Recently in Environment Category

Science: The two great ice sheets—Greenland's and Antarctica's—are closely monitored for ice loss.

Surveys of ice-sheet volume made from planes and satellites have quantified these losses, but those assessments have been spotty in time, space, or both.

Now the latest analysis of the most comprehensive, essentially continuous monitoring of the ice sheets shows that the losses have not eased in the past few years. More ominously, losses from both Greenland and Antarctica appear to have accelerated during the past 7 years.

Nature News: The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), near Gakona, Alaska, has for twenty years used radio waves to probe Earth's magnetic field and ionosphere.

One of the most visible results of the experiments—since the facility upgraded its transmission power output from 1 to 3.6 megawatts—is that they can create lights in the sky that are similar to auroras.

The technique works by using the high-frequency radio waves to accelerate electrons in the atmosphere, increasing the energy of their collisions and thereby creating a glow.

In February last year, HAARP unexpectedly managed to induce a strange bullseye pattern in the night sky. "This is the really exciting part—we've made a little artificial piece of ionosphere," said US Air Force Research Laboratory physicist Todd Pedersen to Nature's Naomi Lubick.

NYTimes.com: The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change this week are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

Scientists say the pattern of the last decade—after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s—is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

But trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public—and to policy makers—can be frustrating, they say.

Earth Island Journal: A recent New York Times article pointedly asked whether NASA climate scientist James Hansen still matters. The subtext to the story was, has Hansen been too vocal and too unconventional in his criticism of Washington’s response to climate change to be taken seriously?

Nell Greenberg interviews Hansen over his recent political action on combating climate change, and how he ended up in climate science in the first place.

guardian.co.uk: A 2C rise in global temperatures will not necessarily result in the calamity predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), China's most senior climatologist has told the Guardian.

Despite growing evidence that storms in China are getting fiercer, droughts longer and typhoons more deadly, Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing Climate Centre, said it was too early to determine the level of risk posed by global warming.

Science: Global warming is raising the possibility of a devastating oil spill in the Arctic, as melting sea ice attracts more shipping and energy exploration. But the US is ill-prepared to prevent and recover from spills in this ecologically fragile region, say scientists and policymakers. So they are asking the US government to reinvigorate the national oil-spill research program with a focus on the Arctic.

Washingtonpost.com: A tool developed by the Idaho Department of Water Resources and the University of Idaho is changing the face of water management and conservation by efficiently offering specific measurements of the water consumed across a large region or single field.

Using surface temperature readings from government satellites, air temperature, and a system of algorithms, the new method lets officials measure how much water is "consumed" on a certain piece of land through evapotranspiration.

Evapotranspiration is a combination of the evaporation of water into the atmosphere and the water vapor released by plants through respiration—basically, a measurement of the water that leaves the land for the atmosphere, not water that is diverted or pumped onto land but then returned quickly to the water table or river for other users.

Nature News: How quickly did oxygen build up in Earth's early atmosphere? An analysis using chromium isotopes trapped in ancient ocean deposits has provided an unexpected clue.

A team led by Robert Frei of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, sampled banded iron formations—an iron-rich sedimentary rock—dating from around and in between the two main periods of intense oxygen increases. They show that oxygen snuck into surface ocean waters 2.8-2.6 billion years ago—at least 200 million years earlier than predictions based on analyses of other metal isotopes.

More surprisingly, they also claim that around 1.9 billion years ago, oxygen levels actually dipped back down to almost where they were before the Great Oxidation Event, at less than 1% of today's levels.

Related Link
Fluctuations in Precambrian atmospheric oxygenation recorded by chromium isotopes

NYTimes.com: The human-driven buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere appears to have ended a slide, many millenniums in the making, toward cooler summer temperatures in the Arctic, the authors of a new study report.

Scientists familiar with the work, published journal Science, said it provided fresh evidence that human activity is not only warming the globe, particularly the Arctic, but could also even fend off what had been presumed to be an inevitable descent into a new ice age over the next few dozen millenniums.

Related Link
Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling

Wired.com: Tipping points are found in ecosystems, economies, and even bodies. But they're usually recognized in retrospect, when it's too late for anything but regret.

Now a growing body of research suggests there are telltale mathematical signals. If scientists can figure out how to detect them, they may be able to forecast tipping points ahead of time.

"We are repeatedly blindsided by disasters that come out of the blue. If we had better tools for anticipating those events, we could avoid some of them," said Steve Carpenter, a University of Washington ecologist.

Nature News: Millions of hectares of land will be needed to meet growing energy demands in the United States over the next two decades, according to new 'energy sprawl' estimates. The researchers behind the study say that biomass production for fuel or electricity generation will have the biggest impact on landscape and habitats.

The broad analysis of potential US energy and climate-mitigation scenarios compared the land and habitat impacts of various energy mixes -- from nuclear power to biofuels -- resulting from an array of policy options. The study is published this week in PLoS ONE

Related article
Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America

Nature News: Nitrous oxide (N₂O) has become the greatest threat to the ozone layer, a new analysis in Science suggests. The ozone-destroying abilities of the gas have been largely ignored by policy-makers and atmospheric scientists alike, who have focused on the more potent chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—historically the dominant ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere.

Related Link
Nitrous Oxide (N₂O): The Dominant Ozone-Depleting Substance Emitted in the 21st Century

Physics Today: The Italian city of Venice is under threat of frequent flooding under the latest climate change scenarios, say Laura Carbognin at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Venice and colleagues in Climate Dynamics, and new expensive flood barriers may be unable to protect it.

Since the early part of the 20th century Venice has suffered a number of damaging floods, particularly in the 1960s. About four times a year St Mark's Square, the center point of the city, floods during a particularly high tide (about 110 cm according to the research paper).
The new €3 billion controversial flood barriers called Mo.S.E. is due to be completed by 2014. It will protect Venice from these high tides by sealing the city's lagoon off from the surrounding inlets.

The study calculates the tides that will effect Venice by combining land subsidence data from the city—Venice was built on a marsh, and the buildings have been sinking at 0.05 cm per year for sometime—and the latest forecasts on global sea-level rise from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Carbognin's team predict that by 2100, the tide will rise above 110 cm between 30 and 250 times a year, under the most conservative estimates, and that alternatives to Mo.S.E. will have to be considered to save the city. "The temporary closure of inlets alone could not be suitable to efficiently protect Venice from flooding," says the report.

One of the simplest suggestions is to refill the underground aquifers to "float" up the city from its surrounding area. A modeling study has offered "encouraging results," says Carbognin's team, that could rise the city by 30 cm over a 10-year period.

Related Link
Global change and relative sea level rise at Venice: what impact in term of flooding
Can Venice be raised by pumping water underground? A pilot project to help decide

NPR: The Atlantic Ocean is experiencing the most intense period of hurricane activity in 1,000 years, according to a study in the journal Nature.

Slate: Acid rain has been a major problem since the Industrial Revolution. Acidification can cause imbalances in soil chemistry, exacerbating problems for watersheds and plant life, and threaten sensitive tree populations like the Red Spruce in the Northeast mountains.

The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act require power plants make significant cuts on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions—which cause acid rain—by installing "scrubbers" in their smokestacks and switching to low-sulfur coal.

