Illegal logging is the first step in a larger process that often ends in complete deforestation
Doug Boucher, director of the Tropical forest and Climate Initiative at the Union of Concerned Scientists in WASHINGTON DC, says that the key figure in the report is the $2. 50-per-tonne cost of avoiding emissions.
Sometimes the deforestation isn't driven by illegal logging, he says. In the Amazon, deforestation is linked often to the expansion of soy farming and cattle ranching.
The basic underlying driver is the agriculture and illegal logging is associated with deforestation that is happening anyway,
he says. Patrick Gonzalez, a forestry scientist currently visiting at University of California, Berkeley, says that reducing illegal logging can be considered a kind of REDD programme the acronym, popular in climate-negotiation circles,
stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. The reduction in illegal logging that they report has achieved already the kind of results that REDD programmes are trying to achieve,
he says. Gonzalez would like to see vigorous command and control enforcement of logging rules paired with schemes that give the responsibility for and the revenues from a forest to local people.
Not emitting greenhouse gases in the first place is the most effective way to reduce climate change.
Mystery RNA spawns gene-activating peptides: Nature Newssome so-called'non-coding'pieces of RNA may actually encode short proteins that regulate genes,
The lost legacy of the last great oil spill: Nature Newsthe well blew out, the blowout preventer failed,
This all too-familiar description refers not to the ongoing Deepwater horizon oil spill but to an episode three decades earlier and about 1, 000 kilometres south, at an exploratory oil well known as Ixtoc I, operated by Mexico's national petroleum company Petr  leos Mexicanos (PEMEX.
Researchers who are struggling to determine the long-term environmental effects of Deepwater horizon have begun asking what helpful lessons Ixtoc I offers.
says Arne Jernelã v, a Vienna-based environmental biochemist with the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm,
Since the Deepwater horizon blowout, Tunnell, who studied Mexico's coastal habitats extensively just after the Ixtoc I spill, has been inundated with questions about that spill
It is unlikely that the oil is having any significant ecological effects after weathering away for so long,
however, there are ominous signs that not all ecosystems fared as well. After leaving Champot  n, Tunnell and his colleagues travelled about 125 kilometres north to the tiny village of Isla Arena,
this is one of the least-studied ecosystems in Mexico, says Tunnell. He says that he's intrigued by the oyster story and hopes to do follow-up research on the topic.
but that more productive ecosystems such as mangrove swamps or salt marshes the closest analogue to mangroves in the northern Gulf retain oil indefinitely.
In broader terms, Tunnell, Jernelã v and other researchers familiar with Ixtoc I agree that its most important lesson is to continue studying the Deepwater horizon spill
and others have lamented the lack of Ixtoc I data as they have worked to respond to Deepwater horizon.
A more holistic approach could provide a baseline to assess the impact of climate change
Climate change is blamed often, for example. But a team led by Gao Zhanyi of the Beijing-based Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, found that climate contributed only about 10-30%of the water-table depletion in three regions of China.
The majority of the depletion was down to poor practice: There is much room for improvement in terms of more effective water management,
and synchronize crop production with the climate by ending the cultivation of winter wheat and growing maize for more of the year,
And there were environmental causes championed long before such drives were popular. Studying with German professor Helmuth Bossert
UK climate data were tampered not with: Nature Newsthe rigour and honesty of scientists embroiled in the climate change e-mail affair are not in doubt according to an independent review of the matter released today.
However, the scientists have been criticized for a lack of openness that risked the credibility of UK climate science.
In November 2009, more than 1, 000 e-mails and documents were hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK,
They prompted allegations from climate-change sceptics that CRU scientists withheld, concealed and manipulated data in an attempt to boost the case for human-induced climate change.
The review led by Muir Russell, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow, UK, was charged with investigating the scientists'behaviour.
The review has impressed not vocal climate-change critics such as Andrew Montford who maintains the blog Bishop Hill.
but should rather be attributed to global climate change, the review panel downloaded the source data directly from publicly accessible sites.
