Global Greenhouse Gas | Image : Networlddirectory.com

Part of a forest will be enclosed, heated up and pumped with CO2 to see who wins and loses if the planet heats up.

Global warming has found a willing victim: a small patch of spruce forest in the Chippewa National Forest in northern Minnesota.

There, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will create the conditions they expect to see in a warming world. Higher levels of carbon dioxide. Warmer average temperatures. Warmer soil.

Then scientists will watch, measure and record. They want to be able to see how microbes respond, how insect populations change, how decomposition rates change, how plants grow and produce seeds, and how water levels fluctuate. Sensors will try to determine what kind of feedback loops kick in that either increase or decrease temperature and carbon dioxide. Population studies will try to suss out which species do better and which suffer, under which conditions.

Ecosystems are wonderfully–or maddeningly–complex, depending on how you look at them. As a result they are notoriously difficult to study. They can’t be studied in a lab; in the field the variables are so many and the time scales needed to tease out trends are so long that ecologists are left with little ecosystem-wide experimental data. Read more ……

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth’s near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. Global surface temperature increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) between the start and the end of the 20th century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century was caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

The IPCC also concludes that variations in natural phenomena such as solar radiation and volcanism had a small cooling effect after 1950. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by more than 40 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.

An increase in global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern of precipitation, probably including expansion of subtropical deserts. Warming is expected to be strongest in the Arctic and would be associated with continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice. Other likely effects include increases in the intensity of extreme weather events, species extinctions, and changes in agricultural yields. Warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe, though the nature of these regional variations are uncertain. Source : Wikipedia

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Text Messaging, SMS | Image Source : Softwarenewsdaily.com

Text messages and mapping tools are helping victims of the earthquake. Geeks and technologists around the world are creating tools to help earthquake victims in Haiti. These tools are focused around gathering and mapping the data, and broadcasting it to the relief workers on the ground.

When the news of the earthquake broke, several groups and companies sprang into action very quickly. Ushahidi, a portal originally built to track election violence in Kenya, created Haiti.Ushahidi.com. The site, developed by Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping at Ushahidi, tracks incidents, search and rescue operations and people in Haiti.

So far more than 19,000 messages in English and Creole have been sent through the system, and the number of messages is increasing by 10% daily. The goal is to place all information reports on a map for immediate dissemination and future analysis of trends. About half the messages are useful and can be mapped (a smaller number of messages carry urgent information and are routed to the proper agency). Oftentimes, volunteers have to get clarification and more location information from the sender. Government agencies and NGOs are tracking Ushahidi’s data.  Read more ……

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