To save the planet, first save elephants
Wiping out all of Africa’s elephants could accelerate Earth’s climate crisis by allowing 7% more damaging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, scientists say. But conserving forest elephants may reverse
Wiping out all of Africa’s elephants could accelerate Earth’s climate crisis by allowing 7% more damaging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, scientists say. But conserving forest elephants may reverse
Where does innovation come from? How can it best be nurtured and encouraged? These questions are taking on global significance as fast-developing nations such as China, India and Brazil increasingly see leadership in innovation as key to their economic competitiveness. Although the link between innovation and economic strength is a matter for debate, the power of innovation to shape and transform society makes it worth studying. (Editorial)
To understand what has happened to the earth's atmosphere--and, therefore, how our climate might change in the future--some ice-core scientists in the Arctic are training their eyes directly downward. It's an incredibly important job. It's also, as the participants in the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project will attest, incredibly fun.
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Swedish researchers have launched a scathing attack on the scientific credentials of an international advisory body on biodiversity, warning that its effectiveness is being undermined by the increasing dominance of politicians and professional negotiators. Their concerns about the work of the scientific body that advises the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are widely shared, the convention's own executive secretary, Ahmed Djoghlaf, has told Nature.
The lay-off last week of a senior political scientist involved in helping poor countries prepare for climate change has exposed a stark division in opinions on the core purpose of a key US climate-research institution. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, says its hand was forced by several years of largely stagnant budgets. These have resulted in the loss of 12% of its core workforce during the past five years
Last year, a private company proposed "fertilizing" parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.
Scientists studying variations in tropical heat and rainfall since the mid-1980s have found a strong link between warm periods and more extreme downpours. The observed rise in the heaviest rains is about twice that produced by computer simulations used to assess human-caused global warming, said the researchers. Other studies have already measured a rise in heavy rains in areas as varied as North America and India, and climatologists have long forecast more heavy rains in a world warmed by accumulating greenhouse gases.
On June 13 when Dr GD Agrawal, the eminent 76-year-old environmental scientist started a fast unto death to protest indiscriminate dam building on the Bhagirathi Ganga river, many wondered whether his gesture would be in vain. The government, by and large, turns a deaf ear to such protests. Two groups, who could not be more unlike each other, took up the cause. The Alumni Association of IIT Kanpur and the All India Association of Sadhus met the Union Government and lobbied with the state government of Uttarakhand. And, surprisingly, Dr Agrawal scored a major victory.
Indian scientists seek clarity on nitrogen emissions if emissions of reactive nitrogen gases (oxides of nitrogen and ammonia, but especially nitrous oxide) ever get hitched to the international debate on global warming, in the form of a
In the late 1980s and very early 1990s, when scientists worldwide began to highlight global warming as a problem that needed urgent attention, pointing to carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning as the most potent cause, there emerged a counter-discourse that laid the blame of global warming squarely on another greenhouse gas, methane. Then in 1990, the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA)