Posted on

The Wrath of Global Warming

Dr. Reese Halter

Conservation biologist

Last week the Republicans in the House of Representatives decided to eliminate a global warming committee created by Democrats. Apparently some politicians continue to deny that human beings are leaving an indelible footprint around the globe.

Vicious hate-mailers which frequent my inbox on the subject of global warming seem also to be in denial, yet a recent survey published in July 2010 in The Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences found that of 1,372 scientists involved in climate research 97 to 98 percent supported anthropogenic (or human-induced) climate change (ACC).

Twenty-four climate models including Japan’s Earth Simulator super-computer predict that if a carbon-cap is not firmly in place by 2020 Earth’s temperature will rise by at least 5.5 degrees F and perhaps as high as 10 degrees F by the end of this century.

And while the delegates for 193 nations meet at the U.N. climate summit in Cancun and argue for who pays for what; this year (2010) will go down as a record year for the amount of coal burned in one year on our planet. It will easily exceed 6.25 billion tons and China’s galloping economy will have contributed at 54 percent of the global emissions.

Each of their coal-fired power plants is consuming 2.2 billion gallons of fresh water and worldwide burning coal is adding as much as 7,500 tons of mercury vapor — a potent neurotoxin — to our stratosphere. It’s winding up in our food chain and drinking water here in America.

Let’s take a look at what Earth’s ecosystems are telling scientists about rising temperatures, acidifying oceans, droughts, intense rainfalls, dying forests and melting ice caps.

Rising temperatures have significantly impacted Hawaii. Surface temperatures are rising, rainfall and stream flow has generally declined, rain intensity has increased, sea level and sea surface temperatures have increased, and the ocean is acidifying.

Around the world jellyfish populations are on the rise as the oceans acidify. Shellfish, on the other hand, like mussels, shrimp, or lobsters are at risk since they will find it considerably more difficult to build their protective shells.

Oceans are naturally alkaline and had a pH level of about 8.2 in 1750. Since the Industrial Revolution, the acidity has increased by 30 percent. Earth’s oceans absorb about 25 percent of the global CO2 emissions. In this process, CO2 is converted into carbonic acid. Rising CO2 levels are unequivocally causing the oceans to become more acidic.

Canada experienced its warmest and driest winter on record. Abnormally dry conditions in British Columbia combined with higher temperatures resulted in poor snow conditions for some events at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver/Whistler. Winter temperatures on average across the nation were 8 degrees F above normal. Springtime temperatures were also 5 degrees F above average.

Canada experienced the largest spring Arctic sea ice retreat ever recorded as well as registering the largest missing summer sea ice. To experience the warmest winter and spring, back to back, is extraordinary. The year 2010 will go on record as the hottest year ever recorded in Canada.

In Moscow the July mean temperatures were almost 10 degrees F above normal; and the heat wave that gripped the nation killed in excess of 11,000 people in Moscow alone.

Japan and China had their hottest summers ever recorded.

Extreme heat affected northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula during the summer of 2010 with temperatures of 126 degrees F measured in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) and 123 degrees F at Doha (Qatar).

After 13 years of being parched the drought in Australia (except for the southwest) broke. Rainfall arrived, farmers rejoiced, grain crops grew and then the rain kept on falling.

A bumper grain crop of 45 tons was predicted. It was the wettest September since the inception of record keeping in the 1850s in Australia. So far at least 15 tons of grain have rotted on the fields. Global grain prices, already at a two-year high after a drought in Russia, have soared again due to persistent rainfall ruining Australian crops and fueling fears of a global shortage.

October was the driest month in Mexico since 1941. November was the driest month in Israel since 1950 and its just suffered the worst-ever forest fire incinerating about 13,000 acres or 60 percent of the Carmel forest, killing 42 people and destroying over 250 homes.

Droughts have been relentless in the Amazon. In 2005 the northwest jungle experienced a one in 100 year drought. In concert with an intense storm 620 miles long by 124 miles wide at least 500 million trees were killed.

