Author: Joshua S Hill

On the anniversary of the 40^th Earth Day the latest Gallup poll shows that attitudes towards the environmental movement in America are declining.

Despite Gallup’s attempt to spin this as a “still positive” result, the 8 point drop in American’s attitudes towards the environmental movement is indicative of a growing trend. Whether as a result of partisan blinders attempting to denounce the environmental movement as a fraud or simply as a result of attention being given over to the failing economy, the environmental effort in America is losing support. (more…)

A new study to be published in the International Journal of Climatology concludes that predicting the effects of global warming in the future could be significantly affected by mountains.

The study, written by researchers from Oregon State University using the unique historical data provided by Oregon’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, believes that the effects of global warming could be dramatically changed over very small distances thanks to the air movements in complex or mountainous terrain.

The authors believe that such a change could see doubling or even tripling to the temperature increases in some situations. (more…)

The pledges to curb carbon emissions made during 2009’s Copenhagen Accord are more likely to see Earth suffer a three degree warming rather than the deal’s target of two degrees.

Such a warming could have dire affects for Earth’s climate system, possibly increasing the frequency of droughts, floods, storms and rising seas, all of which will affect millions of people.

An analysis published in the journal Nature by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research say the promises made during the Accord last year fell remarkably short of the headline-mark.

“It’s amazing how unambitious these pledges are,” they said. (more…)

The Office of Naval Research will highlight their microbial fuel cell that was one of TIME magazine’s “Top 50 Inventions of 2009” for an Earth Day event on April 22.

According to Peter Vietti of the Office of Naval Research the microbial fuel cell is a device “that could revolutionize naval energy use by converting decomposed marine organisms into electricity.”

By converting naturally occurring fuels and oxidants in the marine environment into electricity, Naval vessels could be running on a clean and efficient reliable alternative battery avoiding the harmful impact that standard batteries and fuels have upon the marine environment. (more…)

A new study to be published in an upcoming edition of the American Journal of Climate showcase evidence that the world’s water cycle has intensified.

The new study, co-authored by CSIRO scientists Paul Durack and Dr Susan Wijffels, looked at over 50 years of data and found increases in ocean surface salinity levels across the planet. The study shows that the sufrace ocean rainfall-dominated regions have freshened while regions dominated by evaporation are saltier.

“This is further confirmation from the global ocean that the Earth’s water cycle has accelerated,” says Paul Durack. (more…)

Could a link between a lull in solar activity and jet streams over the Atlantic Ocean be the result for why the UK is suffering colder winter’s while the rest of the world warms?

According to a new report published in the Institute of Physics Publishing’s Environmental Research Letters points out that we are moving into an era of low solar activity which authors believe is likely to result in UK winter temperatures more akin to those seen at the end of the seventeenth century.

“This year’s winter in the UK has been the 14th coldest in the last 160 years and yet the global average temperature for the same period has been the 5th highest,” says lead author Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading. “We have discovered that this kind of anomaly is significantly more common when solar activity is low.” (more…)

Planet Earth’s oceans now have a second confirmed garbage patch filled with plastic detritus.

The discovery of the first garbage patch is credited to Charles Moore, an ocean researcher who discovered the large patch of plastic floating in the Pacific in 1997. Now the Atlantic can lay claim to a human produced waste patch all of their own.

Wife and husband team Anna Cummins and Marcus Eriksen sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in February between Bermuda and Portugal’s mid-Atlantic Azores Islands. In the middle of the Atlantic is the Sargasso Sea, an area surrounded by various ocean currents including the well known Gulf Stream. The pair took samples ever 100 miles (160 kilometres) and each time they pulled up their trawl it was full of plastic. (more…)

According to almost 50 years of data the Devon Island ice cap in the Canadian High Arctic is thinning and shrinking.

A paper published in the March edition of Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary’s Arctic Institute of North America, reports the substantial loss of mass, ice volume and area each year since 1961 of the Devon Island ice cap.

The report shows that between 1961 and 1985 the ice cap both grew and shrank, signifying an overall loss of mass. However from 1985 onwards scientists began to notice a steady decline in the volume and area of ice covering one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic at approximately 14,400 square kilometres.

This slow death has been evidenced in other ice caps and large sheets of ice the world over. What begins as a couple of years with warmer summers starts a domino effect that is almost irreversible. (more…)

Americans have no more desire in 2010 to be environmentally friendly than they did in 2000.

According to the large Gallup poll conducted March 4 – 7, Americans surveyed show very little desire to increase their more environmentally friendly actions. And though approximately three in four recycle, have reduced their household energy usage and buy environmentally friendly products, this number has hardly changed since 2000.

The largest positive response the poll recorded was the likelihood to voluntarily recycle newspaper, glass, aluminium, motor oil and other items, with 9 out of 10 people admitting to such activity. (more…)

The Wildlife Conservation Society lists 10 animals that they have dubbed the Rarest of the Rare.

