Atmospheric

It's become common for vegetarians and environmental activists to criticize animals. Cows, for example, used to be criticized for carbon dioxide production, with manufactured claims like "it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef" but that has long been debunked and CO2 is dropping thanks to natural gas, so anti-science groups have turned toward methane. While it's true that methane has 23X the warming effect of CO2, it is so short-lived as to be silly from a physics point of view, but so are the anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements, and those still raise a lot of money for groups…

The 2015 Antarctic ozone hole area was larger and formed later than in recent years, accorrding to a new paper. On Oct. 2, 2015, the ozone hole expanded to its peak of 10.9 million square miles, an area larger than the continent of North America. Throughout October, the hole remained large and set many area daily records. Unusually cold temperature and weak dynamics in the Antarctic stratosphere this year resulted in this larger ozone hole. In comparison, last year the ozone hole peaked at 24.1 million square kilometers (9.3 million square miles) on Sept. 11, 2014. Compared to the 1991-2014…

One of the great hypocrisies in climate negotiations a decade ago was exempting China from any agreement by giving them "developing nation" status. The rationale was that their emissions were not that high, according to Europe, who had remained fans of nuclear energy and therefore used less fossil fuels. But scientists knew that policy-makers and activists were using self-reported claims about the emissions. Soon, better measurement techniques began to show giant streams of CO2 coming out of the communist nation and the problem could no longer be denied. When they hosted the Olympics in…

A new study projects that carbon sequestration in European cropland could store between 9 and 38 megatons of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) per year in the soil, or as much as 7% of the annual greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture in the European Union, at a price of carbon of 100 $/tCO2. "However, if strict emission reduction targets are only adopted inside Europe, efforts within the EU to reduce emissions could lead to increased emissions in other parts of the world, which could significantly compromise emission reductions at global level" says IIASA researcher Stefan Frank, who led the study.…

At 8 a.m. EDT on October 23, 2015, the National Hurricane Center said that Hurricane Patricia had grown into a monster hurricane. In fact, it is the strongest eastern north pacific hurricane on record. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite analyzed the temperatures and structure within the storm as it passed overhead. On October 23, a Hurricane Warning was in effect from San Blas to Punta San Telmo. A Hurricane Watch was in effect from east of Punta San Telmo to Lazaro Cardenas and a Tropical Storm Warning was in effect from east of Punta San Telmo to Lazaro Cardenas. When NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP…

Argonne National Laboratory this week released a pair of studies on the efficiency of shale oil production excavation and find that shale oil production generates greenhouse gas emissions at levels similar to traditional crude oil production.  The research analyzed the Eagle Ford shale formation in Texas and the Bakken play mainly in North Dakota. These plays are shale formations with low permeability and must be hydraulically fractured to produce oil and gas. Eagle Ford and Bakken are the second and third largest oil producing shale formation regions in the United States during the last…

A new challenges prevailing wisdom by identifying the atmosphere as the driver of a decades-long climate variation known as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and offering new insight on the causes and predictability of natural climate variations, which are known to cause wide-ranging global weather impacts, including increased rainfall, drought, and greater hurricane frequency in many parts of the Atlantic basin. For decades, research on climate variations in the Atlantic has focused almost exclusively on the role of ocean circulation as the main driver, specifically the Atlantic…

Scientists writing in Environmental Research Letters estimate that the onset of spring plant growth will shift by a median of three weeks over the next century - and global warming is to blame. The scholars from University of Wisconsin-Madison applied the extended Spring Indices to predict the dates of leaf and flower emergence based on day length. These general models capture the phenology of many plant species.  Their results show particularly rapid shifts in plant phenology in the Pacific Northwest and Mountainous regions of the western US, with smaller shifts in southern areas,…

To better understand global weather patterns and increase scientific collaboration between the U.S. and India, researchers supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) have completed a month-long cruise studying summer monsoon conditions in the Bay of Bengal. Summer, or southwest, monsoons are moisture-soaked seasonal winds that bring critical rainfall to the Indian subcontinent during the June-September wet season. An abundant season provides sustaining rainfall that replenishes water reservoirs and reaps bountiful crop harvests. By contrast, a weak season could lead to drought, soaring…

Emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels like coal, petroleum and natural gas tend to collect within Earth's atmosphere as "greenhouse gases" that are blamed for escalating global warming. So researchers around the globe are on a quest for materials capable of capturing and storing greenhouse gases. This shared goal led researchers at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur to team up to explore the feasibility of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNTs) to trap and store two greenhouse gases in particular: carbon dioxide (CO2) and…