Scientists in Nevada are reporting development of a new and environmentally friendly process for producing biodiesel fuel from “chicken feather meal,” made from the 11 billion pounds of poultry industry waste that accumulate annually in the United States alone. Their study is scheduled for the July 22 issue of ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication.
In the study Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, Narasimharao Kondamudi, and Jason Strull note that chicken feather meal consists of processed chicken feathers, blood, and innards that have been processed at high temperatures with steam.
Currently feather meal is used as animal feed and fertilizer because of its high protein and nitrogen content. With as much as 12 percent …

Drives events similar to El Niño, La Niña
Establishing a key link between the solar cycle and global climate, research led by scientists at the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., shows that maximum solar activity and its aftermath have impacts on Earth that resemble La Niña and El Niño events in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
The research may pave the way toward predictions of temperature and precipitation patterns at certain times during the approximately 11-year solar cycle.
“These results are striking in that they point to a scientifically feasible series of events that link the 11-year solar cycle with ENSO, the tropical Pacific phenomenon that so strongly influences climate variability …

By accurately modeling Earth’s last major global warming — and answering pressing questions about its causes — scientists led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison climatologist are unraveling the intricacies of the kind of abrupt climate shifts that may occur in the future.
“We want to know what will happen in the future, especially if the climate will change abruptly,” says Zhengyu Liu, a UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and director of the Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “The problem is, you don’t know if your model is right for this kind of change. The important thing is validating your model.”
To do so, Liu and his colleagues run their …

The global composite temperature during June 2009 was flat, according to figures from The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Northern Hemisphere experienced a slight increase — +0.03 C (about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit) above 20-year average for June. Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere was cooler by the same amount — -0.03 C (about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit) below 20-year average for June.
Global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978: +0.12 C per decade
June temperatures (preliminary)
Global composite temp.: ±0.00 C (about 0.00 degrees Fahrenheit) above/below 20-year average for April.
Northern Hemisphere: +0.03 C (about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit) above 20-year average for June.
Southern Hemisphere: -0.03 C (about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit) below 20-year average for June.
May temperatures (revised):
Global Composite: +0.05 C above 20-year …

Widely sought efforts to reduce fuels that increase catastrophic fire in Pacific Northwest forests will be counterproductive to another important societal goal of sequestering carbon to help offset global warming, forestry researchers at Oregon State University conclude in a new report.
Even if the biofuels were used in an optimal manner to produce electricity or make cellulosic ethanol, there would still be a net loss of carbon sequestration in forests of the Coast Range and the west side of the Cascade Mountains for at least 100 years – and probably much longer, the study showed.
“Fuel reduction treatments should be forgone if forest ecosystems are to provide maximal amelioration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the next 100 …

Researchers have reconstructed atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past 2.1 million years in the sharpest detail yet, shedding new light on its role in the earth’s cycles of cooling and warming.
The study, in the June 19 issue of the journal Science, is the latest to rule out a drop in CO2 as the cause for earth’s ice ages growing longer and more intense some 850,000 years ago. But it also confirms many researchers’ suspicion that higher carbon dioxide levels coincided with warmer intervals during the study period.
The authors show that peak CO2 levels over the last 2.1 million years averaged only 280 parts per million; but today, CO2 is at 385 parts per million, …

Study finds that climate’s influence on production, drying of fuels — not higher temperatures or longer fire seasons alone — critical determinant of Western wildfire burned area
The recent increase in area burned by wildfires in the Western United States is a product not of higher temperatures or longer fire seasons alone, but a complex relationship between climate and fuels that varies among different ecosystems, according to a study conducted by U.S. Forest Service and university scientists. The study is the most detailed examination of wildfire in the United States to date and appears in the current issue of the journal Ecological Applications.
“We found that what matters most in accounting for large wildfires in the Western …