West Oxford Community Renewables is applying for a grant from “energyshare” to kick start a Micro-Hydro scheme on Osney Island, Oxford. We want to install a reverse Archimedes screw in the River Thames. We are hoping to win some of the £500,000 prize on offer to kick start our fund for an Archimedes screw in the Thames at Osney Lock. The projects which get the most on-line support by the end of June will get through to the next round.

If you would like to register your support then please follow this link:
http://www.energyshare.com/west-oxford-community-renewables

About our community
West Oxford is built around a river, but it’s a complicated relationship. We enjoy the power, beauty and history of the Thames every day. But we live on the front line when the waters rise. In the summer of 2007 we felt powerless as we watched the homes of friends and neighbours succumb to the flood waters.
Yet this community has always worked with the river, harnessed its great power. So now, here in the oldest industrial quarter of the city, we want to work with the river once again using the newest technology.

Our dream
To set up a microhydro system in the heart of Oxford that will use the power of the river to generate improvements for our community. Situated by Osney Lock, just across the river from the site of the city’s first electric power station, the benefits of the scheme will be two fold
1. Providing a source of green energy, a 48 kW installation could generate 159,169kWh a year, saving 68 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.
2. Creating an income stream which can be invested in local community projects to help further reduce our community’s carbon footprint.

The story so far…..
A site has been identified and assessed as suitable. A full feasibility study has been completed to show that the project is both technically and financially viable. Flood risk analysis and ecology and arboricultural surveys have been carried out, to enable us to understand and manage any potential negative impact the project may have.
We are now working on leasing the land, securing planning permission and abstraction licence for the project.
We’re also working to secure the funding to carry out the project, through a community share scheme and loans.

About us
What started in 2007 as a group of enthusiastic neighbours around a kitchen table, is now a flourishing Industrial and Provident Society with a track record in setting up community owned renewable projects, with five installations complete and another three in the pipeline. The microhydro scheme will be our first hydrogeneration project.
We wouldn’t exist without the extraordinary community support we have received – not only from people living in the area, who have invested time and money in making our plans a reality, but also as a virtual community of friends, likeminded individuals and organisations who have supported us along the way.
We know that with your help, we can continue to flourish and play our part in making West Oxford the supportive and vibrant community we feel privileged to be a part of.
Together, we have the power to make it possible.

Scientists have discovered a link between low solar activity and cold winters that could explain why despite global warming trends, the UK and other regions North East of the Atlantic Ocean are experiencing and heading for more frequent cold winters.

Mike Lockwood from STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Reading who led the work said of this year’s winter; “It’s been the 14th coldest in the last 160 years, yet global average temperature for the same period has been the 5th highest. We have discovered this kind of anomaly is significantly more common when solar activity is low”.

The results published in Environmental Research Letters describe how we are now moving into a period of low solar activity which is likely to result in UK winter temperatures more like those seen at the end of the seventeenth century.

The findings are different to previous efforts to explain the UK’s recent cold winters as they compare the most comprehensive, but regionally specific temperature data to the long-term behaviour of the Sun’s magnetic field to study the differences to the average trends for the entire Northern Hemisphere. More details can be found in the Institute of Physics press release on this.

Image Credit: NASA
You can see a high-res image of the covered UK here and more information on the NASA website.

Science Oxford is delighted to welcome Prof Gideon Henderson from Oxford University. He will explain how we can use what we know about the Earth’s climate over the last million years to help us predict temperatures, rainfall, and sea-level in the future.

This is a great lecture, check it out:

Shooting lasers at the sky can make the germ of a raincloud, a new study shows. In an experiment that smacks of science fiction, scientists used a high-powered laser to squeeze water from air, both indoors and out.

Although the technique is unlikely to be an instant rainmaker anytime soon, it could plant the seeds for more eco-friendly cloud manipulation.

“This is the first time that a laser was used to condense water from both laboratory experiments and from the atmosphere,” says Jérôme Kasparian of the University of Geneva, a coauthor of the study. The work appeared in the May 2 Nature Photonics.

Atmospheric scientists have been trying to build artificial clouds since the 1940s, with mixed success. The most popular method, shooting particles of silver iodide into the sky, relied on the fact that raindrops need something to condense around.

“It’s just like when you take a shower with hot water — it’s very humid in your bathroom, but it’s not raining,” Kasparian says. Water droplets need a surface to condense on, like a mirror in a bathroom or a speck of dust or pollen in the atmosphere.

Previous experimenters hoped droplets would form around flakes of silver, salt or other materials just like on a bathroom mirror. “The idea is, you provide more condensation nuclei, you get more condensation,” Kasparian says. “It seems obvious, but in practice no one could really prove that it works.”

Kasparian and colleagues took inspiration from a mist-making apparatus that was invented in 1911 to detect cosmic rays, highly energetic subatomic particles that come from deep space. A physicist named Charles Wilson noticed that when cosmic rays strike a sealed container filled with water vapor, they leave a visible trail of water droplets behind them. This works because the cosmic rays knock electrons off the water molecules, leaving behind charged particles that act like specks of dust for water to congeal around.

“Our idea was to mimic what happens in a Wilson chamber,” Kasparian says. “If you get some condensation with cosmic rays, we should get even more condensation with a laser.”

