Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

The potential role of molecular hydrogen (H2) as a future alternative energy carrier has generated widespread interest. The possible amount of additional hydrogen emission into the atmosphere in a hydrogen-based economy depends on future hydrogen production and leakage rates throughout the complete process chain. However, the expected emissions are highly uncertain. Based on the current [...]

Climate change poses threats to human health, safety, and survival via weather extremes and climatic impacts on food yields, fresh water, infectious diseases, conflict, and displacement. Paradoxically, these risks to health are neither widely nor fully recognized. Historical experiences of diverse societies experiencing climatic changes, spanning multicentury to single-year duration, provide insights into population health [...]

Current consensus on global climate change predicts warming trends driven by anthropogenic forcing, with maximum temperature changes projected in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) high latitudes during winter. Yet, global temperature trends show little warming over the most recent decade or so. For longer time periods appropriate to the assessment of trends, however, global temperatures have [...]

Ocean acidification may have severe consequences for marine ecosystems; however, assessing its future impact is difficult because laboratory experiments and field observations are limited by their reduced ecologic complexity and sample period, respectively. In contrast, the geological record contains long-term evidence for a variety of global environmental perturbations, including ocean acidification plus their associated biotic [...]

Understanding the causes and consequences of wildfires in forests of the western United States requires integrated information about fire, climate changes, and human activity on multiple temporal scales. We use sedimentary charcoal accumulation rates to construct long-term variations in fire during the past 3,000 y in the American West and compare this record to independent [...]

Here we show that abnormal olfactory preferences and loss of behavioural lateralization exhibited by two species of larval coral reef fish exposed to high CO2 can be rapidly and effectively reversed by treatment with an antagonist of the GABA-A receptor. GABA-A is a major neurotransmitter receptor in the vertebrate brain. Thus, our results indicate that [...]

Ocean acidification is considered a major threat to calcifying organisms4, 5, 6. Detecting its magnitude and impacts on regional scales requires accurate knowledge of the level of natural variability of surface ocean carbonate ion concentrations on seasonal to annual timescales and beyond. Ocean observations are severely limited with respect to providing reliable estimates of the [...]