NOAA Scientists to Search Tropical Skies for Answers on Climate Change, Ozone Loss

From this week's news at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA.gov

"Scientists from NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab will be among 400 researchers in Costa Rica this summer to probe one of the most complex and least observed regions of Earth’s atmosphere during the rainy season. Based in San Jose, Costa Rica, the NASA-led field study will shed light on key processes related to climate change, the stratospheric ozone layer, and global chemistry. The study runs from July 2 through August 15.

"ESRL’s David Fahey and colleagues from NOAA and the University of Colorado will fly instruments aboard NASA’s high-altitude WB-57 aircraft to gather data on black carbon particles [produced by fossil fuel burning], ozone, water vapor and particle composition, as well as air pressure and temperature.

"By absorbing sunlight and heating the air, black carbon can change atmospheric circulation and precipitation, but the processes involved are unclear. For example, how black carbon influences clouds and how clouds remove it from the atmosphere remain an unsolved puzzle. Scientists know so little about black carbon that any direct observations are important, Fahey said." [Read more]

While at the NOAA Web site, slip on over to NOAA's Central Library. There you will find a treasure trove of digital images, including scanned pages from historical and rare monographs, charts and maps, and access to the NOAA Photo Library.

On the new book shelf: The Suicidal Planet

The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe, is one of three climate-related books received today. Authored by Mayer Hillman with Tina Fawcett and Sudhir Chella Rajan, it has been reviewed in many sources [summary at BookBrowse].

Wisconsin Public Radio hosted an interview with one of the co-authors on Monday, April 23, 2007, on the radio program At Issue with Ben Merens. In the interview, Sudhir Chella Rajan "gives an overview of global warming, and an optimistic but practical plan for avoiding the worst of the damage". Rajan is a senior fellow at the Tellus Institute in Boston where he heads the Global Politics and Institutions program.

Other climate studies on the new book shelf are:
QC981.8.C5 P58 2005.
Climate change : turning up the heat / A. Barrie Pittock.
London ; Sterling, VA : Earthscan, c2005.

QC981.8.G56 A73 2007.
Global warming : understanding the forecast / David Archer.
Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., c2007.

DNA Study Forces New Thinking on What It Means to Be a Gene

From Science News of the Week

Elizabeth Pennisi

"According to a painstaking new analysis of 1% of the human genome, genes can be sprawling, with far-flung protein-coding and regulatory regions that overlap with other genes.

"As part of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, 35 research teams have analyzed 44 regions of the human genome covering 30 million bases and figured out how each base contributes to overall genome function. The results, compiled in a paper in the 14 June issue of Nature and 28 papers in the June issue of Genome Research, provide a litany of new insights and drive home how complex our genetic code really is. For example, protein-coding DNA makes up barely 2% of the overall genome, yet 80% of the bases studied showed signs of being expressed, says Ewan Birney of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, U.K., who led the ENCODE analysis."

Read the EBI Press Release (pdf)

AAPG Proposed Global Climate Change Statement

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) members are currently discussing the association's proposed Global Climate Change Statement, which offers a perspective "embodied ...in our commitment to a continued level of energy security that will ensure we have the economic capability required to address the broad range of issues facing society." The proposed statement is accessible to the public, but the discussion is open to AAPG members only.

Geotimes, from the American Geological Institute, will be "Plunging into the Debate on Climate Change" in its Geologic Column (coming later this month). Check in there to read Fred Schwab's call for geologists "to lead the charge in educating the public and taking action to help our warming world."

300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus

From the New York Times:

Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist, was born 300 years ago today and is remembered as the man who gave the world modern taxonomy, the science of classifying organisms. The event was observed at the New York Botanical Garden and reported in today's edition of the NYT. Robbin C. Moran, a Linnaeus expert and the garden’s curator of ferns, noted that Linnaeus had a penchant for naming "smelly, ugly plants" after his critics (of whom there were many). [read more]

The University of California Museum of Paleontology offers a succinct biography of Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linné or Carolus Linnaeus.
[image from www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html]

Sounds of the Earth: Seismic Revelations of the Earth's Interior

John Bullitt has created Deep Earth Dome, a publicly accessible, web-based sound installation with sound clips of vibrations of the earth's crust and "reverberations of thousands of small earthquakes bouncing around the interior of the earth." Grab your headphones (you can check some out from our circulation desk) and listen to the amazing movements beneath our feet, and consider the thousands of miles of earth and water (not to forget telecommunications hardware and air) through which those sound waves traveled to reach your ears. Earthwatch Radio describes John Bullitt's work in a recent broadcast [click on "Listen" at the Earthwatch Radio web site, then visit Deep Earth Dome for more]. Visit often and hear the Sound of the Week. About John Bullitt.
[image from jtbullitt.com/index]

