Open Intelligence / Ecology

since the 1970s, the frequency of wildfires has increased at least four-fold, and the total size of burn areas has increased at least six-fold in the western United States alone. Steadily rising, the U.S.'s bill for fighting wildfires now totals $1.5 billion per year

the paper presents a new framework for considering wildfires based on the Earth's pre-human fire history, ways that humans have historically used and managed fire and ways that they currently do so.

This research emphasizes the importance of understanding the relative influences of climate, human ignition sources and cultural practices in particular environments in order to design sustainable fire management practices that protect human health, property and ecosystems.

New research from Carnegie's Global Ecology department concludes that evaporated water helps cool the earth as a whole, not just the local area of evaporation, demonstrating that evaporation of water from trees and lakes could have a cooling effect on the entire atmosphere

It is well known that the paving over of urban areas and the clearing of forests can contribute to local warming by decreasing local evaporative cooling, but it was not understood whether this decreased evaporation would also contribute to global warming

Globally, this cycle of evaporation and condensation moves energy around, but cannot create or destroy energy. So, evaporation cannot directly affect the global balance of energy on our planet.

"And what we want do," says John Sauven, who is executive director of Greenpeace UK, "is say that this area, which is currently not national territory, this area of sea ice around the North Pole, should be a 'global commons', collectively owned by humanity under the auspices of the United Nations.

So now Greenpeace, Mr Sauven says, is planning a global campaign to make the North Pole off-limits. Internalionalised. No development. No oil drilling. No territorial claims

It has done so by its own form of protest, by being present (often at considerable personal risk) at the sharp end of all these situations, and making the world aware: it is the idea of "bearing witness", from the Quaker background of some its founders.

Coral reefs are on course to become the first ecosystem that human activity will eliminate entirely from the Earth, a leading United Nations scientist claims. He says this event will occur before the end of the present century,

"a new first for mankind – the 'extinction' of an entire ecosystem"

The predicted decline is mainly down to climate change and ocean acidification, though local activities such as overfishing, pollution and coastal development have also harmed the reefs. The book, Our Dying Planet, published by University of California Press, contains further alarming predictions, such as the prospect that "we risk having no reefs that resemble those of today in as little as 30 or 40 more years"

It has been proposed that Ecocide, the environmental equivalent of genocide, becomes the 5th International Crime Against Peace alongside Genocide itself, Crimes Against Humanity, Crimes of Aggression and War Crimes. The new law has been proposed to the UN by British Environmental Lawyer, Polly Higgins who proposes that under the new law Heads of States and Directors of Corporations be required to take individual and personal responsibility for their actions. On September 30th 2011, London's Supreme Court of the United Kingdom will be the venue for a Mock Trial, played out as though the crime of Ecocide had already been adopted.

Ecocide is defined as: "the mass damage, destruction to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished."

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

A giant wall of dust rolled through the Phoenix area on Thursday for the third time since early July — turning the sky brown, creating dangerous driving conditions and delaying some airline flights. The dust storm, also known as a haboob in Arabic and around Arizona, swept through Pinal County and headed northeast, reaching Phoenix at about 6 p.m. Some incoming and departing flights at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport were temporarily delayed because of the storm, according to airport officials who couldn’t immediately provide exact numbers. Take-offs and landing began again at about 6:50 p.m. National Weather Service meteorologists said a powerful thunderstorm packing winds of up to 60 mph hit Pinal County and pushed the dust storm toward Arizona’s most populous county. There were several reports of downed poles and Salt River Project officials said 3,500 of its customers were without electricity, mostly in the Queen Creek area southeast of Phoenix. There were no immediate reports of any weather-related auto accidents. It was the third major dust storm to hit the Phoenix metro area since last month. A haboob on July 5 brought a mile-high wall of dust that halted airline flights, knocked out power for 10,000 people and covered everything in its path with a thick sheet of dust. Another dust storm hit July 18 reaching heights of 3,000 to 4,000 feet, delaying flights and cutting off power for more than 2,000 people in the Phoenix metro area. Weather officials say haboobs only happen in Arizona, the Sahara desert and parts of the Middle East because of dry conditions and large amounts of sand. –The Chron

Continued flooding does threaten the plants, however. As nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen explains in the above video, cooling pumps must operate continuously, even years after a plant is shut down. One group, the Foundation for Resilient Societies, has proposed solar panels and other high-reliability power sources to supply backup cooling for the fuel pools at nuclear plants.

While hindsight might be 20/20, the lack of foresight can be blindingly deadly when it comes to radioactive waste that lasts tens of thousands of years for the measly prize of 40 years of electricity.

