The seven scientists behind the article, due to be published 10 April, conclude that the reports by the UN climate panel serve an important function in setting the agenda for climate research. Yet the most important role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to inform the global political discussion on how the harm caused by climate change should be handled.
Earth
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A team of researchers lead by Florida State University have found new evidence that permafrost thawing is releasing large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere via plants, which could accelerate warming trends.
The research is featured in the newest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The recent slowdown in the warming rate of the Northern Hemisphere may be a result of internal variability of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation -- a natural phenomenon related to sea surface temperatures, according to Penn State researchers.
"Some researchers have in the past attributed a portion of Northern Hemispheric warming to a warm phase of the AMO," said Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology. "The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming temporarily."
Source:
CHESTNUT HILL, MA (April 7, 2014) – Taking remedial courses at the four-year college level may hold students back from earning their bachelor's degrees, but at the community college level remedial education can help earn an associate's degree, according to researchers from Boston College's Lynch School of Education.
The role of remedial education has been under scrutiny for years, viewed as an essential tool in efforts to raise rates of degree completion. At the same time, critics question whether the courses are appropriate for institutions of higher education.
For the first time, a field test has demonstrated that elevated levels of carbon dioxide inhibit plants' assimilation of nitrate into proteins, indicating that the nutritional quality of food crops is at risk as climate change intensifies.
Findings from this wheat field-test study, led by a UC Davis plant scientist, will be reported online April 6 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
PULLMAN, Wash.—Researchers led by a Washington State University biologist have found that arid areas, among the biggest ecosystems on the planet, take up an unexpectedly large amount of carbon as levels of carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere. The findings give scientists a better handle on the earth's carbon budget—how much carbon remains in the atmosphere as CO2, contributing to global warming, and how much gets stored in the land or ocean in other carbon-containing forms.
At St. Paul's Cathedral in London, a section of the dome called the Whispering Gallery makes a whisper audible from the other side of the dome as a result of the way sound waves travel around the curved surface. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have used the same phenomenon to build an optical device that may lead to new and more powerful computers that run faster and cooler.
Boulder, Colo., USA – Highlights from GSA Bulletin articles published online on 20 March through 1 April 2014 include a discussion of a catastrophic rock avalanche in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco 4,500 years ago and that village situated there now; evidence of rain and humidity in ancient soils in the western United States; a contribution to the on-going EarthTime initiative, which is working to refine and calibrate deep time geochronometers; and a call for intensive field studies in volcanic areas.
Chemists in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences have, for the first time, created enzyme-like activity using peptides that are only seven amino acids long.
Their breakthrough, which is the subject a recent article in Nature Chemistry magazine (Macmillan Publishers, 2014), may revolutionize the study of modern-day enzymes, whose chains of amino acids usually number in the hundreds, and of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's, which are usually characterized by small clumps of misshaped proteins called amyloids.
Despite climate change, most polluters still pay little or nothing when they release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
'A cost USD 0.15 per kilo CO2 would be enough to solve the whole climate change problem,' says Thomas Sterner, professor of environmental economics at the University of Gothenburg. Sterner is the only Swedish researcher to serve as a coordinating lead author of a new report that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will present next week.
Scientific uncertainty has been described as a 'monster' that prevents understanding and delays mitigative action in response to climate change. New research by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol, and international colleagues, shows that uncertainty should make us more rather than less concerned about climate change.
As the properties and applications of graphene continue to be explored in laboratories all over the world, a growing number of researchers are looking beyond the one-atom-thick layer of carbon for alternative materials that exhibit similarly captivating properties.
One of these materials is molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), which is part of a wider group of materials known as transition metal dichalcogenides, and has been put forward by a group of researchers in the US as a potential building block for the next generation of low-cost electrical devices.
The amount of snow needed to trigger an avalanche in the Himalayans can be up to four times smaller than in the Alps, according to a new model from a materials scientist at Queen Mary University of London.
The proposed universal model could have implications in better understanding strategies for mitigating natural hazards related to snow and rock avalanches and safeguarding people on mountain villages, roads and ski resorts.
Recent research results show that an atmospheric hole over the tropical West Pacific is reinforcing ozone depletion in the polar regions and could have a significant influence on the climate of the Earth.