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Better climate models are key to understanding how best to protect the environment and food production, but they require massive computing resources. [More] Biofuel for Jumbo Jets: Kiwis Take to the Sky on Jatropha Fuel from the weed jatropha powered an Air New Zealand jet on a two-hour flight today--the world's second flight of a commercial jet on biofuel. One out of the four Rolls Royce engines on an Air New Zealand Boeing 747-400 burned a 50-50 blend of regular jet fuel and a bio-version made from jatropha. [More]

Tags: jet, jatropha, zealand, flight, biofuel

For all the magnificent diversity of on this planet, ranging from tiny bacteria to majestic blue whales, from sunshine-harv­­est­­ing plants to mineral-digesting endoliths miles underground, only one kind of “life as we know it” exists. All these organisms are based on nucleic acids--DNA and RNA--and proteins, working together more or less as described by the so-called central dogma of molecular biology: DNA stores information that is transcribed into RNA, which then serves as a template for producing a protein. The proteins, in turn, serve as important structural elements in tissues and, as enzymes, are the cell’s workhorses. Yet scientists dream of synthesizing life that is utterly alien to this world--both to better understand the minimum components required for life (as part of the quest to uncover the essence of life and how life originated on earth) and, frankly, to see if they can do it. That is, they hope to put together a novel combination of molecules that can self-organize, metabolize (make use of an energy source), grow, reproduce and evolve. [More] Galapagos Invaders Actually Native Species [The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] Darwin's fabled isles, the Galapagos, are in need of a makeover. And removing invasive species of plants tops the to-do list for the islands’ restoration. But six species that were set to be exterminated have gotten a reprieve. Because a new study finds that they’re actually natives. [More]

Tags: life, protein, species, native, serve

Humanity has enjoyed an unusual streak of food surplus since the green revolution began in the mid-1960s. These trends sustained economic development and a significant reduction in global hunger and poverty. A sharp reversal is now possible, however, given strong economic growth in the world’s most populous countries and loss of suitable cropland. People with rising incomes consume more meat and livestock products, which in turn requires more grain per unit of food produced. The rapid expansion of biofuel production only complicates the competition between food and fuel. [More] Today's Alternative Energy; and November Issue Topics, Including Computer-Brain Interfaces and DNA Computing Scientific American magazine editor in chief, John Rennie, talks about the November issue's contents, including computer-brain interfaces, DNA computing, the ongoing attempts to find an HIV vaccine and getting closer to the Star Trek tricorder with portable NMR. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites mentioned on this episode include snipurl.com/4LJ71; SciAm.com/sciammag > Related In-Depth Report: Today's Alternative Energy [More]

Tags: food, november, energy, today, issue

Emissions of a greenhouse gas that has 17,000 times the planet-warming capacity of carbon dioxide are at least four times higher than had been previously estimated. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is used mainly by the semiconductor industry to clean the chambers in which silicon chips are made. The industry had in the past estimated that most of the gas was expended during the cleaning process and only about 2 percent escaped into the air. But the first-ever measurements of nitrogen trifluoride levels in the atmosphere, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters show that emissions could be as high as 16 percent. [More] Warmer Antarctica Shows Climate Changing on Every Continent Humanity's impact on climate has been detected on every continent except Antarctica, or so said the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February 2007. No longer: scientists, comparing decades of records from 17 Antarctic weather stations with computer simulations of Earth's climate, found that human-induced global warming has been heating up the continent that is home to the South Pole, as well. [More]

Tags: climate, gas, industry, continent, show

Editor's note: This story will appear in our January issue but is being posted early because of a publication in today's Nature. Thousands of years after the last woolly mammoth lumbered across the tundra, scientists have sequenced a whopping 50 percent of the beast’s nuclear genome,  they report in a new study. Earlier attempts to sequence the DNA of these icons of the Ice Age produced only tiny quantities of code. The new work marks the first time that so much of the genetic material of an extinct creature has been retrieved. Not only has the feat provided insight into the evolutionary history of mammoths, but it is a step toward realizing the science-fiction dream of being able to resurrect a long-gone animal. [More] (Don't) Pump up the Volume: Sound Waves Silence Whales' Song The noise in the Pacific off the southern California coast has become 10 times louder over the past five decades because of the rumbling of commercial shipping vessels, the clicking of oceanographic research equipment, and the din of Navy operations and sonar systems--all of which are threatening whales that use the same frequency range to communicate. [More]

Tags: mammoth, genome, whales, scientists, time

Emissions of a greenhouse gas that has 17,000 times the planet-warming capacity of carbon dioxide are at least four times higher than had been previously estimated. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is used mainly by the semiconductor industry to clean the chambers in which silicon chips are made. The industry had in the past estimated that most of the gas was expended during the cleaning process and only about 2 percent escaped into the air. But the first-ever measurements of nitrogen trifluoride levels in the atmosphere, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters show that emissions could be as high as 16 percent. [More] Warmer Antarctica Shows Climate Changing on Every Continent Humanity's impact on has been detected on every continent except Antarctica, or so said the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February 2007. No longer: scientists, comparing decades of records from 17 Antarctic weather stations with computer simulations of Earth's climate, found that human-induced global warming has been heating up the continent that is home to the South Pole, as well. [More]

