May 5, 2008
Global warming is likely to reduce the health of tropical species, scientists from UCLA and the University of Washington report May 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
At the same time, a little bit of warming may actually move certain organisms, particularly insects, in the high latitudes closer to their optimal temperature, the researchers say.
“In the tropics, most of the organisms we have studied, from insects to amphibians and reptiles, are already living at their optimal physiological temperatures,” said Curtis Deutsch, UCLA assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and co-author of the study. “When warming starts, they do less well as they move toward the hottest end of their comfort range. Even a modest increase in temperature appears rather large to them and negatively impacts their population growth rates.”
Why should we be concerned with the fate of insects in the tropics?
“The biodiversity of the planet is concentrated in tropical climates, where there is a tremendous variety of species,” Deutsch said. “This makes our finding that the impacts of global warming are going to be most detrimental to species in tropical climates all the more disturbing. In addition, what hurts the insects hurts the ecosystem. Insects carry out essential functions for humans and ecosystems — such as pollinating our crops and breaking down organic matter back into its nutrients so other organisms can use them. Insects are essential to the ecosystem.”
At least for the short term, the impact of global warming will have opposing effects. In the tropics, warming will reduce insects’ ability to reproduce; in the high latitudes, the ability of organisms to reproduce will increase slightly, Deutsch said. If warming continues, the insects in the high latitudes would eventually be adversely affected as well.
“Our results imply that in the absence of any adaptation or migration by these populations in the tropics, they will experience large declines in their population growth rate,” Deutsch said. “This could lead to a fairly rapid population collapse, but organisms are adaptable; the question is, what will their response be? They could migrate toward the poles or toward higher elevations, for instance.”
“We don’t think this is restricted to insect species,” Deutsch said. “Data on turtles, lizards, frogs and toads show patterns that are very similar to what we find for insects. They will do much worse in the tropics than in the high latitudes.”
Scientists have measured in laboratories how sensitive different species are to changes in temperature. For insects, the data is comprehensive and includes information on how temperature affects the population growth rate for species, Deutsch said. He and his colleagues — who included Joshua Tewksbury, assistant professor of biology at the University of Washington, and Raymond Huey, professor of biology at the University of Washington — studied the data, then went to climate models and analyzed what the predicted temperature change in various regions implied about species’ future growth rate.
According to climate predictions, more rapid rates of warming of the Earth’s surface will occur in the higher latitudes, especially in the polar regions, than at the equator, Deutsch said.
“You would think a larger warming in Alaska would have a greater impact on the organisms living there than a much smaller increase in, say, Panama or Costa Rica,” he said. “We found the opposite will be true. A 1-degree temperature change in Panama will not be felt the same way by an organism as a 1-degree temperature change in Alaska.”
The range of temperature tolerance that an organism has is largely dependent on how much temperature variability it experiences. In the tropics, the amount of temperature variability is very small; there is little difference between summer and winter, while in Alaska, the seasons are dramatically different.
To live in their environments, organisms in the tropics should have a relatively narrow tolerance for temperature change, while in the high latitudes, organisms should be able to tolerate a much wider variation in temperature.
“The magnitude of the impact of global warming depends largely on what we do to slow it down,” Deutsch said.
Deutsch studies interactions between the Earth’s climate and biological systems such as ecosystems. He is an expert in biogeochemistry, a new field that studies how biological, chemical and geological processes influence the chemical composition of the atmosphere and its climate.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences research is federally funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as by the University of Washington’s Program on Climate Change, where Deutsch was a postdoctoral scholar and where he conducted the research.
Image Caption: Curtis Deutsch
Image Credit: UCLA Newsroom
Source: University of California, Los Angeles
Posted by Scientific Frontline under Environmental Alerts, Global Warming / Climate Change, Univ. Environmental News | Comments (0)
May 5, 2008
The Earth’s oceans play a vital role in the carbon cycle, making it imperative that we understand marine biological 
activity enough to predict how our planet will react to the extra 25 000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the atmosphere annually.
The color of oceanic seawater depends largely on the number of microscopic phytoplankton, marine plants that live in the well-lit surface layer. Just like land-based plants, phytoplankton accumulate carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and store it in their tissues, making them potentially important carbon sinks.
While phytoplankton themselves are individually microscopic, the chlorophyll they collectively contain colors the ocean’s waters, which provides a means of detecting these tiny organisms from space with dedicated ocean color sensors.
