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“It’s a rapid and catastrophic way you could completely change everything.” As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:49:00 +0000

Temperature Rising

As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks

Katey M. Walter Anthony, a scientist, investigated a plume of methane, a greenhouse gas, at an Alaskan lake. Dr. Walter Anthony is a leading researcher in studying the escape of methane. More Photos »

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Published: December 16, 2011

FAIRBANKS, Alaska — A bubble rose through a hole in the surface of a frozen lake. It popped, followed by another, and another, as if a pot were somehow boiling in the icy depths.

Every bursting bubble sent up a puff of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas generated beneath the lake from the decay of plant debris. These plants last saw the light of day 30,000 years ago and have been locked in a deep freeze — until now.

“That’s a hot spot,” declared Katey M. Walter Anthony, a leading scientist in studying the escape of methane. A few minutes later, she leaned perilously over the edge of the ice, plunging a bottle into the water to grab a gas sample.

It was another small clue for scientists struggling to understand one of the biggest looming mysteries about the future of the earth.

Experts have long known that northern lands were a storehouse of frozen carbon, locked up in the form of leaves, roots and other organic matter trapped in icy soil — a mix that, when thawed, can produce methane and carbon dioxide, gases that trap heat and warm the planet. But they have been stunned in recent years to realize just how much organic debris is there.

A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.

Temperatures are warming across much of that region, primarily, scientists believe, because of the rapid human release of greenhouse gases. Permafrost is warming, too. Some has already thawed, and other signs are emerging that the frozen carbon may be becoming unstable.

“It’s like broccoli in your freezer,” said Kevin Schaefer, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “As long as the broccoli stays in the freezer, it’s going to be O.K. But once you take it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge, it will thaw out and eventually decay.”

If a substantial amount of the carbon should enter the atmosphere, it would intensify the planetary warming. An especially worrisome possibility is that a significant proportion will emerge not as carbon dioxide, the gas that usually forms when organic material breaks down, but as methane, produced when the breakdown occurs in lakes or wetlands. Methane is especially potent at trapping the sun’s heat, and the potential for large new methane emissions in the Arctic is one of the biggest wild cards in climate science.

Scientists have declared that understanding the problem is a major priority. The United States Department of Energy and the European Union recently committed to new projects aimed at doing so, and NASA is considering a similar plan. But researchers say the money and people devoted to the issue are still minimal compared with the risk.

For now, scientists have many more questions than answers. Preliminary computer analyses, made only recently, suggest that the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions could eventually become an annual source of carbon equal to 15 percent or so of today’s yearly emissions from human activities.

But those calculations were deliberately cautious. A recent survey drew on the expertise of 41 permafrost scientists to offer more informal projections. They estimated that if human fossil-fuel burning remained high and the planet warmed sharply, the gases from permafrost could eventually equal 35 percent of today’s annual human emissions.

The experts also said that if humanity began getting its own emissions under control soon, the greenhouse gases emerging from permafrost could be kept to a much lower level, perhaps equivalent to 10 percent of today’s human emissions.

Even at the low end, these numbers mean that the long-running international negotiations over greenhouse gases are likely to become more difficult, with less room for countries to continue burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

In the minds of most experts, the chief worry is not that the carbon in the permafrost will break down quickly — typical estimates say that will take more than a century, perhaps several — but that once the decomposition starts, it will be impossible to stop.

A troubling trend has emerged recently: Wildfires are increasing across much of the north, and early research suggests that extensive burning could lead to a more rapid thaw of permafrost.

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“Even if it’s 5 or 10 percent of today’s emissions, it’s exceptionally worrying, and 30 percent is humongous,” said Josep G. Canadell, a scientist in Australia who runs a global program to monitor greenhouse gases. “It will be a chronic source of emissions that will last hundreds of years.”

Rise and Fall of Permafrost

Standing on a bluff the other day, overlooking an immense river valley, A. David McGuire, a scientist from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, sketched out two million years of the region’s history. It was the peculiar geology of western North America and eastern Siberia, he said, that caused so much plant debris to get locked in an ice box there.

These areas were not covered in glaciers during the last ice age, but the climate was frigid, with powerful winds. The winds and rivers carried immense volumes of silt and dust that settled in the lowlands of Alaska and Siberia.

A thin layer of this soil thawed on top during the summers and grasses grew, capturing carbon dioxide. In the bitter winters, grass roots, leaves and even animal parts froze before they could decompose. Layer after layer of permafrost built up.

At the peak of the ice age, 20,000 years ago, the frozen ground was more extensive than today, stretching deep into parts of the lower 48 states that were not covered by ice sheets. Climate-change contrarians like to point to that history, contending that any melting of permafrost and ice sheets today is simply the tail end of the ice age.

Citing permafrost temperatures for northern Alaska — which, though rising rapidly, remain well below freezing — an organization called the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change claimed that permafrost is in “no more danger of being wiped out any time soon than it was in the days of our great-grandparents.”

But mainstream scientists, while hoping the breakdown of permafrost will indeed be slow, reject that argument. They say the climate was reasonably stable for the past 10,000 years or so, during the period when human civilization arose. Now, as people burn immense amounts of carbon in the form of fossil fuels, the planet’s temperature is rising, and the Arctic is warming twice as fast. That, scientists say, puts the remaining permafrost deposits at risk.

For several decades, researchers have been monitoring permafrost temperatures in hundreds of boreholes across the north. The temperatures have occasionally decreased in some regions for periods as long as a decade, but the overall trend has been a relentless rise, with temperatures now increasing fastest in the most northerly areas.

Thawing has been most notable at the southern margins. Across huge areas, including much of central Alaska, permafrost is hovering just below the freezing point, and is expected to start thawing in earnest as soon as the 2020s. In northern Alaska and northern Siberia, where permafrost is at least 12 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, experts say it should take longer.

“Even in a greenhouse-warmed world, it will still get cold and dark in the Arctic in the winter,” said Mark Serreze, director of the snow and ice data center in Boulder.

Scientists need better inventories of the ancient carbon. The best estimate so far was published in 2009 by a Canadian scientist, Charles Tarnocai, and some colleagues. They calculated that there was about 1.7 trillion tons of carbon in soils of the northern regions, about 88 percent of it locked in permafrost. That is about two and a half times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Philippe Ciais, a leading French scientist, wrote at the time that he was “stunned” by the estimate, a large upward revision from previous calculations.

“If, in a warmer world, bacteria decompose organic soil matter faster, releasing carbon dioxide,” Dr. Ciais wrote, “this will set up a positive feedback loop, speeding up global warming.”

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As a young researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, she wanted to figure out how much of that gas was escaping from lakes in areas of permafrost thaw. She was doing field work in Siberia in 2000, scattering bubble traps around various lakes in the summer, but she got almost nothing.

Plumes of Methane

Katey Walter Anthony had been told to hunt for methane, and she could not find it.

Then, that October, the lakes froze over. Plumes of methane that had been hard to spot on a choppy lake surface in summer suddenly became more visible.

“I went out on the ice, this black ice, and it looked like the starry night sky,” Dr. Walter Anthony said. “You could see these bubble clusters everywhere. I realized — ‘aha!’ — this is where all the methane is.”

When organic material comes out of the deep freeze, it is consumed by bacteria. If the material is well-aerated, bacteria that breathe oxygen will perform the breakdown, and the carbon will enter the air as carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. But in areas where oxygen is limited, like the bottom of a lake or wetland, a group of bacteria called methanogens will break down the organic material, and the carbon will emerge as methane.

Scientists are worried about both gases. They believe that most of the carbon will emerge as carbon dioxide, with only a few percent of it being converted to methane. But because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas, the 41 experts in the recent survey predicted that it would trap about as much heat as the carbon dioxide would.

Dr. Walter Anthony’s seminal discovery was that methane rose from lake bottoms not as diffuse leaks, as many scientists had long assumed, but in a handful of scattered, vigorous plumes, some of them capable of putting out many quarts of gas per day. In certain lakes they accounted for most of the emerging methane, but previous research had not taken them into consideration. That meant big upward revisions were probably needed in estimates of the amount of methane lakes might emit as permafrost thawed.

Most of the lakes Dr. Walter Anthony studies were formed by a peculiar mechanism. Permafrost that is frozen hard supports the ground surface, almost the way a concrete pillar supports a building. But when thaw begins, the ground sometimes turns to mush and the entire land surface collapses into a low-lying area, known as a thermokarst. A lake or wetland can form there, with the dark surface of the water capturing the sun’s heat and causing still more permafrost to thaw nearby.

Near thermokarst locations, trees often lean crazily because their roots are disturbed by the rapid changes in the underlying landscape, creating “drunken forests.” And the thawing, as it feeds on itself, frees up more and more ancient plant debris.

One recent day, in 11-degree weather, Dr. Walter Anthony and an assistant, Amy Strohm, dragged equipment onto two frozen thermokarst lakes near Fairbanks. The fall had been unusually warm and the ice was thin, emitting thunderous cracks — but it held. In spots, methane bubbled so vigorously it had prevented the water from freezing. Dr. Walter Anthony, six months pregnant, bent over one plume to retrieve samples.

“This is thinner ice than we like,” she said. “Don’t tell my mother-in-law! My own mother doesn’t know.”

Dr. Walter Anthony had already run chemical tests on the methane from one of the lakes, dating the carbon molecules within the gas to 30,000 years ago. She has found carbon that old emerging at numerous spots around Fairbanks, and carbon as old as 43,000 years emerging from lakes in Siberia.

“These grasses were food for mammoths during the end of the last ice age,” Dr. Walter Anthony said. “It was in the freezer for 30,000 to 40,000 years, and now the freezer door is open.”

Scientists are not sure yet whether thermokarst lakes will become more common throughout the Arctic in a warming climate, a development that could greatly accelerate permafrost thaw and methane production. But they have already started to see increases in some regions, including northernmost Alaska.

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“We expect increased thermokarst activity could be a very strong effect, but we don’t really know,” said Guido Grosse, another scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He is working with Dr. Walter Anthony on precision mapping of thermokarst lakes and methane seeps, in the hope that the team can ultimately use satellites and aerial photography to detect trends.

