Clouds complicate the measurement of climate change. Last year, for example, a couple of Colorado State students used CloudSat data to show that pollution by aerosols is causing the formation of more of those eerie, high altitude noctilucent clouds. (Said clouds are reportedly encroaching on the lower latitudes…) The increase in cloud cover resulted in an increase of reflected sunlight, which resulted in less solar radiation reaching the surface.
Now, a team of Ukrainian scientists argue that clouds are the only thing that matter when it comes to climate change. Well, almost. Clouds… and solar radiation. Basically, contrary to what almost every other scientist has been saying, they hypothesize that the big picture of climate change has little to do with carbon dioxide. There’s incoming solar radiation, and clouds that either reflect said radiation or reflect it back into space.
Here’s where cosmic rays come in, according to the Ukrainians: they cause an increase in cloud cover by ionizing the atmosphere, which forms aerosols, which leads to more clouds. Thus, cloud cover patterns should follow the same 11 year cycle that is observed in the Sun’s magnetic field, which corresponds the influx of cosmic rays.
Is it time to throw out any inconvenient truths out there?
I love public television. Still, it's not known as an outlet for thrill seekers. It seldom provides its viewers with an adrenaline rush. Nonetheless, PBS does stage memorable television events, and one of them was the documentary, Cadillac Desert, accompanied by Marc Reisner's best-selling book of the same name.
Reisner chronicles in mostly-riveting, though sometimes mind-numbing, detail the great Westward Migration in America and its dependence on a dwindling, non-renewable water supply. The intrigue and politics of water, says Reisner, have been the driving force in shaping the American West, and in the end there simply will not be enough of it. When it runs out, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed inevitably by a great Eastward Migration.
Readers of Cadillac Desert will remember one of the most notorious events in California History, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which occurred eighty years ago this week. Early Twentiety-Century celebrity, Los Angeles water engineer William Mulholland (as in Mulholland Drive) had just watched a proposal to strip yet more water from the Owens Valley go sour. He desperately needed to find a way to satisfy LA's growing water addiction, and in the end he decided to expand the size of an already-large dam in the nearby San Francisquito Canyon. This proved to be a lousy idea.
Last month when American Airlines flew its pampered pentad of passengers from Chicago to London, the carbon footprint left by burning 22,000 gallons of fuel during a virtually empty flight more resembled a carbon foot in Mother Nature's ass.
Environmentalists flew, presumably fossil fuel-free, through the roof. Defenders of the industry loudly countered by pointing out the harsh pragmatics of airline scheduling. Others, sensing opportunity, derided the likes of Al Gore and similar activists for hypocritically jet-setting across the globe to deliver messages of environmental responsibility.
American Airlines, which lost about $60,000 on the much-maligned voyage, won’t have to worry about such fiascos starting at the end of this month. On March 30, the Open Skies agreement takes effect, allowing any US and EU airline to make transatlantic flights between all destinations on both sides of the pond. London’s Heathrow airport will be opened for full competition from foreign carriers with an expected monthly increase of 524 flights to the States as well as 5,853 new trips throughout Europe. Until mankind builds the first trans-oceanic bike path, we’re going to have untold millions more tons of CO2 floating around the friendly skies.
Methane-filled cow toots have long been the bane of environmentalists and pythonophobes everywhere (see also: megacorporations and carbon dioxide).
Now there's a chance that at least one thing coming out of cows could actually help stop global warming.
"When most people see a pile of manure, they see a pile of manure. We saw it as an opportunity for farmers, for utilities, and for California," said David Albers, dairyman and collaborater in The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project.
Back around the turn of the century, some genius with a Burmese python realized his chosen pet was a lot more difficult to manage than a goldfish, so he dumped it in the Everglades. Meanwhile, another genius discovered the same thing and also released his or her Burmese python in the Everglades, and — voila! — by 2003, biologists with the park service confirmed an established breeding population of a 20-foot, 300-lb. snake.
But it gets better: See all the green space on the map? According to a new USGS survey, that represents the area of our country that climatically matches the python's historical range from Pakistan to Indonesia. Burmese pythons have already been spotted north and east of the Everglades, so it seems like only a matter of time before these highly adaptable reptiles spread even more.
