UN urges biofuel investment halt
Palm oil is one of the biofuel crops stirring controversy.
The UN’s new top adviser on food has urged a freeze on biofuel investment, saying the blind pursuit of the policy is “irresponsible”.
Olivier de Schutter also wants curbs on investors whose speculation is, he says, driving food prices higher.
UN officials liken the rise in food prices to a silent tsunami, threatening 100 million of the world’s poorest.
Climate change warms Arctic, cools Antarctica
Fri May 2, 2008 5:07pm EDT By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Arctic and Antarctica are poles apart when it comes to the effects of human-fueled climate change, scientists said on Friday: in the north, it is melting sea ice, but in the south, it powers winds that chill things down.
The North and South poles are both subject to solar radiation and rising levels of climate-warming greenhouse gases, the researchers said in a telephone briefing. But Antarctica is also affected by an ozone hole hovering high above it during the austral summer.
“All the evidence points toward human-made effects playing a major role in the changes that we see at both poles and evidence that contradicts this is very hard to find,” said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Rain and snow spell relief for Great Lakes
Fri May 2, 2008 1:26pm EDT By Jonathan Spice
TORONTO (Reuters) – Twice as much autumn rain and early winter ice helped Lake Superior, the biggest of North America’s Great Lakes, bounce back from record low water levels reached last year.
The deep, cold lake on the Canada-U.S. border — the largest freshwater body of water in the world by surface area — rose about 31 cm (1 foot) in seven months, with half of that in April alone as the spring thaw melted heavy winter snowfall that arrived late in the season.
The turnaround in the uppermost of the Great Lakes could literally trickle down to its four lower cousins, spelling relief for shippers who use the major waterway and residents concerned over shallow channels and receding shorelines.
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“… a conversion of tundra to boreal forest as temperatures increase.”
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ECOLOGY: Fire in the Far North
Andrew M. Sugden
Paleoecological data sets contain historical
records of biotic responses to changes in
climate. Currently, high-latitude regions are
suffering a particularly aggressive regimen of
climate change; hence, an understanding of past
vegetation dynamics in these regions is
especially pertinent. Higuera et al. have
analyzed pollen records from north-central Alaska
and find that a combination of drier climates and
shrubbier tundra during the late glacial period
14,000 to 10,000 years ago led to regular fires.
Given present-day increases in shrub biomass and
temperature, tundra fire activity might increase
again, with consequences for vegetation dynamics
and carbon cycling. Tinner et al. have analyzed
pollen and other records from the past 700 years
(a period that includes the Little Ice Age of
1500 to 1800 CE) in southern Alaska, and find
that temperature fluctuations of 1° to 2°C,
together with changes in moisture balance, led to
conversions between boreal forest and tundra with
concomitant alterations in fire regimes. Taken
together, these findings are consistent with
models predicting a conversion of tundra to
boreal forest as temperatures increase. — AMS
PLoS ONE 3, e0001744 (2008); Ecology 89, 729 (2008).
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