With this kind of work still in the early stages, researchers are worried that the changes in the region may already be outrunning their ability to understand them, or to predict what will happen.

When the Tundra Burns

One day in 2007, on the plain in northern Alaska, a lightning strike set the tundra on fire.

Historically, tundra, a landscape of lichens, mosses and delicate plants, was too damp to burn. But the climate in the area is warming and drying, and fires in both the tundra and forest regions of Alaska are increasing.

The Anaktuvuk River fire burned about 400 square miles of tundra, and work on lake sediments showed that no fire of that scale had occurred in the region in at least 5,000 years.

Scientists have calculated that the fire and its aftermath sent a huge pulse of carbon into the air — as much as would be emitted in two years by a city the size of Miami. Scientists say the fire thawed the upper layer of permafrost and set off what they fear will be permanent shifts in the landscape.

Up to now, the Arctic has been absorbing carbon, on balance, and was once expected to keep doing so throughout this century. But recent analyses suggest that the permafrost thaw could turn the Arctic into a net source of carbon, possibly within a decade or two, and those studies did not account for fire.

“I maintain that the fastest way you’re going to lose permafrost and release permafrost carbon to the atmosphere is increasing fire frequency,” said Michelle C. Mack, a University of Florida scientist who is studying the Anaktuvuk fire. “It’s a rapid and catastrophic way you could completely change everything.”

The essential question scientists need to answer is whether the many factors they do not yet understand could speed the release of carbon from permafrost — or, possibly, slow it more than they expect.

For instance, nutrients released from thawing permafrost could spur denser plant growth in the Arctic, and the plants would take up some carbon dioxide. Conversely, should fires like the one at Anaktuvuk River race across warming northern landscapes, immense amounts of organic material in vegetation, soils, peat deposits and thawed permafrost could burn.

Edward A. G. Schuur, a University of Florida researcher who has done extensive field work in Alaska, is worried by the changes he already sees, including the discovery that carbon buried since before the dawn of civilization is now escaping.

“To me, it’s a spine-tingling feeling, if it’s really old carbon that hasn’t been in the air for a long time, and now it’s entering the air,” Dr. Schuur said. “That’s the fingerprint of a major disruption, and we aren’t going to be able to turn it off someday.”

Temperature Rising - A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:39:00 +0000

by NYtimes - KEEPING WATCH The Mauna Loa Observatory, at an altitude of 11,135 feet above sea level in Hawaii, has been continuously monitoring and collecting data related to climate change since the 1950s.

MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii — Two gray machines sit inside a pair of utilitarian buildings here, sniffing the fresh breezes that blow across thousands of miles of ocean.

They make no noise. But once an hour, they spit out a number, and for decades, it has been rising relentlessly.

The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego. His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science.

Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death, his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming.

When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.

By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.

The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?

Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide traps heat at the surface of the planet. They cite growing evidence that the inexorable rise of the gas is altering the climate in ways that threaten human welfare.

Fossil fuel emissions, they say, are like a runaway train, hurtling the world’s citizens toward a stone wall — a carbon dioxide level that, over time, will cause profound changes.

The risks include melting ice sheets, rising seas, more droughts and heat waves, more flash floods, worse storms, extinction of many plants and animals, depletion of sea life and — perhaps most important — difficulty in producing an adequate supply of food. Many of these changes are taking place at a modest level already, the scientists say, but are expected to intensify.

Reacting to such warnings, President George Bush committed the United States in 1992 to limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Scores of other nations made the same pledge, in a treaty that was long on promises and short on specifics.

But in 1998, when it came time to commit to details in a document known as the Kyoto Protocol, Congress balked. Many countries did ratify the protocol, but it had only a limited effect, and the past decade has seen little additional progress in controlling emissions.

Many countries are reluctant to commit themselves to tough emission limits, fearing that doing so will hurt economic growth. International climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, this month ended with only modest progress. The Obama administration, which came into office pledging to limit emissions in the United States, scaled back its ambitions after climate and energy legislation died in the Senate this year.

Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science. Some of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny.

One of them is Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. In a recent Congressional hearing on global warming, he said, “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.”

But most scientists trained in the physics of the atmosphere have a different reaction to the increase.

“I find it shocking,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the government monitoring program of which the Mauna Loa Observatory is a part. “We really are in a predicament here, and it’s getting worse every year.”

As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time.

“Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”

A Passion for Precision

Perhaps the biggest reason the world learned of the risk of global warming was the unusual personality of a single American scientist.

Charles David Keeling’s son Ralph remembers that when he was a child, his family bought a new home in Del Mar, Calif., north of San Diego. His father assigned him the task of edging the lawn. Dr. Keeling insisted that Ralph copy the habits of the previous owner, an Englishman who had taken pride in his garden, cutting a precise two-inch strip between the sidewalk and the grass.

Temperature Rising - A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:32:00 +0000

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“It took a lot of work to maintain this attractive gap,” Ralph Keeling recalled, but he said his father believed “that was just the right way to do it, and if you didn’t do that, you were cutting corners. It was a moral breach.”

Dr. Keeling was a punctilious man. It was by no means his defining trait — relatives and colleagues described a man who played a brilliant piano, loved hiking mountains and might settle a friendly argument at dinner by pulling an etymological dictionary off the shelf.

But the essence of his scientific legacy was his passion for doing things in a meticulous way. It explains why, even as challengers try to pick apart every other aspect of climate science, his half-century record of carbon dioxide measurements stands unchallenged.

By the 1950s, when Dr. Keeling was completing his scientific training, scientists had been observing the increasing use of fossil fuels and wondering whether carbon dioxide in the air was rising as a result. But nobody had been able to take accurate measurements of the gas.

As a young researcher, Dr. Keeling built instruments and developed techniques that allowed him to achieve great precision in making such measurements. Then he spent the rest of his life applying his approach.

In his earliest measurements of the air, taken in California and other parts of the West in the mid-1950s, he found that the background level for carbon dioxide was about 310 parts per million.

That discovery drew attention in Washington, and Dr. Keeling soon found himself enjoying government backing for his research. He joined the staff of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in the La Jolla section of San Diego, under the guidance of an esteemed scientist named Roger Revelle, and began laying plans to measure carbon dioxide around the world.

Some of the most important data came from an analyzer he placed in a government geophysical observatory that had been set up a few years earlier in a remote location: near the top of Mauna Loa, one of the volcanoes that loom over the Big Island of Hawaii.

He quickly made profound discoveries. One was that carbon dioxide oscillated slightly according to the seasons. Dr. Keeling realized the reason: most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere, and plants there were taking up carbon dioxide as they sprouted leaves and grew over the summer, then shedding it as the leaves died and decayed in the winter.

He had discovered that the earth itself was breathing.

A more ominous finding was that each year, the peak level was a little higher than the year before. Carbon dioxide was indeed rising, and quickly. That finding electrified the small community of scientists who understood its implications. Later chemical tests, by Dr. Keeling and others, proved that the increase was due to the combustion of fossil fuels.

The graph showing rising carbon dioxide levels came to be known as the Keeling Curve. Many Americans have never heard of it, but to climatologists, it is the most recognizable emblem of their science, engraved in bronze on a building at Mauna Loa and carved into a wall at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.

By the late 1960s, a decade after Dr. Keeling began his measurements, the trend of rising carbon dioxide was undeniable, and scientists began to warn of the potential for a big increase in the temperature of the earth.

Dr. Keeling’s mentor, Dr. Revelle, moved to Harvard, where he lectured about the problem. Among the students in the 1960s who first saw the Keeling Curve displayed in Dr. Revelle’s classroom was a senator’s son from Tennessee named Albert Arnold Gore Jr., who marveled at what it could mean for the future of the planet.

Throughout much of his career, Dr. Keeling was cautious about interpreting his own measurements. He left that to other people while he concentrated on creating a record that would withstand scrutiny.

John Chin, a retired technician in Hawaii who worked closely with Dr. Keeling, recently described the painstaking steps he took, at Dr. Keeling’s behest, to ensure accuracy. Many hours were required every week just to be certain that the instruments atop Mauna Loa had not drifted out of kilter.

The golden rule was “no hanky-panky,” Mr. Chin recalled in an interview in Hilo, Hawaii. Dr. Keeling and his aides scrutinized the records closely, and if workers in Hawaii fell down on the job, Mr. Chin said, they were likely to get a call or letter: “What did you do? What happened that day?”

In later years, as the scientific evidence about climate change grew, Dr. Keeling’s interpretations became bolder, and he began to issue warnings. In an essay in 1998, he replied to claims that global warming was a myth, declaring that the real myth was that “natural resources and the ability of the earth’s habitable regions to absorb the impacts of human activities are limitless.”

Still, by the time he died, global warming had not become a major political issue. That changed in 2006, when Mr. Gore’s movie and book, both titled “An Inconvenient Truth,” brought the issue to wider public attention. The Keeling Curve was featured in both.

by NYtimes

A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:21:00 +0000

(Page 3 of 4)

In 2007, a body appointed by the United Nations declared that the scientific evidence that the earth was warming had become unequivocal, and it added that humans were almost certainly the main cause. Mr. Gore and the panel jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But as action began to seem more likely, the political debate intensified, with fossil-fuel industries mobilizing to fight emission-curbing measures. Climate-change contrarians increased their attack on the science, taking advantage of the Internet to distribute their views outside the usual scientific channels.

In an interview in La Jolla, Dr. Keeling’s widow, Louise, said that if her husband had lived to see the hardening of the political battle lines over climate change, he would have been dismayed.

“He was a registered Republican,” she said. “He just didn’t think of it as a political issue at all.”

The Numbers

Not long ago, standing on a black volcanic plain two miles above the Pacific Ocean, the director of the Mauna Loa Observatory, John E. Barnes, pointed toward a high metal tower.

Samples are taken by hoses that snake to the top of the tower to ensure that only clean air is analyzed, he explained. He described other measures intended to guarantee an accurate record. Then Dr. Barnes, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, displayed the hourly calculation from one of the analyzers.

It showed the amount of carbon dioxide that morning as 388 parts per million.

After Dr. Keeling had established the importance of carbon dioxide measurements, the government began making its own, in the early 1970s. Today, a NOAA monitoring program and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography program operate in parallel at Mauna Loa and other sites, with each record of measurements serving as a quality check on the other.

