Author: Michael Ricciardi

Currently, the developing world (what used to be called “The Third World”) is experiencing the effects of higher commodity prices and declining agricultural production. Chronic undernourishment now affects an estimated one billion people, most of whom reside in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

At current population trends, another 2.3 billion will be added to the world’s population by 2050. According to the findings of the World Summit on Food Security (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN), in order to feed this additional 2+ billion people, developing countries will need to increase their cereal crop output by 70%, nearly doubling current output.

One of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals–to dramatically reduce world hunger by 2015–will most likely not be met, given these current trends.

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Earlier this Spring, 200 climate science experts and policy makers gathered in Pacific Grove, California, for ‘Asilomar 2′ (named after the first conference on bio-engineering held there in 1975), a pivotal conference for the emerging science of geoegineering. It  was a meeting that many attendees regretted was even necessary.

2009 was a big year for news on geoengineering, where the word suddenly started appearing, or being heard,  everywhere it seemed. This publicity for a  new science that seeks to intervene on a globe-impacting scale to counteract human induced climate change has also been propelling a greater concern on the part of scientists and policy experts: that of public participation in the policy forming process, and the need for ethical guidelines for future geoengineering decisions, should they be necessary.

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Jeremy Jackson calls himself a tropical ecologist. He has spent decades studying marine habitats. He is one of the foremost experts on coral reefs in the world. And he knows his geologic history too.

Recently, Mr. Jackson gave a slide show talk at the hugely popular, annual TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference. The picture he paints of the current state of our oceans, and where they are heading, is anything but pleasant or comforting. (more…)

Map of countries and territories by fertility rate.

The Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced “mob”) is a new initiative started by a group of social and natural scientists and scholars in the Humanities with the aim of “changing human behavior to avoid a collapse of global civilization.”

Writing in an essay published today on the Public Library of Science – Biology website (The MAHB, the Culture Gap, and Some Really Inconvenient Truths), the multiple award-winning author of The Population Bomb (1968) and Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich details the numerous threats facing the human race and which, collectively, threaten to collapse human civilization this century.

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Illustration showing methane chimney from sea floor to surface (USGS)

A team of scientists confirms that sea-bottom and surface waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are “super-saturated”  with Methane (CH4) gas and “out-gassing” this potent GHG to the Atmosphere.

A variable quantity known as the “venting flux” was calculated for the ESAS and found to be nearly equal to that amount from the entire World Ocean. Previous calculations by climate scientists estimated that “remobilization” of only a small fraction of of this trapped methane could potentially trigger “abrupt climate warming”.

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Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull Volcano eruption, showing volcanic plume and lava flow spreading northeast, spilling into Hrunagil Gully. Image was acquired on March 24, 2010, by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite

Numerous volcanoes  presently active and erupting across the planet will impact short-term warming and climate change. Longer-term impacts are unknown.

On March 20, after nearly 200 years of dormancy, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano started rumbling fiercely; then, the top exploded in a massive out-pouring of lava, pyro-clastic debris and sulfurous smoke and ash. The eruption, which continues into its second week, has sent a great billowing plume of ash and gas high up into the stratosphere and across thousands of miles, blanketing a large portion of Europe.

Apart from the major disruption in flight traffic and the economy, the Icelandic volcano eruption promises in the short-term to disrupt upper atmospheric circulation patterns and temperatures, with an additional impact due to sulfuric acid “nucleation” and subsequent acid rain. But the medium to long-term impacts of continuous, or increasing, volcanic eruptions is a matter of on-going scientific debate.

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A group of 30 leading Earth and Environmental scientists is proposing “nine planetary boundaries”, or safety zones, that must not be crossed in order to preserve the planetary and environmental balance that human civilizations (and much of the rest of the biosphere) require.  Crossing these boundaries–and three of them may have already been crossed–could “generate unacceptable environmental change for humanity.”

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The chart shows the averaged rate of Greenland's mass loss, measured in centimeters of ice thickness, between February 2003 and June 2009 (AGU).

Greenland’s ice mass loss over the past decade–concentrated primarily over its southern most regions–has been well-documented and has been a prime impetus for global warming and climate change concerns, especially as regards the impacts on the Arctic region. Now, thanks to an innovative, combined Earth-Space monitoring system, geophysicists and climatologists have been able to track Greenland’s ice mass loss “migrating” northward (see the embedded video simulation of this migration in the body of this article).

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