The authors of this new study conclude that “despite the widely held perception that reef islands around the perimeter of coral atolls are eroding and will disappear as a consequence of sea-level rise resulting from global warming, the total area of reef islands on Tarawa Atoll has increased over recent decades,” just as it has also done on many other reef islands… Read More
Neotropical Wet Forest Diversity: More Responsive to Temperature or CO2? (5 Nov 2013)
The authors reach far back in time to determine that irrespective of all else, if the air’s CO2 content continues to rise, so also should the diversity of neotropical wet forests rise right along with it… Read More
Hot Times on the Kamchatka Peninsula (5 Nov 2013)
The two warm periods that preceded the Medieval Warm Period on the Kamchatka Peninsula were both vastly warmer than the Current Warm Period has been to date, signifying in duplicate that there is absolutely nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about the Peninsula’s current level of warmth, which fact stands in vivid contradiction of what the IPCC vigorously promotes for the planet in their CO2-induced global warming scenario… Read More
Drought-Prone Rangelands in a Warming World (5 Nov 2013)
Based on the results of this new study, rangelands may well “maintain productivity under more severe drought scenarios than those currently predicted in the climate change literature”… Read More
The Delayed Benefits of Larval-Stage Stresses in a Marine Fish (6 Nov 2013)
The authors of this study report that sole (Solea solea) that “had experienced elevated temperatures during their early-life exhibited higher body masses and tolerance to hypoxia, probably through long-term programming of metabolic pathways,” noting that “such a cohort effect on growth performance and hypoxia tolerance could have major implications for population dynamics.” And those implications, of course, are very positive!… Read More
Larval Development of Barnacles in a Future CO2-Enriched Ocean (6 Nov 2013)
The authors’ results suggest that “the non-calcifying larval stages of A. improvisus are generally tolerant to near-future levels of ocean acidification,” and that “this result is in line with findings for other barnacle species and suggests that barnacles do not show the greater sensitivity to ocean acidification in early life history reported for other invertebrate species,” while adding that the barnacle’s “substantial genetic variability in response to low pH may confer adaptive benefits under future ocean acidification”… Read More
Molecules and Mechanisms that Precipitate Carbonates in Corals (6 Nov 2013)
The seven U.S. researchers who conducted this work say that “based purely on thermodynamic grounds, the predicted change in surface ocean pH in the next decades would appear to have minimal effect on the capacity of these acid-rich proteins to precipitate carbonates.” And as they write in the final sentence of their paper’s conclusion section, they say their findings “strongly suggest that these proteins will continue to catalyze calcification reactions at ocean pH values projected in the coming century”… Read More
Dr. Idso is the founder, former president, and currently chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