To support ocean carbon cycle research, ESA’s GlobColour project has merged 55 terabytes of data from three state-of-the-art instruments aboard different satellites, including MERIS aboard ESA’s Envisat, MODIS aboard NASA’s Aqua and SeaWiFS aboard GeoEye’s Orbview-2, to produce a 10-year dataset of global ocean color stretching to 2007.
“I am quite impressed by the work ESA has done so far within GlobColour,” said Dr Cyril Moulin of the International Ocean Carbon Coordination Project (IOCCP). “This
10-year dataset is going to be very useful for carbon studies and global modeling.”
The ocean color datasets are freely available to the public via the GlobColour web site. A new web interface, Hermes, is available which allows users to select a time period, spatial region and product type. Based on this input, the system extracts the appropriate ocean color products for users to download.
By combining observations from multiple sensors, GlobColour brings several benefits over existing products, such as better sampling of the daily variability, smaller errors because of the larger amount of data and reduced instrumental biases.
To guarantee the data set is of good quality, the data have undergone an intensive validation process by comparing measurements from in-situ buoys. The conclusion was that the error statistics of the merged data are better than data from the three individual sensors.
In addition to aiding carbon cycle research, ocean color data can provide oceanographers with the information they need to monitor the state of the oceans for other applications, such as for the fisheries and aquaculture industries.
GlobColour, part of ESA’s Data User Element (DUE), will begin providing near-real time ocean color observations to support this type of operational oceanography from mid-2008.
This service will continue well into the future, thanks to the European Commission (EC), who will continue production of the GlobColour time series from 2009 as part of the Marine Core Service of the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) initiative.
“We need to sustain an international effort to make sure we can link one satellite dataset to another to build the long-time series that we need to distinguish change from cycles, and GlobColour is definitely a significant step in that perspective,” said Dr James Yoder, Chair of the International Ocean-Colour Coordinating Group (IOCCG).
Marine Core Service and GMES
The Marine Core Service will deliver systematic reference information on the state of the global ocean and European Union seas by providing observational and model data, real-time predictions and ocean scenario simulations.
GMES – a joint initiative of the EC and ESA – responds to Europe’s needs for geo-spatial information services by bringing together the capacity of Europe to collect and manage data and information on the environment and civil security, for the benefit of European citizens.
Image Caption: A GlobColour chlorophyll product showing the distribution of phytoplankton in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.
Image Credit: globcolour.info
Source: ESA
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May 1, 2008
Lake Baikal in Siberia had been thought resistant to climate change
Russian and American scientists have discovered that the rising temperature of the world’s largest lake, located in frigid Siberia, shows that this region is responding strongly to global warming.
Drawing on 60 years of long-term studies of Russia’s Lake Baikal, Stephanie Hampton, an ecologist and deputy director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Marianne Moore, a biologist at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass., along with four other scientists, report their results on-line today in the journal Global Change Biology.
“Warming of this isolated but enormous lake is a clear signal that climate change has affected even the most remote corners of our planet,” Hampton said.
In their paper, the scientists detail the effects of climate change on Lake Baikal–from warming of its vast waters to reorganization of its microscopic food web.
“The conclusions shown here for this enormous body of freshwater result from careful and repeated sampling over six decades,” said Henry Gholz, program director for NCEAS at the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the research. “Thanks to the dedication of local scientists, who were also keen observers, coupled with modern synthetic approaches, we can now visualize and appreciate the far-reaching changes occurring in this lake.”
Lake Baikal is the grand dame of lakes. In 1996, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared it a World Heritage site because of its biological diversity. It boasts 2500 plant and animal species, with most, including the freshwater seal, found nowhere else in the world.
The lake contains 20 percent of the world’s freshwater, and it is large enough to hold all the water in the United States’ Great Lakes. It is the world’s deepest lake as well as its oldest; at 25 million years old, it predates the emergence of humans.
In more recent times, it was a dedicated group of humans who made this study possible.
“Our research relies on a 60-year data set, collected in Lake Baikal by three generations of a single family of Siberian scientists,” Moore said. “In the 1940s, Mikhail Kozhov began collecting and analyzing water samples in anticipation that this lake could reveal much about how lakes in general function.
“Ultimately, his daughter Olga Kozhova continued the program, followed by her daughter, who is also a co-author of today’s paper: Lyubov Izmest’eva.”
The decades-long research effort survived the reign of Stalin, the fall of the Soviet Union, and other social and financial upheavals in the region.