The Scripps program is now run by Ralph Keeling, who grew up to become a renowned atmospheric scientist in his own right and then joined the Scripps faculty. He took control of the measurement program after his father’s sudden death from a heart attack.

In an interview on the Scripps campus in La Jolla, Ralph Keeling calculated that the carbon dioxide level at Mauna Loa was likely to surpass 400 by May 2014, a sort of odometer moment in mankind’s alteration of the atmosphere.

“We’re going to race through 400 like we didn’t see it go by,” Dr. Keeling said.

What do these numbers mean?

The basic physics of the atmosphere, worked out more than a century ago, show that carbon dioxide plays a powerful role in maintaining the earth’s climate. Even though the amount in the air is tiny, the gas is so potent at trapping the sun’s heat that it effectively works as a one-way blanket, letting visible light in but stopping much of the resulting heat from escaping back to space.

Without any of the gas, the earth would most likely be a frozen wasteland — according to a recent study, its average temperature would be colder by roughly 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But scientists say humanity is now polluting the atmosphere with too much of a good thing.

In recent years, researchers have been able to put the Keeling measurements into a broader context. Bubbles of ancient air trapped by glaciers and ice sheets have been tested, and they show that over the past 800,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air oscillated between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Just before the Industrial Revolution, the level was about 280 parts per million and had been there for several thousand years.

That amount of the gas, in other words, produced the equable climate in which human civilization flourished.

Other studies, covering many millions of years, show a close association between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the earth. The gas seemingly played a major role in amplifying the effects of the ice ages, which were caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit.

The geologic record suggests that as the earth began cooling, the amount of carbon dioxide fell, probably because much of it got locked up in the ocean, and that fall amplified the initial cooling. Conversely, when the orbital wobble caused the earth to begin warming, a great deal of carbon dioxide escaped from the ocean, amplifying the warming.

Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, refers to carbon dioxide as the master control knob of the earth’s climate. He said that because the wobbles in the earth’s orbit were not, by themselves, big enough to cause the large changes of the ice ages, the situation made sense only when the amplification from carbon dioxide was factored in.

“What the ice ages tell us is that our physical understanding of CO2 explains what happened and nothing else does,” Dr. Alley said. “The ice ages are a very strong test of whether we’ve got it right.”

When people began burning substantial amounts of coal and oil in the 19th century, the carbon dioxide level began to rise. It is now about 40 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution, and humans have put half the extra gas into the air since just the late 1970s. Emissions are rising so rapidly that some experts fear that the amount of the gas could double or triple before emissions are brought under control.

The earth’s history offers no exact parallel to the human combustion of fossil fuels, so scientists have struggled to calculate the effect.

by NYtimes

A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:06:00 +0000

(Page 4 of 4) by NYtimes

Their best estimate is that if the amount of carbon dioxide doubles, the temperature of the earth will rise about five or six degrees Fahrenheit. While that may sound small given the daily and seasonal variations in the weather, the number represents an annual global average, and therefore an immense addition of heat to the planet.

The warming would be higher over land, and it would be greatly amplified at the poles, where a considerable amount of ice might melt, raising sea levels. The deep ocean would also absorb a tremendous amount of heat.

Moreover, scientists say that an increase of five or six degrees is a mildly optimistic outlook. They cannot rule out an increase as high as 18 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet.

Climate-change contrarians do not accept these numbers.

The Internet has given rise to a vocal cadre of challengers who question every aspect of the science — even the physics, worked out in the 19th century, that shows that carbon dioxide traps heat. That is a point so elementary and well-established that demonstrations of it are routinely carried out by high school students.

However, the contrarians who have most influenced Congress are a handful of men trained in atmospheric physics. They generally accept the rising carbon dioxide numbers, they recognize that the increase is caused by human activity, and they acknowledge that the earth is warming in response.

But they doubt that it will warm nearly as much as mainstream scientists say, arguing that the increase is likely to be less than two degrees Fahrenheit, a change they characterize as manageable.

Among the most prominent of these contrarians is Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who contends that as the earth initially warms, cloud patterns will shift in a way that should help to limit the heat buildup. Most climate scientists contend that little evidence supports this view, but Dr. Lindzen is regularly consulted on Capitol Hill.

“I am quite willing to state,” Dr. Lindzen said in a speech this year, “that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon, though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.”

The Fuel of Civilization

While the world’s governments have largely accepted the science of climate change, their efforts to bring emissions under control are lagging.

The simple reason is that modern civilization is built on burning fossil fuels. Cars, trucks, power plants, steel mills, farms, planes, cement factories, home furnaces — virtually all of them spew carbon dioxide or lesser heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

Developed countries, especially the United States, are largely responsible for the buildup that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution. They have begun to make some headway on the problem, reducing the energy they use to produce a given amount of economic output, with some countries even managing to lower their total emissions.

But these modest efforts are being swamped by rising energy use in developing countries like China, India and Brazil. In those lands, economic growth is not simply desirable — it is a moral imperative, to lift more than a third of the human race out of poverty. A recent scientific paper referred to China’s surge as “the biggest transformation of human well-being the earth has ever seen.”

China’s citizens, on average, still use less than a third of the energy per person as Americans. But with 1.3 billion people, four times as many as the United States, China is so large and is growing so quickly that it has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest overall user of energy.

Barring some big breakthrough in clean-energy technology, this rapid growth in developing countries threatens to make the emissions problem unsolvable.

Emissions dropped sharply in Western nations in 2009, during the recession that followed the financial crisis, but that decrease was largely offset by continued growth in the East. And for 2010, global emissions are projected to return to the rapid growth of the past decade, rising more than 3 percent a year.

Many countries have, in principle, embraced the idea of trying to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, feeling that any greater warming would pose unacceptable risks. As best scientists can calculate, that means about one trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the gases released into the atmosphere before emissions need to fall to nearly zero.

“It took 250 years to burn the first half-trillion tons,” Myles R. Allen, a leading British climate scientist, said in a briefing. “On current trends, we’ll burn the next half-trillion in less than 40.”

Unless more serious efforts to convert to a new energy system begin soon, scientists argue, it will be impossible to hit the 3.6-degree target, and the risk will increase that global warming could spiral out of control by century’s end.

“We are quickly running out of time,” said Josep G. Canadell, an Australian scientist who tracks emissions

In many countries, the United States and China among them, a conversion of the energy system has begun, with wind turbines and solar panels sprouting across the landscape. But they generate only a tiny fraction of all power, with much of the world’s electricity still coming from the combustion of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

With the exception of European countries, few nations have been willing to raise the cost of fossil fuels or set emissions caps as a way to speed the transformation. In the United States, a particular fear has been that a carbon policy will hurt the country’s industries as they compete with companies abroad whose governments have adopted no such policy.

As he watches these difficulties, Ralph Keeling contemplates the unbending math of carbon dioxide emissions first documented by his father more than a half-century ago and wonders about the future effects of that increase.

“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “ ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”

On Dec. 11, another round of international climate negotiations, sponsored by the United Nations, concluded in Cancún. As they have for 18 years running, the gathered nations pledged renewed efforts. But they failed to agree on any binding emission targets.

Late at night, as the delegates were wrapping up in Mexico, the machines atop the volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean issued their own silent verdict on the world’s efforts.

At midnight Mauna Loa time, the carbon dioxide level hit 390 — and rising.

Brazil sea level (Google translate) Nível do mar sobe cada vez mais rápido no litoral norte de São Paulo

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 23:57:00 +0000

São Paulo University research

Registros apontam elevação de 74 centímetros por século.

São Paulo – Sobe cada vez mais rápido o nível do mar no litoral norte de São Paulo, aponta pesquisa coordenada pelo professor do Departamento de Engenharia Hidráulica e Ambiental da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Paolo Alfredini. Com base nos registros feitos de 1944 a 2007 pela Companhia Docas do Estado de São Paulo, em Santos, Alfredini constatou uma elevação do mar de 74 centímetros por século. Também foi analisada a documentação de outras instituições em Ubatuba, São Sebastião e Caraguatatuba .
Nas últimas décadas, no entanto, o avanço das águas marítimas foi mais rápido. “Nos últimos 20 anos, analisando esses dados, a gente nota que tem havido uma aceleração. Isso aparentemente está ligado ao fato que as temperaturas têm aumentado mais nesse período”, ressaltou o professor. Com isso, a estimativa de Alfredini é que neste século o nível do mar suba cerca de 1 metro.
Um aumento desse nível significa, segundo Alfredini, a perda de 100 metros de praia em áreas com declividades suaves. Essa aproximação das águas pode colocar em risco construções à beira-mar. “A quebra da onda vai ficar muito mais próxima das avenidas, onde existem ocupações urbanas. Vai começar a solapar e erodir muros”, disse. “Tubulações que passem perto da praia, como emissários de esgoto, interceptores de águas pluviais, podem vir a ser descalçados e eventualmente até romper”, completou.
Outro fator que ameaça as construções costeiras, verificado no estudo, é o aumento da altura das ondas nas ressacas e tempestades marítimas, além do aumento da frequência desses fenômenos. “Havendo um recrudescimento das ondas, isso também vai provocar mais erosões [nas praias]”, alertou o pesquisador.
A elevação do nível do mar poderá ainda, segundo Alfredini, causar problemas para o abastecimento de água em algumas cidades. Segundo ele, esse processo tende a causar um aumento no volume de água que se infiltra nos rios. “ Portanto, as tomadas de água para abastecimento público e industrial poderão começar a receber água com maior teor de salinidade. E isso pode começar a complicar ou inviabilizar o tratamento da água”.
Para amenizar esses problemas, o pesquisador aponta a necessidade de preparação das cidades afetadas, com a construção, por exemplo, de obras de defesa costeira. “Tem que ter nesses governos municipais, principalmente, que estão em áreas de extremo risco, consciência de que isso é uma realidade”.

2012

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:21:00 +0000

Canada Announces Exit From Kyoto Climate Treaty

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:37:00 +0000

OTTAWA — Canada said on Monday that it would withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Under that accord, major industrialized nations agreed to meet targets for reducing emissions, but mandates were not imposed on developing countries like Brazil, China, India and South Africa. The United States never ratified the treaty.