Tags: climate, gas, industry, continent, show

Editor's note: This story will appear in our January issue but is being posted early because of a publication in today's Nature. Thousands of years after the last woolly mammoth lumbered across the tundra, scientists have sequenced a whopping 50 percent of the beast’s nuclear genome,  they report in a new study. Earlier attempts to sequence the DNA of these icons of the Ice Age produced only tiny quantities of code. The new work marks the first time that so much of the genetic material of an extinct creature has been retrieved. Not only has the feat provided insight into the evolutionary history of mammoths, but it is a step toward realizing the science-fiction dream of being able to resurrect a long-gone animal. [More] (Don't) Pump up the Volume: Sound Waves Silence Whales' Song The noise in the Pacific off the southern California coast has become 10 times louder over the past five decades because of the rumbling of commercial shipping vessels, the clicking of oceanographic research equipment, and the din of Navy operations and sonar systems--all of which are threatening whales that use the same frequency range to communicate. [More]

Tags: mammoth, genome, whales, scientists, time

Editor's note: This story will appear in our January issue but is being posted early because of a publication in today's Nature. Thousands of years after the last woolly mammoth lumbered across the tundra, scientists have sequenced a whopping 50 percent of the beast’s nuclear genome,  they report in a new study. Earlier attempts to sequence the DNA of these icons of the Ice Age produced only tiny quantities of code. The new work marks the first time that so much of the genetic material of an extinct creature has been retrieved. Not only has the feat provided insight into the evolutionary history of mammoths, but it is a step toward realizing the science-fiction dream of being able to resurrect a long-gone animal. [More] (Don't) Pump up the Volume: Sound Waves Silence Whales' Song The noise in the Pacific off the southern California coast has become 10 times louder over the past five decades because of the rumbling of commercial shipping vessels, the clicking of oceanographic research equipment, and the din of Navy operations and sonar systems--all of which are threatening whales that use the same frequency range to communicate. [More]

Tags: mammoth, genome, whales, scientists, time

For all the magnificent diversity of life on this planet, ranging from tiny bacteria to majestic blue whales, from sunshine-harv­­est­­ing plants to mineral-digesting endoliths miles underground, only one kind of “life as we know it” exists. All these organisms are based on nucleic acids--DNA and RNA--and proteins, working together more or less as described by the so-called central dogma of molecular biology: DNA stores information that is transcribed into RNA, which then serves as a template for producing a protein. The proteins, in turn, serve as important structural elements in tissues and, as enzymes, are the cell’s workhorses. Yet scientists dream of synthesizing life that is utterly alien to this world--both to better understand the minimum components required for life (as part of the quest to uncover the essence of life and how life originated on earth) and, frankly, to see if they can do it. That is, they hope to put together a novel combination of molecules that can self-organize, metabolize (make use of an energy source), grow, reproduce and evolve. [More] Galapagos Invaders Actually Native Species [The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] Darwin's fabled isles, the Galapagos, are in need of a makeover. And removing invasive species of plants tops the to-do list for the islands’ restoration. But six species that were set to be exterminated have gotten a reprieve. Because a new study finds that they’re actually natives. [More]

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Scientific American magazine editor in chief, John Rennie, talks about the November issue's contents, including computer-brain interfaces, DNA computing, the ongoing attempts to find an HIV vaccine and getting closer to the Star Trek tricorder with portable NMR. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites mentioned on this episode include snipurl.com/4LJ71; SciAm.com/sciammag > Related In-Depth Report: Today's Alternative Energy [More] Geoengineering: How to Cool Earth--At a Price When David W. Keith, a physicist and energy expert at the University of Calgary in Alberta, gives lectures these days on geoengineering, he likes to point out how old the idea is. People have been talking about deliberately altering climate to counter global warming, he says, for as long as they have been worrying about global warming itself. As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels might cause “marked changes in climate” that “could be deleterious.” Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: “spreading very small reflective particles” over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space--“a wacky geoengineering solution,” Keith says, “that doesn’t even work.” In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe--they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream. [More]

Tags: geoengineering, global, idea, scientists, warming

Scientific American magazine editor in chief, John Rennie, talks about the November issue's contents, including computer-brain interfaces, DNA computing, the ongoing attempts to find an HIV vaccine and getting closer to the Star Trek tricorder with portable NMR. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites mentioned on this episode include snipurl.com/4LJ71; SciAm.com/sciammag > Related In-Depth Report: Today's Alternative Energy [More] Geoengineering: How to Cool Earth--At a Price When David W. Keith, a physicist and energy expert at the University of Calgary in Alberta, gives lectures these days on geoengineering, he likes to point out how old the idea is. People have been talking about deliberately altering climate to counter warming, he says, for as long as they have been worrying about global warming itself. As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels might cause “marked changes in climate” that “could be deleterious.” Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: “spreading very small reflective particles” over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space--“a wacky geoengineering solution,” Keith says, “that doesn’t even work.” In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe--they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream. [More]

Tags: geoengineering, global, idea, scientists, warming

Scientific American magazine editor in chief, John Rennie, talks about the November issue's contents, including computer-brain interfaces, DNA computing, the ongoing attempts to find an HIV vaccine and getting closer to the Star Trek tricorder with portable NMR. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites mentioned on this episode include snipurl.com/4LJ71; SciAm.com/sciammag > Related In-Depth Report: Today's Alternative Energy [More] Geoengineering: How to Cool Earth--At a Price When David W. Keith, a physicist and energy expert at the University of Calgary in Alberta, gives lectures these days on geoengineering, he likes to point out how old the idea is. People have been talking about deliberately altering climate to counter warming, he says, for as long as they have been worrying about global warming itself. As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels might cause “marked changes in climate” that “could be deleterious.” Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: “spreading very small reflective particles” over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space--“a wacky geoengineering solution,” Keith says, “that doesn’t even work.” In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe--they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream. [More]

