'Tis better to have one, or a dozen, that sit in the cabinet and do nothing because no need arises than to need one and not have one.Svartalf wrote:Yu mean you don't have a half dozen already? Shame on you.
Daily Caller News Foundation
Studies: Increased CO2 emissions are greening the planet
3:51 PM 03/14/2014
Michael Bastasch
Will emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere cause tornadoes in Los Angeles and massive floods in the Himalayas? A growing body of research suggests it may just spur plant growth and green planet Earth.
For the past few years, scientific studies have found links between increasing carbon emissions and increased foliage and plant growth — called the CO2 fertilization. The idea is that since plants thrive on CO2 absorbed through photosynthesis, increasing atmospheric CO2 levels will actually green the planet and expand foliage. Scientists have been hard pressed to find evidence of such a phenomenon until recently.
“Well documented evidence shows that concurrently with the increased CO2 levels, extensive, large, and continuing increase in biomass is taking place globally — reducing deserts, turning grasslands to savannas, savannas to forests, and expanding existing forests,” according to a study by the libertarian Cato Institute from earlier this year.
This greening trend goes against what many climate scientists expected, in particularly the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, many climate scientists have been warning about atmospheric carbon levels passing 400 parts per million — which happened last year.
“Nevertheless, in nearly all regions and globally, the overall effect in recent decades is decidedly toward greening,” Cato notes. “This result is also the opposite of what the IPCC expected.”
Cato is not the only place to report that CO2 fertilization is making the world a greener place. Last year, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) released findings that “CO2 fertilisation correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa.” This means that arid regions across the world would have not greened if CO2 levels had not increased.
According to CSIRO, some areas of the world did see some browning instead of greening, but many of the regions studied saw huge gains in greenery. This is because plants in arid regions already use water more judiciously than in other areas, but increasing CO2 levels also drives them to use scarce water resources more efficiently as well.
“In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water very efficiently,” said Dr. Randall Donohue, a CSIRO research scientist. “Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilisation.”
Another study by U.S. scientists published in the journal Nature last year found a “substantial increase in water-use efficiency in temperate and boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere over the past two decades.” the increase in water efficiency, the study said, is consistent with a CO2 fertilization effect.
“The observed increase in forest water-use efficiency is larger than that predicted by existing theory and 13 terrestrial biosphere models,” the study added. “The increase is associated with trends of increasing ecosystem-level photosynthesis and net carbon uptake, and decreasing evapotranspiration.”
While CO2 fertilization is boosting foliage expansion, however, scientists warn that the other effects of global warming like higher temperatures, water scarcity and severe weather could offset the gains in greenery.
“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas; however there will be secondary effects that are likely to influence water availability, the carbon cycle, fire regimes and biodiversity, for example,” Donahue cautioned.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 98171.htmlOfficial prophecy of doom: Global warming will cause widespread conflict, displace millions of people and devastate the global economy
Leaked draft report from UN panel seen by The Independent is most comprehensive investigation into impact of climate change ever undertaken - and it's not good news
TOM BAWDEN Author Biography Tuesday 18 March 2014
Climate change will displace hundreds of millions of people by the end of this century, increasing the risk of violent conflict and wiping trillions of dollars off the global economy, a forthcoming UN report will warn.
The second of three publications by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due to be made public at the end of this month, is the most comprehensive investigation into the impact of climate change ever undertaken. A draft of the final version seen by The Independent says the warming climate will place the world under enormous strain, forcing mass migration, especially in Asia, and increasing the risk of violent conflict.
Based on thousands of peer-reviewed studies and put together by hundreds of respected scientists, the report predicts that climate change will reduce median crop yields by 2 per cent per decade for the rest of the century – at a time of rapidly growing demand for food. This will in turn push up malnutrition in children by about a fifth, it predicts.
Climate change
Coastal systems and low-lying areasFood securityThe global economyHuman healthHuman securityFreshwater resourcesUnique landscapes
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Coastal systems and low-lying areasFood securityThe global economyHuman healthHuman securityFreshwater resourcesUnique landscapes
The report also forecasts that the warming climate will take its toll on human health, pushing up the number of intense heatwaves and fires and increasing the risk from food and water-borne diseases.
While the impact on the UK will be relatively small, global issues such as rising food prices will pose serious problems. Britain’s health and environmental “cultural heritage” is also likely to be hurt, the report warns.
