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Instead, we'd be investing that wood fiber - that biomass - into wood products with a long shelf life, which leads to much bigger carbon emission reductions than what happens when you turn that fiber into wood pellets for bioenergy. Our trees had removed that carbon from the atmosphere and locked it up in the form of wood, but the actual accounting benefits will go to Drax, Britain, because they are the ones who are considered to have I replaced i the burning of fossil fuel with the burning of wood. Biomass, bioenergy, carbon dioxide, climate change, forestry, wood combustion, Drax, sustainable forestry. [Extracted from the article]

The Penn State climate scientist who helped author the “hockey stick” global warming temperature graph describes the campaign to discredit him following the theft of emails, including some he wrote, from servers at England’s University of East Anglia. Climate-change denial groups said the emails showed unethical conduct, but scientific organizations and academic panels said this was not the case, defending Mann and the credibility of climate science. Mann believes the widespread media coverage contributed to the failure of the US Senate to take action on carbon dioxide emission controls this summer. But he cites polls showing that the matter may not have compromised public belief in climate science and expresses optimism that policymakers will force emissions reductions in time to avert truly catastrophic changes to Earth’s climate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The EU, UK, US, and other nations consider wood to be a carbon neutral fuel, ignoring the carbon dioxide emitted from wood combustion in their greenhouse gas accounting. Many countries subsidize wood energy – often by burning wood pellets in place of coal for electric power – to meet their renewable energy targets. But can wood bioenergy help cut greenhouse emissions in time to limit the worst damage from climate change? The argument in favor seems obvious: wood, a renewable resource, must be better than burning fossil fuels. But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal – and far more than other fossil fuels. Therefore, the first impact of wood bioenergy is to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain and takes time – decades to a century or more, depending on forest composition and climatic zone – time we do not have to cut emissions enough to avoid the worst harms from climate change. More effective ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions are already available and affordable now, allowing forests to continue to serve as carbon sinks and moderate climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Dominic Woolf, a senior research associate at Cornell University, describes a potential method for removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere: converting biomass into a long-lived, charcoal-like material that would be added to soil. Called biochar, this material could not only sequester some of the carbon fixed by plants during photosynthesis – and prevent it from returning to the atmosphere – but could also improve soil fertility. Woolf explains some of the tradeoffs and uncertainties associated with biochar and other methods of soil carbon sequestration, and the challenges to scaling up these approaches for global climate change mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To halt global warming, the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by human activities such as fossil fuel burning, cement production, and deforestation needs to be brought all the way to zero. The longer it takes to do so, the hotter the world will get. Lack of progress towards decarbonization has created justifiable panic about the climate crisis. This has led to an intensified interest in technological climate interventions that involve increasing the reflection of sunlight to space by injecting substances into the stratosphere which lead to the formation of highly reflective particles. When first suggested, such albedo modification schemes were introduced as a "Plan B," in case the world economy fails to decarbonize, and this scenario has dominated much of the public perception of albedo modification as a savior waiting in the wings to protect the world against massive climate change arising from a failure to decarbonize. But because of the mismatch between the millennial persistence time of carbon dioxide and the sub-decadal persistence of stratospheric particles, albedo modification can never safely play more than a very minor role in the portfolio of solutions. There is simply no substitute for decarbonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing global warming to a halt requires that worldwide net emissions of carbon dioxide be brought to essentially zero; the sooner this occurs, the less warming our descendants for the next 1000 years and more will need to adapt to. The widespread fear that the actions needed to bring this about conflict with economic growth is a major impediment to efforts to protect the climate. But much of this fear is pointless, and the magnitude of the task - while great - is no greater than the challenges that human ingenuity has surmounted in the past. To light the way forward, we need to examine success stories where nations have greatly reduced their carbon dioxide emissions while simultaneously maintaining vigorous growth in their standard of living; a prime example is Sweden. Through a combination of sensible government infrastructure policies and free-market incentives, Sweden has managed to successfully decarbonize, cutting its per capita emissions by a factor of 3 since the 1970s, while doubling its per capita income and providing a wide range of social benefits. This has all been accomplished within a vigorous capitalistic framework that in many ways better embodies free-market principles than the US economy. Consequently, the Swedish experience shows that solving global warming does not require us to "tear down capitalism." The world just needs to be a bit more like Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the United States were to adopt a policy to phase out nuclear generation, as has happened recently in other developed countries, what would the environmental and energy-mix implications be? Based on alternative scenarios of nuclear exit that consider the influence of potential policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions, a model of the US and global economy indicates that, under current policy, a US nuclear exit would increase carbon dioxide emissions, and likely raise electricity prices and reduce gross domestic product by relatively small amounts. Those economic impacts would be increased by additional measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's view on the development of meteorological knowledge about Antarctica. He says that the question of world-wide pollution is a pressing one and promises to become even more serious and the increase of carbon dioxide, DDT and lead in Antarctica indicates that it is becoming contaminated by man-made pollutants. He emphasizes that it is time to establish stations to measure all aspects of this contamination in order to provide a base line against which to compare future conditions.

The article presents the author's critique of Alwin Weinberg's article about the use of nuclear energy and the dangers of emission of carbon dioxide, which was published in the March issue of the journal. The author states that Weinberg has overstated the potential dangers of carbon dioxide emissions and has gone overboard in advocating the use of nuclear energy. The author states that Weinberg has failed to recognize many energy resources available in future.

The article presents the author's response to the critical analysis by Joseph Barnea, Unitar Senior Fellow, New York state, of his article published in the March issue of the journal. The author states that Barnea is biased toward use of nuclear energy. He further refers to studies, conducted by climatologists who have concluded that carbon dioxide greenhouse effect is real and cannot be ignored, to reinforce his argument of the effects of carbon dioxide on ecology.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to an article on the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on climate, by Frank Barnaby in the April 1981 issue.