“Ft. Calhoun is the designated spent fuel storage facility for the entire state of Nebraska…and maybe for more than one state. Calhoun stores its spent fuel in ground-level pools which are underwater anyway – but they are open at the top. When the Missouri river pours in there, it’s going to make Fukushima look like an x-ray.

a press release for the report which suggested that renewable sources alone, without nuclear power, could provide 77 per cent of the world’s energy supply by 2050.

The supporting documents, which weren’t released until over a month later, reveal that this claim was based on a large real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years (highly unrealistic as India and China grow their economies).

Now it appears that there are more apparent conflicts of interest in the IPCC’s energy report

With wildfires, floods, tornadoes, and other dramatic weather events making front page news around the world, many people are asking questions about the signs and impacts of a changing climate. Climate Science is the World Resources Institute’s periodic review of the state of play of the science of climate change. With summaries and explanations of recent peer-reviewed research from a host of scientific journals, Climate Science is a window into what scientists are discovering about how climate change affects the living things and complex systems of our planet.

The latest edition, Climate Science 2009-2010 will be released this summer. In the meantime, we have assembled a preview of some of the research covered in the report. Take a look at our slideshow detailing the huge variety of impacts we are already seeing from warming global temperatures, including insights into sea-level rise, human migration, weather extremes, and the shrinking habitats of wildlife. Then, use our interactive map to learn more about the regional consequences of climate change around the United States

Slideshow:

Surface temperatures in the Arctic since 2005 have been higher than for any five-year period since record keeping began in 1880, according to a new report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, an international group within the Arctic Council that monitors the Arctic environment and provides advice on Arctic environmental protection.

The rate of sea-ice decline has accelerated and the decline rate in the past 10 years has been higher than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted in 2007, the report says.

News that solar activity might fizzle for a few decades has prompted talk of a new “Little Ice Age,” even a quick fix for global warming. But that’s just not going to happen.

The cooling impact of the last prolonged solar lull “was probably only a couple tenths of a degree Celsius,” said climatologist Michael Mann of Penn State University. “It’s a tiny blip on the radar screen if you’re looking at the driving factors behind climate change.”

The cooling impact of the last prolonged solar lull “was probably only a couple tenths of a degree Celsius,” said climatologist Michael Mann of Penn State University. “It’s a tiny blip on the radar screen if you’re looking at the driving factors behind climate change.”

The United States experienced some of the most extreme weather events in its history this spring, including deadly outbreaks of tornadoes, near-record flooding, drought and wildfires

Damages from these disasters have already passed $32 billion, and the hurricane season, which is just beginning, is projected to be above average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Government scientists said Wednesday that the frequency of extreme weather has increased over the past two decades, in part as a result of global warming caused by the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

Radioactive cesium was detected from two minke whales caught off the coast of Kushiro, Hokkaido, in Japan's so-called research whaling, a whalers' association said Tuesday.

While the level of the radioactive material remained below the temporarily set upper limit, the association officials said during a press conference in Kushiro that the contamination must have been caused by the continuing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant and that they will closely monitor future developments.

During the research whaling that started in late April, 17 whales were caught, and researchers examined six of them. Of the six, two were found tainted with 31 becquerels and 24.3 becquerels of cesium per kilogram of whale meat, they said.

Sunspots are expected to disappear for years, maybe decades, after 2020A sharp decrease in global warming might resultThe sun is heading into an unusual and extended period of hibernation that could trigger a mini-Ice Age on Earth, scientists claim.

A decrease in global warming might result in the years after 2020, the approximate time when sunspots are expected to disappear for years, maybe even decades.

Scientists predict this year's "dead zone" of low-oxygen water in the northern Gulf of Mexico will be the largest in history — about the size of Lake Erie — because of more runoff from the flooded Mississippi River valley.

Each year when the nutrient-rich freshwater from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers pours into the Gulf, it spawns massive algae blooms. In turn, the algae consume the oxygen in the Gulf, creating the low oxygen conditions. Fish, shrimp and many other species must escape the dead zone or face dying

Federal and university scientists predict this year's zone will be between 8,500 square miles and about 9,400 square miles. The actual size of the dead zone will be measured over the summer.

Sun's Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity

Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years. The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.

The results of the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. "The solar cycle may be going into a hiatus," Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory's Solar Synoptic Network, said in a news briefing today (June 14).

The global patterns of the Holocene have receded and their return is no longer possible, sustainable or even desirable. It is no longer Mother Nature who will care for us, but us who must care for her.

The first step will be in our own minds. The Holocene is gone. In the Anthropocene we are the creators, engineers and permanent global stewards of a sustainable human nature.