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Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming, hawaii
Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming, hawaii






Labels: books, climate change, CO2, global warming

Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming, nova, teaching
Heh! This "clean coal" debunking campaign is directed by the Coen Brothers.
And another:
Behind the scenes:
Labels: climate change, CO2, coal, global warming, humor, politics
Labels: CO2, earthquakes, energy, environmental, michigan, minnesota, nevada, volcano, wisconsin
Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming, news, satellite imagery
Very cool -- I think I want to design an Environmental Geology lab that uses Google Earth to access and evaluate this data. Kudos to the Vulcan Project for putting it together.
You can open these layers in Google Earth by clicking here.
Labels: climate change, CO2, coal, global warming
NASA is launching a new satellite next week to monitor the atmosphere's carbon flux from a outside-the-planet perspective. It's called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO). Hopefully this will complement and give context to our current ~100 monitoring stations around the world (point measurements) for a truly global picture of our atmosphere's carbon inputs and outputs.Labels: climate change, CO2, satellite imagery
Labels: CO2, critters, mollusks, news, ocean acidfication, oceans
Program Summary
How Fast is Atmospheric CO2 Growing and Why, and Does it Suggest Ways to Mitigate Climate Change?
The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is the single largest human perturbation of the climate system. Its rate of change reflects the balance between human-driven carbon emissions and the dynamics of a number of terrestrial and ocean processes that remove or emit CO2. It is the long term evolution of this balance that will determine to a large extent the speed and magnitude of climate change and the mitigation requirements to stabilize atmospheric CO2 concentrations at any given level. Dr. Canadell will present the most recent trends in global carbon sources and sinks, updated for the first time to the year 2007, with particularly focus on major shifts occurring since 2000. Dr. Canadell’s research indicates that the underlying drivers of changes in atmospheric CO2 growth include: i) increased human-induced carbon emissions, ii) stagnation of the carbon intensity of the global economy, and iii) decreased efficiency of natural carbon sinks.
New Estimates of Carbon Storage in Arctic Soils and Implications in a Changing Environment
The Arctic represents approximately 13% of the total land area of the Earth, and arctic tundra occupies roughly 5 million square kilometers. Arctic tundra soils represent a major storage pool for dead organic carbon, largely due to cold temperatures and saturated soils in many locations that prevent its decomposition. Prior estimates of carbon stored in tundra soils range from 20-29 kg of soil organic carbon (SOC) per square meter. These estimates however, were based on data collected from only the top 20-40 cm of soil, and were sometimes extrapolated to 100 cm. It is our understanding that large quantities of SOC are stored at greater depths, through the annual freezing and thawing motion of the soils (cryoturbation), and potentially frozen in the permafrost.
Recent detailed analysis of Arctic soils by Dr. Epstein and his colleagues found that soil organic carbon values averaged 34.8 kg per square meter, representing an increase of approximately 40% over the prior estimates. Additionally, 38% of the total soil organic carbon was found in the permafrost.
A total of 98.2 gigatonnes (1015 grams) of carbon is estimated to be stored in the soils of the North American Arctic tundra. An area-based estimate for the entire Arctic suggests the presence of approximately 160 gigatonnes of carbon. The annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is roughly 2% of this amount, so small changes in Arctic carbon storage could have substantive impacts on atmospheric CO2. The future of this stored carbon is, however, largely uncertain in the face of a changing Arctic environment. Climate change and resulting increasing temperatures in much of the Arctic could increase the decomposition rates of soil organic carbon (producing atmospheric CO2), and increase permafrost thaw, which would expose more soil organic carbon for decomposition. On the other hand, increasing temperatures could also lead to greater sequestration of atmospheric CO2 by tundra vegetation. Actual changes will be the result of complex interactions between processes that sequester carbon and those that release it.
Past, Present and Future Changes in Permafrost and Implications for a Changing Carbon Budget
Presence of permafrost is one of the major factors that turn northern ecosystems into an efficient natural carbon sink. Moreover, a significant amount of carbon is sequestered in the upper several meters to several tens of meters of permafrost. Because of that, the appearance and disappearance of permafrost within the northern landscapes have a direct impact on the efficiency of northern ecosystems to sequester carbon in soil, both near the ground surface and in deeper soil layers. Recent changes in permafrost may potentially transform the northern ecosystems from an effective carbon sink to a significant source of carbon for the Earth’s atmosphere. Additional emissions of carbon from thawing permafrost may be in the form of CO2 or methane depending upon specific local conditions.
Dr. Romanovsky will present information on changes in terrestrial and subsea permafrost in the past during the last glacial-interglacial cycle and on the most recent trends in permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere. He will further discuss the potential impact of these changes in permafrost (including a short discussion on potential changes in methane gas clathrates) on the global carbon cycle. Dr. Romanovsky’s research suggests that permafrost in North America and Northern Eurasia shows a substantial warming during the last 20 to 30 years. The magnitude of warming varied with location, but was typically from 0.5 to 2°C at 15 meters depth. Thawing of the Little Ice Age permafrost is on-going at many locations. There are some indications that the late-Holocene permafrost started to thaw at some specific undisturbed locations in the European Northeast, in the Northwest and East Siberia, and in Alaska. Future projections of possible changes in permafrost during the current century, based on the application of calibrated permafrost models, will be also presented.
The next seminar is tentatively scheduled for October 10, 2008.
Topic: Ecosystem Health in a Rapidly Changing Climate
Please see the AMS web site for seminar summaries, presentations and future
events: http://www.ametsoc.org/seminar
For more information please contact:
Anthony D. Socci, Ph.D. Tel. (202) 737-9006, ext. 412 socci@ametsoc.org
UMD: 11:00am - 12:00pm at 1121 Computer Science Instructional Center
Internal flow and extrusion of the Greater Himalayan Slab, Mount Everest Massif: a tour of the world's highest rocks
Dr. Rick Law from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Law please sign up online. You also may delete an appointment from this page. Please join the faculty and students for refreshments in the Geology Building foyer at 10:30 am.
Seminar series web page for UMD-College Park Geology.
Labels: climate change, CO2, geology, global warming, maryland, meetings
Labels: blogs, climate change, CO2, dc, geology, global warming, gsw, nova, piedmont
This map was in this morning's Washington Post. The red dots are currently-existing coal-fired power plants. The black dots with the central stars are proposed future coal-fired power plants. Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming, ice
Labels: art, climate change, CO2, global warming, maps
-- Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss, 1957
In other words: The timescale of carbon storage is ~7 orders of magnitude larger than the timescale of carbon release. That's a large difference. Humans are thus changing the atmosphere's composition; but what effect will it have on the climate? Those who practice science can make some logical predictions based on our understanding of the natural world:--Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
-- Steve Gardiner, University of Washington
-- Damon Matthews, Concordia University
Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming, politics
Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming
Just got through watching an episode of the PBS program NOVA (which I like to refer to as the "other" NOVA). The episode was titled "Volcano under the city," and it looks at the volcano Nyiragongo in Congo, central Africa. This was the same volcano that had such a spectacular eruption in 2002, when lava flowed through the city of Goma, on the shore of Lake Kivu. The program follows UN vulcanologist Jacques Durieux on a journey through Goma and into Nyiragongo to evaluate the risk for the ~2 million people who live in the mountain's shadow. The program explores volcanic hazards including lava flows, landslides, lake overturn (a la Lake Nyos), and pockets of CO2 in low-lying areas on land. This last one provided what I found to be the most dramatic footage: Durieux tosses a signal flare into one of the ditches, and the smoke rises and flows on top of the invisible layer of CO2 below: it demonstrates dramatically how there's something invisible pooled in that ditch due to its density. There's also plenty of footage of frothing spewing blobby lava, if that's your thing. As is often the case, the narrator overpitches the dangerous aspects of the situation, and the whole hour-long show feels kind of like a hyped-up movie trailer. Certainly the situation there is dangerous, but I feel like some credibility gets lost when every word is uttered with a sense of looming menace.
Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming
Labels: climate change, CO2, geology, global warming, nova, snow, snowball earth, teaching
Labels: CO2, global warming
Here's the only figure from the paper, a temporal comparison between several lines of data (top to bottom): sea level, average global temperature, atmospheric CO2, terrestrial erosion rates, and human population of the planet.Labels: CO2, environmental, global warming, stratigraphy
On Monday at noon, I went to the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill to attend a seminar organized by the American Meteorological Society.
The seminar was titled "Natural CO2 Sinks and their Policy Implications: A Closer Look at Where Current CO2 Levels are Headed, in Historical Context." The two scientists gave an outstanding pair of back-to-back presentations, detailing the enormity of climate change we are now committed to.Labels: CO2, global warming, oxygen

