Group items tagged

"The Middlemist's Red exists in only two known locations: a greenhouse in the UK, and a garden in New Zealand. Imported to Britain two hundred years ago from China, back when flowers where a luxury item, it has since been exterminated in its original homeland. The flower is in bloom for the next couple of weeks, and will be the star attraction at the reopening of the Chiswick House, the BBC reports."

"WWF Philippines works in Sablayan to explain the difficult concept of climate change - what it means to have rising sea water levels; stronger and extreme weathers in the rainy season and drought in the summer season. The term now in use for conservation here is ADAPTATION - what to anticipate and how to proactively react in these trying times."

"Researchers at the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft have given scientists studying carbon dixoide a new tool - daily global measurements of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The data shown in the tool includes information gathered during more than 7 years of research on the concentration and distribution of CO2 in our mid-trophosphere - or, 3-7 miles above the Earth's surface - and how that CO2 travels across the globe. The video after the jump shows an animation of the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere with the Mauna Loa curve laid over it. The visualization is intense."

"From the recent discovery of a species of wasp that enslave unsuspecting spiders to a new report from the United Nations that estimates a 500% growth over the next 10 years in computer waste in India alone, a lot has happened this week in green."

Gross said that even though the Chilean earthquake is much smaller than the Sumatran quake, it is predicted to have changed the position of the figure axis by a bit more for two reasons. First, unlike the 2004 Sumatran earthquake, which was located near the equator, the 2010 Chilean earthquake was located in Earth's mid-latitudes, which makes it more effective in shifting Earth's figure axis. Second, the fault responsible for the 2010 Chiliean earthquake dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake. This makes the Chile fault more effective in moving Earth's mass vertically and hence more effective in shifting Earth's figure axis.

Overall strength of storms as measured in wind speed would rise by 2 to 11 percent, but there would be between 6 and 34 percent fewer storms in number, a new report from a World Meteorological Organization panel of 10 experts indicates. There would be fewer weak and moderate storms and more of the big damaging ones. "An 11 percent increase in wind speed translates to roughly a 60 percent increase in damage, said study co-author Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT."

"In 2006, Ron Suskind published "The One Percent Doctrine," a book about the U.S. war on terrorists after 9/11. The title was drawn from an assessment by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, who, in the face of concerns that a Pakistani scientist was offering nuclear-weapons expertise to Al Qaeda, reportedly declared: "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." Cheney contended that the U.S. had to confront a very new type of threat: a 'low-probability, high-impact event.' Soon after Suskind's book came out, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who then was at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Mr. Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same "precautionary principle" that also animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: "According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events - such as climate change."

"New research indicates that the middle [of the food chain] -small insectivorous birds and lizards-are critically important to overall health of an ecosystem, and actually help promote greater biomass." "Gruner and a team of other researchers looked at more than 100 studies insect predation by birds, bats or lizards and found that, regardless of the predator in question, their presence was associated with a 40 percent reduction in damage to plants. In turn, a healthy population of insectivores was linked to a 14 percent increase in plant biomass."

"Global warming has caused a seven-fold increase in cases of malaria on the slopes of Mount Kenya, a British-funded research team has found. A 2C increase in average temperatures around the mountain in the past 20 years has allowed the disease to creep into higher altitude areas, where the local population of four million has little or no immunity."

Excessive use of fertilizer is polluting China's soils, in addition to their water from agricultural run-off, a new report from Science reveals. The report details the acidification and rates of nitrogen specifically in the North China Plain and the Taihu Lake region in south China.

"Speed is not a word typically associated with trees; they can take centuries to grow. However, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change."

"It's been absent from the hives of Scotland for 50 years but, it seems, the Southern Cuckoo bumblebee has returned. Still common in England, the curious bee-a member of the subgenus Psithyrus-was discovered just over the border in St Abbs."

"A new study from the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, confirms what everyone probably knew intuitively: If you give people control of their own environment they use less energy. According to the New Scientist, by installing individual vents and controls for each worker (which automatically turn off when the desk is vacant) instead of cooling the whole office to one temperature, it can cut the energy consumed for cooling in half. It was particularly effective in hot, humid climates; they modeled it on Singapor and concluded that 'In an environment like Singapore, it's pretty clear that these systems would pay for themselves in energy savings.'"

"Google.org demonstrated a new platform on Thursday that, if implemented in conjunction with a proposed United Nations program, could provide a significant tool to combat climate change. Its new "high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine" can process terabytes of information on thousands of Google servers while giving access to the results online. The platform, which was demonstrated on Thursday at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, would allow anyone using the tool to monitor whether or not trees were being chopped down in a given forest. It analyzes satellite images to show forest changes over a given time period."

"Our ecological footprint - what we take out of the planet - is now 1.3 times the biological capacity of the Earth. In the words of Professor Bob Watson, Defra's chief scientific adviser and former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we are in danger of approaching "a point of no return". So the action we take in the... See More next couple of decades will determine whether the stable environment on which human civilization has depended since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago will continue. "

"The first decade of the twenty-first century was the hottest since record keeping began in 1880. With an average global temperature of 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.1 degrees Fahrenheit), this decade was 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than any previous decade. The year 2005 was the hottest on record, while 2007 and 2009 tied for second hottest. In fact, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past decade."

"One lesson is that anyone hoping to up-end decades of research pointing to a growing human influence on the climate by challenging a single batch of studies (in this case efforts to chart past temperatures using indirect clues like tree rings) is almost surely on a fool's errand. Another is that scientists, even when under relentless pressure, need to conduct their work scrupulously, carefully and openly and understand that transparency is inevitable in the digital era. A third is that scientists in highly specialized fields would do well to reach out for added statistical expertise when trying to test broader implications of their work."

Direct experience of extreme weather events increases concern about climate change and willingness to engage in energy-saving behaviour, according to a new research paper published in the first edition of the journal Nature Climate Change this week. In particular, members of the British public are more prepared to take personal action and reduce their energy use when they perceive their local area has a greater vulnerability to flooding, according to the research by Cardiff and Nottingham Universities.

A frog species thought to have been extinct for more than three decades has been sighted in farmland in Australia.

"But some positive news from the biggest developing nations--China, India, and Brazil--have encouraged the proceedings. Each has pledged to reduce carbon emissions on some level, and Obama has put forward an emissions reduction target based on the climate bill that passed the House of Representatives last summer. At 17% below 2005 levels, it's hardly what the international community was looking for--but it's progress nonetheless. Most importantly, hope seems to be in the air--real progress can be made in the coming days."