washingtonpost.com: By Kari Lydersen

When a 1991 cholera outbreak that killed thousands in Peru was traced to plankton blooms fueled by warmer-than-usual coastal waters, linking disease outbreaks to epidemics was a new idea. Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world. [ read more ]

washingtonpost.com: By David A. Fahrenthold

Carbon-Offset Sales Brisk Despite Financial Crisis

This is strange territory. The Dow is down. Wall Street needs a bailout. But in the Washington area and across the country, there is still a bull market in environmental guilt. Sales of carbon offsets — whose buyers pay hard cash to make amends for their sins against the climate — are up. Still. In some cases, the prices have actually been climbing. [ read more ]

bloomberg.com: By Adam Satariano

asmanian salmon farmers are trying to breed a new species that can flourish in warmer ponds. Along the coast in Britain the National Trust, a charity, is moving electricity sockets halfway up the wall in several buildings to safeguard against flooding from the sea.

Preparing for global warming also demands government action because temperature increase is unavoidable and will affect everyone, European scientists said in a study published today by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. [ read more ]

physorg.com:

University of Calgary climate change scientist David Keith and his team are working to efficiently capture the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide directly from the air, using near-commercial technology.

In research conducted at the U of C, Keith and a team of researchers showed it is possible to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) – the main greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming – using a relatively simple machine that can capture the trace amount of CO2 present in the air at any place on the planet.

“At first thought, capturing CO2 from the air where it’s at a concentration of 0.04 per cent seems absurd, when we are just starting to do cost-effective capture at power plants where CO2 produced is at a concentration of more than 10 per cent,” says Keith, Canada Research Chair in Energy and Environment. [ read more ]

technologyreview.com: By Kevin Bullis

With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy.

“I’m going to show you something I haven’t showed anybody yet,” said Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, speaking this May to an auditorium filled with scientists and U.S. government energy officials. He asked the house manager to lower the lights. Then he started a video. “Can you see that?” he asked excitedly, pointing to the bubbles rising from a strip of material immersed in water. “Oxygen is pouring off of this electrode.” Then he added, somewhat cryptically, “This is the future. We’ve got the leaf.” [ read more ]

technologyreview.com: By Prachi Patel-Predd

Materials that change temperature in response to electric fields could keep computers–and kitchen fridges–cool.

Thin films of a new polymer developed at Penn State change temperature in response to changing electric fields. The Penn State researchers, who reported the new material in Science last week, say that it could lead to new technologies for cooling computer chips and to environmentally friendly refrigerators.

Changing the electric field rearranges the polymer’s atoms, changing its temperature; this is called the electrocaloric effect. In a cooling device, a voltage would be applied to the material, which would then be brought in contact with whatever it’s intended to cool. The material would heat up, passing its energy to a heat sink or releasing it into the atmosphere. Reducing the electric field would bring the polymer back to a low temperature so that it could be reused. [ read more ]

nytimes.com: By Andrew C. Revkin

Climate scientists keep testing that turbulent world between data and society — an arena far less safe than the laboratory or field camp, where a researcher becomes a potential target for both darts and laurels from those threatened or bolstered by his or her views. One new experiment is a nascent blog at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with a fresh contribution by Josh Willis, whose work on ocean temperature trends has been discussed here. Dr. Willis says those who grasp at short-term wiggles in ocean or atmospheric conditions as evidence of global warming or cooling are like gamblers seduced by a hot streak into thinking they can beat the house. [ read more ]

nytimes.com: by Andrew C. Revkin

Michael Glantz, the social scientist whose program was recently cut by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is in Libya at the moment working with the meteorological service there on education programs for North Africa. Before he left, he sent me an open letter calling on the center and its main source of money, the National Science Foundation, to “tear down” the wall between physical science and the social sciences that could help insure that knowledge is applied productively outside the walls of supercomputer centers. The letter is posted below. [ read more ]

newscientist.com: By Catherine Brahic

Even Jules Verne did not foresee this one. Deep down at the very bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, geochemist Andrea Koschinsky has found something truly extraordinary: “It’s water,” she says, “but not as we know it.”

At over 3 kilometres beneath the surface, sitting atop what could be a huge bubble of magma, it’s the hottest water ever found on Earth. The fluid is in a “supercritical” state that has never before been seen in nature.

The fluid spews out of two black smokers called Two Boats and Sisters Peak. [ read more ]

bbc.co.uk

Scientists have made an important advance in their efforts to predict earthquakes, the journal Nature says.

A team of US researchers has detected stress-induced changes in rocks that occurred hours before two small tremors in California’s San Andreas Fault. The observations used sensors lowered down holes drilled into the quake zone.

The team says we are a long way from routine tremor forecasts but the latest findings hold out hope that such services might be possible one day. [ read more ]