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Science and The Gulf Spill – Scientists Gauge The Impact of Oil
Erna Buffie, Suite 101
Whether deploying robotic gliders, tracking oil up the food chain or trying to stanch the flow of oil, scientists in the Gulf play a key role.
Right now, dozens of scientists are out in the Gulf doing what they do best – working on our behalf, gathering information, trying to estimate and mitigate the environmental impact of the spill.
So who is out there? What are they doing? And why should we be grateful they’re there?
What Scientists Are Saying About Oil Impacts On Gulf Species and Ecosystems
From plankton and crab larvae to bluefin tuna and seaweed, scientists from the Gulf states, and from as far away as Indiana, are currently tracking the impact of oil as it makes its way through the Gulf’s food web. No one has yet compiled the results into a comprehensive picture, but more than two months of data suggests that its not just individual species, but entire ecosystems that are feeling the stress…
(1 July 2010)
Review of questioned IPCC report says conclusions ‘well-founded’
Juliette Jowit, The guardian
The first major independent review of criticisms of the global assessment of climate change led by the United Nations declared today that it found “no errors that would undermine the main conclusions” of the panel of international scientists that climate change will have serious consequences around the world.
However the Dutch panel of experts claims it found 12 errors – from a criticism of the number of people in Africa at risk of water shortages to mistakes in references or typing. It also suggested the summary version of the report had portrayed an over-dramatic picture by putting the emphasis on negative impacts of climate change, and it failed to explain some of the threats were not only driven by climate change.
Among several recommendations, it said the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, paid for by governments including the UK and Netherlands, should in future pay researchers to review the report in more detail.
The report was officially welcomed by the IPCC and scientists who worked on the last assessment report, published in 2007, however only a small number of the “errors” have been corrected. The remaining errors were not accepted by the scientists, said Professor Martin Parry, who was co-chair of the section of the report that was under scrutiny…
(5 July 2010)
Prehistoric Humans Caused Climate Changes, Too?
Stephen Messenger, treehugger.com
It’s almost quaint to think that our ancient ancestors, living some 10,000 years ago, may have altered the planet’s climate, just like us. Though unlike today, a time when our thirst of fossil fuels is heating up the planet, a new study suggests that our distant relatives’ hunger for mammoth meat could have played a hand in ancient climate change, long before the wheel was even invented.
Nice going, great-(x400)-grandpa.
According to a report from Science, it all stems back to the grazing habits of one of early man’s favorite menu items, the wooly mammoth. The enormous herbivores were big eaters, grazing largely on small trees and grasses in northern regions of the globe, namely in what is now Siberia and Alaska. Their propensity to strip young trees of their leaves like modern-day elephants, however, may have helped dampen the growth of forests in this part of the world — evidenced by a rapid increase in the number of trees which corresponds to a decline in mammoths.
While it would be impossible to say for certain that ancient humans were responsible for killing off the very last woolly mammoth, many researchers do believe over-hunting contributed to the animal’s eventual extinction…
(5 July 2010)
A Climate Change Corrective
editorial, New York Times
Perhaps now we can put the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us and turn to the task of actually doing something about global warming. On Wednesday, a panel in Britain concluded that scientists whose e-mail had been hacked late last year had not, as critics alleged, distorted scientific evidence to prove that global warming was occurring and that human beings were primarily responsible.
It was the fifth such review of hundreds of e-mail exchanges among some of the world’s most prominent climatologists. Some of the e-mail messages, purloined last November, were mean-spirited, others were dismissive of contrarian views, and others revealed a timid reluctance to share data. Climate skeptics pounced on them as evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate research to support predetermined ideas about global warming.
The panel found no such conspiracy. It complained mildly about one poorly explained temperature chart discussed in the e-mail, but otherwise found no reason to dispute the scientists’ “rigor and honesty.” Two earlier panels convened by Britain’s Royal Society and the House of Commons reached essentially the same verdict. And this month, a second panel at Penn State University exonerated Michael Mann, a prominent climatologist and faculty member, of scientific wrongdoing…
(9 July 2010)