Data collection continued through every season, in an environment where winter temperatures drop to -50 degrees F.
The data on Lake Baikal reveal “significant warming of surface waters and long-term changes in the food web of the world’s largest, most ancient lake,” write the researchers in their paper. “Increases in water temperature (1.21°C since 1946), chlorophyll a (300 percent since 1979), and an influential group of zooplankton grazers (335 percent since 1946) have important implications for nutrient cycling and food web dynamics.”
The scientists conclude that the lake now joins other large lakes, including Superior, Tanganyika and Tahoe, in showing warming trends.
“But,” they note, “temperature changes in Lake Baikal are particularly significant as a signal of long-term regional warming.
“This lake was expected to be among those most resistant to climate change, due to its tremendous volume and unique water circulation.”
The research paper is the result of a collaboration involving six Siberian and American scientists, who were assisted by student translators from Wellesley College.
In addition to Hampton and Moore, the paper’s contributors are Izmest’eva, director of the Scientific Research Institute of Biology, Irkutsk State University, Irkutsk, Russia; Stephen L. Katz, recently of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA Fisheries, Seattle, Wash.; Brian Dennis of the departments of statistics and fish and wildlife resources, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho; and Eugene A. Silow of the Scientific Research Institute of Biology, Irkutsk State University, Irkutsk, Russia.
Image Caption: This well-known landmark, Shaman Rock on Lake Baikal in Russia, stands guard over an ancient lake whose pristine condition is changing quickly.
Image Credit: Nicholas Rodenhouse
Source: NSF
Posted by Scientific Frontline under Global Warming / Climate Change | Comments (0)
April 30, 2008
New University of Colorado at Boulder calculations indicate the record low minimum extent of sea ice across the Arctic last September has a three-in-five chance of being shattered again in 2008 because of continued warming temperatures and a preponderance of younger, thinner ice.
The forecast by researchers at CU-Boulder’s Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research is based on satellite data and temperature records and indicates there is a 59 percent chance the annual minimum sea ice record will be broken this fall for the third time in five years. Arctic sea ice declined by roughly 10 percent in the past decade, culminating in a record 2007 minimum ice cover of 1.59 million square miles. That broke the 2005 record by 460,000 miles — an area the size of Texas and California combined.
“The current Arctic ice cover is thinner and younger than at any previous time in our recorded history, and this sets the stage for rapid melt and a new record low,” said Research Associate Sheldon Drobot, who leads CCAR’s Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group in CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department. Overall, 63 percent of the Arctic ice cover is younger than average, and only 2 percent is older than average, according to Drobot.
Changes in Arctic sea ice — defined as the area of an ocean covered by at least 15 percent ice — is “one of the more compelling and obvious signs of climate change,” said Drobot. Continued Arctic sea ice declines likely will have negative effects on various types of wildlife, including polar bears, walruses and seals, he said.
For humans, larger ice-free zones in the Arctic region for longer periods offer potential for cheaper and faster merchant shipping between North America and Europe, he said. The declining ice may well open up the Northwest Passage, for example, which runs through the Bering Strait, the Chukchi Sea, the Beaufort Sea and through the Canadian Archipelago to the Atlantic Ocean.
“Based on the current sea ice conditions, aerospace engineering Research Professor Jim Maslanik said the Northern Sea Route — the shipping lane from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean along the Russian coastline — might also open up this summer. “It also is quite possible that extensive ice-free conditions could develop at or near the North Pole,” said Maslanik.
CU-Boulder’s Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group — the only research group in the world currently making seasonal Arctic sea ice forecasts based on probability — receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
In January 2008, a team led by Maslanik and involving CCAR’s Drobot, Charles Fowler and William Emery, as well as Julienne Stroeve of CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and NASA’s Jay Zwally and Donghui Yi, concluded there had been a nearly complete loss of the oldest, thickest Arctic sea ice. The team calculated that 58 percent of the remaining Arctic sea ice was thin and only two to three years old.
The researchers used passive microwave, visible infrared radar and laser altimeter satellite data from NOAA, NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as ocean buoys to measure and track sections of sea ice. They developed “signatures” of individual ice sections roughly 15 miles square using their thickness, roughness, snow depth and ridge characteristics, tracking them over the seasons and years as they moved around the Arctic.
