Like a dirty filter, the Earth's oceans are growing less efficient at absorbing vast amounts of carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas produced by fossil-fuel burning, reports a study co-authored by Francois Primeau (pictured), UC Irvine Earth system science associate professor. The oceans largely kept up when carbon dioxide emissions began soaring in the 1950s, but the absorption rate has slowed since the 1980s and dropped off even more noticeably since 2000, according to the recent study in the journal Nature.   More »

It's the year 2060, and 75 percent of drivers in the Greater Los Angeles area have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that emit only water vapor. Look into Shane Stephens-Romero's crystal ball - a computer model called STREET - and find that air quality has significantly improved. Greenhouse gas emissions are more than 60 percent lower than in 2009, and levels of microscopic soot and ozone are about 15 percent and 10 percent lower, respectively. "For the first time, we can look at these future fuel scenarios and say how they're going to impact things like ozone and particulate matter, which have severe effects on people's lungs and quality of life," says Stephens-Romero (pictured), a UC Irvine doctoral candidate in the Advanced Power & Energy Program. His 2060 analysis appeared online recently in Environmental Science & Technology.   More »

UCI Earth system scientist Adam Martiny (pictured) will receive about $658,000 of a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant over four years to study nitrate uptake by single-cell bacteria called prochlorococcus in the ocean off Bermuda. Martiny and colleagues recently reported that these bacteria - which perform photosynthesis in the ocean - have genes responsible for taking up nitrogen. Previously, scientists believed they only took in ammonium, generated from dead cells in the water. The gain and loss of nitrogen is important to the global carbon cycle. Martiny's study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   More »

The UC Irvine campus will become a living renewable energy laboratory under a statewide program designed to make electricity generation and transportation safer, cleaner and more affordable for Californians. The Advanced Power & Energy Program at The Henry Samueli School of Engineering has been awarded $2 million over three years to create a roadmap for a cost-effective and reliable energy infrastructure that maximizes use of renewable resources such as solar photovoltaics, wind and biomass fuels while improving transportation, waste management and energy efficiency in buildings. Lessons learned at UCI will help communities establish their own flexible, secure and climate-neutral energy infrastructures. The California Energy Commission awarded UCI nearly $1 million for the project. The balance includes in-kind support from such partners as CTG Energetics and Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.   More »

Dinosaurs appeared on Earth about 230 million years ago, when atmospheric oxygen levels were close to half what they are today. Scientists wonder how they survived - for 165 million years - under these varying conditions. UC Irvine biologist James Hicks is finding answers in the alligator, a modern relative of the dinosaur. In a recent study, Hicks and UCI postdoctoral researcher Tomasz Owerkowicz found that alligators incubated and raised in an environment with just 12 percent oxygen (compared to today's 21 percent) had larger hearts and lungs and improved cardiopulmonary function. "In a similar vein, the success of dinosaurs probably depended on the effectiveness of their lungs and hearts in obtaining oxygen from air and distributing it throughout the body," Hicks says. "Our results provide indirect evidence that dinosaurs must have had superior oxygen delivery systems." The study appeared in the Journal of Experimental Biology.   More »

UC Irvine will receive $2 million over five years as part of two of 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers recently announced by the U.S. Department of Energy. The goal is to accelerate scientific breakthroughs necessary to build a sustainable energy economy. Chemists John C. Hemminger (pictured) and Matt Law are part of the Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics involving Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, which will develop materials that convert sunlight to electricity with high efficiency. Chemist Reg Penner and physicist Phil Collins are involved with the Center for the Science of Precision Multifunctional Nanostructure for Electrical Energy Storage at the University of Maryland that aims to design a new generation of electrodes for electrical energy storage.   More »

A recent study in the journal Science found that drought affects the Amazon rainforest more than previously thought, killing trees, which then release carbon, the main contributor to global warming. Claudia Czimczik (pictured), a project scientist in UC Irvine's Department of Earth System Science, played a small but integral part in the study by, well, digging in the dirt. Czimczik took a trip in 2001 to Peru, during which she collected soil. "For a lot of people, soil is just dirt, and it's messy when you play with it, but it's important," Czimczik says. "It supports the whole forest system, which affects not just local people and weather patterns but the global atmosphere and climate."   More »

UC Irvine biologists Al Bennett, Brandon Gaut and Tony Long received $900,000 from the National Science Foundation to study bacteria at high temperatures, which will give them insight into evolution. By warming E. coli and studying how their offspring evolve at higher temperatures, biologists can watch an accelerated evolutionary process and learn how bacteria adapt to warming. This project will include education for K-12 teachers. Next summer, ecology & evolutionary biology lecturer Brad Hughes will give a course on evolution to teachers, using the E. coli system as a model.   More »

In the rainforests of equatorial Asia, the practice of using fire to clear forests and destroy organic soil increases substantially in dry years, releasing huge amounts of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, finds a study co-authored by James Randerson (pictured), UC Irvine climate scientist. In 2006, the climate was three times drier in the region than it was in 2000, and the carbon emissions were 30 times greater – exceeding emissions from fossil fuel burning. The study appears online the week of Monday, Dec. 8, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   More »

The fight against climate warming has an unexpected ally in mushrooms growing in dry spruce forests covering Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and other northern regions, a new UC Irvine study finds. When soil in these forests is warmed, fungi that feed on dead plant material dry out and produce significantly less climate-warming carbon dioxide than fungi in cooler, wetter soil. Knowing how forests cycle carbon is crucial to accurately predicting global climate warming, which in turn guides public policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The study by Steven Allison and Kathleen Treseder appeared online Monday, Nov. 3, in the journal Global Change Biology.   More »

