Environmentalist Paul Ehrlich has proved himself to be a stupendously bad prophet. In 1968 he declared: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." They didn't. Indeed, a "green revolution" nearly tripled the world's food supply. In 1975, he predicted that, by the mid-1980s, "mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity," in which "accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." Far from it. Between 1975 and 2000 the World Bank's commodity price index for minerals and metals fell by nearly 50%. In other words, we abound in "key minerals." Naturally, Mr. Ehrlich has won a MacArthur Foundation genius award--and a Heinz Award for the environment.

For scientists studying climate change, the past is often a key to understanding the future. Dake Chen at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory recently used more than a century of climate data to successfully test an improved model of ENSO, the El-Niño/Southern Oscillation that scientists believe is behind climate change in many parts of the world.

Chen and his colleagues report in the April 15 issue of the journal Nature that an improved climate model, known as LDEO5, for the first time predicted every major change in the temperature of the tropical Pacific Ocean over the past 150 years with up to two years of advance notice.

New underwater turbines could be cheap and eco-friendly.

A British company has invented a simple tidal power system that is relatively easy to install and has little impact on its environment. The device could soon be added to our range of renewable energy resources, and be used to bring power to remote seaside locations.

The TidEl system uses floating turbines that are anchored to the seabed by chains. The underwater windmills drift back and forth with the tide, so they point in the best direction to get power from the spinning blades.

Iron fertilization of the surface ocean layer has been considered as a possible strategy for reducing the burden of atmospheric CO2; this would mitigate greenhouse gas buildup and global warming. The idea is that CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere by sequestering it as new ocean production in "high nutrient--low chlorophyll" regions, where biological production is limited by the scarcity of iron. This approach might have other consequences, however, including the increased production and atmospheric concentration of N2O, another powerful greenhouse gas.

NASA scientists say soot, mostly from diesel engines, is causing as much as a quarter of all observed global warming by reducing the ability of snow and ice to reflect sunlight.

In 1985, a geography researcher called Atsumu Ohmura at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology got the shock of his life. As part of his studies into climate and atmospheric radiation, Ohmura was checking levels of sunlight recorded around Europe when he made an astonishing discovery. It was too dark. Compared to similar measurements recorded by his predecessors in the 1960s, Ohmura's results suggested that levels of solar radiation striking the Earth's surface had declined by more than 10% in three decades. Sunshine, it seemed, was on the way out.

New evidence found by teams of climate researchers leaves no doubt that industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for increasing global temperatures -- an ominous trend that has speeded up in the past 50 years and threatens to continue for centuries, according to a report by two of the nation's leading atmospheric scientists.

A large and rapid warming event 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), raised the temperature of the high latitudes by 10{o}C and of the deep ocean by 5{degrees}C. Its effect on the low-latitude surface ocean has remained unresolved due to the absence of reliable sea surface temperature (SST) records from the tropics. Zachos et al. (p. 1551)now present an SST reconstruction based on a sediment core from the tropical Pacific Ocean. After measuring both oxygen isotopes and Mg/Ca inthe skeletons of long-dead surface-dwelling foraminifera, they produced a record of temperature and salinity and found that SSTs rose by approximately 5{degrees}C. This result is consistent with model studies which assume that the warming was caused by a two- to threefold increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In a recent discussion published in the Russian journal Geomagnetizm i Aeronomiya (Vol. 43, pp. 132-135), two scientists from the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences challenge the politically-correct global warming dogma that vexes the entire world. Bashkirtsev and Mashnich (2003) say that "a number of publications report that the anthropogenic impact on the Earth's climate is an obvious and proven fact," when in actuality, in their opinion, "none of the investigations dealing with the anthropogenic impact on climate convincingly argues for such an impact."

A unique group of oxide materials that readily gives up and accepts oxygen atoms with changes in temperature could be the basis for a small-scale hydrogen production system able to power fuel cells in homes -- and potentially in automotive applications. Scientists have long known that oxides of the rare earth elements cerium (Ce), terbium (Tb), and praseodymium (Pr) can produce hydrogen from water vapor and methane in continuous "inhale and exhale" cycles. By doping iron atoms into the oxides, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have lowered the temperatures at which these "oxygen pump" materials produce hydrogen, potentially allowing the process to be powered by solar energy.

A few days ago, we came across a news report from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune entitled "Greenhouse effect may make Minnesota into Kansas." As the former of these states had been home to several generations of our ancestors, we were naturally curious to learn about its impending transformation, so we read on.

BERKELEY, CA — Researchers in the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with crystal-growing teams at Cornell University and Japan's Ritsumeikan University, have learned that the band gap of the semiconductor indium nitride is not 2 electron volts (2 eV) as previously thought, but instead is a much lower 0.7 eV.
The serendipitous discovery means that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight -- from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet -- to electrical current.

UK geologists say efforts to bury the carbon dioxide byproduct from gas exploration in the North Sea have been hugely successful.
An experiment has been running in the Sleipner Field since 1996, in which waste CO2 that comes up with the extracted methane is separated off and then pumped back under ground. It would normally be vented into the atmosphere.

Another big freeze might never happen.