On July 1, 2012 Australia will impose a price on carbon emissions.

A price on carbon is the most environmentally effective and economically efficient way to reduce pollution. This means our economy can continue to prosper – without our pollution continuing to grow. The Government’s plan for a clean energy future includes four key components. Firstly, the establishment of a carbon price. Secondly, support for renewable energy. Thirdly, to support improvements in energy efficiency. And fourthly, to store carbon through changed land-use practices. So, they’re the four key foundations, if you like, of our plan for a clean energy future. A carbon price has got a very important role to play because it puts a price tag on pollution. For the first time in our economy, the largest polluters will have to pay a price for every tonne of pollution that they put into the atmosphere, and that creates the incentive to cut pollution and it also creates the pressure to innovate, the pressure to invest in cleaner energy sources. And that’ll be very important for the future of our country and our economy and our living standards, because it’s the countries in the 21st century that have innovated and that have got clean energy as a key part of their economic future that will be the most competitive, and that’s very important for our future as well.

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Ocean currents may mitigate warming near handful of equatorial islands

Coral reefs near the island nation of Kiribati may be somewhat protected from global warming. Credit and Larger Version

Scientists predict ocean temperatures will rise in the equatorial Pacific by the end of the century, wreaking havoc on coral reef ecosystems.

But a new study shows that climate change could cause ocean currents to operate in a way that mitigates warming near a handful of islands right on the equator.

Those islands include some of the 33 coral atolls that form the nation of Kiribati. This low-lying country is at risk from sea-level rise caused by global warming.

Surprisingly, these Pacific islands within two degrees north and south of the equator may become isolated climate change refuges for corals and fish.

“The finding that there may be refuges in the tropics where local circulation features buffer the trend of rising sea surface temperature has important implications for the survival of coral reef systems,” said David Garrison, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research.

Here’s how it could happen, according to the study by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists Kristopher Karnauskas and Anne Cohen, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.

At the equator, trade winds push a surface current from east to west.

About 100 to 200 meters below, a swift countercurrent develops, flowing in the opposite direction.

This, the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC), is cooler and rich in nutrients. When it hits an island, like a rock in a river, water is deflected upward on an island’s western flank.

This upwelling process brings cooler water and nutrients to the sunlit surface, creating localized areas where tiny marine plants and corals flourish.

On color-enhanced satellite maps showing measurements of global ocean chlorophyll levels, these productive patches of ocean stand out as bright green or red spots–for example, around the Galapagos Islands in the Eastern Pacific.

But as you gaze west, chlorophyll levels fade like a comet tail, giving scientists little reason to look closely at scattered low-lying coral atolls in that direction.

These islands are easy to overlook because they are tiny, remote, and lie at the far left edge of standard global satellite maps that place continents in the center.

Karnauskas, a climate scientist, was working with coral scientist Cohen to explore how climate change would affect central equatorial Pacific reefs.

When he changed the map view on his screen in order to view the entire tropical Pacific at once, he saw that chlorophyll concentrations jumped up again exactly at the Gilbert Islands on the equator.

Satellite maps also showed cooler sea surface temperatures on the west sides of these islands, part of Kiribati.

“I’ve been studying the tropical Pacific Ocean for most of my career, and I had never noticed that,” he said. “It jumped out at me immediately, and I thought, ‘there’s probably a story there.’”

So Karnauskas and Cohen began to investigate how the EUC would affect the equatorial islands’ reef ecosystems, starting with global climate models that simulate effects in a warming world.

Global-scale climate models predict that ocean temperatures will rise nearly 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the central tropical Pacific.

Warmer waters often cause corals to bleach, a process in which they lose the tiny symbiotic algae that live in them and provide vital nutrition.

Bleaching has been a major cause of coral mortality and loss of coral reef area during the last 30 years.

Even the best global models, with their planet-scale views and lower resolution, cannot predict conditions in areas as small as these small islands, Karnauskas said.

So the scientists combined global models with a fine-scale regional model to focus on much smaller areas around minuscule islands scattered along the equator.

To accommodate the trillions of calculations needed for such small-area resolution, they used the new high-performance computer cluster at WHOI called “Scylla.”

“Global models predict significant temperature increases in the central tropical Pacific over the next few decades, but in truth conditions can be highly variable across and around a coral reef island,” Cohen said.

“To predict what the coral reef will experience in global climate change, we have to use high-resolution models, not global models.”

The model predicts that as air temperatures rise and equatorial trade winds weaken, the Pacific surface current will also weaken by 15 percent by the end of the century.

