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Northern Lights Attacking Earth?

The strange, beautiful coloured lights that circle the Earth's polar regions are a source of fascination for many.

But as the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, dance in the frozen skies over Alaska, scientists' trigger fingers are poised to launch rockets.

The researchers at the world's largest land-based rocket range hope to learn more about these storms and their impact on lives in the northern hemisphere.

The luminous sheets of light might look spectacular, but they are also visual indicators of geomagnetic storms in space that can interfere with satellites, power grids, navigation and communication systems. They can even corrode oil pipelines.

It is this disruption that the researchers are trying to help mitigate. More

Disease-Carrying American Crayfish Invade U.K. Rivers

U.S. crayfish and their British cousins do not get along. First the U.K. was invaded by the American signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) carrying the deadly crayfish plague, which has killed 95 percent of Britain’s native white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) over the past 20 years. Now another invasive crayfish species—the virile crayfish (Orconectes virilis), native to the U.S. and Canada—is starting to spread in the rivers around East London. The species also carries crayfish plague.

The disease, caused by a water mold (Aphanomyces astaci), is a pretty nasty killer. It literally eats a crayfish from the inside out, leaving nothing but an empty shell behind. Death occurs within weeks of infection.

Virile crayfish were first spotted in East London’s waterways in 2004, probably after being dumped into a pond from a home aquarium. Since then, they have colonized 17 kilometers of the River Lee and surrounding waterways. River Lee has no native white-clawed crayfish left—they were all wiped out by the signal crayfish invasion in the 1980s. More

Sun Storms May Affect Radios, Cell Phones

Intense solar activity may affect Earth today, potentially disrupting radio and cell phone transmissions.

On Monday, the sun released a coronal mass ejection (CME), which is a "massive eruption of solar plasma," according to Space.com. The blast is expected to affect the Earth through Saturday.

"Coronal Mass Ejections from the last few days may cause isolated periods of G1 (Minor) Geomagnetic Storm Activity on December 28-29," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center wrote in an update. "R1 (Minor) radio blackouts are expected until 31 December."

If the storms are powerful enough, they could temporarily interrupt radio frequencies, GPS signals and cell phone communication. More

New Icelandic volcano eruption could have global impact

Mighty Katla, with its 10km (6.2 mile) crater, has the potential to cause catastrophic flooding as it melts the frozen surface of its caldera and sends billions of gallons of water surging through Iceland's east coast and into the Atlantic Ocean.

"There has been a great deal of seismic activity," says Ford Cochran, the National Geographic's expert on Iceland.

There were more than 500 tremors in and around the caldera of Katla just in October, which suggests the motion of magma. "And that certainly suggests an eruption may be imminent."

Scientists in Iceland have been closely monitoring the area since 9 July, when there appears to have been some sort of disturbance that may have been a small eruption. More

World has five years to avoid severe warming

PARIS - The world has just five years to avoid being trapped in a scenario of perilous climate change and extreme weather events, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned on Wednesday.

On current trends, "rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change," the IEA concluded in its annual World Energy Outlook report.

"The door to 2.0 C is closing," it said, referring to the 2.0 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) cap on global warming widely accepted by scientists and governments as the ceiling for averting unmanageable climate damage.

Without further action, by 2017 the total CO2 emissions compatible with the 2.0 C goal will be "locked in" by power plants, factories and other carbon-emitting sources either built or planned, the IEA said. Global infrastructure already accounts for more than 75 per cent of that limit. More

Fears of Mount Paekdu eruption spreading in N. Korea

SEOUL -- North Korea's adoption of a new rule on natural disasters last month indicates that experts' warnings of volcanic eruptions of Mount Paekdu have spread widely throughout the country, the South Korean government said Wednesday.

Pyongyang's new law stipulates principles for observing and forecasting natural disasters, particularly earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, in addition to how to minimize damage and undertake rescue activities, the Korean Central News Agency reported last month, without giving further details.

Experts outside the secretive communist country have warned since last year that North Korea's Mount Paekdu, which borders China, may still have an active core, citing topographical signs and satellite images.

The 2,744-meter Mount Paekdu last erupted in 1903. More

Toxic Toys Are Naughty, Not Nice

Researchers at the U.S. PIRG, a public interest research organization, have released their 26th annual report on toxic toys called "Trouble in Toyland" just in time to warn parents heading out to fill holiday wish lists.

The report includes safety guidelines and provides examples of toys still on store shelves that may pose safety hazards whether from lead exposure, other chemicals or as a choking hazard.

Investigators found two toys with lead levels in excess of 300 parts per million (ppm), above the current standard set by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. Another toy exceeded a 100 ppm standard that went into effect in August.

Another four toys exceeded the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation that toys not contain more than 40 parts per million of lead. More

Home washing machines: Source of potentially harmful ocean 'microplastic' pollution

Scientists are reporting that household washing machines seem to be a major source of so-called "microplastic" pollution — bits of polyester and acrylic smaller than the head of a pin — that they now have detected on ocean shorelines worldwide. Their report describing this potentially harmful material appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Mark Browne and colleagues explain that the accumulation of microplastic debris in marine environments has raised health and safety concerns. The bits of plastic contain potentially harmful ingredients which go into the bodies of animals and could be transferred to people who consume fish. Ingested microplastic can transfer and persist into their cells for months. How big is the problem of microplastic contamination? Where are these materials coming from? To answer those questions, the scientists looked for microplastic contamination along 18 coasts around the world and did some detective work to track down a likely source of this contamination.

They found more microplastic on shores in densely populated areas, and identified an important source — wastewater from household washing machines. They point out that more than 1,900 fibers can rinse off of a single garment during a wash cycle, and these fibers look just like the microplastic debris on shorelines.

The problem, they say, is likely to intensify in the future, and the report suggests solutions: "Designers of clothing and washing machines should consider the need to reduce the release of fibers into wastewater and research is needed to develop methods for removing microplastic from sewage." More

Nestle chief warns of new food riots

VIENNA - The head of the world’s biggest food company Nestle said Friday that rising food prices have created conditions “similar” to 2008 when hunger riots took place in many countries.

“The situation is similar (to 2008). This has become the new reality,” the Swiss giant’s chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe told the Salzburger Nachrichten daily in his native Austria in an interview.

“We have reached a level of food prices that is substantially higher than before. It will likely settle down at this level.

“If you live in a developing country and spend 80 percent of your income on food then of course you are going to feel it more than here (in Europe) where it is maybe eight percent.”

In 2008, the price of cereals reached historic levels, provoking a food crisis and riots in a number of African countries, as well as in Haiti and the Philippines.

In September the UN food agency’s food price index came in at 225 points, just higher than the peak it hit in June 2008. It is down from the record 237.7 points hit in February this year. More

SDG&E asks for higher rates on customers who go solar

Homeowners with solar power may have to dig a little deeper to pay off their green investment if regulators approve San Diego Gas & Electric Co.'s request to change the way electricity is billed.

Under its proposal, SDG&E would unbundle the charges for electricity and for transporting electricity.

The change would have little effect on bills for traditional electricity customers, but customers with solar, wind or other renewable generation would find they pay an average of an extra $33 a month, said J.C. Thomas, the utility's manager for government and regulatory affairs, last week.

Late Monday, SDG&E spokeswoman Stephanie Donovan revised the estimate, saying the average was closer to $11 a month.

The utility said non-solar customers subsidize solar customers by an average of $1,100 a year, though consumer advocates expressed deep skepticism of that figure. More

Giant Chunk of Greenland Ice Set to Break Away

An ice shelf is poised to break off from a Greenland glacier and float out to sea as an island twice the size of Manhattan, scientists say.

