Earth's cooling came to sudden halt in 1900, study shows

An international study used tree rings and pollen to build the first?record of global climate change, continent by continent, over 2,000 years.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / April 23, 2013

Emperor penguins walk across sea ice near Ross Island, Antarctica, in this 2012, photo released by Thomas Beer. The continent's pristine habitat provides a laboratory for scientists studying the effects of climate change.

Courtesy Thomas Beer/AP/File

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A reconstruction of 2,000 years of global temperatures shows that a long-term decline in Earth's temperatures ended abruptly about 1900, replaced by a warming trend that has continued despite the persistence into the 20th century of the factors driving the cooling, according to a new study.

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Indeed, for several continents, the increase in global average temperatures from the 19th century to the 20th was the highest century-to-century increase during the 2,000-year span, the study indicates. It's the first study to attempt building a millennial-scale climate history, continent by continent.

The research wasn't designed to identify the cause of the warming trend, which climate researchers say has been triggered by a buildup of greenhouse gases ? mainly carbon dioxide ? as humans burned increasing amounts of fossil fuel and altered the landscape in ways that released CO2.

Still, it's hard to explain 20th-century warming without including the influence of rising CO2 levels, because the factors driving the cooling were still present, notes Darrell Kaufman, a researcher at Northern Arizona University and one of the lead authors on the paper formally reporting the results in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The study, five years in the making, drew on the work of 87 scientists in 24 countries as part of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program. One goal of the 27-year-old program is to gain a deeper understanding of Earth's climate history and the factors that contribute to climate variability.

The study used nature's proxies for thermometers ? tree rings, pollen, and other natural temperature indicators ? to build continent by continent a coordinated record of temperature changes during the past two millenniums.

Scientists use this proxy approach to reach farther into the climate's temperature history than the relatively short thermometer record allows. Such efforts aim to put today's climate into a deeper historical context as well as to identify the duration and possible triggers for natural swings that the climate undergoes over a variety of time scales.

Last March, for instance, a team led by Shaun Marcott at Oregon State University used climate proxies to build a global temperature record reaching back 1,200 years ? one that also noted the pre-1900 cooling trend.

Until now, however, the proxy approach has been used to reconstruct changes in global-average and hemisphere-wide temperatures, Dr. Kaufman explains.

"There was very little information about past climate variability at the regional scale," he says. Yet the team notes that no one lives in a global-average world. People live in specific regions where geography plays a vital role in shaping the climate patterns they experience.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/s_CQlowEYIE/Earth-s-cooling-came-to-sudden-halt-in-1900-study-shows

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SKorea's economic growth hits 2-year high in 1Q

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? South Korea's economy expanded at the fastest level in two years in the first quarter as capital expenditure and exports turned higher, the central bank said Thursday.

South Korea's economy grew 0.9 percent in the January-March period from three months prior, accelerating from 0.3 percent growth in the fourth quarter, according to Bank of Korea's preliminary reading.

Over a year earlier, Asia's fourth-largest economy expanded 1.5 percent, the same level as the previous quarter.

The bank said capital expenditure increased after declining for the previous three quarters. Exports also turned higher after the fourth quarter's drop despite Japan's aggressive monetary easing programs that drove down the value of yen, which gave a boost to Japanese firms that compete with South Korean exporters.

Growth in capital expenditure and exports helped mask a decline in private consumption, which turned lower for the first time in five quarters.

The better-than-expected reading comes after the central bank slightly revised down its forecast for South Korea's economy to 2.6 percent growth this year, from 2.8 percent three months earlier, citing a downgrade in the global economic outlook. But Bank of Korea held its key interest rate steady for a sixth month in April after two rate cuts last year, saying that South Korea's economy is on track to slow recovery and is not weak enough to justify an additional monetary easing.

South Korea's government takes a more grim view on the economy. Last month, it said South Korea's economy will expand 2.3 percent this year, instead of 3 percent it had predicted three months earlier, blaming the yen's slide that dents exports and weak consumer sentiment.

The government proposed $15 billion extra budget to boost the economy and to create jobs, which is under the parliament's review.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/skoreas-economic-growth-hits-2-high-1q-001029616--finance.html

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Gut Microbe Makes Diesel Biofuel

Reconfiguring the genetics of the food pathogen E. coli produces hydrocarbons indistinguishable from those burned in trucks

By David Biello

E. coli can now replicate the hydrocarbon molecules that burn predominantly in big trucks and other powerful moving machines. Image: Flickr/Carlos de Paz

Welding bits and pieces from various microbes and the camphor tree into the genetic code of Escherichia coli has allowed scientists to convince the stomach bug to produce hydrocarbons, rather than sickness or more E. coli. The gut microbe can now replicate the molecules, more commonly known as diesel, that burn predominantly in big trucks and other powerful moving machines.

