11 Degree Celsius Temperature Rise By 2100

 An 11 degree Fahrenheit global temperature increase by 2100. The finding comes from the typically conservative International Energy Agency, which revealed a new analysis of global energy consumption at this year's COP17 climate talks in Durban. If we continue consuming energy in the same fossil fuels-heavy manner, it notes, the world will become a hot, more unpleasant, and potentially hazardous place.

A place hot enough to "spell catastrophe for all of us."

Those are the words of the IEA's chief economist, Fatih Birol, who addressed world leaders and climate negotiators yesterday. The Washington Post has more:

"...heat-trapping emissions from the world’s energy infrastructure will lead to a 2-degree Celsius increase in the Earth’s temperature that, as more capacity is added to the system, will climb to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. Unless there is a shift away from some of the fossil fuel energy now used for electricity generation and transportation, Birol said, “the world is perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius increase in temperature. Everybody, even the schoolchildren, knows this is a catastrophe for all of us,” he said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Upon hearing this dire news, Republicans in the US Congress (until now the number one impediment to forging a global climate treaty) reportedly rushed to convene an emergency session on how best to transition from our reliance on fossil fuels and embrace renewable energy sources.

But not instead, they most likely thumbed their noses at the allegation, and went about entertaining oil industry lobbyists in their mahogany-laden offices: 'Climate change. Can't believe that every top scientific institution, nearly every world government, indeed, almost everyone else on the planet fell for that hogwash. What dupes.'

Sad, but true. If the world is to collectively act to combat the advance of climate change, the United States, the largest historic greenhouse gas polluter, is going to have to play a leading role. And it won't, not so as long as one of its two major political parties does not believe that climate change exists.

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A New Model for Understanding Biodiversity

 Researchers have developed a unified theory of ecosystem change by combining spatial modelling and food web analysis.
Animals like foxes and raccoons are highly adaptable. They move around and eat everything from insects to eggs. They and other "generalist feeders" like them may also be crucial to sustaining biological diversity, according to a new study published this week in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

McGill biology researchers have developed a unified, spatially based understanding of biodiversity that takes into account the complex food webs of predators and prey. "Biodiversity exists within a landscape. Predators and prey are continuously on the move as their habitats change -- it's a complex dynamic system," says lead author Pradeep Pillai, a doctoral candidate at McGill.

Previous theories of biodiversity have either concentrated on the complex network of feeding interactions that connects all species into food webs or have focused on the way that species are connected in space. "A unified theory of ecological diversity requires understanding how species interact both in space and time, and this is what is different about our work," explains co-author Michel Loreau, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Community and Ecosystem Ecology.

What they discovered was that a "branching network" maintained by generalist species, like foxes or coyotes, that are able to move around and prey on different species in different locations, have an important role in promoting complex food webs and thereby in maintaining biodiversity. The researchers concluded that these generalist species have the advantage of being able to find prey no matter where they are as they move from one place to another, and this sustains the network.

This theory also lays a foundation for understanding the effects human activities -- like deforestation -- are likely to have not simply on a single species but on whole food webs. The researchers show how food webs are eroded by species extinction when disturbed by habitat destruction. "The theory is useful because it helps us understand how biodiversity is maintained, but also the impacts humans have when they disrupt ecological networks by destroying and fragmenting habitat," concludes co-author Andrew Gonzalez, Canada Research Chair in Biodiversity Science and Director of the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science.

This research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies.

To read an abstract of the paper:http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/11/09/1106235108.abstract?sid=fcec9d4e-49e9-43b3-9a40-6cdc94dbb268

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Handheld Application to Detect Plant Diseases

How do you identify plant diseases, keep pathogens from spreading and help protect the food supply? The old way was to collect field samples, send them to a lab ... and wait. The new way: An app that works with an iPod Touch or Android-based tablet (how inclusive) and can ID a plant pathogen in 10-30 minutes. The technology, called Gene-Z, was developed by Michigan State University scientists and is being developed for the market. Gene-Z is not only a gee-whiz project; it's designed to speed treatments and keep pathogens from spreading.In more detail, the Gene-Z invention can detect cancer in plants and crops. It was developed by Syed Hashsham, professor of civil and environmental engineering at MSU, and has already been used to detect a new disease devastating cucumber crops in the United States. The app was unveiled and demonstrated for the first time in public at a recent National Plant Diagnostic Network conference in Berkeley, California.

To use Gene-Z, you take a swab for pathogens, transfer the sample to a microfluidic chip, and insert it into the device. In 10-30 minutes, the app can ID the pathogen, its genotype and its amounts.

“We’ve already successfully proven Gene-Z’s capacity for quantifying cancer markers,” Hashsham says. “With this application, we can speed the analysis of pathogens in plants, water and food with the ultimate goal of improving the safety and security of food supplies anywhere in the world.”

MSU researcher Syed Hashsham has invented a handheld, low-cost application that can perform genetic analysis

That hopefully also means less pesticide use and more sustainable farming operations. Hashsham is working with MSU Technologies to commercialize the product. So some day, a farmer may be able to download and use it. The project was paid for with a grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corp. and AquaBioChip, the latter of which also is working on quick pathogen identification in air and water.

Besides Hashsham, others involved in the development included James Tiedje, MSU distinguished professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, a team of graduate students led by Robert Stedtfeld (now an MSU postdoctoral researcher), and a wolverine: Erdogan Gulari, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan.

