Is climate change hiding the decline of maple syrup?:Nature Newsthe burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment an effect that is now being found in food,
reveals a US study. Modern methods for tracking the origins of processed foods use isotopes atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons.
if it was possible that baseline isotope ratios might be shifting because of environmental changes. To work this out Peck
is shifting environmental carbon isotope ratios accordingly. Atmospheric data show that isotope ratio changes correlate directly with the changes in the maple syrup isotopes over the course of the 36 years studied
'These include'climate change and agriculture'and'mobilizing agricultural biodiversity for food security and resilience'.('By contrast, donors currently fund individual centres directly,
including one on the impact of climate change on agriculture, says Jonathan Wadsworth, senior agricultural research adviser to Britain's Department for International Development (DFID).
The warning, from Robert Socolow, a climate researcher at Princeton university in New jersey, came at the end of a meeting last week that aimed to thrash out guidelines for the nascent field of geoengineering.
The discipline aims to use global-scale efforts to control the climate and mitigate the worst effects of anthropogenic warming
and preserve or perhaps create a climate of its own liking. In another, climate policies result in a world full of forest plantations that are created solely to store the greatest possible amount of carbon, with no regard for preserving biodiversity.
Or what if the very possibility of using geoengineering to mitigate climate change gives political leaders cover to say that greenhouse gases aren't a problem?
The morning after Socolow's sobering talk, the conference's scientific organizing committee released a summary statement, based on attendees'comments,
says Jane Long, associate director for energy and environment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
that detecting changes in the climate system caused by geoengineering would be nearly as difficult as measuring global warming itself.
He says that there should be a way to conduct small-scale experiments that test this kind of technology without perturbing the global climate.
Another cadre of researchers is pushing a more benign technology that involves seeding clouds with sea salt to increase their brightness.
because the clouds would disperse quickly once the seeding was stopped. The technique could be focused on regional problems such as disappearing Arctic sea ice
You can't build a wall around the Arctic climate, counters Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University in New brunswick, New jersey.
He fears that some of his colleagues are pushing forwards too quickly in their hunt for a climate fix,
The case involves a series of applications made by the state-owned science company Agresearch to the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA), a government regulatory agency.
Nature Newscreating and strengthening protected areas and indigenous lands is one of the most effective ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, according to a new paper.
Support for forest protection programmes was one of the few successes during last December's climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark,
During the meetings, countries agreed that developed countries would financially support poor nations in protecting their forests through an initiative called REDD-plus Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, with added benefits for local
the researchers show that deforestation in protected areas and indigenous lands is 7-11 times less than in the surrounding areas.
Previous models have shown that protected areas established in the region between 2003 and 2007 could by 2050 prevent around 227,000 square kilometres of deforestation,
and are often sitting right in the path of deforestation. The cost of establishing and managing a protected areas network in developing countries is around US$4 billion per year, four times more than the sum that is spent now4.
says Celia Harvey, the vice president of Global Change & Ecosystem Services at Conservation International, an Arlington,
When you are dealing with a trade worth tens of billions of dollars and with major consequences on the environment,
Similarly, male donor cells in an ovary-inducing environment didn't take on female roles. The team concluded that the cells couldn't switch sexual roles
if they claim to have some evidence that the crops might pose a risk to human health or the environment.
Environmental groups and some countries have had longstanding concerns about the risk of genes spreading from crops to bacteria and increasing bacterial antibiotic resistance.
Shellfish could supplant tree-ring climate data: Nature Newsoxygen isotopes in clamshells may provide the most detailed record yet of global climate change,
according to a team of scientists who studied a haul of ancient Icelandic molluscs. Most measures of palaeoclimate provide data on only average annual temperatures,
isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in
One of Patterson's goals was to verify assertions in historical Icelandic sagas describing the weather.
Patterson's data also reveal a number of climate changes recorded by historians, including a Roman-era warming period, a cold snap in the Dark ages and a subsequent period of warming, during which the Vikings discovered Iceland.