Evolution is a Many Splendored Thing

"A Novel Electrosensory Organ" is depicted on the cover of BioScience (May 2007, now on display with this week's journals) in the form of the rostrum of the paddlefish Polyodon spathula. Take a few moments away from studying for finals and marvel at the evolutionary pathway that led to the development of this exquisitely receptive organ, uniquely adapted to detect planktonic prey (primarily the water flea, Daphnia) in turbid, vision-limiting environments.

Investigators Lon Wilkens and Michael Hofmann, Center for Neurodynamics and the Department of Biology, Univ. of Missouri St. Louis, have studied P. spathula for more than a dozen years. See also an earlier review by Wilkens in The senses of fish : adaptations for the reception of natural stimuli edited by Gerhard von der Emde, Joachim Mogdans, and B.G. Kapoor [Science Library QL639.1 .S44 2004].

A Bumper Crop of New Books

Spring often brings a rush of new books to the library, and this year is no exception. Books received today include a wide range of titles, with something to appeal to everyone. Here are just a few to lure you in. Take a break from preparing for finals, sit a spell by the new book display and read something to refresh your thinking!

Learning to Smell
"Drawing on research in neuroscience, physiology, and ethology, Donald A. Wilson and Richard J. Stevenson address the fundamental question of how we navigate through a world of chemical encounters and provide a compelling alternative to the "reception-centric" view of olfaction." [Johns Hopkins University Press]

The End of the Wild is a "wake-up call. Marshaling evidence from the last ten years of research on the environment, Stephen Meyer argues that nothing--not national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability schemes, or "wildlands"--will change the course that has been set. Like it or not, we can no longer talk about conserving nature, only managing what is left. The race to save biodiversity is over." [MIT Press]

From Alchemy to Chemistry in Picture and Story

University of New Hampshire professor Arthur Greenberg chronicles the mystery, truths, lies, art, and even humor of chemistry. Greenberg gives an engaging account of chemistry's history, introducing some notable characters along the path from alchemy and birth of metallurgy to nanotechnology and femtochemistry.
[Read more from the review at MachineDesign.com]

Small Changes + More Small Changes = A More Sustainable Environment

Ideal Bite Offers Daily Tips

Looking for manageable ways you can make a positive impact for a more sustainable environment? Ideal Bite is a great resource!

From their Welcome page:
"We know that you would just love to "do the right thing" for yourself and the planet if it were convenient, fun, inexpensive, and made you feel good. But until now you have lacked a good source of advice for real people leading busy lives."

Ideal Bite "Eco-tips" give practical advice, with links for more information and persuasive arguments of how one small action on your part can have such a positive benefit for the environment. Check out the Tip Library.

NPR Launches Climate Connections

Climate Connections is a multi-faceted series just launched by National Public Radio in collaboration with National Geographic.

Listen to the story of China's "Coal-Fueled Boom has Costs" from Morning Edition today, and hear Coal miner Wu Gui, who has been working the mines for 34 years, describe his role in China's economy as "a glorious job."

"I am making a contribution to the country," he says. "If we couldn't find coal, China couldn't get richer and more powerful, and we wouldn't be able to improve people's living standards."

NPR correspondent Louisa Lin points out that "China will build 500 coal-fired power plants in the next decade, at the rate of almost one a week. This massive appetite for coal means equally huge greenhouse gas emissions."

Other stories in the series include a report on England's fast-growing vineyards, yielding award-winning wines, thanks to a warming climate and longer growing season, and the advent of olive farming in Devon.
Visit Climate Connections: A Global Voyage for NPR stories on climate change around the world.

Earth-like Planet Discovered in Libra

From NPR.org
by Nell Boyce

Morning Edition, April 25, 2007 · Scientists have discovered a new planet in the constellation Libra. The small, rocky planet is special because it appears to have mild temperatures, like Earth. Researchers believe it looks like the first planet outside of our solar system that could be home to liquid water, and maybe even life.
Listen to the story on NPR

[image: an artist's illustration of the planet, which scientists think is either rocky, or covered with oceans. From NPR.org]

Audubon Exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History

John James Audubon: American Artist and Naturalist
Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Open through April 29, 2007

The name John James Audubon is synonymous with the study and preservation of American wildlife. His masterpiece, "The Birds of America" folio (the "baby" folio edition is in the science library) and his lifetime of written journals stand as an unsurpassed contribution to the world of fine art, natural science and American history and literature.

