Protected areas not safe from light pollution

Protected areas, such as nature reserves and national parks, are thought to provide a refuge for wildlife, but according to a new study, many of these areas are not safe from light pollution. Thanks to increasing urbanization, many nocturnal skies are no longer dark. 

Although helpful for humans, artificial night lighting can impact nocturnal wildlife by disrupting natural reproductive cycles, disorienting migratory species, and increasing the risk of predation. To assess how well protected areas shelter wildlife from light pollution and preserve natural darkness, researchers analyzed satellite images of Earth collected at night by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program between 1992 and 2010. Individual pixels, representative of approximately 3 square kilometers, were assigned a number based on their degree of illumination, ranging from 0 (complete darkness) to 63 (brightly lit urban areas). 

More than 170,000 unique protected areas were identified using the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Database on Protected Areas. 

The degree of nighttime illumination was then compared with unprotected areas for each continent over the 2 decades. Although 86% of the world’s landmasses remain in relative darkness at night, darkness declined slightly in all regions over the study period.

 Protected areas were still generally darker than unprotected areas, yet protected areas experienced widespread increases in nighttime light exposure between 1992 and 2010, the team reports online this month in Conservation Biology. In Europe, Asia, and South and Central America, up to 42% of protected areas have experienced significant increases in nighttime lighting. 

A smaller percentage of protected areas in Europe (24%) and North America (17%) exhibited high levels of nighttime lighting in all years. Based on their findings, researchers propose reduced lighting zones be established around existing refuges to preserve their natural darkness and biodiversity. 

Let’s call it: 30 years of above average temperatures means the climate has changed

If you’re younger than 30, you’ve never experienced a month in which the average surface temperature of the Earth was below average.

Each month, the US National Climatic Data Center calculates Earth’s average surface temperature using temperature measurements that cover the Earth’s surface. Then, another average is calculated for each month of the year for the twentieth century, 1901-2000. For each month, this gives one number representative of the entire century. Subtract this overall 1900s monthly average – which for February is 53.9F (12.1C) – from each individual month’s temperature and you’ve got the anomaly: that is, the difference from the average.

The last month that was at or below that 1900s average was February 1985. Ronald Reagan had just started his second presidential term and Foreigner had the number one single with “I want to know what love is.”

These temperature observations make it clear the new normal will be systematically rising temperatures, not the stability of the last 100 years. The traditional definition of climate is the 30-year average of weather. The fact that – once the official records are in for February 2015 – it will have been 30 years since a month was below average is an important measure that the climate has changed.

Temperature history for all Februaries from 1880-2014  NCDC

How the Earth warms

As you can see in the graphic above, ocean temperature doesn’t vary as much as land temperature. This fact is intuitive to many people because they understand that coastal regions don’t experience as extreme highs and lows as the interiors of continents. Since oceans cover the majority of the Earth’s surface, the combined land and ocean graph strongly resembles the graph just for the ocean. Looking at only the ocean plots, you have to go all the way back to February 1976 to find a month below average. (That would be under President Gerald Ford’s watch.)

You can interpret variability over land as the driver of the ups and downs seen in the global graph. There are four years from 1976 onwards when the land was below average; the last time the land temperature was cool enough for the globe to be at or below average was February 1985. The flirtation with below-average temps was tiny – primarily worth noting in the spirit of accurate record keeping. Looking at any of these graphs, it’s obvious that earlier times were cooler and more recent times are warmer. None of the fluctuations over land since 1976 provide evidence contrary to the observation that the Earth is warming.

Some of the most convincing evidence that the Earth is warming is actually found in measures of the heat stored in the oceans and the melting of ice. However, we often focus on the surface air temperature. One reason for that is that we feel the surface air temperature; therefore, we have intuition about the importance of hot and cold surface temperatures. Another reason is historical; we have often thought of climate as the average of weather. We’ve been taking temperature observations for weather for a long time; it is a robust and essential observation.

Temperature history for every year from 1880-2014.  NOAA National Climatic Data Center

Despite variability, a stable signal

Choosing one month, February in this instance, perhaps overemphasizes that time in 1985 when we had a below average month. We can get a single yearly average for all the months in an entire year, January-December. If we look at these annual averages, then the ups and downs are reduced. In this case, 1976 emerges as the last year in which the global-average temperature was below the 20th century average of 57.0F (13.9C) – that’s 38 years ago, the year that Nadia Comaneci scored her seven perfect 10s at the Montreal Olympics.

