A new article in the December 4 issue of Science addresses how the combined efforts of government commitments and market transition could save forest and reduce carbon emissions in Brazil. The Policy Forum brief, entitled "The End of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon" was authored by contributors from the Woods Hole Research Center, Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM), Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Aliança da Terra, Environmental Defense Fund, University of Florida, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and the Universidade Federal do Pará.
Earth
An international team of scientists led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has developed a new method of measuring the absorption of CO2 by the oceans and mapped for the first time CO2 uptake for the entire North Atlantic.
Published tomorrow in the journal Science, the peer-reviewed study will greatly improve our understanding of the natural ocean 'sinks' and enable more accurate predictions about how the global climate is changing.
Washington, D.C.—Hawaii may be paradise for vacationers, but for geologists it has long been a puzzle. Plate tectonic theory readily explains the existence of volcanoes at boundaries where plates split apart or collide, but mid-plate volcanoes such as those that built the Hawaiian island chain have been harder to fit into the theory. A classic explanation, proposed nearly 40 years ago, has been that magma is supplied to the volcanoes from upwellings of hot rock, called mantle "plumes," that originate deep in the Earth's mantle. Evidence for these deep structures has been sketchy, however.
Rising levels of carbon dioxide may overheat the planet and cause other environmental problems, but fears that rising CO2 levels could directly reduce plant biodiversity can be allayed, according to a new study by a University of Minnesota scientist Peter Reich. In fact, rising CO2 may actually help counteract losses of diversity from another environmental villain: the global rain of nitrogen from fertilizers and exhaust fumes.
OTTAWA, DECEMBER 2009 – The analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes embedded in tree rings may shed new light on past climate events in the Mackenzie Delta region of northern Canada.
Scientists have long looked at the width of tree rings to estimate temperature levels of past years. Larger rings indicate more tree growth in a season, which translates into warmer summer temperatures. But the analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes in tree rings can also provide accurate data on past climate events, say researchers working in northern Canada.
The indigenous peoples delegation, some members traveling overseas for the first time, will be aided by interpreters to participate at the UN talks Dec. 7 to 18. Their agenda includes discussion of the controversial international REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) program, adaptation strategies and other topics at a special Indigenous Day symposium Dec. 12th
The 30-year record low in Antarctic snowmelt that occurred during the 2008-09 austral summer was likely due to concurrent strong positive phases for two main climate drivers, ENSO (El Niño - Southern Oscillation) and SAM (Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode), according to Dr. Marco Tedesco, Assistant Professor of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at The City College of New York.
Spanish researchers have measured CO2 levels for the past three years in the troposphere (lower atmosphere) over a sparsely inhabited rural area near Valladolid. The results, which are the first of their kind in the Iberian Peninsula, show that the levels rose "significantly" between 2002 and 2005.
Leading mental health researchers are warning that some of the most important health consequences of climate change will be on mental health, yet this issue is unlikely to be given much attention at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen next week.
Dr Lisa Page and Dr Louise Howard from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King's College London reviewed a range of recent research by scientists into the potential mental health impacts of climate change.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A new study using solid-state NMR spectroscopy to analyze intact bone paves the way for atomic-level explorations of how disease and aging affect bone.
The research by scientists at the University of Michigan is reported in the Dec. 2 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Faculty and students from Louisiana Tech University are playing an important role in what has been described as "the most complex and comprehensive science project ever assembled on the planet."
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project in Geneva, Switzerland is an underground "atom smasher" that seeks to re-enact the beginning of the universe, back to one-billionth of a second after the theorized Big Bang, by accelerating and colliding protons at near the speed of light.
Climatic fluctuations close to the equator show a different pattern toclimate change in the Arctic and Antarctic. In the tropics distinct11500 year fluctuations between wet and dry periods can be clearlyidentified which do not occur in temperature reconstructions of polarice cores. The investigations of the climate of the last 25000 years intropical Africa show that dry phases prevailed during lower solarradiation in March and September, which caused the following rain periodto be less intensive.
For the first time, physicists have used laser light to create "synthetic magnetism," an exotic condition in which neutral atoms suddenly begin to behave as if they were charged particles interacting with a magnetic field -- even though no such field is present and the atoms have no charge. The achievement provides unprecedented insights into fundamental physics and the behavior of quantum objects, and opens up entirely new ways to study the nature of condensed-matter systems that were barely imaginable before.
Achieving an important new capability in ultracold atomic gases, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute, a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, have created "synthetic" magnetic fields for ultracold gas atoms, in effect "tricking" neutral atoms into acting as if they are electrically charged particles subjected to a real magnetic field.
(Washington, DC • Dec. 2, 2009) – The STPSat-1, built for the Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP) and operated by the DoD STP for the first year then transitioned to NRL for the last 16 months, was decommissioned on October 7th after completing almost 2 ½ years of successful on-orbit operation. The satellite's two payloads, both designed and built by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), provided unique measurements of middle atmospheric hydroxyl, polar mesospheric clouds and the low latitude ionosphere.