According to the draft report, a rare grassy coastal habitat unique to Scotland and Ireland is set to suffer, as are grouse moors in the UK and peatlands in Ireland. The UK’s already elevated air pollution is likely to worsen as burning fossil fuels increase ozone levels, while warmer weather will increase the incidence of asthma and hay fever.
Coastal systems and low-lying areas
The report predicts that by the end of the century “hundreds of millions of people will be affected by coastal flooding and displaced due to land loss”. The majority affected will be in East Asia, South-east Asia and South Asia. Rising sea levels mean coastal systems and low-lying areas will increasingly experience submergence, coastal flooding and coastal erosion.
Food security
Relatively low local temperature increases of 1C or more above pre-industralised levels are projected to “negatively impact” yields of major crops such as wheat, rice and maize in tropical and temperate regions. The report forecasts that climate change will reduce median yields by up to 2 per cent per decade for the rest of the century – against a backdrop of rising demand that is set to increase by 14 per cent per decade until 2050.
The global economy
A global mean temperature increase of 2.5C above pre-industrial levels may lead to global aggregate economic losses of between 0.2 and 2.0 per cent, the report warns. Global GDP was $71.8trn (£43.1trn) in 2012, meaning a 2 per cent reduction would wipe $1.4trn off the world’s economic output that year.
Human health
Until mid-century, climate change will impact human health mainly by exacerbating problems that already exist, the report says. Climate change will lead to increases in ill-health in many regions, with examples including a greater likelihood of injury, disease and death due to more intense heatwaves and fires; increased likelihood of under-nutrition; and increased risks from food and water-borne diseases. Without accelerated investment in planned adaptations, climate change by 2050 would increase the number of undernourished children under the age of five by 20-25 million globally, or by 17-22 per cent, it says.
Human security
Climate change over the 21st century will have a significant impact on forms of migration that compromise human security, the report states. For example, it indirectly increases the risks from violent conflict in the form of civil war, inter-group violence and violent protests by exacerbating well-established drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks.
Small-island states and other places highly vulnerable to sea-level rise face major challenges to their territorial integrity. Some “transboundary” impacts of climate change, such as changes in sea ice, shared water resources and migration of fish stocks have the potential to increase rivalry among states.
Freshwater resources
The draft of the report says “freshwater-related risks of climate change increase significantly with increasing greenhouse gas emissions”. It finds that climate change will “reduce renewable surface water and groundwater resources significantly in most dry subtropical regions”, exacerbating the competition for water. Terrestrial and freshwater species will also face an increased extinction risk under projected climate change during and beyond the 21st century.
Unique landscapes
Machair, a grassy coastal habitat found only in north-west Scotland and the west coast of Ireland, is one of the several elements of the UK’s “cultural heritage” that is at risk from climate change, the report says. Machair is found only on west-facing shores and is rich in calcium carbonate derived from crushed seashells. It is so rare and special, that a recent assessment by the European Forum on Nature Conservation and Pastoralism described it as an “unknown jewel”.
The IPCC also warns of climate threats to Irish peatlands and UK grousemoors and notes an increasing risk to health across Europe from rising air pollution – in which the polluted UK is already in serial breach of EU regulations.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!!!macdoc wrote:Official prophecy of doom: Global warming will cause widespread conflict, displace millions of people and devastate the global economy
*snip*
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... y1Z49zjP3wLess gloopy oceans will slow climate change
16:27 21 March 2014 by Fred Pearce
Our changing climate will have an unexpected effect: it will make the oceans less thick and viscous. That is good news, as it should make the seas much better at burying atmospheric carbon out of harm's way on the seabed.
The effect is big enough to reduce the temperature rise by 8 per cent, says Jan Taucher of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research at Kiel, Germany, who claims to be the first to model the change in stickiness.
Much of the carbon dioxide we pour into the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean, where it is taken up by growing organisms. When these organisms die, some of the carbon forms particles that sink to the ocean floor. To replace this buried carbon, the oceans absorb more from the air, which in turn curbs climate change.
Global warming may give this process a boost, says Taucher. Warmer water is less viscous, and a previous study suggested the particles will sink 5 per cent faster for every degree of warming, so more carbon will end up on the seabed.
Taucher added the viscosity effect to a model of ocean physics and chemistry and ran it until the year 4000, with emissions falling to zero after 2100. The world ended up 6 °C warmer, but the oceans absorbed 17 per cent more carbon dioxide than previously thought. That reduced overall warming by 8 per cent.