John James Audubon's art and aesthetic legacy continue to amaze and inspire. His visionary and prophetic concerns for the environment continue to speak to new generations throughout America and the world today. Met this man of contradictions — John James Audubon: American Artist and Naturalist, on display in the Museum’s Corning and Fawick galleries from February 10 through April 29. The exhibition, which traces Audubon’s life and development as an artist, features 60 Double Elephant Folio-sized, hand-colored engravings from his masterwork, The Birds of America, printed between 1826 and 1838.

When completed, the final Birds of America folio comprised four volumes (each weighing 50 pounds) containing 435 life-sized, hand-colored plates portraying 1,065 individual birds. Each set sold for $1,000, and fewer than 200 bound copies were printed. (Most of the original copper plates were sold years later by Audubon’s destitute widow for their value as scrap metal; only about 80 were saved.)

Also on exhibit are 10 other Audubon prints, three from the smaller and less expensive Royal Octavo edition of The Birds of America and seven from the Imperial Folio of the Quadrapeds, created with son John Woodhouse Audubon. Visitors can see works by Audobon’s contemporaries, original letters, documents, personal items, rare books and photographs. There are also other originals by Audubon, including oil paintings, a drawing and watercolors with his field notes.

In addition to the traveling exhibition from the John James Audubon Museum and State Park in Henderson, Kentucky, the The Cleveland Museum of Natural History will display some of its own Audubon holdings, which include a first-edition Double Elephant Folio of Birds of America, two unbound reprint sets of the Folio and a complete set of the 1876 edition of American Ornithology by Alexander Wilson, a contemporary (and competitor) of Audubon.

Directions to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Giant Bats Snatch Birds from Night Sky

From NPR.org Morning Edition April 18
by John Nielsen

Every spring, billions of songbirds in Europe migrate north to their breeding grounds. They often fly at night, when few predators are around. But now researchers have found evidence that giant noctule bats in Europe are catching and eating songbirds mid-flight. The songbirds often migrate at night in an attempt to avoid predators.

“[The bats] wrap the prey between their wings and the tail membrane, so they make kind of a cage for the bird... It was something that shocked all bat scientists.” Ana Popa-Lisseanu, Bat Ecologist
[Listen to John Nielsen's full story on NPR]

These surprising research findings were published Feb. 14, 2007, in Public Library of Science ONE (PLoS ONE), an open-access journal:
Bats' Conquest of a Formidable Foraging Niche: The Myriads of Nocturnally Migrating Songbirds

Authors: Ana G. Popa-Lisseanu, Antonio Delgado-Huertas Manuela G. Forero, Alicia Rodríguez, Raphaël Arlettaz, Carlos Ibáñez.

[image from Figure 1 in the PLoS One article: "Nyctalus lasiopterus showing its impressive teeth to the researchers."]

Interested in more about bat ecology? Check out the book with the same title:

Bat Ecology / edited by Thomas H. Kunz and M. Brock Fenton
University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Against All Odds, Scientists Isolate Protein

Summary from the Chronicle of Higher Education [access by subscribers only after April 17]

By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

"Using sophisticated medical equipment designed for studying human diseases, a team of scientists has isolated fragments of proteins inside the bones of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, a find that shatters expectations about how quickly biological materials decay in fossils.

"The discovery also points to a new method for unraveling the evolution of extinct animals, and it could potentially settle major debates, such as whether birds evolved from dinosaurs or a different group of reptiles.

"If the work can be verified by other laboratories, it suggests fossilized bone might harbor far more information than scientists have ever suspected." The research was reported in Science April 13, in articles on pp. 277-280 and 280-285, by a team that included Mary Higby Schweitzer, an assistant professor of paleontology at North Carolina State University, as well as members from Harvard and Montana State Universities and the University of Chicago. [access to Science articles for subscribers only].

Image from "Sue at the Field Museum" The Field Museum, Chicago.

Global Warming Impacts Will Worsen in Coming Decades

Richard Kerr (Science April 13, News Focus) summarizes the latest report of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Report of Working Group II (WGII) was released last week, following the release in February of the Working Group I Report.

Excerpt from Kerr's analysis:
"The latest IPCC report sees a bleak future if we humans persist in our ways. The climate impacts, mostly negative, would fall hardest on the poor, developing countries, and flora and fauna--that is, on those least capable of adapting to change. Even the modest climate changes expected in the next few decades will begin to decrease crop productivity at low latitudes, where drying will be concentrated. At the same time, disease and death from heat waves, floods, and drought would increase. Toward midcentury, up to 30% of species would be at increasing risk of extinction."

