With more people sharing our mutual responsibility to reduce carbon footprints by shifting to plant-based meals we have reason to be hopeful for our planet's future.
The researchers analyzed leaf mass per area which indicates how much carbon a plant invests in growing a leaf.
The scientists also looked at leaf vein density a measure of how fast a plant takes up carbon.
and low-carbon-emission that just to make a buck. But as a farmer in the last several years we are actually seeing those changes happen here on the farm.
and warned that the consequences of doing nothing to curb carbon emissions would be dire indeed.
One solution the scientists support is the U s. Environmental protection agency (EPA)' s recent proposal to limit power-plant carbon pollution.
The draft plan requires Montana industries to cut carbon emissions 21 percent by 2030. Given that coal was responsible for 53 percent of the electricity generated in Montana last year
carbon emissions at the same time. That's the good news. The bad news? Despite the fact that the three companies have met already the 15 percent requirement
Negin's most recent op-ed was Carbon Controls are New But Industry Scare Tactics Aren't. This article was adapted from an article that first appeared on the Huffington Post.
When scientists account for the world's carbon dioxide their totals suggest some of the greenhouse gas disappears into land-based carbon traps.
These natural carbon sinks such as forests absorb and store carbon dioxide helping to lower the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
Dead trees release their stored carbon back into the atmosphere through decay. But the model of a rainforest as carbon sink is based on small heavily-studied tree areas called test plots
which means the concept could lose its accuracy when scaled up to the size of a continent.
Trees That Dominate the Rainforest To better measure the carbon on the rainforest's breath researchers tracked tree death throughout the Amazon.
and tree counts to compare carbon consumed by living trees with emissions from dead trees.
Espã rito-Santo found that dead Amazonian trees emit an estimated 1. 9 billion tons (1. 7 billion metric tons) of carbon to the atmosphere each year.
And the big storms that blow down millions of trees at once barely budge the forest's carbon output the study found.
We found that large natural disturbances the sort not captured by plots have only a tiny effect on carbon cycling throughout the Amazon study co-author Sassan Saatchi of JPL said in a statement.
#Resolve to Lose weight and Cut Carbon Emissions: Eat Less Beef (Op-Ed) Elliott Negin is the director of news and commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS.
Shrink Your Carbon Footprint When it comes to global warming not all meat is created equal.
Globally ruminants contribute 12 percent of all anthropogenic carbon emissions and 80 percent of those emissions are from cattle.
or pork would still go a long way to shrink your carbon footprint. Boucher a biologist pointed out that
But that is still more than consumers in every other country besides Argentina Brazil and Uruguay translating into 1850 to 2600 pounds of annual carbon emissions per person.
Biofuels are a type of combustible matter holding potential energy in the form of carbon that was bonded chemically in the recent past (when considered on a geologic time scale.
</p><p>When scientists account for the world's carbon dioxide their totals suggest some of the greenhouse gas disappears into land-based carbon traps.
These natural carbon sinks such as forests absorb and store carbon dioxide helping to lower the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
Dead trees release their stored carbon back into the atmosphere through decay.</</p><p>Full Story:<
and they have different levels of carbon and oxygen than lower leaves the researchers reported at the meeting.
In a somber scene-setter for the climate summit in New york this week the World meteorological organization the United Nation's meteorological office released a report showing that world carbon emissions in 2013 reached a record high and atmospheric
carbon is increasing at the fastest rate seen in more than thirty years. Some hard questions face the international order which has spent much of that period in an interminable round of meetings meant to combat climate change.
and crop rotation to sequester carbon in soil and so forth. Adaptation involves diversifying crop portfolios combining grazing with cropping using water
Schoolteacher farmer and international carbon consultant Beatrice Ahimbisibwe too knows the value of planting trees.
In 2003 she began reforesting a one-hectare plot on her farm in Uganda after signing up for Uganda-based Ecotrust's Trees for Global Benefits carbon-credit program.
which absorb and store carbon from the air. As a farmer she wanted to invest in her land.
Thanks to the carbon credit program she could address both interests simultaneously. The first to join the program Ahimbisibwe gets paid in increments over its 10-year life for planting and growing trees.