Fire seasons, particularly in southern Australia, will extend in high-risk areas.
Australia's multibillion-dollar mining, farming and tourism industries face significant threats as worsening global warming causes more dangerous and extreme weather, the world's leading climate science body will warn.
A final draft of a five-year assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - seen by Fairfax Media - details a litany of global impacts from intensifying climate change including the displacement of hundreds of millions of people, reduced crop yields and the loss of trillions of dollars from the global economy.
The report is the second part of the IPCC's fifth major assessment and focuses on climate change's impacts and how the world might adapt. It will be finalised at a meeting in Japan next weekend before its release on March 31.
The final draft Australasia chapter also outlines significant local threats if human-caused climate change gets worse, in particular high confidence that fire seasons, particularly in southern Australia, will extend in high-risk areas.
There is also significant risk of increased damage and death from heatwaves resulting from more frequent extreme high temperatures. Flood risk too would be worse.
The draft says these new extremes imply Australia's mammoth mining industry is increasingly vulnerable without adaptation measures. The report points to significant loss of coal exports revenue of $5 billion to $9 billion when mines were flooded in 2011.
Tourism also faces some significant threats, the draft says. The Great Barrier Reef is expected to degrade under all climate change scenarios, reducing its attractiveness to visitors.
Australia's $1.8 billion ski industry is identified as most negatively affected, with little option for it to counteract threats.
For Australian farming a 4 per cent reduction in the gross value of beef, sheep and wool is expected with 3 degrees of warming above a 1980-99 baseline.
Dairy output is projected to decline in all regions, except in Tasmania.
Out of the major risks identified for Australia in the draft, the loss of montane ecosystems and changes in coral reefs, appear to be very difficult to avoid. The draft also finds modelling consistently indicated the range of many wildlife species will contract.
And there is high confidence climate change is already affecting Australia's oceans, with climate zones and species shifting hundreds of kilometres southwards.
Professor Jean Palutikof - a review editor of the assessment and director of Australia's National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility - said while adaptation measures were important, there were limits to what the world could do and it was important to cut global emissions to ensure these thresholds are not reached.
''I think it is quite black and white, there is a risk we will go beyond the limits of the natural environment and human society to adapt to the climate'' she said.
A spokesman for Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the government recognised the importance of adapting to the impacts of climate change, pointing to the refunding of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, which it has asked to ''focus on putting practical adaptation information in the hands of decision-makers so we can build a stronger, more resilient Australia''.
FOOD
The world is hungry and increasingly so. Demand for the three staple food crops - rice, wheat and maize - is expected to grow 14 per cent a decade to 2050.
Meeting that demand will be hard at the best of times. CSIRO's Dr Mark Howden says the food produced (yields) by most primary crops is presently growing by only about 1 per cent a decade.
Then there is climate change. The draft IPCC assessment finds with global warming average global crop yield will decline by up to 2 per cent a decade .
Dr Howden is a lead author of the food security chapter in the report. He says food crops will remain relatively stable with less than 1 degree of warming. But as temperatures rise above that they will feel the heat. And the more heat, the less crops will produce.
''Confidence that things will get more and more negative is stronger and stronger as we go out to higher temperatures,'' he says.
More extreme weather will also mean the amount of food produced will vary wildly year-on-year.
The draft findings of the fifth assessment differ from the IPCC's last report, which found crop losses in some areas would be offset by gains elsewhere. Five years on and more negative impacts are now being observed than positive.
Dr Howden says adaptation can improve yields by about 10 to 15 per cent above what they would otherwise have been - enough to feed a billion people. The draft says adaptation can be effective at about two degrees of warming, but at four degrees the gap between production and demand will become increasingly large in many regions, even with adaptation.
The work to be able to adapt food production to a hotter and more variable world must begin now, Dr Howden says. One example is the need to breed varieties that can handle the new climate, while to date we breed for historic conditions.
NATURAL HABITAT
At the top of Australia's mountains the world is closing in. As the planet warms, snow is disappearing and the montane environment is receding. The animal and plant species that call it home, such as the mountain pygmy-possum, have a significant problem - their chance of extinction is growing.
Macquarie University biologist, Professor Lesley Hughes, says habitat contraction is one of the key challenges emerging as a result of climate change.
Professor Hughes is a lead author of the Australasian chapter. She says if warming intensifies over the coming decades the overall global picture for ecosystems, plants and animals is bleak. A leaked draft of the report concludes many species are already shifting their range, seasonal activities, migration patterns, and interactions.
