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The snapping shrimp is the noisiest marine creature in coastal ecosystems.
Image: Tullio Ross/University of Adelaide

The effect of the sea absorbing increased carbon dioxide in the air has damaging consequences for the noisy snapping shrimp and marine life in coastal rock pools.

LONDON, 6 April, 2016 – The slow change in water chemistry as more and more atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves in the sea and causes acidification could make the oceans much less noisy and slow the growth of life at the sea’s margins.

In one study, Australian scientists warn that as the acidity levels grow, the snapping shrimp may grow ever quieter. And in another study, Californian scientists have tested the water chemistry in coastal rock pools and discovered that they become most corrosive at night.

The snapping shrimp is the loudest invertebrate in the ocean. It forms bubbles in its snapping claw and uses this noise-making tool to warn off predators. And it can generate up to 210 decibels of noise, with important consequences for other creatures in coastal ecosystems.

Cracking sounds

“Coastal reefs are far from being quiet environments – they are filled with loud cracking sounds,” says Tullio Rossi, a marine acidification specialist at the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological sciences. “Shrimp choruses can be heard kilometres offshore and are important because they aid the navigation of baby fish to their homes. But ocean acidification is jeopardising this process.”

He and colleagues report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that they tested the shrimps under laboratory conditions of acidity predicted for the end of the century, and they found that both the frequency and volume of the snapping noises diminished.

The researchers also made field recordings at carbon dioxide-rich submarine volcanic vents, and observed the same pattern. They believe that the change of ocean pH levels affects behaviour, rather than impairing physiology.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Politicians push nuclear ‘poison pill’

March 21, 2016

Politicians push nuclear ‘poison pill’

Construction of a new nuclear reactor in Flamanville, France, is already six years behind schedule. Image: schoella via Wikimedia Commons

The economics of nuclear power in Europe are in meltdown, leaving taxpayers facing a heavy burden as the industry clings to pledges of huge public cash injections.

LONDON, 21 March, 2016 – The deeply troubled European nuclear industry, dominated by the huge French state-owned company EDF, home is now surviving only because of massive public subsidies from the French, British and Chinese governments.

The depth of the financial problems that EDF is facing was underlined last week by the resignation of its finance director, Thomas Piquemal.

He believes that building the world’s most expensive nuclear power plant – at Hinkley Point in southwest England – could threaten the viability of the group, whose finances are already stretched to breaking point, and so he decided he would leave.

Within days, both the UK prime minister, David Cameron, and the French president, François Hollande, pledged to support the building of the £18 billion plant, despite the fact that the economies of the project look disastrous.

Massive injection

They did so in response to a letter from EDF chief executive Jean-Bernard Levy, which said the project could not go ahead without a massive injection of new capital by the French government.

Immediately, Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister, made it clear that EDF would be bailed out. He dismissed concerns in both countries about the high cost of the project and signalled the French government’s willingness to prop up EDF to enable it to complete the job, whatever it took.

“If we need to recapitalise, we will do it,” he said. “If we need to renounce dividend payments again, we will do it.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Emissions standstill boosts Paris hopes

March 18, 2016

Emissions standstill boosts Paris hopes

Reduced coal use in China will have a positive impact on poor air quality.
Image: V.T. Polywoda via Flickr

The link between global economic growth and emissions growth has been further weakened as greenhouse gas levels show no increase for the second year in succession.

LONDON, 18 March, 2016 – The world continued to make progress towards a low-carbon economy during 2015, according to analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

It says analysis of preliminary data for the year reveals that global energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide − the largest source of man-made greenhouse gas emissions − showed no increase for the second year in a row.

The IEA announcement will be doubly welcome as some Arctic temperatures continue to warm bizarrely. It comes a day after reports from Fort Yukon in Alaska said temperatures there had reached up to 10°C higher than expected for this time of year.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said of the emissions report: “The new figures confirm last year’s surprising but welcome news. We now have seen two straight years of greenhouse gas emissions decoupling from economic growth.