First with the carbon payments she has received Ahimbisibwe has educated her two children built a permanent home purchased furniture
and serves as a carbon consultant locally and internationally. Her story should remind the world of the amazing conservation impact local women can make
By using remote sensors on the ground to measure the carbon emissions from two of the Southwest s largest coal-fired power plants the study published in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated the strategy
and technology satellites may use to measure carbon emissions from CO2 sources all over the globe.
The use of satellites to measure carbon emissions is called space-based verification #and it could be a way to check the accuracy of other countries claims about how much carbon they emit.
For example coal accounts for 70 percent of energy used in China today primarily for electricity production
when NASA launches its Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite in July. The Los alamos team clearly demonstrated the value of remote sensing for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions said David Crisp the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) science lead at NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory.
Crisp is unaffiliated with the Los alamos study.##oeto fully exploit this capability we need to acquire measurements like this at high spatial resolution over the entire globe#Crisp said.
I wake up every morning with good intentions wanting to help save the planet by reducing my carbon footprint.
Can a poor family struggling to earn three meals a day really make decisions based on carbon footprint?
China and India saw their per capita carbon emission from fossil fuel and cement production go from about two tons and one ton respectively in 1990 to almost eight tons and two tons respectively in 2012.
The human mind simply is not capable of worrying all day every day about carbon footprint. We should be worrying about the big picture finding solutions rather than relying on the pipe dream of simply reducing consumption to save the planet.
It is beyond doubt that we have been ramping up the carbon in land air and water and this is increasing temperatures on our planet.
In the meantime we must continue to try to reduce our carbon footprint until these game changers come along with efforts like http://confessionsfilm. com/oneearth
An added advantage in protecting community forest rights is that the quality of the forests tends to be better often containing about one-third more carbon per hectare than areas outside community forests.
The report shows that these community forests contain 37 billion tons of carbon more than 29 times that emitted annually by all the passenger vehicles On earth.
Legal recognition of community forest rights and protecting those rights stops this carbon going into the atmosphere.
arguing that direct regulation would be faster and cheaper than using carbon markets under a global climate treaty.
HFCS could also be dealt with in a global carbon market; the problem is that, because many are thousands of times more potent than CO2,
when HFCS are wrapped into the carbon market. He illustrates with the following scenario: a US$25-per-tonne price on carbon equates to $150 for the cost of the HFCS that go into an average home air conditioner,
which translates into a $450 to $600 price bump for consumers. By contrast, the Lieberman-Warner climate legislation introduced in the US Senate last year proposed a stricter phase-down for HFCS than for other greenhouse gases,
He worries that the carbon market will be too slow to spur the kind of technological transformations that will be necessary to avoid the worst that global warming has to offer.
What the work means for the carbon balance of the Earth is also not as obvious as it may seem.
Recently, it was shown that old forests continue to suck away carbon into their third centuries and beyond2.
With fewer live trees, you would expect that they would take up less carbon suggests Kurz.
or long-lived wood products to keep the carbon from the atmosphere, and then replanting with species that are suited slightly more to the changing climate.
This kind of approach will be at best a minor niche player in our overall response to the climate-carbon problem.
even while being adamant that they cannot replace the imperative need to cut carbon emissions.
if true, the finding would require a major rethink of the planet's carbon budget. But the claim has proved controversial.
The best way for the current generation to help posterity might be through reducing carbon emissions;
but also fiscal policies and regulations and the most important is, of course, a price on carbon. Whether it is a tax
Rainforest loss in Xishuangbanna also has implications for carbon dynamics and climate change in the region.
and his colleagues have calculated that 6 million tonnes of biomass carbon stock were lost in the prefecture between 1976 and 20031.
are exploring the potential of carbon trading and biodiversity offsets to help conserve the land
Nature Newsthe climate community is counting the costs of losing NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO),
and identify'carbon sinks'around the globe. Many also hoped that OCO would pioneer an approach for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions under a future Kyoto-style global warming treaty.
a senior scientist who studies carbon and nitrogen cycles at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder,
if the international community implements carbon regulations that require each country to accurately assess its carbon emissions.