Climate scientists must be open to scrutiny, says committee-member Geoffrey Boulton, a professor emeritus of geology at the University of Edinburgh who added that they cannot make papal announcements:'
'Another allegation revolved around the handling of contentious tree-ring-width data used as a temperature proxy in a graph that contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Ross Mckitrick, an environmental economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, argues the review missed the point of criticisms regarding the deletion of tree-ring data after the 1960s.
Russell made clear that it was not within the remit of the review to assess the validity of CRU's climate science that is still open to legitimate debate.
adding that it could put India ahead of most other countries in terms of deforestation. Nature contacted the FSI for comment,
This is bad for the environment because replanting native forests with nonnative trees damages local biodiversity,
Laurance says he is hopeful that the United nations'REDD+initiative to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation
He says that countries such as Norway the programme's first and largest donor will be interested more in paying to stop deforestation of native forests than in expanding plantations.
Bhaskar Vira, an environmental economist at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that he thinks there is probably some truth in the study's finding.
the study may have overestimated the amount of deforestation taking place. Laurance agrees that the data on plantations is rough,
The figures derived were similar to his estimates for deforestation, so he is confident in the results.
The unrelenting, intense rainfall over the past three weeks has resulted in two surges of floodwater.
because the ground was so hard and dry when the first rains fell, the runoff was huge,
Last week, the northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region was the worst hit (see'Pakistan's floods:
There, the second flood wave has merged with the first flood wave, says M. Akram Anjum, chief meteorologist of the Pakistan Meteorological Department.
The second flood wave is likely to create exceptionally high flood levels over the next three to four days in and around the Kotri area in Sindh,
The decision on 13 august means that the beets 墉 which at present provide around half of the US sugar supply 墉 cannot be grown until the US Department of agriculture (USDA) completes an environmental-impact statement,
Environmental organizations including the Sierra Club and the Center for Food safety, headquartered in California and WASHINGTON DC,
the core of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) project, has violated federal law by failing to produce an environmental-impact statement.
Events Disease follows deluge in Pakistan As nearly three weeks of floods in Pakistan displaced tens of millions of people
the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs added that the floods would have a catastrophic effect on agricultural livelihoods, with extensive damage to standing crops 墉 such as maize (corn),
The summer monsoon was exacerbated this year by an unusual jet-stream pattern in the upper atmosphere;
the same weather phenomenon has been linked to the Russian heatwave and resulting peat fires. Business Battery start-up:
Russia counts environmental cost of wildfires: Nature Newsas fires sweep across Russia during its hottest and driest summer on record,
and environmental disasters including the risk of radioactive particles being released from contaminated land around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
Most are sparked by lightning in areas forested with fire-tolerant trees, which can withstand the worst of a fire, such as pine (Pinus).
Such fires are often beneficial to the functioning of the ecosystem, and forests usually regrow quickly after them.
and vegetable patches, says Johann Goldammer, a fire ecologist and director of the GFMC. Many poor people will lose their harvest,
Jim Smith, who researches the fate of radioactivity in the environment at the University of Portsmouth,
Will climate change make fire more likely? Yes. If the climate in Russia continues to change as expected,
the areas affected by the current fires will continue to be dry, making fires more likely in the future.
researchers told the Ecological Society of America conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, today. The scientists behind the discovery say this highlights a lack of proper monitoring
says Cynthia Sagers, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who led the research team that found the canola (Brassica napus, also known as rapeseed).
whether these escaped GM canola plants have any ecological consequences. But those that have evolved resistance to both herbicides could become a weed problem for farmers,
Tom Nickson, head of environmental policy at Monsanto in St louis, Missouri, told Nature, Those familiar with canola know that these plants are readily found on roadsides and in areas near farmers'fields.
Alison Snow, an ecologist at Ohio State university in Columbus, says it is not surprising that escaped transgenic plants have now been found in the United states,
and animal manure in China has resulted in serious water pollution and substantial waste of phosphorus, a nonrenewable inorganic chemical.
