By Michael McCarthy 18 February 2013 (The Independent) – The world is facing a fertiliser crisis, with far too little in some places, and far too much in others, a new report from the United Nations says today. The mass application of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients needed for plant growth has had huge benefits for […]
By Damien Gayle26 November 2012 As much as 44 billion tons of nitrogen and 850 billion tons of carbon could be released into the environment as permafrost thaws over the next century, U.S. government experts warn. The release of carbon and nitrogen in permafrost could make global warming much worse and threaten delicate water systems […]
By David Biello 12 October 2012 NEW YORK CITY (Scientific American) – The state of the planet is grim, whether that assessment is undertaken from the perspective of economic development, social justice or the global environment. What’s known as sustainable development—a bid to capture all three of those efforts in one effort and phrase—has hardly […]
By Eugene Robinson18 October 2012 (The Washington Post) – Not a word has been said in the presidential debates about what may be the most urgent and consequential issue in the world: climate change. President Obama understands and accepts the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is trapping heat in the atmosphere, with […]
Record drought across the United States in 2012 followed a year of record flooding in the Mid-West in 2011, producing two very different areas of hypoxia, or oxygen deficient water, on the Louisiana continental shelf. The 2012 area of low oxygen, commonly known as the ‘Dead Zone,’ measured 7,480 square kilometers (= 2,889 square miles) […]
By KELLY SLIVKA2 August 2012 In yet another display of the inexorable interdependence of Earth’s ecosystems, a bad summer for Midwestern farmland has turned out to be a good one for life in the Gulf of Mexico. Researchers from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium have found that this summer’s hypoxic zone in the Gulf of […]
By Ben Cubby, Environment Editor18 June 2012 In a surprise finding, researchers have shown that as trees start to grow closer to the North Pole, replacing once-barren tundra, they release more greenhouse gases than they absorb. The study has global implications for measuring the speed of global warming because it had previously been thought that […]
1000-year records of southern hemisphere background concentrations of CO2 parts per million (ppm – orange), N2O parts per billion (ppb – blue) and CH4 (ppb – green) measured at Cape Grim Tasmania and in air extracted from Antarctic ice and near surface levels of ice known as firn. Global CO2, methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide […]
Contact: Michael Bishop, michael.bishop@iop.org, 01-179-301-032, Institute of Physics12 April 2012 Meat consumption in the developed world needs to be cut by 50 per cent per person by 2050 if we are to meet the most aggressive strategy, set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to reduce one of the most important greenhouse […]
9 April 2012 (NAU) – Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research conducted at Northern Arizona University. The study, published this week in Nature Climate Change, shows that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but begin to deteriorate quickly. “We were […]