The proposed A-SCOPE (Advanced Space Carbon and Climate Observation of Planet Earth) would use a laser to actively probe the CO2 in the atmosphere.
decreasing the amount of carbon that plants remove from the atmosphere further exacerbating greenhouse warming by carbon dioxide.
and release huge amounts of carbon each year. On the whole, they are a significant'sink'for atmospheric carbon dioxide,
they could turn into a carbon'source'sooner than we thought. So, are we in danger of losing our closest allies in the fight against climate change?
the unusual 2005 drought there has turned apparently some of the affected areas of the Amazon from a carbon sink to a carbon source.
and after the drought revealed that forest patches subjected to a 100-milimetre decrease in rainfall released on average 5. 3 tonnes of carbon per hectare as trees in the area died.
Basin-wide, between 1. 2 billion and 1. 6 billion tonnes of carbon were released as a result of the intense dry season and weakened wet season during 2005, the team estimates.
So does climate change mean that rainforests will not be carbon sinks in the future? That's not clear,
How large a carbon sink are the world's tropical forests at the moment? Scientists estimate that mature tropical forests,
take up as much as 1. 3 billion tonnes of carbon per year. This is a substantial amount, equivalent to almost 20%of carbon emissions from fossil-fuel burning.
Tropical forest thus accounts for around 40%of the global terrestrial carbon sink. The good news is undisturbed that old forests keep getting better at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.
Over the past couple of decades, mature tropical forests in Africa and South america seem to have taken up an extra 0. 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare each year on average2
3. Tropical forests in Asia are likely to have improved their carbon uptake as well, although probably at a lower rate.
How reliable are these figures? Measuring tree growth is notoriously difficult, not least because tropical observation networks are pitifully few, particularly in Africa.
Problems related to plot selection, comparability and converting tree-diameter measurements to carbon content have led to an intense debate about the size and fate of the tropical (and global) terrestrial carbon sink.
Given the many uncertainties, forests have been excluded from national carbon budgets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.
However, data gathered over the past decade suggest that undisturbed old-growth forests in and outside the tropics do indeed continue to grow
and accumulate carbon. There is little doubt that tropical forests have acted as a substantial carbon sink for at least the past couple of decades.
Old-growth boreal forests which were suspected long to be carbon-neutral, have recently been found to keep accumulating carbon as well4.
How long will old forests continue to get better at taking up CO2? That is a key question.
Deforestation and forest degradation, through logging, clearing and fire, are only the most obvious problems.
So when putting a carbon value on them we'd rather be conservative.
Evidence for ancient horse ranch uncovered: Nature Newshumans rode and milked horses as early as 3500 BC,
The California Air Resources Board approved its'low-carbon fuel standard'on 23 april, requiring fuel providers to cut the greenhouse-gas emissions from fuels by 10%by 2020,
but the low-carbon fuel standard is exactly the right approach. The US Environmental protection agency is reviewing its own ruling that will establish greenhouse-gas criteria under the national biofuels mandate.
The low-carbon fuel standard could also prove a barrier to coal-based fuels, while providing a boost to vehicles powered by natural gas and electricity.
At the moment developing countries don't really contribute much in terms of carbon. We need to identify the particular things we can do to make sure that we don't limit those countries'growth
but at the same time ensure that growth can be minimized carbon. What sort of research will DFID's health programme support?
Nature Newsforestry experts have warned again that climate change could transform forests from sinks to sources of carbon.
The carbon storing capacity of global forests could be lost entirely if the earth heats up 2. 5 °Celsius above preindustrial levels, according to a new report1.
The impacts of these fires and pest infestations will lead to an additional release of carbon into the atmosphere,
This would lead to more carbon being released a recent report in Science2 found that a 2005 drought in the Amazon basin released about 1. 2 billion-1. 6 billion tonnes of carbon (See'Climate change crisis for rainforests'.
By 2020, the projected end of the outbreak, about 270 megatonnes of carbon will have been emitted to the atmosphere3.
Nature Newssince the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) crashed into the ocean minutes after its 24 february launch,
Or fund ground and suborbital carbon measurements, while working with existing greenhouse-gas monitoring satellites such as Europe's Envisat and Japan's Greenhouse gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT, also known as IBUKI).
