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Pine Plantations May Be One Culprit In Increasing Carbon Dioxide Levels
SPX, Terradaily
The increasing number of pine plantations in the southern United States could contribute to a rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, a new study reports. This is important because carbon dioxide is a key greenhouse gas, one that is linked to global warming.
Landowners in the South are turning stands of hardwood and natural pine trees into pine plantations because pine is a more lucrative source of lumber.
But pine plantations don’t retain carbon as well as hardwood or natural pine forests, said Brent Sohngen, a study co-author and an associate professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at Ohio State University.
“For environmental reasons, policy makers may want to develop policies that encourage the establishment or maintenance of hardwood forests to ensure diversity across the landscape,” Sohngen said.
(25 July 2006)
Researchers Link Wildfires, Climate Change
Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press via Common Dreams
Scientists worldwide are watching temperatures rise, the land turn dry and vast forests go up in flames. In the Siberian taiga and Canadian Rockies, in southern California and Australia, researchers find growing evidence tying an upsurge in wildfires to climate change, an impact long predicted by global-warming forecasters.
Forest and peat fires release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, adding to climate warming, which in turn will intensify forest fires, further worsening warming in a planetary feedback loop.
“This is a carbon bomb,” said Johann Goldammer, director of the Global Fire Monitoring Center at Germany’s Freiburg University. “It’s sitting there waiting to be ignited, and there is already ignition going on.”
A team at California’s Scripps Institution, in a headline-making report this month, found that warmer temperatures, causing earlier snow runoff and consequently drier summer conditions, were the key factor in an explosion of big wildfires in the U.S. West over three decades, including fires now rampaging east of Los Angeles.
Researchers previously reached similar conclusions in Canada, where fire is destroying an average 6.4 million acres a year, compared with 2.5 million in the early 1970s. And an upcoming U.S.-Russian-Canadian scientific paper points to links between warming and wildfires in Siberia, where 2006 already qualifies as an extreme fire season, sixth in the past eight years. Far to the south in drought-stricken Australia, meanwhile, 2005 was the hottest year on record, and the dangerous bushfire season is growing longer.
“Temperature increases are intimately linked with increases in area burned in Canada, and I would expect the same worldwide,” said Mike Flannigan, a veteran Canadian Forest Service researcher.
(22 July 2006)
Global Warming, Not Just Heat Wave
Julio Godoy, Inter Press Service via Common Dreams
PARIS – The heat wave sweeping Europe is a direct consequence of the warming of the earth’s atmosphere, experts say. “We are observing and suffering the first effects of global warming,” Hervé Le Treut, meteorologist at the French Centre for Scientific Research told IPS.
“The emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are leading to higher temperatures all over the world, but these are observed in an irregular manner across the continents,” he said. “The global weather is clearly disturbed.”
Record temperatures of well over 35 degrees Celsius were recorded all over Europe this week. On Jul. 20 Paris and Berlin registered 39 degrees. In Belgium, Jul. 19 was the hottest day ever in July, with 37 degrees.
The July maximum temperature record was also broken in Britain. The mercury reached 36.5 Celsius at the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Wisley in Surrey. The previous record for July, 36 degrees, was set in Epsom in 1911.
“Europa achicharrada”, the weekly Spanish newspaper El Semanal declared, meaning “Europe burned to a crisp”.
The heat wave has led to several deaths across Europe.
(21 July 2006)
Scientists split on heat wave cause
Some think culprit is global warming, but jury is still out
Keay Davidson, SF Chronicle
In the past, most weather experts hesitated to blame short-term weather events — say, a terrible winter storm or a nasty heat wave — on longer-scale climate shifts like global warming.
But this week — as many Bay Area residents flee to air-conditioned theaters to watch Al Gore’s global warming film, “An Inconvenient Truth” — the latest sweltering weather is starting to look to many like a calling card of global warming.
Some of the nation’s top climate experts also believe the heat wave is caused at least partly by global climate change. Others, however, disagree and say it’s still too early to blame the current weather on the planet’s changing climate.
How hot is it? The first six months of 2006 were the warmest of any year in the United States since record keeping began in 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. In Northern California, the weather has been hot enough to drain power supplies, dry up streams and contribute to several deaths.
“I think there are very good reasons to believe that the current U.S. heat wave is at least partly caused by global warming,” Kevin Trenberth, one of the nation’s top global-warming computer modelers, wrote in an e-mail.
(25 July 2006)
NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet
Andrew C. Revkin, NY Times
From 2002 until this year, NASA’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.”
In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”
David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.
But the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the “understand and protect” phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
(22 July 2006)
Also posted at Common Dreams.
