct relationship between the global temperature and the sea level 2000 years into the past", explains Aslak Grinsted, who is a geophysicist at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 8, 2009, 9:28 PM CT

Decline of carbon dioxide-gobbling plankton

The evolutionary history of diatoms -- abundant oceanic plankton that remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year -- needs to be rewritten, as per a new Cornell study. The findings suggest that after a sudden rise in species numbers, diatoms abruptly declined about 33 million years ago -- trends that coincided with severe global cooling.

The study is reported in the Jan. 8 issue of the journal Nature.

The research casts doubt on the long-held theory that diatoms' success was tied to an influx of nutrients into the oceans from the rise of grasslands about 18 million years ago. New evidence from a study led by graduate student Dan Rabosky of Cornell's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology takes into account a widespread problem in paleontology: that younger fossils are easier to find than older ones.

"We just tried to address the simple fact that the number of available fossils is colossally greater from recent time periods than from earlier time periods," Rabosky said. "It's a pretty standard correction in some fields, but it hasn't been applied to planktonic paleontology up till now".

More than 90 percent of known diatom fossils are younger than 18 million years. So an unadjusted survey of diatom fossils suggests that more diatom species were alive in the recent past than 18 million years ago......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 8, 2009, 9:21 PM CT

Emission from natural gas burning home appliances

Natural gas, thought to beamong the cleanest forms of fuel, does emit ultrafine airborne particulate matter when burned in home appliances such as stove tops and water heaters, as per a report in the December 2008 issue (Volume 25, Number 10) of Environmental Engineering Science journal, a peer-evaluated journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The paper is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/ees.

Italian scientists measured the particulate matter produced by natural gas domestic burners to assess risk of exposure to organic emissions, which have been linked to increased mortality due to deposition in the lungs, brain, and circulatory system.

Patrizia Minutolo, Andrea D'Anna, Mario Commodo, Rocco Pagliara, Giuseppe Toniato, and Claudio Accordini, from Universit Federico II (Napoli), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR, Napoli), and Riello SpA, Burner Division, used advanced optical diagnostic tools, particle collection methods, and particle size assessment to identify particulate matter with diameters in the range of 1 nm to 10 nm. In the paper entitled, "Emission of Ultrafine Particles from Natural Gas Domestic Burners," they conclude that while these particles were present in relatively high concentrations in the flame region of home heating burners, these were strongly oxidized, resulting in very low emissions. In contrast, domestic stove tops emitted larger amounts of these very small particles......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source