But it's not just historians who will be interested. The new data will help climate modellers to improve their understanding of seasonal effects in the North Atlantic
Patterson says. This is a new line of evidence. Other scientists are impressed. The technique is fascinating, says geoscientist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State university in University Park.
With the Dutch Institute for Public health and the Environment, Roest's team is carrying out genome sequencing and comparisons of different strains.
But analyses of these comet grains several years ago showed that they were forged in hot environments near the Sun
Nature Newstree-ring data from more than 300 sites in Asia have allowed scientists to piece together a year-by-year history of the region's monsoon rains as far back as 1300 AD.
is understood little by climate modellers. In fact, says tree-ring expert Edward Cook, the models are poor enough that they don't even agree on
whether global climate change will strengthen the Asian monsoon or weaken it. That gives you an idea of just how difficult the problem is
and lead author of the monsoon study is that the good weather records that are necessary for validating climate models don't exist for much of Asia before about 1950.
In addition to mapping annual rainfall across thousands of kilometres of Asia, encompassing the Indian, east Asian and Australian monsoon areas,
the team also correlated rainfall patterns with nearly 150 years of sea-surface-temperature recordings throughout the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Colorado, reveals how distant ocean conditions might affect Asian weather again, useful for refining climate models.
But whereas climate models need to be able to duplicate historic weather patterns, there's no guarantee that future climate patterns will mimic past ones,
warns Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California.
The monsoons are caused, he says, by hot air rising inland over the continents, pulling in moisture from the sea.
but notes that Cook's data still give climate modellers a wealth of new information.
And by extending climate records back in time, the Asian tree-ring data, like similar studies in North america, have revealed past droughts that were much longer
Historians had speculated that there was an environmental factor involved in the demise of that civilization he says,
Now we've shown that the climate at that time was significantly drier than it's been since.
speculating that environmental changes might have played a part. Some of his predictions are confirmed and others are contradicted by the monsoon study,
This inquiry, set up by the university, considered several allegations, including that data in research papers had been manipulated to support predetermined conclusions on climate change.
The US Department of the interior has requested a scientific review of the possible ecological impact of drilling for oil and gas in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in the Arctic.
) Business watch Genetically engineered crops offer significant environmental and economic advantages over non-transgenic varieties,
a herbicide thought to be less harmful to the environment (see graphic). Farmers growing transgenic crops are more likely to practise'conservation'tillage,
Magma from the eruption has found a route to the surface from under a glacier.
Meteorologists are modelling where the cloud will move, using satellite and wind-speed data. The emissions are so small,
however, that climate experts don't anticipate any climate effects. The week ahead 24 april The Hubble Space Telescope was launched 20 years ago on this day.
See Nature's online special for a retrospective slideshow and stories from our archive. www. nature. com/hubble 24-28 april About 13,000 scientists are expected at Experimental Biology 2010 in Anaheim, California.
We are now at a stage where we have years of extensive research results on the ecological, economic and health aspects of many GMOS.
which can lead to concentration of these chemicals in the environment and negative effects. The results are mixed that's why it is important not to speak of GMOS in general
part of an effort to establish middle ground as the administration seeks votes on Senate climate legislation.
Wind-farm breakthrough: Wind-energy companies have struck a compromise with the UK Ministry of Defence,
which was blocking the development of five wind farms on England's east coast. The ministry has opposed previously these projects
because spinning turbine blades can confuse air-defence radar (see Nature 451,746; 2008). ) But under an agreement announced on 31 march,
wind developers will pay part of the roughly $15 million cost for a replacement radar at Trimingham, Norfolk,
which can discriminate between wind turbines and aircraft. The project would supply 3 gigawatts of wind power.
In addition, on 30 march the country's Natural Environment Research Council announced that it had commissioned a £75-million replacement vessel for its ageing research ship, the RSS Discovery.
Wind reliability: Linking offshore wind farms together with an undersea cable down the US east coast could produce a reliable supply of grid electricity,
) Researchers from the University of Delaware in Newark studied 5 years of wind data from 11 meteorological stations.