Unsurprisingly, global warming could play a big part in the invasive animals' spread. Click through to see another USGS projection of the python's suitable range in 100 years:
Ever since my folks moved to the foothill mountains of Colorado, they've been unable to shake a preternatural fear of predators and wilderness. My dad used to have a situation room dedicated to cougar sightings, and both parents worried that bears lurked on every corner, ready to raid fridges and steal babies. (Never mind that you'll see more Audi SUVs than apex predators in the foothills).They've gotten a little better, but not much — every time they step off a paved road, it's an opportunity for wilderness to swallow you whole. I've always thought a little time spent camping in the wild might help cure them of their phobias, but they've never gone.
But it turns out they're not alone: Recent research shows that backpacking and national park attendance has been steadily on the wane since 1987, and David Biello, of our better-dressed older brother Scientific American, wonders if fear might cause Americans to shy away from recreation in the natural world. When compounded with work and school pressures, the rising cost of park visits and the preponderance of electronic entertainment, the desire to enter and experience the wild falls of sharply.
Patricia Zaradic, of the Environmental Leadership Program and co-author of the report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimates that it would take 80 million park visits this year to bring per-capita attendance numbers to 1987 levels. Zaradic and University of Illinois at Chicago researcher Oliver Pergams analyzed trends in visits to national parks and forests, state parks, surveys on camping and the number of hunting or fishing licenses to determine the extent of the decline. Every single outdoor pursuit they analyzed peaked between 1981 and 1991 and has declined roughly 1 percent per year since for an overall decline of around 25 percent.
Everyone knows chipmunks need their sleep — otherwise they get ornery and attack you in local parks. Oh, and they're also more likely to die.
Global warming, it seems, has shortened the hibernation period for animals like bears, marmots and chipmunks like Mr. Cutie Pants over there. But it leads to more than animals just getting crankier: They wake up earlier thinking it's spring, but the food sources often haven't caught up, and the animals starve. So much for the early-bird-gets-the-worm theory; it's more like "the early bird gets the shaft."
Researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological lab have checked up on marmot hibernation behavior since the 1970s, and because temperatures have risen by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit in recent times, they've seen the marmots awaken from their dens about a month earlier.
Because of the temperature change, some animals don't hibernate at all. Brown bears in Spain skipped out on hibernation as did chipmunks in the U.S., and while the bears didn't take much of a population hit, many early-rising chipmunks starved or got chomped by predators.
The polar bear is widely accepted as the unofficial symbol of global warming. Most people would suggest that the poor, drowning, computer-generated creature from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth thrust the plight of the polar bear into the national consciousness. Soon after, with the birth of little Knut in a Berlin zoo, the world had a physical being of heartbreaking cuteness to associate with the problem, though the cub, far from the Dorian Gray of his species, is susceptible to the corruption of age, as are most adolescents.
It didn’t take long for Hollywood to cast them as honorable (and rational) warriors, who’d also star in their own features and rub elbows with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio. So when reports surfaced in 2006 that the shifting climate forced the bears into cannibalism, the public reacted with an outpouring of compassion rather than dismissing them as fearsome predators, as may have been the case in other circumstances. These days, 1993 seems a lifetime ago, when America was captivated by Coca-Cola’s dreamlike Arctic idyll.
Villagers in the Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountains have practiced "glacier growing" for centuries, according to local legend. Historically, snowmelt often hasn't provided enough water for crops or humans in the dry, high-altitude regions, so growing glaciers became crucial to survival. How did they do it? By combining "male" and "female" glaciers to grow the glaciers larger.
Before you laugh at what sounds like old-world witchcraft, consider this: Researcher Ingvar Tveiten from the Department of International Environment and Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences seems to support the locals' methods of glacier farming. While only a few villages still have glacier-growing elders, if Tveiten can refine and disseminate these techniques for glacier growing, it could go a long way to alleviating problems caused by population growth and glacier retreat in the poverty-plagued mountains of Central Asia.
So how does it work? Local tradition believes that there are two types of glaciers: "male" glaciers are covered in soil or stones and move hardly if at all, while "female" glaciers are whiter, grow faster and yield more water. Tradition also dictates that in order to grow a glacier, you need equal amounts of both types of glaciers — just like the birds and the bees, only colder.
