Converting the rubbish that fills the world’s landfills into biofuel may be the answer to both the growing energy crisis and to tackling carbon emissions, claim scientists in Singapore and Switzerland. New research published in Global Change Biology: Bioenergy, reveals how replacing gasoline with biofuel from processed waste could cut global carbon emissions by 80%. Biofuels produced from cr...

Climate change wreaked havoc on the Earth’s first rainforests but they quickly bounced back, scientists reveal. The findings of the research team, led by Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from Royal Holloway, University of London, are based on spectacular discoveries of 300-million-year-old rainforests in coal mines in Illinois, USA. Preserved over vast areas, these fossilized rainforests in Illinois ar...

Heavier rainstorms lie in our future. That`s the clear conclusion of a new MIT and Caltech study on the impact that global climate change will have on precipitation patterns. But the increase in extreme downpours is not uniformly spread around the world, the analysis shows. While the pattern is clear and consistent outside of the tropics, climate models give conflicting results within the tropics ...

In a paper titled "The Boundless Carbon Cycle," published in the September issue of Nature Geoscience, scientists from the University of Vienna, Uppsala University in Sweden, University of Antwerp, and the U.S. based Stroud™ Water Research Center argue that current international strategies to mitigate manmade carbon emissions and address climate change have overlooked a critical pl...

Can we predict which species will be most vulnerable to climate change by studying how they responded in the past? A new study of flowering plants provides a clue. An analysis of more than 5000 plant species reveals that woody plants — such as trees and shrubs — adapted to past climate change much more slowly than herbaceous plants did. If the past is any indicator of the future, woody...

An editorial and letter, published simultaneously by the BMJ and Lancet, warn that failure to agree radical cuts in carbon dioxide emissions at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen this December spells a global health catastrophe. The scientific evidence that global temperatures are rising and that man is responsible has been widely accepted since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate C...

Like the robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which wheeled tirelessly across the dusty surface of Mars, a new robot spent most of July traveling across the muddy ocean bottom, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) off the California coast. This robot, the Benthic Rover, has been providing scientists with an entirely new view of life on the deep seafloor. It will also give scientists a way to document ...

The U.S. Geological Survey has released the results of a long-term study of key glaciers in western North America, reporting this month that glacial shrinkage is rapid and accelerating and a result of climate change. University of Illinois geologist William Shilts spent nearly two decades studying glaciers on Bylot Island, an uninhabited island about 300 miles southwest of Thule, Greenland. He, hi...

In line with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) interest in characterizing the biotic factors involved in global carbon cycling, the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) characterizes a diverse array of plants, microorganisms, and the communities in which they reside to inform options for reducing and stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases. Through a novel genomic approach detailed in the September...

The ice is melting, the sea level is rising and species are conquering new habitats. The warming of the world climate has many consequences. Researchers now report that climate change influences the size of aquatic organisms. For a long time scientists have observed the biological consequences of global climate change. One of the most famous symptoms is the shift of habitats from the equator furth...