The meeting follows a review of the United states'nuclear policy. 12-16 april Weather, water and climate services in Africa are under the spotlight at the First Conference of Ministers Responsible for Meteorology in Africa, in Nairobi,
Kenya. go. nature. com/HV9GSH 14-18 april Two annual meetings will see debate on a federal rule that allows Native american tribes to reclaim ancient bones found near their lands (see Nature 464,
The Cerling group contends that the abundance of small-mammal fossils at the site which White's group says supports a woodland environment could be due to predators hiding in vegetation growing around water
and south Asia vulnerable as the fungus can now migrate using different wind trajectories, says Zacharias Pretorius, a wheat pathologist at the University of the Free state in Bloemfontein, South africa,
Nature Newspolicy Research Business Business watch People The week ahead News maker Number crunch Policy Oil spill:
But the political fallout intensified as Congress sought answers about the explosion of the Deepwater horizon rig.
separating safety and environmental operations from its oil-leasing arm. For more on the spill, see pages 274-275.
New climate bill arrives in US Senate US senators John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts; pictured centre) and Joseph Lieberman (Independent, Connecticut;
pictured right) released their much-anticipated climate legislation on 12 may, setting the stage for one last attempt at getting climate legislation through the current Congress before the midterm elections in November.
The bill would use a cap -and-trade scheme to curb emissions by 17%by 2020,
A day later, the Environmental protection agency turned up the pressure on Congress by releasing a rule clarifying how greenhouse-gas emission restrictions would be phased in for major industrial polluters beginning next year
if Congress fails to enact climate legislation. Research Stimulus salvo: On 14 may, the US National institutes of health doled out the final big chunk of new awards to be funded from its US$10. 4-billion 2009 economic stimulus package:
53, is the new head of the United nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, succeeding Yvo de Boer.
Nature Newsan unlikely coalition of logging companies and environmental groups has reached an agreement to protect more than 300,000 square kilometres of Canadian boreal forest an area larger than the United kingdom the biggest forest
nine environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the Nature Conservancy, have pledged to suspend do-not-buy campaigns against the loggers'products,
We strongly believe that every improvement in environmental quality can translate into market value for our products,
director of the Pew Environment Group's International Boreal Conservation Campaign, based in Seattle, Washington,
says Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke university in Durham, North carolina, who advises Pew. Unlike tropical forests,
Belgium, found that mature boreal forests remain active carbon sinks rather than becoming carbon-neutral ecosystems as they mature (S. Luyssaert et al.
which hold an average of 7, 800 tonnes of carbon per hectare, far more than any other ecosystem.
Given the speed of climate change, it's not clear that intact forests will necessarily be more resilient than well-managed ones,
says Hank Margolis, a forest ecosystem scientist at Laval University in Quebec city, who heads the Canadian Carbon Program.
the Canadian government has declined to renew funding for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences its granting agency dedicated to climate research in universities.
I'm afraid most of our research will die out by the end of the year,
and the pesticides used to control the bollworm damaged the environment and caused thousands of deaths from poisoning each year.
however, that pest control must keep sight of the whole ecosystem. The impact of genetically modified crops must be assessed on the landscape level,
taking into account the ecological input of different organisms, he says. This is the only way to ensure the sustainability of their application.
Nature Newsthe conservation of biodiversity is touted often as a win-win solution both for the environment and for the world's poorest people,
Meeting co-organizer Matt Walpole, head of ecosystem assessment at the United nations Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, UK, says that conservation agencies have been na
and ensuring environmental sustainability. Studies that track large numbers of people involved in many different conservation projects in various regions,
aircraft will crisscross the skies, measuring an array of greenhouse gases, aerosols and other atmospheric properties as they fly over cities, industrial facilities and agricultural areas.