                

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Lower Biodiversity Hurts Species' Chances To Adapt To Climate Change

Interesting new research explaining how what, to me at least, seems intuitively true: The greater the biodiversity in an ecosystem, the greater chance that any species will be able to adapt to climate change. It applies to communities and human economies too. But first, the research.

Published in Evolutionary Applications, research for the National Institute for Mathematical and Billogical Synthesis shows,

In some cases evolution can rescue plant-pollinator mutalisms that would otherwise become extinct as a result of climate change. Whether a mutalism survives, however, can depend on upon the density and distribution of other species in the community. For example, under many circumstances, the presence of alternative pollinators available to the focal plant can help to protect both the focal plant and the focal pollinator from extinction.

More basically, say there are two species who have evolved to be dependent upon one another -- a plant depends on a particular insect to pollinate it and the insect depends on that plant in return. If climate change has differing impacts at differing times to each of them -- say, the plant starts flowering before the insects arrive, or the insects arrive earlier because of changing temperatures elsewhere and the plant isn't yet flowering -- then both species may be in danger of extinction. Or at least face a much harder time adapting to the changing climatic conditions. But if there is greater biodiversity, there may be alternative pollinators to take up the slack, if you will.

In even greater brevity: When you reduce biodiversity, you reduce possible interactions, you reduce possible avenues of change, you start closing off differing ways of coping.

Paper lead author Tucker Gilman says,

Habitat fragmentation or loss of native pollinators might compound the threat of climate change to mutalisms. The results are troubling because anthropogenic climate change is thought to be happening up to ten times faster than any natural climate change in the past 500,000 years. This means that mutalisms that have survived past climate change events may still be vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change.

Really, as I started to say, this applies to communities and economies as well. The greater the diversity of business, people, thoughts, ways of expression (here, the loss of differing languages and cosmologies is apropos to environmentalism), the greater the number of possible permutations of the expression of consciousness and existence itself and the easier it is for these to become manifest.

A city or nation that devotes itself to too few types of economic activity is more easily shocked when that source of prosperity is disrupted (for whatever reason). A community with a tightly circumscribed boundary around the types of people that live there, the political, cosmological or ethical viewpoints, is more easily shocked. On a personal level it applies as well, in terms of the types of viewpoints that you regularly hear on any given subject.

Of course, simply having this diversity is no guarantor that the best path forward in any given circumstance will be chosen -- just as having ample biodiversity is no guarantee that any specific species will be able to adapt to climate change. But the more routes around disaster, disruption, or just distraction are present, the easier it is to avoid it.

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Internet Sucks Up 2% of Global Energy, Study Estimates

Estimating the amount of energy the Internet uses is no small task. We have to take into account everything -- from the embodied energy of Internet-connected devices like smart phones, laptops, e-readers, desktops, cables and wires and of course the servers themselves, as well as the energy consumption of the servers and devices and more. It's a huge task, but two researchers from University of California, Berkeley, Justin Ma and Barath Raghavan, came up with an estimate they think is reasonable.

The study, called "The Energy and Emergy of the Internet" (PDF) looks at a whole slew of information. The team's estimates include 750 million of each desktops and laptops; 1 billion smartphones; 100 million servers; 1 million routers and router-like devices; 100 million LAN devices; 5 million cell towers; 75 million telecom switches; 1.5 billion km of fiber optic cabling; and 3.5 billion km of copper cabling for global telecommunications. Estimates on embodied energy of devices are based on previous studies.

The team concludes that the Internet consumes between 170 and 307 GW, which is equal to between 1.1% and 1.9% of the 16 TW used by humans worldwide. Embodied power is responsible for about 53% of that total.

The team concludes that there are some obvious ways to reduce the energy consumption of the Internet, which includes reducing the embodied energy of new devices, as well as reducing the number of new devices by keeping older devices functional longer. They state that doubling the replacement timespan for all components they listed in their estimates could reduce the Internet's embodied power by 43-82 GW. That's a hefty amount of the total.

But again, the team estimates that the Internet is roughly less than 2% of the total energy use. They note that transportation takes up a far more substantial amount, and that there could be a beneficial tradeoff of increasing the Internet's use in reducing the need to travel as much. A little boost in the Internet's energy consumption could mean a big reduction in energy consumption in planes, trains and automobiles.

The team writes:

First, suppose we replace some fraction of business air travel worldwide with teleconferencing. Each year there are 1.8 billion air passenger (one-way) trips; suppose 25% of those trips are eligible for elimination and are replaced with video conferencing. This yields 400 million passenger trips eliminated yearly, each of which uses roughly 20 GJ, saving 285 GW total. Thus, by replacing one in four plane trips with videoconferencing, we save about as much power as the entire Internet, and in particular we save a lot of oil.

Their conclusions are not particularly novel or surprising -- we've been aware for a long time that reducing the consumption of devices, keeping old device useful, and using recycled materials in the construction of new devices are key parts of keeping the carbon footprint (and therefore energy footprint) of electronics low. And Greenpeace has been on the IT industry for years to acknowledge its impact on the environment and move toward using renewable energy for data centers  and improving the energy consumption of the data center as well as the servers it houses. Not to mention boosting the use of the internet for communication and virtual meetings to help reduce how much we travel. But the study's methods and results still spark critical thought about the impact of the Internet -- something most of us couldn't imagine our lives without.

One thing will catch your eye in the paper -- a sentence that simply states, "Although we are certain our answer is wrong, we hope to raise awareness on the study of this important topic."

If there's two things this study leaves us with, it is gratitude for a solid guess and curiosity for what the real answer actually is.New Scientist reports that the research will be presented next month at the Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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