The growth in China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is far outpacing previous estimates, making the goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases even more difficult, according to a new analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Diego.

Previous estimates, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say the region that includes China will see a 2.5 to 5 percent annual increase in CO2 emissions, the largest contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gases, between 2004 and 2010. The new UC analysis puts that annual growth rate for China to at least 11 percent for the same time period.

Continue reading "New analysis shows alarming increase in expected growth of China's carbon dioxide emissions" »

Posted by Cyril at 3:53 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)

CNR's new Society and Environment major helped propel the University of California system to the #4 slot in Sierra magazine's new story on "green" colleges and universities. The feature, "Ten that Get It", in its November/December issue also congratulates the UC system on its "green policy."

"When such a large and important educational institution takes such significant, systemic steps toward addressing global warming it can’t help but influence the thinking of many tens of thousands of students,” said Bob Sipchen, the magazine’s editor-in-chief. “If students carry these strong environmental values back to their communities and into their careers, UC’s initiative will reverberate globally."

Related links:

• Sustainability at UC Berkeley


• The UC system's green policy (PDF)

Posted by Eva St. Clair at 10:53 AM | Permalink

CNR Professor Claire Kremen’s research on bee decline has been cited in publications ranging from the New York Times to KQED, but a recent article in House and Garden details what you can do to help bees.

According to research conducted by ESPM Professor Gordon Frankie as well as Kremen, the solution may be your garden. Urban and suburban gardens can provide refuge for native species of wild bees driven from their natural habitat.

Continue reading "Suburban Gardens Solution to Bee Decline" »

Posted by Stephanie Ludwig at 1:38 PM | Permalink

The Office of the Chancellor has announced the formation of the committee that will search and make recommendations for a new dean of the College of Natural Resources.

The members of the committee are:

• William Dietrich, Professor, Earth & Planetary Science (Committee Chair)
• Inez Fung, Professor, ESPM and Earth & Planetary Science
• Marc Hellerstein, Associate Professor, NST
  
• Maggi Kelly, Cooperative Extension Specialist and Adjunct Associate Professor, ESPM
• Randy Scheckman, Professor, Cell & Developmental Biology
• Lydia Sohn, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering
• Brian Wright, Professor, ARE
• Dick Beahrs, Board Member, CNR Advisory Board
• Kathryn Moriarty Baldwin, Assistant Dean for Development & Public Information
• Elisabeth Rose Middleton, Graduate Student, ESPM

The committee will consult with the CNR community both for suggestions and views on candidates.

Posted by Cyril at 8:14 AM | Permalink

Continue reading "Executive Associate Dean, Departmental Leadership Announced" »

Posted by Cyril at 3:24 PM | Permalink

Professor J. Keith Gilless has been appointed interim dean of the College of Natural Resources effective July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008. Gilless joined the faculty in1983 and is professor of Forest Economics and Management jointly in the departments of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and of Agricultural and Resource Economics. He is currently serving as the executive associate dean of the College and will succeed Dean Paul Ludden, who has accepted the position of provost and vice president for academic affairs at Southern Methodist University.

Continue reading "J. Keith Gilless named Interim Dean" »

Posted by Cyril at 9:58 AM | Permalink

This year, CNR student Betty Sousa was one of four finalists for the University Medal.

Hometown: Davis, Calif.
Age: 23
Major: Nutritional science: physiology and metabolism

Favorite class at Cal: My Sustainable Gardening seminar....

Continue reading "University Medal Finalist Betty Sousa" »

Posted by Cyril at 3:55 PM | Permalink

From the Associated Press:

Increased production of biofuels such as ethanol might help farmers' bottom lines and address climate-change concerns, but it could inflate food prices worldwide, warns a former White House economist.

"Worldwide, especially in developing countries ... food price increases are definitely something we're going to have to come to grips with," said David Sunding, who served on former President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers.

Sunding, an [agricultural resources and economics] professor at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke on March 26 to water experts at a conference at the University of Nebraska.

The combination of rising energy prices and the demand for corn, which is used to produce ethanol, will continue to drive up commodity prices, he said.

Corn prices have already begun to soar. A rush to turn more land into corn production could decrease supplies of other commodities, driving up prices of them as well.

The resulting higher market prices could then dampen the public's support for government subsidies that are designed to help farmers reap profits when markets are down.

Sunding envisioned a scenario in which price supports for farmers are replaced by another government program — one to purchase food to keep prices affordable and prevent hunger.

Energy costs will also be a factor, said Sunding, who predicted that "ag policy will ... become energy policy."

"The ag sector," he added, "is so vulnerable to energy price changes."

Higher fuel costs affect farm operations that depend on irrigation and make it more expensive for farmers to transport their crops.

A study released last month by the Energy Information Administration, an arm of the federal government that provides energy statistics, forecasts that world oil prices might decrease over the next five or six years, then steadily increase over the next two decades.