Labels: CO2, deep sea vents

Okay, so we all know that carbon dioxide has this property of being selectively transparent, and that it is accumulating at greater concentrations in Earth's atmosphere because the rate that it is being produced by human activities greatly exceeds the rate it is removed by natural processes. That's the global warming issue in a nutshell. But there's another aspect to climate change that hasn't gotten as much press: ocean acidification.
n two kinds of plankton: coccolithophores and pteropods. The third and fourth images here show scanning electron micrographs of how skeletal material reacts to acidified conditions. The third image is from a study by Ulf Reibesell of the University of Norway, who grew coccolithophores in a series of model "ocean" tanks that had equilibrated to an "atmosphere"
containing 300 ppm and 800 ppm CO2. For reference, pre-Industrial CO2 values were about 280 ppm, and today's CO2 values are about 380 ppm. You can see that the calcareous plates of the coccolithophores are smaller, thinner, and more degraded in the more acidic water. The fourth image shows the results of a similar experiment on a pteropod, by Orr, et al. in 2005. (A pteropod is a kind of planktonic snail.) The pteropod was placed in a tank of water undersaturated with respect to aragonite (a polymorph of calcite) for 48 hours. Sub-images b, c, and d show degradation of the snail's shell in those acid waters, and sub-image e shows a the surface of a normal pteropod shell for comparison.
Here's some model predictions of ocean pH from Scott Doney in a 2006 paper in Scientific American. Note that the northern Pacific Ocean becomes marginally saturated with respect to aragonite by the end of the century, and the Southern Ocean will be undersaturated by then. The skeletons of organisms with calcareous shells in those waters will begin to dissolve! So far, the pH drop has been only about 0.1 pH unit, but it is expected to hit around 0.3 pH units by 2100. It's hard to imagine how fundamental a change this will be to oceanic ecosystems!Labels: climate change, CO2, ocean acidfication

Labels: CO2, coal, global warming, mining, satellite imagery