''There are lots of species that have proved to be very sensitive to warming of even less than 1 degree,'' Professor Hughes says.
''In some cases species have moved several hundred kilometres to cooler areas towards the poles, particularly in the marine world, where there are less barriers to movement than on land.''
She says that at up to 2 degrees of warming, the main driver of extinction, will continue to be land-use change, but at any higher rate of warming, climate change will become the predominant factor.
Professor Hughes says most species cannot evolve at the same speed as the planet is changing, and there is little humans can do to help out.
SECURITY
Wars between great nations and millions of refugees driven from home by rising seas. These are the nightmare security scenarios envisaged under climate change.
In a sign of concern about global warming's security impact the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has for the first time assessed what problems may emerge. Professor Jon Barnett, a political geographer at Melbourne University, is a lead author of the security chapter. He says published evidence is clear that extreme weather will displace large numbers of people. But it also shows people tend to return once a threat subsides, meaning displacement is often temporary.
What about long-term deterioration, such as sea level rise? The draft report says by 2100, without help, hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by coastal flooding and land loss.
Will that mean great numbers of refugees fleeing to other countries? Professor Barnett says there is no clear evidence for that. And the real concern will be the poor and vulnerable who will have no escape means.
''Only some groups have the wherewithal to move as conditions deteriorate. Typically, it is the most vulnerable who are left behind and that is where the greatest social and humanitarian problem is,'' Professor Barnett says.
The IPCC assessment also looks at whether climate change will cause more armed conflicts, an area which he says is deeply contested. The draft assessment concludes climate change will indirectly increase the risk of conflict by exacerbating factors that cause violence, such as poverty and economic shocks.
While the link between climate change and war is not clear, it may shape security policy and heighten tensions between nations over factors such as shared water resources and fish stocks. But Professor Barnett says these can be managed peacefully with strong international institutions.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/new-i ... z2wmIUePHg
No more and somewhat less than the other 4.5 billion years it's been around.Scumple wrote: The planet is borked good and proper.
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... c30b6f1709Thorium reactors
Asgard’s fire
Thorium, an element named after the Norse god of thunder, may soon contribute to the world’s electricity supply
Apr 12th 2014 | From the print edition
WELL begun; half done. That proverb—or, rather, its obverse—encapsulates the problems which have dogged civil nuclear power since its inception. Atomic energy is seen by many, and with reason, as the misbegotten stepchild of the world’s atom-bomb programmes: ill begun and badly done. But a clean slate is a wonderful thing. And that might soon be provided by two of the world’s rising industrial powers, India and China, whose demand for energy is leading them to look at the idea of building reactors that run on thorium.
Existing reactors use uranium or plutonium—the stuff of bombs. Uranium reactors need the same fuel-enrichment technology that bomb-makers employ, and can thus give cover for clandestine weapons programmes. Plutonium is made from unenriched uranium in reactors whose purpose can easily be switched to bomb-making. Thorium, though, is hard to turn into a bomb; not impossible, but sufficiently uninviting a prospect that America axed thorium research in the 1970s. It is also three or four times as abundant as uranium. In a world where nuclear energy was a primary goal of research, rather than a military spin-off, it would certainly look worthy of investigation. And it is, indeed, being investigated.
India has abundant thorium reserves, and the country’s nuclear-power programme, which is intended, eventually, to supply a quarter of the country’s electricity (up from 3% at the moment), plans to use these for fuel. This will take time. The Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research already runs a small research reactor in Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu, and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai plans to follow this up with a thorium-powered heavy-water reactor that will, it hopes, be ready early next decade.
China’s thorium programme looks bigger. The Chinese Academy of Sciences claims the country now has “the world’s largest national effort on thorium”, employing a team of 430 scientists and engineers, a number planned to rise to 750 by 2015. This team, moreover, is headed by Jiang Mianheng, an engineering graduate of Drexel University in the United States who is the son of China’s former leader, Jiang Zemin (himself an engineer). Some may question whether Mr Jiang got his job strictly on merit. His appointment, though, does suggest the project has political clout. The team plan to fire up a prototype thorium reactor in 2015. Like India’s, this will use solid fuel. But by 2017 the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics expects to have one that uses a trickier but better fuel, molten thorium fluoride.
