Phys.org November 25, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Nebraska, University of Pennsylvania, Finland, China) has identified a catalytic reaction between methanol and SO3, catalyzed by SA, DMA, or water that was previously overlooked. The catalytic reaction between methanol and SO3 can convert methanol into a methyl hydrogen sulfate (MHS). Their simulation results suggest that the formation of MHS consumes an appreciable amount of atmospheric SO3, disfavoring further reactions of SO3 with H2O. They show that MHS formation can cause a reduction of SA concentration up to 87%. Hence, a high abundance of methanol in the […]
Category Archives: Global warming
More Than 11,000 Scientists Just Officially Declared a Global Climate Emergency
Science Alert November 5, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – State University of Oregon, Tufts University, Australia, South Africa) explores four decades-worth of publicly available data, covering energy use, surface temperature, population, deforestation, polar ice, fertility rates, and, of course, carbon emissions. According to the researchers the human population is still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, deforestation in the Amazon is once again on the up and up and we have generally conducted business as usual and are essentially failing to address this crisis. To stop the worst consequences of the climate crisis, they say […]
A roadmap to make the land sector carbon neutral by 2040
Science Daily October 23, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Virginia, organizations, UC Berkeley, Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan) combines a review of modelled pathways and literature on mitigation strategies, and develop a land-sector roadmap of priority measures and regions that can help to achieve the 1.5 °C temperature goal set by the Paris agreement. Transforming the land sector and deploying measures in agriculture, forestry, wetlands and bioenergy could feasibly and sustainably contribute about 30%, or 15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, of the global mitigation needed in 2050 to deliver on the 1.5 […]
1 in 5 Cities Is About to Have a Climate Unknown to Any Place on Earth
Science Alert July 11, 2019 Researchers in Switzerland analyzed city pairs for 520 major cities of the world and tested if their climate in 2050. They found that even under an optimistic climate scenario 77% of future cities are very likely to experience a climate that is closer to that of another existing city than to its own current climate. As a general trend, they found that all the cities tend to shift towards the sub-tropics, with cities from the Northern hemisphere shifting to warmer conditions, on average ~1000 km south and cities from the tropics shifting to drier conditions…read […]
Climate impact of aircraft contrails could treble by mid-century
Physics World July 1, 2019 Researchers in Germany used ECHAM5-CCMod, an atmospheric climate model, to investigate the climate impact of contrail cirrus for the year 2050. Contrails have the potential to linger and become artificial cirrus clouds which reflect infrared radiation coming up from the Earth’s surface far more than they reflect incoming solar radiation back into space. As a result, such clouds tend to trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere and have an overall warming effect on climate. According to the researchers instead of rerouting flights to mitigate the effects of contrails, a better course of action may be […]
More energy needed to cope with climate change
Science Daily June 24, 2019 Future energy demand is likely to increase due to climate change, but the magnitude depends on many interacting sources of uncertainty. An international team of researchers (Austria, USA – NCAR, Boston University, Italy) shows that, across 210 realizations of socioeconomic and climate scenarios, vigorous (moderate) warming increases global climate-exposed energy demand before adaptation around 2050 by 25–58% (11–27%), on top of a factor 1.7–2.8 increase above present-day due to socioeconomic developments and that energy demand rises by more than 25% in the tropics and southern regions of the USA, Europe and China. An important way […]
Climate change is already affecting global food production — unequally
Science Daily May 31, 2019 The world’s top 10 crops supply a combined 83 percent of all calories produced on cropland. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Minnesota, Denmark) constructed linear regression relationships using weather and reported crop data to assess the potential impact of observed climate change on the yields of the top ten global crops–barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat at ~20,000 political units. They found that the impact of global climate change on yields of different crops from climate trends ranged from -13.4% (oil palm) to 3.5% (soybean). The […]
Counter-intuitive climate change solution
EurekAlert May 20, 2019 According to an international team of researchers (USA – Sanford University, Australia) some sources of methane emissions – from rice cultivation or cattle- may be very difficult or expensive to eliminate. An alternative is to offset these emissions via methane removal, so there is no net effect on warming the atmosphere. They argue that methane concentrations could be restored to pre-industrial levels by removing about 3.2 billion tons of the gas from the atmosphere and converting it into an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to a few months of global industrial emissions. They describe a potential […]
It’s Official: Atmospheric CO2 Just Exceeded 415 Ppm For The First Time in Human History
Science Alert May 13, 2019 Researchers at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography sensors in Hawaii recorded Earth’s atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide passing 415 parts per million for the first time since before the ancient dawn of humanity. As recently as 1910, atmospheric CO2 stood at 300 ppm – higher than it had been for some 800,000 years at least. It’s that ongoing fossil fuel use that’s the real problem here. According to the scientists we basically have no idea how bad things could get if we don’t stop adding to the problem at such an accelerated rate. There is […]
The Transpolar Drift is faltering: Sea ice is now melting before it can leave the nursery
Science Daily April 2, 2019 The dramatic loss of ice in the Arctic is influencing sea-ice transport across the Arctic Ocean. Researchers in Germany report that today only 20 percent of the sea ice that forms in the shallow Russian marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean actually reaches the Central Arctic, where it joins the Transpolar Drift; the remaining 80 percent of the young ice melts before it has a chance to leave its ‘nursery’. Before 2000, that number was only 50 percent. This trend has been confirmed by the outcomes of sea-ice thickness measurements taken in the Fram Strait. […]