Global warming - problems and solutions

Warming of the sea surface by as little as several tenths of a degree can pose a serious threat to King penguins. This was shown in a new report by the team of Yvon Le Maho, CNRS senior researcher at the Institut pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien (IPHC, CNRS / University of Strasbourg 1) and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. The researchers tracked more than 450 individual King penguins over nine years in their natural environment, within the Crozet Archipelago. Read the rest of this entry »

More than two million trees belonging to nearly 5000 species, growing in tropical forests spread over 12 sites and three continents, have been monitored since the 1980s. The aims of this major study were to analyze the carbon storage capacity of tropical forests and measure the effects of climate change on how they function. This work was carried out by an international team, coordinated by Jérôme Chave₍₁₎, a CNRS researcher. Their results suggest that the tropical forests studied did indeed act as carbon sinks, but appeared to react principally to intrinsic phenomena rather than climate change. They also demonstrated the complex functioning of forest ecosystems, their vulnerability and the importance of efforts to ensure their conservation. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists know that air pollution particles from mid-latitude cities migrate to the Arctic and form an ugly haze, but a new University of Utah study finds surprising evidence that polar explorers saw the same phenomenon as early as 1870.

“The reaction from some colleagues — when we first mentioned that people had seen haze in the late 1800s — was that it was crazy,” says Tim Garrett, assistant professor of meteorology and senior author of the study. “Who would have thought the Arctic could be so polluted back then? Our instinctive reaction is to believe the world was a cleaner place 130 years ago.” Read the rest of this entry »

A recent study at the University of Illinois created a bit of a mystery for soil scientist Michelle Wander — increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was expected to increase plant growth, increase plant biomass and ultimately beef up the organic matter in the soil — but it didn’t. What researchers found instead was that organic matter decay increased along with residue inputs when carbon dioxide levels were increased and they think the accelerated decay was due to increased moisture in the soil. Read the rest of this entry »

Earth’s land cover has been charted from space before, but this map, which will be made available to the public upon its completion in July, has a resolution 10 times sharper than any of its predecessors.

Scientists, who will use the data to plot worldwide land-cover trends, study natural and managed ecosystems and to model climate change extent and impacts, are hailing the product – generated under the ESA-initiated GlobCover project – as ‘a milestone.’ Read the rest of this entry »