The case against reincarnating OCO is that the spectroscopy it used to measure carbon levels needed reflected sunlight to work,
and some states are hoping that a market for carbon credits based on retaining forests will make them money.
The state's'low carbon fuel standard''adopted last month, sets a greenhouse-gas standard for fuels
However, there are proposals to deploy something like California's low carbon fuel standard at the national level.
where more carbon is bound up in plants and soil. Areas that are protected not formally, and thus are most likely to be cleared in the future,
contain roughly 25 percent more carbon than areas cleared in 2001, according to the study. 1the arc of deforestation started out in the southeast,
which is responsible for upward of 20 percent of global carbon emissions. Asner says the study serves as a reminder that monitoring forest cover will not be enough in the future.
what scientists know about both forest carbon and the drivers of deforestation. It makes perfect sense,
the results were published in Global Change Biology. 2 It basically provided a benchmark map of the biomass carbon in the Amazon,
China bases its assessment of historical emissions on the idea of a per-capita carbon budget for carbon emissions from 1850 to 2050, in which cumulative emissions,
I countries reduce their current carbon emissions they will still have exceeded their per-capita allocation.
The researchers tracked how much of each flour the beetles had consumed by looking at the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in ground-up beetle carcasses.
Wheat and maize have different ratios of these carbon isotopes. After only two weeks, Agashe found, the beetles'diet shifted to almost 30%maize flour.
The authors outline several ways of reducing carbon emissions while limiting energy sprawl. These include energy conservation to reduce the need for additional energy and land use;
and a flexible cap-and-trade system that allows for offsets that would provide incentives for low-carbon-emitting activities.
Nature Newsthe health of the world's forests and their capacity to lock away carbon could be jeopardized by logging
So even though the region could lose a lot of biodiversity and a large proportion of its carbon stock,
which hold the most carbon. In a case study of an evergreen forest in Cambodia, Sasaki and his co-author Francis Putz from the University of Florida in Gainsville use inventory data for plots of trees with trunks wider than 5 centimetres to estimate that the forest
holds 121.2 tonnes of carbon per hectare. Of this, 71.4 tonnes is in trees that have trunks wider than 45 centimetres the trees that loggers are most likely to target.
the carbon stock would be depleted by almost 40, %yet the forest would still be considered a forest under the UNFCCC definition,
and estimate the forest's carbon stock. Burgess says Sasaki's paper has not proven why its proposed definition of a forest would be optimal,
so the more carbon it is retaining. Working out the amount of degradation that would be tolerable in a post-Kyoto agreement would be useful.
That is 75%less than the going price on the European carbon market. Backed by a satellite monitoring system and an increasingly focused enforcement programme
Climate negotiators in the United nations talks are looking at various ways to link international carbon markets to forest conservation,
cio Lula da Silva urging the country to reconsider its opposition to directly tapping carbon markets for forest conservation.
suggesting that carbon markets could surpass $2 trillion annually by 2020 and $15 trillion in 2050.
With global temperatures rising as a result of climate change, the emission of methane which traps about 25 times more of the Sun's heat than carbon dioxide will play a greater part in the global carbon budget than it does now
but the lack of an accurate estimate of the baseline level challenges the use of paddy emissions in carbon trading,
Mystery of missing carbon cracked: Nature Newsmysteriously, Earth has much less carbon in its rocks than would be expected from the amounts of carbon available in the planet-forming regions of our Galaxy.
But a new model suggests that chemical reactions between carbon grains and oxygen could be the explanation.
Planets form from the disks of gas and dust that coalesce around stars. The gas and dust in these disks make up the interstellar medium that forms the space between stars in galaxies,
with the dust containing carbon-rich and silicate-rich grains. But despite the green, carbon-rich surface of our planet
Earth's mantle is remarkably poor in carbon compared with the amount in the interstellar medium.
Meteorites, thought to be the building blocks of our planet, also have missing carbon, whereas comets,
which are formed farther away from the Sun, do not. Conversely, silicon seems to make it from the interstellar medium, from
Astronomers have struggled to fully account for the carbon shortfall in Earth's mantle and in meteorites.