Usually the Amazon can absorb about 2 billion tons of CO2 a year. In 2005 the massive die-off of trees released 3 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, therefore an additional 5 billion tons of heat-trapping gases accumulated that year – more than the combined annual emissions of Europe and Japan.

In 2009 extreme flooding occurred in the Amazon jungle.

This year the drought in the northwest Amazon is forecasted to be more lethal than that of 2005. The mighty Negro River — a tributary of the Amazon River — is at its lowest since records began in 1902. Over 60,000 people are now without food and fresh water.

Almost 900 miles southwest of the Negro River over 36,600 fires are alight in the forest over four times the number burning at this time last year.

Unless we reduce our global greenhouse gases around the globe researchers from Carnegie Institution for Sciences predict rising temperatures will alter rainfall in the Amazon by at least 37 percent; many plants and animals now living there with either move but more likely die. Let me remind you that the Amazon accounts for about a fifth of Earth’s annual oxygen output.

Droughts, wild fires and a plague of indigenous bark beetles have leveled the western forests of the United States. Instead of Arizona, Idaho, Colorado and Wyoming forests absorbing CO2 they too are now emitters of CO2.

In the last 60 years the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than perhaps any place on Earth. Winter temperatures have soared by 11 degrees F, and 90 percent of the 244 glaciers are in retreat. The ice-dependent Antarctica krill which feeds millions sea birds and marine mammals has declined in some cases by as much as 80 percent.

The natural world is in a tailspin from the speed of rising temperatures; there is no debate about human-induced global warming amongst field scientists working in marine or terrestrial ecosystems. Global warming is a citizen’s issue therefore we all are required to lend a helping hand — the time is now.

Dr Reese Halter is a Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology, conservation biologist at Cal Lutheran and author of Wild Weather – The Truth Behind Global Warming. Contact him through www.DrReese.com

Share
Posted on

Aliens May Be Living Among Us

By James Morgan , Science reporter

Never mind Mars, alien life may be thriving right here on Earth, a major science conference has heard.

