Global Warming or Climate Change

What’s Been Found? Very fine films of water on dust particles on lunar surface How Much Water Is There? 1 tonne of top layer of Moon’s surface could yield 32 ounces of water How Was It Seen? Nasa’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper on board Chandrayaan detected water from electro magnetic radiation emanating from different minerals on and just below lunar surface Why Is It A Big Deal? Potentially, humans could live there. They could split water into oxygen (for breathing) and hydrogen (for rocket fuel). Also, there could be water in other planets too Why Did Scientists Miss Water Earlier? There were traces of moisture on rock samples brought back by other Apollo missions but scientists weren’t sure if the moisture was deposited after these were brought back ‘Comets could have deposited water on Moon’ Wellknown astrophysicist, S M Chitre, said water on the Moon found by Chandrayaan-1 could have been deposited by the comets several billion years ago. ‘‘The comets are like water carriers,’’ he told ...

Extracting carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust and storing it underground may be the only hope to avoid a climate change catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels Like all big coal-fired power plants, the 1,600-mega-watt-capacity Schwarze Pumpe plant in Spremberg, Germany, is undeniably dirty. Yet a small addition to the facility—a tiny boiler that pipes 30 MW worth of steam to local industrial customers—represents a hope for salvation from the global climate-changing consequences of burning fossil fuels. To heat that boiler, the damp, crumbly brown coal known as lignite—which is even more polluting than the harder black anthracite variety—burns in the presence of pure oxygen, releasing as waste both water vapor and that more notorious greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). By condensing the water in a simple pipe, Vattenfall, the Swedish utility that owns the power plant, captures and isolates nearly 95 percent of the CO 2 in a 99.7 percent pure form. That CO 2 is then compres...

Inexpensive thin-film photovoltaic cells made from organic plastics may be one of the fastest ways to ramp up production of solar power —if only they could do a better job converting the sun's energy into electricity. One of the keys to unlocking organic thin-film's capabilities, according to a team of University of Washington in Seattle researchers headed up by chemist David Ginger , is to better understand how electrical charges move through solar cells by studying their structure at the nano level. Ginger says his team has been able to do this, directly measuring how much current is carried by each tiny bubble and channel formed during the making of the plastic in a solar cell, giving a better understanding of exactly how a solar cell converts light into electricity . This information could help engineers leap the hurdle of coaxing these carbon-based materials to reliably form the cheapest and most efficient structure for generating electric current and moving that current t...

A new study has shown strong evidence that as the oceans warm, clouds appear to scatter, indicating that changes in these clouds may increase global warming. The role of clouds in climate change has been a major question for decades. As the earth warms under increasing greenhouse gases, it is not known whether clouds will dissipate, letting in more of the sun's heat energy and making the earth warm even faster, or whether cloud cover will increase, blocking the Sun's rays and actually slowing down global warming. Now, a new study by researchers Amy Clement and Robert Burgman from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Joel Norris from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has begin to unravel this mystery. Using observational data collected over the last 50 years and complex climate models, the team has established that low-level stratiform clouds appear to dissipate as the ocean warms, indicating that changes in the...

New predictions indicate that the amount of sea level rise by the end of this century will be between 7- 82 cm – depending on the amount of warming that occurs. Placing limits on the amount of sea level rise over the next century is one of the most pressing challenges for climate scientists. Dr Mark Siddall from the University of Bristol, together with colleagues from Switzerland and the US, used fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements to reconstruct sea level fluctuations in response to changing climate for the past 22,000 years, a period that covers the transition from glacial maximum to the warm Holocene interglacial period. By considering how sea level has responded to temperature since the end of the last glacial period, Siddall and colleagues predict that the amount of sea level rise by the end of this century will be similar to that projected by the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). According to...

