New life form found on Earth

[JohnSmith2007 353]

Yeah, like the fact that we are killing life as we know it on this planet and a small percentage of people on this living globe refuse to accept science.

The planet has had a lot worse thrown at it than humans. If giant asteroids didn't kill the planet there is nothing we can do to kill it. What little CO2 we put out is a drop in the ocean compared to what a good size volcano can give. Your worried about a tiny splinter (humans) when a giant club (volcanoes, asteroids and the suns variability) didn't get the job done. Really man, the two just can't be compared. Your science is overblown and corrupted by politics.

[^_^ 5,021]

John is right. We're not ruining the planet. We're simply ruining the planet for humans.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

John is right. We're not ruining the planet. We're simply ruining the planet for humans.

That's my argument. Gar-John is simply making a straw man.

[^_^ 5,021]

That's my argument. Gar-John is simply making a straw man.

Why do you care about humanity so much? So selfish.

[JohnSmith2007 353]

That's my argument. Gar-John is simply making a straw man.

No, you have no argument. We aren't going to get into this again. GW is yet another failed scare tactic that has been shown to be false. Go find something else to try and scare people with. This one is over.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

No, you have no argument. We aren't going to get into this again. GW is yet another failed scare tactic that has been shown to be false. Go find something else to try and scare people with. This one is over.

So you embrace scientific exploration, but believe that climate science is a conspiracy to get you to ride your bike. Nucking futz.

[JohnSmith2007 353]

So you embrace scientific exploration, but believe that climate science is a conspiracy to get you to ride your bike. Nucking futz.

Climate science isn't a conspiracy, the politics behind it are. The scientists have been corrupted with money and the desire for more funding. It is a well know fact that if a scientist doesn't tow the line with GW he does not get funding. Like I said, your sides failed attempt to scare everyone so the government can gain more control has failed. No more new government funding for GW will be approved. Once that happens the hysteria will slowly die down like it did for the last global scare cause, a new ice age. I will give you the last word. I no longer care enough about this to argue now that the threat of cap and tax is done. And just to head off your next point, if the EPA tries to regulate CO2 watch how fast they are defunded.

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This is not a global warming thread.

[chri'stina 190]

What if life exists in forms we don't even recognize?

Oh you mean like...God? Sure.

[JohnSmith2007 353]

This is not a global warming thread.

I know, sorry. I am done now.

[Ban Hammer 13,512]

Oh you mean like...God? Sure.

quit pwning him like that

[웃 910]

11/29/10World could heat up 4 degrees C in 50 years

There’s not much time to reach binding international agreements for limiting greenhouse gas emissions if climate negotiators are going to meet the goal of keeping global average temperatures from climbing no more than 2 degrees Celsius above those typical of pre-industrial times. Continuing with a business-as-usual approach to energy use into the foreseeable future could foster a 4 degree C warming, perhaps as early as the 2060s, a package of new papers concludes.

Such a dramatic temperature increase would be expected to trigger extensive, recurring droughts in some parts of the world, flood coastlines as sea levels rise and drastically alter the types of crops that can survive where lands remain arable, notes Mark New of the University of Oxford in England. New contributed to several of the 11 papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. The journal issue, officially dated January 13, 2011, has been posted early online to coincide with the November 29 start in Cancun, Mexico of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Climate negotiators tend to focus on political goals, like setting timetables of 2020 or 2050 for when binding emissions limits should go into effect, notes Oxford’s Niel Bowerman. “But Mother Nature doesn’t care about what we emit in any particular year,” the atmospheric physicist says. “What matters is cumulative carbon emissions.”

His Oxford colleagues have calculated that to keep maximum global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius, humanity can spew greenhouse gases equivalent to no more than 1 trillion metric tons of carbon (or 3.67 million metric tons of carbon dioxide) by 2200. Already, he adds, regarding this carbon limit: “We’re just over halfway there.”

Also important, he and his colleagues argue in their new paper, is the maximum rate at which society emits that carbon. If it’s too high, warming may occur faster than society can accommodate. That peak emission rate will occur within the next decade or so, he says, so “there’s an urgent need to peak emissions quickly if we want to prevent dangerous rates of warming within our lifetime.”

Climate scientist Richard Betts of the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office in Exeter led a team that attempted to gauge how soon a global 4 degree C warming might occur. They considered seven different “business-as-usual” scenarios of energy use.

“We don’t really know which [energy use and emissions] trajectory we’re on yet,” Betts says. But by using the upper value for likely emissions into the future — based on what industrial nations are emitting and what rapidly industrializing nations like China and India probably will soon be releasing annually — “you get to this projection showing us reaching 4 degrees in the 2060s,” Betts says.

There’s plenty of uncertainty surrounding such a projection, he acknowledges. “But if our models are a good judge,” he cautions, greenhouse gas emissions will have to peak within about five years or so if humanity hopes to dodge temperature increases exceeding 2 degrees C. When Betts’ group used less extreme versions of the business-as-usual emissions trajectories, the time to excessive warming lengthened.

“But most of these business-as-usual scenarios still gave you a 4 degree warming at some point in the next century,” he reports.

Unfortunately, climate models “don’t have a full grasp of reality,” notes Alice Bows, a climate scientist with the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester in England. The models can’t anticipate how people or cultures might react to climate threats to their economy. “So we started asking: ‘How realistic is it to think global emissions might stop growing in five or 10 years?’”

In their new paper, Bows and Manchester colleague Kevin Anderson decided to separately project likely greenhouse gas emissions scenarios for industrial and newly industrializing countries. As developing nations seek to increase their standards of living and market shares for new products, the researchers say, models should expect these nations’ near-term emissions to climb.

To slow the global growth of emissions, industrial powers may need to put a heavy brake on their own, Bows says. How much? “More than 6 percent per year — beginning immediately,” she says. And that’s to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

She and Anderson also reran their analyses to look at what might occur if industrial countries did limit their reductions to what might be deemed “economically feasible.” This yielded at best a 3 percent drop in annual emissions and eventually, a 4 degree warming of the globe. So in the absence of at least these emissions reductions, she says, “we could be looking at much more than a 4 degree warming.”

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/66782/title/World_could_heat_up_4_degrees_C_in_50_years

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Update from cnet. This bacteria can grow without any phosphorus at all!

NASA scientists discover all-new form of life

NASA scientists have discovered an entirely new form of life that shares no biological building blocks with anything currently known on Earth, the agency said today.

In a press conference held at NASA's Washington D.C. headquarters, scientists announced that they had discovered a new form of bacteria, known as GFAJ-1, in California's Mono Lake that has DNA completely foreign to anything ever before found on Earth. It substitutes arsenic at the DNA level for phosphorus.

That would distinguish it from every other form of life known to man, all of which, no matter how diverse, is comprised of the same six elements, phosphorus, sulfur, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. But the bacteria found in Mono Lake--which is known for its unusual chemistry, including very high levels of salinity, alkalinity, and arsenic--is made partly of arsenic, and has no phosphorus in its DNA.

"We've discovered an organism that can substitute one element for another," said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology research fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. "We've cracked open the door to what's possible for life elsewhere in the universe.

...

But Wolfe-Simon said that by discovering a microbe that has a new form of DNA, it forces scientists to question what they've long held as true--that all life was based on the same six components.

"The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria," NASA wrote in a release. "In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic, the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20024450-52.html

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Created by Global Warming! Send some to Vermont!