Environment

The winter chill is upon us, and holiday songs put us all in the mood to snuggle by a warm fire with our loved ones... but in this new "environmental age", what should we be using to fuel our roaring fires?  Tradition generates images in our minds of a large stone fireplace, ablaze with a fiery tower of wood - casting heat and light into the room where family and friends gather.  It's warm, it's natural, it traditional... why should we consider anything else? But there are other things to be considered, or at least to be aware of, before stocking your fireplace with wood. …

The heat created by human activities does not even amount to 1/10,000th of the heat that the Earth receives from the sun, say a group of researchers, and it may not be possible to get people to agree to burn fewer fossil fuels but covering parts of the Earth would offset that. This radical plan to curb global warming and so reverse the climate change caused by burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution would involve covering parts of the world's deserts with reflective sheeting and they write about it in the January issue of the International Journal of Global Environmental…

We haven't always been warming.  The circle of climate change has made 90% of the planet's history ice ages and many of those swings were sudden and dramatic.  And it could happen that way again, within decades, says a new government report. It contends that seas could rise rapidly if melting of polar ice continues to outrun recent projections and that an ongoing drought in the U.S. west could be the start of permanent drying for the region. Commissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the report was authored by researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, Columbia…

Bursera simaruba has always been one of my favourite tree species. It’s a dry-season deciduous tree with compound leaves and a coppery peeling outer bark and a green (presumably photosynthetic) inner bark.  It’s a conspicuous element of tropical dry forests in Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico and parts of southern Florida (where they call it the ‘gumbo limbo’ tree).  In all these places it’s the only representative of its genus.  In my experience, Bursera was Bursera simaruba, so I was surprised when I came across a Bursera that was grown from seed collected in Costa Rica that…

When most people think of climate change, they think of it as another term for global warming.  But climate change replaced global warming as a term because the warming has never been global and  it wasn't just warming that impacted human civilization - it was cooling too. Stanford University researchers have conducted an analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-Columbian population centers in the Americas and in sparsely populated surrounding regions. They concluded that reforestation of agricultural lands…

Effects of climate change and global warming, although currently shrouded in mystery may soon be more clearly explained thanks to a new microbial ecosystem model built by researchers at MIT. The study is based on microscopic ‘planktonic’ marine organisms, so small that 500,000 of them could fit on the head of a pin. The MIT ecosystem, smaller than a stick of chewing gum, is the first ecosystem model to show how microscopic plankton live and collect food, serving as the base of the aquatic food chain. Their work, published in the January issue of American Naturalist, may lead to better…

It is sometimes claimed that changes in radiation from space, so-called galactic cosmic rays, can be one of the causes of global warming. A new study, investigating the effect of cosmic rays on clouds, says that the likelihood of this is very small.  The study "Cosmic rays, cloud condensation nuclei and clouds – a reassessment using MODIS data" was recently published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. A group of researchers from the University of Oslo, Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU), CICERO Center for Climate and Environmental Research, and the University of…

Unparalleled warming over the last few decades has triggered widespread ecosystem changes in many temperate North American and Western European lakes, say researchers at Queen's University and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. The team reports that striking changes are now occurring in many temperate lakes similar to those previously observed in the rapidly warming Arctic, although typically many decades later. The Arctic has long been considered a "bellwether" of what will eventually happen with warmer conditions farther south. "Our findings suggest that ecologically important changes…

Rocky Mountain ski areas face dramatic changes this century as the climate warms, says a new Colorado study. The study indicates snowlines -- elevations below which seasonal snowpack will not develop -- will continue to rise through this century, moving up more than 2,400 feet from the base areas of Colorado's Aspen Mountain and Utah's Park City Mountain by 2100, said University of Colorado at Boulder geography Professor Mark Williams. Williams and Brian Lazar of Stratus Consulting Inc. of Boulder combined temperature and precipitation data for Aspen Mountain and Park City Mountain with…

It's a bad thing in sports, but a goose egg in a warming Arctic could be a good thing - for polar bears.   New calculations show that changes in the timing of sea-ice breakup and of snow goose nesting near the western Hudson Bay could provide at least some polar bears with this alternative source of food. This new analysis appears in Polar Biology. Polar bears, Ursus maritimus, are listed as a threatened species under the United States' Endangered Species Act and are classified as "vulnerable with declining populations" under IUCN's Red List. Polar bears' habitat rings the Arctic south…