Atmospheric

Buried Fossil Soils From Long Before Industrialization Are Deep In Carbon

Soil from thousands of years ago that is now deeply buried has been found to be rich in carbon, adding a new dimension to figuring out the planet's carbon cycle. The element carbon comes in many forms and cycles through the environment – land, sea an ...

Article - News Staff - May 26 2014 - 11:32am

DVDs Implicated In Global Warming: Billions Of Kg Of CO2

Do you prefer to own a DVD, rather than wondering if Netflix will remove whatever show you wanted to watch this week? If you buy or rent, rather than streaming, you are contributing to billions of tons of carbon going into the atmosphere. ...

Article - News Staff - May 29 2014 - 9:18am

PNAS Study Says Changing Hurricanes To Male Names Will Lead To Fewer Deaths

Either male hurricanes need to break through that glass ceiling of really dangerous storms, or we underestimate storms with female-sounding names and that puts more people in peril, or business scholars have taken causalation (correlation does not equal c ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 3 2014 - 12:05pm

Assumption That Climate Is Primary Driver Of How Quickly Organic Matter Decomposes Challenged

A new study in Nature Climate Change challenges the assumption in climate models that climate is the primary driver of how quickly organic matter decomposes in different regions.  A long-term analysis conducted across several sites in the eastern United S ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 2 2014 - 4:30pm

Solar Activity Influences Earth's Global Warming

We know solar cycles impact the weather and the climate but figuring how much, and how much of recent warming has been due to human-controllable variables, has been difficult. A recent paper found the existence of significant resonance cycles and high cor ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 5 2014 - 10:16am

Anthropogenic Cloud Impact: The Sky's The Limit

Understanding how clouds affect climate is been a difficult proposition, even for a difficult to understand field like climate science. What controls the makeup of the low clouds that cool the atmosphere or the high ones that trap heat underneath? How doe ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 9 2014 - 1:35pm

We Have A Breathable Atmosphere Because Nature Took Control Of The Carbon Cycle

Like breathing? Thank water. And the continents. One of the greatest mysteries of evolution involves oxygen levels in the atmosphere. At various points throughout 4.5 billion years of geological history, carbon levels have been 10X what they are today, ye ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 9 2014 - 4:57pm

How Much Fertilizer Is Too Much?

More is often not better. In the old days, naive corporations believed that a product that was not harmful when used according to guidance could be overused and it was just a waste of money. Once DDT got banned in America because more was not better, comp ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 9 2014 - 4:44pm

NASA Recreates The Atmospheric Soup Of Titan

Titan, the most famous moon around Saturn, has an atmosphere that is a brownish-orange haze. The dirty color comes from a mixture of hydrocarbons, molecules that contain hydrogen and carbon, and nitrogen-carrying chemicals called nitriles. The family of h ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 14 2014 - 9:28am

"Twice As Good As Before": Toward More Accurate Anthropogenic Emission Numbers

Do you know where the solar system ends? Not really. We know it does, but picking a hard boundary is difficult. And when it comes to anthropogenic emissions and air quality, it is hard to know for sure also. How much of CO2 is natural? How are we past the ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 13 2014 - 4:27pm