Cap-and-trade programs came online in 1995 for sulfur dioxide and 2003 for nitrogen oxides. Vehicles, which emit large amounts of nitrogen oxides, became cleaner thanks to the catalytic converters.

According to the National Emissions Inventory, sulfur dioxide emissions from all sources fell from nearly 26 million tons in 1980 to 11.4 million tons in 2008. Nitrogen oxides decreased from 27 million tons to 16.3 million tons in the same time frame.

However, despite these improvements, much of the rainwater in the East is between 2.5 and 8 times more acidic than it should be.

Nature News: Researchers in the United States and Europe are seeking funding so that the ice cores used to study Earth's past climate can have the same luxuriously chilly storage facilities currently enjoyed by prize tuna.

Nature News: When nations made plans to save the ozone layer, they didn't factor in global warming. Nature's Quirin Schiermeier reports on how two environmental problems complicate each other.

ScienceNOW: Most of Earth's clouds get their start in deep space. That's the surprising conclusion from a team of researchers who argue that interstellar cosmic rays collide with water molecules in our atmosphere to form overcast skies.

New York Times: As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gears up for its next climate review, many specialists in climate science and policy, both inside and out of the network, are warning that it could quickly lose relevance unless it adjusts its methods and focus.

There is scant evidence that nations are acting on its warnings; emissions of heat-trapping gases have grown; talks about a new climate treaty remain largely deadlocked.

Environmentalists assert that the reports by the panel are watered down by a requirement that sponsoring governments reach consensus line by line.

Some experts fret that the IPCC has failed to keep pace with an explosion of climate research.

At the same time, some scientists accuse the panel of cherry-picking studies and playing down levels of uncertainty about the severity of global warming.

"It just feels like the IPCC has gone from being a broker of science to a gatekeeper," said John R. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and a former panel author.

NYTimes.com: China’s envoy to global negotiations on climate change expressed optimism on Wednesday that a new agreement to reduce greenhouse gases would be reached this year, and he said that his nation’s efforts to curb carbon pollution already had produced results that he called “second to none.”

But the envoy, Yu Qingtai, also underscored China’s opposition to placing a ceiling on its emissions of greenhouse gases, a step that some experts have called crucial to efforts to slow global warming.

The Atlantic: As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force.

Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that’s the scariest part says The Atlantic's Graeme Wood.

Related Physics Today articles
Geoengineering: What, how, and for whom? February 2009
Will desperate climates call for desperate geoengineering measures? August 2008

Los Angeles Times: A several-degree increase in temperature allowed the Incas to move higher into the Andes mountains, opening up new farmland and providing a water source through the gradual melting of glaciers at the top of those mountains, paleoecologist Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima reported online Monday in the journal Climate of the Past.

Science News: A macromolecule that was accidentally discovered when scientists left stuff sitting on a lab bench seems to soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The original find was made by a research team led by chemists at the University of Southampton in England. They were trying to design and create molecules that could capture negatively charged ions, such as chlorides and phosphates, on the surfaces of bioengineered cells.

In one experiment, the researchers set aside an alkaline solution of various organic substances to evaporate, says geochemist John A. Tossell, author of the new study. When analyzing the crystals that formed, the team found that the organic macromolecule that made up the crystal unexpectedly contained carbonates, which form in solutions containing carbon dioxide.

Related Link
Catching CO2 in a Bowl

Salon: As the debate over the Waxman–Markey climate bill rages on, Harvard's top environmental economist Robert Stavins sheds some light on how the bill will work.

csmonitor.com: In the past, national borders were determined by war, revolution, or, as is the case with many former colonies, someone in a pith helmet doodling on a map. But in the 21st century, the job could be done by global warming.

For instance, the 463-mile border between Italy and Switzerland runs mostly through the Alps, and has remained more or less fixed since Italy became a unified state in 1861.

Seeking to define the border more precisely, a 1941 convention between the two countries established the demarcation as running along the ridge crest of the glaciers in the mountain range.

But as the Alps experience the warmest period in 1,300 years, those glaciers are beginning to recede, moving the border northward. As the Discovery Channel reported in May, measurements taken at the Monte Rosa massif found that the border has shifted hundreds of feet in some places, with most of the change in the past five years. Now the two countries are at work redefining their boundaries, this time basing them on rock, not ice. Italy plans to make similar arrangements with France and Austria.

Science News: Hundreds of high-resolution satellite photos of the Arctic sea ice taken during the past 10 years should be immediately declassified and released to the scientific research community, the National Research Council reported on July 15. Shortly after, the US Geological Survey made about a thousand of the images available to the public through the Global Fiducials Library.

“Most people from the scientific community are not aware that these images have been collected,” says Stephanie Pfirman, chair of the NRC committee that wrote the report. “They’ll be very excited to see these results.”

ESA: These Envisat images highlight the dramatic retreat of the Aral Sea's shoreline from 2006 to 2009 (see animated image below).

The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, but it has been steadily shrinking over the past 50 years since the rivers that fed it were diverted for irrigation projects. By the end of the 1980s, it had split into the Small Aral Sea (north) and the horseshoe-shaped Large Aral Sea (south). By 2000, the Large Aral Sea had split into two — an eastern and western lobe. As visible in the images, the eastern lobe retreated substantially between 2006 and 2009. It appears to have lost about 80% of its water since the 2006 acquisition, at which time the eastern lobe had a length of about 150 km and a width of about 70 km.

The sea's entire southern section is expected to dry out completely by 2020, but efforts are underway to save the northern part.

The Kok-Aral dike, a joint project of the World Bank and the Kazakhstan government, was constructed between the northern and southern sections of the sea to prevent water flowing into the southern section. Since its completion in 2005, the water level has risen in the northern section by an average of 4 m.

As the Aral Sea evaporated, it left behind a 40 000-km² zone of dry, white salt terrain now called the Aral Karakum Desert. Each year violent sandstorms pick up at least 150 000 tonnes of salt and sand from the Aral Karakum and transport it across hundreds of kilometers, causing severe health problems for the local population and making regional winters colder and summers hotter. In an attempt to mitigate these effects, vegetation that thrives in dry, saline conditions is being planted in the former seabed.

In 2007, the Kazakhstan government secured another loan from the World Bank to implement the second stage, which includes the building of a second dam, of the project aimed at reversing this manmade environmental disaster.

Envisat acquired these images on 1 July 2006 and 6 July 2009 with its Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument while working in Full Resolution Mode to provide a spatial resolution of 300 m.

csmonitor.com: Unless enormous amounts of soil are dumped onto the Mississippi River Delta, the region could lose up to 5,212 square miles of land to ocean and tidal marsh by 2100 say two Louisiana State University scientists.

This could leave New Orleans with just the French Quarter and the airport above part of a vast bay.

“This was an attempt to give real boundary conditions for restoration efforts,” says Harry Roberts, one of the researchers conducting the study.

The researchers acknowledge that the study is a first cut at putting numbers to the problem. Others are likely to devise more precise estimates. “But even if we’re off by 50 percent, it’s still bad,” says Michael Blum, Dr. Roberts’s colleague on the work.