I am not a fan of tracking month-by-month or even year-by-year averages and arguing over the statistical minutia of possible records. We live at a time when the Earth is definitively warming. And we know why: predominately, the increase of greenhouse gas warming due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Under current conditions, we should expect the planet to be warming. What would be more important news would be if we had a year, even a month, that was below average.

The variability we observe in surface temperature comes primarily from understood patterns of weather. Many have heard of El Niño, when the eastern Pacific Ocean is warmer than average. The eastern Pacific is so large that when it is warmer than average, the entire planet is likely to be warmer than average. As we look at averages, 30 years, 10 years, or even one year, these patterns, some years warmer, some cooler, become less prominent. The trend of warming is large enough to mask the variability. The fact that there have been 30 years with no month below the 20th century average is a definitive statement that climate has changed.

To see a cooler Earth any time soon, you’ll need to carve one out of ice.  Kirsten Spry, CC BY-NC-SA

The 30-year horizon

There are other reasons that this 30-year span of time is important. Thirty years is a length of time in which people plan. This includes personal choices – where to live, what job to take, how to plan for retirement. There are institutional choices – building bridges, building factories and power plants, urban flood management. There are resource management questions – assuring water supply for people, ecosystems, energy production and agriculture. There are many questions concerning how to build the fortifications and plan the migrations that sea-level rise will demand. Thirty years is long enough to be convincing that the climate is changing, and short enough that we can conceive, both individually and collectively, what the future might hold.

Finally, 30 years is long enough to educate us. We have 30 years during which we can see what challenges a changing climate brings us. Thirty years that are informing us about the next 30 years, which will be warmer still. This is a temperature record that makes it clear that the new normal will be systematically rising temperatures, not the ups and downs of the last 100 years.

Those who are under 30 years old have not experienced the climate I grew up with. In thirty more years, those born today will also be living in a climate that, by fundamental measures, will be different than the climate of their birth. Future success will rely on understanding that the climate in which we are all now living is changing and will continue to change with accumulating consequences.

Story: TheConversation

[EXCLUSIVE] If you are still thinking that there are 9 planets in our Solar System...?! Think again !

Way out beyond Mars, but before you get to Jupiter, is a planet.

You read that right. There's a planet between Mars and Jupiter.

You may not have heard of it, but it was discovered in 1801 -- 129 years before Pluto. It originally was called a planet, then later an asteroid and now it's called a dwarf planet.

Its name is Ceres (pronounced like series) and you'll likely be hearing a lot more about it in the coming weeks.

Ceres is one of five named dwarf planets recognized by NASA and the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The other four are Eris, Pluto, Makemake and Haumea.

But Ceres is the first of these worlds to get a visitor from Earth: NASA's Dawn spacecraft is arriving on March 6.

"Ceres is a 'planet' that you've probably never heard of," said Robert Mase, Dawn project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Ceres may be considered a dwarf planet, but it's "the giant of the main asteroid belt," Dr. Marc Rayman, chief engineer and mission director of the Dawn mission, told CNN. "It is not only the largest object between Mars and Jupiter, it is the largest object between the sun and Pluto that a spacecraft has not yet visited."

"We are tremendously excited," Rayman said. "We have guided this robotic probe for well over seven years on an interplanetary journey of more than 3 billion miles. Along the way we sailed past Mars. We spent 14 months orbiting and scrutinizing the giant protoplanet Vesta. ... Now, finally, we are on the verge of conducting the first exploration ever of the first dwarf planet."

New images from Dawn, taken when the probe was about 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) from Ceres, show craters and what NASA calls mysterious bright spots. Rayman said its surface is pretty beaten up and that the craters that are "scars from life in the rough and tumble asteroid belt."

Why study a beaten-up space rock? Rayman said because it's a survivor -- and a mysterious one. Made up of rock and ice, Ceres may even have liquid water deep beneath its surface -- "perhaps as ponds or lakes or even oceans," Rayman said.