Tags: geoengineering, global, idea, scientists, warming

Wandering the aisles of a supermarket several years ago, one of us (Hebert) marveled at how the store could keep track of the array of merchandise simply by examining the varying order of thick and thin lines that make up a product’s barcode. Why, he mused, couldn’t the unique ordering of the four nucleic acids in a short strand of DNA be mined in a similar way to identify the legions of species on earth? Ever since Carl Linnaeus began systematically classifying all living things 250 years ago, biologists have looked at various features--color, shape, even behavior--to identify animals and plants. In the past few decades, researchers have begun to apply the genetic information in DNA to the task. But both classical and modern genetic methods demand great expertise and eat up huge amounts of time. Using just a small section of the DNA--something more akin to the 12-digit barcode on products--would require far less time and skill. [More] The X Chromosome and the Case against Monogamy Researchers report genetic evidence bolstering the socially contentious idea that polygyny--the mating practice where some males dominate reproduction by fathering children with several women--was the norm for sexual behavior throughout human history and prehistory. Because polygyny means other men father few or no children, the study, published today in PLoS Genetics, also shows that, on average, women bequeath more genes to their offspring than men do.  [More]

Tags: dna, genetic, behavior, identify, barcode

Scientific American magazine editor in chief, John Rennie, talks about the November issue's contents, including computer-brain interfaces, DNA computing, the ongoing attempts to find an HIV vaccine and getting closer to the Star Trek tricorder with portable NMR. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites mentioned on this episode include snipurl.com/4LJ71; SciAm.com/sciammag > Related In-Depth Report: Today's Alternative Energy [More] Geoengineering: How to Cool Earth--At a Price When David W. Keith, a physicist and energy expert at the University of Calgary in Alberta, gives lectures these days on geoengineering, he likes to point out how old the idea is. People have been talking about deliberately altering climate to counter warming, he says, for as long as they have been worrying about global warming itself. As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels might cause “marked changes in climate” that “could be deleterious.” Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: “spreading very small reflective particles” over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space--“a wacky geoengineering solution,” Keith says, “that doesn’t even work.” In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe--they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream. [More]

Tags: geoengineering, global, idea, scientists, warming

In the late ninth century a disastrous harvest precipitated by drought brought famine to China under the rule of the Tang dynasty. By A.D. 907--after nearly three centuries of rule--the dynasty fell when its emperor, Ai, was deposed, and the empire was divided. According to the atmospheric record contained in a stalagmite, one of the causes of that downfall may have been climate change. [More] Electronics Industry Changes the Climate with New Greenhouse Gas Emissions of a greenhouse gas that has 17,000 times the planet-warming capacity of carbon dioxide are at least four times higher than had been previously estimated. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is used mainly by the semiconductor industry to clean the chambers in which silicon chips are made. The industry had in the past estimated that most of the gas was expended during the cleaning process and only about 2 percent escaped into the air. But the first-ever measurements of nitrogen trifluoride levels in the atmosphere, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters show that emissions could be as high as 16 percent. [More]

Tags: industry, gas, greenhouse, climate, dynasty

“Wasteland” conjures up visions of dusty desolation where life is fleeting and harsh--if it exists at all. Oceans, too, have their inhospitable pockets. Scientists are discovering that climate change--and not just fertilizer from farm use--may be spurring the emergence of barren underwater landscapes in coastal waters. Expanding dead zones not only spell trouble for biodiversity, but they also threaten the commercial fisheries of many nations. Dead zones are not new; they form seasonally in economically vital ecoystems worldwide, including the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay. Agricultural runoff sparks many of these die-offs; increased use of nitrogen fertilizers has doubled the number of lifeless pockets every decade since the 1960s, resulting in 405 dead zones now dotting coastlines globally. [More] Bar Code of Life: DNA Tags Help Classify Animals Wandering the aisles of a supermarket several years ago, one of us (Hebert) marveled at how the store could keep track of the array of merchandise simply by examining the varying order of thick and thin lines that make up a product’s barcode. Why, he mused, couldn’t the unique ordering of the four nucleic acids in a short strand of DNA be mined in a similar way to identify the legions of species on earth? Ever since Carl Linnaeus began systematically classifying all living things 250 years ago, biologists have looked at various features--color, shape, even behavior--to identify animals and plants. In the past few decades, researchers have begun to apply the genetic information in DNA to the task. But both classical and modern genetic methods demand great expertise and eat up huge amounts of time. Using just a small section of the DNA--something more akin to the 12-digit barcode on products--would require far less time and skill. [More]