Our planet may harbour forms of “weird life” unrelated to life as we know it, according to Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University.
This “shadow life” may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents, he says.
He has called on scientists to launch a “mission to Earth” by trawling hostile environments for signs of bio-activity.
Weird life could even be living among us, in forms which we don’t yet recognise, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago.
“We don’t have to go to other planets to find weird life.
“It could be right in front of our noses – or even in our noses,” said the physicist.
“It is entirely reasonable to expect we will find a shadow biosphere here on Earth.
“But nobody has actually taken the trouble to look.
“The question is why? The cost is not expensive – it would be a fraction of the money we spend searching for extraterrestrial life.”
‘Second genesis’
Professor Davies was one of the speakers at a symposium exploring the possibility that life has evolved on Earth more than once.
The descendants of this “second genesis” may have survived until today in a “shadow biosphere” which is beyond our radar because its inhabitants have biochemistry so different from our own.
“All our microscopes are customised for life as we know it – so it’s no surprise that we haven’t found microbes with different biochemistry,” said Professor Davies.
“We don’t quite know how weird life would look. It’s as wide as the imagination and that’s why it’s really hard to look for.”
If it exists, weird life could be based on DNA and RNA – but with a slightly different genetic code or different amino acids.
At the other end of the spectrum, we could find creatures which have more drastic differences.
“Maybe one of the elements life uses – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus – could be replaced by something else,” said Professor Davies.
“When I say that, everyone immediately thinks of silicon life – because of Star Trek. But I’m not talking about anything that drastic.
“For example, most of the jobs that can be done by phosphorus can be done by arsenic.”
Arsenic may be poisonous to humans, but it has chemical properties which might make it ideal in a microbe’s machinery, he said.
‘Mission to Earth’
So how do we go about hunting for something we have never seen before?
“There are two possibilities,” said Prof Davies, Director of the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science.
“One is that weird life is ecologically isolated, in niches beyond the reach of mankind.”
In this case, we must begin trawling the world’s most inhospitable environments – deserts, salt lakes, and areas of high pressure, temperature or UV radiation.
We could have a ‘mission to Earth’. There’s a big long list of places we could be looking,” observed Professor Davies
For example, if we are looking for arsenic life, we could head for environments which are both arsenic rich and phosphorus poor – such as deep ocean vents.
“There is also a heavily contaminated lake in California which is arsenic rich – Mono Lake – and we do find microbes in there which get their energy from arsenic.
“But they don’t actually incorporate the arsenic into themselves. They spit it back out again. They smoke but they don’t inhale.”
On the other hand, it could be that “weird life” is actually all around us – intermingled with carbon based life.
“In that case it’s going to be really hard to detect – you have to find some way of filtering everything else out.”
This laborious process has been used to search for unknown organisms in seawater – by painstakingly filtering everything else away.
If we did discover something unprecedented, “we’d all start arguing” said Professor Davies, a theoretical physicist.
“The question would be whether this life was truly different, or whether there was a common precursor a deep branch on the main tree of life.
“Also, how do we know we are dealing with separate Earth genesis and not a Mars genesis?
“We know rocks do get traded between the two planets, and life could hitch a ride.
“Personally, I’m only interested in establishing whether life happened more than once. If we find it has happened twice from scratch then its going to have happened all around the universe.
“It’s going to be teeming with life and there’s a very good chance we are not alone.”
deap sea creatures
Life in the lab
Another way to determine what alternative life might look like is to try to invent it ourselves.
If we can create new molecules which can behave in life-like way, we may then go out and look for these in the environment, says Professor Steven Benner, of the University of Florida.
His team have created perhaps the closest yet to a man-made alternative form of life.
“We are announcing the first example of an artificial synthetic chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution,” he told the conference.
“Is it alive? Well, I can tell you that it is not self-sustaining.
“You have to have a graduate student stand there and feed it from time to time, but it is evolving.”
The molecule is essentially a modified version of our own DNA double helix – but with six “letters” in its genetic alphabet, instead of four.
These nucleotides pair up in strands, which can replicate, though only with the help of polymerase enzymes and heat.
“Sometimes mistakes are made in pairing and these mistakes are maintained in the next generation – it is evolving,” said Prof Brenner.
“The next step is to apply natural selection to it, to see if it can evolve under selective pressure.
“The accepted definition of life is a molecule capable of Darwinian evolution, so we are trying to put together molecules that are capable of doing it.”
But he questioned whether our definition of “living” is perhaps too “Earth-centric”.
“Remember – just because you are a chemical system which is self-sustaining and capable of Darwinian evolution, that doesn’t mean that is the universal definition of life,” he said.
Share
Posted on

Africa to Make a “Quantum Leap” Ahead in Forecasting Climate Change

Africa has struggled to make accurate and detailed predictions of the impact of climate change on its countries, but the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) which began earlier in 2010, will see the continent take a “quantum leap” in climate change projection, says Bruce Hewitson, the project’s Africa coordinator.

CORDEX, an initiative by the World Climate Research Programme, will help downscale the global climate model climate change projections being prepared for the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) so as to predict, for instance, what impact higher global temperatures might have on Lagos, Nigeria, until the end of this century.
This detailed information will feed into the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, expected to be published in 2013 or 2014.

“The priority area for CORDEX is Africa, as it is historically under-researched,” said Hewitson, who is also the co-lead author of the chapter on regional contexts in the report by IPCC Working Group II, which will look at impact, adaptation and vulnerability.

Projecting the impact of climate change requires studying changes in the long-term averages of daily weather patterns and many other factors, and can be a tricky business.

Scientists use climate models that simulate the possible impact of variables like radiation, moisture content, and the movement of air and temperature over a given period of time to help project what could happen.

To make forecasting the possible effects of climate change as comprehensive as possible, and also make the connection between current events and future consequences clearer, scientists and academics have been expanding the list of variables to include sea level rise and even food price increases and malnutrition statistics.

A climate model works by calculating what the climate is doing, say, in terms of wind, temperature and humidity at a number of points on the earth’s surface and in the atmosphere or ocean, according to an explanation on the website, climateprediction.net. The website is backed by the University of Oxford, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and The Open University, all based in the UK.

“These points are laid out as a grid covering the surface of the Earth, dividing it up into a lot of little boxes. The more boxes there are, the finer the resolution of the model and the smaller-scale climate features it can represent. From this point of view, the best climate model would be the one with the finest resolution.”

Previous climate change models for Africa have typically worked at 200 km resolution – the distance covered by each box in the grid – said Hewitson, who heads the Climate Systems Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa.

The target for Africa is to predict climate changes for every 50 km, but some modellers might take it down to even 25 km, said Hewitson.

Fourteen climate modelling groups have already begun work, taking into account climate data from as far back as 1950 and looking beyond into 2100. Because of a lack of capacity in Africa, only two groups – one at UCT, led by Hewitson, and the other being the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria, South Africa – are based on the continent

Climate models are systems of differential equations based on the basic laws of physics, fluid motion, and chemistry.To “run” a model, scientists divide the planet into a 3-dimensional grid, apply the basic equations, and evaluate the results. Atmospheric models calculate winds, heat transfer, radiation, relative humidity, and surface hydrology within each grid and evaluate interactions with neighboring points
The 12 other groups are led by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, the Danish Meteorological Institute and the University of Iowa, which are among the world’s foremost climate modelling institutions.

The climate data generated by the modelling groups will be processed by regional teams in Afrca led by African scientists, as part of the CORDEX initiative. They will be mentored by top global climate modellers such as Bill Gutowski of Iowa State University, who has been involved in efforts to build a climate research community in Africa for the last decade.

The regional teams will then use the data from the 14 climate modelling groups to develop projections, for instance, of flood frequency in a particular catchment area.

“The focus [of the modeling in Africa] is on areas that are urban, agricultural, water catchments, and other regionally important aspects,” said Hewitson.

The mentors will assist the regional teams in developing projections and writing analyses that will meet the requirement of countries wanting information on the effect of climate change on their food security, health, economic growth and a host of other sectors.

The regional teams will be finalized by the end of 2010 and data processing will start in 2011.

(UN Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)
Share
Posted on

As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap

As you sow, so shall you reap

GERD = Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D (It’s how much countries are spending on research and development)


Contribution to peer-reviewed scientific publications by various countries.

Development, progress, recognition: these do not come  accident.

Conclusion:

Robust R&D spending is necessary in order to make any significant contribution to the 21st century world we live in.

(UNESCO Science Report 2010 & The Economist)

Share
Posted on

Using Africa as a Test-Bed for Sustainable Technology

Joshua Keyak, Political science student at Yeshiva University and PresenTense ’09 Greening Fellow

Generally when people talk about needing to slow down and stop climate change they point to the world’s most egregious emission offenders. While countries like the United States and China have the ability to make the largest impact on emission reduction, every country must do its part. Africa has one of the lowest carbon emissions per-capita largely due to its status as underdeveloped. In fact, by using African counties as a test bed for sustainable technologies, we can both help bring sustainability to the forefront and aid developing countries.

To make real progress we need a massive investment in sustainable infrastructure in Africa. Part of the major carbon emitters responsibility is to help developing countries ease into industrialization, but in a sustainable manner. At the same time Africans must take it upon themselves to come into the future with sustainability in mind. I do not mean to gloss over this and pretend this is going to be easy. This will necessarily be a long process with a need to address political and security issues. While there are stable African governments, there are many with dictatorial regimes and even more that are that are war torn. These forms of government certainly stand in the way of the progress of sustainability.

The use of Africa as a test-bed for sustainable technology, albeit on the periphery of its mission, has been tried by the Earth Institute. One of the biggest problems I believe this institution strives to solve, as should the powers of the world if they are serious about this issue, is how to approach Africa. For years, Africa has been looked upon as a continent riddled with tribal war dating back to ancient times. Many do not hesitate to classify this society as primitive and thus, believe that the “solution” to the “problem” is supplanting infrastructure and industrialization. If we can see that Africa is a continent which was controlled through colonization and was demoralized, split up and forced to hate, we can see that the “solution” is not so clear. Aid to Africa is not a mere imposition of our beliefs on their culture, but it is working together with their culture to bring sustainable technology to them. Once we set them on the path, they will have the tools to “fish” for themselves.

