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Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial page occupies a uniquely obnoxious place in commentary on global warming. Over the many [...]
by Simon Gompertz
It’s not every day you look in a compost heap and find a bug which might help save the planet. But a UK company is using just such a bug to make renewable fuel for cars.
Viewed through a microscope at TMO Renewables near Guildford in Surrey, hundreds of the [...]
The Arctic and Antarctic regions are warming faster than previously thought, raising world sea levels and making drastic global climate change more likely than ever, international scientists said on Wednesday.
New evidence of the trend was uncovered by wide-ranging research in the two areas over the past two years in a United Nations-backed program dubbed the International Polar Year (IPY), they said.
“Snow and ice are declining in both polar regions, affecting human livelihoods as well as local plant and animal life in the Arctic as well as global atmospheric circulation and sea-level,” according to a summary of a report by the researchers.
An assessment of the findings of the research was still being refined, said the IPY’s “State of Polar Research” report.
“But it now appears certain that both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass and thus raising sea level, and that the rate of ice loss from Greenland is growing,” it said.
Continue reading Polar regions found warming fast, raising sea levels
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
A new satellite to track the chief culprit in global warming crashed into the ocean near Antarctica after launch Tuesday, dealing a major setback to NASA’s already weak network for monitoring Earth and its environment from above.
The $280 million mission was designed to answer one of the biggest question marks of global warming: What happens to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas? How much of it is sucked up and stored by plants, soil and oceans and how much is left to trap heat on Earth, worsening global warming?
“It’s definitely a setback. We were already well behind,” said Neal Lane, science adviser during former President Bill Clinton’s administration. “The program was weak and now it’s really weak.”
For about a decade, scientists have complained of a decline in the study of Earth from space. NASA spent more money looking at other planets than it did at Earth in 2007. That same year, the National Academy of Sciences warned that NASA’s study of Earth “is at great risk” with fewer missions than before and aging satellites.
“We have a very weakened Earth observing system just at a time where we need every bit of data that we could possibly get,” said Elisabeth Holland, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Continue reading NASA rocket failure blow to Earth watching network
Genes from genetically-engineered corn have been found in traditional crop strains in Mexico, according to a new study likely to reignite a bitter controversy over biotech maize.
The paper, by scientists from Mexico, the United States and the Netherlands, backs a 2001 probe that sparked a row over the safety of genetically-modified (GM) crops.
Green activists say GM crops are a potential hazard, arguing that their genes could spread to related plants through cross-pollination.
Their campaign has helped drive bans on GM crops in some countries, including Mexico itself, the ancestral home of maize, as corn is also called.
In the 2001 study, published in the prestigious British journal Nature, researchers reported finding transgenes in samples of corn taken from the Sierra Juarez region of Oaxaca.
But this study was blasted for technical inaccuracy and choice of samples. In an exceptional slap, Nature distanced itself from the paper, saying the evidence had not been strong enough to warrant publication.
This damning verdict was underscored by a further study, carried out in 2005 by a different team, that was unable to replicate the results.
But new research now says the original study was right.
A team led by Elena Alvarez-Buylla of the National Autonomous University in Mexico City looked at nearly 2,000 samples from 100 fields in the region from 2001 and 2004, and found that around one percent of the samples had genes that had jumped from GM varieties.
“We confirmed that there was contamination in 2001 and also found contamination in 2004, which means that it either persisted in the local maize that we sampled or that it was reintroduced, which is less likely,” Alvarez-Buylla told AFP.
She said the difference between previous studies and her research lay in the samples chosen for gene sequencing and in the molecular technique for decrypting the DNA.
The investigators looked for two specific genes that had escaped from biotech corn, and found them in some fields but not in others.
Alvarez-Buylla said the evidence shed stark light on the failure of efforts to shield Mexico from unauthorised GM corn.
The country imposed a moratorium on the planting of transgenic maize in 1998 in order to protect genetic diversity. It is the home of about 60 traditional domesticated strains, also called landraces, as well as several wild strains.
Transgenic seeds are entering the country, most probably from the United States, and getting mixed with local seeds in trade among small farmers, Alvarez-Buylla believed.
“It is very hard to avoid gene flow from transgenic maize to non-transgenic maize in Mexico, even though there has been a moratorium,” she said.
“It is really worrying that the government of Mexico has not been efficient enough in biosecurity monitoring,” she said, accusing watchdogs of failing to establish rigorous molecular monitoring that was independent of data provided by biotech giants.
Alvarez-Buylla’s team did not explore the impact of the escaped genes on the native corn, on the local environment or human health, nor did it test whether the foreign genes passed on to progeny plants.
The study appears in the latest issue of Molecular Ecology, a peer-reviewed journal published by Britain’s Blackwell group. It has been endorsed by a lead author of the 2005 paper.
Continue reading New study points to GM contamination of Mexican corn
It looks more like an Ice Age than global warming.
There is so much snow in Oslo, where I live, that the city authorities are resorting to dumping truckloads of it in the sea because the usual storage sites on land are full.
That is angering environmentalists who say the snow is far too [...]
The climate change science keeps on getting clearer, and it is not pretty. A new study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [ark], updating a 2001 assessment by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change that looked at temperature changes and the risks they pose, found “the risks of negative impacts of [...]
A team of US scientists led by Purdue University unveiled an interactive Google Earth map on Thursday showing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels across the United States.
The high-resolution map, available at Purdue university , shows carbon dioxide emissions in metric tons in residential and commercial areas by state, county or per capita.
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