New ocean life discovered at the ‘Hadal Zone’ – 11,000 meters deep, and pressure rises to 1,000 bar (or a ton per square centimeter)

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The hadal zone: deep sea trenches over 11,000 meter deep (deeper than Mount Everest is high), the pressure rises to 1,000 bar, there is no light and food is scarce.

It (the Hadal zone) offers a glimpse of what life on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, might look like. A new species of archaebacteria, Pyrococcus CH1,was recently discovered thriving on a mid-Atlantic ridge within a temperature range of 80 to 105°C and able to divide itself up to a hydrostatic pressure of 120 Mpa (1000 times higher than the atmospheric pressure). Excedrin Migraine won’t help down there.

This discovery was made by an international team of microbiologists of the Microbiology of Extreme Environments Laboratory in partnership with the Institute of Oceanography of Xiamen (China) and the Earth Science Laboratory. This archaebacteria had been isolated from samples by a Franco-Russian team that explored the mid-Atlantic ridge for six weeks searching for new hydrothermal vents.

The piezophilic microorganisms constitute a subgroup of extremophiles. Discovered on the site “Ashadze”(2) at 4100 meters depth, the deepest vent field explored so far, the CH1 strain was successfully isolated and assigned to the genus Pyrococcus, within the Euryarchaeota lineage of the Archae domain. The discovery extends the known physical and chemical limits of life on Earth.

The reason scientists believed for so long that life did not exist in the deepest parts of the sea is because the oxygen that filters down is centuries old, having formed near the surface through photosynthesis by microscopic plants known as phytoplankton.

(link to full text)

How health is a climate change issue

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Climate change certainly appears to a topic that both leaders would prefer not to discuss in much detail during the current election campaign.  Ignoring for a moment that the policies put forth are expected to lead to an increase in Australia’s emissions (according to the Climate Institute’s Pollute O Meter), Tony Abbott has this week barely concealed his skepticism of human induced climate change, and Julia Gillard devoted just 0.2% of her campaign launch speech to the topic.

While climate change seems to be the elephant in the room being ignored (but who just won’t go away), health has been a major topic of discussion for our political leaders in the past few weeks. The state of public health is obviously an issue that touches everyone, and has far more tangiable and immediate impacts on the nation that outweigh thoughts on what may be occurring in the Pacific Islands, the Arctic or in Australia more than 3 years into the future.

What our leaders have so far failed to recognise is the ever greater prominance of climate change as  a significant human health issue.  Last month, the Australian Medical Association called on the federal government to set up a national climate change and health strategy, given the expected impacts of unabated climate change upon public health.

Eugenie Kayak from Doctors for the Environment Australia has said:

As a modern society we have often failed to recognise, or conveniently forgotten, the absolute dependence of human health on stable, productive, healthy, natural environments. Nearly all the adverse environmental effects of climate change threaten human health and humanity possibly to catastrophic levels and probably sooner than many realise.

These are not extreme views but rather follow what has been expressed by respected international health journals and organisations concerning the relationship between climate change and human health. For example, in 2009, leading international medical journal, the Lancet, published that, “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”.

World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan stated that, “The real bottom-line of climate change is its risk to human health and quality of life”.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has said, “Climate change threatens all our goals for development and social progress” and “it is a true existential threat to the planet”.

Make sure to the rest of the article on ABC News.

When ethics and resources combine …

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Bill Gates

By Ian Wylie

Financial Times Published: August 9 2010 23:35 | Last updated: August 9 2010 23:35

The cold call asking you to pledge money to a charity is an uncomfortable conversation at the best of times. But what if the person on the other end of the line happens to be the third-richest man in the world?

It seems Warren Buffett, who has been calling up fellow American billionaires to ask them to donate at least half their wealth to charitable causes, also knows an evasive answer when he hears one. “Sometimes they’re just trying to get you off the phone,” he said last week. “A few people had dynastic ideas about wealth because they had inherited their wealth themselves. And then there were others who said they had a plane to catch.”

But, like the best charity street “chuggers”, Mr Buffett – who has already pledged to give away 99 per cent of his $47bn fortune – and his “Giving Pledge” partners Bill and Melinda Gates plan to keep asking, working their way through the Forbes 400 rich list.