Kasparian and his colleagues tested this idea by shooting a high-powered infrared laser into a cloud chamber. The laser shot extremely short pulses of intense light, which each carrying several terawatts — or a trillion watts — of energy.

The view fogged up immediately. Droplets about 50 micrometers in diameter formed first, and grew to about 80 micrometers in diameter over the next three seconds. “The effect in the cloud chamber was very spectacular and visible by bare eye,” Kasparian says. “We expected an effect, definitely. But that magnitude was pretty much a surprise.”

Next, the researchers took the laser out in the backyard to try it on the sky. They rolled the laser, called “Teramobile” for its terawatt power and its mobility, onto the lawn behind the physics building at the Free University of Berlin on several nights in the fall of 2008. The clouds, if they formed, would be too distant to see with the naked eye, so the team used a second laser to confirm the cloudy view.

“It also worked quite well in the free atmosphere,” Kasparian says. “That was quite surprising, and a very good surprise.”

Kasparian thinks lasers could provide a more reliable and environmentally friendly way to build clouds. “If you can seed clouds and get some control or at least modulation on the weather, the implications are huge for agriculture, many other economic sectors, many aspects of human life,” Kasparian says. “There are potentially huge consequences.”

“It is a clever technique,” says John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. But he’s skeptical that laser-built clouds could actually make it rain on demand. “Rainfall production requires many conditions to be met,” he cautions.

Image Credit: Jean-Pierre Wolf / University of Geneva

If life has evolved on Sat­urn’s frig­id moon, Ti­tan, it would be strange, smelly—and po­tent­ial­ly ex­plo­sive, new re­search sug­gests.

The con­clu­sions come from as­tro­bi­ol­o­gist Wil­liam Bains, who pre­s­ents his re­search at the Na­tional As­tron­o­my Meet­ing in Glas­gow, Scot­land on April 13.

“Hol­ly­wood would have prob­lems with these al­iens,” said Bains. “Beam one on­to the Star­ship En­ter­prise and it would boil and then burst in­to flames, and the fumes would kill eve­ry­one in range. Even a ti­ny whiff of its breath would smell un­be­lievably hor­ri­ble.

“But I think it is all the more in­ter­est­ing for that rea­son. Would­n’t it be sad if the most al­ien things we found in the gal­axy were just like us, but blue and with tail­s?” added Bains, re­fer­ring to the tall ex­tra­ter­res­tri­als from the mov­ie Av­a­tar.

Bains, whose re­search is car­ried out through Ru­fus Sci­en­tif­ic Ltd. in Cam­bridge, U.K. and the Mas­sachusetts In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, is stu­dy­ing just how ex­treme life’s chem­is­try can be.

Life on Ti­tan, Sat­urn’s larg­est moon, is one of strang­er sce­nar­i­os un­der ex­amina­t­ion. Ti­tan is twice as large as our Moon and has a thick at­mos­phere of freez­ing, or­ange smog. At ten times our dis­tance from the Sun, it is a frig­id place, with a sur­face tem­per­a­ture of mi­nus 180 de­grees Cel­si­us (mi­nus 292 Fah­ren­heit). All the wa­ter is ice; the only liq­uids are meth­ane and eth­ane, fill­ing what sci­en­tists be­lieve are ponds and lakes.

“So, if life were to ex­ist on Ti­tan, it must have blood based on liq­uid meth­ane, not wa­ter. That means its whole chem­is­try is radic­ally dif­fer­ent. The mo­le­cules must be made of a wid­er va­ri­e­ty of el­e­ments than we use, but put to­geth­er in smaller molecules. It would al­so be much more chem­ic­ally re­ac­tive,” said Bains.

This blood would have to con­tain dis­solved chem­icals, but few chem­icals dis­solve easily in liq­uid meth­ane. Most mo­le­cules can’t dis­solve in it if they have more than six atoms not count­ing eas­ily-dis­solved hy­dro­gen. So a me­tab­o­lism run­ning in liq­uid meth­ane will have to be built of smaller mo­le­cules than in Earth bio­chem­is­try, which is typ­ic­ally built of mod­ules of around 10 atoms apart from hy­dro­gen.

You can only build around 3,400 dif­fer­ent mo­le­cules with­in the above-described lim­ita­t­ions on Ti­tan, Bains said. In con­trast, he added, one can build around 10 mil­lion or more dif­fer­ent mo­le­cules fit­ting Earth’s re­quired spe­cif­ica­t­ions, al­though only about 700 are ac­tu­ally used.

“The is­sue is not how many mo­le­cules you can make, but wheth­er you can make the col­lec­tion you need to as­sem­ble a me­tab­o­lism. It is like try­ing to find bits of wood in a lumber-yard to make a ta­ble. In the­o­ry you only need five. But you may have a lumber-yard full of off­cuts and still not find ex­actly the right five… so you need the po­ten­tial to make many more mo­le­cules than you ac­tu­ally need. Thus the six-atom chem­icals on Ti­tan would have to in­clude much more di­verse bond types [link­ing the atoms] and probably more di­verse el­e­ments, in­clud­ing sul­phur and phos­pho­rus.”

