Nitrogen pollution 'costs EU up to £280bn a year'

The study by 200 European experts says reactive nitrogen contributes to air pollution, fuels climate change and is estimated to shorten the life of the average resident by six months.
Livestock farming is one of the biggest causes of nitrogen pollution, it adds.
It calls for changes in farming and more controls on vehicles and industry.
The problem would be greatly helped if less meat was consumed, the report says.
Nitrogen is the most common element in the atmosphere and is harmless.
It is the reactive form - mainly produced by human activity - that causes a web of related problems.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13025304

Sugarcane seen as global warming weapon

In addition to significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions that otherwise would be emitted from using gasoline, scientists from the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology have found that expansion of the sugarcane crop in areas previously occupied by other Brazilian crops cools the local climate.


It accomplishes this by reflecting sunlight back into space and by lowering the temperature of the surrounding air as the plants "exhale" cooler water, a Carnegie release reported Monday.

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/04/18/Sugarcane-seen-as-global-warming-weapon/UPI-57981303167617/

More Travel More Problems

Have $200,000 to spend on a seat into space? You may want to re-think the expenditure given a new study in Geophysical Research Letters that shows space tourism will likely aggravate global climate change. Using sophisticated modeling, the researchers found that the biggest impact of a rise in space tourism on global temperatures won't be due to carbon emissions, but black carbon, often in the form of soot.

Produced from the incomplete combustion of burning fossil fuels or biomass, black carbon in the atmosphere absorbs sunlight and emits it as heat. When produced on terra firma, say from burning forests or diesel, black carbon particles stays in the atmosphere for a few days or weeks. However soot particles emitted from space rockets would have a longer-term impact, since they remains in the stratosphere for years.

"Rockets are the only direct source of human-produced compounds above about 14 miles [22.5 kilometers] and so it is important to understand how their exhaust affects the atmosphere," said Martin Ross of The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California and the study's lead author.

"The response of the climate system to a relatively small input of black carbon is surprising, and our results show particular climate system sensitivity to the type of particles that rockets emit," adds co-author Michael Mills of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Found:

http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/41924

Share this page * Email * Print Share this page 1,584 * Share * Facebook * Twitter Shale gas 'worse than coal' for climate

The new kid on the energy block, shale gas, may be worse in climate change terms than coal, a study concludes.

Drawn from rock through a controversial "fracking" process, some hail the gas as a "stepping stone" to a low-carbon future and a route to energy security.
But US researchers found that shale gas wells leak substantial amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
This makes its climate impact worse than conventional gas, they say - and probably worse than coal as well.
"Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20% greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon, and is comparable over 100 years," they write in a paper to be published shortly in the journal Climatic Change.
"We have produced the first comprehensive analysis of the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas," said lead author Robert Howarth from Cornell University in Ithaca, US.
"We have used the best available data [and] the conclusion is that shale gas may indeed be quite damaging to global warming, quite likely as bad or worse than coal," he told BBC News.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13053040

U.N. Goal of Limiting Global Warming Is Nearly Impossible, Researchers Say

by Eli Kintisch on 8 April 2011

 

International negotiators at a United Nations-sponsored climate conference ending today in Bangkok repeatedly underscored the goal of keeping the amount of global warming in this century to no more than 2˚C. But results from a Canadian government climate modeling study published last month suggest that “it is unlikely that warming can be limited to the 2˚C target,” the scientists who wrote the study say.
The paper finds that reaching that goal would require that greenhouse emissions “ramp down to zero immediately” and that scientists deploy means, starting in 2050, to actively remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Previous modeling efforts have already highlighted the difficulty of reaching the 2˚C goal. But the new study is unique in several ways. Most important, it relies on the first published results from the latest generation of so-called Earth System climate models, complex programs that run on supercomputers and seek to simulate the planet’s oceans, land, ice, and atmosphere. The model in this study, Canadian Earth System Model 2, also incorporates updated data on volcanic eruptions, and it simulates in a more sophisticated way the biosphere’s ability to take in or emit carbon.....

Obama's speech in relation to the system of Global Warming

Please LINK HERE 

• 
  

When a system has causal effects, as in the above cases, we speak of "systemic causation." "Systemic risks" are the risks created when there is systemic causation. Systemic causation contrasts with direct causation, as when, say, someone lifts something, or throws something or shoots someone.

Linguists have discovered that every language studied has direct causation in its grammar, but no language has systemic causation in its grammar. Systemic causation is a harder concept and has to be learned either through socialization or education.

Progressives tend to think more readily in terms of systems than conservatives. We see this in the answers to a question like, "What causes crime?" Progressives tend to give answers like economic hardship, or lack of education, or crime-ridden neighborhoods. Conservatives tend more to give an answer like "bad people - lock 'em up, punish 'em." This is a consequence of a lifetime of thinking in terms of social connection (for progressives) and individual responsibility (for conservatives). Thus, conservatives did not see the president's plan, which relied on systemic causation, as a plan at all for directly addressing the deficit.