"I don't know exactly when," Jason Box, a climatologist with Ohio State Unversity's Byrd Polar Research Center, told OurAmazingPlanet.

"I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened today — or if it happened next summer."

Just a year ago, in August 2010, the same glacier produced an even larger iceberg — a mass of ice four times the size of Manhattan, the largest in recorded Greenland history — yet researchers warn that the next spectacular break could have more-dire consequences.

Box said it's not clear when the 62-square-mile (160 square kilometers) ice shelf, which is dangling from Greenland's Petermann Glacier, will detach from the mainland.

"I think it's more likely to occur during periods of melt, and that's coming to an end, so I'm losing confidence it's going to break this year," Box said.

Ice shelves are enormous plates of ice that float on polar seas but are connected to the shoreline by the land-bound glaciers that feed into them. More

The Age of Man: A New Geologic Epoch

For the past 250 years, humans have released billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, primarily by burning fossil fuels like coal and oil. Now, scientists say the impact of all this CO2 and other human activities on the natural world is so significant that it constitutes a new period of geologic time in the planet's history.

This new proposed epoch, the Anthropocene — so named to represent the human-dominated influence — is marked by measurable changes in the Earth's climate, geography and biological composition. These changes are akin, they say, to the great extinctions and ice ages that previously signified transitions between geologic periods or epochs now visible in layers of ancient rock.

For the first time, humans are attempting to denote a new geologic epoch as they live through it, and in a new issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A many scientists contend the planet's environment has already met the criteria for a newly-designated epoch.

Moreover, in the March 2011 issue of National Geographic, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the Anthropocene and what types of human activity are expected to have a long-lasting impact on the planet, from a geologic perspective. More

Destructive fish spurs call to ‘re-reverse’ Chicago River

CHICAGO | The city was in a predicament. By the late 1800s the slow-moving Chicago River had become a cesspool of sewage and factory pollution oozing into Lake Michigan, the source of drinking water for the bustling metropolis.

The waterway had grown so putrid that it raised fears of a disease outbreak and concerns about hurting development. So in a first-of-its-kind feat, engineers reversed the river by digging a series of canals that not only carried the stinking mess away from the lake, but also created the only shipping route between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.

Now a modern threat — a voracious fish that biologists are desperate to keep out of Lake Michigan — has spurred serious talk of undertaking another engineering feat almost as bold as the original: reversing the river again to restore its flow into the lake.

The Army Corps of Engineers is studying ways to stop invasive species from moving between two of the nation’s largest watersheds, including a proposal to block the canals and undo the engineering marvel that helped define Chicago. More

Increasingly Powerful Solar Storms Could Disrupt Technology on Earth

Power grids, GPS systems and satellites could be among the technologies affected by surges of energy released by the sun's swelling magnetic field, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The sun is essentially a ball of gas with a magnetic field at its core, and that field regularly expands and contracts in what is dubbed the "solar cycle."

It is currently about a year into a strengthening phase, which is expected to peak around July 2013. As a result, the increasingly volatile magnetic field will likely cause more eruptions on the sun's surface.

"The consequence of a stronger magnetic field is it becomes concentrated in certain parts of the sun and it becomes unstable," said Joe Kunches, a space scientist with the NOAA. "These contorted and somewhat uncomfortable magnetic fields want to return to a more familiar state and in doing so they give off energy." More

Australian kids are living in climate of fear

PRIMARY school children are being terrified by lessons claiming climate change will bring "death, injury and destruction" to the world unless they take action.

On the eve of Prime Minister Julia Gillard's carbon tax package announcement, psychologists and scientists said the lessons were alarmist, created unneeded anxiety among school children and endangered their mental health.

Climate change as a "Doomsday scenario" is being taught in classrooms across Australia. Resource material produced by the Gillard government for primary school teachers and students states climate change will cause "devastating disasters".

"As well as their terrible impact on people, animals and ecosystems they cause billions of dollars worth of damage to homes and other buildings," the material says.

Australian National University's Centre for the Public Awareness of Science director Dr Sue Stocklmayer said climate change had been portrayed as "Doomsday scenarios with no way out". More

Newly Found Gonorrhea Superbug Resists All Existing Antibiotics

A new strain of the gonorrhea bacteria can resist all available antibiotics, doctors say. Gonorrhea is one of the world’s most common sexually transmitted diseases, so this could portend a major threat to public health.

This should actually not be surprising, because for some time now, just one class of drug has been able to successfully treat the infection. Now researchers in Sweden and Japan identified a new variant of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bug that causes gonorrhea, that can survive that last remaining drug, the cephalosporin-class antibiotics. Researchers isolated the strain from the throat of a sex worker in Japan, the Los Angeles Times reports.

“This is both an alarming and a predictable discovery,” said Dr. Magnus Unemo, of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, in a statement.

The bacteria has been evolving to resist antibiotics since they became the standard treatment for the infection in the 1940s, during World War II. More

Al Gore returns with new climate campaign

It should almost be called Inconvenient Truth 2.0. Five years after Al Gore launched his original documentary project, the former vice-president returned on Tuesday with a new campaign aimed at exposing the full scale of the climate crisis.

Gore's Climate Reality project announced it would kick off with a 24-hour live streamed event on 14 September. The day's events will include a new multimedia presentation by Gore that will "connect the dots" between extreme weather events and climate change, a statement said.

The campaign represents a modest comeback for Gore who has reduced his public profile on climate action in the past few years – probably out of consideration for the political consequences to his fellow Democrat Barack Obama.

It is being launched four years after Inconvenient Truth, based on Gore's climate change slide-show, won an Oscar for best documentary. More

Could the Net be killing the planet one web search at a time?

It's Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun.

Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet. Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

Sure, it's not a lot on its own — but add up all of the more than one billion daily Google searches, throw in 60 million Facebook status updates each day, 50 million daily tweets and 250 billion emails per day, and you're making a serious dent in some Greenland glaciers. More

Toxic pesticides from GM crops found in unborn babies

Scientists at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, at the University of Sherbrooke Hospital Centre in Quebec, took dozens of samples from women.

Traces of the toxin were found 93 per cent of the pregnant mothers and in 80 per cent of the umbilical cords.

The research suggested the chemicals were entering the body through eating meat, milk and eggs from farm livestock which have been fed GM corn.

The findings appear to contradict the GM industry’s long-standing claim that any potentially harmful chemicals added to crops would pass safely through the body.

To date, most of the global research which has been used to demonstrate the safety of GM crops has been funded by the industry itself. More

EPA Whistleblower Criticizes Global Warming in Peer-Reviewed Study

The scientific hypotheses underlying global warming alarmism are overwhelmingly contradicted by real-world data, and for that reason economic studies on the alleged benefits of controlling greenhouse gas emissions are baseless. That’s the finding of a new peer-reviewed report by a former EPA whistleblower.

Dr. Alan Carlin, now retired, was a career environmental economist at EPA when CEI (Competitive Enterprise Institute) broke the story of his negative report on the agency’s proposal to regulate greenhouse gases in June, 2009. Dr. Carlin’s supervisor had ordered him to keep quiet about the report and to stop working on global warming issues. EPA’s attempt to silence Dr. Carlin became a highly-publicized embarrassment to the agency, given Administrator Lisa Jackson’s supposed commitment to transparency.

