Latest Greenhouse gas Stories

The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic region is home to large reservoirs of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As Earth's climate warms, the methane, frozen in reservoirs stored in Arctic tundra soils or marine sediments, is vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere, where it can add to global warming. Now a multi-institutional study by Eric Kort of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has uncovered a surprising and potentially important new source of Arctic methane:...

MILWAUKEE, April 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- In celebration of Earth Day, Johnson Controls, the global leader in delivering solutions that increase energy efficiency in buildings, released its Top Earth Day Champions list to highlight organizations saving the carbon equivalent of 45,000 acres of pine forests through energy efficiency and renewable energy projects at their facilities. Carbon emissions from building energy use are predicted to grow faster than any other sector in the...

A University of Colorado Boulder-led team has developed a new monitoring system to analyze and compare emissions from man-made fossil fuels and trace gases in the atmosphere, a technique that likely could be used to monitor the effectiveness of measures regulating greenhouse gases. The research team looked at atmospheric gas measurements taken every two weeks from aircraft over a six-year period over the northeast United States to collect samples of CO2 and other environmentally important...

ScienceAlerts.com is a new social network featuring the latest information in the basic and applied sciences of biology, agriculture, environment, forestry, geography and health. The members of this new website monitor nearly 3,500 journals publishing in these fields and alert visitors in real-time through topic-specific site content and RSS feeds. The latest addition to this natural sciences website is the Environmental Sciences Category with nearly 35,000 articles partly derived by...

Lawrence LeBlond for RedOrbit.com A proposed reduction in the world’s carbon emissions set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can only be met if the developed world cuts down meat consumption by 50 percent per person, according to new research from a Massachusetts-based climate initiative organization. Scientists from the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC), located in Falmouth, Mass., found in a new study that the world needs to not only cut meat consumption by 50...

Imagine a world where the rooftops and pavements of every urban area are resurfaced to increase the reflection of the Sun's light rays. Well, this is exactly what a group of Canadian researchers have done in an attempt to measure the potential effects against global warming. In a study published today, 13 April, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, researchers from Concordia University created this scenario to see what effect a global increase in surface reflectance...

Self-sealing valves also increase data reliability for airborne industrial and battlefield gas detection and point-of-contact medicine An air sampler the size of an ear plug is expected to cheaply and easily collect atmospheric samples to improve computer climate models. "We now have an inexpensive tool for collecting pristine vapor samples in the field," said Sandia National Laboratories researcher Ron Manginell, lead author of the cover story for the Review of Scientific Instruments,...

Researcher helps paint the fullest picture yet of how increases in CO2 helped end the ice age Harvard scientists are helping to paint the fullest picture yet of how a handful of factors, particularly world-wide increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, combined to end the last ice age approximately 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. As described in a paper published April 5 in Nature, researchers compiled ice and sedimentary core samples collected from dozens of locations around the world, and...

Fossilized raindrop impressions have shown scientists evidence of greenhouse gases in Earth’s early atmosphere. This means between 2 and 4 billion years ago, the sun may have burned 30% less brightly than it does now. “Because the sun was so much fainter back then, if the atmosphere was the same as it is today the Earth should have been frozen,” says Sanjoy Som, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center. While the Earth should have been theoretically encased in...

Far from being a pipe dream years away from reality, practical technology for capturing carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas — from smokestacks is aiming for deployment at coal-fired electric power generating stations and other sources, scientists said here today. Their presentation at the 243rd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, was on a potential advance toward dealing with the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide released into...