Tags: dna, dead, zones, pockets, identify

Dawson City, Yukon--After revving up with a roar, a core drill designed to punch holes in concrete begins digging into ice more than 100,000 years old. Here in the Klondike, the drill serves as a kind of gas-powered, handheld time machine, bringing up frozen earth from the Pleistocene, when mammoths and other megafauna once ruled. In a land where miners still hunt for gold, paleomammalogist Ross Mac­Phee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and his colleagues seek a different kind of treasure--DNA from extinct titans. Millennia ago, as the earth in the Klon­dike cracked during the springtime thaw, water leaked in, only to freeze again during winter to form wedges of ice, explains geologist Duane Froese of the University of Alberta. Dripping in with this water was sediment from the surface, which might hold DNA from mammoths, as well as that of the plants, bacteria and other life once found in the region, MacPhee says. Nothing is known about the genetics of mammoths from the middle Pleistocene, and such DNA could elucidate their evolution. The researchers hope to find clear evidence that two species of , not just one, roamed the Americas at the end of the last ice age. [More] Not-So-Permafrost: Big Thaw of Arctic Soil May Unleash Runaway Warming "Drunken" trees listing wildly, cracked highways and sinkholes--all are visible signs of thawing Arctic permafrost. When this frozen soil warms, it releases carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases as microbes start to thrive on the organic material it contains--a potentially potent source of uncontrollable climate change. [More]

Tags: mammoth, dna, ice, kind, thaw

Dawson City, Yukon--After revving up with a roar, a core drill designed to punch holes in concrete begins digging into ice more than 100,000 years old. Here in the Klondike, the drill serves as a kind of gas-powered, handheld time machine, bringing up frozen earth from the Pleistocene, when mammoths and other megafauna once ruled. In a land where miners still hunt for gold, paleomammalogist Ross Mac­Phee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and his colleagues seek a different kind of treasure--DNA from extinct titans. Millennia ago, as the earth in the Klon­dike cracked during the springtime thaw, water leaked in, only to freeze again during winter to form wedges of ice, explains geologist Duane Froese of the University of Alberta. Dripping in with this water was sediment from the surface, which might hold DNA from mammoths, as well as that of the plants, bacteria and other life once found in the region, MacPhee says. Nothing is known about the genetics of mammoths from the middle Pleistocene, and such DNA could elucidate their evolution. The researchers hope to find clear evidence that two species of mammoth, not just one, roamed the Americas at the end of the last ice age. [More] Not-So-Permafrost: Big Thaw of Arctic Soil May Unleash Runaway Warming "Drunken" trees listing wildly, cracked highways and sinkholes--all are visible signs of thawing Arctic permafrost. When this frozen soil warms, it releases carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases as microbes start to thrive on the organic material it contains--a potentially potent source of uncontrollable climate change. [More]

