WASHINGTON — Researchers looking at corals in the western tropical Pacific Ocean have found signs of a profound shift in the depth where warm surface water and colder deeper water meet—a shift predicted by computer models of global warming.
The finding is the first physical evidence supporting what climate modelers have been predicting as the effects of global climate change on the subsurface ocean circulation. (more…)
*Researchers at University of California, Berkeley, work with Microsoft Research to analyze vast amounts of data without supercomputers.*
BERKELEY, Calif. — Studying the environment would be simple if it weren’t for one thing: Even an isolated ecosystem is unbelievably complicated. Factors to study include water systems, plant life cycles, carbon dioxide fluctuations, resource use by humans, and far more — and each can be studied at the scale of a plant or of the planet, and measured in an instant or over decades. (more…)
Contrary to some previous, highly publicized, reports, ocean acidification is not likely to worsen the hearing of whales and other animals, according to a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientist who studies sound propagation in the ocean. (more…)
*Changes in population, including aging and urbanization, could affect global carbon dioxide emissions*
Changes in the human population, including aging and urbanization, could significantly affect global emissions of carbon dioxide over the next 40 years, according to research results published this week. (more…)
The January 2010 M7.0 earthquake that devastated Haiti’s economy and caused over 200,000 casualties also resulted in significant uplift of the ground surface along Haiti’s coastline, and involved slip on multiple faults, according to a study published online in Nature Geoscience. (more…)
It’s black, it’s gritty, it’s essential for barbecues—and it just might save the world from global warming.
Biochar, a kind of charcoal that is rich in carbon, traps CO2 from the atmosphere and can store it in soils for hundreds to thousands of years, says Professor Nathan Basiliko, a soil scientist at U of T Mississauga’s Department of Geography. Now, Basiliko and colleagues in the Faculty of Forestry are poised to demonstrate that wood waste from Ontario’s forest industry could be used to produce energy and biochar, making the wood a truly carbon-negative biofuel. (more…)
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been chosen to lead a consortium for a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center on Building Energy Efficiency. The Center will develop technologies for low-energy residential and commercial buildings, as well as work on commercialization of those technologies and research how human behavior affects building energy use. (more…)
Resulting ecological damage is serious, but could be reduced by wider use of more sustainable, time-honored practices
Humans are overloading ecosystems with nitrogen through the burning of fossil fuels and an increase in nitrogen-producing industrial and agricultural activities, according to a new study. While nitrogen is an element that is essential to life, it is an environmental scourge at high levels. (more…)