Last summer the CCAR Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group, which has been making Arctic sea ice forecasts for the past six years, correctly forecast the 2007 record minimum. Updated forecasts will be provided throughout the spring and summer. For more information visit the Web at ccar.colorado.edu/arifs.
CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, which also analyzes changes and trends in Arctic sea ice, maintains a Web site with general information about sea ice, updated images of Arctic sea ice conditions, monthly analyses and more frequent sea ice updates during the summer melt season. For more information on the NSIDC Arctic sea ice research activity, visit the Web at nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/.
Source: University of Colorado, Boulder
Posted by Scientific Frontline under Environmental Alerts, Global Warming / Climate Change | Comments (0)
April 30, 2008
Solar America Cities program has simple aim: solarize the U.S. landscape
DOE photovoltaic funding for years has gone to programs that promise more efficient conversion of sunlight to electricity, or in aiding solar start-up companies. It’s called “technology push.”
Now for something different. In the past year, an unusually innovative DOE program called Solar America Cities has focused on reaching out to formerly ignored, sometimes low-profile city decision makers who administer large chunks of urban real estate. It’s called “technology pull.”
The insight at DOE management was that these key folk could purchase enough solar to make its installation as common and ordinary as curbside recycling.
DOE encouragement would include matching funds, technical support, free policy analyses, and public relations suggestions to help educate relevant political participants as well as the public.
“Tiger Teams” play a large role in underpinning the program. Personnel from Sandia National Laboratories, the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), the Florida Solar Energy Center, New Mexico State University, and private sector partner CH2M Hill, aid city managers and staff with practical savvy as DOE personnel push the higher vision of “making solar mainstream.”
Tiger Teams are assemblages of experts put together for a particular purpose, says Sandia Tiger Team group leader Vipin Gupta. They disband once the mission is completed, only to reassemble elsewhere.
“Tigers are an appropriate metaphor,” Gupta says. “Our people are independent-minded and driven. You can’t just issue an order to them. They’re decentralized, creative, and getting more and more disciplined.”
Tiger Team member Jeannette Moore puts it more viscerally. “People in city agencies have been talking about solar for years. Usually, they’ve gotten a little sleepy. Then we show up. We tell them, we’re going to do solar right now. That wakes everyone up.”
The program was conceived by DOE acting program manager Tom Kimbis in a casual drawing on a piece of paper on an airplane trip. He passed it back to a colleague who thought it was a nice idea but saw no reason why anyone would participate.
They would participate, Kimbis decided, because “Cities are strapped for cash,” he said in an interview. “We’d give them money. But we’d give more than money. Two hundred k [dollars] is a lot in Ann Arbor but nothing in New York. We’d give them wording for legislation, when legislators call us for advice. A website where they could exchange ideas, so that New York could see what San Francisco was doing. And we’d give it a name — Solar America Cities — because for some reason cities like names [like Sunbelt Cities]. Amazingly, it makes people want to move there.”
The remarkably energetic effort celebrated its first anniversary in Tucson on April 14-16.
One-hundred twenty involved participants from 25 selected cities (chosen competitively from among 50 to 75 applicants, says Kimbis) explained or absorbed lessons of success or failure in attempts to use solar not only to save energy and lower greenhouse gases but generate low-interest loans, foster start-up companies, attract technically educated personnel, create high-paying jobs, and develop solar education courses. Other areas under discussion included solidifying local political support, writing workable inspection codes, supplying wording for appropriate legislation when asked, and choosing appropriate and sometimes “out-of-the-box” materials and locations for various forms of solar.
“I’m amazed this is a DOE project,” says Mustapha Beydoun, a research scientist at the Houston Advanced Research Center. “It’s so inclusive. It’s good to see who’s tried what and what works and what doesn’t,” he said of the conference, “so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Problems often come up exactly where you never expected them to.”
While from a flat financial viewpoint, the dour view is correct that solar is still too expensive to be practical — in some areas, three times the cost of generating electricity from coal — some attendees pointed out that solar power is strongest when the demand for electricity is greatest, at the hottest part of summer days. Thus, it could be used to lower the number of power plants needed to meet air conditioning and other power needs of these peak hours.
Solar electricity also requires no water to convert its fuel into electricity — a possible problem for other methods of generating power as fresh water becomes scarcer.
An oft-repeated mantra, often in the form of graphs, at the convention was that the costs of other fuels are rising while the cost of converting sunlight to electricity is declining.
