Noah's Ark

Amphibians are in much more danger than any other type of creature on the planet. They are having the worst problems with species numbers and extinctions. There are many factors that are causing this and one of those is believed to be global warming. Climate change is attributed to a type of fungus growing on amphibian's skin, which is how they breathe, causing them to suffocate. Climate change also forces these creatures to move from where they live and into more dangerous places. Many of these threatened species' are being held in a safe haven for amphibians in many zoos across the globe in an attempt to save them and eventually breed enough to reintroduce back into the wild. This distribution of endangered amphibians is known as "assurance populations." It is not expected to save every amphibian taken in but a valid attempt will be made to save all that are taken in.

'Ark' Designed to Save Imperiled Amphibians

NEW YORK -- The 300 Kihansi spray toads residing in a small room at the Bronx Zoo chirp cheerily as they bask in a light sprinkling of water 14 times a day. Until a few years ago, the tiny, mustard-colored toads existed only in a river gorge in Tanzania. Now the survivors are confined to the Bronx and Toledo zoos, having gone extinct in the wild.

With thousands of amphibian species facing unprecedented threats to their survival, scientists have launched a global effort to collect them in zoos in an attempt to save them from disappearing altogether. The program, called Amphibian Ark, aims to keep 500 species in captivity and breed enough to eventually reintroduce them into the wild.

"In terms of scope, I think this is the biggest conservation project that humanity has ever tried to tackle," said Kevin Zippel, the program's director, who said the initiative is testing zoos' ability to raise and maintain animals with specialized needs. "In the course of the last four years, we've realized how badly off amphibians are," he said.

Scientists have been tracking the rapid disappearance of amphibians for two decades, but new evidence suggests the animals face increasingly grave peril. A third to a half of all amphibians are now threatened with extinction; 165 species have already vanished. In Latin America and the Caribbean alone, three of every four amphibian species are critically endangered.

Research published Wednesday in PLOS One, a journal of the Public Library of Science, estimated that in the neotropic region, which spans from the Mexican deserts to Patagonia in southern Argentina, 35 percent of amphibians "are threatened by habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, and habitat split."

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Polar Bears on Thin Ice

Steven C. Armstrup is a government employed scientist who provides a substantial amount of data about polar bears in the arctic and he is now back in the Arctic studying mothers and cubs in the new seaon of offspring. What he is noticing is a lack of not new borns but bears around one year old. They are obviously dying off at a rate much faster than anticipated or expected by anyone. The only way a real conclusion can be drawn to these early observations is to wait for the season to end and compare the data to that of the years before all the while waiting for the Bush administration to make a decision whether or not to add the Polar Bear to the protection of the endangered species act.

Tensions Rise as Polar Bear Decision Looms

Steven C. Amstrup, the federal biologist who led an analysis last year concluding that the world’s polar bear population could shrink two thirds by 2050 under moderate projections for retreating summer sea ice, is once again in the field along Alaska’s Arctic coast, studying this year’s brood of cubs, yearlings and mothers.

As the Bush administration rushes toward a court-ordered decision on whether the bears should gain threatened status under the Endangered Species Act, Dr. Amstrup is concerned anew by what he’s seeing, he said in an Alaska Public Radio interview a few days ago and in an email exchange Friday evening. In the radio segment, he said the coastal survey so far had turned up only one yearling among 57 bears found between Barrow and Kaktovik, 300 miles east. For several years, he said, females have been found with cubs, but the lack of year-old bears implies a high mortality rate for the young. “The cubs appear to be dying at a higher rate than we’re used to,” he told the radio station.

He was more circumspect in the email message. “We cannot say what this year means until the season is over and we have analyzed this year’s data in the context of our long-term record,” Dr. Amstrup told me. “The Arctic is in a very dynamic flux right now, as you know, and we simply need to be very careful that any word we put out really is information and that it doesn’t provide fuel for people to jump to conclusions.”

His new fieldwork comes as the agency is in the final days of mulling whether to list the bears under the Endangered Species Act before a deadline of May 15 set by a federal judge in California. Last September, when Dr. Amstrup and other experts released their report concluding the bears were at risk in a warming Arctic climate, he said simply: “As the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear.”

But since then, while the agency went on to propose listing the species as threatened (a step below endangered), Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of the Interior, has refused to draw a line between human-caused warming of the global climate and the retreating ice that Dr. Amstrup and other government biologists say poses the biggest threat to the bears.

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Warm Ocean Water

As the climate temperature has been decreasing, many spots in the ocean are losing oxygen. The oxygen-depleation in central and eastern equatorial Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans appear to have expanded over the last 50 years. This is having a lot of affects on the wild life in the ocean because we know that ocean wildlife needs oxygen to survive.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Low-oxygen zones where sea life is threatened or cannot
survive are growing as the oceans are heated by global
warming, researchers warn.

Oxygen-depleted zones in the central and eastern equatorial Atlantic and
equatorial Pacific oceans appear to have expanded over the last 50 years,
researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Low-oxygen zones in the Gulf of Mexico and other areas also have been
studied in recent years, raising concerns about the threat to sea
life.

Continued expansion of these zones could have dramatic consequences for
both sea life and coastal economies, said the team led by Lothar Stramma of the
University of Kiel in Germany.

The finding was not surprising, Stramma said, because computer climate
models had predicted a decline in dissolved oxygen in the oceans under warmer
conditions.

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Climate predictions

After much research, climatologists believe that they can predict the next decades climate change just like meteorologists predict the weekly weather forcast. On one of the first attempts they have figured that there would be cooling in North America and Europe due to climate patterns. The team that generated this came from two German ocean and climate reseach centers.