Thorium itself is not fissile. If bombarded by neutrons, though, it turns into an isotope of uranium, 233U, which is. Thorium can thus be burned in a conventional reactor along with enriched uranium or plutonium to provide the necessary neutrons. But a better way is to turn the element into its fluoride, mix that with fluorides of beryllium and lithium to bring its melting-point down from 1,110ºC to a more tractable 360ºC, and melt the mixture. The resulting liquid can be pumped into a specially designed reactor core, where fission raises its temperature to 700ºC or so. It then moves on to a heat exchanger, to transfer its newly acquired heat to a gas (usually carbon dioxide or helium) which is employed to drive turbines that generate electricity. That done, the now-cooled fluoride mixture returns to the core to be recharged with heat.
This is roughly how America’s experimental thorium reactor, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, worked in the 1960s. Its modern incarnation is known as an LFTR (liquid-fluoride thorium reactor).
The benefits of fluoridation
One of the cleverest things about LFTRs is that they work at atmospheric pressure. This changes the economics of nuclear power. In a light-water reactor, the type most commonly deployed at the moment, the cooling water is under extremely high pressure. As a consequence, light-water reactors need to be sheathed in steel pressure vessels and housed in fortress-like containment buildings in case their cooling systems fail and radioactive steam is released. An LFTR needs none of these.
Thorium is also easier to prepare than its rivals. Only 0.7% of natural uranium is the fissionable isotope 235U. The rest is 238U, which is heavier because it has three more neutrons, and does not undergo fission because of the stability these neutrons bring. This is why uranium has to be enriched by the complicated process of centrifugation. Plutonium is made by bombarding 238U with neutrons in a manner similar to the conversion of thorium into 233U. In its case, however, this requires a separate reactor from the one the plutonium is eventually burned in. By contrast thorium, once extracted from its ore, is reactor-ready.
It does, it is true, need a seed of uranium or plutonium to provide neutrons to start the ball rolling. Once enough of it has been converted into 233U, though, the process becomes self-sustaining, with neutrons from the fission of 233U transmuting sufficient thorium to replace the 233U as it is consumed. The seed material then becomes superfluous and can, because the fuel is liquid, be flushed out of the reactor along with the fission products generated when 233U atoms split up. Similarly, more thorium fluoride can be bled in as needed. The consequence is that thorium reactors can run non-stop for years, unlike light-water reactors. These have to be shut down every 18 months to replace batches of fuel rods.
Bombs away?
Thorium has other advantages, too. Even the waste products of LFTRs are less hazardous than those of a light-water reactor. There is less than a hundredth of the quantity and its radioactivity falls to safe levels within centuries, instead of the tens of millennia for light-water waste.
Paradoxically, though, given thorium’s history, it is the difficulty of weaponising thorium which many see (as it were) as its killer app in civil power stations. One or two 233U bombs were tested in the Nevada desert during the 1950s and, perhaps ominously, another was detonated by India in the late 1990s. But if the American experience is anything to go by, such bombs are temperamental and susceptible to premature detonation because the intense gamma radiation 233U produces fries the triggering circuitry and makes handling the weapons hazardous. The American effort was abandoned after the Nevada tests.
The gamma-ray problem is created by a quirk of the process that turns thorium into 233U. A small amount takes a different path and ends up as radioactive thallium—which is very radioactive indeed. Its gamma rays are so powerful that they can penetrate concrete a metre thick. Extracting, smelting and machining material containing even trace amounts of it is beyond the scope of all but a handful of national weapons laboratories. Rogue nations interested in an atom bomb are thus likely to leave thorium reactors well alone when there is so much poorly policed plutonium scattered around the world. So a technology abandoned because it could not be turned into weapons may now, in part for that very reason, be about to resurface.
moreEl Niño could raise meteorological hell this year
By John Upton
It’s more likely than not that El Niño will rise from the Pacific Ocean this year — and some scientists are warning that it could grow into a bona fide monster.
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center put out a bulletin Thursday saying there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that El Niño will develop later this year. Australian government meteorologists are even more confident — they said earlier this week that there’s a greater than 70 percent chance that El Niño will develop this summer.
Man will (hopefully) be gone by then.Tero wrote:Thorium will probably be an intermediate stage, but fusion will eventually be managed. If a fusion reactor blows up, well, it may look vuolent, but no permanent damage or waste.
And whose fusion reactor would it be then?Scot Dutchy wrote:Man will (hopefully) be gone by then.Tero wrote:Thorium will probably be an intermediate stage, but fusion will eventually be managed. If a fusion reactor blows up, well, it may look vuolent, but no permanent damage or waste.
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