(Press-News.org) A new study published today in Nature Climate Change has found analyses of carbon emissions may be misleading as they failed to include the impacts of policies such as trading schemes, emission caps or quotas.
"The inclusion of policy mechanisms can radically alter the outcomes from life-cycle analyses and result in counter-intuitive outcomes," said Associate Professor Andrew Macintosh from The Australian National University (ANU) College of Law, lead author of the study.
"Traditional life-cycle analysis would find a person who regularly eats beef and builds their house with bricks and mortar has a greater impact on the climate than a vegan with a wooden house.
"But when the impacts of policy mechanisms are accounted for, the simple dichotomies that so often characterise climate debates like 'lentils good, beef bad' and 'wood good, cement bad' become impossible to maintain."
The paper develops a new framework for evaluating the impacts of policy mechanisms in life-cycle analysis and applies it to the issue of whether it is better for the climate to conserve native forests or to harvest them sustainably to produce wood products.
Contrary to the findings of many previous life-cycle analyses, the study found that, when policy effects are accounted for, conserving the native forests of southeast New South Wales resulted in better climate outcomes than if they continued to be sustainably harvested.
"The results showed that conserving the native forests resulted in significant reductions in domestic emissions over the 100-year projection period; 79 to 85 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or almost 15 per cent of Australia's current annual emissions," said co-author Professor David Lindenmayer, from ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society.
"The simplest explanations for why conserving native forests reduces emissions is that, when these forests are harvested, only a small proportion of the biomass finds its way into long-lived wood products and burning wood does not generate much energy.
"The applicable policy mechanisms magnify these factors by shielding Australia from the emissions embodied in substitute imported wood products and ensuring that, when native forests are burnt for electricity, it displaces other types of renewable energy generation like wind and solar rather than fossil fuels," he said.
INFORMATION:
It remains unclear whether a special ophthalmological examination of all children younger than 6 years (and potential follow-up treatments) would reduce the frequency and severity of visual impairment (amblyopia) in the population. An update search conducted for a benefit assessment of the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) from 2008 identified no new screening study. No benefit of vision screening in preschool-aged children could be derived from the only new treatment study. This is the finding of a rapid report prepared by IQWiG on behalf ...
Scientists have discovered a new inherited form of obesity and type 2 diabetes in humans.
A large number of genes are involved in regulating body weight, and there are now over 30 genes known in which people with harmful changes in DNA sequence become extremely overweight. Similarly, there are a number of genes that can, when altered, cause type 2 diabetes. These conditions are inherited through families in exactly the same way as disorders such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease.
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Geoscientists at the University of Liverpool have used friction experiments to investigate the processes of fault slip.
Fault slip occurs in many natural environments - including during earthquakes - when large stress build-ups are rapidly released as two sliding tectonic plates grinds together. In this process a large amount of the energy released can be converted to heat, that leads to frictional melting.
Frictional melts, when cooled, preserve in the rock-record as pseudotachylytes; but their influence is much greater than just this.
As Professor Lavallée ...
Scientists at the University of Sussex in the UK have unraveled a key process in the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB), potentially paving the way for new antibiotics to fight the disease.
TB is one of the world's top infectious killers, causing 1.5 million deaths every year. The TB bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is estimated to be present in up to a third of the world's population, although active TB only develops in around one in 10 cases.
While TB is curable, antibiotic resistance is on the rise and so a major challenge for scientists is to continually ...
A pair of paleobiologists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego have determined that the world's most numerous and diverse vertebrates ¬- ray-finned fishes - began their ecological dominance of the oceans 66 million years ago, aided by the mass extinction event that killed off dinosaurs.
Scripps graduate student Elizabeth Sibert and Professor Richard Norris analyzed the microscopic teeth of fishes found in sediment cores around the world and found that the abundance of ray-finned fish teeth began to explode in the aftermath of the mass die-off of ...
Using the nation's weather radar network, two University of Oklahoma doctoral students have developed a technique for forecasting something other than the weather: the orientation behavior of birds as they migrate through the atmosphere at night. The students have discovered a way to use the latest dual-polarization radar upgrade to measure broad-scale flight orientation of nocturnal migrant birds--a promising development for biologists and bird enthusiasts.
The approach to the problem paired Phillip M. Stepanian, a meteorology and electrical engineering student, and ...
A team of researchers led by UCLA electrical engineers has demonstrated a new way to harness light particles, or photons, that are connected to each other and act in unison no matter how far apart they are -- a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.
In previous studies, photons have typically been entangled by one dimension of their quantum properties -- usually the direction of their polarization.
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Researchers have found that parts of the western Solomon Islands, a region thought to be free of large earthquakes until an 8.1 magnitude quake devastated the area in 2007, have a long history of big seismic events.
The findings, published online in Nature Communications on Tuesday, suggest that future large earthquakes will occur, but predicting when is difficult because of the complex environment at the interface of the tectonic plates.
The team, led by researchers at The University of Texas Austin, analyzed corals for the study. The coral, in addition to providing ...
Partners who become romantically involved soon after meeting tend to be more similar in physical attractiveness than partners who get together after knowing each other for a while, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"Our results indicate that perceptions of beauty in a romantic partner might change with time, as individuals get to know one another better before they start dating," says lead researcher Lucy Hunt of the University of Texas at Austin. "Having more time to get acquainted may ...
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are legal and increasingly popular for individuals wanting to circumvent censorship, avoid mass surveillance or access geographically limited services like Netflix and BBC iPlayer. Used by around 20 per cent of European internet users they encrypt users' internet communications, making it more difficult for people to monitor their activities.
The study of fourteen popular VPN providers found that eleven of them leaked information about the user because of a vulnerability known as 'IPv6 leakage'. The leaked information ranged from the websites ...