ScienceNOW: One fine day about 74 000 years ago, a giant volcano on Sumatra blew its top. The volcano, named Toba, may have ejected 1000 times more rock and other material than Mount St. Helens in Washington State did in 1980. In the process, it cooled the climate by at least 10 °C, causing a global famine.

But could the aftermath have been even worse? A new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research—Atmospheres puts to rest questions about whether Toba plunged Earth into a 1000-year deep freeze. Their simulations indicate that the temperature drop would last only a few decades and put to rest the claim that volcanic eruptions could have a long-term impact on the climate.

Nature News: Modern refrigerants designed to protect the ozone layer are poised to become a major contributor to global warming because of their future explosive growth in the developing world.

Hydrofluorocarbon chemicals (HFCs) were developed to phase out ozone-depleting gases, in response to the Montreal Protocol. But they can be hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases in trapping heat.

In the new study, a team led by Guus Velders at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in Bilthoven analyzed the latest industry trends and then modeled HFC production to 2050. Their results suggest that HFC emissions could be the equivalent of between 5.5 billion and 8.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2010—roughly 19% of the projected CO₂ emissions if greenhouse gases continue to rise unchecked.

Related Link
The large contribution of projected HFC emissions to future climate forcing

Various: Cosmologist Adrian Melott has been researching for some time mass extinctions in the Earth's fossil records and linking them to astrophysical events.

Recently, Melott and Brian Thomas looked at the Ordovician extinction, which occurred 450 million years ago and resulted in the loss of 60% of marine invertebrates.

According to computer simulations and matched with the fossil record, they find that their data suggests that photons from a gamma-ray burst approximately over the South Pole (and no further than -75 degrees) caused the atmosphere's chemistry to change, doubling the level of ultraviolet-B solar radiation reaching the surface.

In this scenario parts of north China, Laurentia, and New Guinea—which lay north of the equator—should be a refuge from the ultraviolet effects, and show a different pattern of extinction in the "first strike" of the end-Ordovician extinction, if it was induced by such a radiation event.

Melott cautions that gamma-rays or x-rays may not be the main cause for extinction events but could be the trigger for tipping an already stressed environment into a catastrophic event.

Related Link
Late Ordovician Geographic Patterns Of Extinction Compared With Simulations Of Astrophysical Ionizing Radiation Damage

In a broader article in SEED magazine Melott talks about his earlier research on cyclic mass extinctions.

There are at least 20 mass extinctions throughout the fossil record that fit a 62-million year cycle. Sometime ago Melott suggested that the solar-system's orbit around the Milky Way's center—which oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years, is the key—the galactic magnetic field protects the solar-system from extragalactic cosmic rays.

As the solar system "bobs" out of the galactic plane it becomes exposed to these cosmic rays which can cause enhanced cloud formation and depletion of the ozone layer, killing off many small organisms at the base of the food chain and potentially leading to a population crash.

Related Links
The Extinction Oscillator
Do Extragalactic Cosmic Rays Induce Cycles in Fossil Diversity?

Related Physics Today article
Recent Nearby Supernovae May Have Left Their Marks on Earth May 2002

Carnegie Institution for Science: Emergency plans to counteract global warming by artificially shading the Earth from incoming sunlight might lower the planet’s temperature a few degrees, but such “geoengineering” solutions would do little to stop the acidification of the world oceans that threatens coral reefs and other marine life, report the authors of a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The culprit is atmospheric carbon dioxide, which even in a cooler globe will continue to be absorbed by seawater, creating acidic conditions.

Related Link
Sensitivity of ocean acidification to geoengineered climate stabilization

Physics Today: On Friday, the Democrats narrowly won passage in the House for the 1200-page American Clean Energy and Security Act by a 219–212 vote—two votes more than required.

The bill calls on the US to cut production of greenhouse gases by 17% of 1990 levels by 2020 and 83% by mid-century. Currently US greenhouse gas emissions are rising on average by 1% each year.

Despite statements on both sides of the aisle insisting that they want to combat climate change, a number of Republicans and Democrats have been mounting a rear-guard action to weaken the bill, particularly in its long and convoluted passage through the House Energy and Commerce committee.

The outcome depended on locking in the so-called "Blue Dog Democrats" and the number of moderate Republicans—despite pressure from Republican leadership to kill the bill (more).

In his weekly address President Obama hailed the bill and stated that he was looking forward to the Senate clearing passage "so that we can say, at long last, that this was the moment when we decided to confront America's energy challenge and reclaim America's future."

"As this legislation moves to the Senate, it is also important to consider its international implications," says Eileen Claussen of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change . "Enactment of a comprehensive energy and climate bill along the lines of the ACES Act will finally allow the US to help lead the efforts toward a global agreement in which the major economies of the world, both developed and developing, play their part to address the climate challenge."

Related Links
House narrowly passes climate change bill Physics Today
House Passes Bill to Address Threat of Climate Change New York Times
Climate Change Activists Dismayed by Some of Bill's Provisions Washington Post

Nature News: Beijing spent the run-up to last year's Olympic Games claiming that the city's air had been drastically cleaned up, but those measurements are now being called into question.

Using an air pollution index (API) in which a score of 100 or lower indicates air quality as 'good', all 17 days of Olympic events in Beijing made the grade. Overall, the city hit an all-time high of 274 good air days in 2008.

APIs can be calculated in various different ways; Beijing's includes measurements of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particles smaller than 10 micrometres across — dubbed PM10. Controversially, it has not previously used low-level ozone measurements to calculate APIs, and it does not report on the level of particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres across (known as PM2.5). Both ozone and PM2.5 have potential negative impacts on health.

Now, Jian Wang of the Chinese environment ministry's pollution-prevention division has admitted that visibility in eastern cities in China is deteriorating. He says that the cause is ozone pollution and, especially, PM2.5.

Related Link
Inconsistencies in air quality metrics: 'Blue Sky' days and PM10 concentrations in Beijing

COSMOS magazine: Light pollution has caused 20% of the world's population —mostly in Europe, Britain and the US—to lose their ability to see the Milky Way in the night sky.

"The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage," said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

Yet "more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the U.S. population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way."

Nature News: This week, in the hallways of a conference in Guiyang, China, Nicola Pirrone—the director of Italy's CNR-Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research—will be trying to rustle up more support for a global network to monitor mercury pollution.

Such a network would underlie a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) treaty to control mercury emissions, which negotiators plan to forge by 2013.

Researchers are facing a complex task—how to monitor 2,500 tonnes of mercury every year, more than half of which comes from fossil-fuel power plants—on what may be shoestring budgets.

But so far, global monitoring endeavors have been relatively uncoordinated; hundreds of sporadic efforts can include one-time samplings from a ship cruise or aeroplane flight.

Science: Every June for 25 years, meteorologist William Gray and associates at Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins, have tried to decipher what the coming summer and fall have in store for hurricane country.

Now for the first time, the CSU group has graded itself. The researchers' statistical analysis credits their forecasts with a "modest" improvement over the baseline assumption that every season would be normal.

Others concede that the group has shown some measurable skill in forecasting—just not much.