China won the right to host the 2008 Summer Olympics after overcoming political worries, environmental concerns and a knockdown-drag-out fight with Paris. China declared of Paris that "certain urban areas leave something to be desired when it comes to cleanliness. In particular, errant dogs and rabid dogs are increasingly numerous." Claude Bebear, the head of the Paris Olympic bid committee, shot back with "dogs are dogs...they do the same thing everywhere... It's just that there are no dogs in China - because they eat them." BURN!
So after that flame war, there's no way in hell China's going to let a little thing like water ruin the opening-day festivities: They've had some success in preventing light rain, as we've previously reported.
But at the same time that China is attempting to stop H2O from falling from the sky, they've also constructed a groundbreaking structure inspired by water bubbles (pictured above). The Beijing National Aquatics Center, or Water Cube, as it's affectionately called, is covered in 100,000 square meters of iridescent, Teflon-like plastic called ETFE. ETFE is only 0.08 of an inch think, but it can hold up to 300 times its weight. The Water Cube is said to mimic nature's way of filling space most efficiently — with bubbles — while also absorbing solar heat to warm the building and the pool. It's said to be one of the most sustainable buildings in the increasingly environmentally-aware China, who want to look good for the world come August.
Duck and cover boys and girls. A broken-down photo-recon satellite the size of a shortbus has had it with piping close-ups of the blinding bald patches of C.I.A. operatives into their own Blackberries as they distribute Kalashnikovs and crack to third-world babies. [Phew.]
The disillusioned satellite is reported to have given its entire record collection to an obsolete cellphone satellite and seems to be inching ever closer to the precipice of uncontrolled reentry.
Most people have gone through 5-17 cell phones in the relatively short span of the gadget's ubiquity. But what happens to your crap-ass Chocolate when you trade up for an iPhone? If you're like most people, it usually sits in a drawer, gets tossed in the trash, or awaits use as a convenient projectile weapon.
But here's what could happen to your old cell phone:
Those April showers may bring something in addition to May flowers. You’ve heard of solar power and wind power, but what about rain power?
It's good news for all the rain dogs out there... French scientists have created a machine that can capture kinetic energy carried by a rain drop as it plummets to the ground. According to their models, the machine can capture about 12 milliwatts from a large raindrop (5 mm diameter) that hits the machine.
To capture the raindrops’ mechanical energy, the scientists used a PVDF (polyvinylidene fluoride) polymer, a piezoelectric material that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. When a raindrop impacts the 25-micrometer-thick PVDF, the polymer starts to vibrate. Electrodes embedded in the PVDF are used to recover the electrical charges generated by the vibrations.
The researchers discuss their work in Smart Materials and Structures.
The presidential campaigns are heating up, and we're still hearing very little about science. Will we? Three weeks ago, Science featured a special section devoted to candidates’ opinions and views on science. Unfortunately, some of those articles are available only to subscribers.
Not so at Physics Today, which is published by the American Institute of Physics. At the web site, you can read about the major candidates and their official positions on topics related to science. Physics Today posed six questions to the major contenders; the topics for the questions included science education, teaching evolution, nuclear weapons, science investment, energy policy and climate change. The answers to the questions are pulled from the candidates’ web sites.
Ever since my folks moved to the foothill mountains of Colorado, they've been unable to shake a preternatural fear of predators and wilderness. My dad used to have a situation room dedicated to cougar sightings, and both parents worried that bears lurked on every corner, ready to raid fridges and steal babies. (Never mind that you'll see more Audi SUVs than apex predators in the foothills).They've gotten a little better, but not much — every time they step off a paved road, it's an opportunity for wilderness to swallow you whole. I've always thought a little time spent camping in the wild might help cure them of their phobias, but they've never gone.
Everyone knows chipmunks need their sleep — otherwise they get ornery and attack you in local parks. Oh, and they're also more likely to die.
Villagers in the Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountains have practiced "glacier growing" for centuries, according to local legend. Historically, snowmelt often hasn't provided enough water for crops or humans in the dry, high-altitude regions, so growing glaciers became crucial to survival. How did they do it? By combining "male" and "female" glaciers to grow the glaciers larger.
China won the right to host the 2008 Summer Olympics after overcoming political worries, environmental concerns and a 
Those April showers may bring something in addition to May flowers. You’ve heard of solar power and wind power, but what about rain power?
