Sugar cane ethanol cools climate when it replaces cattle pasture

Converting cattle pasture and cropland in Brazil to sugar cane helps cool local climate reports research published in Nature Climate Change. 

Scientists with the Carnegie Institutions’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University and the University of Montana analyzed temperature, reflectivity, and evapotranspiration from satellite data across 733,000 square miles—an area larger than the state of Alaska. They found converting from natural cerrado grassland vegetation to crop/pasture on average triggered warming of 2.79 °F (1.55 °C), but that subsequent conversion to sugarcane, cooled the surrounding air by an average of 1.67 °F (0.93°C). 

"We found that shifting from natural vegetation to crops or pasture results in local warming because the plants give off less beneficial water. But the bamboo-like sugarcane is more reflective and gives off more water—much like the natural vegetation," said Carnegie's Scott Loarie, lead author of the research. "It’s a potential win-win for the climate—using sugarcane to power vehicles reduces carbon emissions, while growing it lowers the local air temperature." 

"The beneficial effects are contingent on the fact sugarcane is grown on areas previously occupied by crops or pastureland, and not in areas converted from natural vegetation," stated a press release from the Carnegie Institution. "It is also important that other crops and pastureland do not move to natural vegetation areas, which would contribute to deforestation." 

The findings suggest that Brazil's sugar cane ethanol industry, which powers a quarter of the country's automobile fleet, has even more benefits than previously believed. Sugar cane ethanol has significantly lower carbon dioxide emissions than conventional gasoline. 

The research also indicates the importance in accounting for non-fossil fuel-based climate impacts. 

"It’s becoming increasingly clear that direct climate effects on local climate from land-use decisions constitute significant impacts that need to be considered core elements of human-caused climate change," said coauthor Greg Asner, also of the Carnegie Institution. 

AGRICULTURE: Pot growers inhale 1% of U.S. electricity, exhale GHGs of 3M cars

Indoor marijuana cultivation consumes enough electricity to power 2 million average-sized U.S. homes, which corresponds to about 1 percent of national power consumption, according to a study by a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Researcher Evan Mills’ study notes that cannabis production has largely shifted indoors, especially in California, where medical marijuana growers use high-intensity lights usually reserved for operating rooms that are 500 times more powerful that a standard reading lamp.
The resulting price tag is about $5 billion in annual electricity costs, said Mills, who conducted and published the research independently from the Berkeley lab. The resulting contribution to greenhouse gas emissions equals about 3 million cars on the road, he said.
Narrowing the implications even further reveals some staggering numbers. Mills said a single marijuana cigarette represents 2 pounds of CO2 emissions, an amount equal to running a 100-watt light bulb for 17 hours.
“The added electricity use [to an average home] is equivalent to running about 30 refrigerators,” Mills wrote. “Processed cannabis results in 3,000 times its weight in CO2 emissions. For off-grid production, it requires 70 gallons of diesel fuel to produce one indoor cannabis plant, or 140 gallons with smaller, less-efficient gasoline generators.”
Mills went on to compare an average pot-growing facility to the electric power intensity of a data center. In California, which is the top producing state and one of 17 states to allow medical use of marijuana, cultivation accounts for 3 percent of all electricity use and 8 percent of household use, he said.
Mills added that he completed his research with no external sponsorship, insisting that he does not mean to pass judgment on the merits of cannabis cultivation or use. He also suggested that the minimal amount of information available and the almost complete lack of regulation of the industry mean energy consumption could easily be lowered.
“If improved practices applicable to commercial agricultural greenhouses are any indication, the energy use for indoor cannabis production can be reduced dramatically,” he said. “Cost-effective efficiency improvements of 75 percent are conceivable, which would yield energy savings of about $25,000/year for a generic 10-module growing room.”
Mills, a member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, drew his data from open literature and interviews with horticultural equipment retailers.
By some estimates, marijuana has long been the largest cash crop in the United States — ahead of corn, soybeans and hay. The industry has been pegged at about $40 billion in value, with California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii and Washington the top five production states.
Water consumption is also an issue when it comes to environmental impact, with each marijuana plant said to need between 3 and 5 gallons of water per day to grow to fruition.

High-Yield Agriculture Slows Global-Warming

Jennifer Burney and associates at Stanford University published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (July 2010) demonstrating that high-yield agriculture slows the pace of global-warming. They reported that advances in high-yield agriculture over the latter part of the 20th century have prevented massive amounts of greenhouse gases (equivalent to 590 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide) from entering the atmosphere. Such yield improvements reduced the need to convert forests to farmland – which usually involves burning of trees and thus generation of greenhouse gases. The researchers determined that, if not for increased yields, additional greenhouse-gas emissions from clearing land for farming would have been equal to one-third of the world’s total output of greenhouse gases since the dawn (in 1850) of the Industrial Revolution. Consumers concerned with carbon footprints and global warming might benefit from information regarding where food comes from because it would allow them to avoid consuming food produced the “old-fashioned” (i.e., low-yield) way.

Global Warming Could Severely Impact U.S. Military Operations, Says Texas A&M Researcher

COLLEGE STATION, March 10, 2011 – Changing global climate due to on-going and projected warming have great potential to impact U.S. naval forces worldwide, according to a panel report issued today that includes a Texas A&M University researcher.

A warming climate presents national and homeland security challenges that will require the U.S. military to adopt a new way of doing business according to the report, National Security Implications of Climate Change for U.S. Naval Forces. The report, issued by the National Research Council and requested by the Chief of Naval Operations, paints an ominous picture of disputes over national boundaries and exclusive economic zones, strains on naval capabilities due to increasing disaster assistance demands, vulnerabilities of naval coastal facilities to sea level rise, greater demands on America’s international maritime partnerships, and a shortfall in naval capabilities and personnel trained to operate in the Arctic, says Mahlon “Chuck” Kennicutt II, professor of oceanography who was a member of the committee that authored the report.

The committee included retired military leaders, policy experts from private sector “think tanks” and university researchers and scientists. The committee, which met nine times over more than 12 months, heard testimony from a large number of military, private sector and scientific experts. It was asked to examine climate change impacts on our world and how these might affect U.S. Naval forces’ (including the Navy, Marine Corps and the Coast Guard) operations and capabilities.)

“We were given a broad mandate to look at how climate change could affect naval forces.” Kennicutt says. “The U.S. military needs to know what the world will look like 20-30 years from now if it is to make the preparations today to cope with tomorrow’s realities.”

The report describes a range of realistic scenarios about what could happen if climate change continues to unfold as most scientists believe it will over the next few decades. Kennicutt says the committee took the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) most likely future scenarios as a basis for its deliberations.

Dr. Kennicutt

“It is an eye-opening report and presents a rather foreboding series of possible outcomes as our planet warms and reacts to past and continued greenhouse gas emissions.” Kennicutt said.

“The report brings to the attention of U.S. naval leadership areas that need attention in future planning and that will prepare the Navy for a warmer world.”

Kennicutt points out that if the polar icecaps in Greenland and Antarctica continue to melt, sea levels around the world will dramatically rise. Rising sea levels could have wide ranging detrimental impacts on naval facilities now and in the future, the report says.

“Arctic sea ice is melting much faster than predicted just a few years ago, so much so that there could be a summer, ice-free Arctic Ocean in a matter of years,” he explains.

In the Arctic, the Northwest Passage could become seasonally ice-free, allowing for routine transiting of ocean going vessels across the Arctic Ocean. This would reduce shipping time by as much as one-third from Europe to Asia alone.

“How this affects homeland security and what it means for terrorists or contraband smugglers that have ill will toward the U.S. is largely unknown,” Kennicutt adds.

“It would open large areas of the Arctic Ocean that were previously inaccessible to fishing, tourism, oil and gas exploration and possible environmental disasters. Studies suggest that as much as 30 percent of the world’s remaining oil and gas reserves are above the Arctic Circle, so it seems inevitable that exploration, exploitation and transport of oil and gas in the region will increase.”

The United Nations “Law of the Sea” Treaty allows countries to expand their seaward national boundaries, creating friction between Arctic nations, he points out. The Arctic is seen by many as the epicenter for conflicts related to the “Law of Sea” as the Arctic Ocean is ringed by eight nations.

He adds that conflict over new national boundaries in the Arctic has already strained our relations with Canada, since much of Canada’s territory is in the Arctic and their claims overlap with U.S. claims. The U.S. considers the Northwest Passage international waters, whereas Canada sees them as within its national boundaries.

“How this will affect U.S. national and homeland security is open to debate, but it is clear that an ice-free summer Arctic will dramatically change the politics and military strategies of the north for the foreseeable future,” Kennicutt says.

The committee also looked at how droughts and other weather disasters play a role in the military’s human assistance/disaster relief activities, such as the role the military played in  recent tsunami and earthquake incidents (though not climate related). In recent years, there has been a growing demand on the U.S. military to serve a lead role in disaster relief.