Dr. Carlin’s new study, A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change, is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It finds that fossil fuel use has little impact on atmospheric CO2 levels. Moreover, the claim that atmospheric CO2 has a strong positive feedback effect on temperature is contradicted on several grounds, ranging from low atmospheric sensitivity to volcanic eruptions, to the lack of ocean heating and the absence of a predicted tropical “hot spot.” More

Exploding watermelons caused by chemicals, weather

NANJING -- An investigation into bursting watermelons in east China's Jiangsu Province shows that growth promoter as well as sudden rainfall may be to blame, said experts on Tuesday.

More than 700 mu (46.7 hectares) of watermelons have been ruined due to the problem in the city of Danyang in May, the harvest time for watermelons in southern China. At the village of Dalu, within the jurisdiction of Danyang, 67 percent of Liu Mingsuo's watermelons have burst, with watermelon pieces piled up in the field.

"This is the first year that I have planted watermelons. I sprayed forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator, and instant calcium on May 6. The next day, about 180 watermelons burst," said Liu Mingsuo.

There are now 20 watermelon producers in the village, up from only seven in 2010 since last year saw a bumper harvest. Agriculture experts believe that the problem is caused by multiple factors such as the use of forchlorfenuron and sudden heavy rainfall after a long period of dry weather after checking 10 watermelons producers' land in the village. More

Record Snowpacks Could Threaten Western States

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — For all the attention on epic flooding in the Mississippi Valley, a quiet threat has been growing here in the West where winter snows have piled up on mountain ranges throughout the region.

Thanks to a blizzard-filled winter and an unusually cold and wet spring, more than 90 measuring sites from Montana to New Mexico and California to Colorado have record snowpack totals on the ground for late May, according to a federal report released last week.

Those giant and spectacularly beautiful snowpacks will now melt under the hotter, sunnier skies of June — mildly if weather conditions are just right, wildly and perhaps catastrophically if they are not.

Fear of a sudden thaw, releasing millions of gallons of water through river channels and narrow canyons, has disaster experts on edge. More

Ocean Noise Pollution Blowing Holes in Squids' Heads

Thousands of Humboldt squid died off the coast of Oregon in 2004 and hundreds again in 2008. The culprit was originally considered a shift in deep-sea currents, but a new study pinpoints the physical trauma noise pollution can inflict on cephalopods and raises new concerns over the incidents of squid strandings.

Dolphins and whales and other marine mammals aren't the only sea life vulnerable to noise pollution from human activities.

Earlier indications that squid might be susceptible to noise occurred in 2001 and again in 2003, when giant squid washed up along the shore of Asturias, Spain. After struggling to identify the reason, biologists eventually concluded that the deaths were most likely related to the presence of vessels using seismic air guns for geophysical prospecting of the seabed. More

180 Lb Giant 'Federal' Wolves Threaten Idaho Citizens

Today there are many issues that confront our political institutions. We are living in interesting times. For state governments the big issues are balancing budgets and federal government encroachment. And for the state of Idaho, the face of federal government encroachment is that of a Canadian Gray Wolf.

Under the authority of the Endangered Species Act, in the mid-70’s Washington D.C. bureaucrats began to contemplate the introduction of wolves into parts of the so called lower 48 states. The reason that this was even a possibility was because the original settlers of the country, who had lived with wolves, decided to get rid of them. Such people will tell you that wolves are a menace, and dangerous on top of that.

Over the objections of the Idaho Legislature, the governor of Idaho, and Idaho’s congressional delegation, in 1995 the federal Fish and Wildlife Service introduced 35 Canadian Gray Wolves into central Idaho. A like number of wolves were introduced into Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, just across the Idaho border.

The plan was to protect this population of Gray Wolves such that their numbers would increase to 300 and at least 30 breeding pairs across the three state region of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. The Idaho Legislature, with a gun to its head, agreed to this scheme in a 2002 Wolf Management Plan it ratified; while at the same time passing a resolution stating that its real desire was to remove the wolves from Idaho all together. The DC bureaucrats were going to introduce the wolves no matter what the state of Idaho wanted; and the negotiated 2002 Wolf Management Plan reflected Idaho’s effort to at least have a say in the process. More

Many Coastal Wetlands Likely to Disappear This Century

Many coastal wetlands worldwide -- including several on the U.S. Atlantic coast -- may be more sensitive than previously thought to climate change and sea-level rise projections for the 21st century.

U.S. Geological Survey scientists made this conclusion from an international research modeling effort published December 1 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. Scientists identified conditions under which coastal wetlands could survive rising sea level.

Using a rapid sea-level rise scenario, most coastal wetlands worldwide will disappear near the end of the 21st century. In contrast, under the slow sea-level rise projection, wetlands with low sediment availability and low tidal ranges are vulnerable and may drown. However, in the slow sea-level rise projection, wetlands with higher sediment availability would be more likely to survive. More

Earth's Sixth Mass Extinction: Is It Almost Here?

With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that have occurred just five times during the past 540 million years.

Each of these "Big Five" saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct.

In results of a study published in this week's issue of journal Nature, researchers report on an assessment of where mammals and other species stand today in terms of possible extinction compared with the past 540 million years. They find cause for hope--and alarm.

"If you look only at the critically endangered mammals--those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations--and assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm," said Anthony Barnosky, an integrative biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, and first author of the paper. More

If an island state vanishes, is it still a nation?

CANCUN — Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two. "It's getting worse," says Kaminaga Kaminaga, the tiny nation's climate change coordinator.

The rising ocean raises questions, too: What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a UN seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?

For years global negotiations to act on climate change have dragged on, with little to show. Parties to the 193-nation UN climate treaty are meeting again in this Caribbean resort, but no one expects decisive action to roll back the industrial, agricultural and transport emissions blamed for global warming — and consequently for swelling seas.

From 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers) away, the people of the Marshalls - and of Kiribati, Tuvalu and other atoll nations beyond - can only wonder how many more years they'll be able to cope. More

Study: If We're Not Alone, We Should Fear the Aliens

When considering the prospect of alien life, humankind should prepare for the worst, according to a new study: Either we're alone, or any aliens out there are acquisitive and resource-hungry, just like us.

These two unpalatable options are pretty much the only possibilities, according to the new study. That's because evolution is predictable, and alien biospheres should thus produce intelligent creatures much like us, with technological prowess and an ever-increasing need for resources.

But the fact that we haven't run across E.T. yet argues strongly for the latter possibility — that we are alone in the universe's howling void, the study suggests.

"At present, as many have observed, it is very quiet out there," study author Simon Conway Morris, of the University of Cambridge, told SPACE.com in an e-mail interview.

"And given many planetary systems are billions of years older than ours, I'd expect us to be best grilled on toast back in the Cambrian." More

Climate action could save polar bears

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough over the next few decades may stabilize the rapidly shrinking Arctic sea ice sufficiently to provide a sustainable habitat for polar bears, a paper in the Dec. 16 Nature reports. And if emissions do keep rising, another new study finds, the only species that has officially been declared threatened by the U.S. government due to global warming may still be able to hang on for a while in a few pockets of the northern Arctic.

Polar bears need sea ice to hunt their prey, but the frozen skin that floats atop the Arctic Ocean has been thinning and shrinking in recent decades as global temperatures rise.

Between 1979 and 2010, Arctic sea ice cover at the end of the summer melt season dropped an average of 11.5 percent per decade. Many researchers think that end-summer Arctic ice could be almost entirely gone by the middle of this century. More

Massive Volcanism May Have Caused Biggest Extinction Ever

The greatest extinction in the history of life may have been caused, in part, by ozone-depleting gases spewed in a massive volcanic eruption, a new study suggests. Geologists have found surprisingly high amounts of the elements fluorine and chlorine in Siberian lavas dating back 250 million years — when about 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial species went extinct.