The performance of the CSU forecasts has been "not too good" to "pretty bad," says seasonal forecaster Anthony Barnston of Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society in Palisades, New York. But then, he and colleagues have done their own seasonal hurricane forecasts, and "our skills are lousy also. No one is very good at this."

New York Times: "In the debate over global warming, one thing is clear: as the planet gets warmer, sea levels will rise. But how much, where and how soon? Those questions are notoriously hard to answer.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., are now adding to the complexity with a new prediction. If the melting of Greenland’s ice sheets continues to accelerate, they say, sea levels will rise even more in the northeastern United States and Maritime Canada than in other areas around the world.

The researchers, Aixue Hu and Gerald A. Meehl, based their predictions on runoff data from Greenland and an analysis of ocean circulation patterns."

The Daily Telegraph: Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, has proposed fitting white roofs to buildings in over to save energy and money on air conditioning by deflecting the sun's rays.

More pale surfaces could also slow global warming by reflecting heat into space rather than allowing it to be absorbed by dark surfaces where it is trapped by greenhouse gases and increases temperatures.

In a wide-ranging discussion at the three-day Nobel laureate Symposium in London, Chu described climate change as a "crisis situation", and called for a whole host of measures to be introduced, from promoting energy efficiency to renewable energy such as wind, wave and solar.

Chu's comments are backed up by research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which suggests white roofs can cut energy bills by 20%.

Associated Press: A mass extinction some 260 million years ago may have been caused by volcanic eruptions in what is now China, new research suggests.

[Image credit: Re-evaluating vertical motion preceding the Emeishan continental flood basalt province, SW China]

The so-called Guadalupian Mass Extinction, devastating marine life around the world, was preceded by massive eruptions in the Emeishan geological province of Southwest China, says Paul Wignall of the University of Leeds and colleagues in Science.

Related Link
Volcanism, Mass Extinction, and Carbon Isotope Fluctuations in the Middle Permian of China

The Guardian: We must shake off this inertia to keep sea level rises to a minimum

Björn Lomborg's claim that sea levels are not rising faster than predicted are unfounded and used by those wanting to downplay climate change

The MIT model is said to be the only one that incorporates among its variables possible changes in economic growth and other human activities and draws on peer-reviewed science on the climatic effects of atmospheric, oceanic and biological systems.

After running the model 400 times with slight variations in the inputs, the new predictions are for surface temperatures to warm by 6.3 to 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit. The prediction is for a 9.4-degree increase in the median temperature, more than double the 4.3 degrees predicted in a 2003 simulation.

NPR: A hundred years ago, the Welsbach and General Gas Mantle factories kept the lights on across the country by making a popular precursor to the light bulb called a mantle, but they left a toxic, radioactive legacy behind in Camden and Gloucester City, NJ. As part of the economic stimulus package, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to spend more than $25 million to accelerate the cleanup at the Welsbach and General Gas Mantle Superfund site. It's one of 50 contaminated properties getting injections of cash totaling $600 million from the recovery funds. That's more than double what the EPA usually spends on these projects each year.

But there is another line of research that needs exploring: The overall impact of human-made orbital debris, solid and liquid propellant discharges, and other space age substance abuse that winds up in a high-speed dive through Earth's atmosphere.

There's a convenient toss-away line that is in vogue: that such space refuse simply "burns up"—a kind of out of sight, out of mind declaration.

What chemistry is involved given the high heating during reentry of space leftovers made of tungsten, beryllium, aluminum, and lots of composite materials? The impact of these materials on Earth's atmosphere—top to bottom—would seem worthy of investigation.

Josh Wurman is president of the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colorado, and a VORTEX2 member. He is now looking for storms in Nebraska, and joins host Neal Conan to talk about 15 years studying tornadoes.

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The technique, which relies of frequencies close to 1 MHz, has an effective raduis of 20-meters, and is ideal for clearing algae blooms in lakes and ponds. However, because of the loud-nature of the sound (more than 35 dB over government safety standards) the researchers warn that caution should be taken if there are aquatic or semi-aquatic animals present.

Environmental News Network: A two-day workshop was held this week (May 11–12) between the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Japan's Ministry of Environment (MOEJ), and Japan's Institute for Global Environmental Strategies to discuss key climate change issues.

And when Earth lies in the path of that blast, the flare can play havoc with power grids, disrupt radio communications, and disturb or disable satellites. Fifty years into the Space Age, Earth has avoided the worst the Sun can deliver - so far.

But with the Sun entering a period of increased activity, more frequent solar flares could be headed our way. This has many astronomers and companies asking if satellites and power grids are ready.

The Associated Press: Former Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia says dealing with climate change is a national security issue that must be addressed.

The New York Times: Obama administration officials said Wednesday that an ambitious energy and climate-change proposal sponsored by House Democrats could help create jobs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they stopped short of endorsing it.

"In our view, Biosphere 2 was a tremendous success," said Bill Dempster, the project's engineering systems director and designer of the sphere's remarkable lungs. "Many people don't realize that hundreds of papers were written about it."

If built, the 460-mile line would carry about 3,000 megawatts of power, enough to avoid the need for a handful of coal-fired plants and to help utilities meet mandated targets for use of renewable fuel. "We have to connect the sun of the deserts and the winds of the plains to places where people live," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said recently.

But the line would also cross grasslands, skirt two national wildlife refuges and traverse the Rio Grande, all habitat areas rich in wildlife. The graceful sandhill crane, for example, makes its winter home in the wetlands of New Mexico's Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, right next to the path of the proposed power line. And much of the area falls under the protection of the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

At the time, some observers put the odds of such an event occurring at millions, maybe billions, to one.

But experts had been warning for years that useable space was becoming crowded, boosting the possibility of a serious collision

The Washington Post: Days after the Obama administration unveiled a push to combat climate change, Indian officials said it was unlikely to prompt them to agree to binding emission cuts, a position among emerging economies that many say derails effective action.

If oil prices rise again, adoption of the new coal-to-liquid technology, reported this week in Science, could undercut adoption of electric vehicles or next-generation biofuels. And that's bad news for the fight against climate change.

Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists since he came to the US at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory.

Among Dyson's gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics.

Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination's ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. "You point Freeman at a problem and he'll solve it," Goldberger says. "He's extraordinarily powerful." Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate.

Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

Los Angeles Times: In a move that could pit environmentalists and alternative energy industries against each other, the senator wants hundreds of thousands of acres in California designated as a national monument.

Nature: Researchers work to put changing ice types into climate models.

Science: Eleven universities convened the Copenhagen Climate Congress last week in hopes of providing a comprehensive picture of the status of world climate science before another set of delegates meets here in December to hammer out a follow-up to the 1997 Kyoto Accords, which expire in 2012.

The only good news here is the catastrophe isn't likely to unfold quickly.

Science: The westerlies are the prevailing winds in the middle latitudes of Earth's atmosphere, blowing from west to east between the high-pressure areas of the subtropics and the low-pressure areas over the poles. They have strengthened and shifted poleward over the past 50 years, possibly in response to warming from rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Something similar appears to have happened 17,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age: Earth warmed, atmospheric CO₂ increased, and the Southern Hemisphere westerlies seem to have shifted toward Antarctica. Data reported by R. F. Anderson and colleagues suggest that the shift
17,000 years ago occurred before the warming and that it caused the CO₂ increase.