He said Ceres "appears to have been in the process of growing to become a full-sized planet when Jupiter terminated its growth nearly 4.6 billion years ago."

So by studying Ceres, scientists learn more about how the rest of the solar system formed. And he said, we should study Ceres because it's there -- and we need to understand the universe we live in. 

"We should study it because we hunger for knowledge and understanding. Grand undertakings like this nurture our spirit," Rayman said.

Rayman said that if you had learned about the solar system 200 years ago, "you would have learned that Ceres was a planet, just as people who learned about the solar system in more recent generations learned that Pluto is."

Speaking of Pluto, the most famous of the dwarf planets gets its own visitor in July. The New Horizons spacecraft is closing in for a flyby of Pluto and its moons.

This talk of planets and dwarf planets is still a little confusing, so here's the most recent tally: NASA currently recognizes eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and the five named dwarf planets we listed earlier.

But a sixth possible dwarf planet already is on NASA's watch list.

Called 2012 VP113, it's believed to be one of the most distant objects in our solar system. On its Solar System Exploration website, NASA says the object was nicknamed "Biden" after Vice President Joseph Biden because of the VP in its initial designation. It will be up to the IAU to decide whether i2012 VP113 is a dwarf planet and whether it gets an official name.

But expect the numbers for planets in our solar system to keep changing. Mike Brown, the CalTech astronomy professor who helped discover dwarf planet Eris and who takes responsibility for killing off Pluto as a full-fledged planet, has his own tally listing more than 360 possible dwarf planets. And NASA has said there may be many more dwarf planets that we haven't found yet.

So Ceres, and its cousins, may soon outnumber the traditional planets you learned about in grade school.

VIDEO of the Ceres Planet here

Read more on CNN

India could be the world's most important solar market

Europe, the U.S., Japan, and China have been the stars of the solar industry for the past decade. In the early 2000s, Europe's feed-in tariffs gave birth to the industry as we know it. China brought low-cost manufacturing and billions of dollars in capacity expansions at a rapid rate. Now, the U.S. and Japan are growing demand based on market forces, not subsidies or government mandates.

But the biggest prize in the solar industry could be India. The country has an underserved population that solar energy could help to power, and its population of over 1 billion provides an opportunity for growth that could last for decades.



India's big solar plans

India actually has two distinct potential solar markets, utility scale and small distributed solar on rooftops in rural areas . First, the government is pushing massive 500-plus megawatt solar power plants in a bid to build 100 gigawatts of solar by 2022. SunEdison has been an early mover in this market, saying recently it will build over 15 GW of wind and solar in the next seven years. First Solar is also moving into the market with a plan for 5 GW of solar projects.  

The U.S. has said it is ready to help cover the estimated $160 billion investment needed to build that much solar energy, a potential financial lifeline for India's unstable energy industry.

To put this investment into perspective, China is the world's largest solar energy producer, with 33.4 GW installed, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, while India has just 3.3 GW of solar. To hit 100 GW by 2022, India would have to install on average 13.8 GW of solar every year, more than any country has ever installed and double what the U.S. installed in 2014.  



The smaller, and potentially more important Indian solar market

Mega-solar projects aren't the only kind of solar energy India will build in the next few years. Distributed solar, installed on rooftops or in fields close to demand sources, will play a large role in powering the country's rural populations.

The central grid does a poor job of reaching some of India's most remote locations, and there's little hope they'll be connected anytime soon. The best option is for communities to build their own microgrids, powered by locally produced energy from wind, solar, and other sources and including new technologies such as energy storage and demand response.

Why the industry will grow for decades

India has a couple things going for it that other countries investing in solar don't. The nation is expected to be the world's most populous country by 2030. This rapid population growth will be one of the drivers of India doubling the amount of energy it consumes by that time, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

As you can see above, India also has strong solar resources, particularly in the western part of the country. In the map above, the region that gets 5.0 to 6.0 kW-hrs/m2/day gets a similar amount of sunlight as the southwestern U.S. in terms of intensity. For some perspective, nearly all of the country gets more solar energy than northeastern U.S. states such as New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Germany, China, the U.S., and other nations have also done much of the dirty work in proving out solar energy's feasibility and lowering costs to prices competitive with fossil fuels. India can now install large-scale solar plants for $1.60 per watt or less, which is a fraction of what it cost Germany to install most of its solar capacity.

