Hawaii has become the first state to require solar water heaters in new homes. Gov. Linda Lingle, a Republican, has signed into law a bill requiring the energy-saving systems in homes starting in 2010. The new law prohibits issuing building permits for single-family homes that do not have solar water heaters. Some exceptions will be allowed, like for houses in forested areas.
Oil pollution, depletion of fisheries and rampant coastline development that threatens breeding habitat for many penguin species, along with Earth’s warming climate, are leading to rapid population declines among penguins, said Dee Boersma, a University of Washington biology professor and an authority on the flightless birds.
“Penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world,” she said. “The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins.”
In a new paper published in the July-August edition of the journal BioScience, Boersma notes that there are 16 to 19 penguin species, and most penguins are at 43 geographical sites, virtually all in the Southern Hemisphere. But for most of these colonies, so little is known that even their population trends are a mystery. The result is that few people realized that many of them were experiencing sharp population declines.
Boersma contends the birds actually serve as sentinels for radically changing environment. She advocates a broad international effort to check on the largest colonies of each penguin species regularly– at least every five years — to see how their populations are faring, what the greatest threats seem to be and what the changes mean for the health of the oceans.
“We have to be able to understand the world that we live in and depend on,” she said. “It is the responsibility of governments to gather the information that helps us understand and make it available, but if they can’t do it then we need non-governmental organizations to step up.”
For 25 years, working with the Wildlife Conservation Society and UW colleagues, Boersma has studied the world’s largest breeding colony of Magellanic penguins at Punta Tombo on the Atlantic coast of Argentina. That population probably peaked at about 400,000 pairs between the late 1960s and early 1980s, and today is just half that total.
There are similar stories from other regions. African penguins decreased from 1.5 million pairs a century ago to just 63,000 pairs by 2005. The number of Galapagos Islands penguins, the only species with a range that extends into the Northern Hemisphere, has fallen to around 2,500 birds, about one-quarter what it was when Boersma first studied the population in the 1970s.
Extreme heat, dry conditions and strong winds quickly spread the fire in the cities of Mykland and Froland in the southern county of Aust-Agder, dampening fire-fighters attempts to squelch the blaze. Before being brought under control by more than 150 fire-fighters, aided by 16 helicopters (and much hoped for rain), the fire is estimated to have destroyed around 3000 hectares.
To assess the full extent of the damage, Norway’s KSAT (the Kongsberg Satellite Services) compared Envisat acquisitions taken before and after the event.
“At KSAT, we were quite surprised by how easy it was to detect the affected area in the image and to learn how extensive the damages are,” Nina Soleng said. “We sent the images to the County Director of Forestry (Fylkesskogmester) of Aust-Agder County.”
Major fires are visible from space – satellites detect not only the smoke billowing from major conflagrations but also the burn scars left in their wake. Even the fires themselves appear as ‘hotspots’ when the satellites’ sensors scan the Earth’s surface in infrared wavelengths.
More than 50 million hectares of forest are burnt annually, and these fires have a significant impact on global atmospheric pollution, with biomass burning contributing to the global budgets of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide.
Satellites have proven to be vital tools for keeping track of fires and are able to keep forests under constant surveillance. ESA satellites have been surveying fires burning across the Earth’s surface for the last decade. Worldwide fire maps based on this data are now available to users online in near-real time through ESA’s ATSR World Fire Atlas (WFA).
The WFA data are based on results from the Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) instrument onboard ESA’s ERS-2 satellite and the Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) onboard Envisat. These twin radiometer sensors work like thermometers in the sky, measuring thermal infrared radiation to take the temperature of Earth’s land surfaces.
By combining satellite-derived information, such as surface temperatures, land and vegetation cover and vegetation water content, with meteorological forecasting data, such as air temperature, wind speed and rainfall, forests can be systematically monitored to assess fire risks and allow fire fighters to plan fast and efficient actions to extinguish flames.
Within the context of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative, ESA and the European Commission (EC) have jointly demonstrated the ability of satellite-based observations to respond to the operational needs of fire fighting teams through projects such as RISK-EOS and PREVIEW.
It has always been a mystery how trace metals, like mercury, with a volcanic signature find their way into polar ice in regions without nearby evidence of volcanic activity,’ said Dr David Pyle of Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences who led the research team with colleague Dr Tamsin Mather. ‘These traces only appear as a faint ‘background signal’ in ice cores but up until now it has still been difficult to explain.’
The team sampled the fumes of two volcanoes; Mount Etna in Sicily and Masaya in Nicaragua. They pumped gases from the edges of the volcanic craters across some gold-plated sand, to measure the volatile metal mercury, and through very fine filters, to capture fume particles. They discovered that the gases at both volcanoes contain high levels of mercury vapour, and that the fume is also very rich in tiny particles, as small as 10-20 nanometres in size.
