Reuters File / Reuters

This file photo shows a view of a coal-burning power plant during daybreak in Xiangfan, central China's Hubei province.

Global emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide notched up 1.4 percent to 31.6 gigatonnes in 2012, a move in the opposite direction of an international climate goal to limit global warming, the International Energy Agency said in a report released Monday. 

Instead of limiting warming to a long-term rise of no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), the report said the world is currently on a path toward a rise of as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5.3 degree Celsius) above pre-industrial levels. 

Such a rise would come "with potentially disastrous implications in terms of extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and the huge economic and social costs that these can bring," Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said at the report's launch. 

"In short, we are drifting off track, and global negotiations are not expected to yield agreement before 2015, and to be enforced after 2020."

Ratcheting down emissions
In the report, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map, the energy agency outlines four steps the world can take to ratchet down emissions between now and 2020 and keep the door open to limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius. The steps include:

• Increased energy efficiency measures in buildings, industry and transport;
• Strict curbs on construction of new coal-fired power plants while increasing the share of renewables and use of natural gas, the cleanest burning fossil fuel;
• Reduction in methane emissions from the oil and gas industries;
• And a partial phase out of fossil fuel subsidies 

Delaying action to move toward the 2 degree Celsius target until 2020 will result in substantial additional costs to the energy sector, the International Energy Agency noted. For example, if no steps are taken until 2020, $5 trillion in additional clean energy investments will be required.

Target a distraction
The focus of trying to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius "is a distraction," Roger Pielke, Jr., a science policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who writes frequently climate change, told NBC News in an email.

"Rather than talk about fanciful scenarios for the future, we'd be better served by looking realistically at short term options," he said.

To meet the target of 2 degrees Celsius, he noted, will require "that the carbon dioxide emitted for every dollar of economic activity has to decrease by 5 percent per year, or more, for many decades. Right now the world is at about 0 to 1 percent per year."

Realistic options, he noted, include switching to natural gas from coal for power generation, which is already occurring in the U.S. and largely responsible for the country's 200 million ton drop in emissions.

"More rapid deployment of nuclear can do even more," Pielke Jr. said.

Uneven emissions
The rise in emissions of carbon dioxide is uneven around the world. In addition to the drop in the U.S., emissions also declined 50 million tons in Europe.

In Japan, emissions rose by 70 million tons due to a switch to more fossil fuels following the shutdown of nuclear plants in the country following the tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

In China, emissions rose 3.8 percent, or 300 million tons. This was the largest jump in 2012, but one of the smallest increases in the past decade for the fast-growing nation thanks to wider adoption of renewable energy and improvements in energy intensity, according to the International Energy Agency.

"Unfortunately, the combination of the late U.S. entry into the emissions reduction race and China's continued increases in emissions mean that the likelihood of avoiding a 2-degree warming is (in my view) less than 50-50 and shrinking rapidly," Michael Oppenheimer, a climate policy expert at Princeton University, told NBC News in an email.

"And that's too bad, because if these two countries decided to make a grand bargain on climate change, the rest of the large-emitter countries would likely follow suit."

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, visit his website.

Public domain

President Obama's proposed 2014 budget promises to maintain or expand research funding in many areas.

By Tanya Lewis
LiveScience

The proposed 2014 budget released by the White House Wednesday brings good news for science: Under the budget, civilian research spending would swell by 9 percent from 2012 levels.

President Barack Obama's budget provides a total of $143 billion for research and development (R&D), which includes investments in energy, space exploration, basic research and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)education, cybersecurity and climate monitoring.

"The state of the R&D budget is quite strong," said John Holdren, assistant to the president for Science and Technology and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, during a briefing of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) earlier Thursday.

Although the budget does include funding cuts, these are much more strategic than the sledgehammer approach of the sequester, the across-the-board cuts that took effect March 1. Here are five areas of research that will take center stage under the proposed budget.

1. Energy gets a turbo boost
The proposed 2014 budget provides $5 billion for the Department of Energy's Office of Science — a 5.7 percent increase over 2012 levels (all numbers refer to 2012 funding, because the complete appropriations bills for 2013 were not enacted when the budget was drafted).

The funding will go toward supporting clean energy and advanced manufacturing, promoting energy independence, dealing with climate change and modernizing nuclear weapons systems. [The 10 Best Alternative Energy Bets]

"No area holds more promise than our investments in American energy," Obama wrote in his budget message to Congress.

2. NASA heads for asteroids and Mars
Despite trying economic times, space exploration remains a priority for the president. NASA would receive $17.7 billion in discretionary funding under the proposed budget. Whereas the total funding is 0.3 percent, or about $50 million, less than 2012 amounts, it heals deep cuts to the agency under sequestration.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden is optimistic. "The president's budget ensures that the United States will remain the world's leader in space exploration and scientific discovery for years to come while making critical advances in aeronautics to benefit the American public," Bolden said in the OMB briefing.