A pollution census conducted by China's government earlier this year earlier this year see'China takes stock of environment')found that livestock is the largest contributor to run off pollution from the land into waterways,
an ecologist at the Beijing-based Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, examined phosphate run off into Lake Tai,
There is a lot that can be done to save both the environment and the natural resource, he says.
The environment ministry this week rejected the academies'report. The anti-GM CROPS lobby has seized on the controversy,
after an outcry from farmers and activists, environment minister Jairam Ramesh put a moratorium on planting the vegetable, pending the interacademy assessment of its safety to human health and the environment.
has been subjected to a rigorous biosafety regulatory process encompassing all aspects of toxicity, allergenicity, environmental safety, socioeconomic assessment etc.
%But Dahl's study suggests that the radiation in the Ediacaran probably occurred in a low-oxygen environment,
However, Tim Lenton, an Earth system scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, questions whether atmospheric conditions can be inferred directly from measurements of oceanic oxygenation.
How stress shapes ecosystems: Nature Newsyou are tense and wary, alert to every rustle and snapped twig.
but also for the ecosystems they live in. In more relaxed conditions, many animals opt for high-protein foods that help them to grow
an ecologist at Yale university in New haven, Connecticut, has been teasing out the ecological ramifications of this predation stress in meadows.
Hawlena thinks that the ecosystem is likely to be changed in two ways by frightened grasshoppers. First, they eat more goldenrod
Hawlena says that this phenomenon may help ecologists to understand previously unexplained ecosystem changes and could move ecology closer towards being a fully predictive science.
But the relationship, if it exists, may not be clear cut. Like Hawlena's grasshoppers, the elk of Yellowstone national park in Wyoming were thought to eat differently because of the threat of predation.
and is swamped by all the other convoluted causal factors in ecosystems. It is very intriguing that Hawlena
reinforcing fears that the invisible hand of climate change may be involved. Nature takes a closer look.
Fewer clouds and less rain also translate into higher temperatures, and Aragao says that the maximum temperatures in September are 1 °C higher than 2005,
Although deforestation in Brazil has decreased, there have been increased reports of fire activity. Is that related to the drought?
Forest fires are associated generally with deforestation, but drought amplifies the impact of fires that are set in order to clear land.
Preliminary data for 2010 indicate that deforestation has fallen by some 85%compared with its recent peak in 2004.
Brazil might be able to claim that it has met its commitment to reduce deforestation by 80%(compared with a rolling average) a decade early.
Is climate change to blame for the drought? It is hard to pinpoint a culprit,
but both the 2005 and the 2010 droughts align well with longer-term projections by some climate modellers for a drying out of the Amazon due to climate change.
which effectively pull the trade winds and all of the moisture they carry to the north. Scientists described the 2005 drought as a once-in-a-century phenomenon.
From this perspective, fewer clouds and more sunlight could spur an initial increase in photosynthesis resulting in more plant growth,
when you look at how important it is to recognize the weight of the evidence in areas like climate change,
Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists based in Cambridge,
and industry, leaving nothing for the aquatic environment, fish and plants won't be able to survive,
Nature Newsin many regions, climate change has advanced the timing of spring events, such as flowering or the unfolding of leaves.
Plants that have evolved in cold-weather climates become dormant in the winter to avoid frost damage.
Martin Lechowicz, a plant ecologist at Mcgill University in Montreal Quebec is not surprised, however. Lechowicz and his colleagues have analysed
Many models of climate change's effects on the growing season don't deal with the internal climate-control system by which plants respond to seasonal temperature changes,
Other attendees concentrated on climate-change impacts that could be exacerbating the decline. For instance, flowers may bloom one
It will also cover at least 34 projects involving innovative technology for renewable sources such as solar power, bioenergy and wind, tidal and geothermal energy.
Climate media Climate science received only token coverage as journalists documented the 2009 United nations climate summit in Copenhagen
and found that nearly 80%of them mentioned climate science in less than 10%of their space.
