Atmospheric

A new study of Antarctica's past climate reveals that temperatures during the warm periods between ice ages (interglacials) may have been higher than previously thought. The latest analysis of ice core records suggests that Antarctic temperatures may have been up to 6°C warmer than the present day. The study also found that during the last warm period, about 125,000 years ago, the sea level was around 5 metres higher than today.

The findings, reported this week by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Open University and University of Bristol in the journal Nature could help us understand more about rapid Antarctic climate changes.

A study published today in Nature Geoscience says that increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions continue to outstrip the world's natural ability to absorb carbon and claim that drastic cuts in fossil fuel emissions are the only way to mitigate climate change.

The authors report that over the last 50 years the average fraction of global CO2 emissions that remained in the atmosphere each year was around 43 per cent - the rest was absorbed by the Earth's carbon sinks on land and in the oceans. During that time the fraction has likely increased from 40 per cent to 45 per cent, suggesting a decrease in the efficiency of the natural sinks. The team also offers evidence that the sinks are responding to climate change and variability.

Like most mountainous areas, Bowron makes its own weather system and it appears you get everything in a 24-hour period. In fact, whatever weather you are enjoying seems to change 40 minutes later; good for rain, bad for sun. Wisps of cloud that seemed light and airy only hours early have become dark. Careful to hug the shore, we are ready for a quick escape from lightening as thundershowers break.

Thousand ha of land is lying as wasteland between Ahamedabad to Bhavnagar but Prosopis juliflora , Salvadora  prominent. On inland wasteland areas CSMCRI has done very good Jatropha cultivation. Now the technology for biodiesel has been perfected and patented its ideal plant for wastelands provided proper agotechnology is employed. However Salicornia is good for inland marshes while Salvadora is well supported in saline areas of extreme nature. There is need to colonise wasteland using a combination of petro crops, oil yielding plants and wasteland colonizers

With the COP15 conference fast approaching, the world's political leaders are gearing up to hash out a global agreement that will save us from ever increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the unstoppable climate change that will follow.

New research published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, however, may complicate their plans. The new research, conducted by a professor of Earth Science at the University of Bristol, shows that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of CO2 has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of CO2 having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.

While it's generally accepted that melting polar ice due to global warming is bad, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey are reporting this week that the loss of ice in the world's southernmost region could actually be slightly slowing the pace of climate change.

Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula. This remarkable colonization is having a beneficial impact on climate change. As the blooms die back phytoplankton sinks to the sea-bed where it can store carbon for thousands or millions of years.

Countries vary across the globe in releases of greenhouse gases (GHG). For example, eight countries -- USA (23.5), Canada (22.6), Czech Republic (13.7), UK (10.6), Spain (10.1), Switzerland (7.3), South Africa (9.0), and Thailand (5.6) -- released in 2005 their portion of per capita carbon dioxide emissions in metric tons as shown inside the parentheses. The data are from the World Resource Institute and exclude bunker-fuel emissions and land-use change. Just USA, EU, Canada, Czech Republic, Switzerland, South Africa, and Thailand contributed on the same basis 43.4% of the total global emissions in 2006 per U.S. Department of Energy.

A narrow focus on carbon dioxide has long focused attention of the political and economic motivations of the European countries behind treaties like the Kyoto protocol rather than the science data and what parameters are needed to make climate simulations truly accurate.

Now that the fad aspects of global warming are behind us, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have taken a step to make better climate simulation.   Their results, published in Biogeosciences, illustrate the complexity of climate modeling by demonstrating how natural processes still have a strong effect on the carbon cycle and climate simulations.

I. Introduction

From time-to-time, one has the opportunity to assist in developing a research tool with the versatility of a Swiss Army Knife (or sonic screwdriver for the Dr. Who aficionados). I was lucky enough to have that opportunity while working on my postdoc at the University of Louisville Comparative Planetology Laboratory (CPL) http://louisville.edu/cpl/ established and lead by Prof. Timothy Dowling in 2000. The primary goal of CPL is to develop theoretical and numerical models that may be used to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms that shape large-scale planetary atmosphere characteristics.

Air pollutants which travel from a country like China, the world's top producer of CO2 who also happens to be exempt from  Kyoto because they insist they are a developing nation,  impact the USA and then on to Europe, says a new report by the National Research Council.

Poor air quality is most strongly a result of local emissions but the influence of non-domestic pollution sources may grow as emissions from developing countries increase and become relatively more important as a result of tightening environmental protection standards in industrialized countries.