"We wanted to make biofuels that could be used directly with existing engines to completely replace fossil fuels," explains biologist John Love of the University of Exeter in England, who led the research into fuels. "Our next step will be to try to develop a bacterium that could be deployed industrially." Love?s work was published April 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That means harnessing E. coli's already high tolerance for harsh conditions, such as the high acidity and warmth of the human digestive tract. That hardiness also seems to be helping the bacterium survive its own production of such longer-chain hydrocarbons, which could have proved toxic to the microbes, in the way brewer's yeast cells are killed off by the alcohol they ferment. The engineered E. coli used genetic code from the insect pathogen Photorhabdus luminescens and from the cyanobacterium Nostoc punctiforme as well as soil microbe Bacillus subtilis to make the fuel molecules from fatty acids, along with a gene from the camphor tree?Cinamomum camphora?to cut the resulting hydrocarbon to the right length.

The E. coli are currently fed on sugar and yeast extract, which suggests that the resulting fuel would be expensive compared with the kind refined from oil found in the ground. "We are hopeful that we could change their diet to something less valuable to humanity," Love suggests. "For example, organic wastes from agriculture or even sewage."

Exactly how the E. coli microbes expel the diesel fuel molecules is unknown at this point. The researchers have found them floating in the growth medium, suggesting the microbes are somehow secreting the hydrocarbons from their cells once produced. "We don't know how they get there yet," Love admits. But that may solve a problem posed to other would-be biofuels produced in microbes; algal oils have proved difficult to extract cheaply and effectively from inside the algae themselves, among other challenges.

Besides a better grasp of the process itself, fine-tuning the genetic engineering may one day yield other useful hydrocarbons, such as jet fuel or even gasoline (a short-chained hydrocarbon). Similar work at the University of California, Berkeley, has tinkered with E. coli genetics to allow the bacteria to digest the inedible parts of plants known as cellulose and turn them into microbial diesel that can be used in place of fossil-fuel diesel or other useful hydrocarbons. And E. coli has been harnessed in the past to make specialty oils for cosmetics; the company Amyris makes the moisturizing oil known as squalane from E. coli fed sugarcane and grown in vats in Brazil. The synthetic biologists at Amyris have also coaxed yeast to produce the antimalarial drug artemisinin, a technology that is currently being commercialized with drugmaker Sanofi.

Regardless, industrial-scale fuel production from microbes remains a much tougher proposition than making specialty oils or medicines, given the low cost and high volumes required to compete with the fuels made from fossil sources. "Fuel is actually a lot cheaper than artemisinin, so it has to be made in significantly larger quantities," Love notes. "That in itself is a challenge."

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=4cddaf5a21b5a5d4dda63c21773cb607

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Engadget HD Podcast 346 - 04.23.13

New remotes from Logitech and a slew of streaming video news from Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft lead off the podcast this week. Netflix finally has more customers than HBO in the US, so we'll dig into its Q4 numbers and see what's next for the streaming company. Cox, time Warner Cable and Sky all had updates for their mobile apps this week, which presents the question of Android vs. iOS for video streaming. Finally, another city is getting Google Fiber, and once again it's a place neither of us live in -- hopefully the NFL Draft will go better.

Hosts: Ben Drawbaugh (@bjdraw), Richard Lawler (@rjcc)

Producer: James Trew (@itstrew)

Hear the podcast

Filed under: Podcasts, HD

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/lZ71pRaMyrQ/

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Drug czar: Pot legalization won't change mission

BALTIMORE (AP) ? The nation's drug czar says the legalization of marijuana in Washington state and Colorado won't change his office's mission of fighting the nation's drug problem by getting treatment for those battling addictions

Gil Kerlikowske, director of the National Drug Control Policy, released President Barack Obama's 2013 strategy for fighting drug addiction Wednesday at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

He says questions about the legal implications of the policy changes in Washington state and Colorado are best left to the Justice Department.

The strategy includes a greater emphasis on using public health tools to battle addiction and diverting non-violent drug offenders into treatment instead of prisons.