The CO₂ that appeared in the atmosphere 17,000 years ago came from the
oceans rather than from anthropogenic emissions. It was vented from the deep ocean up to the atmosphere in the vicinity of Antarctica. The southern westerlies are important in this context because they can alter the oceanic circulation in a way that vents CO₂ from the ocean interior up to the atmosphere.

Related Link
Wind-Driven Upwelling in the Southern Ocean and the Deglacial Rise in Atmospheric CO₂

The research, currently available on arXiv, has been submitted to Nature for peer-review, but not everyone is convinced the group has found a supernova chemical fingerprint in the ice.

“The basic idea is an interesting one, but it’s way premature to accept these findings” at face value, comments Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England. “If the authors could show convincingly that they had supernovas, this would be exciting...But I think we are a long way from that.”

The New York Times: More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.

NPR: The US satellites that monitor climate change are aging, and replacements are years away, thanks to more than a decade of budget cuts and squabbling about which federal agency should run the climate satellite program.

The study answers the question of why giant dunes don't grow indefinitely, says Nick Lancaster, a geomorphologist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, who was not involved in the work.

However, as most community colleges do not have a dedicated Earth sciences department, students will not get an opportunity to get the necessary background or skills to work in this area says reporter Trina Hoaks.

"Demand is growing for credible, understandable and useful information for responding to climate change," says the report, called Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change. The report, released Thursday, calls for "transformation" of climate science to emphasize the climate's influence on food, economics and public health.

Otherwise, there's lots of evidence that politicians will tackle such practical problems without scientists.

The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, was widely viewed as badly flawed. Many countries that signed the accord lagged far behind their targets in curbing carbon dioxide emissions. The United States refused even to ratify it. And the treaty gave a pass to major emitters in the developing world like China and India.

But within weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty — to be signed in Copenhagen in December — “in a robust way.”

The New York Times: Bush administration standards for pollutants like soot are "contrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decisionmaking," a federal appeals court said Tuesday.

The New York Times: Nine years of work disappeared in five minutes yesterday when a NASA satellite crashed into the icy waters near Antarctica. Now climate scientists who worked on the ambitious effort to map the world's carbon dioxide are trying to figure out what comes next.

Guardian Unlimited : Environment ministers overcame seven years of obstacles today and committed to reducing the world's mercury pollution.

Carbon dioxide and other gases added to the air by industrial and other activities have been blamed for rising temperatures, increasing worries about possible major changes in weather and climate.

Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5% per year since 2000, up sharply from the 0.9% per year in the 1990s, Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It is now outside the entire envelope of possibilities" considered in the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, he said.

Related Links
How to avoid contaminating planetary neighbors NPR

ScienceNow: Climate change is bringing mixed news to the ozone layer. Thanks to increasing CO₂ concentrations and shifting air currents, the mid-northern hemisphere, including the United States, Canada, and Europe, will likely see its ozone restored ahead of schedule, according to a new study. Meanwhile, areas throughout the tropics and the mid-southern hemisphere, such as Australia, New Zealand, and Peru, may experience a delay in their ozone recovery.

Environmental News Network: The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the first multinational agency focused solely on spreading clean energy across the globe, officially launched this week.

In a study published today in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, earth systems scientist Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and a graduate student analyzed 17 schemes for cooling the planet.

On Wednesday, Gore returned to the Senate to offer advice about how to arrive at a different outcome as a new climate treaty is negotiated this year in Copenhagen, Denmark.

ScienceNow: Climate scientists have painted an unpleasant picture of the end of this century if humankind keeps spewing climate-changing gases into the atmosphere. Now they are pointing out that the ill effects won't be going away for a long, long time. The carbon dioxide we're emitting this century is so slow to disappear and climate so slow to respond, they say, that the effects felt in a century or two will be almost as strong 1000 years from now.

The New York Times: Not long ago, Ed Adams, a civil engineering professor, studied avalanches by setting them off with dynamite and studying their movement as they buried him, his instruments and his colleagues in a tiny shack.

USA Today: NASA and Northrop Grumman recently unveiled two unmanned drones that will be used for atmospheric research. One of the two Global Hawks, a version of the Air Force's top-of-the-line unmanned spy plane, will be outfitted with science instruments this spring and conduct its first earth science mission in June for NASA.

The planes, which are capable of staying aloft for more than 30 hours, will sample greenhouse gases responsible for ozone depletion and verify measurements by NASA's Aura atmosphere research satellite.

"It's a whole new ballgame for us," said project scientist Paul A. Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Environmental News Network:
Tackling climate change and its consequences, reforming the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, improving air quality, and reducing the environmental impact of biofuels will top the bloc's environmental policy debates in the coming year, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA).

US News & World Report: The White House on Monday released a long-awaited document broadly laying out U.S. policy toward the Arctic, a region whose potential for oil, gas, and mineral exploitation is for the first time being unlocked by a historic ice melt driven by climate change.

The balloon, which was launched on December 28, 2008, from McMurdo Station in Antarctica, is 7 million cubic feet and is said to be the largest single-cell, super-pressure, fully sealed balloon ever flown. When the project--which NASA is conducting in coordination with the National Science Foundation--is completed, the space agency should have a 22 million cubic foot balloon to work with.

NASA said that long-duration high-altitude balloon missions are far more cost-effective than satellites and that a chief benefit is that the instruments used can be easily retrieved and re-used.

The Independent: An emergency "Plan B" using the latest technology is needed to save the world from dangerous climate change, according to a poll of leading scientists carried out by The Independent. The collective international failure to curb the growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has meant that an alternative to merely curbing emissions may become necessary.

The plan would involve highly controversial proposals to lower global temperatures artificially through daringly ambitious schemes that either reduce sunlight levels by man-made means or take CO2 out of the air. This "geoengineering" approach – including schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms – would have been dismissed as a distraction a few years ago but is now being seen by 54% of the scientists they surveyed as a viable emergency backup plan that could save the planet from the worst effects of climate change, at least until deep cuts are made in CO2 emissions.

"This is the first paper in the scientific literature that explicitly melds the two vital issues of global peak oil production and human-induced climate change," Kharecha said. "We're illustrating the types of action needed to get to target carbon dioxide levels."

He also collects sand....

Now researchers are reporting that the abrupt cooling — which took place about 12,900 years ago, just as the planet was emerging from an ice age — may have been caused by one or more meteors that slammed into North America.

CNN: Between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion tons of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted at an accelerating rate since 2003, according to NASA scientists, in the latest signs of what they say is global warming.

Physics Today: President-elect Obama's transition team is expected to shortly announce that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu will be nominated as secretary of energy, while Lisa Jackson, a former environmental policy official in New Jersey, has been picked to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Carol Browner, who led the EPA under President Clinton, will fill a new White House "energy czar" role. The announcements came from Democratic officials on Wednesday night.

Chu, who will be the first Nobel Prize winner to be appointed to the US cabinet, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has played a key role in moving the lab in the direction of specializing in renewable energy, particularly in the field of new fuels for transportation. LBNL is experimenting with making biofuels from different types of biomass, using algae in fermentation tanks to make fuel, and applying solar energy to convert water and carbon dioxide to fuels. "[President-elect Obama] certainly needs somebody who can focus on the science and energy policies and I can't think of a better guy than Steve," says Mike Lubell from the American Physical Society.