Landmark agreement

“Coming just a few months after the landmark COP21 agreement in Paris, this is yet another boost to the global fight against climate change.”

Significantly, the global economy continued to grow in 2015 by more than 3%, which the IEA says is further evidence that the link between economic growth and emissions growth is weakening.

In more than 40 years, it says, there have been only four periods in which emissions stood still or fell compared to the previous year. Three of those – the early 1980s, 1992 and 2009 – were associated with global economic weakness.

But the recent stall in emissions comes amid economic expansion. According to the International Monetary Fund, global GDP grew by 3.4% in 2014 and 3.1% in 2015.

Scientists calculate our debt to the Earth

February 24, 2016

Scientists calculate our debt to the Earth

Wheat crops on the Kansas High Plains in the US depend on aquifer water. Image: James Watkins via Flickr

Researchers in the US have found a way to put a monetary value on the multitude of vital services and assets we rely on nature to provide us cost-free.

LONDON, 24 February, 2016 – Perhaps for the first time, scientists have put a direct cash value on the metaphor that conservationists call “natural capital”.

This is, in effect, the money humans don’t have to spend on services that nature supplies for free – such as crop pollination, water purification, and coastal protection by wetlands, sandbanks and reefs.

And one high value transaction supplied gratis by nature is groundwater. For farmers, water in subterranean aquifers represents money in the bank, as groundwater underwrites 40% of world food production.

Eli Fenichel, assistant professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and colleagues looked at withdrawals from the Kansas High Plains Aquifer and report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that between 1996 and 2005, Kansas lost approximately $110 million a year.

Food production

The losses represented the depletion of the aquifer as farmers withdraw this ultimate natural capital to support food production. And the total for the decade was $1.1 billion.

This is roughly equal to Kansas State’s 2005 budget surplus. It is, the scientists say, substantially more than the sums invested in schools over the same period.

It isn’t often that economists can place any direct value on a natural resource. Farming and industry evolved as they did because the natural resources were there in the first place.

Conservationists sometimes pose the question: if plants had not evolved alkaloids that could be exploited as pharmaceutical drugs, or if there were no bees to pollinate fruit blossom, what would humans have to pay to get someone else to do these things?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Better water use can cut global food gap

February 17, 2016

Better water use can cut global food gap

An irrigation system on a pumpkin patch in a semi-arid area of New Mexico in southwestern US.
Image: Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists say that forecasts of a world food shortage need not prove as disastrous as previously thought if humans learn to use water more effectively.

LONDON, 16 February, 2016 – Although growing human numbers, climate change and other crises threaten the world‘s ability to feed itself, researchers believe that if we used water more sensibly that would go a long way towards closing the global food gap.

Politicians and experts have simply underestimated what better water use can do to save millions of people from starvation, they say.

For the first time, scientists have assessed the global potential for growing more food with the same amount of water. They found that production could rise by 40%, simply by optimising rain use and careful irrigation. That is half the increase the UN says is needed to eradicate world hunger by mid-century.

The lead author of the study, Jonas Jägermeyr, an Earth system analyst at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research(PIK), says the potential yields from good water management have not been taken fully into account.

Climate resilience

Already parched areas, he says, have the most potential for increases in yield, especially water-scarce regions in China, Australia, the western US, Mexico and South Africa.

“It turns out that crop water management is a largely under-rated approach to reducing undernourishment and increasing the climate resilience of smallholders,” he says.

In theory, the gains could be massive, but the authors acknowledge that getting local people to adopt best practice remains a challenge.

They have been careful to limit their estimates to existing croplands, and not to include additional water resources. But they have taken into account a number of very different water management options, from low-tech solutions for smallholders to the industrial scale.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oceans are heating up at the double

February 8, 2016

Oceans are heating up at the double

The British survey ship HMS Challenger blazed an oceanic trail a century and a half ago.
Image: William Frederick Mitchell via Wikimedia Commons

Records from a sailing ship’s round-the-world research voyage almost 150 years ago provide further evidence that the Earth is continuing to warm unchecked.