These strong growth factors and a government that is putting its weight behind solar energy make India one of the world's most important solar markets. Companies that can gain market share and win projects there should reap billions of dollars in profits for investors. It's just a race to see who will get there first.


Credits: BussinessInsider

If we came across alien life, would we even know it was alive?

Scientists have found life on Earth in extreme environments like this Yellowstone hot spring, but alien life might be more elusive.

If we came across alien life, would we even know it was alive? That was a central question posed at a session here yesterday at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science). All known life on Earth fits a particular mold, but life from other planets might break free from that mold, making it difficult for us to identify. We could even be oblivious to unfamiliar forms of life right under our noses.

All life as we know it follows a standard protocol, known as the “central dogma,” using DNA and RNA to store genetic information, and translating that into proteins. And all living things rely on the same handful of chemical elements. So, when searching for life in remote or extreme environments scientists typically look for signs of the kind of life we’re familiar with. But, “if we have other organisms out there that do things just slightly differently, we might miss the boat,” geobiologist Victoria Orphan of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena told attendees.

Biologists have proposed the existence of a “shadow biosphere” an undiscovered group of living things with biochemistry different from what we’re used to. Most of life’s diversity on our planet is too small to see, making microbes the most likely place to look for these new types of life. Already, new discoveries are shaking our beliefs about what life is. Recently discovered giant, amoeba-infecting viruses blur the line between life and nonlife although they rely on their hosts for essential biological functions, the bacteria-sized viruses have complex genomes. Such unexpected discoveries suggest that we shouldn’t define what we are searching for by what we know is already out there, Orphan said.

But it’s hard to search for something if you don’t know what it is. One general hallmark to look for, said planetary scientist Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, is a system that is out of equilibrium. Life takes in and uses energy, altering its environment in the process. Without life, for example, our planet would not have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, as chemical reactions tend to deplete oxygen. The proliferation of left-handed amino acids is another example we see on Earth; life is made up of left-handed amino acids, but not their mirror-images. Such a lopsided situation is an indication of an environment out of whack and perhaps life.

However, what we can search for also depends on what’s practical. As a result, NASA’s strategy for searching out life on other planets has generally been to “follow the water,” looking for life similar to that on Earth, Porco said, because that's what we know how to find. Porco called on other scientists on the panel to come up with a “working definition” of life that could give planetary scientists guidance as to what else they should look for. For example, on other worlds, life might form in liquid hydrocarbons instead of water, such as on Saturn's moon, Titan. Different markers might reveal life in hydrocarbon seas.

Rather than searching for new forms of life on Earth or in the stars, other scientists study the question from the bottom up, looking for possible precursors of life. Chemist David Lynn of Emory University in Atlanta points out that misfolded proteins like the those implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's show some similarities to life, namely that they can generate diversity in the different ways that they fold, and can undergo chemical evolution, in which those folded proteins are selected not genetically, but chemically. Such precursors could form complex chemical networks, which might be the foundation of radically different life elsewhere in the universe.

Biochemist John Chaput of Arizona State University, Tempe, takes the approach of working backward from the central dogma, asking if early life could have used a simpler precursor to RNA and DNA. He studies threose nucleic acid, which is not found in nature but can be synthesized in the lab. It forms a similar structure to DNA, but with a different backbone and would've been simpler to produce and replicate on primordial Earth. “Life did not choose DNA or RNA out of chemical necessity,” he said. “There may have been many alternative paths to the evolution of life.”

Credits: ScienceMAG

Is Alaska Losing Its Snow?

I’m writing this from a village community center in rural Yukon. It’s been transformed into a checkpoint on the Yukon Quest, a 1,000-mile dogsled race from Whitehorse, where I live in the Yukon, to Fairbanks, in the Alaska interior.

Outside right now, it’s -39 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s been that way through the 48 hours since the race started. The husky teams handle the cold pretty well, but humans and machines are suffering I have to go outside every two to three hours to start my car and let it warm up all the way through to prevent it from freezing solid.