Never has there been such an attempt by a group of the wealthiest people in the world to enrol their peers in such grand scale philanthropy. And in the process Buffett and the Gateses are trying to export their model of “philanthrocapitalism” or “venture capital” to the world.

Mr Gates has previously estimated that just 15 per cent of the super-wealthy give away large chunks of their fortunes, but he thinks this could rise to 70 per cent. After just two months of calls, some 40 billionaires have signed the pledge, including George Lucas, Barry Diller, Michael Bloomberg, Larry Ellison, Pierre Omidyar and Jeffrey Skoll. The pledge is not binding, but a moral commitment to donate more than 50 per cent of their wealth. It does not in volve pooling money or supporting one single cause or organisation. Charitable causes supported by these early signatories range from HIV programmes and the arts to brain research and Middle East peace.

Yet philanthrocapitalism has come under fire from critics who say billionaires are simply buying power and control. Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell has warned of their “disruptive effects on democracy”. An editorial in The Lancet in May 2009 expressed “serious anxiety about the transparency of the [Gates] Foundation’s operation” and questioned its “whimsical governance”.

Moreover, donating billions is not as straightforward as it might seem. Many charities are incapable of absorbing large sums of money, and some billionaires’ assets are illiquid.

However, for supporters of philanthrocapitalism, it is the influence and networks as well as the funds that billionaires have at their disposal that make their commitment so important. “What’s remarkable increasingly about billionaire families is that they have not only significant financial resources, but the access, opportunities, relationships and connections to have tremendous impact in very perplexing problems,” says Melissa Berman, chief executive of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Most of the 40 who have signed up to the pledge are already generous givers – yet the pledge is significant, says Michael Green, co-author of Philanthrocapitalism: How The Rich Can Save The World. “To have brought in people like Larry Ellison – who has blown hot and cold on philanthropy over the years – to make public his intention to give away 95 per cent of his wealth, is a big step change,” says Mr Green. “It raises the bar in that super-rich category where the question now is, are you going to sign the Gates/Buffett pledge?”

The timing is significant, as the worlds of business and finance struggle to redeem their reputations. According to one of the pledge signatories, investment banker Tom Steyer, the initiative is “changing the face of American business . . . to my mind it transforms the image of private enterprise from an old-fashioned extractive model where people are taking resources out of the system for their benefit and their families to a more regenerative model of capitalism where they are putting resources back into society.”

Also, in the current climate of budget cuts, indebted governments will be more likely to welcome wealthy philanthropists who share Mr Gates’ and Mr Buffett’s belief in co-funding and leverage – a conviction that, as Mr Buffett puts it, “private philanthropy can make the subsequent expenditure of public monies more effective”. The Gates Foundation, for example, has granted more than $650m in the past couple of years to schools, public agencies and other groups that align with its main education priorities.

Philanthropists using their money as risk capital to help governments spend money better is an emerging theme, says Mr Green: “The most striking thing Gates said when we interviewed him for the book was that the Gates Foundation is ‘just a tiny organisation’. He recognised that to tackle the problems he wants to tackle he can’t do it on his own. He wants to lever government money, and here in the UK there’s scope in this idea of ‘big society’ for that kind of partnership working.”

The pledge is a nudge too for donors to consider giving the money away during their lifetime – “spend down” their endowments within a specified timeframe to meet current needs, rather than have them dribble out grants from a foundation once they are dead. Unlike the philanthropists of former times, many new billionaires are young enough to take a more active role.

The initiative is also an attempt to apply a network effect to philanthropy. The more common it becomes, the more the wealthy will seek to do it, as they share experiences, plot strategies and exchange ideas.

“It’s not just about people pledging success – it is also about inspiring more families to talk about giving and philanthropy,” says Patty Stonesifer, former CEO of the Gates Foundation, who currently advises Bill and Melinda Gates and was present at the May 2009 dinner in New York where the idea of the pledge was hatched.

The agenda includes educating the super-rich on the Buffett/Gates model of “high-engagement philanthropy” and “results-oriented giving”, where the efficiency of the business world is injected into aid – where philanthropists “invest” their donations and use venture capital strategies and research tools and techniques to manage the performance of their “portfolios”.

According to Mr Buffett, pledge signatories will be invited to an annual summit to “spend a day talking about various problems of philanthropy and how better to do it”. And last month the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made a $3.7m grant to RPA to publish donor education resources on its website for would-be philanthropists in the US and beyond.

