global warming

You may find this hard to believe if you’re standing near a swarm of chain smokers, but most scientists think the trace amounts of carbon dioxide and other pollutants in cigarette smoke have, at most, a negligible effect on the climate. “In fact,” theorizes John M. Wallace, a professor at the University of Washington’s climate-research department, “it might even counteract global warming by an equally minuscule amount, because the white particulate matter in smoke would reflect some of the sun’s energy, thereby minimizing heat.”

Global warming is far and away the symptom at the top of the list of indicators that our planet is overloaded with carbon dioxide. Another important, but less considered consequence of the excess CO2 is the effect it has on the world's oceans. The oceans are a natural carbon dioxide sponge, responsible for maintaining the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere by absorbing a measure of the gas in its water. Currently, it is estimated that the ocean is uptaking nearly one-third of all human-produced CO2, which is slowly lowering its overall pH. Put simply: the oceans are becoming acidic.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced yesterday that 2008 could be a busy hurricane season. Between twelve and 16 storms may be big enough to earn names, and six to nine should be intense enough to be qualified as hurricanes. And of those, two to five could be major.

A team of scientists led by V. Ramanathan of the University of California, San Diego have begun using autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, or AUAVs, to study the link between air pollution and climate change. While some of today's top robot drones are operated via remote control, this new fleet of eight-foot-long, sub-50-pound Manta AUAVs fly all on their own.

MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel got a ton of attention in 2005 when he published a paper in Nature demonstrating a link between global warming and hurricanes—especially since Katrina hit New Orleans just three weeks later.

When it comes to climate change, a quick fix won't do. Science published a paper Friday from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) which concludes that a proposed plan to inject the atmosphere with sulfate particles in order to cool the planet would actually have dire consequences.

The good news is that the ozone hole over Antarctica is slowly healing, thanks to controls on ozone-depleting substances that were once widely used in products such as refrigerators and aerosol cans. Stratospheric ozone protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation that can cause problems such as skin cancer and crop damage.

In the fifty-some years since Sir David Attenborough began producing shows about Earth's wildlife, our planet has changed considerably. Population has skyrocketed. Cities have grown and spread to accommodate massive influx from the countryside. Species have become endangered; extinct. And amidst it all, Attenborough—the famed British TV naturalist and by some accounts the world's most-traveled human—has borne witness.

MIT researchers have proposed a strange new way to predict the severity of a hurricane: Listening underwater. Currently, the most common way to gauge a storm's strength is to either study satellite images (which can be pretty inaccurate), or fly a weather plane straight on into the storm and gather critical data (which gets expensive).

Yes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that man is at the root of most of Earth's warming in the last five decades. Still, some researchers say the trend can be attributed to natural causes, including changes in the flux of cosmic rays slamming into our atmosphere, but now, according to Physics World, a pair of U.K. particle physicists have dismissed that idea.

As far as TV history goes, public service announcements will go down as a small but memorable slice of the great broadcast pie. The weeping Native American, brought to tears by the garbage strewn across his great country's highways. "Knowing is half the battle." "This is drugs; this is your brain on drugs." And so on.

Now, Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection group have begun a privately funded PSA of their own with hopes of rallying the general public to the cause of preventing a global climate crisis.

Getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is just one step. After plants and trees pull CO2 out of the air, some of the surplus carbon is funneled down into the soil, where it can then re-enter the atmosphere or seep into groundwater. To trap this excess carbon, Newcastle University scientists are trying to design new kinds of soils that would transform the stuff into calcium carbonate, keeping it down in the ground.

In a new review article in Nature Geoscience, two scientists say that black carbon, the stuff that gets kicked up into the air from biomass burning and diesel engines, among other things, could account for as much as 60 percent of the warming effect of carbon dioxide. That's three to four times greater than most estimates, and more than that of any greenhouse gas save CO2.