Canada did commit to the treaty, but the agreement has been fraying. Participants at a United Nations conference in Durban, South Africa, renewed it on Sunday but could not agree on a new accord to replace it.

Instead, the 200 nations represented at the conference agreed to begin a long-term process of negotiating a new treaty, but without resolving a core issue: whether its requirements will apply equally to all countries.

The decision by Canada’s Conservative Party government had long been expected. A Liberal Party government negotiated Canada’s entry into the agreement, but the Conservative government has never disguised its disdain for the treaty.

In announcing the decision, government officials indicated that the possibility of huge fines for Canada’s failure to meet emissions targets had also played a role.

“Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past,” the environment minister, Peter Kent, told reporters shortly after returning from South Africa. He added that Canada would work toward developing an agreement that includes targets for developing nations, particularly China and India.

“What we have to look at is all major emitters,” Mr. Kent said.

Under the Kyoto Protocol’s rules, Canada must formally give notice of its intention to withdraw by the end of this year or else face penalties after 2012.

The extent of those penalties, as well as Canada’s ability to redress its inability to meet the treaty’s emission reduction targets, is a matter of some debate.

Mr. Kent said Canada could meet its commitment only through extreme measures, like pulling all motor vehicles from its roads and shutting heat off to every building in the country. He said the Liberal Party had agreed to the treaty “without any regard as to how it would be fulfilled.”

He also said the failure to meet the targets would have cost Canada $14 billion in penalties.

Other estimates, however, put the figure at $6 billion to $9 billion. Matt Horne, the director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental group, said the financial penalties might have been further reduced by agreeing to additional reductions. He also dismissed Mr. Kent’s assertions about the steps that Canada would have had to have taken to meet its commitments as extreme misrepresentations.

“It’s not a surprise that it happened,” Mr. Horne said of the government’s decision to withdraw from the treaty. “But it is a bit of surprise that it happened pretty much as they got off the plane from Durban.”

NYtimes

Bracing for a Bullfrog Invasion

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 18:45:00 +0000

By JOSIE GARTHWAITE

NYTimes,

Kenneth H. Thomas/Photo Researchers On the move in coming decades: the American bullfrog.

The consequences of climate change for animals can seem very direct, as with polar bears in a warming Arctic. Others involve leaps, like the case of an invasive bullfrog: by 2080, it could splash into some of South America’s most ecologically rich protected areas, disrupting unique hotbeds of biodiversity. At least, that’s the prediction of a new study in the journal PLoS One.

Worldwide, researchers have increasingly been focusing on how a changing climate has altered or is likely to alter migration patterns and the habitats that different species may find hospitable.

For example, one recent study suggests that more than a million giant king crabs have ventured into the warming waters of Palmer Deep in the Antarctic shelf in recent decades, destroying native sea life. (Colder waters may have kept these “skeleton-crushing predators” at bay for more than 14 million years, the report said.)

Another, a meta-analysis published in the journal Science, found that a host of animal and plant species are moving to cooler, higher altitudes at a striking speed (an average of eight inches per hour). They have moved farthest in regions where the most warming has occurred, the report said.

And then there’s Lithobates catesbeianus (or Rana catesbeianus), commonly known as the American bullfrog.

Working out of universities in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, the authors of this latest study have mapped species distribution models against climate models, information about biological preserves and sites where the species currently lives.

The result is a prediction of what places are more likely to be invaded by 2080. If the climate changes as anticipated, it appears that a bullfrog invasion will subside in portions of central western Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. But it will increase in parts of northern Brazil, southeastern Colombia, eastern Peru and southern Venezuela, the researchers project.

The American bullfrog is a particularly vexing trespasser. “Bullfrogs are superfrogs, very adaptable and seemingly immune to most of the causes of amphibian decline,” said Peter B. Moyle, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “They live in a wide variety of habitats, colonize new ones readily, and eat everything that fits into their mouths.”

If that seems like an overstatement, consider the United States Geological Survey’s summary of the species’ diet, which includes birds, rodents, frogs, snakes, turtles, lizards, and bats. In short, “they are voracious eaters who will also prey on their own young,” the survey says,

Dr. Moyle noted that the American bullfrog gets so big that people around the world have embraced them for culinary purposes (frog legs), even in Europe, “home of the original edible frog.”

Endemic to the eastern United States and Canada, the species has been introduced in more than 40 countries and four continents, including more than 75 percent of South America.

As areas where the American bullfrog has already taken up residence become less hospitable in a changing climate, the researchers, led by Javier Nori of the Universidad de Córdoba, anticipate that protected forest areas will become more suitable for the species.

Unless steps are taken to prevent the invasion, the authors write, climate change could enable the American bullfrog to thrive in areas of the Andean-Patagonian forest, eastern Paragua and northwestern Bolivia, where the species has not yet been reported.

The authors’ concern is especially high for the Atlantic Forest, a biodiversity hot spot in tropical South America. “Continuous monitoring of the native biodiversity in this biome should be a priority since L. castesbeianus is likely to colonize reserves more efficiently under climate changes,” they write.

Dr. Moyle said the study is of the sort that should be carried out for other species worldwide because “it demonstrates that we can predict alien invasions.”

The American bullfrog has a record that even Cortés might envy. But beyond its history, there are additional reasons that the species seems likely to colonize new territory.

“Amphibians rely on external temperatures, moisture levels, rainfall to regulate their own conditions,” said Robin Moore, an amphibian conservation officer for Conservation International. “They have semi-permeable skin, so even slight changes in rainfall can really affect them. Given their reliance on external temperatures and climate, as the climate changes, they are going to move.”

For native species, the arrival of the American bullfrog often means new competition, predation and the rapid spread of deadly disease among amphibians.The bullfrog is a carrier of amphibian chytrid fungus, Dr. Moore said, “possibly the most devastating disease to affect an entire class of animals, certainly vertebrates.”

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, based near Geneva, nearly half of all amphibians are now at risk of extinction for many reasons, climate change among them. Dr. Moore described it as an enormous conservation challenge.

Dr. Moyle said the latest study was quite thorough in its climate modeling and predictions and suggested that this could make it more convincing for policymakers.

But even good models have their limitations.“It is important to keep in mind that these are predictions,” he cautioned, noting that they are based in part on a big assumption: that the areas that conservationists need to protect in 50 years will be the same areas protected for their biodiversity today. “It is unrealistic to assume no change,” he said.

In an e-mail, the study’s authors also emphasized, for example, that their models do not take into account the dispersal capability of the bullfrog and its interactions with other organisms. So while this type of modeling is useful for pinpointing areas prone to invasion and providing management guidelines, Dr. Nori’s team wrote, more work is needed.

The scientists called on governments to redouble their efforts to collaborate with universities, research institutions and environmental groups to address “an imminent biological invasion of the bullfrog in the continent.”

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:58:00 +0000

By Justin Gillis NYTimes

WISE RIVER, Mont. — The trees spanning many of the mountainsides of western Montana glow an earthy red, like a broadleaf forest at the beginning of autumn.

But these trees are not supposed to turn red. They are evergreens, falling victim to beetles that used to be controlled in part by bitterly cold winters. As the climate warms, scientists say, that control is no longer happening.

Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.

From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.

The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.

Experts are scrambling to understand the situation, and to predict how serious it may become.

Scientists say the future habitability of the Earth might well depend on the answer. For, while a majority of the world’s people now live in cities, they depend more than ever on forests, in a way that few of them understand.

Scientists have figured out — with the precise numbers deduced only recently — that forests have been absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people are putting into the air by burning fossil fuels and other activities. It is an amount so large that trees are effectively absorbing the emissions from all the world’s cars and trucks.

Without that disposal service, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be rising faster. The gas traps heat from the sun, and human emissions are causing the planet to warm.

Yet the forests have only been able to restrain the increase, not halt it. And some scientists are increasingly worried that as the warming accelerates, trees themselves could become climate-change victims on a massive scale.

“At the same time that we’re recognizing the potential great value of trees and forests in helping us deal with the excess carbon we’re generating, we’re starting to lose forests,” saidThomas W. Swetnam, an expert on forest history at the University of Arizona.

While some of the forests that died recently are expected to grow back, scientists say others are not, because of climate change.

If forests were to die on a sufficient scale, they would not only stop absorbing carbon dioxide, they might also start to burn up or decay at such a rate that they would spew huge amounts of the gas back into the air — as is already happening in some regions. That, in turn, could speed the warming of the planet, unlocking yet more carbon stored in once-cold places like the Arctic.

Scientists are not sure how likely this feedback loop is, and they are not eager to find out the hard way.

“It would be a very different world than the world we’re in,” said Christopher B. Field, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

It is clear that the point of no return has not been reached yet — and it may never be. Despite the troubles of recent years, forests continue to take up a large amount of carbon, with some regions, including the Eastern United States, being especially important as global carbon absorbers.

“I think we have a situation where both the ‘forces of growth’ and the ‘forces of death’ are strengthening, and have been for some time,” said Oliver L. Phillips, a prominent tropical forest researcher with the University of Leeds in England. “The latter are more eye-catching, but the former have in fact been more important so far.”

Scientists acknowledge that their attempts to use computers to project the future of forests are still crude. Some of those forecasts warn that climate change could cause potentially widespread forest death in places like the Amazon, while others show forests remaining robust carbon sponges throughout the 21st century.

“We’re not completely blind, but we’re not in good shape,” said William R. L. Anderegg, a researcher at Stanford University.

Many scientists say that ensuring the health of the world’s forests requires slowing human emissions of greenhouse gases. Most nations committed to doing so in a global environmental treaty in 1992, yet two decades of negotiations have yielded scant progress.

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:55:00 +0000

(Page 2 of 6)

In the near term, experts say, more modest steps could be taken to protect forests. One promising plan calls for wealthy countries to pay those in the tropics to halt the destruction of their immense forests for agriculture and logging.

But now even that plan is at risk, for lack of money. Other strategies, like thinning overgrown forests in the American West to make them more resistant to fire and insect damage, are also going begging in straitened times. With growing economic problems and a Congress skeptical of both climate science and new spending, chances for additional funding appear remote.