I feel like a doomsayer at times. You see, I work as a door-to-door campaigner for a local environmental organization, and sometimes I feel like the watchman who comes a-knocking, warning the village of raiders from the far east. "So I'm sure you've heard of the problems global warming has caused," I say to a poor, unsuspecting homeowner, as part of my usual rap. "The last week it's been rather cold, actually. I don't think global warming is happening," he responds. I smile, nod, then bid him goodbye. The environment is a slow, sleepy giant. It takes a lot to wake him up, but when he does wake up, he is awakened (just catch the previews for the "2012" movie). At the moment, he is just barely stirring, tossing around in his sleep. We haven't seen all he can do yet. We can draw the charts, cite the figures - the giant will do so and so when he awakes - but until people feel his breath down their necks, the giant of climate change is just ...

NEW DELHI : Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday admitted that India had for the first time agreed to join the effort to cap the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees from the pre-industrial level. But he strongly denied that it was a climbdown from its position not to accept binding emission cut targets. In a debate that for the first time saw climate change politics echo so deep in Parliament, Singh said the controversial Major Economic Forum declaration adopted at L’Aquila in Italy was “not a declaration of climate change policy by India”. Singh was speaking against the backdrop of suspicion in certain quarters that India’s agreeing to be part of the endeavour to adhere to the 2 degree threshold would lead to its acquiescence to pressure from the US-led developed bloc to take binding emission cut targets. He described such an interpretation as “misleading” and “one-sided.” The MEF is a US-backed initiative with 16 countries, including the G8 and emerging economies, to buil...

Dear EarthTalk: I keep meeting people who say that human-induced global warming is only theory, that just as many scientists doubt it as believe it. Can you settle the score? -- J. Proctor, London, UK So-called “global warming skeptics” are indeed getting more vocal than ever, and banding together to show their solidarity against the scientific consensus that has concluded that global warming is caused by emissions from human activities. Upwards of 800 skeptics (most of whom are not scientists) took part in the second annual International Conference on Climate Change—sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank—in March 2009. Keynote speaker and Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Richard Lindzen told the gathering that “there is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons.” Most skeptics attribute global warming—few if any...

A scientific research cruise following the palaeo-equator has uncovered nearly 53 million years of climate and ocean acidification history। Three scientists from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton were onboard. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program drillship JOIDES Resolution has returned to Honolulu after a two-month voyage to chart the detailed climate history of the Earth. This was the first of two voyages of the ‘Pacific Equatorial Age Transect’ project, and the first international scientific drilling expedition since the JOIDES Resolution underwent a multi-year, more than $100-million transformation into a 21st century floating science laboratory. Onboard were 29 scientists from seven nations, 25 technicians, and an international crew of 66. The first expedition, led by Heiko Pälike of the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science, based at the Centre, and Hiroshi Nishi (Sapporo, Japan), ended on 4 May after successfully coring over 3.5 km of the sed...

This article will appear in the July issue of Scientific American. We are posting it early in light of a report today in the journal Science that bears on similar themes. The study, led by Nancy J. Cox of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention describes a molecular analysis of the novel influenza A (H1N1) virus infecting humans in several parts of the world. The authors confirm that the new strain is comprised of segments from swine flu strains known to circulate in Europe, Asia and North America, but that this combination has not previously been seen and appears to have been evolving independently from its parent strains for some time. Noting the "relative lack of surveillance for swine influenza viruses," the authors suggest, "this virus might have been circulating undetected among swine herds somewhere in the world." The study also confirms that the "H1" hemagluttinin protein of the new virus derives from the classical swine H1N1 strain, which ...

Experts say that more than half of the world's coral reefs could disappear in the next 50 years, in large part because of higher ocean temperatures caused by climate change। But now Stanford University scientists have found evidence that some coral reefs are adapting and may actually survive global वार्मिन। A toppled but surviving table-top coral at Ofu Island, American Samoa. This coral species hosts heat-resistant algae and thrives in Ofu's high-temperature लगून्स "Corals are certainly threatened by environmental change, but this research has really sparked the notion that corals may be tougher than we thought," said Stephen Palumbi, a professor of biology and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. Palumbi and his Stanford colleagues began studying the resiliency of coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean in 2006 with the support of a Woods Institute Environmental Venture Project grant. The project has expanded and is now being funded by Co...