“Especially dire are predicted impacts of famines and other natural disasters on Africa and the movement of refugees into Europe,” he explains. “Predictions suggest that over the next few decades droughts will be more severe, and so will storms such as hurricanes and typhoons, and this could put a severe strain on the military as it tries to respond to increasingly frequent natural disasters worldwide.

“How the U.S. military responds to a changing world will be critical to how prepared we are as a nation for a future that might look quite different than today,” he notes. “The report looks at some rather dire situations that could become a reality in just a few short years, and will the U.S. naval forces be ready to respond?”

#####

Climate Change Creates Longer Ragweed Season

A changing climate means allergy-causing ragweed pollen has a longer season that extends further north than it did just 16 years ago, U.S. scientists reported on Monday.

In research that gibes with projections by the U.N.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, plant and allergy experts found that ragweed pollen season lasted as much as 27 days longer in 2009 than it did in 1995. The further north in the Western Hemisphere, the more dramatic the change in the length of pollen season.

Ragweed pollen can cause asthma flare-ups and hay fever, and costs about $21 billion a year in the United States, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This is not something that's hypothesized, this is not something that's modeled, this is not something that may or may not occur depending on the math that you do," said study author Lewis Ziska of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "This is something that we're actually seeing on the ground in recent years."

Even in places where ragweed season didn't lengthen or even shortened slightly, such as Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, there was lots more pollen, which caused more intense symptoms, said co-author Dr. Jay Portnoy of the Allergy, Asthma and Immunology Section at Children's Mercy Hospital, the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.

Ragweed is probably not the only pollen likely to have a longer season as the planet warms, Portnoy said in a telephone interview.

LATER FROST, MORE POLLEN

"We used ragweed as a marker but it's probably true for other pollens too," he said, including tree pollen that causes allergy symptoms in the U.S. spring.

Ragweed pollen was a reasonable marker because its season is naturally easy to track.

It's what's known as a short-day plant, which begins blooming when the days start getting shorter, that is, after the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice around June 21. It stops flowering with the first frost.

As global average temperatures have warmed, the first frost has been delayed, especially at higher latitudes, which has meant a longer season for ragweed. Because warming is greater at these high latitudes, the length of the season has been more pronounced.

For example, in Georgetown, Texas, the ragweed season actually shrank by 4 days between 1995 and 2009. But further north in Papillion, Nebraska, it got 11 days longer; in Minneapolis, it was 16 days longer, and in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada, the season was 27 days longer.

Ziska said he was surprised by how big the change was in such a relatively short period of time: "I thought maybe 10 days, or a couple of weeks, but to see it up to almost 4 weeks was kind of interesting."

This could mean a change in the way ragweed-triggered allergies are diagnosed and treated. Clinicians who are unaccustomed to checking their patients for ragweed-related symptoms will likely have to start doing this.

"Things that used to be a fairly minor disease are now going to be a much more significant problem," Portnoy said.

Amazon droughts increase climate change fears

(CNN) -- Two major droughts in Brazil's Amazon region in the last six years threaten to undermine its role as the planet's most important carbon sink and a vital brake on climate change, according to new research.
Scientists from Brazil and the UK concluded that last year's Amazonian drought was more widespread and damaging than in 2005, which at the time was thought to be a "once in a century" event.
The Amazon River fell to its lowest level in decades, with many of its tributaries such as the Rio Negro completely drying up in some area. With tens of thousands of people dependent in the waterways for their survival, a state of emergency was declared in a number of towns in the region.
The report, published in the journal Science, calculated that the carbon impact of the 2010 drought may eventually exceed the 5 billion tonnes of CO2 released following the 2005 event. This compares to the estimated 5.4 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted through fossil fuel use in the United States in 2009.
Tropical rainforests such as the Amazon act as a natural buffer to man-made emissions by absorbing huge amounts of carbon each year. However they become major emitters of CO2 during drought years.
At the present time we don't know whether these two droughts are just associated with natural climatic variability.
--Dr Simon Lewis
RELATED TOPICS
Brazil
Amazon Rain Forest
Global Climate Change
"In a normal year we would see these remote rainforests being net absorbers of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," the report's co-author Simon Lewis, from the University of Leeds, told CNN.
"And a drought will kill some of those trees, and over time these trees will rot down and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
"So over the next few years we'll see billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere from these rotting trees that were killed during the 2010 drought.
"That's enough to offset the carbon absorption, so that the rainforest becomes carbon neutral."
The research team, made up of scientists from the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield in the UK and the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM) in Brazil, compared satellite data showing rainfall across the 5.3 million square kilometers of the Amazon Basin with information about how individual trees responded since the 2005 drought.
"We knew how many trees had died in 2005," said Lewis. "So we could use that relationship between tree deaths and the drought intensity from 2005 to estimate the impact of the 2010 drought."
Lewis warned more research was needed into the relationship between the droughts and climate change, despite some global climate models suggesting Amazon droughts will become more frequent in future as a direct result of greenhouse gas emissions.
He said: "We could see an increase in the severity and the number of these droughts, which could lead into a vicious cycle: droughts, then the forests releasing carbon reinforcing those droughts.
"At the present time we don't know whether these two droughts are just associated with natural climatic variability. If so, then we may go back to a situation of not seeing these droughts. It may just be an unusual decade."
But in any case Lewis believes current emissions pathways "risk playing Russian roulette with the world's largest rainforest."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/02/04/brazil.amazon.drought/index.html?iref=allsearch

