Levels of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide have increased since pre-industrial times, mainly because of agricultural activities. Among these changes it has been reported that livestock grazing substantially increases nitrous oxide emissions from temperate grasslands.
Most emissions of nitrous oxide from semi-arid, temperate grasslands
usually occur during the spring thaw. The effects that grazing has on plant
litter and snow cover dramatically reduce these seasonal emissions.
China and South Korea have invested heavily in environmental stimulus projects. Other G20 countries need to deliver on their sustainability promises to save both the planet and the economy, says Edward Barbier.
Global steps to battle climate change might have faltered, but philanthropic institutions in the United States have swung into action, more than tripling their support for climate related causes in 2008. Donations jumped from the 2007 total of US$240 million to $897 million in 2008, according to a report from the Foundation
Center, an organization that supports philanthropies, in New York.
Like most countries that embraced nuclear power decades ago, Japan has soured on the technology in recent years. But prompted by worries about climate and energy security, the country's industry ministry placed a big bet on a rapid expansion of its nuclear power capability.
It has been inferred that, during the Archaean eon, there must have been a high concentration of atmospheric CO2 and/or CH4, causing a greenhouse effect that would have compensated for the lower solar luminosity at the time and allowed liquid water to be stable in the hydrosphere.
Our current concepts of abrupt climate change are strongly influenced by compelling palaeoclimate evidence for events like the Younger Dryas, in which massive changes in climate occurred essentially instantaneously.
A thousand years after the last ice age ended, the Northern Hemisphere was plunged back into glacial conditions. For 20 years, scientists have blamed a vast flood of meltwater for causing this