So, even as potential solutions to forest problems languish, signs of trouble build.

In the 1990s, many of the white spruce trees of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula were wiped out by beetles. For more than a decade, other beetle varieties have been destroying trees across millions of acres of western North America. Red-hued mountainsides have become a familiar sight in a half-dozen states, including Montana and Colorado, as well as British Columbia in Canada.

Researchers refer to events like these as forest die-offs, and they have begun to document what appears to be a rising pattern of them around the world. Only some have been directly linked to global warming by scientific studies; many have yet to be analyzed in detail. Yet it is clear that hotter weather, of the sort that science has long predicted as a consequence of human activity, is playing a large role.

Many scientists had hoped that serious forest damage would not set in before the middle of the 21st century, and that people would have time to get emissions of heat-trapping gases under control before then. Some of them have been shocked in recent years by what they are seeing.

“The amount of area burning now in Siberia is just startling — individual years with 30 million acres burned,” Dr. Swetnam said, describing an area the size of Pennsylvania. “The big fires that are occurring in the American Southwest are extraordinary in terms of their severity, on time scales of thousands of years. If we were to continue at this rate through the century, you’re looking at the loss of at least half the forest landscape of the Southwest.”

The Carbon Dioxide Mystery

In the 1950s, when a scientist named Charles David Keeling first obtained accurate measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a mystery presented itself. Only about half the carbon that people were releasing into the sky seemed to be staying there. It took scientists decades to figure out where the rest was going. The most comprehensive estimates on the role of forests were published only a few weeks ago by an international team of scientists.

As best researchers can tell, the oceans are taking up about a quarter of the carbon emissions arising from human activities. That is causing the sea to become more acidic and is expected to damage marine life over the long run, perhaps catastrophically. But the chemistry is at least somewhat predictable, and scientists are reasonably confident the oceans will continue absorbing carbon for many decades.

Trees are taking up a similar amount of carbon, but whether this will continue is much less certain, as the recent forest damage illustrates.

Carbon dioxide is an essential part of the cycle of life on Earth, but geologic history suggests that too much can cause the climate to warm sharply. With enough time, the chemical cycles operating on the planet have a tendency to bury excess carbon.

In the 19th century, humans discovered the usefulness of some forms of buried carbon —coal, oil and natural gas — as a source of energy, and have been perturbing the natural order ever since. About 10 billion tons of carbon are pouring into the atmosphere every year from the combustion of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests.

The concentration of the gas in the atmosphere has jumped 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and scientists fear it could double or even triple this century, with profound consequences.

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:53:00 +0000

(Page 3 of 6)

While all types of plants absorb carbon dioxide, known as CO2, most of them return it to the atmosphere quickly because their vegetation decays, burns or is eaten. Every year, during the Northern Hemisphere growing season, plants and other organisms inhale some 120 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere, then exhale nearly the same amount as they decay in the winter.

It is mainly trees that have the ability to lock carbon into long-term storage, and they do so by making wood or transferring carbon into the soil. The wood may stand for centuries inside a living tree, and it is slow to decay even when the tree dies.

But the carbon in wood is vulnerable to rapid release. If a forest burns down, for instance, much of the carbon stored in it will re-enter the atmosphere.

Destruction by fires and insects is a part of the natural history of forests, and in isolation, such events would be no cause for alarm. Indeed, despite the recent problems, the new estimate, published Aug. 19 in the journal Science, suggests that when emissions from the destruction of forests are subtracted from the carbon they absorb, they are, on balance, packing more than a billion tons of carbon into long-term storage every year.

One major reason is that forests, like other types of plants, appear to be responding to the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by growing more vigorously. The gas is, after all, the main food supply for plants. Scientists have been surprised in recent years to learn that this factor is causing a growth spurt even in mature forests, a finding that overturned decades of ecological dogma.

Climate-change contrarians tend to focus on this “fertilization effect,” hailing it as a boon for forests and the food supply. “The ongoing rise of the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth,” one advocate of this position, Craig D. Idso, said at a contrarian meeting in Washington in July.

Dr. Idso and others assert that this effect is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, ameliorating any negative impacts on plant growth from rising temperatures. More mainstream scientists, while stating that CO2 fertilization is real, are much less certain about the long-term effects, saying that the heat and water stress associated with climate change seem to be making forests vulnerable to insect attack, fires and many other problems.

“Forests take a century to grow to maturity,” said Werner A. Kurz, a Canadian scientist who is a leading expert on forest carbon. “It takes only a single extreme climate event, a single attack by insects, to interrupt that hundred-year uptake of carbon.”

It is possible the recent die-backs will prove transitory — a coincidence, perhaps, that they all occurred at roughly the same time. The more troubling possibility, experts said, is that the die-offs might prove to be the leading edge of a more sweeping change.

“If this were happening in just a few places, it would be easier to deny and write off,” said David A. Cleaves, senior adviser for the United States Forest Service. “But it’s not. It’s happening all over the place. You’ve got to say, gee, what is the common element?”

Tracking an Ebb and Flow

So far, humanity has been lucky. While some forests are starting to release more carbon than they take up, that effect continues to be outweighed by forests that pack carbon away. Whether those healthy forests will predominate over coming decades, or will become sick themselves, is simply unclear.

The other day, deep in a healthy New England thicket of oaks, maples and hemlocks, two young men scrambled around on their hands and knees measuring twigs and sticks that had fallen from the trees.

“What was the diameter on that?” asked Jakob Lindaas, a Harvard student holding a pencil and clipboard.

Leland K. Werden, a researcher at the university, called out a metric measurement, and they moved to the next twig. It was one of thousands they would eventually have to measure as part of an effort to tell how fast the wood, knocked off the trees in an ice storm in 2008, was decaying.

The debris they were cataloging would not have struck a hiker as anything to notice, much less measure, but the Harvard Forest, 3,000 acres near Petersham, Mass., is one of the world’s most intensively studied patches of woods. The work the men were doing will become a small contribution toward solving one of the biggest accounting problems of modern science.

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:49:00 +0000

(Page 4 of 6)

In every forest, carbon is constantly being absorbed as trees and other organisms grow, then released as they die or go dormant. These carbon fluxes, as they are called, vary through the day. They vary with seasons, with climate and weather extremes, with the health of the forests and with many other factors. Across the world, scientists are struggling to track and understand this ebb and flow.

A 100-foot tower stands in the middle of the Harvard Forest, studded with instruments. Put up in 1989, it was the first permanent tower of its kind in the world, built to help track the carbon fluxes. Now hundreds of them dot the planet.

Meticulous measurements over the decades have established that the Harvest Forest is gaining weight, roughly two tons per acre per year, on average. It is characteristic of a type of forest that is playing a big role in limiting the damage from human carbon emissions: a recovering forest.

Not so long ago, the land was not a forest at all. Close to where the men were working stood an old stone fence, a telltale sign of the land’s history.

“When the European colonists came to America, they saw trees, and they wanted fields and pastures,” explained J. William Munger, a Harvard research fellow who was supervising the measurements. So the colonists chopped down the original forest and built farmhouses, barns, paddocks and sturdy stone fences.

By the mid-19th century, the Erie Canal and the railroads had opened the interior of the country, and farmers plowing the thin, stony soils of New England could not compete with produce from the rich fields of the Midwest. So the old fields were abandoned, and trees have returned.

Today, the re-growing forests of the Eastern United States are among the most important carbon sponges in the world. In the Harvard Forest, the rate of carbon storage accelerated about a decade ago. As in much of the world, the temperature is warming there — by an average of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 40 years — and that has led to longer growing seasons, benefiting this particular forest more than hurting it, at least so far.

“We’re actually seeing that the leaves are falling off the trees later in the fall,” Mr. Werden said.

Scientists say that something similar may be happening in other forests, particularly in cold northern regions that are warming rapidly. In some places, the higher temperatures could aid tree growth or cause forests to expand into zones previously occupied by grasslands or tundra, storing more carbon.

Forests are re-growing on abandoned agricultural land across vast reaches of Europe and Russia. China, trying to slow the advance of a desert, has planted nearly 100 million acres of trees, and those forests, too, are absorbing carbon.

But, as a strategy for managing carbon emissions, these recovering forests have one big limitation: the planet simply does not have room for many more of them. To expand them significantly would require taking more farmland out of production, an unlikely prospect in a world where food demand and prices are rising.

“We’re basically running out of land,” Dr. Kurz said.

Even in forests that are relatively healthy now, like those of New England, climate risks are coming into focus. For instance, invasive insects that used to be killed off by cold winters are expected to spread north more readily as the temperature warms, attacking trees.

The Harvard Forest has already been invaded by an insect called the woolly adelgid that kills hemlock trees, and managers there fear a large die-off in coming years.

Wildfires and Bugs

Stripping the bark of a tree with a hatchet, Diana L. Six, a University of Montana insect scientist, pointed out the telltale signs of infestation by pine beetles: channels drilled by the creatures as they chewed their way through the juicy part of the tree.

The tree she was pointing out was already dead. Its needles, which should have been deep green, displayed the sickly red that has become so commonplace in the mountainous West. Because the beetles had cut off the tree’s nutrients, the chlorophyll that made the needles green was breaking down, leaving only reddish compounds.

Pine beetles are a natural part of the life cycle in Western forests, but this outbreak, under way for more than a decade in some areas, is by far the most extensive ever recorded. Scientists say winter temperatures used to fall to 40 degrees below zero in the mountains every few years, killing off many beetles. “It just doesn’t happen anymore,” said a leading climate scientist from the University of Montana, Steven W. Running, who was surveying the scene with Dr. Six one recent day.

As the climate has warmed, various beetle species have marauded across the landscape, from Arizona to Alaska. The situation is worst in British Columbia, which has lost millions of trees across an area the size of Wisconsin.

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:39:00 +0000

(Page 5 of 6)

The species Dr. Six was pointing out, the mountain pine beetle, has pushed farther north into Canada than ever recorded. The beetles have jumped the Rocky Mountains into Alberta, and fears are rising that they could spread across the continent as temperatures rise in coming decades. Standing on a mountain plateau south of Missoula, Dr. Six and Dr. Running pointed to the devastation the beetles had wrought in the forest around them, consisting of a high-elevation species called whitebark pine.