Rick Scheu, CEO of Portland, Ore.-based King Solar Products, said that administrators in Germany had decided it was useless to compare the various subsidies for different forms of energy production: “About solar, they decided, ‘We need it and we’re putting it in.’”
Austin Mayor Will Wynn (“That’s really my name. My parents did it to me,”) said that city buildings will be 100 percent renewable-energy run by Jan. 1, 2009, with 15 megawatts of solar online by 2012 and 100 solar megawatts online by 2020.
“I tell people that Texas was America’s number-one energy state in the 20th century, and if we want to remain that in the 21st, we need to work on starting up companies that harness the sun,” he said.
So the enthusiasm was there, along with more cynical motives like the need to meet legislated requirements on alternative energy production, the carrot of tax incentives, and the funding and technical assistance provided by the DOE program.
The program distributed $200,000 cash to each chosen city for the execution of their developing citywide solar adoption plan, and also makes available a kind of gift certificate of $200,000 drawn on DOE that pays for work by Sandia and other labs for solar technical assistance. The cities contribute, on average, $200,000 of their own, though larger cities like Boston and New York contribute far more. The city population must be at least 100,000.
Asked what will bring other cities to the table once the two-year DOE-funded program ceases in fiscal 2009, DOE program “market transformation director” Charlie Hemmeline said that the agency’s solar programs weren’t going away, and suggested that cities later interested in getting help to follow the path laid out by the 25 chosen cities might not find a deaf ear at DOE.
And there’s more. The Solar American Showcase program and the Government Solar Installation Program are less publicized but equally real parts of DOE’s solar effort.
The showcase program provides $200,000 and Tiger Team technical assistance to companies, universities, cities, or states interested in trying new solar technologies. The winners include Forest City Military Communities in Hawaii, the city of San Jose, the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., Montclair State University in New Jersey, and a Housing Authority project in northeast Denver.
The government installation program provides solar technical assistance to federal entities.
Sandia provided two Tiger Team members for these projects last year, says Vipin: one at the Smithsonian Zoo last spring and summer, figuring out the photovoltaic needs for the elephant house (3,000 sq. ft. of photovoltaics would do the job for cooling and lights) and for the US Capitol Building complex. “The Tiger Team did a comprehensive study there on creative ways to adopt solar without running against the stringent historic architecture restrictions there,” Gupta says.
Some areas in which Tiger Teams provide help:
- Tech assistance in photovoltaics, solar water heating, concentrated solar power, solar water, air heating technologies; solar resource assessment (time of year/day)
- City municipal planning: city planning, regulatory support, policy-making assistance; market analysis, consumer behavior, project financing; appropriate technology solutions, user training, monitoring.
- Architectural structural support: building codes review, architectural and structural analysis, preparation of bid specifications, outreach communications, best practices.
Image Caption: Sandia’s Tiger Team members relaxing for a group shot at the 1st annual Solar America Cities meeting in Tuscon are (standing, left to right) Jeannette Moore, Andrew Kazensky, Howard Passell, Vipin Gupta, Greg Kolb, and Jack Mizner. Kneeling is Warren Cox. Present but not in the photo were Sandra Begay-Campbell, Beth Richards, and Charlie Hanley. Dick Fate, another team member, was occupied elsewhere.
Source: Sandia National Laboratories
Posted by Scientific Frontline under Government Achievements | Comments (0)
April 29, 2008
MU engineer concerned about environmental impact of silver nanoparticles in wastewater treatment
Too much of a good thing could be harmful to the environment. For years, scientists have known about silver’s ability to kill harmful bacteria and, recently, have used this knowledge to create consumer products containing silver nanoparticles. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found that silver nanoparticles also may destroy benign bacteria that are used to remove ammonia from wastewater treatment systems. The study was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Several products containing silver nanoparticles already are on the market, including socks containing silver nanoparticles designed to inhibit odor-causing bacteria and high-tech, energy-efficient washing machines that disinfect clothes by generating the tiny particles. The positive effects of that technology may be overshadowed by the potential negative environmental impact.
“Because of the increasing use of silver nanoparticles in consumer products, the risk that this material will be released into sewage lines, wastewater treatment facilities, and, eventually, to rivers, streams and lakes is of concern,” said Zhiqiang Hu, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in MU’s College of Engineering. “We found that silver nanoparticles are extremely toxic. The nanoparticles destroy the benign species of bacteria that are used for wastewater treatment. It basically halts the reproduction activity of the good bacteria.”