This type of cold used to be standard on the Quest, but the last couple of years have been unusually balmy; last year, the race was unable to finish at its usual location because the Yukon River, normally a frozen highway in February, wasn’t safe for travel. Other sled dog races have been affected by the unusual weather, too: low snow levels in Southcentral Alaska, in the big city of Anchorage and the surrounding country, have wreaked havoc on the racing season.

"Over the last, say, 25 years, there is probably some trend for decreased snowfall in the autumn that is to say the snow is coming later. But if we just look at the total over-winter snow, there is very little trend."

In 2013, the Knik 200 was canceled due to warm weather and lack of snow; in 2014, the Tustumena 200 and the Northern Lights 300 were both canceled for the same reasons, as were high school cross country ski races and a fat-tire bike race. This year, snowless conditions have forced the cancellation of the Norton Sound 450, the Knik 100, and numerous smaller amateur dogsled races and skiing and biathlon events. For only the second time in its history, the Iditarod, the most famous dog sled race in the world, is being forced to change its start location.

The perception in Alaska, from what I can tell as a nearby observer, is that snow accumulation levels are dropping precipitously in the Anchorage area and the surrounding Mat-Su Borough. I called the National Weather Service to see how our perceptions stack up against the data.

“Our climate records here in Anchorage go back to 1916, so we have about a hundred years worth of data,” says Rebecca Duell, a meteorologist at the Anchorage office of the NWS. At the time of my call last week, the Anchorage area had received a total of 19.4 inches of snow since August 1, when the annual count begins. The annual average for this time of year over the past century? Over 50 inches. “So we are 30 inches below average right now,” Duell says.

Up to this point, the 2014-15 season in the Anchorage-to-Willow corridor has the 10th lowest snowfall on record. Some other recent years have been below average, too: in 2013-14, 43.5 inches had accumulated at this point; in 2012-13, 39.8 inches; and in 2010-11, 43.7. On the other end of things, 2011-12 “was one of our snowiest years on record,” Duell says. Ninety-four inches of snow had fallen by this point in that year.

Hugh Neff in an earlier Yukon Quest. (Photo: James Brooks/Flickr)

So what does this all mean? Is Anchorage becoming a snowless winter city? It’s a little more complicated than that, according to Rick Toman, the NWS climate science and services manager for the Alaska region. “Some of what we have going on is that people’s working memory is pretty short,” he says. “Over the last, say, 25 years, there is probably some trend for decreased snowfall in the autumn that is to say the snow is coming later. But if we just look at the total over-winter snow, there is very little trend. In the long term, there’s no trend.”

Anchorage, Toman points out, is coastal: it can go weeks without snow and then get a substantial fraction of its annual snowfall in a one- or two-day storm. That can make it difficult to track season-long trends, since the accumulation is so erratic. “Even though the numbers can look big, you can have long stretches without snow,” he says. “In Anchorage, that’s always been the case.”

That’s small consolation for the race organizers and participants who are seeing their annual events canceled. Even if the overall snow level isn’t decreasing markedly, a shift toward late-season snow would be enough to change the life and culture of Anchorage and the surrounding area in very real ways.

Snow accumulation in and around Anchorage is about 30 inches below average for this time of year, and it’s affecting daily life in the area.

Winter in Alaska means snowmobiling, skiing, snowshoeing, and dogsledding and all of those activities require some snow cover on the ground, not just in March or April but from November or December on. It’s not just a matter of amateur races being canceled, either: snowmobiles, in particular, are a practical form of transport in a rural Alaska winter. People use them to travel around and to or from the more remote communities that aren’t reachable by road. Trappers use them to work their traplines, they’re integral to ice fishing and some seasonal hunting, and many tourism businesses depend on them too.

Of course, the affected area, from Anchorage north to Willow, is Alaska’s most developed, urban area for most residents in that part of the state, a reduced or displaced snow cover will only affect their winter hobbies. But that’s no minor thing in a state that defines itself as a winter playground. As David Hulen, the managing editor of the state’s largest paper, the Alaska Dispatch News, asked on Twitter three weeks back: “Is this just a lousy winter or is the basic nature of this place changing in pretty significant ways?”

Dispatches From a Changing Arctic is a biweekly series of reported stories from Alaska and the three Canadian northern territories.

Lead photo: Susan R. Serna/Shutterstock.

Credits: PSMAG