Developed countries that are party to the United nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are required to report inventories of their yearly greenhouse-gas emissions.
which are required not currently to report their annual emissions to the United nations climate framework. In principle
these countries agreed to additional reporting requirements as part of the Copenhagen climate accord signed in December,
Essentially all of the carbon in fossil fuels winds up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide after combustion,
The state built its inventory for that gas using standard calculations recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
says Philippe Ciais, who doubles as ICOS coordinator and associate director of the Laboratory for Climate Sciences and the Environment in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Carbon dioxide monitoring and control will be only one part of any future climate treaty; gases such as methane, nitrous oxide and various fluorine-containing compounds have a powerful warming effect
The European commission and The netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency have teamed up to create an independent inventory for these lesser greenhouse gases.
The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) approved the fumigant in October 2007, finding it safe for use.
saying in its 5 february reviewreport. pdf>report that in every instance where the DPR findings differed from the US EPA risk assessment for methyl iodide,
to file a petition to the EPA, asking the agency to cancel its national registration of methyl iodide.
limiting exposure for workers and people living nearby to one-half and one-fifth, respectively, of the EPA's regulatory target levels, increasing buffer zones,
says Ted Schettler, science director of the Science and Environmental Health Network in Ann arbor, Michigan,
The EPA is due to review its approval of methyl iodide in 2013. The chemical is registered already for use in 48 states.
'But the research by Crowder, an insect ecologist at Washington state University in Pullman, and his colleagues, shows the importance of'evenness'the relative abundance of different species. Evenness quantifies not just the presence of different species,
Almost all the studies that have been done have looked at the number of species in an ecosystem, says Crowder.
agrees Marc Cadotte, a community ecologist at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. This knowledge can shed light on, for example,
and can also be crucial for determining how ecosystems will respond to challenges, such as those posed by climate change.
This paper, says Cadotte, demonstrates that different agricultural practices have distinct effects on evenness, and that manipulating evenness leads to the cascading reactions identified by Crowder and his team.
Intensive farming may ease climate change: Nature Newsto many people, modern agriculture, with its industrial-scale farms and reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers, may seem a necessary evil one that has fed a growing human population while causing
untold damage to the environment. But the alternative may be worse, concludes a Stanford university study: a less-productive agricultural system would destroy even more wild land,
The environmental benefits will accrue if yields continue to increase, say researchers. Last year, for example, a team from the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Maryland, analysed land-use scenarios
and found that increasing yields could reduce emissions as much as could energy technologies such as wind and solar (M. Wise et al.
an ecologist at the University of Minnesota in St paul. Fortunately, there is plenty of cleared land that is underperforming
But work1 by Brigitte Poulin, a bird ecologist at the Tour du Valat research centre in Arles, France,
and her colleagues in the Journal of Applied Ecology provides evidence that mosquito control has effects further up the food chain.
New york. That's the central dilemma of behavioural ecology that we've been grappling with for a long time.
At a climate conference in Oslo on 27 may, some 50 countries agreed to a loose framework for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions caused by deforestation.
This builds on commitments made at the United nations climate talks in Copenhagen last December. Developed countries pledged to boost funds for the framework programme from US$3. 5 billion to $4 billion between now and 2012,
and the deal creates a formal partnership for evaluating future efforts to tackle deforestation. Climate controversy:
The Royal Society in London, Britain's national academy of science, is reviewing its public climate-change message after receiving a complaint from 43 of its fellows.
They were angered reportedly by a policy document known as'Climate Change Controversies, 'which seeks to help non-experts better understand some of the debates in this complex area of science.
The fellows complained that the 2007 document was too dismissive of attacks on the understanding of climate change.
The society says that a new guide will be released later this summer. Events Top kill fails:
Eye in the sky The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy has made its first airborne observations
There is concern that winds will help the fungus to migrate further, threatening crops in areas including the Middle east and south Asia.
and Ecosystem Services. http://ipbes. net/8-12 june Oslo boasts the'largest polar science gathering ever'at a conference on the 2007-08 International Polar Year. http://www. ipy
or the environment and whether they have been approved by the European commission. The commission says that, in principle,
Meanwhile, environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are concerned that devolving decision-making on GM CROPS will make it more difficult to block their development.