The el­e­ments would have to ap­pear in much more di­verse forms, as well as in forms that would be highly un­sta­ble on the Earth en­vi­ron­ment—hence the ex­plo­siveness, he added.

En­er­gy is anoth­er fac­tor that would af­fect the type of life that could evolve on Ti­tan. With sun­light a tenth of a per­cent as in­tense on Ti­tan’s sur­face as on the sur­face of Earth, en­er­gy is probably in short sup­ply. “Rapid move­ment or growth needs a lot of en­er­gy, so slow-growing, lichen-like or­gan­isms are pos­si­ble in the­o­ry, but ve­loci­rap­tors are pret­ty much ruled out,” said Bains.

Image Credit: © 2008 Karl Ko­foed

Oxfordshire Science Festival
This event is part of the Oxfordshire Science Festival 2010. For more information visit the website.

New research suggests that animals living at high latitudes grow better than their counterparts closer to the equator because higher-latitude vegetation is more nutritious. The study, published in the February issue of The American Naturalist, presents a novel explanation for Bergmann’s Rule, the observation that animals tend to be bigger at higher latitudes.

Ever since Christian Bergmann made his observation about latitude and size in 1847, scientists have been trying to explain it. The traditional explanation is that body temperature is the driving force. Because larger animals have less surface area compared to overall body mass, they don’t lose heat as readily as smaller animals. That would give big animals an advantage at high latitudes where temperatures are generally colder.

But biologist Chuan-Kai Ho from Texas A&M University wondered if there might be another explanation. Might plants at higher latitudes be more nutritious, enabling the animals that eat those plants to grow bigger?

To answer that question, Ho along with colleagues Steven Pennings from the University of Houston and Thomas Carefoot from the University of British Columbia, devised a series of lab experiments. They raised several groups of juvenile planthoppers on a diet of cordgrass, which was collected from high to low latitudes. Ho and his team then measured the body sizes of the planthopppers when they reached maturity. They found that the planthoppers that fed the high-latitude grass grew larger than those fed low latitude grass.

The researchers performed similar experiments using two other plant-eating species—grasshoppers and sea snails. “All three species grew better when fed plants from high versus low latitudes,” Ho said. “These results showed part of the explanation for Bergmann’s rule could be that plants from high latitudes are better food than plants from low latitudes.” Although this explanation applies only to herbivores, Ho explained that predators might also grow larger as a consequence of eating larger herbivores.

“We don’t think that this is the only explanation for Bergmann’s rule,” Ho added. “But we do think that studies of Bergmann’s rule should consider ecological interactions in addition to mechanisms based on physiological responses to temperature.”

It’s not known why the higher-latitude plants might be more nutritious. But research in Pennings’s lab at the University of Houston offers a clue. Pennings has shown that plants at low latitudes suffer more damage from herbivores than those at higher latitudes. Ho and Pennings suggest that perhaps lower nutrition and increased chemical defenses are a response to higher pressure from herbivores.

Flurries of questions about mysterious triangle-shaped snowflakes may soon subside, thanks to new research on snowflake formation. Most snowflakes are hexagons because of the arrangement of hydrogen bonds in the water molecule. But the new study, appearing online at arxiv.org (http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.4267) and in an upcoming issue of The Microscope, suggests that after hexagonal flakes, oddball triangular flakes are the most prevalent.

Study coauthors Kenneth Libbrecht and Hannah Arnold of Caltech in Pasadena propose an aeronautical reason for the triangular geometry. The results help solve the very old puzzle of how the unexpected flakes form, Libbrecht says.

Snowflake enthusiasts — such as Libbrecht, who photographs snowflakes — have spotted triangular snowflakes in the wild. The snowflake scientific literature, which goes back almost two centuries, is thick with such sightings, Libbrecht adds, but no one has explained why. “People have noticed them for hundreds of years.”

To address the mystery, the researchers created snowflakes in the laboratory and recorded the shapes. In conditions that simulate natural snowfall, the vast majority of flakes were the standard hexagons, but more of them were triangular than a statistical model had predicted, the team found. Some of these flakes still have six sides but an overall triangular shape, created by three short edges and three long ones. The abundance of triangle-shaped flakes suggests that they may be more common in nature than chance alone would allow.

Tiny impurities, such as dust particles, can cause one edge of the falling snowflake to tilt up as it falls, Libbrecht says. The snowflake sides that are pointed down grow faster as the wind blows by, leading to a stable triangular pattern. Once a triangle shape gets started, the snowflake remains triangular despite any later bumps as it falls, the researchers propose.

Article Credit: ScienceNews

Image Credit: Kenneth Libbrecht

Tec­ton­ic plates are dis­tinct seg­ments of the Earth’s crust whose bor­ders tend to un­dergo large amounts of seis­mic, or earth­quake-re­lat­ed, ac­ti­vity. This oc­curs when a build­up in pres­sure along these bound­aries causes the ground to slip sud­den­ly.

This can al­so oc­cur with­in the plates, along cracks in the crust called fault­lines, but less of­ten. Such an event, though, was the 2008 Wenchuan earth­quake in Chi­na, which killed some 68,000 peo­ple by of­fi­cial es­ti­mates. It came as a sur­prise to many be­cause it oc­curred on a fault­line that had un­der­gone lit­tle re­cent seis­mic ac­ti­vity.

