Ecology and the Environment

Just what size of human population can our planet really support?

I thought this was quite funny: It would probably be more humorous if I weren't married to a restoration ecologist - hits a little to close to home... I can't even have a simple walk in the park without him threatening the trees (Siberian Elm and Callery Pear) with death and destruction

A DailyTech blog entry has been making the news & blogosphere rounds this week in which the author discusses a potential Y2K bug that has reportedly been found in NASA's data regarding global temperatures. The study is (or so it says here) the basis for ongoing media stories saying that 1998 is the warmest year on record, but the new information (if it's accurate) states that the corrected data shows 1934 to be warmest, and that it also disturbs the upward trend, instead showing half of the "warmest years" to be in the early part of the 20th century. But the article also goes on to say that this would only impact the overall warming trend by 1-2%. Which really…

One of my interests, and the reason I joined this forum, is climate change. I am sceptical of rising temperatures being solely down to man and believe man contributes but not significantly. I understand the link between CO2 and the atmosphere, but I think water vapour plays a much more significant role in global warming. What I would really like is to find a reliable, unbiased, honest, unpolitical website, which reports what is really happening on climate change. I like the CO2 Science website, because it is fairly open with it's funding, gives references for all it's articles and because it coincides with my current view. I'm not so keen on Real Climate, because …

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=18652E04-E7F2-99DF-3824FFAA3F933FDB&chanID=sa007 The above article is from a news story that made the rounds a couple of days ago is headlined "Climate Change Linked to Doubling of Atlantic Hurricanes". The story goes on to talk about the link between global warming and Atlantic sea temperatures (which is based on two peer-reviewed studies of actual temperature data. It all sounded very interesting and legitimate, but then I read this: Uhh... sure it leaves the conclusions unaffected -- because you chose a number that wouldn't affect them! Hello! I have to give SciAm credit for including criticism, but m…

Hi guys I'm new, so apologies if you have covered these questions before. I should also declare that I am sceptical of MMGW, GW - yes, MMGW - no, although I hopefully have an open mind. I'm not a scientist or climate change expert, just an interested passer by, who believes in conserving the earth's resources 1 Quotes from Chapter 6 of IPCC AR4 pages 436 / 474 respectively: "There are markedly fewer well-dated proxy records for the SH compared to the NH, and consequently little evidence of how large-scale average surface temperatures have changed over the past few thousand years.." "Knowledge of climate variability over the last 1 kyr in the Southern Hemis…

Now not to talk about highly social species of life, such as ants, just more or less hypothesis put forward that life on earth or even the earth is a collective organism. Personally I think many of them happen to be romantic ideas obtained simply from the study of life overall. For instance, in the case of reproduction, if life were simply nothing more then DNA, why is reproduction so important, or more or less it would seem the cell has at least as much importance as DNA holds, the same with RNA, as life cannot function without any of those, and thus it would go extinct. Personally from the concept of ecosystems, or ecologies and the relationship life in gener…

The most recent issue of Scientific American has an article summarizing the data that led to the conclusion of global warming: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=B1182F51-E7F2-99DF-30CB2EAAC975FE93 You need to be a digital subscriber to read the entire issue, or you can go to your local bookstore and read/buy the issue.

I happen to have read a lot of peer-review on this subject and the idea that the troposphere isn't behaving as expected is really pretty erroneous. Several threads have had this claim come up so I figured I'd put an end to it once and for all. The Earth as a whole is warming at about .2C/decade but ground temperatures are actually around .18. Recording temperatures isn't all that easy. There's a lot of inherent problems with A/MSU readings and specifically they have a natural tendency to show temperatures that are lower then actual. Just so you guys know what I'm talking about there's an interesting article, "Contribution of stratosphericcooling to satellite…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6290228.stm Can we put aside arguments about the effects of solar forcings yet?

In Bjorn Lomborg's book : "The Skeptical Environmentalist", he makes the statement that loss of natural habitat is a minor cause of extinctions. Two examples are given of places where massive natural habitat loss occurred with very little in the ways of extinction of species. 1. Puerto Rico. 2. Atlantic coast of Brazil. Yet in environmentalist literature, habitat loss is almost invariably described as a major cause of extinctions. Does anyone have any unambiguous examples of cases where habitat loss has caused substantial extinctions? Please try to use examples where other causes are unlikely.

I am trying to conceive a title for my research. So far I have come up with this: Light Intensity During Foraging Times and Its Relation to Population Density of Bats in name of sampling site/ place. Please tell me what you think about it.

