Environment
Though 90,000 out of every 100,000 years in recent geological cycles have been Ice Ages, and it has been 12,000 years since the last one, a new glacial inception hasn't happened.
That's because humanity has become a geological force that is able to suppress the beginning of the next ice age, according to a paper in Nature.
Scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found the relation of insolation and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to be the key criterion to explain the last eight glacial cycles in Earth history. Even moderate human interference with…
Fire use for brush control is nature's way of keeping the ecosystem thriving but as the 20th century progressed, natural methods gave way to environmental lobbying and legal bullying. California, which led the nation in environmental activism, has seen fire hazards run out of control.
This was no surprise to experts in land management. Dr. Bill Rogers, a Texas A&M AgriLife Research professor in the department of ecosystem science and management in College Station, notes that fire has historically played an important role in achieving land management objectives and further…
Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plant growth, and nitrogen fertilization and is often used in agriculture in the developing world and in organic process farming in wealthy countries. But organic farmers have to worry about yield also, and that has led to overuse and misuse that has resulted in the accumulation of surplus nitrogen in soil and its eventual migration to soil layers and groundwater.
The authors of a new study in HortScience found that the environmental risks of manure applications in high-input greenhouse environments may outweigh the benefits, and recommend that the role…
It's no secret that the organic growing process is harder on the environment, with more toxic pesticides, less efficient use of the land, and lower yields, but some practices are exceptionally harmful, like growing crops in organic (peat) soil.
When organic soils are drained and cultivated the organic matter in the soil will decompose which leads to emissions of greenhouse gases, finds a study in Denmark, and that makes up as much as 6 percent of Denmark's total greenhouse gas emissions.
Agricultural management practices affect emissions of the three greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide,…
In the 1980s, the recycling debate was all the rage, with arguments for and against government doing it. The argument against government doing it was predictable; government is inefficient and expensive and the landfills waiting for a recycling list that would grow with every environmental lobbying effort would be the size of regular landfills.
Government recycling won and now there are giant landfills of recycling material that can never actually be recycled - all those glossy magazine pages with perfume on them, for example. Most of California recycling is actually done in China, after…
Hydraulic fracturing is an important technological advance in the extraction of natural gas and petroleum from black shales, but wastewater produced along with shale gas and petroleum following fracking is extremely saline and contains high concentrations of barium. It has been assumed that the peculiar composition of the produced wastewater results from mixing of freshwater used for fracking with high salinity water already underground that also contains barium but a new study found that a large amount of barium in the shale is tied to clay minerals, and this barium is readily released into…
A pesticide called heptachlor epoxide and used in 1970s was found in milk at that time - and it being linked to Parkinson's disease now, in a paper in Neurology.
It's not the first paper to link dairy products and Parkinson's disease, though correlation remain spurious - it is only in the last century that life expectancies have climbed high enough that people are not routinely dying from lots of other things before they get diseases of old age. Academics have been scrambling to link thinks to various conditions and the authors say theirs is the first attempt to make milk causational.…
Early life exposures to toxic chemicals such as PCBs and DDT dampen an infant's response to the tuberculosis vaccine, according to a new study.
DDT? Banned over 40 years ago but so safe the United States EPA creates guidelines for other countries to spray it inside homes?
It's that pesky 'persistent pollutant' designation which, like endocrine disruptor, is invoked when nothing else is available. Todd Jusko, Ph.D., an assistant professor in epidemiology at the University of Rocheste, lead author of the paper, also says PCBs - banned in the 1970s - are still impacting babies and, in case…
Though 99.9999% of species that have gone extinct have never actually been identified, it is common to read claims that we are facing a catastrophic species extinction crisis.
It's best to take such talk with a grain of salt, because conservationists are only now discovering that cities are better at preserving species than pristine wilderness environments. A recent study looked at the distributions of 1,643 protected species in Australia, and counted up the number of these species that occurred in square-kilometer units across the continent. They found that, on average, urban…
There is good news for environmentalists who raise money showing that a toxic 'cocktail' must be harming the environment even when science cannot show it.
With modern testing, anything can be detected, though that does not make it harmful. One molecule in a hundred acres is not really high exposure, even to the hand-picked participants of IARC committees but a new paper says bodies of water are "sinks", and thereby bind contaminants particularly well. If environmentalists and the scientists that enable them want to detect even slight concentrations in water without being disqualified…