Be­cause of the in­fre­quent seis­mic ac­ti­vity at con­ti­nen­tal in­te­ri­ors like the Wenchuan re­gion, as­sess­ment of earth­quake haz­ard in these ar­eas re­lies on a rel­a­tively short his­tor­i­cal rec­ord, ac­cord­ing to re­search­ers Seth Stein of North­west­ern Un­ivers­ity in Il­li­nois and Mian Liu of the Un­ivers­ity of Mis­souri.

This, they added, makes it hard to dis­tin­guish po­ten­tially long af­ter­shock se­quences from “back­ground” seis­mic ac­ti­vity, which can point to a stress build-up fore­shad­ow­ing a pos­si­ble earth­quake.

In their stu­dy, to be pub­lished in the Nov. 5 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture, Stein and Liu de­vel­oped a mod­el com­par­ing the length of af­ter­shock se­quences to the rate at which stress builds up in a fault in a va­ri­e­ty of sce­nar­i­os.

They found that at plate bound­aries, where most large earth­quakes oc­cur, the mo­tion of tec­ton­ic plates rap­idly “reloads” faults with stress that must be re­leased through an earth­quake. How­ev­er, af­ter­shock ac­ti­vity drops off rel­a­tively quickly al­so, af­ter a dec­ade or so.

With­in con­ti­nents, the op­po­site hap­pens. Slower changes in the po­si­tion of the un­der­ly­ing crust means af­ter­shocks can con­tin­ue much long­er.

The sci­en­tists did­n’t spec­u­late as to which past earth­quake the Wenchuan event might be re­lat­ed to. Chi­na has had sev­er­al ma­jor earth­quakes over the coun­try’s his­to­ry. In ad­di­tion, the re­search­ers wrote, oth­er “seis­micity in the ar­eas of past large earth­quakes, in­clud­ing those in New Ma­drid, Mis­souri (1811 1812), Char­le­voix, Que­bec (1663), and Ba­sel, Switz­er­land (1356), may be af­ter­shocks.”

You think you know why leaves fall off trees. Well, you’re wrong. It’s not the wind. It’s not the cold.

It’s because trees use “scissors” to cut their leaves off.

We call this season the “fall” because all around us right now (if you live near leaf-dropping trees in a temporal zone), leaves are turning yellow and looking a little dry and crusty. So when a stiff breeze comes along, those leaves seem to “fall” off, thus justifying the name “fall.”

Sounds reasonable, no?

But the truth is much more interesting.

According to Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden and a renowned botanist, the wind doesn’t gently pull leaves off trees. Trees are more proactive than that. They throw their leaves off. Instead of calling this season “The Fall,” if trees could talk they’d call this the “Get Off Me” season.

Here’s why.

Around this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, as the days grow shorter and colder, those changes trigger a hormone in leaf-dropping trees that sends a chemical message to every leaf that says, in essence, “Time to go! Let’s part company!”

Once the message is received, says Raven, little cells appear at the place where the leaf stem meets the branch. They are called “abscission” cells. They have the same root as the word scissors, meaning they are designed, like scissors, to make a cut.

And within a few days or weeks, every leaf on these deciduous trees develops a thin bumpy line of cells that push the leaf, bit by bit, away from the stem. You can’t see this without a microscope, but if you looked through one, you’d see those scissors cells lined right up.

That’s where the tree gives each leaf a push, leaving it increasingly dangling. “So with that very slender connection, they’re sort of ready to be kicked off,” says Raven, and then a breeze comes along and finishes the job.

So the truth is, the wind isn’t making the leaves fall. It’s the tree.

The tree is deeply programmed by eons of evolution to insist that the leaves drop away. Why? Why not let the leaves stick around? Why drop?

Raven explains that leaves are basically the kitchen staff of a tree. During the spring, summer and early fall they make the food that helps the tree grow and thrive and reproduce. When the days get short and cold, food production slows down, giving the tree an option: It can keep the kitchen staff or it can let it go.

If trees kept their leaves permanently they wouldn’t have to grow new ones, but leaves are not the brightest of bulbs (sorry!). Every so often, when the winter weather has a break and the days turn warm, Raven says leaves will start photosynthesizing. “They get some water up and they start operating and making food and then it freezes again.”

When the cold snap’s back on, the leaves will be caught with water in their veins, freeze and die. So instead of a food staff that’s resting, the tree is stuck with a food staff that’s dead. And when spring comes, the permanent help will be no help. The tree will die.

That’s why every fall, deciduous trees in many parts of North America get rid of their leaves and grow new ones in the spring. It’s safer that way.

So for leaves, falling in the fall isn’t optional. The trees are shoving them off.