Benjamin Black, a graduate student at MIT, and his colleagues described their theory Dec. 13 in a poster presentation at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Researchers have long struggled to explain the “Great Dying” that occurred at the end of the Permian period. Some think that the extinction was a long, drawn-out affair caused by multiple factors — perhaps gradual changes in oceanic or atmospheric chemistry (SN: 5/28/05, p. 339). Others have blamed a single catastrophic event such as a belch of methane from the seafloor or an asteroid impact (SN: 2/24/01, p. 116) like the one thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other species 65 million years ago.

Volcanoes might be one of those calamities. In Siberia, around 250 million years ago, a series of massive volcanic eruptions spewed out lava over more than 2 million square kilometers [800,000 square miles]. Some scientists have blamed these eruptions, known as the Siberian Traps, for climatic changes that contributed to the extinction. More

Thousands of birds falling from the sky

The mystery over thousands of birds raining from the sky in America deepened today after hundreds more plunged to their deaths in different parts of the country.

Scientists said that New Year’s Eve fireworks might have been to blame for the 3,000 blackbirds that died in a small town in Arkansas.

But they were forced to order more tests last night after 500 birds plummeted to the ground 360 miles away in Louisiana on Monday and dozens more died in Kentucky.

And just a 100 miles away from the Arkansas mass bird kill, at least 83,000 dead and dying fish washed ashore - possibly as many as 100,000.

The Internet has been abuzz with conspiracy theories about secret government testing and a looming Armageddon. More

Study Charts How Underground CO2 Can Leach Metals into Water

It’s not a common for a solution to carbon emissions to also pose a contamination danger for drinking water supplies, but new research indicates that if CO2 stored deep underground were to leak in even small amounts, it could cause metals to be released in shallow groundwater aquifers at concentrations that would pose a health risk.

In a study published in Environmental Science & Technology, authors Mark Little and Robert B. Jackson studied samples of sand and rock taken from four freshwater aquifers located around the country that overlie potential carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) sites.

The scientists found that tiny amounts of CO2 drove up levels of metals including manganese, cobalt, nickel, and iron in the water tenfold or more in some places. Some of these metals moved into the water quickly, within one week or two. They also observed potentially dangerous uranium and barium steadily moving into the water over the entire year-long experiment. More

Bering Sea Was Ice-Free And Full Of Life During Last Warm Period

Deep sediment cores retrieved from the Bering Sea floor indicate that the region was ice-free all year and biological productivity was high during the last major warm period in Earth's climate history.

Christina Ravelo, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present the new findings in a talk on December 13 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.

Ravelo and co-chief scientist Kozo Takahashi of Kyushu University, Japan, led a nine-week expedition of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) to the Bering Sea last summer aboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution. The researchers drilled down 700 meters through rock and sludge to retrieve sediments deposited during the Pliocene Warm Period, 3.5 to 4.5 million years ago. More

Tigers Could Be Extinct In 12 Years

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Wild tigers could become extinct in 12 years if countries where they still roam fail to take quick action to protect their habitats and step up the fight against poaching, global wildlife experts told a "tiger summit" Sunday.

The World Wildlife Fund and other experts say only about 3,200 tigers remain in the wild, a dramatic plunge from an estimated 100,000 a century ago.

James Leape, director general of the World Wildlife Fund, told the meeting in St. Petersburg that if the proper protective measures aren't taken, tigers may disappear by 2022, the next Chinese calendar year of the tiger.

Their habitat is being destroyed by forest cutting and construction, and they are a valuable trophy for poachers who want their skins and body parts prized in Chinese traditional medicine. More

Extreme Heat Bleaches Coral, and Threat Is Seen

This year’s extreme heat is putting the world’s coral reefs under such severe stress that scientists fear widespread die-offs, endangering not only the richest ecosystems in the ocean but also fisheries that feed millions of people.

From Thailand to Texas, corals are reacting to the heat stress by bleaching, or shedding their color and going into survival mode. Many have already died, and more are expected to do so in coming months. Computer forecasts of water temperature suggest that corals in the Caribbean may undergo drastic bleaching in the next few weeks.

"What is unfolding this year is only the second known global bleaching of coral reefs. Scientists are holding out hope that this year will not be as bad, over all, as 1998, the hottest year in the historical record, when an estimated 16 percent of the world’s shallow-water reefs died. But in some places, including Thailand, the situation is looking worse than in 1998. More

Al Gore left car engine on during environment lecture

London, Oct 30 (IANS) Former US vice president Al Gore, who is known for his climate conservation campaigns, has been accused of not switching off his car engine while he gave an hour-long lecture on environment in Sweden, a media report said Saturday.

It is alleged that Gore left his car running for almost an hour while he spoke at the School of Business, Economics and Law in Gothenburg, Sweden Wednesday, British newspaper Daily Mail said.

His mistake was compounded further by the fact that he had asked his distinguished guests to attend the event by public transport in order to minimise carbon emissions. More

New super-bug spreading from India to Europe

A new gene, NDM-1, has emerged that allows bacteria to be highly resistant to most available antibiotics. The UK now has 37 confirmed cases, all people who have recently been to Pakistan or India for medical treatment or cosmetic surgery.

What is commonly described as super-bugs are bacteria that have become resistant by having been around in hospitals for a long time.

Now, a new gene called NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1) had been detected that enables bacteria to be highly resistant to almost all antibiotics. Having emerged in India, soon spreading to Pakistan and Bangladesh, NDM-1 has now arrived in the United Kingdom, by way of travellers who have been treated in hospitals there during the past year. More

Stephen Hawking says humanity is doomed unless it takes to the stars

If humanity is to survive long-term, it must find a way to get off planet Earth — and fast, according to famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

In fact, human beings may have less than 200 years to figure out how to escape our planet, Hawking said in a recent interview with video site Big Think. Otherwise our species could be at risk for extinction, he said.

"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million," Hawking said. "Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space." More

Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide

In recent decades, the rate at which humans worldwide are pumping dry the vast underground stores of water that billions depend on has more than doubled, say scientists who have conducted an unusual, global assessment of groundwater use.

These fast-shrinking subterranean reservoirs are essential to daily life and agriculture in many regions, while also sustaining streams, wetlands, and ecosystems and resisting land subsidence and salt water intrusion into fresh water supplies. Today, people are drawing so much water from below that they are adding enough of it to the oceans (mainly by evaporation, then precipitation) to account for about 25 percent of the annual sea level rise across the planet, the researchers find.

Soaring global groundwater depletion bodes a potential disaster for an increasingly globalized agricultural system, says Marc Bierkens of Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and leader of the new study. More

Cold empties Bolivian rivers of fish

With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere's recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country's tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.

Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.

"There's just a huge number of dead fish," says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. "In the rivers near Santa Cruz there's about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river." More

Hoover Dam could stop generating electricity as soon as 2013, officials fear

After 75 years of steadily cranking out electricity for California, Arizona and Nevada, the mighty turbines of the Hoover Dam could cease turning as soon as 2013, if water levels in the lake that feeds the dam don't start to recover, say water and dam experts.

Under pressure from the region's growing population and years of drought, Lake Mead was down to 1,087 feet, a 54-year low, as of Wednesday.

If the lake loses 10 feet a year, as it has recently, it will soon reach 1,050 feet, the level below which the turbines can no longer run.

Those hydroelectric generators produce cheap electricity for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is responsible for pumping water across the Colorado River Aqueduct to hydrate much of Southern California. More

Climate Change: Hypocrisy of the Green Bully

RAJENDRA PACHAURI has a chauffeur, lives in luxury and jets across the world on his quest to ban Sunday roasts and cheap flights. Now he's accused of exaggerating the climate change crisis.