Originally his father wanted him to be an architect as "the competition in physics was too strong." Chu did both his graduate and postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. He then spent nine years at Bell Labs before joining Stanford University's physics department where he remained between 1987-2004. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Phillips for cooling and trapping atoms with lasers.

During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would invest $150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and proposed requiring that 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from renewable sources by 2012. Chu, has been one of the most public faces of promoting renewable energy. At the National Clean Energy Summit held in August, Chu said "I think political will is absolutely necessary. But we need new technologies."

Chu is also one of the co-authors of the 2006 National Academy of Sciences' report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, in which he lobbied for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy as a way of funding risky hich-tech technologies to solve the US energy crisis. ARPA-E, although legislation creating its existence has passed into law, has yet to be receive a budget as the proposal is not supported by the Bush administration. Chu's appointment increases the likelihood that the ARPA-E will finally be created.

The largest part of the Department of Energy's budget however, goes towards maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile. It is too early to say what the implications are for Chu's appointment to the long term future of the three main nuclear weapons labs at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chu is likely to focus his attention on the Energy Department's core missions: basic science, nuclear weapons and cleaning up a nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex contaminated since the Cold War.

Related Physics Today articles
Chu Named Berkeley Lab Director (August 2004)
Politicians skeptical about need for ARPA-E (June 2006)
'Gathering Storm' Report Urges Strong Federal Action to Save US Science and Technology Leadership December 2005
Could 'green gasoline' displace ethanol as the biofuel of choice? December 2008
Blueprint for new energy institute February 2007

Related Physics Today science articles
Laser Beam Focus Forms Optical Trap for Neutral Atoms September 1986
New Mechanisms for Laser Cooling October 1990
Atom Interferometers Prove Their Worth in Atomic Measurements July 1995
Work on Atom Trapping and Cooling Gets a Warm Reception in Stockholm December 1997
Atom Interferometer Measures G with Same Accuracy as Optical Devices November 1999
How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist December 1999 (review by Steven Chu)

Related Web LInks
Nobel Winner Chu To Land Top Energy Post (NPR)
Obama Team Set on Environment New York TImes
Obama Picks Team to Guide Energy, Environment Agendas Wall Street Journal
Steve Chu, Sixth Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Obama Said to Pick Nobel Laureate Chu as Energy Chief Bloomberg
Nobel Physicist Chosen To Be Energy Secretary Washington Post

Water samples collected around an island in the eastern Pacific over the past eight years showed seawater had acidified more than 20 times faster than scientists expected. The effect could be devastating for shellfish and other crustaceans, because acidic waters dissolve calcium carbonate used by the organisms to make their protective shells.

Nature: Convective mixing resumes after a decade due to massive loss of Arctic ice.

Nature: Jet-setting scientists are responsible for substantial greenhouse gas emissions.

San Francisco Chronicle: Despite new signals from President-elect Barack Obama and Congress that they may defy predictions of delay by pressing forward with legislation on global warming, California's role as the key battleground for climate policy is greater than ever - and local communities will be on the front line.

Nature: Environmentalists concerned over potential effects on whales.

Environmental News Network: President-elect Obama will shred the Bush administration's energy policies and introduce a major climate change bill in an attempt to bring the US back into the international environment fold according to his senior advisers.

The Associated Press: This year's ozone hole over Antarctica was the fifth biggest on record, reaching a maximum area of 10.5 million square miles in September, NASA says.

The Guardian: Science academy to launch a feasibility study to establish which techniques might best tackle climate change.

Environmental News Network: China wants rich countries to commit 1 percent of their economic worth to help poor nations fight global warming, and will press for a new international mechanism to spread "green" technology worldwide.

BBC: The thickness of Arctic sea ice "plummeted" last winter, thinning by as much as 49 centimetres (1.6ft) in some regions, satellite data has revealed.

Environmental News Network: Scientists will visit a vulnerable part of an Antarctic ice shelf this year to work out if it will crack off in coming decades and perhaps trigger a rise in sea levels, they said Thursday.

Inside Science News: As the world's oceans absorb increasing amounts of human-generated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they will become both more acidic and noisier, according to researchers with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California. Their study, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, says the noise increase will correspond to underwater sound actually traveling up to 70 percent farther in the more acidic seawater by 2050.

Environmental News Network: Emissions from China's export industry are everyone's responsibility — future trade and climate policy must be linked, says Glen Peters.

Environmental News Network: Trapping and burying carbon dioxide from power plants could become viable without public funding by 2030, helping nations reduce their dependence on energy imports and meet climate goals, a report said on Monday.

Environmental News Network: The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has already surpassed its 2007 size this year, and is set to keep growing for another few weeks, the U.N. weather agency said on Tuesday.

Xinhua: China's newly launched environment monitoring satellites have started operation and are sending back concrete data, Chinese authorities have announced.

Related article
Medicine for a feverish planet: kill or cure? by James Lovelock

BBC: The ice shelves in Canada's High Arctic have lost a colossal area this year, scientists report.

The Independent: Open water now stretches all the way round the Arctic, making it possible for the first time in human history to circumnavigate the North Pole. New satellite images, taken only two days ago, show that melting ice last week opened up both the fabled North-west and North-east passages, in the most important geographical landmark to date to signal the unexpectedly rapid progress of global warming.

Last night Professor Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the official US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), hailed the publication of the images – on an obscure website by scientists at the University of Bremen, Germany – as "a historic event", and said that it provided further evidence that the Arctic icecap may now have entered a "death spiral". Some scientists predict that it could vanish altogether in summer within five years, a process that would, in itself, greatly accelerate.

The heads of three influential groups, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, representing more than 2 million members, have written to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, warning that the UK proposals for up to eight new coal plants threatens the chance of the US joining a post-Kyoto international agreement to be agreed in 2009.

A recent report by the IPPR said the European Union's goal of reducing emissions from the power sector and heavy industry through its emissions trading scheme would collapse if the go-ahead were given to seven new coal plants in the UK and up to 75 across Europe./p>

The question is whether they can meet a 1 October deadline for completing a critical part of their increasingly complex simulation of the interplay of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice. "We're all very nervous," says atmospheric modeler Philip Rasch, who works remotely for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in nearby Boulder and who oversees the atmospheric component of the model. A big reason for the concern is the budget cuts that have affected the center, which hosts and manages CCSM.

The proposed plan, which was sent as a document to the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama, would cost the nation about $9 billion above the current $10 billion already allotted for fiscal years 2010-2014.

The groups include the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.

"With more than a quarter of the U.S. gross national product sensitive to weather and climate, these events substantially impact our national health, safety, economy, environment, transportation systems, and military readiness," the document states.

The document stressed the need for more research in five areas:

• Observations. Fully fund the Earth observing system from satellite and ground-based instruments as recommended by the National Research Council.
• Computing. Greatly increase the computer power available for weather and climate research, predictions and related applications.
• Research and Modeling. Support a broad fundamental and applied research program in Earth sciences and related fields to advance present understanding of weather and climate and their impacts on society.
• Societal Relevance. Support education, training and communication efforts to use the observations, models and application tools for the maximum benefit of society.
• Leadership and Management. Implement effective leadership, management and evaluation approaches to ensure that these investments are done in the best interest of the nation.

