Climate Meddling Dates Back 8,000 Years. By Alexandra Witze, Science News, 3/29/11. “People started influencing their home planet’s climate millennia before the industrial revolution’s fossil fuel–burning machines began spewing carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, a new study suggests. Clearing land -- first to hunt and gather, and then to farm -- removed trees that otherwise would have soaked up carbon dioxide. The new work suggests that humans working the land put nearly 350 billion metric tons of carbon -- many times other estimates -- into the atmosphere by the year 1850. (For comparison, between 1850 and 2000 people added 440 billion tons of carbon, mostly from burning fossil fuels — surpassing in a century and a half what had taken humanity eight millennia.)…

“[Team leader Jed Kaplan of the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland] reported the work on March 25 at an American Geophysical Union conference on past civilizations and climate. He and Lausanne colleague Kristen Krumhardt also describe the findings in an upcoming issue of Holocene… Climate scientists often select 1850 as the putative start of the industrial revolution. But the world in 1850 was not a pristine globe untouched by human hands... Rather, people cut down forests and cleared land early on... Previous research often assumed that as the world’s population grew, the proportion of cleared land grew as well. But the more people crowded onto a landscape, the more efficient they became at extracting dinner from it… Irrigation, fertilizer, multicropping and new tools allowed farmers to increase crop yields, and per-capita land use began to drop...

“Kaplan and Krumhardt looked at how growing population and changing land-use trends affected carbon emissions. The scientists gathered data on how many people lived in each population center for the past 8,000 years, then cataloged how land use changed over time. The result: a dramatic video showing a green-forested world giving way to a brown spread of deforestation, up until the modern era.”

Aircraft Contrails Stoke Warming, Cloud Formation. By Alister Doyle, Reuters, 3/29/11. “Aircraft condensation trails criss-crossing the sky may be warming the planet on a normal day more than the carbon dioxide emitted by all planes since the Wright Brothers' first flight in 1903, a study said on Tuesday. It indicated that contrails -- white lines of Vapor left by jet engines -- also have big knock-on effects by adding to the formation of high-altitude, heat-trapping cirrus clouds as the lines break up. The findings may help governments fix penalties on planes' greenhouse gas emissions in a U.N.-led assault on climate change. Or new engines might be designed to limit Vapor and instead spit out water drops or ice that fall from the sky…

“But a key difference is that CO2 lingers for decades while warming from contrails quickly ends if flights are grounded, such as after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, or in Europe after last year's Icelandic volcano eruption. ‘You can get rid of contrails very quickly. You can't get rid of CO2 quickly,’ lead author Ulrike Burkhardt at DLR told Reuters... Olivier Boucher, of the Met Office Hadley Center in England…said the findings might bring changes in air traffic control, for instance diverting planes from regions or altitudes where air moisture was high and favored cirrus formation. But a problem was that any benefits of fewer contrails might be canceled out by higher fuel use on longer routes.”

San Onofre Wave Farm Idea Churns Up Concerns. By Tony Barboza, LATimes, 3/30/11. “The waves off San Onofre have for generations beckoned surfers and sport fishermen to a wild stretch of coastline in the shadow of domed nuclear reactors. Now, an Orange County entrepreneur wants to tap the power of that legendary surf in a novel but highly controversial plan to build one of the nation's first hydrokinetic wave farms. Federal energy regulators have given JD Products of Fountain Valley permission to begin a three-year study looking at the feasibility of installing thousands of ocean wave electricity generators a mile off San Onofre State Beach. The firm's general manager, Chong Hun Kim, said he chose the site because it is close to transmission lines that serve the San Onofre nuclear power plant…

“Environmental groups, which are broadly supportive of renewable energy projects, said putting the devices in the waters of San Onofre could harm marine life and potentially mar the view from the coastline. Surfers are worried it would dampen waves and alter seafloor terrain along a stretch of coast famed for its surf breaks. Sport-fishing groups said a wave farm could block off favored waters for sand bass, bonito and barracuda fishing.”

Confidence Slips Away as Japan Battles Nuclear Peril. By Ken Belson and Hiroko Tabuchi, NYTimes, 3/ 29/11. “After workers switched on the first set of control room lights at Japan’s crippled power plant in Fukushima last week, the Japanese government offered its strongest assurances yet that its nuclear crisis was close to being under control… But less than a week later, a deluge of contaminated water, plutonium traces in the soil and an increasingly hazardous environment for workers at the plant have forced government officials to confront the reality that the emergency measures they have taken to keep nuclear fuel cool are producing increasingly dangerous side effects…

“The setbacks have raised questions about how long, and at what cost, Japan can keep up what experts call its “feed and bleed” strategy of cooling the reactor’ fuel rods with emergency infusions of water from the ocean and now from freshwater sources. That cooling strategy… has released harmful amounts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere… making it perilous for some of the hundreds of workers at the plant to further critical repair work… The continuing crisis also underscores the unprecedented scale and complexity of the problems facing Fukushima… containing more long-lived radioactivity than the Chernobyl reactor, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research [IEER], based in Takoma Park, Md.”

Charging Ahead: Report Predicts 3.8 Million Electrics on Road by 2016. By Todd Woody, Grist, 3/29/11. “The big question is whether battery-powered vehicles are the future or a fad. The answer won't be known for years but a new report from GTM Research offers some interesting insights into where the electric road might lead. The report, ‘The Networked EV: The Convergence of Smart Grids and Electric Vehicles,’ predicts there will be 3.8 million electric cars on the road worldwide by 2016, with about 1.5 million in the United States, 1.5 million in Europe and 760,000 in Asia. ‘It is the hope of this industry that just as cellular phones and laptops before them, EVs will begin as luxury products but will eventually become widely affordable,’ wrote David J. Leeds, the report's author… The early adopters of electric cars that will like drive the industry aren't so much all those Prius owners but corporate accountants looking to keep a lid on the cost of company fleets of cars and trucks… wrote Leeds. ‘More than any other sources, commercial and government fleet purchases have the power to accelerate the adoption curve of this market.’”