MOST mornings he is driven to work from his £5 million home in a 1.8-litre Toyota Corolla by his personal chauffeur, as befits his status as director-general of a New Delhi research institute employing more than 700 staff.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri is also a winner of a Nobel Peace prize, the holder of India’s second-highest civilian award, an officer of the French Legion of Honour and is used to being treated with respect.

But for some of those who challenge the international consensus on climate change he is public enemy number one and his travel arrangements are fair game. That’s because he is also the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body set up in 1988 to conduct regular assessments on the state of global warming. More

Absence of sunspots make scientists wonder if they're seeing a calm before a storm of energy

Sunspots come and go, but recently they have mostly gone. For centuries, astronomers have recorded when these dark blemishes on the solar surface emerge, only to fade away after a few days, weeks or months. Thanks to their efforts, we know that sunspot numbers ebb and flow in cycles lasting about 11 years.

But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged in nearly 100 years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise.

"This is solar behavior we haven't seen in living memory," says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The sun is under scrutiny as never before, thanks to an armada of space telescopes. The results they beam back are portraying our nearest star, and its influence on Earth, in a new light. Sunspots and other clues indicate that the sun's magnetic activity is diminishing and that the sun may even be shrinking. Together, the results hint that something profound is happening inside the sun.

The big question is: What? More

2 billion gallons of sewage, storm water overflowed

More than 2 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water spilled out of urban sewers into local waterways after last Thursday's torrential rain storm, but even those overflows could not adequately relieve the sewers and prevent basement backups, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District says in a report to state environmental officials.

"The relief points could not get excess rain and flood water out of overburdened sewers fast enough," the district says in a report released Tuesday to the state Department of Natural Resources. Three district rain gauges on Milwaukee's north side recorded total rainfall of more than 8 inches Thursday and Friday.

MMSD estimates total overflows of 2.1 billion gallons - more than four times the total capacity of the district's deep tunnel storage system - from regional sewers between Thursday evening and Sunday evening, said Peter Topczewski, the district's director of water quality protection. The volume does not include overflows from sanitary sewers in Milwaukee and nine other communities in the metropolitan area that had acknowledged problems last week. More

Global warming blamed for pattern of lizard deaths

When it comes to the hazards of global warming, it may turn out that lizards in burrows are the canaries in the coal mine.

In a study to be published Friday in the journal Science, an international team of biologists reports that in more than one-tenth of the places in Mexico where lizards flourished in 1975, the reptiles now cannot be found. The researchers predict that by 2080, about 40 percent of local lizard populations worldwide will have died off and 20 percent of lizard species will be extinct.

The reason for the huge die-off appears to be rising temperatures. But it isn't heat that is killing the lizards directly.

Instead, global warming appears to be lengthening the period of the day when lizards must seek shelter or risk fatal overheating. In the breeding season, that sheltering period is now so long that females of many species are unable to eat enough food to produce eggs and offspring. More

How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a 'world-killing' event

Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.

251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed more than 96 percent of all life on Earth. Experts agree that what is known as the Permian extinction event was the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world.

55 million years later another methane bubble ruptured causing more mass extinctions during the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum (LPTM). The LPTM lasted 100,000 years.

Those subterranean seas of methane virtually reshaped the planet when they explosively blew from deep beneath the waters of what is today called the Gulf of Mexico. Now, worried scientists are increasingly concerned the same series of catastrophic events that led to worldwide death back then may bThose subterranean seas of methane virtually reshaped the planet when they explosively blew from deep beneath the waters of what is today called the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, worried scientists are increasingly concerned the same series of catastrophic events that led to worldwide death back then may be happening again-and no known technology can stop it. More

500 African penguins killed by big freeze in South Africa

Nearly 500 rare African penguins have died in the past 24 hours as a result of extremely cold weather in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.

An AFP report quoted a national parks agency spokesperson, Megan Taplin, who said: "The chicks, aged between a few weeks old and about two months old and covered only with down feathers, succumbed to the cold and wet weather which has hit Bird Island."

The report said the penguin population was already dwindling with only 700 breeding pairs left in the area.

The African Penguin (Spheniscus demersus),is also known as the Black-Footed penguin or the Jackass penguin because of its braying call. The species was officially renamed “African” penguin as it is the only penguin species that breeds on the African continent. It has distinctive black and white markings, with a black stripe and spots on the chest, which are unique to each bird. More

Man killed by swarm of bees

A 54-year-old man was killed Wednesday morning by a swarm of bees in a remote area of Encinitas, a fire official said.

The man was working outdoors with his nephew, clearing the property at about 11 a.m., when the backhoe he was driving disturbed a colony of bees, said Encinitas fire Deputy Chief Scott Henry.

Firefighters arrived to find the man had taken shelter in an outhouse about 200 yards from the colony.

"He was covered in bee stings and in full cardiac arrest," Henry said.

The man was rushed to the hospital, where he later died. It was unclear late Wednesday whether the man was allergic to bee stings. More

Scientist: Global Cooling is the Real Crisis

Most of us have heard or seen what global warming alarmists say the consequences will be if something isn’t done to limit the man’s impact on the environment. Al Gore, in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” warns global sea levels will rise by a whopping 20 feet, causing coastal flooding and creating a refugee crisis. Others aren’t quite as gloomy, but that’s not the real threat to the planet.

At the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change on May 17, Professor Don Easterbrook of Western Washington University warned that the climate is headed for a period of cooling. He told the Chicago gathering of hundreds of scientists and policy professionals that there are three possibilities of cooling, examples of which we’ve seen within the last 200 years. More

As Global Temperatures Rise, World's Lizards Are Disappearing

For many lizards, global climate change is a matter of life and death. After decades of surveying Sceloporus lizard populations in Mexico, an international research team has found that rising temperatures have driven 12 percent of the country's lizard populations to extinction. An extinction model based on this discovery also forecasts a grim future for these ecologically important critters, predicting that a full 20 percent of all lizard species could be extinct by the year 2080.

The detailed surveys of lizard populations in Mexico, collected from 200 different sites, indicate that the temperatures in those regions have changed too rapidly for the lizards to keep pace. It seems that all types of lizards are far more susceptible to climate-warming extinction than previously thought because many species are already living right at the edge of their thermal limits, especially at low elevation and low latitude range limits. More

Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans worry scientists

Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.

In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean. These areas — in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans — appear to be spreading, however, covering more square miles, creeping toward the surface and in some places, such as the Pacific Northwest , encroaching on the continental shelf within sight of the coastline. More

Bees in more trouble than ever after bad winter

The mysterious 4-year-old crisis of disappearing honeybees is deepening. A quick federal survey indicates a heavy bee die-off this winter, while a new study shows honeybees' pollen and hives laden with pesticides.

Two federal agencies along with regulators in California and Canada are scrambling to figure out what is behind this relatively recent threat, ordering new research on pesticides used in fields and orchards. Federal courts are even weighing in this month, ruling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overlooked a requirement when allowing a pesticide on the market.

And on Thursday, chemists at a scientific conference in San Francisco will tackle the issue of chemicals and dwindling bees in response to the new study.

Scientists are concerned because of the vital role bees play in our food supply. About one-third of the human diet is from plants that require pollination from honeybees, which means everything from apples to zucchini. More

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year. More

Urban 'Green' Spaces May Contribute to Global Warming

Dispelling the notion that urban "green" spaces help counteract greenhouse gas emissions, new research has found -- in Southern California at least -- that total emissions would be lower if lawns did not exist.