“We were going to try to do like an eight-year study up here. But within three years, all this has happened,” Dr. Six said sadly.

“It’s game over,” Dr. Running said.

Later, flying in a small plane over the Montana wilderness, Dr. Running said beetles were not the only problem confronting the forests of the West.

Warmer temperatures are causing mountain snowpack, on which so much of the life in the region depends, to melt earlier in most years, he said. That is causing more severe water deficits in the summer, just as the higher temperatures cause trees to need extra water to survive. The whole landscape dries out, creating the conditions for intense fires. Even if the landscape does not burn, the trees become so stressed they are easy prey for beetles.

From the plane, Dr. Running pointed out huge scars where fires had destroyed stands of trees in recent years. “Nothing can stop the wildfires when they get to this magnitude,” he said. Some of the fire scars stood adjacent to stands of lodgepole pine destroyed by beetles.

At the moment, the most severe problems in the nation’s forests are being seen in the Southwestern United States, in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The region has been so dry that huge, explosive fires consumed millions of acres of vegetation and thousands of homes and other buildings this summer.

This year’s drought came against the background of an overall warming and drying of the Southwestern climate, which scientists say helps to explain the severe effects. But the role of climate change in causing the drought itself is unclear — the more immediate cause is an intermittent weather pattern called La Niña, and research is still under way on whether that cycle is being altered or intensified by global warming, as some researchers suspect. Because of the continuing climatic change, experts say some areas that are burning this year may never return as forest — they are more likely to grow back as heat-tolerant grass or shrub lands, storing far less carbon than the forests they replace.

“A lot of ecologists like me are starting to think all these agents, like insects and fires, are just the proximate cause, and the real culprit is water stress caused by climate change,” said Robert L. Crabtree, head of a center studying the Yellowstone region. “It doesn’t really matter what kills the trees — they’re on their way out. The big question is, Are they going to regrow? If they don’t, we could very well catastrophically lose our forests.”

Stalled Efforts

Scientists are coming to a sobering realization: There may be no such thing left on Earth as a natural forest.

However wild some of them may look, experts say, forests from the deepest Amazon to the remotest reaches of Siberia are now responding to human influences, including the rising level of carbon dioxide in the air, increasing heat and changing rainfall patterns. That raises the issue of what people can do to protect forests.

Some steps have already been taken in recent years, with millions of acres of public and private forest land being designated as conservation reserves, for instance. But other ideas are essentially stymied for lack of money.

Widespread areas of pine forest in the Western United States are a prime example. A scientific consensus has emerged that people mismanaged those particular forests over the past century, in part by suppressing the mild ground fires that used to clear out underbrush and limit tree density.

As a consequence, these overgrown forests have become tinderboxes that can be destroyed by high-intensity fires sweeping through the crowns. The government stance is that many forests throughout the West need to be thinned, and some environmental groups have come to agree.

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:30:00 +0000

(Page 6 of 6)

But the small trees and brush that would be removed have a low commercial value, especially in a weak economy. With little money available to subsidize the thinning, the Forest Service is reduced to treating only small sections of forest that pose the biggest threat to life and property.

On an even larger scale, experts cite a lack of money as endangering aprogram to slow or halt the destruction of tropical forests at human hands.

Deforestation, usually to make way for agriculture, has been under way for decades, with Brazil and Indonesia being hotspots. The burning of tropical forests not only ends their ability to absorb carbon, it also produces an immediate flow of carbon back to the atmosphere, making it one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Rich countries agreed in principle in recent years to pay poorer countries large amounts of money if they would protect their forests.

The wealthy countries have pledged nearly $5 billion, enough to get the program started, but far more money was eventually supposed to become available. The idea was that the rich countries would create ways to charge their companies for emissions of carbon dioxide, and some of this money would flow abroad for forest preservation.

Climate legislation stalled in the United States amid opposition from lawmakers worried about the economic effects, and some European countries have also balked at sending money abroad. That means it is not clear the forest program will ever get rolling in a substantial way.

“Like any other scheme to improve the human condition, it’s quite precarious because it is so grand in its ambitions,” said William Boyd, a University of Colorado law professor working to salvage the plan.

The best hope for the program now is that California, which is intent on battling global warming, will allow industries to comply with its rules partly by financing efforts to slow tropical deforestation. The idea is that other states or countries would eventually follow suit.

Yet, scientists emphasize that in the end, programs meant to conserve forests — or to render them more fire-resistant, as in the Western United States, or to plant new ones, as in China — are only partial measures. To ensure that forests are preserved for future generations, they say, society needs to limit the fossil-fuel burning that is altering the climate of the world.

Climate Change Is Shrinking Species, Research Suggests

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:08:00 +0000

By RACHEL NUWER

Jennifer Sheridan and David Bickford

A male frog specimen collected on Mount Kinabalu in Malaysia in the 1980’s, left, versus another collected in 2008.

Climate change’s laundry list of impacts — melting glaciers and rising sea levels, shifts in timing for bird migration and flower budding, a poleward shift of species — just got a new addition: shrinking species.

No, not population sizes, but a diminution in the size of the animals by comparison with the pre-global warming days.

It’s not that scientists are expecting humans to shrink in size, or mini-pandas and mini-panthers to join the ranks of miniature poodles.

“I don’t think that organisms will shrink to the degree that you’ll walk outside and see that trees are suddenly half the size that they sued to be,” said Jennifer Sheridan, a conservation biologist at the University of Alabama and a co-author of a paper describing the phenomenon in Monday’s issue of the journal Nature Climate Change.

But the shrinking among species in general is noticeable, Dr. Sheridan said — at least to scientists studying them. And in the long run, she suggests, changes in species sizes could have major implications for crop production and the availability of protein sources like fish.

Judging from the fossil record, creatures like beetles, spiders and pocket gophers shrank during periods of warming in the past like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 55.8 million years ago, the researchers write. Scientists are increasingly relying on fossils to predict what the planet might anticipate over the next century.

Although climate change is now unfolding at a much faster rate than in past periods of warming, the researchers write, the basic message is the same: warmer temperatures equals smaller animals.

Yet the research community over all has been less than enthusiastic about embracing the idea. “The scientific community is really hesitant to publish things that are potentially inflammatory,” said David Bickford, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Singapore and a co-author of the paper. “People don’t want to think that this is a new reality, everything shrinking.”

Since he and Dr. Sheridan began documenting the trend over two years ago, Dr. Bickford said, another 20to 30 studies have suggested that the shrinking phenomenon is occurring across species. The two researchers compiled evidence of shrinking species across the globe from the scientific literature, presenting an aggregate view of what has been discovered and deduced so far.

So why all the shrinking?

Although some plants were initially expected to flourish on the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere associated with global warming, their growth is also dependent on temperature, humidity and nutrients. So in areas that are getting warmer and dryer, many plants have become smaller and less able to thrive, the researchers write.

Plant growth is also directly controlled by water, which is becoming more limited as regions like the subtropics become drier. Even areas where increased rainfall is predicted, like the equatorial and high-latitude regions, will see increased variability in rainfall, which probably means they will also experience some periods of very limited rain, the authors write.

Droughts in many regions are expected to result in more forest fires, which reduces the nitrogen in soil that is a critical factor in plants’ growth, the study says. As plants respond to these fluctuations by becoming smaller, animals that depend upon plants — from deer to rabbits to insects — will need to eat larger quantities of smaller plants, the scientists say.

And animals that prey upon herbivores will need to eat more of their shrinking prey to maintain their body sizes, the thinking goes. If predators like like wolves, hawks and robins cannot meet their energy demands by catching numerous smaller prey, they may simply adapt by shifting to eating other species, the study says — or they could begin to shrink themselves or even die off.

Drought also generally leads to smaller offspring, who would in turn have smaller offspring.

Evolution will probably favor the small animals who are better able to keep up with energy demands as resources fluctuate on an ever warmer planet, the researchers suggest.

They cautioned that it was too early to make detailed predictions. “Things start falling apart as we try to make generalizations and impose more levels and hierarchies into our hypotheses,” Dr. Bickford said.

The researchers compiled experimental data on various plant and animal species and how they might react to climate change. In one set of experiments, the paper’s authors exposed corals, scallops, and oysters to the increasingly acidic sea conditions that are expected to ensue with climate change, and the animals’ growth rates declined.

In laboratory experiments, for every two degrees the scientists cranked up the temperature, various types of fruit size decreased anywhere from 3 to 17 percent. For fish, the shrinking was even more pronounced, at 6 to 22 percent.

Disparities in size changes are likely to upset the balance of ecosystems, the authors write. “This isn’t a ubiquitous or general law of ecology,” Dr. Bickford says, “but when some animals are affected and others aren’t, that’s when an imbalance will happen, and that’s what we’re most concerned about.”

If all animals were to engage in coordinated shrinking it might not be so bad, the researchers speculate. But if, say, mice are shrinking faster than snakes, the snakes may not be able to capture enough of the mice to meet their energy requirements.

For now, such outcomes are simply possibilities, although the authors believe that shrinking is here to stay.

Dr. Bickford said the paper was intended as an non-alarmist appeal to the world’s ecologists to take notice. “No matter what else they’re doing in the field, we want more ecologists to pay attention to body size and take these measurements,” he explained.

Martin Daufresne, an aquatic ecologist at Cemagref, a government environmental research institute in Aix-en-Provence, France, described the new paper as “very interesting.” It “brings new insights to the topic by discussing the generality of these patterns and their potential causes, and by suggesting future research directions,” he said.

Strong GreenHouse Effects in Brazil | Florianopolis | Santa Catarina

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 10:30:00 +0000

Diminuição no espaço para banhistas é fenômeno natural, mas ação do homem contribui para acelerar o processo de erosão no litoral

Ângela Bastos | angela.bastos@diario.com.br

Menos espaço para curtir um sol na beira da praia. Esta é uma das preocupações da Santur, que prevê a vinda de 6 milhões de turistas na temporada 2011-2012 ao Estado. Além do trânsito, segurança e infraestrutura, o estreitamento da faixa de areia, visível hoje em muitas praias da Ilha, é um problema difícil de resolver.

