Mars_09_01_2012_0944ut-T-EMr Image Credit: Efrain Morales

An amazing  photo of Mars as it approaches the Earth captured by Efrain Morales on January 9, 2012.

Led by NASA researcher Drew Shindell,  a double dozen of scientists argue in an article publiched in the journal Science  that it is possible to mitigate near-term climate-change and improve human health and food security the same time.

They identify 14 measures based on existent technologies and fairly cheap to implement. They argue that targeting the short-lived pollutants, methane and black carbon (shoot), could  reduce projected global mean warming ~0.5°C by 2050.

Simultaneously Mitigating Near-Term Climate Change and Improving Human Health and Food Security

ABSTRACT

Tropospheric ozone and black carbon (BC) contribute to both degraded air quality and global warming. We considered ~400 emission control measures to reduce these pollutants by using current technology and experience. We identified 14 measures targeting methane and BC emissions that reduce projected global mean warming ~0.5°C by 2050. This strategy avoids 0.7 to 4.7 million annual premature deaths from outdoor air pollution and increases annual crop yields by 30 to 135 million metric tons due to ozone reductions in 2030 and beyond. Benefits of methane emissions reductions are valued at $700 to $5000 per metric ton, which is well above typical marginal abatement costs (less than $250). The selected controls target different sources and influence climate on shorter time scales than those of carbon dioxide–reduction measures. Implementing both substantially reduces the risks of crossing the 2°C threshold.

Read the article here (subscription required)

‘If we want to survive on this land we must first help to heal the earth,’ said Nicola Netién, agro-ecologist, teacher and co-creator of the NGO Permaculture Research Institute Hellas. He was talking to a group of some fifty people of all ages who had gathered for two days of workshops on self-sufficiency, how to self-organize, agro-ecology and composting. This small gathering was taking place on a beautifully sunny autumn day at the former Athens airport, Ellinikon.   When the airport moved to another location 10 years ago in preparation for Athens hosting the 2004 Olympic Games, there was the hope and the State’s promise that this now available land would become a park.

Then the ‘crisis’ landed and rumors began spreading that the site had been sold to an international developer who would pour yet more concrete on the chaotic sprawl that is Athens. This is when a small group of local residents, bearing seeds and armed with shovels, moved in. Their mission: to create a communal and productive agricultural space that will encourage an exploration into antidotes for the ecological-economic-educational and cultural crisis.
Via www.theecologist.org

Last night I watched the BBC documentary about Steve Jobs – Steve Jobs :Billion Dollar Hippy. It was an interesting documentary, well balanced and with the usual euphemisms.

Image Credit: davidgalbraith.org

What struck me at the end though, was that when Jobs diagnosed with cancer, he delayed having  surgery for 9 months after he was diagnosed. Instead he tried alternative therapies and a strictly vegan diet to fight the disease, despite the advice of his doctors and people close to him.

I thought “What a stupid idea! That cannot be true”.   Well, it seems it is.  I don’t say that this cost him his life, I don’t know and maybe we will never know, but it is also true that the early stages after diagnosis are the most critical. One of the people close to Jobs said that “Steve was an unconventional person and when it came to treating his illness he was very happy to use non-traditional methods.

ΗAPPY! He said happy, I thought. The man who many regard as genius was “happy” to use alternative methods to treat his cancer.

I have expressed my opinion about the alternative medicine (check antiscience tag), no reason to say more, here. Also, I don’t regard Steve Jobs as genius, a great synthesist perhaps, someone who was able to see and understand all the components and put them together, creating  an attractive and original product.  A clever and authentic man, nevertheless.

It is the human mind that fascinates me and concerns me.  What makes a clever man, such as Steve Jobs , in his most critical moment of his life to abandon logic and waste his talent and his life indeed, in such foolish way.

A consortiun of 23 scientists from 8 different UK institutes were carrying out the science on the cruise, which ended on 11 July 2011.

The group’s research is focused on explaining how different degrees of ocean acidification will affect the surface ocean.

More spesific the scientists are investigating the impacts of changing seawater chemistry on:

• marine organisms and ecosystems
• biochemical cycling in the sea, and
• how the sea interacts with the atmosphere to influence climate

Source and more information: Sea Surface Consortium -Ocean Acidification UK

Arctic waters are rapidly turning acidic, even faster than originally thought. New research from oceanographer Dr. James Orr of the Laboratory for the Sciences of Climate and Environment in Paris predicts that the Arctic Ocean will be corrosive enough to dissolve shells of clams, mussels and others within the next decade. Host Jeff Young talks with Dr. Orr about the mounting crisis in the Arctic Ocean.

Listen/download the podcast

Source: Living on Earth

The Greek Government plans to change the public character of NOA and convert it into a private institution, to the contrary of the status that other similar institutions have around the world. It also plans to suppress by next year the annual state funding of NOA by 30%.

If this happens, critical social services offered by NOA, such as the National Seismic Network and the meteorological monitoring with a wide 24 hours base coverage of Greece, the service to public protection against natural hazards, the space observations and the important astronomical infrastructures in the region will collapse.

Today, Greece allocates less than 0.6% of its GDP for research, compared to the 1.85% EU average. The annual budget for salaries at NOA is less than 5 million Euros while all operational costs are funded through the overhead of competitive EU projects, that also includes  the NESTOR underwater neutrino detector.

There is a petition you can sign here. I signed it.