As agricultural systems, environments and economies all vary, he says, it is reasonable for member states to adapt scientific guidance according to their own circumstances.
Mexican'climate migrants'predicted to flood US: Nature Newsa wave of up to 6. 7 million migrants from Mexico could head to the United states to escape the ravages of climate change on crops,
say the authors of a new study. The findings are claimed to be the first to thoroughly quantify how shifts in global climate might affect human migration from one region to another.
The study's authors, from Princeton university in New jersey, say the United states should prepare for the arrival of up to 10%of Mexico's adult population over the next 70 years as a result of falling agricultural productivity due to climate change.
According to the Pew Hispanic Centre in Washington D c. there were 12.7 million Mexican immigrants in the United states in 2008.
as it warns of exacerbated environmental, economic and social problems that unmanaged and unexpected climate-related migration could bring to both the United states and Mexico.
It would behoove them as scientists to shift their focus says Lorenzo Cano, associate director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston in Texas,
Publishing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1 environmental scientist Michael Oppenheimer and economist colleagues set out to develop a model that quantitatively predicts the potential size of the problem of mass human migration spurred by climate change.
They then correlated this with data on how changes in climate had affected maize (corn) and wheat productivity in different Mexican states during the same time.
In this way, they estimated the sensitivity of Mexican emigration to alterations in crop yields due to climate change.
what might happen under the scenario proposed for 2080 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
Keeping other variables constant, the authors modelled the results for a series of different levels of agricultural adaptation that Mexican farmers might undertake to mitigate the effects of climate change.
saying that it is wrong to make Mexican immigration to the United states the focus of the climate-change problem and that the study lacks context.
The scientific community should explain this within the context of any studies focusing on the impact of climate change.
Neil Adger, an expert on climate-change adaptation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who is evaluating human migration issues for the next IPCC report,
says the study does not consider the possibility that crop yields in the United states could also be reduced drastically by climate change.
Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, says that he thinks some of the migration attributed by the study to environmental change could actually be the result of structural changes in the Mexican economy.
Oppenheimer says he now intends to look at climate-induced displacement or internal migration, in the United states,
reducing rainfall by 60-75%in some areas and giving scientists a window on to a future coloured by climate change.
The drought foreshadowed the Amazon drying that many climate modellers expect to see in a warmer world.
But five years on, a spate of research, including 13 papers published on 20 july in a special issue of the journal New Phytologist,
The phenomenon can be attributed to fewer clouds and more sunlight. But in March, a study using the same satellite data added confusion to the issue
says Gregory Asner, an expert in remote sensing at the Carnegie Institution's global ecology programme at Stanford university in California.
The debate over the greening fuelled accusations that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had exaggerated
After siphoning off half of the rain that fell across a 1-hectare plot, researchers observed a 30%reduction in tree growth and a doubling in tree death over the course of 7 years.
the report estimated that an unusual cluster of powerful thunderstorms in January of that year knocked down more than half a billion trees.
which took place on plots unaffected by the storms. Nonetheless, it is a reminder that there are many factors at play,
CO2 fertilization is absolutely critical in the tropics and we know absolutely nothing about it
Nature Newsas the US Senate gears up to debate the latest incarnation of proposed climate legislation next week, a blue-ribbon panel has released
what it hopes will be a definitive guide to the consequences of climate change for lawmakers and the public.
Yet few are optimistic that the report will influence the fate of the scaled-back climate bill,
There are some very important future impacts of climate change that could be quantified somewhat better than we previously thought,
For example, the report shows that each 1 °C of warming will reduce rain in the southwest of North america, the Mediterranean and southern Africa by 5-10%;
director of the science and impacts programme at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Virginia.
Besides synthesizing data included in the Fourth Assessment Report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007,
The debate over the climate bill is caught up in the mid-term elections and the struggle for power.
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