Atmospheric

Contrary to the conclusions of dozens of other studies, a new paper appearing in  Global Change Biology argues that as the climate warms and growing seasons lengthen, subalpine forests are likely to soak up less carbon dioxide. The authors, scientists at the University of Colorado, say that more of the greenhouse gas will be left to concentrate in the atmosphere as a result. The researchers found that while smaller spring snowpack tended to advance the onset of spring and extend the growing season, it also reduced the amount of water available to forests later in the summer and fall.…

 Volcanic rocks buried along the coasts of New York, New Jersey and New England, and as far south as South Carolina and Georgia, might be ideal reservoirs to lock away carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and other industrial sources. A new study featured this week in PNAS outlines formations on land as well as offshore where scientists say the best potential sites may lie.  Underground burial, or sequestration, of globe-warming carbon dioxide is the subject of increasing study across the country. But up till now, research in New York has focused on inland sites where plants might…

Global warming may be a reality, but the debate over what causes the warming and what to do about it is nowhere near over, according to a story in the latest issue of Chemical&Engineering News (C&EN) that surveyed climate scientists on both sides of the argument. While both global warming "believers" and "skeptics" agree on some basics of climate change, for example, that average global temperatures have risen since 1850, with most of the warming occurring since the 1970s, the cordial agreement stops there, writes author Stephen K. Ritter. "At the heart of the global warming debate is…

The Wrong Kind of Snow has struck again.  As this New Scientist article relates, on the 6th of February 1991, trains in South-Eastern England were brought to a halt.  When British Rail announced that this was caused by "the wrong kind of snow", people thought that this was simply the mother of all official excuses.  But it was true: fine, dry, powdery snow had indeed been sucked into the works of the electric trains, and caused them to fail. Now the same thing has hit Eurostar.  This time the snow was in Northern France, and in Eurostar passengers relive their…

Researchers studying climate change during the early Pliocene have concluded that slow changes such as melting ice sheets amplified the initial warming caused by greenhouse gases, and that a relatively small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels wasassociated with substantial global warming about 4.5 million years ago.  The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The researchers used sediment cores drilled from the seafloor at six different locations around the world to reconstruct carbon dioxide levels over the past five million years. They found that during the…

Yesterday morning Venice awoke in the middle of a snowstorm. It is a very rare phenomenon to see snow in sizable amounts in the island, and the times that I have seen four inches build up on the ground are probably no more than a handful. But the morning was also marked by another phenomenon -less unusual, but still rare: a strong acqua alta. The sea rose to 1.15 meters above its average level, and flooded calli and campi with up to ten inches of water. Now, the two phenomena are obviously correlated, since they are both driven by atmospheric conditions. The fact is, however, that one might…

The gases which formed the Earth's atmosphere and probably its oceans did not come from inside the Earth but from outer space, according to a study by University of Manchester and University of Houston scientists. The report in Science claims that textbook images of ancient Earth with huge volcanoes spewing gas into the atmosphere will have to be rethought, putting to rest the age-old view that volcanoes were the source of the Earth's earliest atmosphere.   Dr Greg Holland, Dr Martin Cassidy and Professor Chris Ballentine tested volcanic gases to support their new theory. The research…

A team of scientists has detected tiny quantities of the unreactive volcanic trace gases Krypton and Xenon in Earth's mantle, which reveal an isotopic 'fingerprint' matching that ofmeteorites. The researchers say this means the gases that formed the Earth's atmosphere - and probably its oceans - did not come from inside the Earth but from outer space. The report published this week in the journal Science demonstrates that the age-old view that volcanoes were the source of the Earth's earliest atmosphere must be put to rest, the researchers suggest. "Until now, no one has had instruments…

A study appearing in Nature Geoscience this week claims that Earth's temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than previous estimates suggest, and the effects of this increased sensitivity could make climate change an even bigger threat than it already is. The results of the study show that the models currently used to forecast climate change often neglect components of the Earth's climate system that vary over long timescales and have an important effect on temperature sensitivity--such as land-ice and vegetation. The researchers compared results from a global…

An international team of scientists has developed a new method of measuring CO2 absorption by the oceans and mapped CO2 uptake for the entire North Atlantic for the first time. Appearing tomorrow in the journal Science, the study could greatly improve our understanding of the natural ocean 'sinks' and enable more accurate predictions about how the global climate is changing. The new technique could also lead to the development of an 'early-warning system' to detect any weakening of the ocean sinks – seen by some scientists as the first sign of more pronounced climate change.  The…