The reactions that convert light to chemical energy happen in a millionth of a millionth of a second, which makes experimental observation extremely challenging. A premier ultrafast laser spectroscopic detection system established at the Biodesign Institute, with the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, acts like a high-speed motion picture camera. It splits the light spectrum into infinitesimally discrete slivers, allowing the group to capture vast numbers of ultrafast frames from the components of these exceedingly rapid reactions. These frames are then mathematically assembled, allowing the group to make a figurative "movie" of the energy transfer events of photosynthesis Photosynthesis is a remarkable biological process that supports life on earth। Plants and photosynthetic microbes do so by harvesting light to produce their food, and in the process, also provide vital oxygen for animals and people। Now, a large, international collaboration between Arizona S...

Despite broad consensus on the existence, origins and potentially catastrophic effects of global warming, a vocal minority continues to question the motives, methods and assumptions of climate scientists sounding the alarm. So when temperature data released by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), one of the leading monitors of climate change, showed an unusually warm October, climate change skeptics cried foul. As it turned out, the GISS data were flawed. The relatively minor glitch was fixed and the figures updated. End of story? Of course not. Climate change skeptic Anthony Watts called the mistake a "data train wreck" in his blog. Global warming denier Christopher Booker, in a column in the U.K.'s conservative Telegraph, called the error a "surreal scientific blunder." Reality check: GISS climate modeler Gavin Schmidt notes on the blog RealClimate.org that the problem occurred because a small but significant percentage of the hund...

Though it pours ominously out of chimneys, forest fires and the exhaust pipes of diesel-run vehicles ( right ), soot has received little attention from scientists studying global warming . Results published today in the journal Nature, however, suggest that soot, 90 percent of which comes from burning fossil fuels and biomass, may be a leading cause of rising world temperatures. "Soot�or black carbon�may be responsible for 15 to 30 percent of global warming," says Stanford University researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, the author of the report. "Yet it's not even considered in any of the discussions about controlling climate change." The conventional model of global heat balance holds that greenhouse gases warm the earth by trapping infrared radiation, while aerosol particles in the atmosphere reflect sunlight back into space, reducing the amount of heat the planet absorbs. The aerosols, in this view, cool the earth in the same way that light-colored clothing keeps...

Reseachers find that, no matter how much data they collect, they may not be able to get a good estimate of the highest temperature increases that global warming may bring. Karen Hopkin reports. Ben Franklin said that nothing’s certain but death and taxes. Today, scientists might add global warming to that list. But though most scientists are certain that more CO2 means a toastier globe, what they can’t pin down is how much warmer it’s going to get. If that sounds like a forecast only Heisenberg could love, well, too bad—that’s just the way it is. Or so say researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle in the October 26th issue of the journal Science. The researchers were working on equations to help climatologists get the most out of their climate models. The current models, run on decades worth of data, predict that we could be looking at a planet that’s 2 to 5 degrees warmer, although there’s a chance it could be closer to 10. What the researchers discovered is that no ma...

One of the first orders of business for newly sworn-in President Barack Obama will be to push through a gigantic stimulus package to revive the U.S. economy from its coma. Debate swirls around how to spend that money; we would like to offer support for certain uses that seem both economically and scientifically worthy. Obama has repeatedly emphasized, both on the campaign trail and in his postelection “fireside chats” on YouTube, that his economic recovery plan will steer massive funding toward America’s decaying and outmoded infrastructure. Multiple studies have documented how desperately U.S. bridges, highways, railways, dams, waterworks and other public resources need repair, modernization or replacement. In 2005 the American Society of Civil Engineers graded the state of U.S. infrastructure as “poor” and estimated that $1.6 trillion would be needed over five years to fix it. So the nation’s infrastructure could surely absorb abundant stimulus spending. Moreover, the money would be ...

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Robert Darwin falls on 12 February 2009. Darwin was arguably the most influential scientist of modern times. No single researcher has since matched his collective impact on the natural and social sciences; on politics, religions, and philosophy; on art and cultural relations, and in ways that the man himself would never have imagined. This Nature news special will provide continuously updated news, research and analysis on Darwin's life, his science and his legacy, as well as news from the Darwin200 consortium of organizations celebrating this landmark event.