An international scientific research project known as the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP), run by 30 teams from 12 countries, has attempted to understand the severity and scale of global impacts of climate change. The project compares model projections on water scarcity, crop yields, disease, floods among other issues to see how they could interact.

The series of papers published by the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that policymakers might be underestimating the social and economic consequences of climate change due to insufficient attention on how different climate risks are interconnected.

Europe, North America at risk

One paper whose lead author is Franziska Piontek of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research explores impacts related to ‘water, agriculture, ecosystems, and malaria at different levels of global warming.’ The study concludes that:

‘… uncertainty arising from the impact models is considerable, and larger than that from the climate models. In a low probability-high impact worst-case assessment, almost the whole inhabited world is at risk for multisectoral pressures.’

The uncertainties in the model are large enough that they may ‘mask’ the risk of a ‘worst case’ scenario of ‘multisectoral hotspots,’ where impacts affecting ‘water, agriculture, ecosystems, and health’ […]

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Engineers have sped up a naturally occurring process to make crude oil from algae from about a million years to just minutes.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pumped a slurry of wet algae into a chemical reactor, which then subjects the biological material to very hot water under high pressure to tear it apart and convert it into liquid and gas fuels.

The resulting crude oil can then be conventionally refined into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel, the researchers reported in the journal Algal Research.

The team’s experiments converted more than 50 percent of the algae’s carbon into crude oil, sometimes up to 70 percent, in about one hour and created nothing more hazardous than an odor of dirty socks, rotten eggs and wood smoke from the processed biological material.

In fact, the leftover water and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium can be recycled to grow more algae.

Algae has long been considered a potential source of biofuel and has been produced by several companies on a research scale, but the fuel was projected to be prohibitively expensive.

However, the recently developed technology uses a number of methods to reduce costs and has been licensed by the Utah-based […]

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Christmas is a season of marvelous and mystical experiences, and maybe it seems churlish to let science and history intrude. What if the Star of Bethlehem was a comet? What if Christ was born in May instead of December? What if the whole literal Biblical picture of how we came to be here is open to question (as it certainly is)? Would that ruin the Christmas experience somehow? Would we grown-ups feel like children who’d had Santa Claus snatched away from them?

Some would, for sure. But this emotionally dangerous ground between faith and science, metaphysics and physics, is familiar territory for Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, a friend and fellow countryman of the Argentine-born Pope Francis.

Bishop Sánchez is the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. It is housed in an elegant little building surrounded by gardens right in the heart of the Vatican, and it promises to be the epicenter of some seismic controversies to come.

Atheists and fundamentalists, both, will be tempted to say the whole notion of a pontifical academy of science is a contradiction in terms. Back in the fiery heyday of the Inquisition, after all, pontiffs and scientists were in deadly opposition, just as Bible-waving Evangelicals and […]

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Scotland’s renewable electricity output has reached record-high levels, according to official statistics released today.

The figures, published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, show that renewables met a record-breaking 40.3 per cent of gross electricity consumption in 2012, confirming that Scotland is on track to meet its interim target of 50% by 2015.

This is important progress towards the Government’s 2020 target of the equivalent of 100 per cent of Scotland’s electricity needs met from renewable electricity, as well as more from other sources.

Scottish renewable electricity made up 36 per cent of the UK’s renewable energy generation in 2012. Scotland continues to be a net exporter of electricity, exporting over 26 per cent of generation in 2012.

Also, quarterly data up to Q3 2013 shows that renewable generation in 2013 is on track to beat the record year set in 2012.

Energy Minister Fergus Ewing said: ‘These figures show that renewable electricity in Scotland is going from strength to strength, confirming that 2012 was a record year for generation in Scotland and that 2013 looks set to be even better. We can already see from the first 9 months of 2013 that generation is 4 per cent higher compared to the same […]

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Greenland has been hiding a lot of melt water that may or may not end up contributing to rising sea levels. The discovery of liquid water hiding inside layers of glacier-top snow in southern Greenland came as a shock to the scientists drilling the ice.

‘It was a complete surprise,

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