In my coming posts I will address specific factors that make Africa ripe for sustainability and the challenges to why this may never happen. At the same time I will try to suggest ways to help develop African countries in a sustainable matter.
Share
Posted on

Imagine all you needed at the ATM was your face, no card

Mamadu Yvonne
You may soon withdraw money from an Automated Teller Machines without using your credit or debit card, thanks to a face recognition technology in the making.
Known as the Basic Intelligent Automated Teller Machine, if the new device is incorporated in the current ATMs, all one will require to get money is to stand in front of the machines.
It is the brainchild of Dr Waweru Mwangi, the director of the Institute of Computer Science and Information Technology at Jomo Kenyatta University, and is on display at the national scientific conference in Nairobi.
The smart ATM removes the need to carry cards every time one wishes to access the bank account. The idea behind the machine’s development is to make banking friendly.
“We realised that many people feel uncomfortable with the card, which in some cases is retained by the machine,” Dr Mwangi says.
 [ad#GBAF-2-pix]

Its use could also reduce the now common incidents where carjackers force their victims to empty their accounts at gunpoint, often taking the card and the personal identification number (PIN).
The Intelligent ATM comes equipped with a camera that recognises the customer’s face and sends details of the facial dimensions to a database for verification.
The camera uses the system of biometrics to recognise the account holder — those used in computer science are the distance between the eyes and the proportion of the nose to the mouth and the location of the cheekbones.
Once the image is found to be authentic, the customer is then prompted to enter their PIN or asked a personal question such as “What’s your pet’s name?”
The correct PIN or answer would then allow the person to use the ATM in the normal way. Your twin brother or sister would pass the face test but fail at the PIN or question stage.
It also impossible to use a life-size photograph of the account holder as the machine uses three dimensions, length, width and depth, to recognise the image.
Dr Mwangi said the only requirement would be for the software to be working properly and then it would be linked to the current system of machines in use.
Face recognition technology is used to control access to buildings, but Dr Mwangi said it has never been used in ATMs anywhere in the world.
Dr Mwangi said at the current rate of progress, a prototype would be ready for testing in a few months and then the idea would be sold to banks and implemented.
It is one of the projects being developed by the National Council for Science and Technology and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
However, face recognition technology has struggled to perform under certain conditions in other countries where the technology has been tested, some researchers say.
Mr Ralph Gross, an American researcher at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, says where face recognition does not work well include poor lighting, sunglasses, long hair, or other objects partially covering the face, and low resolution images.
However, the Kenyan innovators are optimistic that they will beat the setback upon further improvement of the technology.
And at the same exhibition, two student innovators have finally presented the bicycle-powered smart mobile phone chargers in the market.
This is a year after Pascal Katana, 24, and Jeremiah Murimi 25, featured their innovation at the national scientific conference. The simple device is expected to change lives in rural areas as well as boost the boda boda industry.
(The Nation)

[ad#GBAF-2-pix]

Share
Posted on

Tit Bits: In Health and Sceince

 
 Need to improve your sense of smell? Put on a few more pounds
A study by researchers from the University of Portsmouth finds that people who are overweight have a greater sense of smell for food.
The researchers suggest this may explain why some people struggle to stay slim.
It is an already known fact that the part of the brain that processes information about odor is connected to the feeding centers of the brain.
The latest research is published in the journal Chemical Senses
 
Finally a malaria Vaccine?
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the British pharmaceutical giant, is currently running a Phase 3 clinical trial to confirm the safety profile of what would be a much-awaited for  malaria vaccine. The trial is taking place across seven countries in Africa and data is expected in 2011.

Hope for you if mathematics scares you.