Mr Buffett and Mr Gates are taking their model of philanthropy on the road. The pair will travel to China at the end of next month to meet some of its wealthiest business people, followed by a similar trip next March to India, which Mr Gates has already predicted will become second only to the US in its high-end philanthropy.

“Bill, Melinda and Warren started this pledge effort here in the US, in part because they realise that to be successful in any other country the effort will need to be led by local leaders,” says Ms Stonesifer. “That said, the basic idea – that those with great wealth can and should devote that wealth to efforts to leave the world a better place – has resonance around the globe.”

It seems that as Mr Buffett and Mr Gates – the Rockefeller and Carnegie of their day – spin their Rolodexes for yet another cold call, their mood is one of unstoppable momentum

Many Liberal-National Party politicians have trouble understanding climate change.

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See ABC Lateline report on survey.  CLICK here for a summary of the survey methods and results.

It’s official: Coalition politicians are less certain than their Labor counterparts that climate change exists and less likely to consider it a serious threat to human existence, a new survey shows.

The inaugural Political Leaders and Climate Change Index (PLCCI) – co-sponsored by the Global Change Institute and the Institute for Social Science Research, both at The University of Queensland – demonstrates that beliefs about climate change diverge dramatically along political lines.

Dr Kelly Fielding, Institute for Social Science Research (http://www.issr.uq.edu.au), said preliminary results from the survey confirmed that Labor politicians have a greater belief and comprehension of climate change and its impacts.

“Liberal/National politicians, on the other hand, are expressing uncertainty about climate change – they aren’t convinced that it is a serious threat to humans or that the current impacts are serious,” Dr Fielding outlined.

The survey of more than 300 federal, state and local government political leaders highlights that the political debate around climate change is based on significantly different levels of knowledge and understanding of the issue.

And Labor and Liberal political leaders are also influenced by different sources. While the results show that scientists generally have the most influence over politicians’ knowledge of climate change, the level of influence varies significantly between politicians on the left and right of the spectrum.

“Labor politicians are more influenced by scientists than Liberal/National politicians – 85% of Labor politicians are highly influenced by this group compared to 44% of Liberal/National politicians,” Dr Fielding said.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Global Change Institute, said he was surprised by the results.

“They suggest that many politicians are not going to the experts for information on this important matter,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.

“The survey confirms suspicions of a great political divide.  On one hand, you have political leaders that are listening to the science on climate change and are taking it extremely seriously.  On the other, you have others who have less regard for the science and appear not to fully understand the serious nature of climate change for Australia and the world.

“It is of great concern that a large number of political leaders do not feel compelled by the overwhelming scientific case for climate change. So the question needs to be asked – where do those political leaders who are not highly-influenced by science get their information on climate change?

“Why they would not be influenced by climate change experts who have spent their careers exploring this critically important issue in a non-biased fashion needs answering.”

In addition to scientists, environmental groups, international figures and constituents were considered as influential sources by all respondents, irrespective of their political persuasion.

Labor politicians are more influenced by environmental groups than their Coalition counterparts with just over one-third of Liberal/National respondents reporting they are not at all influenced by environmental groups on the issue of climate change.

For Coalition politicians their top priority lies with ‘managing a strong economy’, a big bottom line (60.3%), but only 2.7% rank ‘tackling global warming’ as paramount, and 5.5% nominate ‘protecting the environment’.

By comparison, almost one-quarter of Labor politicians highlight ‘tackling poverty and social disadvantage’ as the most important issue (24.7%), followed by ‘managing a strong economy’ (19.6%), on an equal footing as ‘tackling global warming’ (19.6%) and ‘protecting the environment’ (11.3%).

Interestingly, a sample of the general population surveyed on the same issues as part of the PLCCI, highlights that political leaders overall are less likely to believe in climate change, and the need to act, than members of the public.

“What is surprising is that the community remains convinced that climate change is a major challenge and yet some political leaders appear to be denying climate change.  There is a significant political divide on climate change and it would be good politics to rethink this particular issue,” Prof Hoegh-Guldberg said.

Despite this, politicians think that their own belief in the facts that underpin climate change is stronger than their electorate’s beliefs.