The then-weaker surface current will impose less friction and drag on the EUC, so this deeper current will strengthen by 14 percent.

“Our model suggests that the amount of upwelling will actually increase by about 50 percent around these islands and reduce the rate of warming waters around them by about 0.7 C (1.25 F) per century,” Karnauskas said.

A handful of coral atolls on the equator, some as small as 4 square kilometers (1.54 square miles) in area, may not seem like much.

But Karnauskas’ and Cohen’s results say that waters on the western sides of the islands will warm more slowly than at islands 2 degrees, or 138 miles, north and south of the equator that are not in the path of the EUC.

That gives the Gilbert Islands a significant advantage over neighboring reef systems.

“While the mitigating effect of a strengthened Equatorial Undercurrent will not spare corals the perhaps-inevitable warming expected for this region, the warming rate will be slower around these equatorial islands,” Karnauskas said.

“This may allow corals and their symbiotic algae a better chance to adapt and survive.”

If the model holds true, even if neighboring reefs are hard-hit, equatorial island coral reefs may survive to produce larvae of corals and other reef species.

Like a seed bank for the future, they might be a source of new corals and other species that could re-colonize damaged reefs.

“The globe is warming, but there are things going on underfoot that will slow that warming for certain parts of certain coral reef islands,” said Cohen.

“These little islands in the middle of the ocean can counteract global trends and have a big effect on their own future,” Karnauskas said, “which I think is a beautiful concept.”

-NSF-

EARTH –

acquired April 24, 2012 download large image (429 KB, JPEG, 2000×1600)

More Information On Global Warming

WASHINGTON — Research by NASA and international scientists concludes giant asteroids, similar or larger than the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs, hit Earth billions of years ago with more frequency than previously thought.

To cause the dinosaur extinction, the killer asteroid that impacted Earth 65 million years ago would have been almost 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter. By studying ancient rocks in Australia and using computer models, researchers estimate that approximately 70 asteroids the same size or larger impacted Earth 1.8 to 3.8 billion years ago. During the same period, approximately four similarly-sized objects hit the moon.

“This work demonstrates the power of combining sophisticated computer models with physical evidence from the past, further opening an important window to Earth’s history,” said Yvonne Pendleton, director of NASA’s Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

Evidence for these impacts on Earth comes from thin rock layers that contain debris of nearly spherical, sand-sized droplets called spherules. These millimeter-scale clues were formerly molten droplets ejected into space within the huge plumes created by mega-impacts on Earth. The hardened droplets then fell back to Earth, creating thin but widespread sedimentary layers known as spherule beds.
The new findings are published today in the journal Nature.

“The beds speak to an intense period of bombardment of Earth,” said William Bottke principal investigator of the impact study team at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colo. “Their source long has been a mystery.”

The team’s findings support the theory Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in different orbits nearly 4.5 billion years ago, migrating to their current orbits about 4 billion years ago from the interplay of gravitational forces in the young solar system. This event triggered a solar system-wide bombardment of comets and asteroids called the “Late Heavy Bombardment.” In the paper, the team created a model of the ancient main asteroid belt and tracked what would have happened when the orbits of the giant planets changed. They discovered the innermost portion of the belt became destabilized and could have delivered numerous big impacts to Earth and the moon over long time periods.

At least 12 mega-impacts produced spherule beds during the so-called Archean period 2.5 to 3.7 billion years ago, a formative time for life on Earth. Ancient spherule beds are rare finds, rarer than rocks of any other age. Most of the beds have been preserved amid mud deposited on the sea floor below the reach of waves.

The impact believed to have killed the dinosaurs was the only known collision over the past half-billion years that made a spherule layer as deep as those of the Archean period. The relative abundance of the beds supports the hypothesis for many giant asteroid impacts during Earth’s early history.

The frequency of the impacts indicated in the computer models matches the number of spherule beds found in terrains with ages that are well understood. The data also hint at the possibility that the last impacts of the Late Heavy Bombardment on Earth made South Africa’s Vredefort crater and Canada’s Sudbury crater, both of which formed about 2 billion years ago.

“The Archean beds contain enough extraterrestrial material to rule out alternative sources for the spherules, such as volcanoes,” said Bruce Simonson, a geologist from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

The research was funded by NLSI and conducted by members or associates of NLSI’s Center of Lunar Origin and Evolution, based at SwRI.

The impact study team also includes scientists from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.; Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic; Observatorie de la Cote d’Azur in Nice, France; and Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.