Turfgrass lawns help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and store it as organic carbon in soil, making them important "carbon sinks." However, greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer production, mowing, leaf blowing and other lawnmanagement practices are four times greater than the amount of carbon stored by ornamental grass in parks, a UC Irvine study shows. These emissions include nitrous oxide released from soil after fertilization. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that's 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, the Earth's most problematic climate warmer. More

We'd best mark apocalyptic predictions for 2012 in pencil

The world did not end as the clock ticked ominously past midnight and into the wee hours of January 1, 2000.

Computers and their networks did not crash. Satellites did not fall from the sky. Power grids did not wink out. We were not thrust into a dark, cold and medieval existence.

Humanity carried on as usual after Y2K, happily reproducing, polluting and pillaging land and sea. But human beings, it seems, can't shake a deep feeling of impending doom, even in happy times.

We survived Y2K. Now we've got the next curtain call for civilization -- December 21, 2012. That's right, citizens, there are less than 1,100 shopping days until the end of days. More

Peru's mountain people fight for surviving a bitter winter

For alpaca farmer Ignacio Beneto Huamani and his young family, life in the Peruvian Andes, at almost 4,700m above sea level, has always been a struggle against the elements. His village of Pichccahuasi, in Peru's Huancavelica region, is little more than a collection of small thatched shelters and herds of alpaca surrounded by beautiful, yet bleakly inhospitable, mountain terrain.

The few hundred people who live here are hardened to poverty and months of sub-zero temperatures during the long winter. But, for the fourth year running, the cold came early. First their animals and now their children are dying and in such escalating numbers that many fear that life in the village may be rapidly approaching an end.

In a world growing ever hotter, Huancavelica is an anomaly. These communities, living at the edge of what is possible, face extinction because of increasingly cold conditions in their own microclimate, which may have been altered by the rapid melting of the glaciers. More

Western Reservoirs Could Be Dry By 2050

There's a one-in-two chance that the water reservoirs of the Colorado River will dry up by 2050 if water management practices remain unchanged in our warming world, a new study finds.

Roughly 30 million people — including many in Arizona and Southern California — depend on the Colorado River for drinking and irrigation water.

The Colorado River system is enduring its 10th year of drought, with the reservoir system currently at 59 percent of capacity, about the same as this time last year.

Previous studies have warned of the potential for water shortages with the drier conditions in the West brought about by climate change. The region's growing population has also put pressure on the water supplies of the desert West. More

Record cold weather dominates large areas

As Britain struggles to cope with a few inches of snow, spare a thought for the travellers who were trapped on this train in Mongolia.

Snow drifts several metres deep meant an army of rescue workers had to be sent out to free the passengers from their carriages.

Heavy snow and unusually harsh winter weather snarled up transport across India, northern China and South Korea.

Major roads in Beijing and Tianjin, as well as nearby provinces Hebei, Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, were forced to close due to the heavy snow. The snow shows no sign of stopping, however, and temperatures are expected to drop to -16C in Beijing today, causing more problems for those attempting to return to work after a three-day New Year holiday. More

Climate change alliance crumbling

Cracks emerged on Tuesday in the alliance on climate change formed at the Copenhagen conference last week, with leading developing countries criticising the resulting accord.

The so-called Basic countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – backed the accord in a meeting with the US on Friday night, and it was also supported by almost all other nations at the talks, including all of the biggest emitters.

But on Tuesday the Brazilian government labelled the accord “disappointing” and complained that the financial assistance it contained from rich to poor countries was insufficient.

South Africa also raised objections: Buyelwa Sonjica, the environment minister, called the failure to produce a legally binding agreement “unacceptable”. She said her government had considered leaving the meeting.

“We are not defending this, as I have indicated, for us it is not acceptable, it is definitely not acceptable,” she said. More

Climate change 'sceptic' Ian Plimer argues CO2 is not causing global warming

Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from Adelaide University, argues that a recent rise in temperature around the world is caused by solar cycles and other "extra terrestrial" forces.

He said carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, widely blamed for global warming, is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes erupting.

"We cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes," he said. "It is a normal element cycled around in the earth and my science, which is looking back in time, is saying we have had a planet that has been a green, warm wet planet 80 per cent of the time. We have had huge climate change in the past and to think the very slight variations we measure today are the result of our life - we really have to put ice blocks in our drinks." More

Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren involved in unwinding “Climategate” scandal

Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as “Climategate”.

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal.

In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.

“The files contain so much material that it is going to take some time t o put it all in context,” says Ball. “However, enough is already known to underscore their explosive nature. It is already clear the entire claims and positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on falsified manipulated material and is therefore completely compromised. More

Gropenhagen Conference: Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex

Copenhagen's city council in conjunction with Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards out to 160 Copenhagen hotels urging COP15 guests and delegates to 'Be sustainable - don't buy sex'.

"Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes," the approach to hotels says.

Now, Copenhagen prostitutes are up in arms, saying that the council has no business meddling in their affairs. They have now offered free sex to anyone who can produce one of the offending postcards and their COP15 identity card, according to the Web site avisen.dk. More

ClimateGate - Climate center's server hacked revealing documents and emails

Britain’s Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia, suffered a data breach in recent days when a hacker apparently broke into their system and made away with thousands of emails and documents. The stolen data was then posted to a Russian server and has quickly made the rounds among climate skeptics. The documents within the archive, if proven to be authentic, would at best be embarrassing for many prominent climate researchers and at worst, damning.

The electronic break in itself has been verified by the director of the research unit, Professor Phil Jones. He told Britain’s Investigate magazine's TGIF Edition "It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails." More

Cattle be £75 for each farting cow

SCOTS farmers’ leaders were fuming last night over barmy EU plans to combat climate change — with a tax on cows’ FARTS.

Member states are considering the bizarre flatulence tariff of £75 per beast in a bid to bring gas emissions in line with Brussels rules.

Figures show that a single cow can emit up to four tons of methane a year by breaking wind. And the farts and burps of farm livestock are estimated to make up 18 per cent of all greenhouse gas discharges.

But Scots Tory MEP Struan Stevenson last night urged ministers to to resist the moves as farmers feel the pinch in the recession. He said: “It would be a catastrophic mistake. The Danish government is said to be considering a staggering £75 per cow tax. More

CO2 Levels Were This High 15 Million Years Ago

You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today, a UCLA scientist and colleagues report in the online edition of the journal Science.

"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

"Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history," she said. More

Beetle attack will change our world

Slash piles surround the parking area on Pelton Creek Road in the Medicine Bow National Forest, southwest of Laramie near the Colorado border.

Grant Frost, a terrestrial habitat biologist for Wyoming Game and Fish, inspects a tree, looking for tell-tale signs of beetles.

The tree looks alive, but it probably won't be for long. The brown cadavers of lodgepoles past stand among smaller, greener pines, testifying to the unavoidable truth: Change -- big change -- is coming.

"The general feeling is this will end when the food supply runs out," Frost says. More

2012 isn't the end of the world, Mayans insist

MEXICO CITY – Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.

"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up." More

Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast.

Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month. More

Vaster Regions of Antarctica Melting Into Sea

Antarctic glaciers are melting faster across a much wider area than previously thought, scientists said Wednesday -- a development that could lead to an unprecedented rise in sea levels.

A report by thousands of scientists for the 2007-2008 International Polar Year concluded that the western part of the continent is warming up, not just the Antarctic Peninsula.

