Environment

Take out carbon credit politics and misplaced technical concerns, says the World Agroforestry Center , and existing technology that could effectively monitor carbon storage in developing country landscapes could save more carbon than closing 1,400 coal-burning power plants. Skepticism about carbon credits - an emissions trading scheme that says we can reduce greenhouse effect emissions on an industrial scale by capping total annual emissions and llowing credits to be traded between businesses or bought and sold in international markets - are impeding efforts to encourage sustainable land use…

A study published in Journal of the American Water Resources Association states that the "Green Great Wall," a forest shelterbelt project in northern China running nearly parallel to the Great Wall, is likely to improve climatic and hydrological conditions in the area when completed. The project, which relies on afforestation (a process that changes land without dense tree cover into forest), could lead to an increase in precipitation by up to 20 percent and decrease the temperature in the area. Some climate models predict an increased occurrence of environmental disasters in the future…

A reconstruction of an extreme warm period shows the sensitivity of the climate system to changes in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels as well as the strong influence of ocean temperatures, heat transport from equatorial regions, and greenhouse gases on Earth's temperature. The researchers say the new data allow for more accurate predictions of future climate and improved understanding of today's warming because past warm periods provide insight into climate change and are natural laboratories for understanding the global climate system. Scientists from the Pliocene Research, Interpretation and…

Drs. John Sij, Cristine Morgan and Paul DeLaune have studied nitrate levels in irrigation water from the Seymour Aquifer for the past three years, and have found nitrates can be as high as 40 parts per million. Though unacceptable for drinking, the water would benefit agricultural producers who use it for irrigation.  This high concentration of nitrates is a concern because it exceeds the federal safe drinking water standards as the aquifer is used as a municipal water source for the communities of Vernon, Burkburnett and Electra, as well as some rural families, Sij said.  "When you…

New research says that we should be looking to the ground, not the sky, to see where climate change could have its most perilous impact on life on Earth.  Scientists at the University of Toronto Scarborough have published research findings in Nature Geoscience that says global warming actually changes the molecular structure of organic matter in soil. Soil organic matter is what makes dirt fertile and able to support plant life – both of which are especially important for agriculture. Organic matter retains water in the soil and prevents erosion. Natural processes of decomposition of…

Imagine you have two plants - one is a plant you'd like to keep around, like a crop, and the other is a pest of some kind that interferes with the growth of your crop. Now, imagine synthesizing 30,000 different candidates for an herbicide and spraying each one on a different plant - and only finding one that effectively kills the weed while preserving the life of your crop. Until recently, this incredibly inefficient method was the only way for the agrichemical industry to find new herbicides. Now, thanks to the boom in biological technology during the last 15 years or so, agrichemical…

Global land use patterns and increasing pressures on water resources demand creative urban stormwater management. Traditional stormwater management focuses on regulating the flow of runoff to waterways, but generally does little to restore the hydrologic cycle disrupted by extensive pavement and compacted urban soils with low permeability. The lack of infiltration opportunities affects groundwater recharge and has negative repercussions on water quality downstream. Researchers know that urban forests, like rural forest land, can play a pivotal role in stormwater mitigation, but developing…

A detailed analysis of black carbon, the residue of burned organic matter,  in computer climate models suggests they may be overestimating global warming predictions.  A new Cornell study in Nature Geosciences quantified the amount of black carbon in Australian soils and found that there was far more than expected, said Johannes Lehmann, the paper's lead author and a Cornell professor of biogeochemistry. The survey was the largest of black carbon ever published. As a result of global warming, soils are expected to release more carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, into the…

When Ohio State glaciologists failed to find the expected radioactive signals in the latest core they drilled from a Himalayan ice field, they knew it meant trouble for their research.   Those missing markers of radiation, remnants from atomic bomb tests a half-century ago, could mean a much greater threat to the half-billion or more people living downstream of that vast mountain range. It may mean that future water supplies could fall far short of what's needed to keep that population alive. In a paper just published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers from the Byrd Polar…

The American bison(buffalo) is in trouble, says a survey by the Wildlife Conservation Society, though there are many more of them now than there were a hundred years ago, and we love them - as a symbol of the old West and occasionally to eat, so something should be done to make sure we get more of them home on the range. These sentiments were found in a public survey released today by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) at a national conference on restoring bison populations in the North America.The survey is part of an effort spearheaded by the American Bison Society to lobby government…