BBC: Data from the UK Met Office shows that temperatures in the first half of the year have been more than 0.1 Celsius cooler than any year since 2000.

Science: Now that almost everyone expects a certain amount of global warming by the end of the century, attention can turn to more local climate change. What's going to happen in our own backyards? Researchers can't go that far yet, but in an effort to squeeze the maximum detail out of notoriously fuzzy climate models, they are pooling results from some of the most sophisticated simulations available.

The Times: Britain's great seafaring tradition is to provide a unique insight into modern climate change, thanks to thousands of Royal Navy logbooks that have survived from the 17th century onwards.

“Ships’ officers recorded air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and other weather conditions. From those records scientists can build a detailed picture of past weather and climate,” said Dr Sam Willis, a maritime historian and author who is affiliated with Exeter University’s Centre for Maritime Historical Studies.

Nature News: Many of the research projects launched as part of the International Polar Year (IPY), which runs from March 2007 to March 2009, are under threat because of the steep rise in marine-fuel costs. Hundreds of Arctic and Antarctic scientists face uncertainty as polar science programmes worldwide are curtailed, postponed or cancelled.

Nature News: The Tibetan plateau gets a lot less attention than the Arctic or Antarctic, but after them it is Earth's largest store of ice. And the store is melting fast. In the past half-century, 82% of the plateau's glaciers have retreated. In the past decade, 10% of its permafrost has degraded. As the changes continue, or even accelerate, their effects will resonate far beyond the isolated plateau, changing the water supply for billions of people and altering the atmospheric circulation over half the planet.

The proximate cause of the changes now being felt on the plateau is a rise in temperature of up to 0.3 °C a decade that has been going on for fifty years — approximately three times the global warming rate. The questions are how much more change to expect in the future, and how severe the effects will be on the planet's climate as a whole.

The Guardian: After a 15-month inquiry the UK's media regulator Ofcom will rule next week that the UK television broadcaster Channel 4 misrepresented some of the world's leading climate scientists in a controversial documentary that claimed global warming was a conspiracy and a fraud. Ofcom is expected to censure the network over its treatment of some scientists in the programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle.

But it is understood that Channel 4 will still claim victory because the ultimate verdict on a separate complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, will find that it did not breach the regulator's broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.

The New York Times : Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday urged the United States to wean the nation from its entire electricity grid to carbon-free energy within 10 years, warning that drastic steps were needed to avoid a global economic and ecological cataclysm.

The New York Times: The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Tuesday a first draft of a rule that will govern injecting carbon dioxide into underground storage.

Washington Post: The Bush administration has decided not to take any new steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions before the president leaves office, despite pressure from the Supreme Court and broad accord among senior federal officials that new regulation is appropriate now.

Science: A group of distinguished former government officials (Mark Schaefer, D. James Baker, John H. Gibbons, Charles G. Groat, Donald Kennedy, Charles F. Kennel, David Rejeski) argue in Science magazine that organizational changes must be made at the federal level to align the public institutional infrastructure to address the unprecedented environmental and economic challenges in the decades ahead such as climate change.

The most pressing organizational change that is required they say, is the establishment of an independent Earth Systems Science Agency formed by merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

ENN: The European Union and green groups piled pressure on the United States on Monday to agree to a target to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century and back the need for rich countries to set 2020 goals as well.

News.com: India released its first action plan for climate change earlier this week

Wired: It was one of the largest public demonstrations in US history. On June 12, 1982, an estimated 750,000 protesters thronged Central Park in New York City, chanting "No nukes!" and bearing signs reading "Reagan is a bomb — both should be banned" and "Arms are for embracing." Some demonstrators called for unilateral US disarmament, others for renewing arms control talks with the Soviet Union. It was a diverse coalition that had been pulled together by Ken Caldeira, a 25-year-old activist and computer geek. Back then he was paying the rent doing software consulting on Wall Street, but his passion for the environment would eventually lead him to become one of the nation's leading experts on global warming.

BBC: Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than last year, despite a cold winter.

Environmental News Network: Industrialized nations are failing to lead enough at U.N. climate talks in Bonn even as developing states are showing interest in a new global warming treaty, the U.N.'s top climate official said on Wednesday.

ScienceNow: Scientists tracking a dramatic shrinkage in Arctic sea ice over the past few years have come to a worrisome conclusion: If the trend continues, it could speed up the melting of Arctic permafrost as well. The environmental consequences of such a development are uncertain, but they could spell trouble for plants, animals, and humans in those regions that depend on solid ground underfoot.

Wired: The world needs to invest $45 trillion in energy in coming decades, build some 1,400 nuclear power plants and vastly expand wind power in order to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to an energy study released Friday.

ENN: Even before debate began on Monday on the first comprehensive climate change bill to reach the Senate floor, the White House said President George W. Bush would veto it in its current form.

Bush himself slammed the bill, saying it would cost the U.S. economy $6 trillion. His estimate drew quick denials from those who support the legislation, including Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat and longtime environmentalist.

[From ENN: Bush would veto U.S. climate change bill]

NPR: Walter Mooney, a research seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., says the aftershocks following the earthquake in China are typical so far, but there's no real way to predict them. Mooney tells NPR's Melissa Block his Chinese counterparts are surprised by the extent of the damage and loss of life after the quake.

Related News Picks
The Chengdu Earthquake
Spy satellites monitor China's nuclear weapon sites for earthquake damage

Nature News: Greenhouse-gas concentrations are higher today than they have been at any point in hundreds of millennia, according to researchers who have analysed tiny air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice that dates back 800,000 years.

Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are now more than 28% higher than at any other point in the time period covered by the samples, according to Thomas Stocker, one of the authors of two studies in this week's Nature.

Related articles
Orbital and millennial-scale features of atmospheric CH4 over the past 800,000 years
High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000–800,000 years before present

London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:

The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.

We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.

Physics Today: The European Space Agency has released images of Cyclone Nargis making its way across the Bay of Bengal just south of Myanmar on 1 May 2008.

The cyclone hit the coastal region and ripped through the heart of Myanmar on Saturday, devastating the country. The picture (right) is from the Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument working in Reduced Resolution mode to deliver a spatial resolution of 1200 meters.

Under an international charter founded by ESA, the French space agency (CNES) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) eight years ago, the agencies provide satellite data free of charge to those affected by disasters anywhere in the world. On 4 May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) asked for support.

With inundated areas typically visible from space, Earth Observation (EO) is increasingly being used for flood response and mitigation. One of the biggest problems during flooding emergencies is obtaining an overall view of the phenomenon, with a clear idea of the extent of the flooded area.

