Methane, a greenhouse gas with an impact over 20 times greater than CO2, is constantly seeping out of large methane hydrate reservoirs in the ocean floors but 80 percent of it is immediately consumed by syntrophic ("feeding together") microorganisms.

These microorganisms dramatically reduce the oceanic emission of methane into the atmosphere by oxidizing methane anaerobically, providing an important component of the global carbon cycle and a major sink for methane on Earth.

Scientists of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena succeeded in capturing these syntrophic microorganisms, something various international research groups have been working on since 1999.

Fallow agricultural land and steppe-formation processes are evidently capable of having a much greater effect on global air quality than was previously assumed, according to researchers who examined a dust cloud that formed over parched fields in southern Ukraine and led to extremely high concentrations of particulate matter in Central Europe.

Over two-thirds of the land area in the Ukraine consists of fields and meadows. The soil on 220,000 square kilometres is regarded as being under threat. Since the 1930s wind erosion in what was then the Soviet Union has increased considerably as a result of collectivisation in agriculture and the resultant large field areas.

In particular, this has affected the regions north of the Caucasus, the lower reaches of the Don river and eastern and southern Ukraine. It is possible that the process is also accelerated by climate change. In particular, previously unaffected semi-arid regions are continuing to dry out.

Scientists at Gramina, a joint biotech venture by Australia’s Molecular Plant Breeding Cooperative Research Centre and New Zealand rural services group PGG Wrightson Genomics, are developing a grass that will not only cut the amount of methane cows burp up when chewing the cud but will also grow in hotter climes, according to the latest issue of Chemistry & Industry.

This means that farmers should be able to maintain dairy herds’ productivity and profitability in the face of a changing climate, while cutting down their gaseous burps and reducing their contribution to global warming.

Combating greenhouse gas emissions produced by the agricultural industry is a priority. The UK’s DEFRA has just announced a roadmap aimed at helping the dairy industry reduce its potential impact on the environment in line with Britain’s target to cut its greenhouse emissions by 20% by 2010. By 2015 the roadmap plans to have 20-30% of milk producers trialling new technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Fewer caribou calves are being born and more of them are dying in West Greenland as a result of a warming climate, according to Eric Post, a Penn State associate professor of biology. Post, who believes that caribou may serve as an indicator species for climate changes including global warming, based his conclusions on data showing that the timing of peak food availability no longer corresponds to the timing of caribou births.

Caribou -- which are closely related to wild reindeer -- are dependent on plants for all their energy and nutrients. Throughout the long Arctic winter, when there is no plant growth, they dig through snow to find lichens; however, in spring they rapidly switch to grazing on the new growth of willows, sedges, and flowering tundra herbs. As the birth season approaches, they are cued by increasing day length to migrate into areas where this newly-emergent food is plentiful.

Are climate change and carbon emissions inextricably linked? New research published in Carbon Balance and Management suggests that this may not be the case, although it may be some time before we reach this saturation point.

The land and the oceans contain significantly more carbon than the atmosphere, and exchange carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 emissions absorbed by the land or the oceans vary in response to changes in climate (including natural variations such as El Nino or volcanic eruptions). So current theories suggest that climate change will have a feedback effect on the rate that atmospheric CO2 increases; rising CO2 levels in turn add to global warming.

The link between the carbon cycle, and human effects caused by emissions, energy use and agriculture, may only be relevant for the next 'several centuries,’ suggest Igor Mokhov and Alexey Eliseev from the A.M. Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics RAS, in Moscow, Russia. The authors used a climate model known as IAP RAS CM to study how feedback between our climate and the carbon cycle changes over time. In their simulations, the authors assumed that fossil fuel emissions would grow exponentially with a characteristic timescale from 50 to 250years.

An international team of scientists has detected that some of the glow of Earth’s aurora is polarized, an unexpected state for such emissions. Measurements of this newfound polarization in the Northern Lights may provide scientists with fresh insights into the composition of Earth’s upper atmosphere, the configuration of its magnetic field, and the energies of particles from the Sun, the researchers say.

If observed on other planets, the phenomenon might also give clues to the shape of the Sun’s magnetic field as it curls around other bodies in the solar system.

When a beam of light is polarized, its electromagnetic waves share a common orientation, say, aligned vertically, or at some other angle. Until now, scientists thought that light from energized atoms and molecules in planetary upper atmospheres could not be polarized. The reason is simple: in spite of the low number of particles at the altitudes concerned (above 100 kilometers (60 miles)), there are still numerous collisions between molecules and gas atoms. Those collisions depolarize the emitted light.

Monitoring Earth's rising greenhouse gas levels will require a global data collection network 10 times larger than the one currently in place in order to quantify regional progress in emission reductions, according to a new research commentary by University of Colorado and NOAA researchers appearing in the April 25 issue of Science.

The authors, CU-Boulder Research Associate Melinda Marquis and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist Pieter Tans, said with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations now at 385 parts per million and rising, the need for improved regional greenhouse gas measurements is critical. While the current observation network can measure CO2 fluxes on a continental scale, charting regional emissions where significant mitigation efforts are underway -- like California, New England and European countries -- requires a more densely populated network, they said.

In 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru put a large amount of sulfur into the atmosphere. Sulfur reacts with water in the air to form droplets of sulfuric acid, which cool the planet by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface.

The droplets soon fall back to Earth, so the cooling effects lasted only a year or so, but the global impact on human society was much greater, according to a new study of contemporary records by geologists at UC Davis.
N
o one had looked at the agricultural and social impacts, said Ken Verosub, professor of geology at UC Davis. "We knew it was a big eruption, we knew it was a cold year, and that's all we knew."

A much-discussed idea to offset global warming by injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere would have a drastic impact on Earth's protective ozone layer, new research concludes. The study, led by Simone Tilmes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), warns that such an approach might delay the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by decades and cause significant ozone loss over the Arctic.

The study will be published Thursday in Science Express. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR's principal sponsor, as well as by NASA and European funding agencies.

"Our research indicates that trying to artificially cool off the planet could have perilous side effects," Tilmes says. "While climate change is a major threat, more research is required before society attempts global geoengineering solutions."

The biggest blow-up in the science community about Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" was not over the 20 foot ocean rises but the images of Hurricane Katrina and the implication that global warming had a hand in it.

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution say there may be something to it, though indirectly.

The Earth’s jet streams, the high-altitude bands of fast winds that strongly influence the paths of storms and other weather systems, are shifting — it could be argued that is in response to global warming.