Now Ted Bergin at the University of Michigan, Ann arbor, has come up with a model that could explain what happened to the carbon.
Previous theories to explain why all the interstellar-medium carbon didn't make it into the material that formed Earth include the evaporation of primordial carbon-rich grains from the disk.
although nowhere near as hot as the 1, 200 kelvin needed to evaporate carbon. Here, oxygen atoms exist,
that react with the tiny carbon grains but not with silicates. These grains are about one-tenth of a micrometre in diameter.
would become depleted in carbon. The reaction is oxygen hitting the carbon grain and sputtering carbon off
says Bergin. And this can happen at around 500 kelvin, he says. Farther out from the heat source, the reaction between oxygen and carbon would have been much slower,
which explains why planets such as Mars don't seem to have the carbon deficit. Mike Jura at the University of California, Los angeles, says that the model is very plausible.
In random scoops of interstellar matter one would expect a lot of carbon, he says. Jura agrees that the model suggesting evaporation of carbon is flawed,
We're nowhere near 1, 200 kelvin. That takes a lot of heating he says. Bergin's chemical model helps to take away the need for that heat,
he says. If the new model is correct, one would expect to see lots of extra carbon in the gassy part of the disk from which planets are formed.
He's now working out how this carbon might be detected astronomically, and hopes eventually to be able to test this.
And all the extra gas-phase carbon that the model releases might have helped life to form,
Jura suggests. It's abundantly clear that if the Earth had got all of the carbon that was available,
I guess that would have presented a bit of a problem for forming life, Bergin says. We would have had way too much of a greenhouse
and production from a possible carbon fertilization effect increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may be beneficial to some crops,
Taking carbon fertilization into account could give a more optimistic outcome, he says. But Goulding adds that the models also do not include loss of land to bioenergy crops
Carbon market confusion: The European commission exceeded its authority in imposing tighter-than-requested caps for greenhouse-gas emissions on Poland and Estonia in the second period of the Emission Trading System, a court ruled last week.
The price of carbon credits fell following the news, because traders thought the commission might have to grant additional allowances to Poland,
however and its long-term effect on European carbon emissions is unclear. Events Thousands of students
Tomasini says that one alternative would be to identify the services provided by forests, such as carbon sequestration,
Business watch In September, French company Arkema became the latest carbon-nanotube manufacturer this year to announce plans for a drastic scaling up of production.
Despite the materials'present reliance on the mixed fortunes of the automobile industry, the market for carbon nanotubes as raw materials looks set to grow rapidly.
Carbon cuts: Carbon dioxide emissions could fall by 3%worldwide this year because of the global economic crisis,
and how to regulate carbon trading largely unanswered. Who is running the show? And where do we go from here?
and to a lesser extent the natural-gas industry, see opportunities in the push toward low-carbon energy. Similarly, major companies such as The Dow chemical Company and General electric are pushing for legislation as part of the US Climate Action Partnership.
Australia's national science agency has sought to defuse accusations that it is gagging scientists by allowing the publication, after some rewording, of a paper critical of the effectiveness of cap-and-trade schemes in controlling carbon emissions.
Carbon cutters: Brazil has pledged to reduce its projected carbon dioxide emissions in 2020 by 36-39%below business-as usual levels, increasing pressure on other countries less than a month before the United nations climate summit in Copenhagen.
Business watch One of the questions facing climate negotiators in Copenhagen next month is how to handle surplus carbon allowances in Russia
The Oslo-based consultancy Point Carbon projects that surplus carbon allowances will add up to the equivalent of 9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide during the period 2008-12.
Point Carbon also analysed a 2013-20 scenario that takes into account the economic downturn and current commitments by developed countries.
Yeakel analysed the ratios of carbon isotopes in the lions'tissues, which should reflect the isotope ratios of their prey.
Browsing animals, such as giraffes and antelopes, have different ratios of carbon isotopes to grazers because their food shrubs and trees versus grasses carries out different types of photosynthesis. The team characterized the humans'isotope ratios by taking advantage of a fluke of history,
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