Background on Ocean Acidification (OA)

Ocean acidification is a rapidly emerging scientific issue and its possible ecological and economical impacts (which are largely unknown) have raised serious concerns across the scientific and resource management communities.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) from our industrial and agricultural activities has resulted in atmospheric CO2 concentrations that have increased from approximately 280 to 385 parts per million (ppm). The atmospheric concentration of CO2 is now higher than experienced on Earth for at least the last 800,000 years (direct ice core evidence) and probably the last 25 million years, and is expected to continue to rise at an increasing rate, leading to significant temperature increases in the atmosphere and ocean in the coming decades. The ocean has absorbed about 430 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or about one-third of anthropogenic carbon emissions. This absorption has benefited humankind by significantly lowering greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, thereby reducing anthropogenic global warming. However, the pH of ocean surface waters has already decreased by about 0.1 units, from an average of about 8.21 to 8.10 since the beginning of the industrial revolution. By the middle of this century atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could reach more than 500 ppm, and near the end of the century they could be over 800 ppm. This will result in an additional surface water pH decrease of approximately 0.4 pH units by 2100, implying that the ocean will be about 150% more acidic than at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

The relationship between atmospheric CO2 increase and global change is highly non-linear. On the contrary, the relationship between atmospheric CO2 increase and OA via absorption by the ocean is straightforward and future projections can be carried out with very high confidence, provided that future atmospheric CO2 increase is known. When CO2 is absorbed by seawater, chemical changes occur that reduce seawater pH and the concentration of carbonate ion in a process commonly referred to as ocean acidification. Carbonate ion is a basic building block of skeletons and shells for a large number of marine organisms, including corals, shellfish, and marine plankton. Some of these smaller calcifying plankton are important food sources for higher marine organisms. Hence, if the planktonic preys of larger fish are affected, this will have serious consequences for marine food webs. Also, the abundance of commercially important shellfish species could decline. A decline in coral reefs due to increases in temperature and decreases in carbonate ions would have negative impacts on fisheries and tourism. On the other hand, not all biological impacts from rising atmospheric CO2 are necessarily deleterious for a species. There will likely be ecological “winners” as well as “losers”. The question remains, however, how the “winners” will impact
the ecosystem or the biogeochemical cycles as a whole. Thus ocean acidification could have profound impacts on some of the most fundamental biological and geochemical processes of the sea in coming decades.

Ocean acidification is already occurring today and will continue to intensify, closely tracking atmospheric CO2 increase. Given the potential threat to marine ecosystems and its ensuing impact on human society and economy, especially as it acts in conjunction with anthropogenic global warming, there is an urgent need for immediate action. This “double trouble” is arguably the most critical environmental issue that humans will have to face in the immediate future. The impacts of ocean acidification will be global in scope yet are some of the least understood of all climate change phenomena. Given that chemical effects are already measurable and that biological impacts may be dramatic within only decades, Europe must now accept the challenge to better coordinate and stimulate its research on ocean acidification. This is fundamental if we are to fully understand the risks and consequences of OA and to eventually help mitigate ocean acidification.

This rather new recognition that, in addition to the impact of CO2 as a greenhouse gas on global climate change, OA is a direct consequence of the absorption of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, will hopefully help to set in motion an even more stringent CO2 mitigation policy worldwide. The only solutions to avoid excessive OA are a long-term mitigation strategy to limit future release of CO2 to the atmosphere and/or enhance removal of excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

Source: Japan Geoscience Union, 30 June 2011. Report (Under news).

Video diary from the Carnegie Institution Dept. of Global Ecology expedition to One Tree Island, Australia. The aim of the expedition is to improve our understanding of the effects of ocean acidification on coral reefs.

Expedition participants at this stage include Kenny Schneider, Jack Silverman, Kate Rick, Julia Pongratz, Ben Kravitz, Lilian Caldeira, and Ken Caldeira.

By Benjamin DODMAN (text)

With world leaders still struggling to find an answer to climate change, two documentaries screened at the Pariscience film festival highlight the crucial – and costly – role played by the planet’s greatest natural assets against carbon emissions.   It’s been almost twenty years since representatives of 154 countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – two decades punctuated by largely fruitless attempts to agree on a strategy to fight global warming.

Like most recent gatherings, this year’s climate summit in the South African city of Durban, which is due to start on November 28, has been described as the last chance to come up with a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions, which expires next year.   To prepare for the key event, delegates from 192 countries gathered for talks this week in the Central American country of Panama, a narrow stretch of land covered by pristine rainforests and a gateway between two oceans.

The location of the discussions may have served as a reminder of the importance of the world’s greatest absorbers of carbon emissions: forests and oceans.   Between them – and in roughly equal shares – the planet’s forests and oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide we pump into the air.   Their plight is the subject of two films screened at the 7th edition of the ‘Pariscience’ science film festival, held in the French capital between October 6 and 11.

“Up in smoke”, a documentary by Briton Adam Wakeling, follows scientist Mike Hands in his attempts to find an alternative to slash-and-burn agriculture in equatorial rainforests; a form of subsistence farming that the British scientist blames for a “slowly enacted catastrophe”.

………………..

EPOCA’s work on ocean acidification is the subject of “Tipping Point”, a documentary by France’s Laurence Jourdan. When carbon dioxide dissolves into the oceans it forms acids, which cause the pH of the oceans to decrease. Scientists talk of a “tipping point” when this alteration becomes irreversible.

……………….

Show original