Hu said silver nanoparticles generate more unique chemicals, known as highly reactive oxygen species, than do larger forms of silver. These oxygen species chemicals likely inhibit bacterial growth. For example, the use of wastewater treatment “sludge” as land-application fertilizer is a common practice, according to Hu. If high levels of silver nanoparticles are present in the sludge, soil used to grow food crops may be harmed.
Hu is launching a second study to determine the levels at which the presence of silver nanoparticles become toxic. He will determine how silver nanoparticles affect wastewater treatment processes by introducing nanomaterial into wastewater and sludge. He will then measure microbial growth to determine the nanosilver levels that harm wastewater treatment and sludge digestion.
The Water Environment Research Foundation recently awarded Hu $150,000 to determine when silver nanoparticles start to impair wastewater treatment. Hu said nanoparticles in wastewater can be better managed and regulated. Work on the follow-up research should be completed by 2010.
The silver nanoparticle research conducted by Hu and his graduate student, Okkyoung Choi, was recently published in Water Research and Environmental Science & Technology.
Source: University of Missouri
Posted by Scientific Frontline under Environmental Alerts | Comments (0)
April 29, 2008
The long-term problem of how to manage and dispose of Britain’s nuclear waste is to be tackled by a UK consortium headed by the University of Leeds.
Over the past 60 years, Britain has established 20 nuclear sites and facilities, as part of its civil nuclear program. These are now managed by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). Current estimates of the cost of decommissioning the sites and handling waste management and disposal stand at around £70 billion.
The DIAMOND (Decommissioning, Immobilization And Management of Nuclear wastes for Disposal) consortium will draw on expertise from the universities of Manchester, Sheffield, Imperial College, Loughborough, University College London and Leeds, in a four-year program which has received £4.2 million funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Areas covered by the program will include legacy wastes, site termination, contaminant migration and materials design and performance. A key strength of the consortium’s approach is that it will bring together skills and knowledge from a diverse range of academic disciplines, including radiochemistry, waste immobilization, materials performance and mathematical modeling.
Researchers will also work closely with the NDA and stakeholders in the nuclear industry to make sure research addresses relevant issues. At the same time, researchers will get the opportunity to experience ‘real life’ challenges in industry.
Professor Simon Biggs, from the School of Process, Environmental and Materials Engineering at the University of Leeds, is leading the consortium. He said:
“By challenging the status quo and seeking new and innovative solutions we believe this program of research will generate real savings on the treatment and disposal of legacy waste, site decommissioning and remediation.”
A key priority is to address a growing EU-wide skills gap in the nuclear research field, through training the next generation of nuclear waste specialists. The consortium is looking for industrial partners and is also offering PhD and postdoctoral research opportunities at all member institutions.
Dr Jim Young, DIAMOND program manager, said:
“The value of the consortium’s approach is that projects will be co-supervised by academics with expertise in different fields of knowledge, which will enhance creativity and increase the potential for a step change technology breakthrough.”
Source: University of Leeds
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April 28, 2008
In America, even the smallest footprints are large
Whether you live in a cardboard box or a luxurious mansion, whether you subsist on homegrown vegetables or wolf down imported steaks, whether you’re a jet-setter or a sedentary retiree, anyone who lives in the U.S. contributes more than twice as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as those living in the rest of the world.
An MIT class has estimated the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles–from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms–and compared them to those of other nations. The somewhat disquieting bottom line is that in the United States, even the people with the lowest usage of energy are still producing, on average, more than double the global per-capita average. And those emissions rise steeply from that minimum as people’s income increases: The class estimated Bill Gates’ impact as about 10,000 times the average.
“Regardless of income, there is a certain floor below which the individual carbon footprint of a person in the U.S. will not drop,” says Timothy Gutowski, professor of mechanical engineering, who taught the class that calculated the rates of carbon emissions.
The results will be presented this May 19-20 at the IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment in San Francisco.
While it may seem surprising that even people whose lifestyles don’t appear extravagant–the homeless, monks, children–are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, one major factor is the array of government services that are available to everyone in the United States. These basic services-including police, roads, libraries, the court system and the military-were allocated equally to everyone in the country in this study. Other services that are more specific, such as education or Medicare, were allocated only to those who actually make use of them.
The students conducted detailed interviews or made detailed estimates of the energy usage of 18 lifestyles, spanning the gamut from a vegetarian college student and a 5-year-old up to the ultra-rich-Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates. The energy impact for the rich was estimated from published sources, while all the others were based on direct interviews. The average annual carbon dioxide emissions per person, they found, was 20 metric tons, compared to a world average of four tons.
