African trees dying due to climate change

Sahel AfricaThe Sahel, one of the hottest regions on Earth ranging from the Atlantic coast south of the Sahara Desert to the Red Sea to the east and the Horn of Africa to the southeast, is getting drier and drier and as a result trees are dying.

According to a Berkeley study due for publication in the Journal of Arid Environments on December 16, climate change is to blame.

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Droughts in Horn of Africa have been common for last 20,000 years

This year’s catastrophic drought in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia is thought to be an indirect consequence of the 2010-2011 La Niña. As part of ENSO cycles such droughts come and go – and have been typical for the region for (at least) all of the Holocene up to the Last Glacial Maximum some 20,000 years ago, research shows. By nature, the pattern is irregular – and both dry and wet periods may last multiple years.

Drought Horn of Africa La Niña
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Tectonic response measured to 2010 Greenland melting record

Greenland melting record 2010 upliftTo notice something is going on with the world’s ice sheets, you could measure melting water runoff, glacier retreat or use satellites and GPS to measure ice volume decline.

Just like measuring sea level rise and temperature this all adds to the same picture of a gradually warming world. Now there seems to be yet another route, as research shows there are geological consequences to ice sheet decline as well.

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E. coli produces commonly used biofuels

Escherichia coliCellulose is the major combustible component of non-food energy crops. Recently ways have been devised to turn it into bioethanol. An important step in a more widespread use of food-friendly biofuels.

But as it turns out, besides Brazil and the US, not many countries actually use ethanol as a transportation fuel. That’s why bioengineers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California set out, and with a little help from E.coli succeeded, in producing more commonly used fuels directly from cellulose.

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This humble beauty is still out there – Cockerell’s Bumblebee not extinct

She was last seen in 1956 in the White Mountains of south-central New Mexico. But apparently this rarest of American bumblebees still has her own tiny, humble little home on our planet, where she’s happily helping to pollinate summer flowers.

Cockerell's Bumblebee not extinct
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Despite recession carbon emissions keep rising to new records

We knew CO2 emissions reached a new record high in 2010, at 30.6 gigatonnes.

world CO2 emissionsNow a new study by CICERO, the Tyndall Centre and other institutes reconfirms the strong rebound after the 2008 global financial crisis – and predicts that despite the current recession emissions will keep rising to new records in 2011, sticking to an average annual growth of around 3.1 percent.

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Drop in CO2 heralded the onset of Antarctic glaciation

GlacierFor about 100 million years all sorts of animals roamed the then subtropical North and South poles. But then suddenly some 34 million years ago during the Eocene everything changed when temperatures fell dramatically in only a 100,000 year timespan, leading to the extinction of many animal species.

Previously it was assumed that a change in ocean currents was the cause for the sudden drop in temperature. But a new study in Science shows that the culprit was in fact a roughly 40 per cent drop in atmospheric CO2.

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Marine biodiversity driven by environmental changes

ocean biodiversityOur most important source for knowledge about past life is the fossil record. But how exact is it in telling us about the history of life?

According to a new study in Science the evolution of marine life over the last 500 million years has been strongly influenced by sea level changes and ocean chemistry and despite its incompleteness, the fossil record is a good representation of marine biodiversity over this period.

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