“The idea that there might be a disparity between what politicians think the electorate believes about climate change, and what their electorate actually does believe has significant implications for how politicians prioritise climate change as an issue,” Dr Fielding said.

Climate change ignorance unacceptable.

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  • Andrew Trounson, Higher Education Supplement,
  • The Australian,
  • August 11, 2010 12:00AM

    • LABOR’S Science and Research Minister Kim Carr has hit out at anti-scientific opinion on climate change. He has warned that the scientific method was coming under public attack, undermining science and replacing it with irrationality.

    “In all fields we want to encourage debate, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept the earth is flat,” Senator Carr told the HES yesterday after launching Labor’s science policy, which includes a $21 million science literacy project.

    “We don’t have to accept every lunatic proposition that comes along as the basis of a legitimate view, which now seems to be increasingly present.”

    He took aim at what he called the increasingly rampant irrationality of some Coalition senators. “There is a fundamental change in attitude, and people are now prepared to argue positions that they wouldn’t have been prepared to a few years ago,” he said.

    Senator Carr announced the $21m program to promote science awareness in the community, including ongoing support for science prizes and events, as well as media training for scientists and cadetships for science journalists.

    But the program will be paid for by cuts in three existing research programs: Enterprise Connect, the Co-operative Research Centres and Collaborative Research Networks scheme.

    Australian Nobel prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty backed Senator Carr’s comments.

    He said the attacks on climate science made it easier for people to dismiss the threatening implications of climate science, and distracted the debate from focusing on solutions.

    “People are just rejecting the scientific conclusions and they are being helped in that by people who should know better,” Professor Doherty said.

    The Australian Academy of Science yesterday called for scientific advisers to be appointed to every government department.

    “Despite the emphasis given in recent years to the value of evidence-based policy by major political parties, new policy announcements and spending initiatives are rarely referenced with peer-reviewed research to substantiate the arguments,” the academy said.

    Julie Packard on our oceans

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    Julie Packard, Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium

    Huffington Post: July 16, 2010 10:40 AM

    The oil blowout that’s fouled the Gulf of Mexico since April is many things: a human tragedy, an environmental disaster and a wake-up call.

    But it’s not the greatest crisis facing the oceans today. We’ll be dealing with the gushing oil and its aftermath for years, but we can’t be distracted from Ocean Enemy No. 1: the grave threat of accelerating global climate change caused by the carbon pollution that people produce.

    The list of victims of the oil gushing in the Gulf grows daily: sea turtles, whale sharks, seabirds and so many people whose lives and livelihoods depend on healthy seas. Their stories have deservedly found places in the daily headlines and people are responding.

    At the same time, other sobering news is flying under the radar. These are stories of new scientific research that underscores the urgency of addressing climate change.

    Consider:

    A recent research report published in the journal Science concludes that man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions at the most basic level, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet.

    The article summarizes findings from dozens of peer-reviewed studies on the impacts of climate change on ocean ecosystems. Already, ocean warming, rising sea levels and acidification are changing ocean life as we know it at scales that range from altering the rate of larval fish development to increasing vast nutrient-poor regions known as ocean deserts.

    2010-07-14-temperatereefseaborn.jpg

    Co-author Dr. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the Global Change Institute in Australia warns that, “We are entering a period in which the very ocean services upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and in some cases beginning to fail. Further degradation will continue to create enormous challenges and costs for societies worldwide.”

    Perhaps most striking is the finding that the pace of these changes is expected to accelerate over time. For example, as the oceans warm, nutrient mixing that drives phytoplankton productivity is subsiding, in turn weakening the ocean’s huge role in absorbing excess CO2 from our atmosphere.

    Co-author Dr. John Bruno of the University of North Carolina (and a fellow blogger at Huffington Post), issued a blunt warning:

    What strikes me the most about the recent science coming out on this topic, is the degree to which we are modifying fundamental physical and biological processes by warming the oceans.And the big surprise, at least to me, is how quickly this is all happening. We are actually witnessing these changes before we predict or model them. This isn’t theoretical; this is a huge, real-world problem. Moreover, we, not just our children, will be paying the price if we don’t get a handle on this problem very soon.

    As expected, the authors also make the point that there are far fewer studies of climate change impacts on the oceans when compared to terrestrial ecosystem studies. How strange, but not surprising, that we haven’t made a larger commitment to understanding the largest ecosystems on our planet.