I heard on the news a couple of weeks ago, for the first time, that the economists are now starting to calculate inflation for food in a separate index to general inflation (I live in the UK, other countries probably use a slightly different set of indices). I think this may be the start of global warming/climate change starting to "bite" the wealthy countries where they can't ignore it. The causes of food inflation running higher than the general trend were; the Australian drought, conversion of areas where food is normally grown to productions of crops for green fuel e.g. ecodiesel etc and farmers in sundry other areas beginnning to find that conditions don't …

I have a little question. I have to do a project but to do it I need your help. All I need to know is where in the ozone there are holes and where is the coldest place in the world is, including space and the air between the atmosphere and the ground. Thanks P.S. Don't ask what I am doing, It is top secret until I'm ready. Only my father knows about it!!

"These two last ideas are key, since they make it possible to evaluate the load capacity -- the number of organisms which can be supported by a given ecosystem. In any food network, the energy contained in the level of the producers is not completely transferred to the consumers. And the higher one goes up the chain, the more energy and resources is lost and consumed. Thus, from an energy—and environmental—point of view, it is more efficient for humans to be primary consumers (to subsist from vegetables, grains, legumes, fruit, cotton, etc.) than as secondary consumers (from eating herbivores, omnivores, or their products, such as milk, chickens, cattle, sheep, etc.) and …

This was an interesting blog: http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/weather_stations/ He finds weather stations which clearly give erroneous results. Some of them are quite humorous, such as this one: Here's a station positioned within approximately 5 feet of a barrel used by a janitor to burn trash. Having written the data collection software for a 50+ station network, I can certainly attest that such stations occur frequently. I've heard similar horror stories about some of the stations in the network. However, I'm guessing many of these photos were taken by network administrators who noticed anomalous readings. That's generally how all the "horro…

Take a look at the article I just read recently: link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070602/ap_on_sc/global_warming_states_1 Apparently there are some states that spew out more CO2 than states with much larger populations, and even spew out more than entire nations around the world! Coal, obviously, is to blame for this and this article shows that the states that pollute the most are the ones that are powered primarily by coal. Texas, the worst one, is still planning on building new coal power plants and is not making any effort to lower emissions. Here is another site that shows how much each state is putting up each year: http://www.eia.doe.gov/environment.h…

Hydrogen power is often lauded as a 'clean' energy storage medium, as it only 'pollutes' water -- as long as the power stations that generate the electricity required to split hydrogen from water are clean, then the whole process becomes clean. For things like cars, hydrogen would certainly seem to be cleaner than petrol/diesel/etc. however, what would actually be the effects of thousands of cars exhausting water vapour in a city? I'm not saying that it would contribute to global warming or anything, but H2O is a powerful greenhouse gas... would all that water vapour increase the average air temperature in a city? would the increased air humidity encourage damp-ro…

if anyone knows the answer to this, please post. In which direction(s) does the translocation of plant food occur?

New member Snake Oil asks: Can anyone help him out with this?

I just watched An Inconvenient Truth. That's a scary movie. I had believed in Al Gore's "misconception #1" - that we're not sure if global warming is a real thing, and if it is, how much we're contributing to it. From the data he shows us, we are clear causing global warming every since middle of the 20th century. The sharp increase in CO2 imissions since the 60s/70s is so strongly correlating with the sharp increase in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere. And it's increased to about 3 times the temperature it's ever been in hundreds of thousands of years. That ain't no natural occurence. He keeps refering to the "scientists". "The scientists say..." he …

For information on this you should read these articles (in order) that prove that recent global warming is due not to co2 levels, but solar radiation: http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/2007/05/maximums-and-minimums.html http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/2007/05/statistical-proof-of-sun-caused-global.html http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/2007/05/statistical-proof-of-sun-caused-global_04.html

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170

I'm wondering if heavier and more frequent rain falls is an effect of global warming. I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and this past winter has been especially snowy - not colder, but more snowy. This isn't an official statistic, it's just my own observations. Is it possible that GW is responsible?

I've been reading some of the global warming discussion on here and the amount of skepticism struck me as interesting. I would therefore like to try and quantify people's feelings on the subject. Bascule's poll (though not itself uninteresting) is a bit inadequate to that task, as it's mainly concerned with making a point. I've tried to be as inclusive as possible as to the range of opinions, based largely on some of the options floated in Bascule's poll thread. I think having a nice picture of everyone's opinions might further discussion in this forum on what is obviously its dominant issue. EDIT: When I look at the poll now, I see I excluded two categories: "The…