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Northern permafrost soils represent the largest terrestrial organic carbon pool on Earth. A study the northern circumpolar permafrost zones reveals that landscapes susceptible to abrupt thawing with the release of significant quantities of carbon dioxide and methane cover 20% of the northern permafrost region and store up to half its soil organic carbon.
A seminal book by Milankovitch in 1941 proposed that the sequence of ice ages that has characterized long term changes in the Earth’s climate over the past hundreds of thousands of years was due to changes in the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth as a result of small variations in the Earth’s orientation and orbit with respect to the sun. Since then research has shown that Milankovitch cycles by themselves do not determine the timing of glacial and interglacial cycles and that we still lack a unified mechanism that links changes in Earth’s orbit to ice ages.
In contrast to West Antarctica where several large glaciers have been losing ice for decades, East Antarctica glaciers have exhibited little evidence of ice loss but NASA’s latest detailed maps of East Antarctica ice velocity and elevation show that a number of glaciers have begun to lose ice over the past decade.
Between 2005 and 2017 the U.S. economy as measured by real GDP expanded by about 20 %. Over this same period, emissions from power generation dropped which is evidence of a decoupling between economic growth and power generation.
The source of the accelerating rise in atmospheric methane concentration since 2007 remains an open question. A recent study using satellite imagery suggests that the increase may be ascribed to increased fossil fuels and livestock sources in roughly equal measure.
Based on the latest results from WHO air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk, linked to 12% of all global deaths. Citizen scientists can contribute to measuring air pollution using a low cost sensor measuring atmospheric particulate matter and share the measurements via open source geospatial web mapping software.
Oxygen is fundamental to oceanic biological processes and its decline can cause major changes in ocean productivity and biodiversity. Over the past 50 years low oxygen zones in the open oceans have expanded by an area equivalent to half the size of Canada and hundreds of coastal sites now have low oxygen concentrations that limit the distribution and abundance of animal populations.
During the last deglaciation there was several episodes of rapid and substantial sea level rise. A recent study has found that during one of these, sea level rose by about 17 meters over a period that does not exceed 350 years, but could be as low as a century.
As the Earth warms, permafrost soils melt and this old carbon is released into the atmosphere as methane and CO2. Using radiocarbon dating of methane bubbles and soil organic carbon from lakes formed by melting thermafrost in Alaska, Canada, Sweden and Siberia combined with remote sensing it is found that methane and carbon dioxide releaed in the Arctic region during the past 60 years is much less than the CO2 contributed annually from anthropogenic and other sources.
A reanalysis of the effect of black carbon emissions has found that it is second only to carbon dioxide emissions in its warming impact on the climate. Together carbon dioxide, black carbon, and methane emissions represent the anthropogenic sources with the largest impact on Earth’s climate.
During the last deglaciation atmosphere CO2 concentration rose by about 80 ppm amplifying climate warming. This study of radiocarbon in deep sea corals found that Southern ocean deep water was radiocarbon-depleted throughout the last ice age, but this depletion disappeared between 16,600 and 14,600 years ago consistent with Southern Ocean CO2 outgassing that corresponded to the first pulse of increased atmospheric CO2 early in the deglaciation.
In this study the global average surface temperature over the past 2 million years has been derived from deep sea cores. The results reveal that global cooling occurred about 300,000 years before the rapid ice sheet growth and the development of the first 100,000-year glacial/deglacial cycle about 800,000 years ago.
Evidence that methane emissions from natural gas production have been considerably underestimated by the EPA was recently reinforced by the initiation of an investigation into how the EPA estimates methane emissions by the EPA’s Inspector General. If it is found that emissions of methane from natural gas production are considerably greater than current estimates, the advantage that natural gas has over coal will be eroded and the advantage of switching to natural gas as a cleaner form of energy diminished.
Based on the latest results from WHO air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk, linked to 12% of all global deaths. Citizen scientists can contribute to measuring air pollution using a low cost sensor measuring atmospheric particulate matter and share the measurements via open source geospatial web mapping software.