Atmospheric
The Earth's original atmosphere held very little oxygen. This began to change around 2.4 billion years ago when oxygen levels increased dramatically during what scientists call the "Great Oxidation Event." The cause of this event has puzzled scientists, but researchers writing in Nature* have found indications in ancient sedimentary rocks that it may have been linked to a drop in the level of dissolved nickel in seawater.
"The Great Oxidation Event is what irreversibly changed surface environments on Earth and ultimately made advanced life possible," says research team member Dominic Papineau…
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered a five-sided ice chain structure that they say could be used to modify future weather patterns.
Researchers, in collaboration with University College London and the Fritz-Haber Institut in Berlin, created the first moments of water condensing on matter – a process vital for the formation of clouds in the atmosphere – by analyzing how the two interact on a flat copper surface. Ice has rarely been viewed at the nanoscale before and the team discovered a one-dimensional chain structure built from pentagon-shaped rings, rather than the…
1998 was the warmest year on record, which George Will takes to mean that global warming is not happening:
Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.
In other words, if each successive year isn't warmer than the last, global warming is only 'allegedly occurring.'
In support of his claim, Will links to this publication (PDF), which (in figure 2) ranks the last 150 years by temperature. He conveniently…
It's not just American cars that are hurting the environment, researchers in California and Colorado have set their sights on ... rocket launches?
Future ozone losses from unregulated rocket launches will eventually exceed ozone losses due to chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which stimulated the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, said Martin Ross, chief study author from The Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles. The study, which includes the University of Colorado at Boulder and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, provides a market analysis for estimating future ozone…
The benefits to animals of omega 3 fatty acids in fish oils have been well documented – helping the heart and circulatory system. Can they also help in improving meat quality and reducing methane emissions?
Perhaps. Methane given off by farm animals is a major contributor to greenhouse gas levels and researchers from University College Dublin have reported that by including 2% fish oil in the diet of cattle they achieved a reduction in the amount of methane released by the animals.
Speaking at the Society for General Microbiology meeting in Harrogate, Dr Lorraine Lillis, one of…
Two new greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, according to an international research team led by scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US and CSIRO scientist, Dr Paul Fraser, from the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research.
Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and sulfuryl fluoride (SO2F2) are powerful greenhouse gases that have recently been discovered to be growing quickly in the global background atmosphere.
These gases are used in industrial processes, partly as alternatives to other harmful greenhouse and ozone depleting gases.
NF3 is used in…
Sulfuryl fluoride, a gas used for fumigation, has the potential to contribute significantly to future greenhouse warming, but because its production has not yet reached high levels there is still time to nip this potential contributor in the bud, according to an international team of researchers.
Their study of sulfuryl fluoride this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research, measured the levels of the gas in the atmosphere and determined its emissions and lifetime to help gauge its potential future effects on climate.
Sulfuryl fluoride was introduced as a replacement for methyl…
The ten warmest years on record have all occurred between 1997 and 2008 but the 2008 temperature in the US was not much different than the 1951-1980 mean, which makes it cooler than all the previous years this decade, say climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.
That's still pretty warm. The GISS analysis found that the global average surface air temperature was 0.44°C (0.79°F) above the global mean for 1951 to 1980, the baseline period for the study. Most of the world was either near normal or warmer in 2008 than the norm. Eurasia, the…
Globally, tropical trees in undisturbed forest are absorbing nearly a fifth of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels, according to a 40-year study of African tropical forests published in Nature.
The researchers says that remaining tropical forests remove a massive 4.8 billion tons of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere each year. This includes a previously unknown carbon sink in Africa, mopping up 1.2 billion tons of CO2 each year. The African tropical forests – one third of the world's total tropical forest – has trapped an extra 0.6 tons of carbon per year in each hectare of intact…
Aerosols are fine particles suspended in the atmosphere. Sources of human-generated aerosols include industry, motor vehicles and vegetation burning. Natural sources include volcanoes, dust storms and ocean plankton. Human-generated aerosols have long been known to exert a cooling effect on climate. This has partly masked the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases. As aerosol pollution is predicted to decrease over the next few decades, unmasking of the greenhouse effect may lead to accelerated global warming.
However, in an address before the International Conference on Southern…