Original article (IHT)

Posted by Cyril at 8:28 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

Thanks to Congress, the U.S. "sprang forward" three weeks early this year, and daylight savings time will last one week longer in the fall. The idea behind the switch is energy conservation.

But as reported here in January, two ARE researchers, doctoral students Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, found that a similar switch in Australia didn't meet the mark. Now that the the bleary-eyed mornings and brighter evenings are upon us, their work is getting a lot more attention:

Daylight Savings Might Not Save Energy (Video - ABC News)

Does daylight-saving time really save energy? (ScienceBlogs)

Daylight Savings Time: Energy Dud? (Discovery Channel News)

Economists find no difference in electricity usage when Australia moved time change back (Contra Costa Times)

Posted by Cyril at 10:00 AM | Permalink

From The San Francisco Chronicle [original URL]
By Alison Rood

When Professor Gordon Frankie wants to impress schoolchildren with the importance of bees, he lays out an array of foods such as berries, grapes, pears and chocolate alongside a couple of dried-out tortillas and rice cakes and asks them which foods they prefer.

"Invariably the kids go for the fruits and chocolate," he said. "Then I tell them: In a world without bees, the only choice they'd have would be the dried-out tortillas or rice cakes, since wheat and rice are self-pollinated. Even chocolate, from the cacao plant, depends on the pollination of bees. That gets their attention."

Frankie, an entomologist at UC Berkeley and a specialist in the behavior of native bees, has been the leader of a decadelong urban bee research project. By documenting bee diversity and populations in urban gardens throughout California, he's discovering which flowering plants attract native bees and determining whether urban gardens can support bees. He said the declining native bee population is comparable to global warming in terms of a potential ecological catastrophe.

READ THE ARTICLE

Posted by Cyril at 1:33 PM | Permalink

From The San Francisco Chronicle [original URL]
by Tom Abate

About 25 years ago, Congress encouraged universities to commercialize federally funded research by allowing both schools and scientists to profit when they patented discoveries and licensed them to private firms.

This week, hundreds of top university officials will gather in San Francisco as the Association of University Technology Managers meets to mull the promise and perils of this process known as technology transfer.

To Bay Area residents, tech transfer is as familiar as the myth of Silicon Valley: Take knowledge, add capital and create startups....

....The meeting, which starts tonight and runs through Saturday, comes as the controversy around university-industry partnerships is flaring up again, thanks to the proposed $500 million research partnership between the University of California and British Petroleum to develop fuels....

READ THE ARTICLE

Posted by Cyril at 1:16 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has awarded the Cozzarelli Prize to ARE assistant professor Max Auffhammer and his co-authors for their 2006 paper showing that reductions of human-generated air pollution could create unexpected agricultural benefits in one of the world's poorest regions.

Auffhammer, along with co-authors from UC San Diego, analyzed historical data on Indian rice harvests and found that harvests would have been 20 to 25 percent higher during some years in the 1990s if certain negative climate impacts had not occurred.

Just six papers, out of the 3,300 research articles published in PNAS in 2006, were chosen for the Cozzarelli prize.

The award, originally named the "Paper of the Year Prize," recognizes recently published PNAS articles of scientific excellence and originality. The lab motto of Nick Cozzarelli, the late Editor-in-Chief, was "Blast ahead," as he encouraged researchers to push the envelope of discovery. In his honor, this year the award was renamed the Cozzarelli Prize.

Integrated model shows that atmospheric brown clouds and greenhouse gases have reduced rice harvests in India by Maximilian Auffhammer, V. Ramanathan, and Jeffrey R. Vincent.

Posted by Cyril at 2:50 PM | Permalink

Launch ABC News Video

To better understand why an endangered seabird's numbers plummeted over the past century, researchers at CNR turned to museums for help.

By studying marbled murrelet specimens collected around the early 1900s, biologists now have reconstructed the seabird's rates of reproduction and survival before its dramatic decline, providing for the first time a baseline measure of health by which contemporary populations can be compared.

Continue reading "Biologists shed light on health of marbled murrelet population in early 1900s" »

Posted by Cyril at 3:40 PM | Permalink

The Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Foundation has pledged $10 million to the Center for Weight and Health at the University of California, Berkeley, to support nutrition research and obesity prevention programs.

Continue reading "Atkins Foundation pledges $10 million to Center for Weight and Health" »

Posted by Cyril at 3:15 PM | Permalink

A campus colloquium on "Energy Self-Sufficiency in the 21st Century" recently took the global climate crisis as the starting point for a freewheeling discussion among some of the world's top thinkers. Issues covered included the urgent need to make conservation a national way of life, getting the U.S. public to accept nuclear reactors, and persuading the U.S. government to serve as a world leader in developing clean, renewable energy sources.

Posted by Cyril at 10:58 AM | Permalink

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has issued an executive order calling for California to establish the world's first carbon standard for transportation fuels. (Read about it in the Governor's op-ed here.)