Just 9%of stories mentioned climate science in more than 50%of their space. Research Milky way's double bubble Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope,
As the climate changes and temperatures rise, productivity is likely to drop further. By contrast, yield rates for maize (corn),
in production systems that are more resilient to climate change, says Marco Wopereis, director of Africarice, a research centre with temporary headquarters in Cotonou, Benin, that is also part of the CGIAR and of the global partnership.
000 rice strains to identify genes for desirable traits such as improved yield and climate tolerance.
In addition, researchers will look at how to reduce the environmental impact of rice farming, including reducing methane emissions created during its production,
Wayne Powell, a crop geneticist at Aberystwyth University in Wales, says the partnership is creating a new kind of scientific environment that puts translation at the heart of the science.
Nature Newsinternational negotiators might be bogged down in the ongoing United nations climate talks, but there could yet be hope for an agreement on reducing emissions of a class of powerful greenhouse gases  using the same treaty that is responsible for the phasing out of gases responsible for destroying the ozone layer.
At present, HFCS are covered under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but governments are warming to the idea of creating a direct and comprehensive HFC regulatory structure under the Montreal Protocol,
but decided to hold off, in part to see what might come out of the climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.
The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) estimates that Europe will have spent roughly 6 billion euros on payments for HFC-23 destruction by 2012 75 times more than the 80 million euros companies receiving
commission officials say that their decision is expected before the UN climate meeting in Cancun, Mexico,
in order to speed up the transition towards more climate-friendly chemicals, says Durwood Zaelke, who heads the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, an advocacy group in WASHINGTON DC.
aeroplanes crisscrossed the morning skies above Arizona's cotton fields, dropping millions of tiny moths onto the croplands below.
They asked the US Environmental protection agency for permission to dispense with the refuges and instead begin releasing sterile moths.
researchers have found that the Maya coped with tough environmental conditions by developing ingenious methods to grow crops in wetland areas.
The Maya's home was a tough environment replete with recurring droughts and rising sea levels,
clever way of utilizing the environment, says Scarborough. When a Westerner goes into a wetland today,
Climate heretic: Judith Curry turns on her colleagues: Nature Newsin trying to understand the Judith Curry phenomenon,
and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics.
Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit,
the Air Vent and the Black  board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science,
climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty.
She reserves her harshest criticism for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC. For most climate scientists the major reports issued by the United nations-sponsored body every five years
or so constitute the consensus on climate science. Few scientists would claim the IPCC is perfect,
but Curry thinks it needs thoroughgoing reform. She accuses it of corruption. I'm not going to just spout off
Climate science obviously is not like that. The experts broadly agree that it will take massive changes in agriculture
because any delay will make efforts to stave off major climate change much more expensive and difficult to achieve.
But the COP15 climate negotiations in Copenhagen last December ended in a watered-down policy document,
And in the wake of Climategate a year ago and widespread attacks on the IPCC and on climate science in general, the public may be confused more than ever about
which linked an increase in powerful tropical cyclones to global warming. It earned her scathing attacks on skeptical climate blogs.
They claimed there were serious problems with the hurricane statistics the paper relied on, particularly from before the 1970s,
and that she and her co-authors had failed to take natural variability sufficiently into account. We were generally aware of these problems
a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado who is often critical of the climate science establishment,
and onto Climate Audit, run by statistician Steve Mcintyre. The latter, Curry adds, became my blog of choice,
I want to reach rather than preaching to the converted over at the mainstream climate science blog Realclimate.'
'It was here that Curry began to develop respect for climate outsiders or at least, some of them.
I realize I engaged in groupthink myself not on the hurricane paper per se but more broadly in her unquestioning acceptance of the idea that IPCC reports represent the best available thinking about climate change.
She says she always trusted the IPCC to gather and synthesize all the disparate threads in this complex and multifaceted area of science.
In areas where she had some expertise clouds and sea ice, for example she felt that the report's authors were not appropriately careful.