Em muitos casos, o fenômeno acontece naturalmente, mas em outros, a ação do homem acelera o problema e pode acabar com um dos maiores atrativos de Florianópolis, que está no foco de 35% dos turistas que visitam SC.

Confira a galeria de fotos de Florianópolis

A faixa de areia continua diminuindo nos balneários da Capital e, segundo especialista, isso não é um problema localizado, e sim de todo o planeta.

Mas por aqui, o que chateia o veranista e inquieta o morador, preocupa a Santa Catarina Turismo S.A (Santur), órgão responsável pela promoção e divulgação dos produtos turísticos catarinenses. Especialmente em Florianópolis.

–Temos uma expectativa de receber 6 milhões de pessoas na próxima temporada, sendo que 35% ficam na Grande Florianópolis. A Capital com suas praias é a joia desta coroa e não se pode perder este atrativo – afirma Valdir Walendowisky, presidente da Santur.

Veja comparativo da redução da faixa de areia em ANTES E DEPOIS

Erosão em todo o litoral brasileiro

É difícil afirmar se a faixa de areia das praias da Ilha será engolida pelo mar. A conclusão exige um monitoramento constante, com estudos voltados a marés, ventos, altura das ondas.

Além disso, ciclones extratropicais, comuns na costa sul do Brasil, possuem uma grande capacidade de retirar areia das praias. O cálculo é assustador: a quantidade que se tira em dois a três dias leva um ano para ser resposta.

– Um das dificuldades que impedem uma projeção mais segura sobre o futuro das praias é a carência de dados. Existem pesquisas, mas não de forma contínua ou a um prazo mais longo. Em termos de estudos, 10 anos ainda é considerado pouco – diz Argeu Vanz, oceanólogo e pesquisador na Epagri/Ciram, na área de fenômenos extremos, como ciclones e seus efeitos.

Vanz observa que todas as praias do país sofrem com problemas de erosão. Para ele, a solução está em pesquisar cada praia e buscar na engenharia oceânica um tipo de construção que minimize o impacto da erosão:

– Precisamos compreender que não é a natureza que deve se adaptar à pessoa e ao seu modo de viver, mas o homem à natureza.

O oceanólogo considera que o chamado engordamento da praia (colocar areia retirada de alguma duna ou mesmo da plataforma para alargar faixa de areia) pode ser uma alternativa para o futuro das praias mais assoreadas, mas diz que poucas prefeituras possuem condições de bancar este tipo de providência por causa do preço. É relativamente fácil colocar o grão de areia, o difícil é achar o grão adequado.

New revision estimates 2011/2012 harvest will be 510.24 million tons in South-Central Brazil

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:23:00 +0000

The Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA), in partnership with the Sugarcane Technology Center (CTC), other unions and associations of the South-Central region of Brazil, revised the crushing estimates for the 2011/2012 harvest released on July 2011. The new forecast estimates a crushing of 510.24 million tons, a reduction of 4.36% in comparison to the last revision (533.50 million tons) and a total reduction of 8.39% over the final value of the 2010/2011 harvest (556.95 million tons).

UNICA’s Technical Director, Antonio de Padua Rodrigues, explains “the data collected in July showed that frost and flowering of the cane impacted agricultural productivity of cane fields with greater intensity that we had initially anticipated.” These factors also promote a change in harvest schedule for the mills, since many will have to anticipate this work in areas hit by frost and flowering, which further aggravated the situation.

According to data compiled by the CTC, agricultural productivity in harvested areas in July was 70.80 tons of cane per hectare, a drop of 17.48% in comparison to the value observed in July 2010. Total agricultural productivity since the beginning of the harvest remained at 74.10 tons of cane per hectare, against 92.80 observed in the same period last year (down 20.15%).

UNICA, the CTC and other unions and associations of producers will continue to biweekly monitor the production and the conditions of the sugarcane field until the end of the harvest. “Our goal is to communicate clearly, transparently and based on all the details of the production in South-Central Brazil, to facilitate the planning of producers and other public and private agents,” affirms Rodrigues.

Quality of Raw Material and Production

The new estimate for the 2011/2012 harvest presents a quality of raw material measured in Total Recoverable Sugars (ATR in Portuguese) of 135.10 kg per ton of cane, a slight reduction in face of 135.70 kg reported in the previous estimate.

Out of the total cane projected for the 2011/2012 harvest, UNICA estimates that 48.06% will be destined for sugar production. The projection of 31.57 million tons, a drop of 2.50% in comparison to the last estimate, and of 5.76% in relation to the 33.50 million tons produced in the 2010/2011 harvest.

On the other hand, ethanol production should reach 21.00 billion liters, down 6.83% in relation to the projected number in the last revision, and 17.25% over the 25.39 billion liters of the last harvest.

Sugar and ethanol exports

According to the new estimate, sugar exports should reach 22.32 million tons during this harvest. Ethanol exports should present a 23.60% drop in relation to the volume observed last year, totaling 1.35 billion liters in the 2011/2012 harvest. UNICA’s Director explains that “the majority of the exports refers to sealed deals in the past and that had to be met in this harvest.”

EVOLUTION OF THE 2011/2012 HARVEST UNTIL AUGUST 1ST, 2011

Crushing

The volume of sugarcane processed by mills in South-Central Brazil added 41.60 million tons in the second half of July, down 2.48% in comparison to the same period in the 2010/2011 harvest. Total crushing since the beginning of the harvest was 259.06 million tons, a 13.02% drop in relation to the 2010/2011 harvest.

Quality of Raw Material

Total quantity of ATR since the beginning of the harvest until August 1st reached 128.32 kg, a reduction of 3.13% in relation to the value registered during the same period in 2010.

In a bi-weekly comparison, this drop reached 4.06%, with a ATR concentration totaling 141.90 kg per ton of cane in the second half of July, against 147.90 kg in the same period in the 2010/2011 harvest.

Production

Sugar production reached 14.76 million tons since the beginning of the harvest until August 1st, against 16.79 million in the same period of 2010. In comparison to ethanol, the volume produced added 10.42 billion liters, against 12.88 billion liters last year.

In the second half of July, sugar production reached 2.82 million tons, a quantity 1.77% superior to that observed in the last harvest. During this same period, ethanol production reached 1.72 billion liters – of which 1.04 billion was hydrous ethanol and 685.00 million was anhydrous ethanol.

“The producers are committed to the production of anhydrous ethanol and in the last month production grew 26.24% compared to 2010, even with no increase in sugarcane crushing during this period,” the UNICA executive said.

Ethanol sales

Ethanol sales by mills in the South-Central region totaled 2.07 billion liters in July, of which only 303.49 million liters were destined to the external market.

Of the total volume, 722.56 million liters referred to anhydrous ethanol and 1.34 billion liters of hydrous ethanol. In the domestic market, hydrous ethanol sales reached 639.93 million liters, and hydrous 1.12 billion liters in the last month.

From April to August 1st, sales of the products totaled 7.16 billion liters, 16.71% below the total sold during the same period last year. For UNICA’s Director, “ethanol prices to producers have been almost stable for 40 days, unlike what happened in other years: we are not observing sharp declines during the harvest, which in general lead to an excessive seasonality between periods of harvest and off season.”

Chegada de bioplásticos a Tetra Pak e Nestlé reforça importante tendência de uso da cana-de-açúcar

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:10:00 +0000

Embalagem com tampa de polietileno feita a partir de cana-de-açúcar
acaba de ser lançada (Foto: Tetra Pak)

Embalagens sustentáveis fabricadas a partir de derivados de cana-de-açúcar estão deixando de ser um nicho e ganhando cada vez mais espaço no mercado, avalia o consultor de Tecnologia e Emissões da União da Indústria de Cana-de-Açúcar (UNICA), Alfred Szwarc. Segundo ele, iniciativas recentes como a da Braskem, Tetra Pak e a Nestlé Brasil são um indício de que esse processo esteja ganhando força.

No final do mês julho, as três companhias anunciaram um acordo para uso de embalagens com tampas de polietileno, fabricadas a partir de cana, para os produtos das marcas Ninho e Molico. “O que assistimos é fantástico. Basta lembrar o importante projeto da PlantBottle envolvendo a Coca-Cola e agora empresas do porte da Heinz, TetraPak e Nestlé utilizando embalagens completas ou componentes dessas embalagens produzidos de bioplásticos. A percepção é que a indústria está cada vez mais atenta às vantagens de se produzir bioplásticos a partir de uma matéria-prima como a cana, cujas vantagens para absorção de gases que causam o efeito estufa são enormes quando comparadas às que utilizam petróleo,” afirma Szwarc.

O Brasil foi o primeiro país da América Latina a comercializar embalagens feitas com bioplástico, fabricadas a partir de cana-de-açúcar. Empresas como Procter & Gamble, Danone, Coca-Cola e Heinz, se destacaram como pioneiras no uso de biopolietileno e bioPET criados a partir do caldo da cana.

Valor agregado

Para Ivan Zurita, presidente da Nestlé Brasil, com o uso das novas tampas a empresa espera estimular a consciência ambiental ao proporcionar aos consumidores um produto que utiliza fontes renováveis na fabricação de sua embalagem. “Além disso, a nova embalagem agrega valor às mercadorias,” ressalta.

Já Paulo Nigro, presidente da Tetra Pak Brasil, enfatiza que a embalagem de polietileno de cana é apenas o primeiro passo para a criação de outra versão, que será 100% sustentável. "Com a inovação, a Tetra Pak reforça o compromisso com seus clientes e a sociedade em trabalhar por um planeta mais saudável e sustentável," explica.

Quanto à parceria, o presidente da Braskem, Carlos Fadigas, diz que o acordo fortalece o compromisso social. “Participar dessa iniciativa ao lado de empresas que são líderes globais em seus setores de atuação é muito importante e reforça o compromisso com a promoção da sustentabilidade,” concluiu.

Dow-Mitsui Brazilian bioplastics project reveals new investment path for sugarcane

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:01:00 +0000

Although not yet a trend, it can be described as an impressive early step with more to come. A joint-venture between U.S. multinational Dow Chemical and Japan’s Mitsui, announced in Brazil on July 19th, will result in the construction of a new sugarcane processing unit dedicated to manufacturing bioplastics and biopolymers.