Previously most of the warming was thought to occur on the narrow stretch pointing toward South America, said Colin Summerhayes, executive director of the Britain-based Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and a member of International Polar Year's steering committee.

But satellite data and automated weather stations indicate otherwise. More

Sydney turns red: dust storm blankets city

Sydneysiders have woken to a red haze unlike anything seen before by residents or weather experts, as the sun struggles to pierce a thick blanket of dust cloaking the city this morning.

Callers flooded talkback radio, others hit social networking sites and scores of emails were received from smh.com.au readers as Sydney residents expressed their amazement at this morning's conditions.

"It's just red, red, red as far as you can see," one caller at the Anzac Bridge told 2GB. More

Chemicals That Eased One Woe Worsen Another

This is not the funny kind of irony: Scientists say the chemicals that helped solve the last global environmental crisis -- the hole in the ozone layer -- are making the current one worse.

The chemicals, called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), were introduced widely in the 1990s to replace ozone-depleting gases used in air conditioners, refrigerators and insulating foam. They worked: The earth's protective shield seems to be recovering.

But researchers say what's good for ozone is bad for climate change. In the atmosphere, these replacement chemicals act like "super" greenhouse gases, with a heat-trapping power that can be 4,470 times that of carbon dioxide. More

Scientists predict greater longevity for planets with life

Roughly a billion years from now, the ever-increasing radiation from the sun will have heated Earth into inhabitability; the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that serves as food for plant life will disappear, pulled out by the weathering of rocks; the oceans will evaporate; and all living things will disappear.

Or maybe not quite so soon, say researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who have come up with a mechanism that doubles the future lifespan of the biosphere—while also increasing the chance that advanced life will be found elsewhere in the universe.

A paper describing their hypothesis was published June 1 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). More

Quake, tsunami potential high on U.S. west coast

WASHINGTON - Scientists have underestimated the potential for a giant quake and tsunami that could swamp much the U.S. northwest and Canadian west coasts, British and U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Geological evidence suggests there have been earthquakes in the past that were even stronger than a magnitude 9.2 quake -- the second-biggest ever recorded -- which caused a 42-foot-high (12-meter-high) tsunami in the Gulf of Alaska in 1964, they said.

"Our data indicate that two major earthquakes have struck Alaska in the last 1,500 years and our findings show that a bigger earthquake and a more destructive tsunami than the 1964 event are possible in the future," Ian Shennan, a professor of geography at Britain's Durham University, who led the study, said in a statement. More

El Nino an early warning for food security

JOHANNESBURG - Rising sea surface temperatures across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean herald El Niño, which could disrupt the rains in major cereal producing regions, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned.

"Typically, an El Niño has the potential to disrupt the rainy seasons and cause lower rainfall in India, Australia, Southeast Asia - Philippines and Indonesia - southern Africa and Central America," said Robert Stefanski, a WMO scientific officer who works on agriculture-related weather and climate issues.

"In past El Niño events, there was lowered food production in many of these regions." More

MIT Model Predicts Accelerating Warming Trends

If an unusually detailed computer simulation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has it right, global warming in this century is on track to be about twice as bad as predicted six years ago.

The MIT model is said to be the only one that incorporates among its variables possible changes in economic growth and other human activities and draws on peer-reviewed science on the climatic effects of atmospheric, oceanic and biological systems.

After running the model 400 times with slight variations in the inputs, the new predictions are for surface temperatures to warm by 6.3 to 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit. The prediction is for a 9.4-degree increase in the median temperature, more than double the 4.3 degrees predicted in a 2003 simulation. More

Not so windy: Research suggests winds dying down

The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming - the very problem wind power seeks to address.

The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.

"It's a very large effect," said study co-author Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University. In some places in the Midwest, the trend shows a 10 percent drop or more over a decade. More

New Zealand could go bust over Global Warming

No country in the world would risk as much for “global warming” as New Zealand if it goes ahead with the cap-and-trade energy taxation installed by Helen Clarke’s now-departed Labour Government.

New Zealand’s economy is almost completely dependent on its farm exports: lamb, dairy products, beef and high-end white wines. Half of New Zealand’s carbon emissions come from cattle and sheep. If New Zealand taxes its cows and sheep hundreds of dollars per animal for methane emissions and manure handling fees, Argentina would almost immediately displace New Zealand’s farm exports. Argentina has more grass, more cattle, the potential for more lambs, a surging wine industry—and no Kyoto obligations. More

The missing sunspots: Is this the big chill?

Could the Sun play a greater role in recent climate change than has been believed? Climatologists had dismissed the idea and some solar scientists have been reticent about it because of its connections with those who those who deny climate change. But now the speculation has grown louder because of what is happening to our Sun. No living scientist has seen it behave this way. There are no sunspots.

The disappearance of sunspots happens every few years, but this time it’s gone on far longer than anyone expected – and there is no sign of the Sun waking up. “This is the lowest we’ve ever seen. We thought we’d be out of it by now, but we’re not,” says Marc Hairston of the University of Texas. More

Bacteria Create Aquatic Superbugs In Waste Treatment Plants

For bacteria in wastewater treatment plants, the stars align perfectly to create a hedonistic mating ground for antibiotic-resistant superbugs eventually discharged into streams and lakes.

In the first known study of its kind, Chuanwu Xi of the University of Michigan School of Public Health and his team sampled water containing the bacteria Acinetobacter at five sites in and near Ann Arbor's wastewater treatment plant.

They found the so-called superbugs—bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics—up to 100 yards downstream from the discharge point into the Huron River. Xi stresses that while the finding may be disturbing, it is important to understand that much work is still needed to assess what risk, if any, the presence of superbugs in aquatic environments poses to humans. More

Caps, Trades and Offsets: Can Climate Plan Work?

It sounds like alchemy, an act of bureaucratic magic. Under the climate-change bill just approved by a House committee, the U.S. government would literally make a commodity -- as tradable as a Pontiac or a pork belly -- out of thin air.

The bill would require polluters to obtain "allowances" -- permits allowing them to emit a given amount of a greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide or methane. Today, these gases are invisible, free and floating all around us. This bill would put a price on them.

That would accomplish an economist's version of a triple back flip. It would divide a problem of the global commons into pieces and make those who use gas or electricity pay for their share of the emissions that result. More

Honeybee Numbers Expand Worldwide as U.S. Decline Continues

Even as U.S. honeybee populations have been hit hard by colony collapse disorder in recent years, domesticated beehives have been thriving elsewhere.

In an analysis of nearly 50 years of data on bees from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, researchers found that domesticated honeybee populations have increased about 45 percent, thanks in large part to expansion of the bees into areas such as South America, eastern Asia and Africa. The results appear in the latest issue Current Biology.

The overall increase, however, is not what surprised Marcelo Aizen, a professor at the National University of Comahue in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and lead author of the study. Instead, he was taken aback by the sixfold increase in the growth rate of crops that depend on domesticated bees for pollination. More

Next Panic: Carbonated oceans

Like a sinkful of hard water deposits suddenly doused with vinegar, the shells of tiny marine snails in Victoria Fabry's test tanks don't stand a chance.

Fabry, a biological oceanographer and visiting researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, studies the effects of ocean acidification on the molluscs known as pteropods. In one experiment, only 48 hours of exposure to slightly corrosive seawater caused normally smooth shells to become frayed at the edges on their way to eventual dissolution, severely diminishing their owners' chances of survival.

