Public Affairs — Page 34

As plants become starved for CO2, rock weathering diminishes. Credit: study coauthor David Beerling Earth is currently in an ice age. (People, especially climate change naysayers, sometimes forget that.) The growth of the Antarctic ice sheet began about 25 million years ago, and by about 3 million years ago we had a full-blown ice age.  What has remained a mystery…

Academics are like turtles, pulling their heads in when reporters come knocking. An article in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has the best metaphor for this syndrome that I’ve heard: Scientists become turtles. They’re discouraged from media relations, and thus never get better at it, and they don’t think it’s their job.  As author Michael Munger, professor of political…

The California Condor has enjoyed a comeback despite its relative ugliness. So-called charismatic megafauna have traditionally captured the attention of the public, becoming the poster children for zoos, aquariums and conservation organizations. This public affection for attractive animals has also translated into legislation: Cuddly and economically important animals get more money under the Endangered Species Act, regardless of their level…

People love living on the coast, and one of the most destructive human infrastructure practices is replacing natural shorelines with human-made seawalls.  These walls are often tall, flat, and featureless, making them bad habitat for shore animals and plants. Biodiversity in these areas, of course, declines. In a paper published online today in Oecologia, Gee Chapman and D.J. Blockley did…

The information below was submitted by Sue Anderson of the University of Southern California. The 2010 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, an international award that honors achievements and contributions in the fields of environmental science, protection, energy and medicine, is now open for nominations. The deadline is September 15. The winner will receive a gold medallion and a $200,000 cash…

Some existing projections of global warming predict that by the year 2100, global sea levels will have risen by one meter due to polar ice cap melting and water expansion caused by rising temperatures. In a paper this week in Nature Geoscience, however, researchers determined that given our current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, our seas should actually be 25…

In their Huffington Post blog, Todd Palmer (University of Florida) and Rob Pringle (Stanford/Harvard Fellow) took on Paul Basken of the Chronicle of Higher Education last week, who was interviewed on NPR’s Marketplace.  Palmer and Pringle say that Basken didn’t defend science’s place in the stimulus bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), even going so far as to…

If we want to convince people to take action against global warming, maybe we need to take advice from advertising. A report by the nonprofit EcoAmerica, as reported by The New York Times in early May, suggests that terms like “greenhouse gas” and “carbon dioxide” turn people off.  Instead, they say, climate activists should change their rhetoric, emphasizing a “move…

Geoengineering is the idea that humans can slow, stop or reverse the effects of climate change by altering the composition of Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere.  While controversial, these methods, including reducing sun exposure by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere or using giant mirrors to reflect the sun’s rays, were identified as a high-priority area for research by the G8-5 nations….

The U.S. Forest Service, in partnership with Ravenswood Media, has produced an informational video about white-nose syndrome in bats (learn about WNS in this ESA press release).  The video doesn’t include the latest news — that Pennsylvania has ordered all bats taken from afflected caves to be killed — but it’s a good overview of the current state of information…

Ecologists have discovered yet another astonishing way that plants defy all manner of physical obstacles to get what they need. Researchers have discovered alpine plant roots that grow upwards, against gravity, and out of the soil…into the snow. A group of researchers centered at VU University in Amsterdam discovered the plant roots high in the mountains of southern Russia. The…

Mountaintop mining, the practice of using dynamite or bulldozers to blast off the tops of mountains in search of coal and dumping the rock remnants into valleys, will apparently receive tighter restrictions in an announcement the White House is scheduled to make today. But the practice, which destroys both the mountaintop ecosystems it blasts away and many stream ecosystems buried…