LONDON, 6 February, 2016 – Ocean temperatures first collected during one of the great 19th-century voyages of exploration confirm one of the consequences of climate change: humans have managed to warm even the deepest parts of the ocean.

A new study in Nature Climate Change calculates that the amount of heat absorbed by the ocean has doubled in the last 18 years. A third of this heat has collected in the depths at least 700 metres below the waves − and the same region is rapidly getting hotter.

Peter Gleckler, a research scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, and colleagues started with data collected by the world’s first modern oceanographers aboard the British survey ship HMS Challenger in 1872-76.

Deep-sea soundings

Challenger circumnavigated the globe, sailed 70,000 nautical miles (130,000 kilometres), collected 4,700 new species, and made 492 deep-sea soundings and 283 sets of measurements of water temperatures.

With such systematic findings, the American research team could begin to make estimates of how ocean temperatures have changed between 1865 and 2015.

They calculate that, since 1970, around 90% of the Earth’s uptake of heat associated with man-made global warming, as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion, has been absorbed by the oceans.

In effect, they have used the evidence collected from the depths by 19th-century scientists aboard a three-masted, square-rigged wooden ship to settle a 21st-century puzzle: where has the heat from global warming actually gone?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Warming linked to spread of zika virus

February 5, 2016

Warming linked to spread of zika virus

The Aedes egypti mosquito has now spread to 80% of Brazil.
Image: James Gathany via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists believe that record average temperatures may be helping to create an environment that has led to big increases in the number of disease-carrying mosquitoes.

SÃO PAULO, 5 February, 2016 – The Zika virus, transmitted by the same mosquito as dengue fever, has spread with alarming speed throughout South and Central America – and scientists in Brazil suspect that global warming is exacerbating the problem.

Although the virus, named after the Ugandan forest where it was first identified, usually causes only mild symptoms and often passes undetected, it has been associated with a surge in the number of cases of babies born with microcephaly, which can cause brain damage.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has now declared the situation an international public health emergency.

The numbers are alarming. Until last year, while dengue fever claimed many victims, Zika was unknown in Latin America. Since first detected in April 2014, there have been over 4,000 births of babies with suspected microcephaly in Brazil, compared with a previous yearly average of 154.

Twenty-four countries in South and Central America have reported cases of microcephaly, and the rapid spread of the virus is being attributed by some scientists to global warming.

Abnormal warming

Last year was the hottest on record, with temperatures for the first time about 1°C above pre-industrial levels. But in some parts of Brazil, average temperatures rose by between 3° and 5°C, according to data from the Centre for Weather Forecasting and Climate Studies at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. The abnormal warming of the Pacific caused by El Niño contributed to this.

Studies by Brazilian scientists show that the Aedes egypti mosquito has spread to 80% of the country, an area of 6.9 million sq km (2.6 million square miles) − four times larger than a decade ago.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Renewables offer quick fix for US emissions

February 1, 2016

Renewables offer quick fix for US emissions

A wind farm sprouts alongside the Interstate 10 road near Whitewater, California
Image: Chuck Coker via Flicker

Scientists say interstate energy “highways” would allow current wind and solar technologies to deliver electricity where and when it’s needed throughout the US.

LONDON, 31 January, 2016 – The US could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation by 80% below 1990 levels within 15 years just by using renewable sources such as wind and solar energy, according to a former government research chief.

The nation could do this using only technologies available right now, and by introducing a national grid system connected by high voltage direct current (HVDC) that could get the power without loss to those places that needed it most, when they needed it.