Curry says, on the subject of atmospheric aerosols that is, particles such as dust and soot that affect cloud formation.
and that they didn't even mention the issue of aerosol impacts on the nucleation of ice clouds.
she said in a recent interview posted on the Collide-a-Scape climate blog. Curry began to find other examples where she thought the IPCC was torquing the science in various ways.
a senior leader at one of the big climate-modeling institutions told me that climate modelers seem to be spending 80 percent of their time on the IPCC production runs
and 20 percent of their time developing better climate models. She also asserts that the IPCC has violated its own rules by accepting nonpeer-reviewed papers
Climate skeptics have seized on Curry's statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change.
What she does believe is that the mainstream climate science community has moved beyond the ivory tower into a type of fortress mentality, in
Curry is not alone in criticizing the IPCC and individual climate scientists; in the wake of Climategate, an error about glacial melting in an IPCC report,
the central issue that concerns Curry also happens to be the key problem in translating climate science into climate policy.
whether or not climate is warming, by how much and when, and they want to know how bad the effects are going to be.
and other politically motivated skeptics will continue to use the word as a blunt instrument against the whole enterprise of climate science that
The uncertainty lies in both the data about past climate and the models that project future climate.
the climate forcing from CO2 that is, the amount of warming a doubling of CO2 alone would cause without any amplifying
Many climate scientists find these complaints unfair. They say the IPCC has been upfront about uncertainties all along that the reports explicitly cite areas where knowledge is lacking.
Yes, the most basic number in climate science is known not with absolute precision, agreed Stanford university's Stephen H. Schneider in a conversation shortly before he died in July.
such as whether clouds will accelerate or retard warming, are much less certain but here people like Schneider point out that the lack of precision is laid out by the IPCC.
Curry has sought to begin a conversation on one of the most important and difficult issues in climate policy:
And because climate is complex, he adds, the terms likely and very likely in the IPCC reports represent lots of wheels
The public gets cartoon versions of climate theories which are refuted easily. A crucial lesson for the public is that uncertainty cuts both ways.
which glaciers flow from the ice sheets down to the sea to dump icebergs, which raises sea level independently.
The same could be true for other aspects of climate. The plausible worst-case scenario could be worse than anything we're looking at right now,
including Marc Morano, the former aide to Senator Inhofe and founder of the Climate Depot skeptic blog.
Andrew C. Revkin, the New york times's longtime environment reporter has treated her with great respect on his Dot Earth blog more than once.
What scientists worry is that such exposure means Curry has the power to do damage to a consensus on climate change that has been building for the past 20 years.
Says Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New york city and proprietor of the Realclimate blog:
She's been criticized hugely by the climate science community, Mcintyre says, for not maintaining the fatwa against talking to outsiders.
The climate community, he says, is engaging in classic black sheep syndrome: members of a group may be annoyed by public criticism from outsiders,
it is not in the interests of climate scientists to treat Curry as merely an annoyance or a distraction.
Climate scientists feel embattled by a politically motivated witch hunt, and in that charged environment, what Curry has tried to do naturally feels like treason especially
since the skeptics have latched onto her as proof they have been right all along. But Curry and the skeptics have their own cause for grievance.
 Michael D. Lemonick is senior science writer at Climate Central, a nonprofit, nonpartisan climate change think tank. For 21 years he was a science writer for Time magazine.
This article was published first by Scientific American on 25 october 2010 and appears in the November 2010 issue
but experts hope that the environment will eventually recover from the disaster. The alkaline sludge, a by-product of bauxite production, contains high concentrations of heavy metals,
Hungarian emergency agencies, assisted by environmental chemists from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, are confident that there will be no lasting damage to human health
and the local environment Independent measurements taken in November by the international environmental organization Greenpeace confirm that tap water
when the snow has gone. Whether local farmers will be allowed to sow any crops next year is yet to be established.
but not burning, after the country was set ablaze during its hottest and driest summer on record (see'Russia counts environmental cost of wildfires').
says Johann Goldammer, a fire ecologist and director of the GFMC. But it could happen,
the ATTO will provide the first long-term monitoring capacity from a tall tower in the tropics;
however, the US Environmental protection agency pulled back the 2011 requirement for cellulosic biofuels from 946 million to 25 million litres,
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