Atmospheric
A previously unknown chemical compound in the atmosphere may help explain how and when clouds are formed, say a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Copenhagen.
The discovery of so-called dihydroxyepoxides (an aerosol precursor) was originally found when a team of researchers from Caltech mounted a measuring device known as a Chemical Ionization Mass Spectrometer (CIMS) on an airplane and flew it over the forests of North America.
Professor Henrik Kjærgaard from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen calls…
Methane was discovered on Mars in 2004, meaning volcanic activity continues to generate heat below the martian surface or, if you are exceptionally kooky, that life there is generating it.
When Mars Express arrived in orbit around the red planet, Vittorio Formisano, Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario CNR, Rome, and the rest of the instrument team using planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) began taking data and saw a puzzling signal; along with atmospheric gases such as carbon monoxide and water vapor, they saw methane. Methane is thought to be stable in the martian…
In the early days of global warming concern, prior to 1994, there was doubt because some researchers used data that skewed results during predictable events, like El Niño, from locations in the tropical Pacific Ocean and that lack of scientific impartiality made it more difficult to convince people going forward despite more rigorous methods.
In later years both activists and skeptics have sought to use the solar cycle in their culture war. There's something to that but both sides are a little wrong, according to scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (…
A good video laying out how climate scientists think:
There are problems that attract a different kind of thinker: really complex problems such as the human body, or an individual cell, or the climate system or solar physics. These are subjects that don't fit into the same aesthetic that special relatively fits into. They demand that you deal with multiple conflicting and intersecting elements. They are horribly non-linear right from the word 'go'; they are horribly complex. There is never going to be a theory of climate that somebody will come up with just by thinking about how the climate…
Rising levels of smokestack emissions from oceangoing ships will cause an estimated 87,000 deaths worldwide each year by 2012 — so more than heat wave deaths in French elderly people in 2003 while French young people protested much fewer deaths in the American invasion of Iraq but far less than the nearly 15,000,000 who die annually from cancer.
And it's almost one-third higher than the previously claimed 60,000 deaths but, like many things in pollution-related deaths, accurate numbers are hard to pin down. You take some sample data and you extrapolate.
According to the new study,…
Though New Orleans residents were told to evacuate days before the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, no one could have predicted the real extent of the devastation that would follow.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University say they may be ableto make just such a prediction in the future. They say a reliable way to help predict the intensity of the next big flood can use common cell phone towers across the United States. Their model, which analyzes cell phone signals, adds a critical component to weather forecasting never before available.
"By monitoring the specific and…
An ancient Ice Age, once regarded as a brief 'blip', in fact lasted for 30 million years according to geologists at the University of Leicester who will discuss their findings during a public lecture at the University on Wednesday June 17.
Their research suggests that during this ancient Ice Age, global warming was curbed through the burial of organic carbon that eventually lead to the formation of oil – including the 'hot shales' of north Africa and Arabia which constitute the world's most productive oil source rock.
This ice age has been named 'the Early Palaeozoic Icehouse' by Dr Alex Page…
I awoke early this morning, confused in my half-asleep stupor as to why the neighbors were rolling the garbage cans up and down the driveway while at the same time the nearby naval air station was staging extremely low-flying drills about 10 feet from the roof.
After I ruled out the garbage can theory (garbage day is Wednesday, so that would just be silly) and I didn't see Maverick and Goose buzzing the house tower, I thought, "Is that thunder?" It couldn't be - I'd never heard thunder like that, and I grew up in the upper midwest where tornadoes are the only relief from mosquitoes.
But it…
Research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB in Stuttgart working in conjunction with their colleagues from the company Logos Innovationen have found a way of converting this air humidity autonomously and decentrally into drinkable water.
Even in deserts the air contains water and the research scientists have found a way of obtaining drinking water from air humidity using a system is based completely on renewable energy, making it autonomous.
Even in places with no lakes, rivers or groundwater, considerable quantities of water are…
A study in Nature has helped define the potentially significant contribution of permafrost thaw to atmospheric concentrations of carbon, which have already reached unprecedented levels.
A large amount of organic carbon in the tundra is stored in the soil and permafrost. This pool of carbon, deposited over thousands of years, remains locked in the perennially frozen ground. In recent years this area began to thaw, providing increased access to plants and microbes that could shift the carbon from the land to the atmosphere.
An understanding of the rate of carbon release is necessary to estimate…