This utopian vision – and it has been dreamed at least twice before by researchers in Delaware and in Stanford, California – comes directly from a former chief of research in a US government agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Dr Alexander MacDonald, a distinguished meteorologist, was until recently, the head of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

Supply and demand

He and colleagues at the University of Colorado report in Nature Climate Change that instead of factoring in fossil fuel backup, or yet-to-be-invented methods of storing electricity from wind and solar sources, they took a new look at the simple problems of supply and demand in a nation that tends to be sunny and warm in the south and windy in the north, but not always reliably so in either place.

Their reasoning was that storage technologies could only increase the cost of renewable energy, and increase the problem of reducing carbon emissions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cloud blanket warms up melting icecap

January 31, 2016

Cloud blanket warms up melting icecap

Ominous clouds over the icecap near Kangerlussuaq in Western Greenland.
Image: Nikolaj F. Rasmussen via Flickr

New study shows that up to 30% of the Greenland icecap melting is due to cloud cover that is helping to raise temperatures − and accelerate sea level rise.

LONDON, 30 January, 2016 – Researchers have identified another piece in the climate machinery that is accelerating the melting of the Greenland ice cap. The icy hills are responding to the influence of a higher command system: the clouds.

An international research team led by scientists from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium report in Nature Communications journal that cloud cover above the northern hemisphere’s largest single volume of permanent ice is raising temperatures by between 2° and 3°C and accounting for 20-30% of the melting.

The conclusion, based on imaging from satellites and on computer simulations, is one more part of the global examination of the intricate climate systems on which human harvests, health and happiness ultimately depend.

Disastrous consequences

“With climate change at the back of our minds, and the disastrous consequences of global sea level rise, we need to understand these processes to make more reliable projections for the future,” says the study leader, Kristof Van Tricht, a Ph.D research fellow in Leuven’s Division of Geography and Tourism. “Clouds are more important for that purpose than we used to think.

“Clouds always have several effects. On the one hand, they help add mass to the ice sheet when it snows. On the other, they have an indirect effect on the ice sheet as well.

“They have an impact on the temperature, and snow and ice react to these changes by melting and refreezing. That works both ways. Clouds block the sunlight, which lowers the temperature. At the same time, they form a blanket that keeps the surface warm, especially at night.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Plutonium’s global problems are piling up

January 22, 2016

Plutonium’s global problems are piling up

The nuclear fuel carriers Pacific Heron and Pacific Egret in port at Barrow-in-Furness, England, before setting sail for Japan. Image: CORE

Increasing worldwide stockpiles of surplus plutonium are becoming a political embarrassment, a worrying security risk, and a hidden extra cost to the nuclear industry.

LONDON, 22 January, 2016 − Two armed ships set off from the northwest of England this week to sail round the world to Japan on a secretive and controversial mission to collect a consignment of plutonium and transport it to the US.

The cargo of plutonium, once the most sought-after and valuable substance in the world, is one of a number of ever-growing stockpiles that are becoming an increasing financial and security embarrassment to the countries that own them.

So far, there is no commercially viable use for this toxic metal, and there is increasing fear that plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists, or that governments could be tempted to use it to join the nuclear arms race.

All the plans to use plutonium for peaceful purposes in fast breeder and commercial reactors have so far failed to keep pace with the amounts of this highly-dangerous radioactive metal being produced by the countries that run nuclear power stations.

The small amounts of plutonium that have been used in conventional and fast breeder reactors have produced very little electricity − at startlingly high costs.

Out of harm’s way

Japan, with its 47-ton stockpile, is among the countries that once hoped to turn their plutonium into a power source, but various attempts have failed. The government, which has a firm policy of using it only for peaceful purposes, has nonetheless come under pressure to keep it out of harm’s way. Hence, the current plan to ship it to the US.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate change slows onset of next ice age

January 18, 2016

Climate change slows onset of next ice age

Relic of the last ice age: Jökulsárlón, one of Iceland’s glacial lakes
Image: Kenneth Muir via Wikimedia Commons

The planet’s inexorable warming means there will be no new ice age for at least the next 100,000 years, scientists say.

