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Research shows that changes in land cover influence the Earth's climate. Humankind's manufacture of greenhouse gasses is the main engine of climate change. At the University of Kansas Climate Change research focuses on the study of natural and human induced climate change, and the impacts of these changes on human and environmental systems.
Humans impact the climate by covering land with crops, urban concrete and suburban sprawl. As humans change a landscape, chop down a forest and replace it with bare ground or cotton or something else, it will change the reflectivity of the surface and that changes the amount of energy that is absorbed, and then ultimately energy that.s available to evaporate water, to conduct into the ground, to be used for photosynthesis. It changes the path of energy through the environment. And ultimately the temperature of an object is just the reflection of its energy content.
Because of concerns about climate change, KU researchers are working to develop models of the climate during other warm periods in earth history when no people were present. Reconstructing the climate during those ancient times is known as paleoclimatology.
The Cretaceous Period and the period shortly thereafter are of particular interest because of extreme warming throughout the world. Polar regions were warm enough that crocodile-like animals, which cannot survive subfreezing conditions, lived near the North Pole. Fossils of these animals were recently discovered in the Canadian Arctic.
The KU scientists are using samples of soils and water from Kansas, Texas, Louisiana and New Jersey and analyze them for siderite formation. By understanding how siderite forms in modern environments, researchers can better apply that understanding to interpret ancient climates. This will help researchers better understand times of global warming in the geologic past, and thus help advance fundamental research about forecasting the atmospheric processes on an Earth that's getting warmer.
Carbon Trading is the practice of providing companies with economic incentives to control air pollution. Usually set up by the local or state government, companies are issued a permit to operate and must obtain a certain number of carbon credits below a pre-established cap. If he company finds that it needs more credits than it has under typical operating conditions it must either reduce emissions or purchase credits from a company that has extra credits.
A company with extra credits has already reduced emissions to the point of having surplus credits is rewarded financially for their efforts. The concept empowers individual companies to receive financial gain for reduced emissions and costs the surrounding community very little.
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