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IMAGE: A cliff in Jameson Land Basin in central East Greenland, the northernmost site where sauropodomorph fossils are found. The labels point out several series of layers that helped the researchers. view more
Credit: Lars Clemmensen
A new paper refines estimates of when herbivorous dinosaurs must have traversed North America on a northerly trek to reach Greenland, and points out an intriguing climatic phenomenon that may have helped them along the journey.
The study, published today in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is authored by Dennis Kent, adjunct research scientist at Columbia University s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and Lars Clemmensen from the University of Copenhagen.
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IMAGE: Annual wet-bulb Cooling Degree Days CDDwb (°C-days) in the baseline and the specific warming level scenarios. view more
Credit: See the paper
Space cooling already accounts for 14% of residential electricity demand in Brazil, and it is expected to increase further because of climate change.
Very few studies investigate the relationship between climate change, cooling needs, and electricity demand. In a new study in
Energy and Buildings, a team of researchers from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and CMCC@Ca Foscari - a joint program of Ca Foscari University of Venice and CMCC Foundation - investigate how climate and income during the period 1970-2010 shaped cooling services in Brazil. This historical relationship allows projecting the resulting energy demand for cooling services across three warming scenarios: +1.5°C, +2°C, +4°C.
There may be greater CO2 emissions associated with thawing Arctic permafrost than ever imagined. An international team of researchers, including one from the University of Copenhagen, has discovered that soil bacteria release CO2 previously thought to be trapped by iron. The finding presents a large new carbon footprint that is unaccounted for in current climate models.
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Credit: Eduardo Maeda
Researchers report that large-scale commercial farms on deforested land in the southern Amazon result in higher temperature increases and less rainfall than small-scale farms.
Deforestation has converted swaths of land in the southern Amazon region from rainforest to farmland. The uses of the deforested land are diverse, and activities can range from small-scale farming in rural settlements to large-scale commodity agriculture. Commercial farms in the Southern Amazon can reach hundreds of thousands of hectares in area, exporting millions of tons in grains and beef every year.
Eduardo Maeda from the University of Helsinki and colleagues used satellite data to compare areas dominated by different land uses and farm sizes to evaluate their impacts on the regional climate. Although small rural settlements experienced no clear changes in rainfall during recent decades, areas dominated by commodity farms have become significantly drier. Areas of commodit
A warmer global climate can cause mutations to have more severe consequences for the health of organisms through their detrimental effect on protein function. This may have major repercussions on organisms ability to adapt to, and survive in, the altered habitats of the future. This is shown in a new Uppsala University research study now published in the scientific journal