The first hydrological satellite, SMOS, will map out the earth’s soil moisture levels, which will enable scientists to anticipate floods earlier and to improve weather forecasts. TU Delft will be applying the data to the Volta Basin in West Africa, among other things. The European space organisation ESA is launching SMOS on Monday 2 November.
Shovel

“Soil moisture levels actually form the basis for every hydrologist,” says Professor Nick van de Giesen of TU Delft. “Using them, along with other information, you can make decisions on such matters as flooding, drought, desertification and regional weather.”
“Good data on soil moisture levels, however, is scarce. Up to now, you had to go out into the field with a shovel, in a manner of speaking, in order to map out soil moisture levels. That is all going to change with the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) satellite.”
Radio waves

SMOS, which belongs to the European space organisation ESA, is the very first hydrological satellite. It measures the faint radio waves that are sent out through the upper layer of the soil and the sea water. The strength of the signal measured is an indicator of how much water there is in the soil. So for the first time, this satellite will continually be mapping out the soil moisture levels of the whole earth, even if rather roughly at present.

Atmosphere

The upper layer of the soil is the link between the earth and the atmosphere. We know that soil moisture has a great influence on regional weather and climate. New and more detailed information about this can therefore be used to improve weather forecasts. But it will also be possible, for instance, to anticipate floods earlier and to understand storm conditions better.
Cables

Along with other scientific parties, TU Delft will be responsible for calibrating the SMOS data. “To do so, we will combine the satellite information with a new type of measurement on the ground, among other things,” says Van de Giesen. “Through fibre optic cables, we will measure the temperature of the soil at several depths. This temperature is an indication of the soil moisture levels.”
Besides carrying out this calibration, TU Delft will be applying the new information to large basins, such as the Volta in West Africa and the Rhine.
Oceans

Besides measuring soil moisture, the SMOS satellite uses the same technique to measure the levels of salt in the oceans. Together with the temperature, salt levels determine the density of the sea water. Global differences in this density produce large-scale ocean currents, which in turn have a great influence on the earth’s climate.

The first 40 million years of Arctic climate history was recovered from beneath the Arctic sea floor yesterday (Monday 23 August).

After four days drilling in hazardous conditions the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s Arctic Coring Expedition retrieved a 272m core before sea ice forced the work to be abandoned.

The deepest ever Arctic borehole, just 233 kilometres from the North Pole, was interrupted late on Monday when very thick, moving ice floes meant that even the world’s most powerful icebreaker, the Russian Sovetskiy Soyuz, could no longer ensure it was safe to continue coring.

The Sovetskiy Soyuz is one of two ice breakers brought in to protect the coring ship, the Vidar Viking, which must remain stationary while the cores are being taken.

While the team search for another favourable site scientists are taking the opportunity to look at the retrieved core.

Initial analyses, based on examining microfossils in the core, suggest that some of the material in these sediments could be 40 million years old – the Middle Eocene period.

Chief co-scientist, Professor Jan Backman, from the University of Stockholm said: “This is very exciting. For the first time we are beginning to get information about the history of ice in the central Arctic Ocean.

“This core goes back to a time when there was no ice on the planet – it was too warm. It will tell us a great deal about the climate of the region. It will tell us when it changed from hot to cold and hopefully why.”

Jan explained that back in prehistoric times life in the Arctic Ocean was much different to today. In the warmer conditions, and free from ice, life thrived in the far north. The sediments will give some indication of the type and abundance of marine creatures living in these waters at that time.

The team of international scientists are two weeks into the six-week expedition and intend coring to a depth of about 500 metres under the seabed. The previous deepest core extracted from the Arctic was only 16 metres.

On Monday afternoon, a Hercules C-130, from the Swedish Armed Forces, parachuted a package of spare parts and supplies onto the site. Both still pictures and broadcast quality video were collected during this airdrop, which are available to the media. Onshore personnel are available for immediate interview, the scientists and drilling personnel may be available for interview by satellite phone by prior arrangement.

Article Credit: AlphaGalileo

A new way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and tackle climate change had been unveiled by leading economists. Under the proposals, companies would buy what are in effect permits to pollute, but the price of those permits would be controlled because the government would retain enough, at a fixed price, to stop the cost increasing above that level. The economists, whose work is published tomorrow [Tuesday 6 January] along with two other research papers, say it could appeal to supporters of a carbon tax and also to those who favour the alternative, so-called cap-and-trade. “It may well to turn out to be the kind of proposal that the new White House and the new Congress wind up converging on,’’ says Professor Robert N.

Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business & Government, at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Editor of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (REEP) which is publishing the papers. He added, “These papers on domestic US climate policy could not be coming at a more important time. The eyes of the world are turned towards Washington. People worldwide are not just asking how the new administration will participate in the global measures going forward, but more importantly, asking what the US is going to do domestically.’’ The three papers looking at different ways of tackling carbon emissions are published tomorrow in the online edition of the Oxford University Press journal. Until now there have been two options for reducing emissions – carbon tax and cap-and-trade. A carbon tax is a tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels. The result is that the more CO2 a company emits, the greater the cost, with most or all of the money raised from the tax possibly redistributed to the public, because the aim is to discourage emissions rather than raise revenue.