These Envisat radar images above highlight the extent of flooding in the Irrawaddy delta caused by the cyclone Nargis that hit Myanmar on May 3, 2008, devastating the country. The left image, acquired on Feb. 5, 2007, shows the situation approximately one year ago. The black and dark areas in the image on the right, acquired on May 5, 2008, indicate areas potentially still flooded two days after the event. Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar data are especially well suited for delivering information on floods, which are usually accompanied by rain and therefore cloudy conditions. Radar sensors can peer through clouds, rain or local darkness and are especially sensitive to moisture on the ground. Both images have a 75 m pixel grid on the ground and show an area approximately 100 km wide.

Physics Today: Faster moving ships hit the whales, causing injury or death, say scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet for over a year the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has blocked the National Marine Fisheries Service from issuing a rule based on scientific research that limits the speed of ships near US ports to protect the endangered right whale.

According to documents obtained by the House of representative committee on oversight and government reform (OGR), the delay appears to be based on objections raised by Whitehouse officials and the Vice President's office. Under Executive order 12866, the OIRA is supposed to complete their review of rule changes within 90 days and can only extend the review period by an additional 30 days.

According to Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who recently sent a letter to the administration requesting an explanation, the Vice President's office is objecting to NOAA's research as the Vice President's staff "contends that we have no evidence that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference."

In a memo obtained by the OGR committee NOAA rejected these objections, stating that both a statistical analysis of ship strike records and the peer-reviewed literature justified the final rule. NOAA reported that there is "no basis to overturn our previous conclusion that imposing a speed limit on large vessels would be beneficial to whales."

Waxman says that he questions "why White House economic advisors are apparently conducting their own research on right whales and why the Vice President's staff is challenging the conclusions of the government's scientific experts. The appearance is that the White House rejects the conclusions of its own scientists and peer-reviewed scientific studies because it does not like the policy implications of the data. This is not how the review process is supposed to work."

Various: More than 900 scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) say they have personally experienced political interference in their work, according to a survey released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The report has been picked up by ScienceNOW, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post

"Our investigation found an agency in crisis," said Francesca Grifo, director of UCS's Scientific Integrity Program. "Distorting science to accommodate a narrow political agenda threatens our environment, our health, and our democracy itself."

The survey results show "an agency under siege from political pressures," says UCS while in a statement EPA says that the concerns may largely reflect a misunderstanding of how policy is made. EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar said the findings will not change anything.

The survey was sent to the majority of 7000 scientists at EPA last summer, and 1586 filled it out.

Among the UCS report's findings:

– 889 scientists (60 percent) said they had personally experienced at least one instance of political interference in their work over the last five years.

– 394 scientists (31 percent) personally experienced frequent or occasional "statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists' findings."

– 285 scientists (22 percent) said they frequently or occasionally personally experienced "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome."

– 224 scientists (17 percent) said they had been "directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from an EPA scientific document."

– Of the 969 agency veterans with more than 10 years of EPA experience, 409 scientists (43 percent) said interference has occurred more often in the past five years than in the previous five-year period. Only 43 scientists (4 percent) said interference occurred less often.

– Hundreds of scientists reported being unable to openly express concerns about the EPA's work without fear of retaliation; 492 (31 percent) felt they could not speak candidly within the agency and 382 (24 percent) felt they could not do so outside the agency.

The UCS investigation also revealed that EPA scientists cannot freely communicate their findings to the media, public or colleagues. Seven-hundred-eighty-three respondents (51 percent) said EPA policies do not let scientists speak freely to the news media about their findings. Scientists also shared anecdotes about being barred from presenting their research at conferences and their difficulties clearing research publication articles with EPA managers.

Scientists who reported political interference tended to work in offices that write regulations rather than in basic research labs. Hundreds said they feared retaliation by officials if they voiced concerns about EPA regulations.

In optional essays, scientists repeatedly singled out the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, accusing officials there of inserting themselves into decision-making at early stages in a way that shaped the outcome of their inquiries. They also alleged that the OMB delayed rules not to its liking. EPA actions "are held hostage" until changes are made, a scientist from the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation wrote.

The Guardian: Fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels have been allayed by new research. Though scientists confirmed that the water can drain away faster than Niagara Falls, it did not seem to accelerate the movement of the ice sheet into the ocean as previously thought.

New York Times: It was the end of January 2005, during the spawning season for a fish appropriately called the black drum. Nightly mating calls were at a crescendo. But no one living in the area seemed to realize the din was of aquatic origin.

James Locascio, a doctoral student in marine science at the University of South Florida, explains that at 100 to 500 hertz, black drum mating calls travel at a low enough frequency and long enough wavelength to carry through sea walls, into the ground and through the construction of waterfront homes like the throbbing beat in a passing car.

“Black drum have taken a liking to the canal system in Cape Coral,” Mr. Locascio said. “Their nightly booming is like a water drip torture that lasts for months.”

New York Times reporter Nonny de la Pena investigates the mystery of how fish make sound, and how the National Marine Fisheries Service is listening to fish sounds in an attempt to discover a new noninvasive way of managing declining fish stocks.

The Guardian: Energy companies are planning to revive a polluting technology developed by the Nazis to replace dwindling supplies of oil with synthetic fuels derived from coal.

Senior industry figures told a high-level conference in Paris this week that coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology could fuel cars and aircraft for decades to come.

Green campaigners reacted with alarm because the process produces twice as much greenhouse gas as using oil. Supporters say much of the carbon pollution could be captured and stored underground, and that the synthetic fuel burns cleaner than conventional diesel.

Various: Imposing caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prod energy users to conserve or switch to nonpolluting technologies isn't working fast enough to combat an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency say a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy. "It will be too little and come too late," writes Andrew C. Revkin in the New York Times.

What is needed says economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in Scientific American, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which will only come about with greatly increased government spending by what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development.

A different mindset is highlighted by Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post who writes about a public discussion between climate scientist James E. Hansen and Duke Energy CEO James E. Rogers, an energy company company with a number of coal-fied power plants. Hansen was complaining that two new power plants built by Duke Energy did not include any carbon-capture technologies to reduce their emissions.

Rogers, said the scientist's demand reflects a "snap-your-fingers, instant transition of the economy" mind-set. "My requirement is to balance reliability, affordability and clean energy," Rogers said. "He's apparently focused on the clean perspective."

Globally, the number of coal power plants that will have carbon capture and storge units is limited. "You don't have other countries lining up and investing serious funding" in this technology," says Rachel Crisp, deputy director of Britain's cleaner fossil fuels unit to the Washington Post.

Sacramento Bee: Attorney General Jerry Brown joined officials in 17 other states Wednesday to demand that the federal Environmental Protection Agency release its internal finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health.

The move comes after EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson wrote last week that he plans to open a months-long public comment period on greenhouse gas emissions, a procedure critics say serves to delay action on emissions until after President Bush leaves office.

The states, joined by environmental groups, filed their legal demand Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking that EPA release the finding within 60 days.

The Guardian: Gordon Brown is preparing for a battle with the European Union over biofuels after one of the government's leading scientists warned they could exacerbate climate change rather than combat it.

In an outspoken attack on a policy which comes into force next week, Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said it would be wrong to introduce compulsory quotas for the use of biofuels in petrol and diesel before their effects had been properly assessed.

"If one started to use biofuels ... and in reality that policy led to an increase in greenhouse gases rather than a decrease, that would obviously be insane," Watson said. "It would certainly be a perverse outcome.