10 March 2016, The Conversation, Global food production threatens to overwhelm efforts to combat climate change. Each year our terrestrial biosphere absorbs about a quarter of all the carbon dioxide emissions that humans produce. This a very good thing; it helps to moderate the warming produced by human activities such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. But in a paper published in Nature today, we show that emissions from other human activities, particularly food production, are overwhelming this cooling effect. This is a worrying trend, at a time when CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels are slowing down, and is clearly not consistent with efforts to stabilise global warming well below 2℃ as agreed at the Paris climate conference. To explain why, we need to look at two other greenhouse gases: methane and nitrous oxide. The other greenhouse gases Each year, people produce about 40 billion tones of CO₂ emissions, largely from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. This has produced about 82% of the growth in warming due to greenhouses gases over the past decade. The planet, through plant growth, removes about a quarter of this each year (another quarter goes into the oceans and the rest stays in the atmosphere and heats the planet). If it didn’t, the world would warm much faster. If we had to remove this CO₂ ourselves, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars each year, so we should be very grateful that the Earth does it for free. Apart from CO₂, there are two other main greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O). In fact, they are both more potent greenhouse gases than CO₂. The global warming potential of methane and nitrous oxide is 28 and 265 times greater than that of CO₂, respectively. The human emissions of these gases are largely associated with food production. Methane is produced by ruminants (livestock), rice cultivation, landfills and manure, among others. Read More here
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10 March 2016, Washington Post: Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have spiked more in the period from February 2015 to February 2016 than in any other comparable period dating back to 1959, according to a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory. The change in average concentrations from February of last year to February of this year was 3.76 parts per million at the storied Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, leaving the concentration at 404.02 parts per million for February, based on preliminary data. Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, confirmed that the increase, reported previously by New Scientist, represented a record year-over-year growth for Mauna Loa. He also said that in addition to the stark rise in carbon dioxide levels over the past year, researchers have now observed four straight years of increases of more than 2 parts per million in the atmosphere. “We’ve never seen that,” Tans said. “That’s unprecedented.” Read More here
10 March 2016, Science Daily, Cutting cattle carbon: Bad breath and flatulence. Cattle have bad breath and commonly suffer from severe, chronic flatus generating large amounts of methane, which is a greenhouse gas and a driver of anthropogenic global warming. There is an obvious answer to this problem, stop breeding cattle. Unfortunately a large proportion of us enjoy our bovine dairy products and meat too much. Until synthetic products that are indistinguishable from the real thing become available and accepted by milk drinkers and steak fans, we will have to look into alternative approaches to reducing the carbon emissions from these creatures. Writing in International Journal of Global Warming, Abdelmajid Moumen, Ghizlane Azizi, Kaoutar Ben Chekroun and Mourad Baghour of the Université Mohamed 1er, in Nador, Morocco, have reviewed the various approaches to reducing methane emissions from cattle and other livestock. These approaches involve improved genetic selection through breeding, modification of dietary composition, or through rumen microbial manipulation, vaccines against the methanogenic bacteria that generate the methane in these animals and various other techniques. It is possible that among the approaches or with a combination of approaches there might be a way to reduce the global burden of methane emissions from livestock. Read More here
8 March 2016, Energy Post, New data debunks clean energy claims Apple, Amazon, Google. Recent claims by owners of large data centers that a large part of their operations are powered by renewable energy have skeptics coming out of from under their solar panels. Now, there is hard data proving that skepticism is valid, writes energy consultant and author Jim Pierobon. He applauds the efforts of companies like Amazon, Apple and Google to strive for clean energy, but calls for more transparency on their actual practices. A recent report by Lux Research casts a large shadow on some data centers’ clean-energy claims. Scientists at Lux Research found the data centers frequently draw on far more coal-fired power with its much higher emissions than renewables. Companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple should be careful about the claims they make, lest they come across partly as PR stunts. Amazon’s claims are off-base in 23 of its data centers in Virginia. It is less than transparent about how it calculates its emissions “They aren’t doing as much as they claim about sourcing their electricity,” said Ory Zik, Lux Vice President of Analytics. Full-time Data centers need a lot of power to run 24/7. They cannot rely on the intermittent supplies that come from solar and wind energy systems. As a result, they must draw electricity from the regional power grid. Solar and wind systems they have deployed or are developing can help supply renewable power to their centers and to power grids. But they supply nowhere near enough electricity on their own to run operate data centers reliably full-time. Read More here