The problem with this approach is that it leaves uncertain the quantity of emissions reduction that will be achieved. In the second approach, cap-and-trade, the government would set a limit for the annual emissions, and companies would buy permits or allowances for set amounts. Again, the money raised would be redistributed. While that would directly tackle the amounts of gas produced, the downside is that there is no control on the price of the permits and hence the cost of emissions reductions, resulting in significant cost uncertainty. The neat solution proposed in one the papers[1] is a hybrid cap-and-trade, where allowances are issued and bought, but a ceiling price enforced by the Government holding back a=2 0proportion of them. They would have a predetermined set price which would ensure that the market price of those already issued would never rise about that price. “The government would hold allowances for the purpose of selling them at a predetermined price,’’ says Professor Stavins. “As a result they will keep the price of allowances in the market from ever going above that that level, thereby eliminating the upside cost uncertainty that has been of great concern to private industry.‘’

A second paper[2], suggests a carbon tax with a modification to protect poorer households who may suffer disproportionately. The more tax that energy providers pay, the greater the price rise to consumers. This paper proposes a novel system for distributing the money raised, with the lowest income group getting a credit worth 2.7 per cent of income and the highest income group, a credit worth 0.8 per cent of income. The third paper[3] argues that a cap-and-trade approach has a number of important advantages, and that a system of tradable permits offers a great deal of flexibility in allocating the value of emissions: `Trading promotes cost-effectiveness, broad participation, and equity in the international context, without the high-level coordination that a tax would require,’’ it says.

Contact: (media inquiries only):
Roger Dobson:
Tel: 01873 854960 Email: theskirrid@aol.com

Helen Ison: Communications Executive, Oxford Journals
Tel: (0044) 1865 353043 Email: helen.ison@oxfordjournals.org

Professor Robert Stavins:
Tel: (001) 617-495-1820 Cell: (001) 617-755-5638.

A leading climate scientist has presented new research findings on the increasing potential for a 4 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures if the current high emissions of greenhouse gases continue.

The conference at Oxford University is the first to consider the global consequences of climate change beyond 2 degrees Celsius, and is jointly sponsored by University’s Environmental Change Institute, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the Met Office Hadley Centre.

Speaking at the international conference called ‘4 degrees and beyond’ at Oxford University, Dr Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, described the possibility of a 4 degree warming happening ‘before the end of the century’. He added that a scenario of very intensive fossil fuel burning could bring this forward by 20 years.

Topics from over 50 other conference research papers will include: food and water security, vulnerable populations, human health, migration, wild fires, sea level rise, wildlife conservation, and ecosystem services. Regional case studies will include Amazonia, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Finland, Mauritius, Siberia, Vietnam, and the monsoon region.

Conference convenor Dr Mark New, from the Oxford University School of Geography and the Environment, and the Tyndall Centre, said: ‘Since the late 1990s, greenhouse gas emissions have increased at close to the most extreme IPCC scenarios, meaning that rates of warming will be faster than most people expect. The conference will review the best science on the consequences of these large climate changes and what we can do about it.’

In today’s presentation Dr Betts warned that 4 degrees of warming could have extreme regional implications along with major changes in rainfall. He said: ‘If greenhouse emissions are not cut soon, then we could see major climate changes within our own lifetimes.’

Other speakers are Professor John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, on 4 degrees warming and the potential for tipping points; Professor Yadvinder Mahli, from Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, on the impact on tropical forests; Dr Philip Thornton, International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi, on sub-Saharan agriculture; Dr Pier Vellinga, from Wageningen University, on sea-level rise; and Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, on global emission pathways.

The Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at Oxford University focuses on environmental change across the natural and social sciences with an orientation to applied and public policy. ECI plays a leading role in three of the UK Government’s main climate research initiatives: the UK Climate Impacts Programme, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and the UK Energy Research Centre.

With land degradation in dryland regions continuing to worsen, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification has agreed on scientist-recommended indicators for monitoring and assessing desertification that signatory countries must report on.

The landmark agreement was reached after two weeks of negotiations involving hundreds of scientists and government ministers attending the Ninth Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 9) of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from 21 September to 2 October.

Desertification, land degradation and drought deprive people of food and water and force millions to leave their homes. Desertification refers to the creation of new deserts through the degradation of drylands, which cover 40% of the world’s land surface. Land degradation, caused by over-cultivation, over-grazing, deforestation and inefficient irrigation, affects roughly 20% of Earth’s drylands.

Since dryland desertification can be remedied or even reversed by using appropriate management techniques, scientists attending the first scientific session of the COP, held from 22 to 24 September, stressed the importance of developing science-based methods for monitoring the areas most at risk to support land and water management decisions. Satellite technologies were recognised as playing an important role in achieving this objective.

ESA has been working closely with the UNCCD secretariat for nearly 10 years, developing and demonstrating innovative information services based on satellite Earth observation (EO) technologies that allow land degradation processes to be monitored over time.

Monitoring desertification, land degradation and droughts requires the continuous evaluation of a complex set of parameters and indicators, some of which can be retrieved with EO technologies and state-of-the-art geo-spatial applications. For instance, the status of land cover – one of the 11 indicators defined by COP – can be monitored from space.

In 2004, ESA launched a large pilot project called DesertWatch to develop a set of land degradation indicators based principally on land surface parameters retrieved from satellite observations. These indicators were developed with the support of Italy, Portugal and Turkey – three of the European countries mostly affected by desertification.

DesertWatch also helped these countries fulfil their UNCCD reporting requirements by combining satellite data with weather and in-situ data, numerical models and geo-information systems to create standardised geo-information products.