Tags: mammoth, dna, ice, kind, thaw

The excellent Phillip Stott raises a basic question that should concern all who demand truth from the mass media: why is the media bullishly promoting a 'current global warming" when all the science points to the fact there has been no global warming since at all 1998.  I have long said that it is not the science that is the problem rather it is the media itself which promotes a thoroughly false understaing of science, expecially on the issue of climate science. Phillip here calls it 'cognitive dissonance'. I call it 'too thick too grasp truth, too dishonest (being detrimental to audience ratings) to report it'. But it pretty much amounts to the same thing. But here it is in Phillip's words: I must ask a very serious and urgent question of our media. Whydo you continue to talk glibly about current climate ‘warming’ when itis now widely acknowledged that there has been no ‘global warming’ forthe last ten years, a cooling trend that many think may continue for atleast another ten years? How can you talk of the climate ‘warming’ when, on the key measures, it isn’t? And now a leading Mexican scientist is even predicting that we may enter another ‘Little Ice Age’ - a ‘pequeña era [edad] de hielo’. Suchmedia behaviour exhibits a classic condition known as ‘cognitivedissonance’. This is experienced when belief in a grand narrativepersists blindly even when the facts in the real world begin tocontradict what the narrative is saying. Sadly, our media have come tohave a vested interest in ‘global warming’, as have so many politiciansand activists. They are terrified that the public may begin to questioneverything if climate is acknowledged, on air and in the press, not tobe playing ball with their pet trope. For the full piece go to Global Warming Politics . Now Oxygen Crisis Threatens Us All, reports Guardian Having breathing problems. Forget obesity, that could just be a government cover-up for the growing oxygen crisis. And whatever happened to the apocalyptic threat from carbon emissions? Well that, apparently, CO2 scaremongering isn't scaring us anyway near enough. So now the alarmists have come up with a new scam... oxygen deficiency - on a global scale. This weekend's latest fear-creating salvo was fired in aid of an upcoming book describing the alleged lack of oxygen which could... wait for it. ...yes, you've guessed it, could (note the requisite opt-out clause) obliterate life on earth. of course, that will only happen if the carbon dioxide emissions, the return of TB, AIDS, CJD, the millennium bug, Avian Flu et al don't get us first, of course. Well they could, couldn't they? Anyway, here is long-time leftie and gay rights activist Peter Tatchell with the fiction considered worth publishing by the apparently comotose editors at The Guardian : The rise in carbon dioxide emissions is big news. It is prompting action to reverse global warming. But little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects. Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth, according to Roddy Newman, who is drafting a new book, The Oxygen Crisis. [...] Desertification and deforestation are rapidly accelerating this long-term loss of oxygen sources. [...] Professor Robert Berner of Yale University has researched oxygen levels in prehistoric times by chemically analysing air bubbles trapped in fossilised tree amber. He suggests that humans breathed a much more oxygen-rich air 10,000 years ago. And here is Lord Christopher Monckton and a cast of ...some others... with the facts (shortly to be published at SPPI Scarewatch : The scare : As the peer-reviewed literature is filled with a growing proportion of learned papers demolishing the imagined “consensus” that anthropogenic “global warming” will prove “catastrophic”, the less serious newspapers are looking for new scares to peddle to the feeble-minded. In mid-August 2008, The Guardian, Britain’s silliest newspaper, printed an article by Peter Tatchell, a homosexual campaigner who once attempted to arrest the dictator of Zimbabwe, suggesting that the world’s oxygen is running out because of humankind’s use of fossil fuels. Atmospheric oxygen trend from Cape Grim, Tasmania . Tatchell says: “Little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects. Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. …Much of this recent, accelerated change is down to human activity, notably the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil fuels. …This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth. …” The truth : Dr. Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, says: “The O 2 concentration of the atmosphere has been measured off and on for about 100 years now, and the concentration, at 20.95%, has not varied within the accuracy of the measurements. Only in recent years have more precise measurement techniques been developed, and the tiny decrease in O 2 with increasing CO 2 has been actually measured. But I believe the O 2 concentration is still close to 20.95%. There is so much O 2 in the atmosphere, it is believed not to be substantially affected by vegetation, but it is the result of geochemistry in deep-ocean sediments. No one really knows for sure. Since too much O 2 is not good for humans, the human body keeps O 2 concentrations down to around 5% in our major organs. Extra O 2 can give you a burst of energy, but it will harm you (or kill you) if the exposure is too long. It has been estimated that global wildfire risk would increase greatly if O 2 concentrations were much more than they are now. To say that there is an impending ‘oxygen crisis’ on Earth is the epitome of fear-mongering.” Professor Roy Watts, of www.wattsupwiththat.com , adds: “This is the sort of story I would expect in the supermarket tabloids next to a picture of Bat Boy. For the UK Guardian to say there is a ‘oxygen crisis’, is not only ignorant of the facts, but simple fear-mongering riding on the coat-tails of the ‘CO 2 crisis’. … I really wish the media would do a better job of researching and reporting science stories. This example from the Guardian shows how bad science and bad reporting combine to create fear- mongering.” Dr. Lubos Motl, a physicist, has posted a detailed comment on the Tatchell article on his blog. He says: " The reality is, of course, that the oxygen percentage in the atmosphere has been 20.94 or 20.95 percent for thousands of years and probably much longer than that. The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is so huge that the biosphere (and fossil fuels which used to belong to the biosphere as well) is completely unable to change this amount significantly. "It may be useful to mention that the oxygen is only 1/5 of the atmosphere and the atmosphere is just 1/1,200,000 of the mass of the Earth. However, the Earth is very heavy, 6 x 10 24 kg, so the mass of the oxygen in the atmosphere is something like 10 18 kilograms – about 150,000 tons per capita. We could not burn that much oxygen even if everyone in the world were using a private jet on a daily basis." “There is a simpler way to see that man-made changes to the oxygen levels are trivial and we will look at it now. For a schoolboy who is not skipping his science classes at elementary school, it shouldn’t be difficult to see why we can’t significantly influence the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. How can he do it? Well, he must realize that virtually all processes related to life and human activity – breathing (by animals and plants) and burning ( combustion ) – exchange the atmospheric O 2 molecules for CO 2 molecules or vice versa. Sometimes one needs two O2 molecules and only produces one CO 2 molecule, but this subtlety won’t change our final result significantly. "Virtually all other compounds participating in the relevant chemical reactions are either liquids or solids, which is why they don’t influence the composition of the atmosphere and we can ignore them. When you realize what the words above mean, you will see that the man-made decrease of O 2 is controlled by the increase of carbon dioxide: they’re inseparably linked to one another. The human activity has increased the CO 2 concentration from 280 ppm two centuries ago to 385 ppm today (the schoolboy should have seen these elementary numbers during his ‘CO 2 crisis’ classes). Because many people don’t know what the acronym ppm (parts per million) really means, even if they like to use it, let me tell you that it is the same thing as 0.0001%. “So the carbon dioxide went from 0.028% to 0.038%: the difference is 0.01%, or one-ten-thousandth, of the volume of the atmosphere. Because O 2 and CO 2 molecules occupy the same volume at a given pressure and a given temperature (since pV = NkT ), the decrease of O 2 should be equal to the increase of CO 2 if the molecules were exchanged for one another: the oxygen should drop by 0.01% of the volume of the atmosphere. “As we have already mentioned, two oxygen molecules are replaced in typical "combustion" chemical reactions for one carbon dioxide molecule, so the oxygen drop might be 0.02% instead of 0.01%. However, in the long run, there exist other processes besides the combustion-like processes involving CO 2 that we have considered – for example, processes involving deep ocean sediments – and these processes tend to restore the oxygen levels (as well as the CO 2 levels) . “At any rate, you see that the oxygen level couldn’t have decreased by more than 0.01% or so, from 20.95% to 20.94%, which is pretty much exactly what was observed. We needed centuries or millenia to achieve this modest effect. It is very clear that even if we burned all forests, plants, animals, and fossil fuels in the world, we couldn't get the oxygen levels below 20% (and maybe not even 20.9%). “Does the tiny decrease of oxygen levels change some important things? It doesn’t. The most ‘spectacular’ change is that the wildfire risk decreases by something like 0.01%, too (and maybe slightly more), as the oxygen levels drop. Because wildfires are somewhat unpopular and their decrease would be good news, you won’t read about it. “At any rate, all these changes are negligible given the tiny change in O 2 levels. ”Tatchell writes: ‘I am not a scientist, but this seems a reasonable concern.’ Reasonable to whom? To me, worries about the ‘oxygen crisis’ seems to be a ticket for someone to be sent to a mental asylum. The point here is not whether Tatchell is a scientist: he's clearly not. The question is whether he is a dangerous enough weirdo to be isolated from society. “We can’t change the oxygen level in any significant way. Incidentally, while the overall amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is essentially constant, the amount of oxygen in various organisms varies dramatically. For example, the human body must keep the concentration of this harmful-if-too-abundant gas around 5% in most organs. This optimal percentage depends on the life forms, which is why the varying percentage of oxygen in amber – a point mentioned by Tatchell – says absolutely nothing about the overall O 2 volume. “Men have been able to change the overall carbon dioxide concentrations measurably because it is a trace gas: there was almost none to start with, so it is easy to change its volume by relatively large amounts, proportionally speaking. But oxygen is one of the gases that the Earth's atmosphere has been made out of for 0.5 or even 2.5 billion years. You can’t change that. …“Tatchell writes a lot of other incredible nonsense, for example that the oxygen in cities is much (by 15%) lower than it is in the countryside. He probably believes that the pressure drops from 1000 to 900 millibars in cities... ” Is there someone at The Guardian who has some common sense left? Could you please stop printing insane people like Peter Tatchell who help to transform your daily into an expensive and dirty piece of toilet paper?” Professor Wallace Broecker of Columbia University has written: “An oft-heard warning with regard to our planet’s future is that by cutting back tropical forests we put our supply of oxygen gas at risk. Many good reasons exist for placing deforestation near the top of our list of environmental sins, but fortunately the fate of the Earth’s O 2 supply does not hang in the balance. Simply put, our atmosphere is endowed with such an enormous reserve of this gas that even if we were to burn all our fossil fuel reserves, all our trees, and all the organic matter stored in soils, we would use up only a few percent of the available O 2 . No matter how foolishly we treat our environmental heritage, we simply don’t have the capacity to put more than a small dent in our O 2 supply. Furthermore, the Earth’s forests do not play a dominant role in maintaining O 2 reserves, because they consume just as much of this gas as they produce. In the tropics, ants, termites, bacteria, and fungi eat nearly the entire photosynthetic O 2 product. Only a tiny fraction of the organic matter they produce accumulates in swamps and soils or is carried down the rivers for burial on the sea floor. “While no danger exists that our O 2 reserve will be depleted, nevertheless the O 2 content of our atmosphere is slowly declining–so slowly that a sufficiently accurate technique to measure this change wasn’t developed until the late 1980s. Ralph Keeling , its developer, showed that between 1989 and 1994 the O 2 content of the atmosphere decreased at an average annual rate of 2 parts per million. Considering that the atmosphere contains 210,000 parts per million, one can see why this measurement proved so difficult. This drop was not unexpected, for the combustion of fossil fuels destroys O 2 . For each 100 atoms of fossil-fuel carbon burned, about 140 molecules of O 2 are consumed. The surprise came when Keeling’s measurements showed that the rate of decline of O 2 was only about two-thirds of that attributable to fossil-fuel combustion during this period. Only one explanation can be given for this observation: Losses of biomass through deforestation must have been outweighed by a fattening of biomass elsewhere, termed global “greening” by geochemists. Although the details as to just how and where remain obscure, the buildup of extra CO 2 in our atmosphere and of extra fixed nitrogen in our soils probably allows plants to grow a bit faster than before, leading to a greater storage of carbon in tree wood and soil humus. For each atom of extra carbon stored in this way, roughly one molecule of extra oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere.” Finally, here is what Dr. Ray Langenfelds from CSIRO Atmospheric Research, Australia, has to say about the graph of the decline in atmospheric O 2 at Cape Grim : “The changes we are measuring represent just a tiny fraction of the total amount of oxygen in our air - 20.95 percent by volume. The oxygen reduction is just 0.03 percent in the past 20 years and has no impact on our breathing. Typical oxygen fluctuations indoors or in city air would be far greater than this.” End of scare.

