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Royal Society to research potential of geo-engineering to limit global warming
Alok Jha, The Guardian
The Royal Society has announced plans today to study which planetary-scale geo-engineering techniques might play a practical role in stemming the worst impacts of climate change.
Geo-engineering includes everything from placing mirrors in space that reflect sunlight from the Earth to seeding the oceans with iron to encourage the growth of algae that can soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide. The Royal Society study will look at which techniques might be feasible to carry out and what their impacts or unintended consequences might be on society.
“Some of these proposals seem fantastical, and may prove to be so. Our study aims to separate the science from the science fiction and offer recommendations on which options deserve serious consideration,” said John Shepherd, an oceanographer at Southampton University, and chair of the Royal Society working group that will carry out the study. “We need to investigate if any of these schemes could help us avoid the most dangerous changes to our climate and to fully understand what other impacts they may have.”…
(30 October 2008)
Manmade global warming evident on every continent, polar report finds
David Adam, Guardian
Data compiled by the University of East Anglia finds evidence of warming in Antarctica that can for the first time be directly attributed to human emissions
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No corner of the Earth is immune from the effects of global warming, according to a new study that confirms manmade temperature rises in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Temperature records over the last century show that warming in the planet’s coldest and most remote wildernesses is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study, published today in Nature Geoscience, is the first to find the fingerprints of manmade global warming on the Antarctic, where a shortage of data makes it hard to be sure. Last year’s report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said human influence could be detected on every continent, except Antarctica. Climate sceptics have exploited this omission to question the science of global warming.
(30 October 2008)
Climate-warming methane levels rose fast in 2007
Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Levels of climate-warming methane — a greenhouse gas 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide — rose abruptly in Earth’s atmosphere last year, and scientists who reported the change don’t know why it occurred.
Methane, the primary component of natural gas, has more than doubled in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times, but stayed largely stable over the last decade or so before rising in 2007, researchers said on Wednesday.
This stability led scientists to believe that the emissions of methane, from natural sources like cows, sheep and wetlands, as well as from human activities like coal and gas production, were balanced by the destruction of methane in the atmosphere.
But that balance was upset starting early last year, releasing millions of metric tonnes more methane into the air, the scientists wrote in the Geophysical Research Letters.
“The thing that’s really surprising is that it’s coming after this period of very level emissions,” said Matthew Rigby of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The worry is that we just don’t understand the methane cycle very well.”
Another surprise was that the rise in methane levels happened simultaneously at all the places scientists measured around the globe, instead of being centered near known sources of methane emissions in the Northern Hemisphere, said Rigby, one of the study’s lead authors along with Ronald Prinn, also of MIT…
(30 October 2008)
