Stanford, CA — Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes had an impact on the global carbon cycle as big as today’s annual demand for gasoline. The Black Death, on the other hand, came and went too quickly for it to cause much of a blip in the global car…
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The decreases in Earth’s snow and ice cover over the past 30 years have exacerbated global warming more than models predict they should have, on average, new research from the University of Michigan shows.
To conduct this s…
GREENBELT, Md. — A new NASA computer modeling effort has found that additional growth of plants and trees in a world with doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would create a new negative feedback — a cooling effect — in the Earth’s c…
The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Water Resources Research (WRR), and Journal of Geophysical Research – Earth Surface (JGR-F).
In this release:
Changing…
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — According to a popular hypothesis, grasses such as maize, sugar cane, millet and sorghum got their evolutionary start as a result of a steep drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the Oligocene epoch, more than 2…
Frostburg, Md. (November 15, 2010) — A new analysis of fossilized grass-pollen grains deposited on ancient European lake and sea bottoms 16-35 million years ago reveals that C4 grasses evolved earlier than previously thought. This new evidence cas…
Variations in atmosphere carbon dioxide around 40 million years ago were tightly coupled to changes in global temperature, according to new findings published in the journal Science. The study was led by scientists at Utrecht University, worki…
The food industry generates a lot of waste products, but one of these, eggshells, could help combat climate change, according to research published in the International Journal of Global Warming this month.
Basab Chaudhuri of the University of Cal…
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — New University of Florida research puts to rest the mystery of where old carbon was stored during the last glacial period. It turns out it ended up in the icy waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.
The findings have i…
Scientific findings by international research group of scientists from England, China and Denmark just published suggest that sea level will likely be 30-70 centimetres higher by 2100 than at the start of the century even if all but the most aggr…
Emissions of carbon dioxide are causing ocean acidification as well as global warming. Scientists have previously used computer simulations to quantify how curbing of carbon dioxide emissions would mitigate climate impacts. New computer simulation…
Reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to global warming, by fertilizing the oceans with iron may not be as attractive a solution as once thought according to a report in Science magazine.
In their observations released on April 4, Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Philip Boyd of the University of Otago in New Zealand report that iron fertilization as a means to “lock up” carbon in the oceans should be explored but note that the most basic question of “Will it work?” needs to be addressed before such a strategy is undertaken on a commercial scale.