Warmer temperatures and longer dry spells have killed thousands of trees and shrubs in a Southern California mountain range, pushing the plants’ habitat an average of 213 feet up the mountain over the past 30 years, a UC Irvine study has determined. The study, by Michael Goulden and Anne Kelly, is the first to show directly the impact of climate change on a mountainous ecosystem by physically studying the location of plants, and it demonstrates what could occur globally if the Earth’s temperature continues to rise. The research appears online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   More »

Jim Randerson, associate professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine, helped write a new federal report that links a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to changes in climate change patterns and vegetation across the U.S. The report says the changes could disrupt water supplies, agriculture, forestry and ecosystems for decades. Randerson contributed to the section on land resources that discusses forests and arid lands. He researches the global carbon cycle, including links between deforestation and fire and drought in the tropics, and the impact of changes in high northern-latitude climate on terrestrial ecosystems.   More »

Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, chemistry professor at UC Irvine, has been awarded the Tolman Medal from the Southern California section of the American Chemical Society in recognition of her outstanding contributions to chemistry. She will receive the prize during a dinner meeting at the University Club Wednesday, May 7. Finlayson-Pitts studies chemical reactions in the atmosphere to better understand air pollution. She directs AirUCI (Atmospheric Integrated Research for Understanding Chemistry at Interfaces), a group that researches how reactions on the surfaces of airborne particles, buildings and vegetation affect air quality and global climate change.   More »

The American Geophysical Union today released a new statement updating its position on climate change, the evidence for it, potential consequences from it, and how to respond to it. Michael Prather (pictured), Fred Kavli Professor of Earth System Science at UC Irvine, chaired the committee that drafted the new statement. The statement is the first revision since 2003 of the climate-change position of the AGU, the world's largest scientific society of Earth and space scientists. AGU has a membership of 50,000 researchers, teachers and students in 137 countries.   More »

Ice loss in Antarctica increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers and is now nearly as great as that observed in Greenland, according to a new, comprehensive study by UC Irvine and NASA scientists. In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team led by Eric Rignot (pictured), professor of Earth system science at UCI and a scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, estimated changes in Antarctica’s ice mass between 1996 and 2006 and mapped patterns of ice loss on a glacier-by-glacier basis. They detected a sharp jump in Antarctica’s ice loss, from enough ice to raise global sea level by 0.3 millimeters (.01 inches) a year in 1996, to 0.5 millimeters (.02 inches) a year in 2006. Results of the study are published in February’s issue of Nature Geoscience.   More »

Charlie Zender, associate professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine, testified Thursday, Oct. 18, at a congressional hearing about the role of black carbon in climate change. Zender (pictured, center) was one of five climate scientists to testify before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in Washington D.C. Zender led a study recently that found that dirty snow can explain one-third or more of the Arctic warming primarily attributed to greenhouse gases. Snow becomes dirty when soot from tailpipes, smoke stacks and forest fires enters the atmosphere and falls to the ground.   More »

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize Friday, Oct. 12, for its work to alert the world to the threat of global warming. Several UC Irvine climate scientists have played a part in writing, reviewing and editing IPCC climate change reports over the last decade, including Donald Blake, Michael Goulden, Gudrun Magnusdottir, Michael Prather (pictured), James Randerson, Soroosh Sorooshian, Susan Trumbore, Stan Tyler, Jin-Yi Yu and Charlie Zender. According to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, "Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming." The IPCC shares this award with former Vice President Al Gore.   More »

The U.S. House of Representatives on Monday passed HR 593, a resolution recognizing F. Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen for their groundbreaking work in atmospheric chemistry. The trio shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering that chlorofluorocarbons in products such as aerosol sprays and coolants were damaging the Earth’s protective ozone layer. The finding was controversial at first, but it ultimately led to a world ban on CFCs. Rowland (pictured), Donald Bren Research Professor of Chemistry and Earth System Science at UCI, regularly addresses major conferences and advises world leaders on the impact and dangers of ozone depletion and global warming. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Garden Grove, sponsored the bill.   More »

The global warming debate has focused on carbon dioxide emissions, but scientists at UC Irvine have determined that a lesser-known mechanism – dirty snow – can explain one-third or more of the Arctic warming primarily attributed to greenhouse gases. Snow becomes dirty when soot from tailpipes, smoke stacks and forest fires enters the atmosphere and falls to the ground. Soot-infused snow is darker than natural snow. Dark surfaces absorb sunlight and cause warming, while bright surfaces reflect heat back into space and cause cooling. The study by Earth System Science researchers Charlie Zender (pictured), Mark Flanner and James Randerson was published Tuesday, June 5, in the Journal of Geophysical Research.   More »

Did "An Inconvenient Truth" pique your curiosity about global climate change? If so, check out a free public lecture by renewable energy guru Nathan Lewis at 4 p.m. Friday, May 4, in Rowland Hall Room 104. Lewis, a professor at California Institute of Technology, will speak on "Scientific Challenges in Sustainable Energy Technology," hosted by the UC Irvine Department of Chemistry. Lewis will discuss the challenges -- technical, political and economic -- involved with widespread adoption of energy technology that harnesses the power of wind, water and sun.   More »