To learn about the NLSI, visit:

http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov

Warm Ocean Currents Cause Majority of Ice Loss from Antarctica

WASHINGTON, DC (USA) — Warm ocean currents attacking the underside of ice shelves are the dominant cause of recent ice loss from Antarctica, a new study using measurements from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) revealed.

An international team of scientists used a combination of satellite measurements and models to differentiate between the two known causes of melting ice shelves: warm ocean currents thawing the underbelly of the floating extensions of ice sheets and warm air melting them from above. The finding, published today in the journal Nature, brings scientists a step closer to providing reliable projections of future sea level rise.

The researchers concluded 20 of the 54 ice shelves studied are being melted by warm ocean currents. Most of these are in West Antarctica, where inland glaciers flowing down to the coast and feeding into these thinning ice shelves have accelerated, draining more ice into the sea and contributing to sea-level rise. This ocean-driven thinning is responsible for the most widespread and rapid ice losses in West Antarctica and the majority of Antarctic ice sheet loss during the period studied.

“We can lose an awful lot of ice to the sea without ever having summers warm enough to make the snow on top of the glaciers melt,” said the study’s lead author Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, United Kingdom. “The oceans can do all the work from below.”

To map the changing thickness of almost all the floating ice shelves around Antarctica, the team used a time series of 4.5 million surface height measurements taken by a laser instrument mounted on ICESat from October 2003 to October 2008. They measured how the ice shelf height changed over time and ran computer models to discard changes in ice thickness because of natural snow accumulation and compaction. The researchers also used a tide model that eliminated height changes caused by tides raising and lowering the ice shelves.

“This study demonstrates the power of space-based, laser altimetry for understanding Earth processes,” said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.” Coupled with NASA’s portfolio of other ice sheet research using data from our GRACE mission, satellite radars and aircraft, we get a comprehensive view of ice sheet change that improves estimates of sea level rise.”

Previous studies used satellite radar data to measure the evolution of ice shelves and glaciers, but laser measurements are more precise in detecting changes in ice shelf thickness through time. This is especially true in coastal areas. Steeper slopes at the grounding line, where floating ice shelves connect with the landmass, cause problems for lower-resolution radar altimeters.

ICESat was the first satellite specifically designed to use laser altimetry to study the Earth’s polar regions. It operated from 2003 to 2009. Its successor, ICESat-2, is scheduled for launch in 2016.

“This study demonstrates the urgent need for ICESat-2 to get into space,” said Jay Zwally, ICESat project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We have limited information on the changes in polar regions caused by climate change. Nothing can look at these changes like satellite measurements do.”

The new research also links the observed increase in melting that occurs on the underside of a glacier or ice shelf, called basal melt, and glacier acceleration with changes in wind patterns.

“Studies have shown Antarctic winds have changed because of changes in climate,” Pritchard said. “This has affected the strength and direction of ocean currents. As a result warm water is funnelled beneath the floating ice. These studies and our new results suggest Antarctica’s glaciers are responding rapidly to a changing climate.”

A different picture is seen on the Antarctic Peninsula, the long stretch of land pointing towards South America. The study found thinning of the largest ice shelf on the peninsula can be explained by warm summer winds directly melting the snow on the ice shelf surfaces. The patterns of widespread ocean-driven melting and summer melting on the Antarctic Peninsula can be attributed to changing wind patterns.

The study was carried out by an international team from the British Antarctic Survey, Utrecht University in Utrecht, Netherlands, the University of California in San Diego and the non-profit research institute Earth and Space Research in Corvallis, Ore.

For more information, a visualization and related imagery, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/currents-ice-loss.html

For more information about ICESat and ICESat-2, visit:

http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov

WEST CHESTER, PENNSYLVANIA, USA — Will human induced climate change cause the extinction of the Gummi Bear? An expert from West Chester University says, “Yes.”

Stay tuned for the gooey details.

More from the experiment “Human Induced Climate Change”

Australia’s historic opal industry dying off

Updated March 22, 2012 01:40:41

Photo: Opal miner Branko Brankovic checks the conveyer at his opal mine in the Queensland outback town of Opalton. (Mick Tsikas: AAP)

As the mining boom roars on, a small, historic part of the industry has been forgotten.

The vast, arid gem fields of South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland are some of the few places in the world where opals can be found.

But this iconic piece of Australian history is being killed off as tourism figures decline and the number of people taking up the opal mining trade plummets.

Kev Phillips has been mining opals in Queensland since the 1980s and says he is struggling to see a future for the industry.