Millions of people in the United States will become eligible in less than a year for treatment for substance abuse under the new health care overhaul.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/drug-czar-pot-legalization-wont-change-mission-185458992.html

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Dewey ex-chairman agrees to proposed settlement to resolve claims

By Casey Sullivan

(Reuters) - The former chairman of Dewey & LeBoeuf has agreed to pay more than half a million dollars in a proposed settlement with Dewey's trustee and insurer to resolve claims that bad management led to the law firm's demise, according to papers filed in federal bankruptcy court.

Former Dewey Chairman Steve Davis has agreed to pay $511,145 to settle claims that he mismanaged Dewey & LeBoeuf, which last May became the largest law firm in U.S. history to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. XL Specialty Insurance Co, which issued Dewey's management liability insurance policy, has agreed to pay $19 million in the proposed settlement, according to court documents.

"The Settlement Agreement is a substantially more favorable result than litigation," said Edward Weisfelner, speaking on behalf of the liquidation trustee Alan Jacobs, in court papers.

Without a settlement, Weisfelner said, Dewey's estate would face large litigation expenses to go after Davis and the insurance company in court, as well as the risk of not collecting a full recovery from the parties.

"Litigation of the Management Claims would require extensive discovery, including millions of pages of documents to review and over 100 depositions," he said.

The settlement agreement still needs a judge's approval. A hearing on the proposed deal is scheduled for May 13.

Reached Tuesday, Kevin Van Wart, a lawyer for Davis, said: "Mr. Davis is pleased with the settlement, which is a practical resolution for all concerned."

A spokeswoman for XL Specialty Insurance Co did not immediately return a request for comment.

The case is: In re: Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP, Debtor, United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, Case No. 12-12321 (MG)

(This story was fixed to correct that XL Specialty Insurance Co issued Dewey's management liability insurance policy, not that XL is the policyholder; in second paragraph)

(Reporting by Casey Sullivan; Editing by Alden Bentley and Phil Berlowitz)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dewey-ex-chairman-agrees-proposed-settlement-resolve-claims-215240227--finance.html

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STOP LOSS: Democrats Bent on Forcing Small Businesses into ...

As the Peak has pointed out time and time again, the Democrat-controlled Colorado state legislature have paid ample lip service to small business and economic issues, but their actions during the session tell a different story altogether.? Far left social issues such as civil unions, gun control, and sex ed have taken most the air out of the room, and when the democrats actually expended the effort to address business issues, they are have been throwing up more regulations, impediments, and interference in the marketplace.? Denver Rep. Beth McCann has offered the latest example.

Legislators on the left have targeted health plans popular with small businesses to force small businesses into the more expensive small-group market.? Eliminating the popular stop-loss insurance option is important to the left because the small business health exchange that the state plans to launch needs the small businesses with young, healthy employees in order to spread out costs and to prevent the state?s program from becoming almost impossibly expensive.

Stop-loss insurance is a simple type of policy that many small businesses use as an alternative to expensive group policies.? In a stop-loss insurance arrangement, the company self-insures to a certain extent, and then purchases stop-loss insurance to protect against catastrophic claims.? In Colorado, it?s common for the stop-loss coverage to kick in at $15,000 per person, and a higher aggregate amount for the entire company.? This is a great option for small companies with young, healthy employees.? In fact, testimony at the legislature this year included a vignette about a local company with five employees who took advantage of stop-loss insurance, and had a scant $300 in claims above what they spent on the annual premium last year.

Unfortunately for growing businesses that view this type of insurance as a way to provide benefits for employees and control costs, these types of plans pose a threat to the future small-group state insurance exchange by attracting companies with low-risk employees.? But Beth McCann had a plan:? if she could pass a law that would radically increase the minimum stop-loss coverage amount, a quick vote in the legislature and a stroke of Governor Hickenlooper?s pen could essentially wipe out this insurance option by rendering it economically useless.

At first she introduced a bill, HB13-1290, that stated that stop-loss insurance providers could not pay a penny in claims until an individual?s claims hit $30,000.? After an amendment lowering that amount to $20,000, she was able to convince enough of her fellow Democrats to get this one through the Health, Insurance and Environment Committee.? By the state changing the economics of these policies, it will invariably push companies into the more expensive small-group market, and grease the skids for the expensive, government-run exchange.

Source: http://coloradopeakpolitics.com/2013/04/23/stop-loss-democrats-bent-on-forcing-small-businesses-into-state-run-insurance/

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