Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

NOTE ON POPULAR POSTS

The reason some popular posts are tagged ‘no title’ is not because they have no title—they all do—but because the old Blogger embedded the title at the top of text, and the new software does not see that. You can see the titles in capitals at the start of each snippet. (It would be nice if Blogger introduced an upgrade program that could fix this little problem.)

Popular Posts

Thursday 30 September 2010

LOOHOLES IN CLIMATE ACCORD COULD SEE 4.2-DEGREE RISE BY 2100

An increase in the global temperature of up to 4.2 ยบ C and the end of coral reefs could be reality by 2100 if national targets in the Copenhagen Accord are not revised--see ScienceDaily for the full report.
A FIFTH OF THE WORLD'S PLANTS FACE EXTINCTION

A global analysis of the risk of extinction for the world's plants, conducted by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Natural History Museum, London, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has revealed that they are as threatened as mammals. One in five species face extinction.

Full story in ScienceDaily.

Wednesday 1 September 2010

BLEAK FUTURE FOR OCEAN LIFE
A unique natural laboratory in the Mediterranean is revealing the effects of rising carbon-dioxide levels on ocean life, and shows a bleak future as ocean acidity rises.

Scientists from the University of Plymouth in England and the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil studied single-celled organisms called Foraminifera round volcanic carbon-dioxide vents off Naples in Italy. The study, published in the September issue of the Journal of the Geological Society, found that increasing CO2 levels caused foram diversity to fall from 24 species to only 4. A tipping-point occurs at mean pH 7.8, the pH level predicted for the end of the century.