What Is a "System?"

Systems have the following properties:

• Homeostasis: Stable systems are self-correcting or are correctable; they have indicators that have to stay within a certain range for the system to be stable. In an economy, there are indicators like unemployment, GDP, and so on. In global ecology, the temperature of the earth is a major indicator.
   
• Feedback: Feedback can be controllable or uncontrollable. In our economy, the Federal Reserve uses indicators as feedback in an attempt to control certain aspects of the economy, using interest rates and the money supply. In the global environment, the global ice caps are an uncontrollable feedback mechanism. They reflect sunlight and heat, which has a cooling effect. As the earth gets warmer, they melt and get smaller, which lowers their ability to reflect and to cool, which makes the earth get warmer, which melts them more, which heats the earth more and on and on.
   
• Non-Local and Network Effects: Global warming in the Pacific increases ocean evaporation. Winds blow the additional water vapor toward the northeast, pushing cold arctic air down over the East coast of the US and the excess water vapor falls as a huge snowstorm. Warming in the Pacific can produce huge snowstorms on the East Coast of the US via such non-local effects.
   
• Nonlinear Effects: A small cause can produce a large effect. A few percentage points lowered in the tax rates of the wealthiest percent or two of Americans can produce a trillion dollars of debt over the whole country over a decade.

What Is a "System?"

Systems have the following properties:

• Homeostasis: Stable systems are self-correcting or are correctable; they have indicators that have to stay within a certain range for the system to be stable. In an economy, there are indicators like unemployment, GDP, and so on. In global ecology, the temperature of the earth is a major indicator.
   
• Feedback: Feedback can be controllable or uncontrollable. In our economy, the Federal Reserve uses indicators as feedback in an attempt to control certain aspects of the economy, using interest rates and the money supply. In the global environment, the global ice caps are an uncontrollable feedback mechanism. They reflect sunlight and heat, which has a cooling effect. As the earth gets warmer, they melt and get smaller, which lowers their ability to reflect and to cool, which makes the earth get warmer, which melts them more, which heats the earth more and on and on.
   
• Non-Local and Network Effects: Global warming in the Pacific increases ocean evaporation. Winds blow the additional water vapor toward the northeast, pushing cold arctic air down over the East coast of the US and the excess water vapor falls as a huge snowstorm. Warming in the Pacific can produce huge snowstorms on the East Coast of the US via such non-local effects.
   
• Nonlinear Effects: A small cause can produce a large effect. A few percentage points lowered in the tax rates of the wealthiest percent or two of Americans can produce a trillion dollars of debt over the whole country over a decade.

When a system has causal effects, as in the above cases, we speak of "systemic causation." "Systemic risks" are the risks created when there is systemic causation. Systemic causation contrasts with direct causation, as when, say, someone lifts something, or throws something or shoots someone.

What Is a "System?"

Systems have the following properties:

• Homeostasis: Stable systems are self-correcting or are correctable; they have indicators that have to stay within a certain range for the system to be stable. In an economy, there are indicators like unemployment, GDP, and so on. In global ecology, the temperature of the earth is a major indicator.
   
• Feedback: Feedback can be controllable or uncontrollable. In our economy, the Federal Reserve uses indicators as feedback in an attempt to control certain aspects of the economy, using interest rates and the money supply. In the global environment, the global ice caps are an uncontrollable feedback mechanism. They reflect sunlight and heat, which has a cooling effect. As the earth gets warmer, they melt and get smaller, which lowers their ability to reflect and to cool, which makes the earth get warmer, which melts them more, which heats the earth more and on and on.
   
• Non-Local and Network Effects: Global warming in the Pacific increases ocean evaporation. Winds blow the additional water vapor toward the northeast, pushing cold arctic air down over the East coast of the US and the excess water vapor falls as a huge snowstorm. Warming in the Pacific can produce huge snowstorms on the East Coast of the US via such non-local effects.
   
• Nonlinear Effects: A small cause can produce a large effect. A few percentage points lowered in the tax rates of the wealthiest percent or two of Americans can produce a trillion dollars of debt over the whole country over a decade.

When a system has causal effects, as in the above cases, we speak of "systemic causation." "Systemic risks" are the risks created when there is systemic causation. Systemic causation contrasts with direct causation, as when, say, someone lifts something, or throws something or shoots someone.

Some Arctic Coasts Eroding by a Hundred Feet a Year

Since 2000, dozens of scientists have recorded an average annual erosion rate of about 1.6 feet (0.5 meter) of permafrost—or frozen soil—while studying some 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) of coast. That's about 25 percent of the total Arctic coastline.

In some very short stretches of shoreline, the scientists recorded erosion of 65 to 100 feet (20 to 30 meters) a year. The most dramatic losses were seen along the Laptev, East Siberian, and Beaufort Seas.