2016-12-13. NASA Releases New Eye-Popping View of Carbon Dioxide.
By NASA.
2011 June 15. Why Wasn't The Hottest Decade Hotter?
By Rob Painting, Skeptical Science. Excerpt: After a rapid rise in
global surface air temperatures during the late 1970s to 1990s, the rate
of global warming in the last decade or so has slowed. A recent
scientific paper, Kaufmann (2011), suggests that once relevant factors
are taken into consideration, the observed slow-down from 1998-2008 is
in line with scientific understanding of the climate. Rapid
industrialization in East Asia, particularly China, led to a big jump in
sunlight-reflecting sulfate aerosol pollution, mainly through coal
burning. This additional reflective aerosol pollution shielded the Earth
from greater warming, but is only a temporary reprieve. Sulfates have a
short lifetime in the atmosphere, and when East Asia stops burning so
much coal, the Earth is going to get an extra nudge in warming….
2008 Nov 5. Dried Mushrooms Slow Climate Warming In Northern Forests. ScienceDaily. Excerpt:
The fight against climate warming has an unexpected ally in mushrooms
growing in dry spruce forests covering Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and
other northern regions, a new UC Irvine study finds. When soil in these
forests is warmed, fungi that feed on dead plant material dry out and
produce significantly less climate-warming carbon dioxide than fungi in
cooler, wetter soil. This came as a surprise to scientists, who
expected warmer soil to emit larger amounts of carbon dioxide because
extreme cold is believed to slow down the process by which fungi
convert soil carbon into carbon dioxide.
Knowing how forests cycle carbon is crucial to accurately predicting
global climate warming, which in turn guides public policy to curb
greenhouse gas emissions. This is especially important in northern
forests, which contain an estimated 30 percent of the Earth's soil
carbon, equivalent to the amount of atmospheric carbon.
"We don't get a vicious cycle of warming in dry, boreal forests.
Instead, we get the reverse, where warming actually prevents further
warming from occurring," said Steven Allison, ecology and evolutionary
biology assistant professor and lead author of the study. "The Earth's
natural processes could give us some time to implement responsible
policies to counteract warming globally."....
27 November 2007. Can baking soda curb global warming? New York Times Online (*requires registration). Michael Kanellos, for News.com. Excerpt:
Some scientists have proposed compressing carbon dioxide and sticking
it in underground caves as a way to cut down on greenhouse gases. Joe
David Jones wants to make baking soda out of it. Jones, the founder and
CEO of Skyonic, has come up with an industrial process called SkyMine
that captures 90 percent of the carbon dioxide coming out of smoke
stacks and mixes it with sodium hydroxide to make sodium bicarbonate,
or baking soda. The energy required for the reaction to turn the
chemicals into baking soda comes from the waste heat from the factory.
"It is cleaner than food-grade (baking soda)," he said.
The system also removes 97 percent of the heavy metals, as well as most of the sulfur and nitrogen compounds, Jones said.
Luminant, a utility formerly known as TXU, installed a pilot version of
the system at its Big Brown Steam Electric Station in Fairfield, Texas,
last year. Skyonic, meanwhile, hopes to install a system that will
consume the greenhouse gas output of a large--500 megawatts or
so--power plant around 2009. Skyonic is currently designing one of
these large systems.
...Because it's a solid, storing baking soda is simply easier, and it
allows greenhouse gas emitters to store a lot of carbon in one place.
The stuff piles up: A 500-megawatt power plant will produce
approximately 338,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. Multiply that
weight by 1.9 and you get the number of tons of baking soda that the
plant will produce. Still, it can be sold, stored in containers, used
for landfill or buried in abandoned mines.
"If you can use the waste heat, it strikes me as a potentially feasible
approach," said Alex Farrell, an assistant professor in the energy and
resources group at the University of California at Berkeley. "I'm not
willing to throw any of the ideas out yet."....
16 May 2007. Climate change: A guide for the perplexed. NewScientist.com news service. Michael Le Page. Excerpt:
Our planet's climate is anything but simple. All kinds of factors
influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of
microscopic creatures in the oceans, and there are subtle interactions
between many of
these factors. Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and
ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is
warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated
the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences.Yes, there
are still big uncertainties in some predictions, but these swing both
ways. For example, the response of clouds could slow the
warming or speed it up. With so much at stake, it is right that climate
science is subjected to the most intense scrutiny. What does not help
is for the real issues to be muddied by discredited arguments or wild
theories. So for those who are not sure what to believe, here is our
round-up of the 26 most common climate myths and misconceptions.
11 April 2007. Greenhouse Gas Study: 1 Percent From NYC. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Excerpt:
NEW YORK (AP) -- New York City produces nearly 1 percent of the
nation's greenhouse gas emissions -- an amount that puts it on par with
Ireland and Portugal -- according to a city study. ...The study found
that the buildings, subways, buses, cars and decomposition of waste in
America's most populous city produced a net emission of 58.3 million
metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2005. The U.S. total was 7.26
billion metric tons for that year. ...The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, a United Nations network of 2,000 scientists, warned
last week of possible catastrophic risks such as floods, disease, food
shortages, species extinction and human suffering throughout the
world....
4 March 2004. RELEASE: 04-081. NASA Research Shows Heavy Smoke "Chokes" Clouds. Using
data from NASA's Aqua satellite, agency scientists found heavy smoke
from burning vegetation inhibits cloud formation. The research suggests
the cooling of global climate by pollutant particles, called
"aerosols," may be smaller than previously estimated.
Electromagnetic Pasta. Using
different types of pasta (spaghetti, linguini, cappellini, fettucini,
lasagne, orzo, macaroni, rigatoni, manicotti, ziti, etc), create a
combined model/display as analogies to explain the principal
classification of the electromagnetic spectrum.
All About Atoms http://education.jlab.org/atomtour/ -- help in understanding the atom.
The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change -- http://www.co2science.org/ -- was
created to disseminate factual reports and sound commentary on new
developments in the world-wide scientific quest to determine the
climatic and biological consequences of the ongoing rise in the air's
CO2 content.
Biomass Burning -- Biomass
burning is the burning of living and dead vegetation, including both
human-initiated burning for land clearing, and burning induced by
lightning and other natural sources. Researchers with the Biomass
Burning Project at NASA Langley Research Center are seeking to
understand the impact that biomass burning has on the Earth's
atmosphere and climate.
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Articles from 2001–present
Non-chronological links:
Carbon
Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC),
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Has
sections on how oceans and vegetation
act as carbon sinks, the quantification
of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gas emissions, and the vulnerability
of coastal areas to rising sea level.
The "Frequently
Asked Global Change Questions" section
is especially useful. Find answers
to questions relating to the atmospheric
lifetime of carbon dioxide and methane,
numerical estimates for sources and
sinks of carbon, and greenhouse gas
atmospheric residency times.
Climate Change Education.org
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