Relying on research by David Roland-Holst, adjunct professor in ARE, the governor writes:

The University of California estimates our greenhouse gas emissions goals will increase our gross state product by $60 billion and create more than 20,000 new jobs. The time is now for America to transition to a clean-energy economy.... I am very pleased to be able to announce that California is leading the way.

Posted by Cyril at 11:20 AM | Permalink

Over the past decade, in numerous field sites throughout the world, mesh bags of leaf and root litter sat exposed to the elements, day and night, throughout the four seasons, gradually rotting away.

Now, those bags of decomposing organic matter have allowed a research team led by scientists from CNR and Colorado State University to produce an elegant and simple set of equations to calculate the nitrogen released into the soil during decomposition, which in turn could significantly improve the accuracy of global climate change models.

Continue reading "Study of rotting leaves could lead to more accurate climate models" »

Posted by Cyril at 4:44 PM | Permalink

The faculty of each of CNR's departments have been ranked among the top 5 in their fields, according to a new "Scholarly Productivity Index," with the Plant Biology program ranked #1 in the nation.

The rankings, assessed by the private company Academic Analytics, are based on measurements of faculty productivity in terms of publications, federal-grant dollars awarded, and honors and awards.

Data from the 2005 rankings -- which are not without their share of controversy -- were published and explained in depth in The Chronicle of Higher Education (available by subscription here).

UC Berkeley doctoral programs from within CNR received impressive rankings:

Agricultural economics - 3
Botany and plant biology - 1
Microbiology - 3
Nutrition - 3
Toxicology - 2
Environmental Science - 4

A full list of UC Berkeley rankings is here.

Posted by Cyril at 9:30 PM | Permalink

Springing forward may not help save energy, according to a study by two graduate students in Agricultural and Resource Economics.

From Bloomberg:

U.S. plans to cut electricity usage by lengthening daylight saving time may backfire, the report said. Lengthening daylight saving time by several weeks was included in energy legislation passed in 2005, with the goal of saving energy equivalent to 100,000 barrels of oil a day.

Extending daylight saving time may actually result in increased electricity demand as additional usage during morning hours cancels out the reduced demand in the evening, according to the Berkeley study. The paper analyzed electricity usage in Australia, which lengthened its daylight saving time by two months while hosting the 2000 Olympics.

``There is no evidence that extending daylight saving time will lead to energy savings,'' said Hendrik Wolff, one of the study's authors, in an interview. ``Actually, there is evidence that it may lead to a little higher energy consumption.''

Posted by Cyril at 3:40 PM | Permalink

Some eBay users are artificially boosting their reputations by buying and selling feedback on the Internet auction site, according to John Morgan, a professor at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and Jennifer Brown, a doctoral student in Agricultural and Resource Economics.

Continue reading "Illicit "market for trust" on eBay" »

Posted by Cyril at 10:37 AM | Permalink

Ludden’s departure will follow the Spring ’07 semester, at the close of his 5-year term as dean.

Continue reading "Dean Ludden to Step Down Next Summer" »

Posted by Cyril at 4:56 PM | Permalink

Continue reading "Reducing pollution could increase rice harvests in India" »

Posted by Cyril at 9:06 PM | Permalink

From the New York Times:

One of the practices that many modern cultivation mutualists (that is, farmers) do to help their crops grow is provide domesticated honeybees to pollinate them. The bees flit from male to female flowers, carrying pollen between them. Without such pollination, crops like hybrid sunflowers, grown for their seed, would fail.

Farmers often rent honeybee colonies from apiculturists. But honeybees aren’t particularly efficient pollinators. For one thing, they don’t always flit enough between male and female. And the number of managed honeybee colonies is in decline in the United States and elsewhere because of overuse of pesticides and other problems. So one goal for researchers is to see if honeybee pollination can be enhanced.

A study [found here] by Sarah S. Greenleaf of Princeton and Claire Kremen of the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates one factor that can improve the efficiency of honeybee pollinators: the presence of wild bees.

Continue reading "The Efficiency of Bees" »

Posted by Cyril at 1:40 PM | Permalink

The Daily Cal has a nice article on CNR's newest major, Society and Environment.

"The idea had been kicked around for a long time," said Lynn Huntsinger, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. "We felt we weren't meeting the needs of students (in the department) more interested in the social sciences."

Huntsinger said the major will particularly help prepare students for work in at a nonprofit organization to fix environmental problems.

"Not only would they have the social science skills, but they would understand the biological dimensions," she said. "We need people like that in the world."

The new major enhances CNR's strength as a college poised to solve environmental problems. But while the story's headline dubs CNR as the "Environmental College," the S&E major is really one piece of a much broader landscape focused on sustaining environmental, economic, and human health.

See:
Environmental College to Debut New Major

Posted by Cyril at 12:32 PM | Permalink