Amounts invested were not disclosed, but each company will have a 50% stake in the new mill, to be located in Santa Victoria, in Minas Gerais state. The cane-based polymers will be utilized in the production of flexible packaging, medical products and toiletries.

“What we are seeing is an important product diversification, the use of sugarcane and ethanol in a dedicated unit that will manufacture green polyethylene from renewable fuel instead of naphtha, which is produced from fossil fuels. As the volumes will certainly not be small, the project opens the possibility that other groups will start to focus not only on sugar and ethanol, but also products with higher value-added, as in this case," said Antonio de Padua Rodrigues, technical director of the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA).

Niche market

The project is within objectives set by Dow, to develop low-carbon solutions in tune with the global challenges of energy and climate change. "This historic operation reinforces Dow's commitment to invest in the development of sectors that involve high innovation and value through strategic partnerships," said Andrew N. Liveris, Dow chairman and CEO. "The agreement also brings together the strengths of two global companies, creating a unique combination of global technology leadership and access to renewable raw materials to meet the needs of an important and fast-growing region," he added.

"Bioplastics are still uncharted territory, and we believe that this niche can expand faster than our expectations," said a Mitsui executive who asked not to be named.

Persistency

UNICA’s Rodrigues points out that Dow’s insistence was key element in the success of the new venture. "Since 2006 there were already plans to build a dedicated mill with a different partner. Now, the effort got off the ground with Mitsui, a solid company that is capable of providing longevity and consistency to the project,” said the executive.

The first phase of the project includes the construction of the new mill, which will process sugarcane into ethanol. Work is expected to begin in the third quarter of 2011.

Secure Stock Exchange | Ethanol |

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 21:02:00 +0000

Etanol Anidro	R$ 1,3058	0,78
Etanol Hidratado	R$ 1,1375	0,03
Etanol Hidratado Outros Fins	R$ 1,1867	2,42

Atualização às sextas-feiras, às 18h.
Clique nos itens acima para obter detalhes sobre as cotações

Ethanol Jatos movidos a cana-de-açúcar: UNICA vê avanço essencial para redução de emissões

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 20:52:00 +0000

E-Jet 170 da Embraer (foto Embraer)

Aviões cruzando os céus utilizando biocombustíveis produzidos a partir de cana-de-açúcar, ecologicamente corretos e com emissões reduzidas de gases que causam o efeito estufa, podem ser uma realidade não tão distante. Essa é a aposta das fabricantes de aeronaves Boeing e Embraer, que vão financiar uma série de pesquisas sobre o tema com apoio do Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento (BID) e da Amyris, empresa especializada em biotecnologia. Embora em estágio ainda inicial, a iniciativa sinaliza uma tendência de importância fundamental na visão da União da Indústria de Cana-de-Açúcar (UNICA).

“É um esforço importante e correto para pesquisa e desenvolvimento. O querosene de aviação derivado de petróleo é poluente e contribui para a emissão de gases de efeito estufa que intensificam o aquecimento global. A utilização de um combustível renovável a partir da cana-de-açúcar neste contexto é de grande importância, pois ajudaria a diminuir a emissão desses gases,” afirma Alfred Szwarc, consultor de Emissões e Tecnologia da UNICA.

A parceria entre Boeing, Embraer e BID foi anunciada no final de junho, com as pesquisas para a utilização do biocombustível sob responsabilidade da Amyris do Brasil, coordenadas pelo Instituto de Estudos do Comércio e Negociações Internacionais (Icone) e supervisionadas pela organização não-governamental World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Os resultados do trabalho devem ser divulgados no início de 2012.

De acordo com André Nassar, do Icone, o objetivo do estudo é fornecer dados sobre o ciclo de vida das emissões associadas aos combustíveis de fontes renováveis utilizados em aviões. “Vamos examinar também as mudanças no uso indireto da terra e seus efeitos. Serão feitas análises dos combustíveis derivados da cana para jatos em relação aos padrões de sustentabilidade existentes, incluindo o Bonsucro, o Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels e o Biofuel Scorecard do BID,” destaca.

Fontes Renováveis

O forte envolvimento brasileiro com fontes renováveis de energia foi destacado pelo diretor de Estratégia e Tecnologia para o Meio-Ambiente da Embraer, Guilherme Freire. "O Brasil é uma rica fonte de biomassa e o desenvolvimento dessas tecnologias, baseadas na cana-de-açúcar, reforçam a importância do crescimento sustentável da aviação para o País,” disse.

Já Billy Glover, vice-presidente de Meio Ambiente e Política de Aviação da Boeing, enfatizou a parceria entre as empresas brasileiras e americanas. "A pesquisa em parceria para o uso da cana em jatos é importante para diversificar as fontes de combustível de aviação e fortalecer a cooperação estabelecida entre os Estados Unidos e o Brasil na área das energias renováveis," destacou.

Para o CEO da Amyris, John Melo, o planeta não será beneficiado por um combustível que apenas substitua os atuais. "Este estudo nos ajudará a substituir os combustíveis fósseis com um combustível de fonte renovável para jatos, que exceda os atuais critérios técnicos e de sustentabilidade," explica.

UNICA: Brazil's Anhydrous Ethanol Output Up 27% Early July

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 06:20:00 +0000

The Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association, commonly known as UNICA, said in a new report that production of anhydrous ethanol rose about 27% during the first half of July.

The report issued this week said that 615 million liters of anhydrous ethanol was produced in the first 15 days of the month, compared to the 486 million liters produced for the same period during the 2010-2011 harvest.

UNICA said the increase in the production of anhydrous ethanol suggests the industry is serious about meeting domestic demand.

On demand, the report said 6.19 billion liters of ethanol was sold in the South-Central region of the country between April and July 16, which is down about 16% from same period last year.

Most of the sales were anhydrous ethanol, with hydrous ethanol sales lagging. Anhydrous fuel ethanol is also called pure ethanol, because it contains 1% or less of water.

Brazil's Government Prepares Ethanol Stimulus

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 06:16:00 +0000

Concerned about the inflationary impact of ethanol shortages, Brazil's government is preparing a package of measures to stimulate sugarcane farming and ethanol fuel stocking, local business daily Valor Economico reported Friday.

According to government sources, the Finance Ministry will in August issue a decree offering tax breaks on sugarcane production and subsidized credit to stock ethanol until the post-harvest January to April period, when shortages are most acute.

Brazilian ethanol prices surged in the first quarter of 2011 as producers failed to keep up with soaring demand in this booming economy. Shortages promise to be even more acute next year as sugarcane output is seen falling 4 to 6%.

This potentially hinders the government's fight to control peaking inflation, as ethanol is widely used as an automotive fuel and as a 25% additive in gasoline fuel.

The government has identified lagging sugarcane production as one of the main problems. UNICA, the main sugarcane industry association, forecasts 2011-12 center-south output will come in 48 million metric tons, or 9%, short of demand. That's mainly because rival crops have been offering better returns than sugarcane, which in part is because of government caps on fuel prices.

The government's planned tax breaks, on which sources offered no details, represent an attempt to revert that situation.

No stimulus will be given to increase ethanol-distilling capacity, however, as the country has 150 million metric tons in excess crushing capacity, according to Brasilia.

The creation of ethanol stocks was a key issue for many years before the introduction of the flex-fuel cars, which can run on any mixture of ethanol and gasoline fuel from 2003 onwards.

While a shortage of ethanol no longer means a fuel crisis, it does push fuel prices higher hence the government initiative create stocks.

Brazil is expected to export 1.8 billion liters of ethanol in 2011-12 -- a fact frowned upon in Brasilia.

According to Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobo, the government decided to hold off on reducing the percentage of ethanol added to gasoline to 18 to 20%, from 25%, following assurances from millers and distillers that they will supply the market, at reasonable prices. The industry has committed to import up to 1 billion liters of ethanol to meet that promise. That means more ethanol imports from the U.S. this season.

University’s chemists enable Unilever to improve household products

ethanolsource@gmail.com (Walter Palma Filho) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 03:44:00 +0000

Unilever is working with the University of Liverpool to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of its household products, including bleach and toothpaste.

The University’s £9.6 million Centre for Materials Discovery enables industries to move rapidly into the next generation of manufacturing novel materials. Its high-throughput technology accelerates research by enabling scientists to produce and test large numbers of new materials in parallel.

Unilever is developing new polymers – large molecules of repeating units – with improved properties in a wide range of home and personal care products. The new materials have enabled Unilever to improve the structure, feel and flow of products as well as their ability to bind to surfaces.

Glyn Roberts, Unilever Director for Structured Materials, said: “We aim to double the size of our business while reducing our overall environmental impact so identifying new materials which are both highly effective and sustainably sourced is crucial. Improving the way a product looks, feels and performs is key to how consumers view their experience of using it.”

A number of components in all home and personal care products are derived from non-sustainable sources. Companies are increasingly looking to develop more sustainable alternatives which have similar or enhanced properties and the technology available at the University make it well-placed to support Unilever.

The innovative robotic platforms within the Centre for Materials Discovery are provided by Chemspeed Technologies and allow the automation of polymer synthesis – the development of new materials from their component parts – as well as analysis to check the structure and purity of the material and the formulation of prototype products. These capabilities allow libraries of materials to be made and studied much more rapidly than has been possible in the past.

The Centre opened in 2006, following investment from the University, the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA), and Merseyside European Objective One funding. Unilever has been working with the University on the optimisation of household products since the Centre opened and has now agreed to extend the collaboration until 2017.

Jon Hague, Unilever Vice-President for Open Innovation, said: “The University has enabled a transformation in the way Unilever approaches a traditional and established field such as chemistry, enabling a dramatic uptick in speed and quality of output. The success of this partnership has been instrumental in boosting our innovation funnel and so we are delighted to be extending our collaboration with Liverpool.”

Professor Andy Cooper, Director of the Centre for Materials Discovery, said: “Enabling companies like Unilever to develop new materials and improve products is exactly what the Centre was set up to achieve. I’m delighted that our strong relationships with Unilever and Chemspeed are enabling real innovation in materials discovery.”