But the “floor” below which nobody in the U.S. can reach, no matter what their energy choices, turned out to be 8.5 tons, the class found. That was the usage calculated for a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters. The person with the lowest energy usage was a Buddhist monk who spent six months of every year living in the forest and had total annual spending of $12,500. His carbon footprint was 10.5 tons.
The analysis was carried out by Gutowski and 21 students in his 2007 class “Environmentally benign design and manufacturing.” They derived a system for making such comparisons, which they call ELSA-Environmental Life Style Analysis.
Unlike some other attempts to quantify people’s carbon emissions, Gutowski and his students took great care to account for often-overlooked factors such as the “rebound effect.” That’s when someone makes a particular choice-for example, buying a hybrid car instead of a gas-guzzler-but then uses the money saved from their reduced gasoline costs to do something else like taking a long trip by airplane. The net impact, in such a case, may actually be an overall increase in carbon emissions.
“When you save energy, you save money,” Gutowski explains. “The question is, how are you going to spend that money?”
The students looked at the factors within each person’s control that might lead to a reduction in their carbon output. They found that achieving significant reductions for the most part required drastic changes that would likely be unacceptable to most people. As a result, they said, “this all suggests to us very significant limits to voluntary actions to reduce impacts, both at a personal level and at a national level.”
In a continuation of the class this semester, another group of students are exploring this question in more detail, looking at just what kinds of things people really can do to limit their environmental impact. The question they are addressing, Gutowski says, is “can average Americans tighten their belts” in a way that would make a significant difference. Once again, the class will be interviewing people living in a wide variety of ways, including an Amish farmer. Then, after analyzing the results and possible changes, they will go back to the same people and ask, “would you consider these alternatives?”
In general, spending money on travel or on goods that have substantial energy costs in their manufacture and delivery adds to a person’s carbon footprint, while expenditures on locally based labor-intensive services-whether it’s going to a therapist, taking an art class, or getting a massage-leads to a smaller footprint.
But the biggest factors in most people’s lives were the well-known obvious energy users: housing, transportation and food. “The simple way you get people’s carbon use down is to tax it,” Gutowski says. “That’s a hard pill to swallow-politicians don’t like to step up” to support such measures. Absent such national actions, he says, it is important to study “what role consumer choices can play” in lowering the nation’s carbon emissions.
If nothing else, the members of this class got a whole new perspective. “The students really got into it,” Gutowski says. “It raised everybody’s awareness about the issues.”
Source: MIT / David Chandler
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April 17, 2008
The Earth’s jet streams, the high-altitude bands of fast winds that strongly influence the paths of storms and other weather systems, are shifting—possibly in response to global warming. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution determined that over a 23-year span from 1979 to 2001 the jet streams in both hemispheres have risen in altitude and shifted toward the poles. The jet stream in the northern hemisphere has also weakened. These changes fit the predictions of global warming models and have implications for the frequency and intensity of future storms, including hurricanes.
Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology tracked changes in the average position and strength of jet streams using records compiled by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the National Centers for Environmental Protection, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The data included outputs from weather prediction models, conventional observations from weather balloons and surface instruments, and remote observations from satellites. The results are published in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters.
Jet streams twist and turn in a wide swath that changes from day to day. The poleward shift in their average location discovered by the researchers is small, about 19 kilometers (12 miles) per decade in the northern hemisphere, but if the trend continues the impact could be significant. “The jet streams are the driving factor for weather in half of the globe,” says Archer. “So, as you can imagine, changes in the jets have the potential to affect large populations and major climate systems.”
Storm paths in North America are likely to shift northward as a result of the jet stream changes. Hurricanes, whose development tends to be inhibited by jet streams, may become more powerful and more frequent as the jet streams move away from the sub-tropical zones where hurricanes are born.
The observed changes are consistent with numerous other signals of global warming found in previous studies, such as the widening of the tropical belt, the cooling of the stratosphere, and the poleward shift of storm tracks. This is the first study to use observation-based datasets to examine trends in all the jet stream parameters, however.
“At this point we can’t say for sure that this is the result of global warming, but I think it is,” says Caldeira. “I would bet that the trend in the jet streams’ positions will continue. It is something I’d put my money on.”
Image Credit: NASA
Source: Carnegie Institution of Washington
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