After decades of research that sought, and found, evidence of a human
influence on the earth’s climate, climatologists are beginning to shift to a new
and similarly daunting enterprise: creating decade-long forecasts for climate,
just as meteorologists routinely generate weeklong forecasts for
weather.

One of the first attempts to look ahead a decade, using computer
simulations and measurements of ocean temperatures, predicts a slight cooling of
Europe and North America, probably related to shifting currents and patterns in
the oceans.

The team that generated the forecast, whose members come from two German
ocean and climate research centers, acknowledged that it was a preliminary
effort. But in a short paper published in the May 1 issue of the journal Nature,
they said their modeling method was able to reasonably replicate climate
patterns in those regions in recent decades, providing some confidence in their
prediction for the next one.

The authors stressed that the pause in warming represented only a temporary
blunting of the centuries of rising temperatures that scientists have projected
if carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases continue accumulating in the
atmosphere.

“We’re learning that internal climate variability is important and can mask
the effects of human-induced global change,” said the paper’s lead author, Noel
Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany. “In the
end this gives more confidence in the long-term projections.”

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Improved Solar Energy

A new solar power that will help reduce greenhouse emissin. Solar energy has been around for some time and is now being improved to store energy, then release it when needed. This new solar power contraption is made with mirriors and molten salt. This project is still in a working progress but if it works it's possible that it could produce enough eneryg to run a fair size city.

New Ways to Store Solar Energy for Nighttime and Cloudy Days

Solar power, the holy grail of renewable energy, has always faced the problem of how to store the energy captured from the sun's rays so that demand for electricity can be met at night or whenever the sun is not shining.

The difficulty is that electricity is hard to store. Batteries are not up to efficiently storing energy on a large scale. A different approach being tried by the solar power industry could eliminate the problem.

The idea is to capture the sun's heat. Heat, unlike electric current, is something that industry knows how to store cost-effectively. For example, a coffee thermos and a laptop computer's battery store about the same amount of energy, said John S. O'Donnell, executive vice president of a company in the solar thermal business, Ausra. The thermos costs about $5 and the laptop battery $150, he said, and ''that's why solar thermal is going to be the dominant form.''

Solar thermal systems are built to gather heat from the sun, boil water into steam, spin a turbine and make power, as existing solar thermal power plants do -- but not immediately. The heat would be stored for hours or even days, like water behind a dam.

A plant that could store its output could pick the time to sell the production based on expected price, as wheat farmers and cattle ranchers do. Ausra, of Palo Alto, Calif., is making components for plants to which thermal storage could be added, if the cost were justified by higher prices after sunset or for production that could be realistically promised even if the weather forecast was iffy. Ausra uses Fresnel lenses, which have a short focal length but focus light intensely, to heat miles of black-painted pipe with a fluid inside.

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Renewable energy Vs. Wild life

The Lewis wind farm was turned down when there was a strong opposition against the renewable energy source because of the effect it would have on birds in the area and the effect a 181 turbines would have environment. These turbines would have greatly reduced the corbon dioxide emmision but instead the are going to use energy resoucres that increase corbon dioxide emmision. So the question is, are they saving the environment more by not putting the turbines in to protect the bird life and peat bog or making it wores for not only the bird life and peat bog but the earth because they are emitting more corbon dioxide in to the air

G2: Ethical living: Green v green

Environmentalists are used to fighting battles. But with environmentalism going mainstream - wind farms, biofuels and nuclear power stations, for example, are fast becoming some of the most controversial issues in British politics today - environmentalists increasingly find themselves skirmishing with one another as they see-saw between pragmatism and idealism.

The Lewis wind farm - rejected by the Scottish Executive earlier this week - is merely the latest example. The Scotsman reported that "environmental agencies welcomed the news" of the massive wind power project's demise, thanks to concerns about impacts on rare peat bog and birdlife habitat. Yet according to the developers Lewis Wind Power - a coalition of AMEC and British Energy - the wind farm would have made a substantial contribution to reducing Britain's greenhouse gas emissions, wiping out a quarter of a million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year. With climate change at the top of the list of political priorities, most now agree that Britain desperately needs to expand its renewables sector. How this can be done without major negative impacts on wildlife and landscape remains one of today's toughest challenges.

Wildlife groups such as the RSPB have a particularly difficult task in deciding where they stand. The Lewis wind farm's impact on the landscape would have been substantial - with 181 turbines each standing 140 metres tall, erected on massive concrete bases drilled into the fragile peat surface and connected by dozens of miles of new stone roads, this was unavoidable. And while the developers insisted that strenuous efforts would be made to mitigate the effect on birds, including not putting turbines in areas important to rare species such as merlins and golden eagles, the RSPB objected strongly to the proposal.

Yet the real-world result of defeating the wind farm is that the electricity that would have been generated cleanly from the wind will now be generated using conventional means - a mixture of coal and gas. This in turn will worsen climate change, which will in the long run have a far more serious

effect on fragile habitats such as Lewis' peat moors than any number of wind turbines, as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift. Indeed, global warming is now thought by many biodiversity experts to be the greatest extinction threat facing the planet today. Up to a half of all species could be consigned to oblivion with just two or three degrees of

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Is change on the way?

Scientists now state that in the year 2015 that global warming will stop, because of natural variations in climate. They state that average temperatures of oceans will lower and cool slightly. However the effect of rising gas emissions will mean that, after 2015, warming will accelerate again. The scientists stressed that this was an initial analysis, using a new computer model and was not exact. They also stated that if the analysis could include other variables, such as rainfall or rising fossil fuel emissions, then it will be more helpful. Overall this cannot be a accurate measurement and if it happened then the problem with just come back after 2015.

Global warming may 'stop', scientists predict

Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said.

Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a "lull" for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.

This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: "The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that."

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