“It’s a very colourful industry; we’ve got people from all walks of life, doctors, teachers, immigrants, it’s classic,” he said.

“It’s a fantastic sort of industry and it’ll be a tragedy to lose this iconic way of life and the people involved.

“But it is happening.”

He jokes of how he was born with a natural love for gems.

“As a child I’ve had a genetic interest – coming from a long line of criminals – in gemstones,” he said.

He says it is love not money that moves people to some of the hottest, remote parts of the country to dig for opals.

“It’s not an occupation, it’s a vocation,” he said.

“It’s very seldom people in their life can find something that they love.

“You wouldn’t do it for the money.

“I’d earn more money working for the coal seam gas companies.”

Photo: A couple of opal miners take a break in the gem fields near Quilpie. (Kev Phillips)

He says young people interested in opal mining are now lured away by the fat pay cheques offered by big mining companies.

And Mr Phillips says many of the older opal miners have been forced out of business by a mountain of fees and paperwork imposed by state governments.

“In this term of the Bligh Government we have seen fee increases and legislation pushed through without any consultation whatsoever,” he said.

“They’ve imposed these costs and now we have to just live with them, which is deterring small scale mining from progressing and being a substantial part of the economics of regional Queensland.”

Mr Phillips, who is also head of the Queensland Small Miners Council, says opal miners have been unfairly restricted by laws aimed at the coal seam gas industry.

“We’re only very low impact operations generally, we have to rehabilitate our sites,” he said.

“We had an interest in being involved in this new legislation but the Department didn’t even contact us to see how these new laws for coal seam gas would affect our industry.

“We met with (Queensland Environment Minister) Kate Jones and she more or less implied to us about our concerns that we were environmental vandals and put us in the same boat.

“We were astonished.”

He says unless legislation is wound back, the future for all small miners is bleak.

“It’s not only opal, it’s sapphires and small gold miners,” he said.

“For us it’s been a way of life.

“It’s a lifestyle that’s historical part of Queensland’s identity since day dot.

“What’s happening is the Government is slowly taking away that right in favour of large mining with unionised staff.”

Photo: The Hammonds opal mine near Quilpie is over 100 years old and is still operational. (Kev Phillips)

Away from the rough mining camps of inland Australia, the opal trade is also struggling on the tourist glitter strips of the coast.

Marketed as Australia’s national gemstone, opals have always been a hit with overseas visitors.

But with tourist numbers dropping since the global financial crisis, the economies of tourist centres like Cairns and the Gold and Sunshine coasts are hurting.

Scott Coggan, an opal cutter and manager of Opals Down Under on the Sunshine Coast, says times are tough for opal retailers.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years and this is definitely the toughest period that I’ve seen,” he said.

Mr Coggan says the industry is facing a massive change.

“It’s a different type of tourist that we’re getting through. For us here on the Sunshine Coast the Americans that are not travelling here at the moment, that’s certainly made a big dent,” he said.

Photo: Opals for sale in Coober Pedy, South Australia (Emma Pedler)

“We’ve had to change tack and look at other avenues. We’re predominantly targeting a lot of the interstate markets – a lot of Sydney, Melbourne people, the younger market.”

He is confident the industry can survive the retail slump, so long as the mining trade can attract some young blood.

“The biggest challenge for the industry is getting some incentive for young people to get into the mining sector,” he said.

“Anyone that was doing that has now headed off to the resources boom. They can get a steady $100,000 pay cheque without risking their lives underground.”

Mr Phillips agrees.

He says unless the Government steps in, the colourful existence of the opal miner will be consigned to Australia’s history.

“For the small battler like myself that came through the ranks and had an interest in gemstones as a child and got into it as a hobby and then a career path – for it to be over-regulated as it is is just taking that right away,” he said.

“It’s a tragic day for our country when that happens.”

Topics: mining-industry, industry, business-economics-and-finance, mining-rural, states-and-territories, tourism, opalton-4735, qld, australia, quilpie-4480

As the strongest Solar Radiation Storm (S3) since May, 2005 continues, the associated Earthward-directed Coronal Mass Ejection is expected to arrive about 1400 UT (9am EST) Jan 24. SWPC has issued a Geomagnetic Storm Watch with G2 level storming likely and G3 level storming possible, with the storm continuing into Wednesday, Jan 25. All of this activity is related to a moderate (R2) Radio Blackout x-ray flare that erupted Sunday night (11pm EST).

Geomagnetic Storm Photo of the Sun

NOAA Updates