carbon emissions, china, climate change, climate targets, dirty recovery, economic growth, five-year plan
The world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases announced generally moderate new energy and climate targets that give little indications that it will step up its efforts at combatting climate change over the next five years. Premier Li Keqiang, speaking at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, said the country will reduce carbon emissions ...
As harmful atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to increase, understanding the planet’s carbon balance is increasingly important. A new report by U.S. National Science Foundation-funded ecologists at Arizona State University has quantified the global soil carbon sequestration by roots and the amount leached into the soil. It reveals that climate and land use are major influencers ...
Permafrost in the soil and methane hydrates deep in the ocean are large reservoirs of ancient carbon. As soil and ocean temperatures rise, the reservoirs have the potential to break down, releasing enormous quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. But would this methane actually make it to the atmosphere? Researchers at the University of Rochester ...
Current carbon cycle models may underestimate the amount of carbon dioxide released from the soil during rainy seasons in temperate forests like those found in the northeast United States, according to Penn State researchers. Tree roots and microbes use oxygen to convert organic carbon in the soil to carbon dioxide (CO2) for energy through a ...
Charcoal produced by wildfires could trap carbon for hundreds of years and help mitigate climate change, according to new research just published. The extensive and unprecedented outbreak of wildfires in the arctic and the vast amounts of CO2 they are emitting have been hitting the headlines across the world. But a new Nature Geoscience study ...
Alexandra Kravchenko, Michigan State University professor in the Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences, and several of her colleagues recently discovered a new mechanism determining how carbon storage in soils takes place that could improve the climate resilience of cropping systems and also reduce their carbon footprints. The findings, published in the scientific journal Nature ...
About 252 million years ago, a rise in global temperatures resulted in a massive mass extinction in Earth’s history called the Permian mass extinction. Almost 96 percent of marine animals and 70 percent of land animals perished. All this happened in just a few thousand years. Scientists warn that a similar fate might await us ...
The Internet has been going wild over the past couple of days after media reported that Iceland’s Katla volcano is about to erupt, an event that would dwarf even the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. However, recent reports suggest that the news was just another case of media sensationalism. The fake news It was the British ...
We have seen increasing concern about global warming during the last decade. The possibility of worldwide disasters has led many scientists to search for ways to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. A team of scientists seems to have found an effective way to eliminate carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere — by using industrially ...