LONDON, 18 January, 2016 – Human beings have not just started to leave a unique geological stratum that will announce their existence long after the species has been extinguished. They may have altered a climate cycle that has been stable for millions of years and even cancelled – or certainly postponed – the next Ice Age.

Andrey Ganopolski and colleagues from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany report in Nature that they took a look at the conditions that determined the geologically recent cycle of Ice Ages.

The advance and retreat of vast glaciers over geological time are the consequence of a mix of factors involving sea, mountains, atmosphere, vegetation and the distribution of continents around the globe.

But ultimately what determines the rhythm of these events is what climate scientists call insolation: how much sun the Earth actually gets in a summer. The Earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle but an ellipse, and the shape of the ellipse and the angle of the Earth’s tilt on its axis change subtly and imperceptibly over cycles lasting tens of thousands of years, which in turn alters the amount of sunshine striking the northern hemisphere.

And if the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are not high when the total insolation is near its lowest point, great thick sheets of ice begin to advance over Europe, Asia and North America.

This is enough to explain the last eight Ice Ages. The sequence is punctuated by “interglacials” that tend to last roughly 10,000 years before the ice advances once more.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weather extremes slash cereal yields

January 10, 2016

Weather extremes slash cereal yields

Wheat and other cereal crops in developed countries such as Australia have been decimated. Image: CSIRO via Wikimedia Commons

Increasing intensity of heat and drought as a result of global warming may have caused worldwide cereal harvests to be cut by up to a tenth since the mid-1960s.

LONDON, 8 January, 2016 – Climate change may have already begun to take its toll of agriculture. New research suggests that drought and extreme heat in the last 50 years have reduced cereal production by up to 10%. And, for once, developed nations may have sustained greater losses than developing nations.

Researchers have been warning for years that global warming as a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – in turn, a pay-off from increased fossil fuel combustion – will result in a greater frequency or intensity in extremes of weather.

They have also warned more recently that weather-related extremes could damage food security in Europe, Africa and India.

Global cost

But a study in Nature journal by Navin Ramankutty, professor in global food security and sustainability at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and colleagues is perhaps the first to identify the global cost of weather-related disasters in the last half of the 20th century.

The researchers looked at 2,800 extreme hydro-meteorological disasters – floods, droughts and extremes of heat and cold – reported between 1964 and 2007 from 177 countries, and matched the data with production figures for 16 cereal crops.

They could detect no significant influence from floods or ice storms, but they found that drought and extreme heat reduced average national cereal production by between 9% and 10%.

Drought reduced both cereal yield and the area under harvest, while heat mainly affected yield. This is likely to be a consequence of different timescales: droughts can last for years, but heatwaves tend to be counted in no more than weeks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Droughts May Mean Less Power

January 8, 2016

More Droughts May Mean Less Power

The powerful flow of rivers such as the Columbia in Oregon, US, could be greatly reduced. (National Weather Service Forecast Office via Wikimedia Commons)

LONDON—Climate change could threaten the electricity supply around the world, according to new calculations. That is because the power generation depends on a sure supply of water.

But climate change also promises greater frequencies and intensities of heat and drought. So more than half of the world’s hydropower and thermoelectric generating plants could find their capacity reduced.

Michelle van Vliet, an environmental scientist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and colleagues from the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Austria report in Nature Climate Change that they modelled the potential performance in the decades ahead of 24,515 hydropower plants and 1,427 nuclear, fossil-fuelled, biomass-fuelled and geothermal power stations.

Global consumption

Thermoelectric turbines—which generate power directly from heat, and rely on water as a coolant—and hydropower plants currently generate 98% of the planet’s electricity. But global water consumption for power generation is expected to double in the next 40 years as economies develop and the population continues to grow.