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The excellent Phillip Stott raises a basic question that should concern all who demand truth from the mass media: why is the media bullishly promoting a 'current global warming" when all the science points to the fact there has been no global warming since at all 1998.  I have long said that it is not the science that is the problem rather it is the media itself which promotes a thoroughly false understaing of science, expecially on the issue of climate science. Phillip here calls it 'cognitive dissonance'. I call it 'too thick too grasp truth, too dishonest (being detrimental to audience ratings) to report it'. But it pretty much amounts to the same thing. But here it is in Phillip's words: I must ask a very serious and urgent question of our media. Whydo you continue to talk glibly about current climate ‘warming’ when itis now widely acknowledged that there has been no ‘global warming’ forthe last ten years, a cooling trend that many think may continue for atleast another ten years? How can you talk of the climate ‘warming’ when, on the key measures, it isn’t? And now a leading Mexican scientist is even predicting that we may enter another ‘Little Ice Age’ - a ‘pequeña era [edad] de hielo’. Suchmedia behaviour exhibits a classic condition known as ‘cognitivedissonance’. This is experienced when belief in a grand narrativepersists blindly even when the facts in the real world begin tocontradict what the narrative is saying. Sadly, our media have come tohave a vested interest in ‘global warming’, as have so many politiciansand activists. They are terrified that the public may begin to questioneverything if climate is acknowledged, on air and in the press, not tobe playing ball with their pet trope. For the full piece go to Global Warming Politics . Now Oxygen Crisis Threatens Us All, reports Guardian Having breathing problems. Forget obesity, that could just be a government cover-up for the growing crisis. And whatever happened to the apocalyptic threat from carbon emissions? Well that, apparently, CO2 scaremongering isn't scaring us anyway near enough. So now the alarmists have come up with a new scam... oxygen deficiency - on a global scale. This weekend's latest fear-creating salvo was fired in aid of an upcoming book describing the alleged lack of oxygen which could... wait for it. ...yes, you've guessed it, could (note the requisite opt-out clause) obliterate life on earth. of course, that will only happen if the carbon dioxide emissions, the return of TB, AIDS, CJD, the millennium bug, Avian Flu et al don't get us first, of course. Well they could, couldn't they? Anyway, here is long-time leftie and gay rights activist Peter Tatchell with the fiction considered worth publishing by the apparently comotose editors at The Guardian : The rise in carbon dioxide emissions is big news. It is prompting action to reverse global warming. But little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects. Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth, according to Roddy Newman, who is drafting a new book, The Oxygen Crisis. [...] Desertification and deforestation are rapidly accelerating this long-term loss of oxygen sources. [...] Professor Robert Berner of Yale University has researched oxygen levels in prehistoric times by chemically analysing air bubbles trapped in fossilised tree amber. He suggests that humans breathed a much more oxygen-rich air 10,000 years ago. And here is Lord Christopher Monckton and a cast of ...some others... with the facts (shortly to be published at SPPI Scarewatch : The scare : As the peer-reviewed literature is filled with a growing proportion of learned papers demolishing the imagined “consensus” that anthropogenic “global warming” will prove “catastrophic”, the less serious newspapers are looking for new scares to peddle to the feeble-minded. In mid-August 2008, The Guardian, Britain’s silliest newspaper, printed an article by Peter Tatchell, a homosexual campaigner who once attempted to arrest the dictator of Zimbabwe, suggesting that the world’s oxygen is running out because of humankind’s use of fossil fuels. Atmospheric oxygen trend from Cape Grim, Tasmania . Tatchell says: “Little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects. Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. …Much of this recent, accelerated change is down to human activity, notably the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil fuels. …This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth. …” The truth : Dr. Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, says: “The O 2 concentration of the atmosphere has been measured off and on for about 100 years now, and the concentration, at 20.95%, has not varied within the accuracy of the measurements. Only in recent years have more precise measurement techniques been developed, and the tiny decrease in O 2 with increasing CO 2 has been actually measured. But I believe the O 2 concentration is still close to 20.95%. There is so much O 2 in the atmosphere, it is believed not to be substantially affected by vegetation, but it is the result of geochemistry in deep-ocean sediments. No one really knows for sure. Since too much O 2 is not good for humans, the human body keeps O 2 concentrations down to around 5% in our major organs. Extra O 2 can give you a burst of energy, but it will harm you (or kill you) if the exposure is too long. It has been estimated that global wildfire risk would increase greatly if O 2 concentrations were much more than they are now. To say that there is an impending ‘oxygen crisis’ on Earth is the epitome of fear-mongering.” Professor Roy Watts, of www.wattsupwiththat.com , adds: “This is the sort of story I would expect in the supermarket tabloids next to a picture of Bat Boy. For the UK Guardian to say there is a ‘oxygen crisis’, is not only ignorant of the facts, but simple fear-mongering riding on the coat-tails of the ‘CO 2 crisis’. … I really wish the media would do a better job of researching and reporting science stories. This example from the Guardian shows how bad science and bad reporting combine to create fear- mongering.” Dr. Lubos Motl, a physicist, has posted a detailed comment on the Tatchell article on his blog. He says: " The reality is, of course, that the oxygen percentage in the atmosphere has been 20.94 or 20.95 percent for thousands of years and probably much longer than that. The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is so huge that the biosphere (and fossil fuels which used to belong to the biosphere as well) is completely unable to change this amount significantly. "It may be useful to mention that the oxygen is only 1/5 of the atmosphere and the atmosphere is just 1/1,200,000 of the mass of the Earth. However, the Earth is very heavy, 6 x 10 24 kg, so the mass of the oxygen in the atmosphere is something like 10 18 kilograms – about 150,000 tons per capita. We could not burn that much oxygen even if everyone in the world were using a private jet on a daily basis." “There is a simpler way to see that man-made changes to the oxygen levels are trivial and we will look at it now. For a schoolboy who is not skipping his science classes at elementary school, it shouldn’t be difficult to see why we can’t significantly influence the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. How can he do it? Well, he must realize that virtually all processes related to life and human activity – breathing (by animals and plants) and burning ( combustion ) – exchange