ESA recently extended the project so that its methodology may be adapted and put to wider use. To demonstrate its applicability, the methodology will be applied to arid and semi-arid areas in Portugal, Brazil and Mozambique.

According to the UNCCD, soil moisture is another key parameter that should be monitored, because it is an indicator of water scarcity and vegetation stress. Soil moisture data can also be used for assessing drought risk.

The ESA-backed SHARE (Soil Moisture for Hydrometeorological Applications in the Southern African Development Community Region) project has developed a pre-operational soil moisture monitoring service with the long-term goal of supplying free soil moisture information for all of Africa, at a resolution of 1 km, via the Internet. SHARE was developed under ESA’s TIGER initiative, which helps African countries to overcome water problems. DesertWatch and SHARE are funded by the Data User Element (DUE) under ESA’s EO Envelope Programme.

ESA hosted an exhibition booth and a side event at COP 9 entitled ‘Earth observations from space for the UNCCD’, where the latest DesertWatch findings and results were presented. The side event also served as a platform for demonstrating the benefits of EO technology for the UNCCD Convention.

Speaking of DesertWatch, Dr Lucio do Rosario of the Portuguese delegation said: “We recommend the UNCCD Contracting Parties to adopt these methodologies. The benefits are multiple. They improve the monitoring and assessment of land degradation, provide more efficient decision-making and facilitate the reporting to the Convention on the indicators adopted by COP 9.”

In a message to COP 9, UN Secretary General Banki-Moon said: “In addressing climate change, the international community has tended, quite understandably, to focus on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. But tackling the issue in all its complexity also requires to go beyond mitigation and take into account the intrinsic linkages between desertification, land degradation and climate change.”

ESA will continue to act on both fronts by helping the UNCCD community develop monitoring and assessing tools and supporting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) community with long-term trend analyses of essential climate variables.

The Tenth Conference of the Parties of the UNCCD will be hosted by the Republic of Korea in October 2011.

Article Credit: AlphaGalileo

The Baltic Sea winter climate has changed more in the last 500 years than previously thought. Research at the University of Gothenburg shows that our part of the world has experienced periods of both milder and colder winters, and the transitions between these climate types seem to have been abrupt.

Some of the world’s longest climate data series with information on air temperatures and ice coverage in the Baltic Sea area over the last 500 years can be found at the University of Gothenburg’s Department of Earth Sciences. Using new statistical methods to study the data series, researcher Christin Eriksson at the Department of Earth Sciences investigated the climatic variations in northern Europe since the 1500s, focusing especially on the winter climate.
Long cold periods

Her study shows that the winter climate in the Baltic Sea region is characterised by long periods of either mild or cold winters, and that the transitions between these different climate types have been rather rapid. The fact that several independent Baltic Sea data series point in the same direction reinforces the researchers’ conclusion that the area’s winter climate tends to change surprisingly fast.

Regional scale
The data series enabled Eriksson to identify 15 periods during the last 500 years that deviated from average. Eight of these were warmer than average and seven were colder. The study indicates that we are currently in a warm period that started in the late 1800s. It also shows that there has been more variation among the winters in the cold periods than in the warm.
‘To be able to understand the effects of global climate change, we must understand how the climate changes regionally’, says Eriksson.

Decreased ice coverage
The study also looked at maximal ice coverage and river runoff, and found that the average maximum ice coverage has been lower in the last 100 years than earlier, while the river runoff has been stable. The results suggest that a future temperature increase may lead to a decreasing freshwater supply in the South but an increasing supply in the North, which may significantly affect the salt balance in the Baltic Sea and therefore its sensitive ecosystem.

Article Credit: AlphaGalileo

Scientists have created the final predicted form of stable ice, called ice XV, in the lab. But don’t worry — Kurt Vonnegut had nothing to do with it, and the exotic new form of ice can’t destroy civilization.

Types of ice are classified by how close the water molecules pack together and the structure the molecules arrange themselves in. With the new discovery, researchers have identified 16 forms of ice (including two types of ice I) named in order of discovery. Most of the ice on Earth is type Ih (h for hexagonal, hence the six-sided symmetry of all snowflakes). Researchers had long predicted the existence of ice XV, but had never seen it before.

“We have removed the question mark from the phase diagram of water,” says Christoph Salzmann of the University of Oxford in England, coauthor of a paper published online September 2 in Physical Review Letters. A phase diagram maps how molecules will behave at certain pressures and temperatures.

To create the elusive ice, Salzmann and his colleagues dropped the temperature on another kind of ice, ice VI, in which water molecules are bonded to each other willy-nilly. As the researchers lowered the temperature to 130 kelvins (around -143º Celsius) and held the pressure around one gigapascal (almost 10,000 atmospheres), disordered hydrogen bonds in ice VI snapped into a highly ordered, tight conformation and created ice XV. Ice on Earth is downright fluffy in comparison with the newly discovered ice XV.

Earlier predictions guessed that ice XV might be ferroelectric, possessing the ability to carry a charge. Ice with that property could have had interesting effects on geological events on planets, Salzmann says. Instead, water molecules in ice XV pack in such a way that the charges all cancel out.