The scientists found that reductions in stream and river flow and the rise in levels of water temperature could reduce the generating capacity of up to 86% of the thermoelectric plants and up to 74% of the hydropower plants in their study.

“We clearly show that power plants are not only causing climate change, but they might also be affected in major ways by climate”

This means that power from hydro stations could fall by 3.6% in the 2050s and 6.1% in the 2080s, because of reduced stream flow. And by the 2050s, the monthly capacity of most of the thermoelectric power plants could drop by 50%.

Dr van Vliet says: “In particular, the United States, southern South America, southern Africa, central and southern Europe, Southeast Asia and southern Australia are vulnerable regions, because declines in mean annual stream flow are projected, combined with strong increases in water temperature under changing climate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cli-fi is all the rage

December 27, 2015

Cli-fi is all the rage

The Four Horsemen: Eco-apocalypse appeals to writers – and readers.
Image: Viktor M Vasnetsov via Wikimedia Commons

Need a last-minute present? Stuck for some new year reading material? Then how about a thriller on a world in climate-caused turmoil?

LONDON, 26 December, 2015 – It’s some time in the not too distant future. The American mid-west has turned into a dust bowl. Birds are dropping out of the sky. Cities are encapsulated in domes so that people can breathe clean, if recycled, air.

Billions of refugees, victims of drought and famine, are on the move. The streets are full of violent gangs and human traffickers. Pandemics are breaking out.

Welcome to a new literary genre – climate fiction, or cli-fi.

Some of it might be sensational, some of it not exactly great literature, and some downright depressing, but there’s little doubting cli-fi’s growing popularity.

Cli-fi – along with its elder brother sci-fi – is now considered part of modern literature’s classification system. Though some titles make only a passing reference to climate change, while others are more concerned with murder, mayhem and sex than with global warming, others are more thoughtful, science-based works.

Well-established novelists have used climate change as a backdrop in their books.

“Whether fictional or factual, the coming decades don’t sound like a picnic. It’s a scary scenario, and we’re largely unprepared”

The prize-winning writer, Ian McEwan, in his 2010 novel Solar, describes the world of physicist Michael Beard – a man of apparently insatiable sexual and culinary appetite – and his invention of a system for solving the global energy problem.

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian poet and novelist, has often used environmental catastrophe as a theme in her work: her trilogy MaddAddam graphically describes global floods and battles with criminals. Ultimately civilisation – and the environment – is rebuilt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Arctic methane emissions persist in winter

December 23, 2015

Arctic methane emissions persist in winter

Summer and winter, wet and dry, high and low, the Arctic tundra continues to emit methane.
Image: Bureau of Land Management (Delta WSR) via Wikimedia Commons

Methane, a key greenhouse gas, is released from Arctic soils not only in the short summer period but during the bitterly cold winters too.

LONDON, 22 December, 2015 – The quantity of methane leaking from the frozen soil during the long Arctic winters is probably much greater than climate models estimate, scientists have found.

They say at least half of annual methane emissions occur in the cold months from September to May, and that drier, upland tundra can emit more methane than wetlands.

The multinational team, led by San Diego State University (SDSU) in the US and including colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Sheffield and the Open University in the UK, have published their conclusion, which challenges critical assumptions in current global climate models, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is about 25 times more powerful per molecule than carbon dioxide over a century, but more than 84 times over 20 years. The methane in the Arctic tundra comes primarily from organic matter trapped in soil which thaws seasonally and is decomposed by microbes.

It seeps naturally from the soil over the course of the year, but climate change can warm the soil enough to release more methane from organic matter that is currently stable in the permafrost.

“Virtually all the climate models assume there’s no or very little emission of methane when the ground is frozen. That assumption is incorrect”

Scientists have for some years been accurately measuring Arctic methane emissions and incorporating the results into their climate models. But crucially, the SDSU team says, almost all of these measurements have been obtained during the Arctic’s short summer.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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