‘This is exciting and important since we didn’t know that volcanoes were a natural source of particles as small as this,’ said Dr Rob Martin of the University of Cambridge. ‘The existence of these particles is potentially very important for the climate system – they may control how clouds form, and how much solar energy reaches the Earth’s surface. What we don’t know yet, though, is what these nanoparticles are made of: whether they are tiny droplets of frozen magma, or salts that condense due to cooling of high-temperature volcanic fumes.’
The nanoparticles are small enough to be carried around the world and could be involved in the formation of clouds with dense concentrations of water droplets that reflect large amounts of solar radiation back into space. They may also ‘seed’ distant patches of barren ocean with nutrients.
Whilst researchers had suspected that mercury boils out of hot magma, the big surprise was just how much mercury escapes from volcanoes. Measurements made on just one part of the Masaya volcano in Nicaragua, by Dr Melanie Witt of Oxford University, have shown that about 7 tonnes of natural volcanic mercury escapes into the atmosphere from this vent each year.
‘That one vent of one volcano can produce 7 tonnes of mercury a year is astounding,’ said Oxford’s Dr Melanie Witt, ‘that’s considerably more than total industrial emissions of mercury from the UK – recorded at about 5.5 tonnes in 2000. It confirms our suspicions that volcanoes are an important part of the global mercury cycle: what we need to understand next is where this mercury ends up and what effects it may have on the environment.’
The work was funded through research grants and research fellowships from the Royal Society, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Leverhulme Trust.
The House Energy and Science Committees hold a joint hearing on climate change. Vice President Al Gore testifies, this is the second part of his opening statement.
Debate on Sky News Sunrise morning programme between financial journalist Daniel Ben-Ami and Germana Kanzi of Friends of the Earth on approaches to dealing with climate change. Begins with a review of the possible impacts of increases in global temperature.
This clip from the “Five Ways to Save the World” details a cheap, simple, and low-risk way to compensate for global warming.If the reflectivity of clouds could be increased slightly, sufficient sunlight would be reflected to compensate for any future release of CO2 into the atmosphere.One method of doing this would be to eject seawater spray into the air using a fleet of automated ships. Its estimated that 50 ships costing a few million dollars each could spray enough seawater to do the job. Additional Details:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/6354759.stm
What is the most valuable online VIDEO of ALL TIME? Find Out Now! - http://wadn.weblo.com/94b34de0641884df/gateway?adId=fe0f3cd03f037919http://malagent.comThe debate has been heated on my other video about Greenland melting ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI1AA5JzMq0 ), From insults to well meaning and misinformed rhetoric. Mostly people just say I dont care and Im bitter. Other act as though Im the only person alive that does not believe the “Inconvenient Truth” of the “Planet in Peril” - Its obvious Im not the only one and here are a few others…John Stossel explains other side of global warming issue. Debates Al Gores Movie, An Inconvenient Truth and interviews a few of the non-existent scientists who disagree with Gores doom-say.Discuss it, insult & criticize me or whatever in the forums:http://forum.malagent.com/index.php?topic=8.0Plenty of other topics ranging from Global Climate Crisis to war and politics. We dont just limit it to Al Gore & John Stossel.
I invite you to take 10 minutes to reflect on climate change and Global Warming. Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earths near-surface air and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation. Global average air temperature near the Earths surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.3 ± 0.32 °F) during the past century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes, “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations,” which leads to warming of the surface and lower atmosphere by increasing the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes have probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950, but a small cooling effect since 1950. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists is the only scientific society that rejects these conclusions, and a few individual scientists also disagree with parts of them.Climate change refers to the variation in the Earths global climate or in regional climates over time. It describes changes in the variability or average state of the atmosphere over time scales ranging from decades to millions of years. These changes can be caused by processes internal to the Earth, external forces (e.g. variations in sunlight intensity) or, more recently, human activities.In recent usage, especially in the context of environmental policy, the term “climate change” often refers to changes in modern climate which according to the IPCC are 90-95% likely to have been in part caused by human action. Consequently the term anthropogenic climate change is frequently adopted; this phenomenon is also referred to in the mainstream media as global warming. In some cases, the term is also used with a presumption of human causation, as in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC uses “climate variability” for non-human caused variations.[1]For information on temperature measurements over various periods, and the data sources available, see temperature record. For attribution of climate change over the past century, see attribution of recent climate change.Other tags:Heat waves and periods of unusually warm weather Ocean warming, sea-level rise and coastal flooding Glaciers melting Arctic and Antarctic warming Spreading disease Earlier spring arrival Plant and animal range shifts and population changes Coral reef bleaching Downpours, heavy snowfalls, and flooding Droughts and fires Environmental DefenseNatural Resources Defense CouncilSierra ClubUnion of Concerned ScientistsU.S. Public Interest Research GroupWorld Resources InstituteWorld Wildlife FundHealth Agriculture and Food Supply Forests Ecosystems and Biodiversity Coastal Zones and Sea Level Rise Water Resources Energy Production and UseOther Tagsglobal climate change warming controversy perspective carbon dioxide decision matrix grid scenario row column debate
Another Global Warming Hoax exposed
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