Australian Targets

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Plant Carbon sequestration capacity in a high CO2 world overestimated



With climate change stimulating plant growth due to elevated CO2 concentrations climate models calculated this would also stimulate uptake and sequestration of carbon. But a new long term (13 year) study looking at plant biomass growth in a high CO2 environment with Nitrogen nutrients indicates that plants also require enriched soil nitrogen to escalate uptake and sequestration of carbon from elevated CO2. Soil nitrogen just cannot be increased on a widespread basis.

Related: Rising atmospheric Carbon Dioxide levels threaten crop yields and food security

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Guest Post: Calls for climate action as Great Barrier Reef suffers major coral loss


By Charis Palmer, The Conversation

The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its coral cover in the last 27 years, and it could halve again by 2022 say researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found storm damage drove 48% of the loss, the crown of thorns starfish 42%, and bleaching 10%.

Second chance for Rogue Weathergirl: Still Hot, Still Crazy



Those wonderful people at Deep Rogue Ram have given us more to laugh and think about with the current US Drought, climate change and the US Presidential election.

If you remember Pippa gave us the real weather report a few weeks ago at the start of September highlighting the record reduction in Arctic Sea Ice and unprecedented melting of Greenland ice sheet and thousands of record temperatures broken in North America.