    Still, despite our terrestrial bias when it comes to research funding, our nation’s ocean scientists have accumulated an impressive amount of data on effects of climate change on our oceans, including many measurements like sea level and ocean pH that are not a matter of speculation: They can be measured with a simple instrument every day.

    For sure, we’ll be in for a lot of surprises in the future when it comes to climate change and its impact on our lives. There’s simply no way to model, predict or understand every detail; but, there’s plenty of evidence in our hands today, and there’s no excuse for inaction.

    Clearly, we have a lot of work to do — and little time to act. I’m an optimistic person by nature, and I’m encouraged by all of you who are raising your voices and demanding action from our leaders. Grassroots efforts such as writing letters, sending emails and making phone calls to your elected officials do matter and are among the most important ways we bring about change.

    Together, I’m confident we can address the challenges and make a difference – for our lives, for our children, and for the oceans.

    Fish evolve to tolerate colder temperature in just three years

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    A stickleback may be a long way from a coral reef, but here’s an interesting paper showing one of the fastest evolutionary responses in a vertebrate.  The key here is that generation times are short (less than 6 months), unlike those in corals: From ScienceDaily:

    University of British Columbia researchers have observed one of the fastest evolutionary responses ever recorded in wild populations. In as little as three years, stickleback fish developed tolerance for water temperature 2.5 degrees Celsius lower than their ancestors.

    The study, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provides the some of the first experimental evidence that evolution may help populations survive effects of climate change.

    Measuring three to 10 centimetres, stickleback fish originated in the ocean but began populating freshwater lakes and streams following the last ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, marine and freshwater sticklebacks have evolved different physical and behavioural traits, making them ideal models for Darwin’s natural selection theory.

    “By testing the temperature tolerance of wild and lab-raised sticklebacks, we were able to determine that freshwater sticklebacks can tolerate lower temperatures than their marine counterparts,” says lead author Rowan Barrett from the UBC Department of Zoology. “This made sense from an evolutionary perspective because their ancestors were able to adapt to freshwater lakes, which typically reach colder temperatures than the ocean.”

    To learn how quickly this adaptation took place, Barrett and colleagues from Switzerland and Sweden “recreated history” by transplanting marine sticklebacks to freshwater ponds and found that in as little as three generations (or three years), they were able to tolerate the same minimum temperature as freshwater sticklebacks, 2.5 °C lower than their ancestral populations.

    “Scientific models have suggested that climate change could result in both a general, gradual increase of average temperatures and an increase in extreme temperatures,” says Barrett, who received his PhD last week.

    “Our study is the first to experimentally show that certain species in the wild could adapt to climate change very rapidly — in this case, colder water temperature. However, this rapid adaptation is not achieved without a cost. Only rare individuals that possess the ability to tolerate rapid changes in temperature survive, and the number of survivors may not be large enough to sustain the population. It is crucial that knowledge of evolutionary processes is incorporated into conservation and management policy.”

    Human being and fish can coexist peacefully

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    … or at least that seems to be what Australia’s Opposition leader thinks would happen if he stopped the expansion of marine protected areas in Australian waters:

    In a policy aimed at marginal Queensland seats, Mr Abbott said a Coalition government would ”immediately suspend the marine protection process which is threatening the livelihoods of many people in the fishing industry and many people in the tourism industry”.

    ”All of us want to see appropriate environmental protection, but man and nature have to live together,” Mr Abbott said as he toured the seat of Dawson, in Mackay, which is held by Labor by 2.6 per cent.

    Citing “Real action to protect our marine environments and fishing communities” , Mr Abbott wants to balance environmental protection with economic growth by first suspending the marine protected area process. But doesn’t tourism in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park  generate billions of dollars for the Australian economy annually?

    The GBRMP re-zoning that resulted in an increase in strict protection from 4.5% to over 30% was of course intiated under the previous Howard government, and undertaken through a comprehensive research and consultation process. According to Mr Abbott, things have  gone awry since then, although so far the details on this are scanty.

    Coalition policy would require consideration of peer reviewed scientific evidence of threats to marine biodiversity before future decisions are made about marine park establishment:

    “We would not be interested in just putting lines on maps. If there’s something out there that needs to be protected, if it’s iconic and needs protection, we’d want to see the science and that science would have to be peer-reviewed.”