Ice XV’s stability at high pressures and low temperatures may allow it to exist somewhere out in the cosmos—maybe in deep interiors of icy planets or moons, Salzmann says. The only places on Earth with high enough pressure to sustain ice XV are also extremely hot, so ice XV can’t form there, he says.

Ice IX, made fictionally famous by Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, also exists only under high pressure.

[Image Credit: Flickr/darrenhester.]

Article Credit: Wired Science

The word electricity is thought to derive from the ancient Greek elektron, meaning “amber.” When subject to friction, materials such as amber and fur produce an effect that we now know as static electricity. Related phenomena were studied in the eighteenth century, most notably by Benjamin Franklin. To test his theory that lightning is electricity, in 1752 Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm. He conducted the experiment at great danger to himself; in fact, other researchers were electrocuted while conducting similar experiments. He not only proved his hypothesis, but also that electricity has positive and negative charges.

In 1831, Michael Faraday’s formulation of the law of electromagnetic induction led to the invention of electric generators and transformers, which dramatically changed the quality of human life. Far less well-known is that Faraday’s colleague, William Fox Talbot, was the father of calotype photography. Fox Talbot’s momentous discovery of the photosensitive properties of silver alloys led to the development of positive-negative photographic imaging. The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes.

Photo credit: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Several factors influence global climate change. Long-term influences that work over hundreds of thousands of years have an astronomical origin, namely the eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of the Earth’s orbit. Natural processes on earth, such as volcanic activity and lightning also affect the levels of particulates in the atmosphere and so affect climate. Higher levels of particulates in the atmosphere increase cloud cover, which reduces the amount of energy from sunlight absorbed by the earth’s surface.

However, our burning of fossil fuels at an increasingly high rate is adding the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, at alarming rates. This activity together with human activities that are also raising levels of other greenhouse gases, including methane, are cause for concern and underpin efforts to prevent irreversible climate change.

Heitor Reis and Cláudia Serrano of the Geophysics Centre of Évora, Portugal, point out that another factor must be considered in detailed climate models. They explain that on a shorter timescale, solar activity, which follows an eleven-year cycle, may have a subtle effect not previously recognised.

Their research suggests that the eleven year solar cycle causes a rise and fall in cosmic rays reaching the earth’s surface and so causes a rise and fall in lightning activity. Less solar activity means higher cosmic rays flux and fewer lightning storms, whereas at times of maximum solar activity there are fewer charged particles in the atmosphere so it is more resistant to the smooth flow of charge and lightning bolts occur as the resistance suddenly breaks down.

This lightning effect is in turn affected by the amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere, which depends on fossil fuel burning. The team explains that these two confounding factors also influence cloud cover and so depending on the specific point at which we are in the solar cycle the effect of particulates from fossil fuel burning may have a positive or negative effect on storms, cloud cover, and so the earth’s ability to reflect away energy from sunlight.

When solar activity is close to its minimum cosmic rays will increase cloud cover and lightning, which will almost completely cancel out the warming effect of added greenhouse gases at that point in time.

Article Credit: AlphaGalileo

Researchers from St. Petersburg have ascertained that formation of a child’s sex depends, among other things, on the geomagnetic field status at the time of conception.

Who will be born – a boy or a girl? The answer to this question that worries all parents is determined by a lot of conditions, including external ones. The scientists of the Central Scientific-Research Institute of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Ministry of Health Care of the Russian Federation (St. Petersburg) and the St. Petersburg branch of Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiopropagation, Russian Academy of Sciences (IZMIRAN), have ascertained that the sex of a child depends, among other things, on the level of disturbances of geomagnetic field status at the time of conception.

The researchers have retrospectively analyzed the connection between more than 600 randomly chosen supposed conception instants and the geomagnetic field status within the 1914-1979 timeframe. These instants were mainly inhabitants of St. Petersburg and the St. Petersburg Region. As the exact date of conception is normally unknown, therefore the researchers subtracted 280 days from the date of the child’s birth and determined the geomagnetic field status on that day and on the dates of nearest extremums before and after the supposed conception.

Regardless of the fact that the frequency of the boys’ and girls’ births was on the whole approximately equal within the period under review, some interesting regularities were still discovered. It has turned out that in case of lowering intensity of magnetic field oscillation at the point of conception, boys were borns more frequently (approximately 16 boys per 10 girls), but in case of increasing its intensity – girls were born more frequently (approximately 15 girls per 10 boys).

Can science explain this regularity? The researchers suppose that the discovered dependence is connected with the roles which are assigned by evolution to the male and female sex: the female role is stabilization, the male one – lability, search. That means that in unfavorable environment (in this case – increased level of magnetic field distortion) preconditions for girls’ birth occur in gametal cells, and vice versa, in favorable environment (decreased level of distortion), boys are born.

Such preconditions appearance mechanism is yet unclear. However, the researchers assume that it is connected with the presence of free-radical particles in the cells, fluctuations in ultra-low magnetic fields intensity being able to influence these particles’ recombination processes, and also to affect decay of some types of blood leucocytes, for example, neutrophils, which significantly decrease in number during disturbed geomagnetic activity periods.

Article Credit: AlphaGalileo