The Wildlife Conservation Society has released a list of “Rarest of the Rare” in the 2010-2011 edition of State of the Wild. The ten animals in the list have been extracted from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s list of Critically Endangered animals. The classification of Critically Endangered is described as a species facing an “extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.” Often this meaning will be represented by the species’ number being reduced by approximately 80% in the wild over the last 10 years, or on average three generations.

Unfortunately, as of 2009, the total number of plants and animals listed as Critically Endangered numbers somewhere over the 3,200 mark.

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According to a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment water temperatures are increasing in many streams and rivers throughout the United States.

“Warming waters can impact the basic ecological processes taking place in our nation’s rivers and streams,” said Dr. Sujay Kaushal of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) and lead author of the study. “Long-term temperature increases can impact aquatic biodiversity, biological productivity, and the cycling of contaminants through the ecosystem.”

The study focused its attention on 40 streams and rivers throughout the US, and found that 20 showed “statistically significant long term warming trends.” The annual mean water temperature increased by 0.02-0.14°F (0.009-0.077°C) per year and could often be correlated with increases in air temperature. Rates of warming in these streams were found to be most speedy in urbanized areas.

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According to a new study the regular shift in Earth’s orbit may have a direct linkage to a change in the climate.

In an analysis that looked at ocean sediment cores from 57 locations, UC Santa Barbara geologist Lorraine Lisiecki has found that over the past 1.2 million years there appears a linkage between a shift in the shape of Earth’s orbit – the eccentricity – and Earth’s climate.

By analysing the sediments in the ocean sediment cores scientists are able to look back through Earth’s climate for millions of years. What Lisiecki has done is link the climate information found within these sediment cores and correlated it with a history of Earth’s orbit.

A generally acknowledged scientific fact is that Earth’s orbit around the sun changes every 100,000 years, becoming either more round or more elliptical.

According to her study, Lisiecki has found that glaciation also occurs every 100,000 years, and that the timing of changes in climate and eccentricity coincided.

“The clear correlation between the timing of the change in orbit and the change in the Earth’s climate is strong evidence of a link between the two,” said Lisiecki. “It is unlikely that these events would not be related to one another.”

Oddly, Lisiecki discovered that the largest glacial cycles occurred during the weakest changes in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit, and vice versa. In other words, the stronger the shift in our planet’s orbit, the weaker the shift in our planet’s climate. According to Lisiecki, “this may mean that the Earth’s climate has internal instability in addition to sensitivity to changes in the orbit.”

According to the press release from the University of California – Santa Barbara, Lisiecki concludes that climate changes over the past million years probably involves a complex interaction between various aspects of our planet’s climate system working in conjunction with three different orbital systems; eccentricity, tilt and precession.

“Making wind-generated electricity more steady will enable wind power to become a much larger fraction of our electric sources,” said Willett Kempton, University of Delaware professor of marine policy and author of a new paper which proposes linking wind powered generators to steady electrical production.

The paper, published in the April 5 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that by linking wind powered generation sites with a power line, the electrical output could be stabilized to avoid surges and drops.

Additionally, the researchers showed that wind installations should be set up and fine-tuned according to local meteorological data, and not just space available.

Smart thinking is what the researchers are looking for in future installations.

“Our analysis shows that when transmission systems will carry power from renewable sources, such as wind, they should be designed to consider large-scale meteorology, including the prevailing movement of high- and low-pressure systems,” said Dr. Kempton.

The study is based upon a hypothetical offshore wind farm based along the U.S. East Coast. The team analysed five years of wind observations from 11 monitoring stations stretching from Florida to Maine, and created a hypothetical power grid based on wind speeds at each location as if being powered by five-megawatt offshore turbines.

From this hypothetical power grid they were able to study the seasonal effects on power output.

“A north-south transmission geometry fits nicely with the storm track that shifts northward or southward along the U.S. East Coast on a weekly or seasonal time scale,” said Brian Colle, associate professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. “Because then at any one time a high or low pressure system is likely to be producing wind (and thus power) somewhere along the coast.”

One of the main problems foreseen by experts with environmentally powered electricity generation is the fractious nature of … nature. Sun doesn’t always shine, water doesn’t always pound and wind doesn’t always blow. But by investigating a regions weather patterns, and linking the sites with a power line, the output can be smoothed out so that maximum or minimum output is rare.

There are currently no wind turbines inhabiting US waters, despite multiple projects being proposed. This in contract to the booming wind power industry in Europe, where the stormy nature of the North Sea and similar bodies of water make for perfect wind generation.

Source: Stony Brook University

Image Credit: chaunceydavis818

A new climate projection map released on March 31 by scientists from Climate Central shows predictions for the next nine decades. The projection map depicts northern states of the continental United States experiencing fewer and fewer freezing temperatures.

According to the prediction map, over the next 90 years the likelihood of temperatures reaching below freezing in March throughout many of the northern states drops dramatically. In some instances, such as in Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, South Dakota and Oregon, there won’t even be below freezing temperatures in March.

And let’s not kid ourselves. There will be those – comedians and layman alike – who will tout this as a boon for humanity; or at least humanity within the top third of the USA.

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