Search results for "global warming"

Carbon Footprint Analysis: Towards a Projects Evaluation Model for Promoting Sustainable Development

2013

Abstract Climate change and global warming are internationally recognized as current issues, driving negative effects on humanity, and being mainly caused by GHG emissions generated both from industrial activities, and from other anthropogenic activities. Restoring the ecological balance requires urgent action to reduce GHG emissions. In this respect, the European Union has set the target to reduce the GHG emissions by 20% until 2020, compared to 1990 level. This paper presents a methodology to develop a model for carbon footprint calculation, for assessing and reducing GHG emissions generated by European funds financed projects.

Infrastructure and system programming for digital ecosystems used in natural disaster management

2009

Researchers in most fields of activity must concentrate their efforts to eradicate or at least to mitigate the negative effects of “global warming”, which affect the entire planet. Within this context, we strongly believe that IT&C specialists should also approach the issue. Therefore, this paper presents the results and solutions obtained during the development of a research contract dealing on the one hand with real-time data collection and data centralization in a decision making system, and on the other with the dissemination of information among the people exposed to the effects of natural disasters such as: floods, storms, tsunamis, or other natural disasters which may destroy propert…

Ensemble reconstruction constraints on the global carbon cycle sensitivity to climate

2010

The processes controlling the carbon flux and carbon storage of the atmosphere, ocean and terrestrial biosphere are temperature sensitive and are likely to provide a positive feedback leading to amplified anthropogenic warming. Owing to this feedback, at timescales ranging from interannual to the 20-100-kyr cycles of Earth's orbital variations, warming of the climate system causes a net release of CO(2) into the atmosphere; this in turn amplifies warming. But the magnitude of the climate sensitivity of the global carbon cycle (termed gamma), and thus of its positive feedback strength, is under debate, giving rise to large uncertainties in global warming projections. Here we quantify the med…

2020

Northern peatlands have accumulated large stocks of organic carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), but their spatial distribution and vulnerability to climate warming remain uncertain. Here, we used machine-learning techniques with extensive peat core data (n > 7,000) to create observation-based maps of northern peatland C and N stocks, and to assess their response to warming and permafrost thaw. We estimate that northern peatlands cover 3.7 ± 0.5 million km2 and store 415 ± 150 Pg C and 10 ± 7 Pg N. Nearly half of the peatland area and peat C stocks are permafrost affected. Using modeled global warming stabilization scenarios (from 1.5 to 6 °C warming), we project that the current sink of atmospheri…

Methodology for the estimation of the increase in time loss due to future increase in tropical cyclone intensity in Japan

2009

Published version of an article from the journal: Climatic Change. The original publication is available at Spingerlink. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-009-9725-9 The present paper develops a methodology for estimating the risks and consequences of possible future increases in tropical cyclone intensities that would allow policy makers to relatively quickly evaluate the cost of different mitigation strategies. The methodology simulates future tropical cyclones by modifying the intensity of historical tropical cyclones between the years 1978 and 2007. It then uses a Monte Carlo Simulation to obtain the expected number of hours that a certain area can expect to be affected by winds of a giv…

Climate zoning of the Burgundy winegrowing region

2018

As one of the most emblematic wine regions of cool climate terroir viticulture, Burgundy is endowed with a set of very specific natural features suitable to the production of high quality wines, where climate is arguably one of the main factors to profoundly influence vine physiology/phenology and grape composition. These environmental nuances have led to a wide variety of styles in Pinot noir and Chardonnay wines that have been largely acknowledged and appreciated by the international market and vitivinicultural industry. However, individual grape varieties optimum quality is known to be closely related to well-defined climate and geographical ranges. Climate change and global warming late…

From wood pellets to wood chips, risks of degradation and emissions from the storage of woody biomass – A short review

2016

Abstract The compounds in stored woody biomass degrade as a result of chemical and/or biological processes during storage. These processes produce gaseous emissions. Recent studies concerning gaseous emissions from wood pellet storages are reviewed herein. The applicability of the results from pellet research to wood chips is discussed. Thorough scientific understanding on the storage phenomena of wood chips is extremely important as the threat of climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased need to large scale wood chip storage to ensure supply. Typically the gases produced from stored woody biomasses are carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO 2…

Climate/growth relationships of Brachystegia spiciformis from the miombo woodland in south central Africa

2010

Abstract We present five Brachystegia spiciformis Benth. (BrSp) tree-ring chronologies from the seasonally dry miombo woodland in south central Africa. Between 9 and 34 stem discs were collected from three dry and two wet miombo sites. All samples showed distinct growth rings, which were marked by terminal parenchyma bands. Site chronologies varied in length between 43 and 149 years. An increase in the number of growth ring anomalies in older trees, however, resulted in an increase in dating error and a decrease in between-tree correlations with increase in the chronology length. Annual precipitation variability accounted for some 28% of the common variance in the BrSp chronologies and we f…

Overview paper: New insights into aerosol and climate in the Arctic

2019

Motivated by the need to predict how the Arctic atmosphere will change in a warming world, this article summarizes recent advances made by the research consortium NETCARE (Network on Climate and Aerosols: Addressing Key Uncertainties in Remote Canadian Environments) that contribute to our fundamental understanding of Arctic aerosol particles as they relate to climate forcing. The overall goal of NETCARE research has been to use an interdisciplinary approach encompassing extensive field observations and a range of chemical transport, earth system, and biogeochemical models. Several major findings and advances have emerged from NETCARE since its formation in 2013. (1) Unexpectedly high summer…

Decreasing Phanerozoic extinction intensity as a consequence of Earth surface oxygenation and metazoan ecophysiology

2021

The decline in background extinction rates of marine animals through geologic time is an established but unexplained feature of the Phanerozoic fossil record. There is also growing consensus that the ocean and atmosphere did not become oxygenated to near-modern levels until the mid-Paleozoic, coinciding with the onset of generally lower extinction rates. Physiological theory provides us with a possible causal link between these two observations-predicting that the synergistic impacts of oxygen and temperature on aerobic respiration would have made marine animals more vulnerable to ocean warming events during periods of limited surface oxygenation. Here, we evaluate the hypothesis that chang…