A report in the scientific magazine Current Biology says that by applying electrical current to the brain, they could enhance a person's mathematical performance for up to 6 months without influencing their other cognitive functions.
The findings may lead to treatments for the estimated 20 percent of the population with moderate to severe numerical disabilities (for example, dyscalculia) and for those who lose their skill with numbers as a result of stroke or degenerative disease, according to the researchers.
 
Abortion deaths in Africa
A report from the  UN's Economic Commission for Africa  estimates that about 36,000 women die annually from unsafe abortions in Africa. Many of them are young girls who have unwanted pregnancies and who are forced to have operations illegally….so-called back-street abortions
Share
Posted on

Cocoa genome ‘will save chocolate industry’

Yusif Aban
The public release of the genome of the cacao tree – from which chocolate is made – will save the chocolate industry from collapse, a scientist has said.
Howard Yana-Shapiro, a researcher for Mars, said that without engineering higher-yielding cacao trees, demand would outstrip supply within 50 years.
Dr Yana-Shapiro said such strains will also help biodiversity and farmers’ welfare in cacao-growing regions.
The genome’s availability will likely lead to healthier, tastier chocolate.
The sequencing of the genome was an international, multidisciplinary effort between firms including Mars and IBM, the US department of agriculture and a number of universities, and was announced in September.
Dr Shapiro, once described as a “biodiversifarian”, was speaking at an event at IBM’s research labs in Zurich when he called the date the genome was released “the greatest day of my life”.
“In late 2007, it became very apparent to me that we would not have a continuous supply of cocoa going into the future if we did not intervene on a massive scale to secure our supply chain.”
“Cote d’Ivoire is the largest producer of cocoa in the world,” Dr Shapiro continued. “Mars has bought cocoa from there for sixty years – but when we started to understand the environmental and ecological conditions, the productivity, sociocultural and economic conditions, I realised this was a moment of crisis for this region.”
What is at issue is both the inherent yield of varying strains of the Theobroma cacao tree, which on average currently produce 400 kilograms per hectare of land. What is needed is to make more cocoa from fewer trees and less land.
“In 10 years, under a 2% increase in consumption we will need (an area corresponding to) another Cote d’Ivoire. There is no more place to grow it, productivity with less land must be our driver.”
The genetic codes of major global staple crops such as rice and wheat have been decoded, with a view to improving yields or nutritive properties. However, those crops are grown principally on large, industrial farms.
Cocoa, by comparison, is grown for the most part on small farms by individual farmers and sold on in a less centralised market.
Disease and drought
For that reason, Dr Shapiro said, increases to yields or the cocoa butter and fat content – for which cocoa farmers are actually paid – could directly affect the lives of some 6.5 million small farmers around the globe.
Under his direction, the consortium sequenced the Theobroma cacao genome in a remarkably short time, finishing three years ahead of schedule.
The whole of the genome was first published, as Dr Shapiro puts it, “in the public domain and protected from patenting for perpetuity – so everyone would have free and continued access to it”.
Now correlations between certain characteristics – such as disease and drought resistance or higher proportions of healthier fats – can be made in the field with the benefit of relatively inexpensive laboratory equipment. In this way, each region ensures it has strains that will produce the most, and the best, cocoa.
There are a number of other characteristics that, in time, may be maximised on a genetic basis – such as the level of chemicals known as flavinols, which have been implicated in laboratory tests of heart health.
‘Ecological stability’
“Soon it will be the norm as opposed to the exception: healthy fats, high levels of flavinols, so that chocolate will actually become something quite different. Whether that’s 10, 15 20 years away, it’s on that track now.”
Higher yields will free up land for other under-utilised crops in the region such as yams, sorghum and plantains. Dr Shapiro sees such small changes – that a chocolate consumer never sees – as a tangible human benefit of science-driven agriculture.
“It gives you social stability in the rural sector, it gives you cultural stability that doesn’t break up the rural sector, it gives you environmental stabilty because we’re reducing the risk to the environment from agricultural chemistry, it gives you ecological stability because we’re protecting the remnant forest, it also sequesters carbon,” he said.
“This is the really ‘Green Revolution’ of understanding the entire ecosystem from which you are working.”
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Zurich
Share