Global warming could spur toxic algae, bacteria in seas

WASHINGTON—Global warming could spur the growth of toxic algae and bacteria in the world's seas and lakes, with an impact that could be felt in 10 years, US scientists said Saturday.

Studies have shown that shifts brought about byclimate change make ocean and freshwaterenvironments more susceptible to toxic algae blooms and allow harmful microbes and bacteria to proliferate, according to researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In one study, NOAA scientists modeled future ocean and weather patterns to predict the effect on blooms of Alexandrium catenella, or the toxic "red tide," which can accumulate in shellfish and cause severe symptoms, including paralysis, in humans who eat the contaminated seafood.

"Our projections indicate that by the end of the 21st century, blooms may begin up to two months earlier in the year and persist for one month later compared to the present-day time period of July to October," said Stephanie Moore, one of the scientists who worked on the study.

But the impact could be felt well before the end of this century — as early as 2040, she said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"Changes in the harmful algal bloom season appear to be imminent. We expect a significant increase in Puget Sound (off the coast of Washington state where the study was conducted) and similar at-risk environments within 30 years, possibly by the next decade," said Moore.

In another study, NOAA scientists found that desert dust, which contains iron, deposited into the ocean from the atmosphere could lead to increases of harmfulbacteria in the seawater.

Researchers from the University of Georgia found that adding desert dust to seawater significantly stimulated the growth of Vibrios, a group of ocean bacteria that can cause gastroenteritis and infectious diseases in humans.

"Within 24 hours of mixing weathered desert dust from Morocco with seawater samples, we saw a huge growth in Vibrios, including one strain that could cause eye, ear and open wound infections, and another strain that could cause cholera," said Erin Lipp, who worked on the study.

The amount of iron-containing dust deposited in the sea has increased over the last 30 years and is expected to continue to rise, based on precipitation trends in western Africa that are causing desertification.

Rising precipitation in some parts of the world and lack of rain in other parts has been blamed on climate change by some experts.

Global warming has also been blamed for rising ocean temperatures, and "a warming ocean, which we know is happening, increases the likelihood of disease that affects both wildlife and humans," NOAA administrator Janet Lubchenco told AFP.

Unhealthy oceans impact not only human and animal health but also affect countries' economies, said Lubchenco, noting that US coastal states are home to eight in 10 Americans and generated 83 percent of US GDP in 2007.

Last year, Americans got a stark reminder of the key role played by marine ecosystems in their lives and livelihoods when a BP deepwater well ruptured in the Gulf of Mexico, sending millions of barrels of oil spewing into the sea waters and crippling the region's tourism and seafood industries.

President Barack Obama for a $2.9 million funding increase for NOAA in his 2012 budget to establish an oil spill research and development program to provide "useful information, methods and tools for prevention, response and assessment of oil spill impacts," noted Lubchenco.

NOAA also wants to consolidate its climate change services into a single office, but the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted Saturday to slash funding to the agency, putting many of its programs in jeopardy.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view/20110220-321246/Global-warming-could-spur-toxic-algae-bacteria-in-seas

Despite East Coast freeze, global warming is for real

No single weather event can be directly attributed to climate change. But as the globe warms up, Americans can expect more storms like the one bearing down on much of the United States, scientists say.

That's not because the Feb. 1 storm can be linked to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or increasing global temperature – again, such a connection is impossible to make – but, according to climatologists, an increased propensity for winter storms is exactly what you'd expect in a warming world.

"There's no inconsistency at all," Michael Mann, the director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, told LiveScience. "If anything, this is what the models project: that we see more of these very large snowfalls."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41393090/ns/technology_and_science-science/