Read more @ Science.

EPA Weakens Support for Scientific Staff and Libraries

The Environmental Protection Agency continues its hemorrhaging of libraries, library service and support for its own scientific staff, threatening the integrity of research on which environmental policy is framed and enforced. The consequences for our nation's waterways, air quality, species diversity and overall health of residents and the environment are significant, and should concern every citizen. Read more:

Jeff Ruch, Writers on the Range: Why would a federal agency trash its libraries? Summit Daily News, April 10, 2007. Ruch is the Executive Director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which has led the fight to save the libraries [as described in several posts on Open Access News, by Peter Suber]. Excerpt from Ruch:

...As its in-house scientific staff shrinks, EPA is relying more and more heavily on corporate research in making health and safety decisions. This self-lobotomy at EPA will leave a public agency that is far less capable and independent, and as we enter the final months of the Bush administration, EPA managers seem determined to accelerate the self-destruction.

On the new book shelf: Figuring It Out: Science, Gender and Visual Culture

One of the books in the series "Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture", Figuring It Out: Science, Gender and Visual Culture (Edited by Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman) is now on the new book shelf. The book is a collection of fifteen essays analysing gender in the imagery of science.

The Editorial Review begins, "In light of recent debates about the culture of contemporary science and the place of women in scientific fields, Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture offers a timely consideration of the role of gender in the imagery of modern Western science. Representing a wide array of interdisciplinary fields, the contributors focus on pictures of male and female figures as a way to study the workings of gender in science while using gender as a way to examine how visual images in science contain and convey meanings."

Go to amazon.com to read the full editorial review.

Find a excerpt from the book on amazon online reader.

Dust Bowl Redux : Drying Effect of Human-Caused Climate Change

From Scientific American news of the week:

"A research team, led by a group at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) in Palisades, N.Y., reveal in this week's Science that southwestern North America will likely be saddled with increasingly arid conditions during the next century. This drying effect, the researchers say, is directly related to man-made climate change and will demand new methods for managing water resources in the region. They based their findings on 19 climate models, all of which contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report released in Paris in early February."
Read the Scientific American summary.

Read the paper abstract in Science Express Reports :
Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America. Richard Seager, Mingfang Ting, Isaac Held, et al.
Published online 9 April 2007 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1139601]

Saving the World's Natural Wonders from Climate Change

Recently, a briefing paper was released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) describing the devastating effects of climate change on some of the natural wonders of the world. A summary of the paper entitled "Natural Wonders Feel the Heat" is available in the "press releases" section of the WWF website. The summary begins:

"5 Apr 2007. Brussels, Belgium – From the Amazon to the Himalayas, ten of the world’s greatest natural wonders face destruction if the climate continues to warm at the current rate, warns WWF.

Released ahead of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Second Working Group Report, a WWF briefing — Saving the world's natural wonders from climate change — reports on how the devastating impacts of global warming are damaging some of the world’s greatest natural wonders, such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef shown in the accompanying image. [Image credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team.]

Other natural wonders include: the Amazon; other coral reefs; Chihuahua Desert in Mexico and the US; hawksbill turtles in the Caribbean; Valdivian temperate rainforests in Chile; tigers and people in the Indian Sundarbans; Upper Yangtze River in China; wild salmon in the Bering Sea; melting glaciers in the Himalayas; and East African coastal forests."

Read the full briefing paper online: Saving the World's Natural Wonders from Climate Change

Source: http://www.docuticker.com/?p=12321

An Inconvenient Truth: slide show and discussion, April 11. All are invited.

Senior Ben Purdone will show slides from Al Gore's Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth" at an open meeting on Wednesday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Peace Community Church (44 E. Lorain St., just east of the Allen Art Museum). Discussion about solutions will follow the slide show, focusing on what can be done individually and as a community, to address the crisis of global warming. All are welcome.

There are thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles that document the myriad of symptoms of global warming, and predict the disastrous consequences of unchecked rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Recent summaries for general readers appeared as the cover story of a special issue of Time magazine and as a top story in the April 7 New York Times. See also Time magazine's photo essay of the "proof happening all around us."

The science library's copy of Al Gore's book is currently checked out, as are most of the 63 copies owned by libraries in the OhioLINK central catalog . There are just a few still available for loan, for OhioLINK members.

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