The acidity of the water in Fabry's lab had been ratcheted up to levels that might not be seen until the end of the century, but she and other scientists fear that ongoing acidification of ocean water could be causing a slow-motion destruction of ocean ecosystems now. More

Climate change means bigger medical bills

Climate change concerns like melting icecaps, increased desertification, loss of coral reefs and the extinction of species like polar bears can seem a distant concern in our everyday lives. Little attention, however, has been paid to the likelihood of increased bills, through tax and insurance charges, that will be incurred as the UK climate changes.

Alistair Hunt, a researcher at the University of Bath, will be addressing scientists this week at the international Climate Change Congress being held in Copenhagen to present research which shows that the cost of climate change is going to be felt much closer to home than many expect. Alistair’s talk is one of many described in the complete online abstract book of the congress, published in the IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. More

Blue Sky Research: Increase in Global Air Pollution

A University of Maryland-led team has compiled the first decades-long database of aerosol measurements over land, making possible new research into how air pollution affects climate change.

Using this new database, the researchers show that clear sky visibility over land has decreased globally over the past 30 years, indicative of increases in aerosols, or airborne pollution.

“Creation of this database is a big step forward for researching long-term changes in air pollution and correlating these with climate change,” said Kaicun Wang, assistant research scientist in the University of Maryland’s department of geography and lead author of the paper. More

Global Warming: On Hold?

For those who have endured this winter's frigid temperatures and today's heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful.

But climate is known to be variable -- a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn't mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.

Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat. More

Mr Whipple: An Eco-terrorist?

Americans like their toilet tissue soft: exotic confections that are silken, thick and hot-air-fluffed.

The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra — which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent in some markets, according to Information Resources, Inc., a marketing research firm.

But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them. More

Ecosystems Push South in Antarctica

Adelie penguins are flocking closer to the South Pole. A new study in the leading journal Science explains why: they're following the food supply, which is moving southward with changing climate.

Krill, the shrimp-like critters that Adelies like to eat, feed on phytoplankton. But as global temperatures rise, phytoplankton are declining in the north while increasing further south. The poleward shift is taking place on the Western Antarctic Peninsula, a finger of land stretching toward South America, one of the fastest warming places on Earth. For decades, penguins and other Antarctic predators have been observed further south on the peninsula, where temperatures are colder and sea ice more plentiful. Previous research shows that Adélie penguins have decreased 70 to 80 percent over their northern range. More

Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe

Adam Fier recently sold his home, got rid of his car and pulled his twin 6-year-old girls out of elementary school in Montgomery County. He and his wife packed the family's belongings and moved to New Zealand -- a place they had never visited or seen before, and where they have no family or professional connections. Among the top reasons: global warming.

Halfway around the world, the president of Kiribati, a Pacific nation of low-lying islands, said last week that his country is exploring ways to move all its 100,000 citizens to a new homeland because of fears that a steadily rising ocean will make the islands uninhabitable. The two men are at contrasting poles of a phenomenon that threatens to reshape economies, politics and cultures across the planet. By choice or necessity, millions of "ecomigrants" -- most of them poor and desperate -- are on the move in search of more habitable living space. More

'Unprecedented' fires 'caused by climate change'

Climate change experts have warned that severe weather events are likely to occur more often in Australia as global warming continues. Commenting on the Victorian bushfires, climatologist Professor David Karoly told the ABC's Lateline program on Monday night that hot temperatures in Melbourne on Saturday and in many parts of southeastern Australia were "unprecedented".

"The records were broken by a large amount and you cannot explain that just by natural variability," he said. "What we are seeing now is that the chances of these sorts of extreme fire weather situations are occurring much more rapidly in the last ten years due to climate change." More

Tree deaths soar in Western U.S.

Tree deaths, spurred by global warming, have more than doubled in older forests across Western states, federal scientists reported Thursday.

Droughts and pests brought on by warmer temperatures have killed firs, hemlocks, pines and other large trees in particular over the past 30 years without allowing replacements to sprout, the study published in the journal Science finds.

"Very likely the mortality rate will continue to rise," says lead author Phillip van Mantgem of the U.S. Geologic Survey. More

Antarctica Warming More Than Previously Thought

Scientists studying climate change have long believed that while most of the rest of the globe has been getting steadily warmer, a large part of Antarctica – the East Antarctic Ice Sheet – has actually been getting colder.

But new research shows that for the last 50 years, much of Antarctica has been warming at a rate comparable to the rest of the world. In fact, the warming in West Antarctica is greater than the cooling in East Antarctica, meaning that on average the continent has gotten warmer, said Eric Steig, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences and director of the Quaternary Research Center at the UW. More

Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years. More

Drought, beetles killing forests

Bugs and diseases are killing trees at an alarming rate across the West, from the spruce forests of Alaska to the oak woodlands near the San Diego-Tijuana border.

Several scientists said the growing threat appears linked to global warming. That means tree mortality is likely to rise in places as the continent warms, potentially altering landscapes in ways that increase erosion, fan wildfires and diminish the biodiversity of Western forests.

It also could prompt new approaches to forestry. Possibilities include replanting logged areas with trees that are tolerant of higher temperatures, thinning drought-stressed forests and deploying pesticides to ward off insects.

But in many cases, landowners have few options to protect their trees once insects and diseases take hold, tree experts said. More

Climate Change Wiped Out Cave Bears 13 Millennia Earlier Than Thought

Enormous cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, that once inhabited a large swathe of Europe, from Spain to the Urals, died out 27,800 years ago, around 13 millennia earlier than was previously believed, scientists have reported.

The new date coincides with a period of significant climate change, known as the Last Glacial Maximum, when a marked cooling in temperature resulted in the reduction or loss of vegetation forming the main component of the cave bears' diet.

In a study published in Boreas, researchers suggest it was this deterioration in food supply that led to the extinction of the cave bear, one of a group of 'megafauna' - including woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer and cave lion - to disappear during the last Ice Age. More

Sea levels set to rise faster than expected

Geneva, Switzerland: Even warming of less than 2°C might be enough to trigger the loss of Arctic sea ice and the meltdown of the Greenland Ice Sheet, causing global sea levels to rise by several metres.

Ahead of next week’s meeting of governments in Poznan, Poland for UN climate talks WWF analysis of the latest climate science comes to the dire conclusion that humanity is approaching the last chance to keep global warming below the danger threshold of 2°C.

”The latest science confirms that we are now seeing devastating consequences of warming that were not expected to hit for decades,” said Kim Carstensen, WWF Global Climate Initiative leader. More

Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.” More

Climate change pushing lemmings over the edge

Once famous for their numbers, Norwegian lemmings are disappearing, say scientists, who point an accusing finger at global warming.

The hamster-like rodents burst forth in massive numbers from their sub-Arctic homes every three to five years in a frantic search for food. The mad dash sometimes causes them to race over clifftops and plummet into the sea, thus giving rise to the theory -- now discounted -- of mass suicide.

Since 1994, these periodic population explosions have stopped, prompting researchers to ask why. In a study published on Thursday, investigators say the blame lies not with too many predators or a fall in food supply, but changes in weather patterns. More

The methane time bomb

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

Preliminary findings suggest that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf. More

Climate change may drown cities

JOHANNESBURG, SA - People in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, prefer to commute in three-wheeled autorickshaws, taxis and buses that run on compressed natural gas (CNG), in their bid to slow down global warming.

CNG produces a lower level of greenhouse gases and is an environmentally cleaner alternative to petrol. Dhaka's residents are among the most vulnerable to global warming and don't want to become "climate terrorists".

The city is among more than 3,000 identified by the UN-Habitat's State of the World's Cities 2008/09 as facing the prospect of sea level rise and surge-induced flooding. The report warns policymakers, planners and the world at large that few coastal cities will be spared the effects of global warming. More

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