    Fortunately, there is already a lot out there to suggest that the marine environment is under threat, fishing kills fish and that marine parks have benefits for biodiversity and maintaining fish stocks. Conservation planning software used world wide, and developed in Queensland, is used to assist in the creation of marine parks  in a way that seeks to achieve protection for biodiversity while balancing socio-economic objectives.  The science is light years ahead of lines on maps (although, this can be helpful as part of the community consultation process).

    It’s encouraging to see the high regard that Mr Abbott places upon peer reviewed science on this issue, so for someone who gets his ‘facts’ about climate change from Heaven + Earth, perhaps a bit of consistency wouldn’t go astray?

    No quick fix for climate with geoengineering

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    It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, but the artificial manipulation of the Earth’s climate has been touted as a possible strategy to reduce the effects of unmitigated climate change. Thanks to the painfully slow progress that has been made towards reducing our carbon emissions, there has been some surprisingly serious discussion about the prospect of geoengineering the climate in order to suit the needs of humans.

    Of the various forms that have been suggested (large machines to suck CO2 from the air, space-borne mirrors to reflect sunlight, iron filings in the ocean), the mostly widely discussed option is the injection of vast quantities of sulphur into the stratosphere. In theory, the airborne particles would have the effect of reflecting solar radiation, and thereby the reducing warming effects of climate change.

    Of course, this would do nothing to actually reduce carbon pollution (which would continue to increase with human development), not least anything to reduce the effects of ocean acidification and a myriad of other impacts upon biodiversity, ecosystems and human health. Geoengineering is certainly a drastic option fraught with uncertainty, but advocates of the approach have been considering back-up plans for the worst possible case scenario, while others have been looking into what effects may come if geoengineering became a reality.

    A new study published in Nature Geoscience[1] last week has examined the possible consequences of large scale geoengineering on the planet from the baseline year of 2005. The authors simulated a range of geoengineering scenarios by making use of thousands of home computers that were volunteered as part of a large scale climate forecasting experiment.

    They found that although the injection of trogospheric sulphur aerosols did in fact reduce global average temperatures compared to the unmitigated climate change scenario, global net precipitation would decrease as a result. The disparity between temperature and precipitation anomalies became increasingly apparent the longer that geoengineering activities were maintained in the modelled scenarios – meaning that over time it would become more and more difficult to regulate temperature and precipitation within “20th century climate conditions” simultaneously.

    On top of these effects, the results also indicate that the degree of climate engineering undertaken (i.e the amount of aerosols pumped into the air) would impact upon different parts of the world in different ways. This regional variation in the effects of geo-engineering would make it even more difficult to choose an “optimum” level of climate manipulation – for example, keeping China close to its baseline climate meant undesirable conditions for India, and vice versa.

    Although some of these results may be model-specific (such as the specific regional effects), this new study gives a frightening glimpse into the risks and uncertainties of climate geoengineering. The fact that we’re even considering the idea of large scale climate manipulation seems to be  indicative of society’s desire to seek technological fixes to treat the symptoms of a problem, instead of addressing the root cause. Clive Hamilton[2] describes the penchant of wealthy Texans to enjoy a log fire despite living in a hot climate, and so likens geoengineering to “responding to overheating by turning up the air-conditioning while continuing to pile more logs onto the file”.

    But with the stifling of action on climate change both at home and abroad, is geoengineering a reality we are rapidly moving towards?

    [1] Ricke, K. L., Morgan, M. G. & Allen, M. R. Nature Geosci. Advance online publication doi:10.1038/ngeo915

    [2] Clive Hamilton. 2010. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change

    Page photograph from Nature News article “Geoengineering can’t please everyone”  doi:10.1038/news.2010.357

    Breaking news: Stanford climate scientist Steve Schneider passes away at age 65

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    “No one, and I mean no one, had a broader and deeper understanding of the climate issue than Stephen,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. “More than anyone else, he helped shape the way the public and experts thought about this problem — from the basic physics of the problem, to the impact of human beings on nature’s ecosystems, to developing policy.”

    World renowned climate scientist Steve Schneider, Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University died unexpectedly today of a heart attack whilst returning from a meeting in Sweden. For those that don’t know of him, it’s a huge loss to climate science: Real Climate weights in with eulogy. See Schneider’s work via his lab website here.