China warns of future impact

BEIJING — China’s environment minister on Monday issued an unusually stark warning about the effects of unbridled development on the country’s air, water and soil, saying the nation’s current path could stifle long-term economic growth and feed social instability.

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David Gray/Reuters

In an essay published on the agency’s Web site, the minister, Zhou Shengxian, said the government would take a more aggressive role in determining whether development initiatives contributed to climate change through a new system of risk assessment.

Ignoring such risks, Mr. Zhou said, would be perilous.

“In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” he wrote. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.”

His comments, coupled with similar remarks by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao that were publicized in the state media on Monday, suggest that China may seek to embrace tighter environmental restrictions during legislative sessions that begin this week in Beijing. The meetings, held once a year, will include the introduction of the country’s latest five-year economic plan.

Combating Climate Change: Farming Out Global Warming Solutions

Changes to agricultural practice and forestry management could cut greenhouse gas emissions, buying time to develop alternative technologies.
NO TILL?: By avoiding tillage, seen here, farmers can both increase the quality of their soil and sequester greenhouse gases.Image: USDA

Saving the trees could slow climate change, new research shows. Each year, nearly 33 million acres of forestland around the world is cut down, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Tropical felling alone  contributes 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon—some 20 percent of all man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—to the atmosphere annually. If such losses were cut in half, it could save 500 million metric tons of carbon annually and contribute 12 percent of the total reductions in GHG emissions required to avoid unpleasant global warming, researchers recently reported in Science.

Forest depletion ultimately contributes more GHG emissions than all the cars and trucks in use worldwide, says Werner Kurz, a forest ecologist with Natural Resources Canada, who was not involved with the study. "What we are doing in these tropical forests is really a massive problem."

Changes in forest management and agricultural practices could significantly reduce the threat of global warming much more quickly than can technological solutions such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) from coal-fired power plants, according to experts. "We don't know how to do CCS. These are things we could do today," says Bruce McCarl, an agricultural economist at Texas A&M University in College Station. "They are a bridge to the future."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=combating-climate-change-farming-forestry

Why Are Americans So Ill-Informed about Climate Change?

Scientists and journalists debate why Americans still resist the consensus among research organizations that humans are warming the globe

As glaciers melt and island populations retreat from their coastlines to escape rising seas, many scientists remain baffled as to why the global research consensus on human-induced climate change remains contentious in the U.S.

Parts of the Great Barrier Reef have undergone an aesthetic decline, reflecting the dangers from global warming that the vast, fragile ecosystem faces.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the world's natural wonders, covering an area larger than Italy and drawing nearly 2 million tourists every year to boat, swim, snorkel and dive amid its elaborate flora and fauna. It generates some $6 billion in revenue for Australia annually and provides employment to more than 50,000 people. It's also one of the planet's most fragile ecosystems, home to more than 11,000 species that live, if not necessarily in harmony, in a carefully orchestrated symbiotic balance. At the foundation of this giant ecological and commercial enterprise is one tiny marine organism: the coral.

That foundation is no longer solid. Corals build colonies that secrete calcium carbonate to form ocean reefs. When they're healthy, coral reefs provide shelter and food for animals all along the food chain, including the top: us. Across the planet, half a billion people rely, directly and indirectly, on corals for their living. That's why what happens to the 9,000-year-old Great Barrier Reef, as well as to other reefs worldwide, is critical. The recent Queensland floods were most notably tragic for the lives lost and property destroyed. But they have also hurt the Great Barrier Reef by funneling into the ocean vast plumes of freshwater and agricultural runoff that could severely damage the coral. Besides the extreme rain that sparked the floods, rising ocean temperatures, changes to the ocean's chemistry and the global trade in natural resources — all symptoms of our fossil-fuel economy — are waging a multifront war on the marine environment. "You can't walk into a forest and start hacking at branches and killing off animals and denuding the forest cover without killing the trees," says Justin Marshall, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland. "The outlook for the whole reef is poor."

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2044585,00.html?xid=rss-mostpopular

Bottom Up Growth!

Scientists have seen once again just how dynamic a place the underside of the Antarctic ice sheet can be.

Survey data collected from the middle of the White Continent shows liquid water is being frozen on to the bottom of the sheet in huge quantities.
In places, this deeply buried add-on layer is hundreds of metres thick and represents about half of the entire ice column, researchers say.
The discovery is reported online in the journal Science.
Project leaders confess to being astonished by the findings.
"It's jaw-dropping, I have to say," said Professor Robin Bell from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
"The first time I showed the data to colleagues, there was an audible gasp," she told BBC News.
The new data will add to the understanding of how the ice sheet expands and moves, which in turn will inform researchers as they try to grasp how Antarctica might change in a warmer world.


LINK HERE!!!!!

Nuclear War, the answer to global warming?

There's at least one, admittedly reprehensible, way to reverse global warming fast: Nuclear war. NASA researchers say even a limited nuclear conflict could trigger an "unprecedented" planet-wide cooling that could last several years. But the devastating effects of the plunge in temperatures, not to mention the other consequences of nuclear bombs, would hurt the world for generations,

How much colder would the world get?
A regional nuclear war would immediately cause average global temperatures to drop by 2.25 degrees Fahrenheit for the next two to three years. The most extremely affected areas — the tropics, Europe, Asia, and Alaska — would cool by up to 7.2 degrees, according to computer models. Even a decade after detonation, average world temperatures would remain nearly a full degree lower.
Why would temperatures plunge so far?
The explosions would send dust, soot, and ash into the sky, blotting out the sun for weeks. Smoke from the resulting fires would carry five million metric tons of black carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, where it would absorb the sun's heat.
How big of a nuclear war would it take to cool the planet?
Not that extensive, relatively speaking. These researchers used computer models assuming a war involving 50 to 100 bombs as big as the one the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. That translates into just 0.03 percent of the world's current nuclear firepower. TIME ominously pointed out that could last several years. But the devastating effects of the plunge in temperatures, not to mention the other consequences of nuclear bombs, would hurt the world for generations. Here, a quick guide: that India and Pakistan already have enough bombs in their arsenals to do the trick.

The Big Melt: Greenland Lost More Than a France-Sized Area of Ice Last Year

A longer-than-usual melt season in 2010 proved a record-setter in Greenland. Melting started early, and lasted longer than usual, and in all, melting lasted 50 days longer than average. This map image shows last year compared to number of melts days on average between 1979 and 2009.

NASA's Earth Observatory puts it in context:

The long melt season primarily affected southern and western Greenland, where communities experienced their warmest year on record. After a warm, dry winter, temperatures were particularly high in the spring, getting the melt season off to a strong start. The early melting set the tone for the rest of the season, leading to more melting all the way into mid-September.