Today´s paradox: more vegetation means more CO2 – in tundra that is

Birches can’t hurt the climate. They’re made of carbon and – just to be sure – they’re even painted white!

Well, at least on the Swedish tundra that’s no guarantee…

birches decrease tundra carbon store
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Largest known sea level rise took less than 350 years

CoastlineOcean level rise is known as one of the most disquieting effects of global warming, with more than three billion people living on the coast or less than 200 kilometres land inward and one tenth of the world population living less than 10 metres above sea level. But since many climate change related factors can influence it, sea level rise is also one of the hardest global warming effects to predict.

To see what may happen scientists of CEREGE laboratory and the Universities of Tokyo and Oxford have studied the largest known ocean level rise: Melt-Water Pulse 1A. They found that during a relatively warm period called the Bølling Oscillation roughly 14,650 years ago sea levels rose an average of 14 meters in just 350 years.

Per year this means a rise of 40 millimetres which makes the current approximation of sea level rise of 3 millimetres pale in comparison.

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Nano-giraffe leaves opposition behind in Science as Art competition

Out of 150 entries an image of a nano-structure resembling a giraffe has won first prize in the 2012 Science as Art competition of the Materials Research Society. The creator of the picture is Shaahin Amini a Ph.D. student at the University of California, who stumbled onto the structure by accident after hours of peering through his microscope.


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Rising thunderstorm clouds increase warming

cloud warming aerosol thunderstormsAs a regular you will be well aware that some clouds cool the climate and other clouds warm. Determining the exact balance of the cloud-climate feedback will help decrease uncertainty margins for 21st century warming forecasts.

Unfortunately it’s a complicated picture, as clouds are not only influenced by climatic factors like temperature and evaporation, but also by concentrations of condensation nuclei – aerosols indeed.

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Flatulent dinosaurs may have been a larger methane source than current human activities

The long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs known as sauropods that lived about 150 million years ago appear to have been rather flatulent. New calculations put the combined methane production of the hulking beasts at 520 million tonnes (Tg). As a comparison the total global methane emissions in 2010 were 593 Tg of which only 395 Tg was anthropogenic.

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Grand Solar Minima do bring cooling to Europe Holocene record shows

solar minimum climate cooling EuropeBut now it’s not dry and icy five-month winters, but wet and windy springs instead. Or would you say these combine?

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Biodiversity increases biomass

In theory less biodiversity would not necessarily imply less biomass. But in reality – in case you were to try and replace all animals with pandas – somewhere along the line you may risk to overlook some important symbiotic connections. And what goes for animals and pandas goes for plants and bamboo, new research shows.

biodiversity increases biomass
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