the atmospheric O 2 molecules for CO 2 molecules or vice versa. Sometimes one needs two O2 molecules and only produces one CO 2 molecule, but this subtlety won’t change our final result significantly. "Virtually all other compounds participating in the relevant chemical reactions are either liquids or solids, which is why they don’t influence the composition of the atmosphere and we can ignore them. When you realize what the words above mean, you will see that the man-made decrease of O 2 is controlled by the increase of carbon dioxide: they’re inseparably linked to one another. The human activity has increased the CO 2 concentration from 280 ppm two centuries ago to 385 ppm today (the schoolboy should have seen these elementary numbers during his ‘CO 2 crisis’ classes). Because many people don’t know what the acronym ppm (parts per million) really means, even if they like to use it, let me tell you that it is the same thing as 0.0001%. “So the carbon dioxide went from 0.028% to 0.038%: the difference is 0.01%, or one-ten-thousandth, of the volume of the atmosphere. Because O 2 and CO 2 molecules occupy the same volume at a given pressure and a given temperature (since pV = NkT ), the decrease of O 2 should be equal to the increase of CO 2 if the molecules were exchanged for one another: the oxygen should drop by 0.01% of the volume of the atmosphere. “As we have already mentioned, two oxygen molecules are replaced in typical "combustion" chemical reactions for one carbon dioxide molecule, so the oxygen drop might be 0.02% instead of 0.01%. However, in the long run, there exist other processes besides the combustion-like processes involving CO 2 that we have considered – for example, processes involving deep ocean sediments – and these processes tend to restore the oxygen levels (as well as the CO 2 levels) . “At any rate, you see that the oxygen level couldn’t have decreased by more than 0.01% or so, from 20.95% to 20.94%, which is pretty much exactly what was observed. We needed centuries or millenia to achieve this modest effect. It is very clear that even if we burned all forests, plants, animals, and fossil fuels in the world, we couldn't get the oxygen levels below 20% (and maybe not even 20.9%). “Does the tiny decrease of oxygen levels change some important things? It doesn’t. The most ‘spectacular’ change is that the wildfire risk decreases by something like 0.01%, too (and maybe slightly more), as the oxygen levels drop. Because wildfires are somewhat unpopular and their decrease would be good news, you won’t read about it. “At any rate, all these changes are negligible given the tiny change in O 2 levels. ”Tatchell writes: ‘I am not a scientist, but this seems a reasonable concern.’ Reasonable to whom? To me, worries about the ‘oxygen crisis’ seems to be a ticket for someone to be sent to a mental asylum. The point here is not whether Tatchell is a scientist: he's clearly not. The question is whether he is a dangerous enough weirdo to be isolated from society. “We can’t change the oxygen level in any significant way. Incidentally, while the overall amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is essentially constant, the amount of oxygen in various organisms varies dramatically. For example, the human body must keep the concentration of this harmful-if-too-abundant gas around 5% in most organs. This optimal percentage depends on the life forms, which is why the varying percentage of oxygen in amber – a point mentioned by Tatchell – says absolutely nothing about the overall O 2 volume. “Men have been able to change the overall carbon dioxide concentrations measurably because it is a trace gas: there was almost none to start with, so it is easy to change its volume by relatively large amounts, proportionally speaking. But oxygen is one of the gases that the Earth's atmosphere has been made out of for 0.5 or even 2.5 billion years. You can’t change that. …“Tatchell writes a lot of other incredible nonsense, for example that the oxygen in cities is much (by 15%) lower than it is in the countryside. He probably believes that the pressure drops from 1000 to 900 millibars in cities... ” Is there someone at The Guardian who has some common sense left? Could you please stop printing insane people like Peter Tatchell who help to transform your daily into an expensive and dirty piece of toilet paper?” Professor Wallace Broecker of Columbia University has written: “An oft-heard warning with regard to our planet’s future is that by cutting back tropical forests we put our supply of oxygen gas at risk. Many good reasons exist for placing deforestation near the top of our list of environmental sins, but fortunately the fate of the Earth’s O 2 supply does not hang in the balance. Simply put, our atmosphere is endowed with such an enormous reserve of this gas that even if we were to burn all our fossil fuel reserves, all our trees, and all the organic matter stored in soils, we would use up only a few percent of the available O 2 . No matter how foolishly we treat our environmental heritage, we simply don’t have the capacity to put more than a small dent in our O 2 supply. Furthermore, the Earth’s forests do not play a dominant role in maintaining O 2 reserves, because they consume just as much of this gas as they produce. In the tropics, ants, termites, bacteria, and fungi eat nearly the entire photosynthetic O 2 product. Only a tiny fraction of the organic matter they produce accumulates in swamps and soils or is carried down the rivers for burial on the sea floor. “While no danger exists that our O 2 reserve will be depleted, nevertheless the O 2 content of our atmosphere is slowly declining–so slowly that a sufficiently accurate technique to measure this change wasn’t developed until the late 1980s. Ralph Keeling , its developer, showed that between 1989 and 1994 the O 2 content of the atmosphere decreased at an average annual rate of 2 parts per million. Considering that the atmosphere contains 210,000 parts per million, one can see why this measurement proved so difficult. This drop was not unexpected, for the combustion of fossil fuels destroys O 2 . For each 100 atoms of fossil-fuel carbon burned, about 140 molecules of O 2 are consumed. The surprise came when Keeling’s measurements showed that the rate of decline of O 2 was only about two-thirds of that attributable to fossil-fuel combustion during this period. Only one explanation can be given for this observation: Losses of biomass through deforestation must have been outweighed by a fattening of biomass elsewhere, termed global “greening” by geochemists. Although the details as to just how and where remain obscure, the buildup of extra CO 2 in our atmosphere and of extra fixed nitrogen in our soils probably allows plants to grow a bit faster than before, leading to a greater storage of carbon in tree wood and soil humus. For each atom of extra carbon stored in this way, roughly one molecule of extra oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere.” Finally, here is what Dr. Ray Langenfelds from CSIRO Atmospheric Research, Australia, has to say about the graph of the decline in atmospheric O 2 at Cape Grim : “The changes we are measuring represent just a tiny fraction of the total amount of oxygen in our air - 20.95 percent by volume. The oxygen reduction is just 0.03 percent in the past 20 years and has no impact on our breathing. Typical oxygen fluctuations indoors or in city air would be far greater than this.” End of scare.

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