With this funding, NASA plans to renew its space exploration efforts, supporting crew transportation to the International Space Station as well as manned missions to an asteroid in 2025 and robotic and manned missions to Mars. Under the new budget, NASA is also on track to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, in 2018.

3. Push for STEM education and brain research
Basic research and education in STEM fields will see their funding continue at current levels or increase under the proposed budget.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds basic research and education in all fields of science and engineering, would receive $7.6 billion, an 8 percent increase from 2012 levels. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world's largest supporter of biomedical research, would receive $31 billion in funding, an increase of 1.6 percent over 2012 levels.

Among other things, the funding will support research efforts in massive, complex datasets known as "big data," funding for STEM education (especially for minority students) and the new brain-mapping initiative announced by Obama last week. Visionaries of BRAIN, which stands for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies and was initially called the Brain Activity Map (BAM) project, outlined their final goals in the journal Science in March. They called for an extended effort to develop tools for monitoring up to a million neurons at a time. The end goal is to understand how brain networks function. [Inside the Brain: A Photo Journey Through Time]

4. Better cybersecurity
Given an increasing reliance on digital data and communication, it's not surprising that the new budget highlights cybersecurity.

The budget proposal calls for $830 million in funding for unclassified cybersecurity research across all networking and IT R&D groups, up $150 million from 2012.

"These increases reflect the high priority cybersecurity has in (the Obama) administration," Patricia Falcone, the associate director of National Security and International Affairs at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in Thursday's briefing.

These funds will support efforts to address current cybersecurity threats to the nation, businesses and individuals.

5. Weather and climate research heats up
The proposed federal budget would continue to support important efforts in climate monitoring and modeling.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is requesting $5.4 billion, which would include a total R&D budget of $733 million — $160 million more than the 2012 allotment.

Extreme weather events such as Hurricane Sandy demonstrate a need for accurate weather tracking and forecasting, and NOAA funding would go toward supporting satellite systems designed to enable this work.

NOAA also plans to expand its climate research and ocean observation programs. Holdren said these efforts were good news, "because we do plan to continue to be well-informed stewards of planet Earth."

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

• 7 Great Dramas in Congressional History
• 6 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong
• The 10 Best Science Apps For Your iPhone

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

These global views of Jupiter's icy moon Europa were captured by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in June 1997. The image on the left shows Europa in natural color, while the right-side image has enhanced colors to bring out subtle color differences to show differences between pure water ice (white and bluish white) and non-ice components (red, brown and yellow spots).

By Tariq Malik
Space.com

A potential energy source for life appears to be common on Jupiter's icy moon Europa, a new study suggests.

An analysis of infrared observations of Europa revealed that hydrogen peroxide is abundant on the ice-covered Jovian moon. If the hydrogen peroxide finds a way beneath Europa's surface and mixes with the moon's liquid water ocean, it could be a vital energy source for any life that might exist there, scientists said.

"Life as we know it needs liquid water, elements like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur, and it needs some form of chemical or light energy to get the business of life done," study leader Kevin Hand of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "Europa has the liquid waterand elements, and we think that compounds like peroxide might be an important part of the energy requirement. The availability of oxidants like peroxide on Earth was a critical part of the rise of complex, multicellular life."

Planetary scientist Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena co-authored the new study, which analyzed near-infrared observations of Europa collected in September 2011 by the Keck II telescope atop the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. [See photos of Jupiter's icy moon Europa]

The study found that the highest concentration of hydrogen peroxide occurs on the leading side of Europa as it orbits Jupiter. The ice in those regions is almost pure water, and not contaminated by sulfur like other parts of Europa, NASA officials said.

Hydrogen peroxide is created on Europa due to the intense radiation bombardment of the moon's surface as it moves through Jupiter's powerful magnetic field. At its most concentrated, the chemical was found with a peroxide abundance of about 0.12 percent compared to water. That's about 20 times more diluted than the bottles of hydrogen peroxide for sale in drug stores on Earth, NASA officials said.

 Hydrogen peroxide was first discovered on Europa by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which studied Jupiter and its moons from 1995 to 2003. But Galileo's observations studied only a limited path of Europa. The new analysis covers a much broader region of Europa's surface.

"The Galileo measurements gave us tantalizing hints of what might be happening all over the surface of Europa, and we've now been able to quantify that with our Keck telescope observations," Brown said. "What we still don't know is how the surface and the ocean mix, which would provide a mechanism for any life to use the peroxide."

But the fact that so much peroxide exists on Europa is a boon for the potential habitability of the icy moon's water ocean. When mixed with water, peroxide releases oxygen.

"At Europa, abundant compounds like peroxide could help to satisfy the chemical energy requirement needed for life within the ocean, if the peroxide is mixed into the ocean," Hand said.

The research is detailed in a recent edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters and was partially funded by NASA's Astrobiology Institute through its Icy Worlds team.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+.

• 6 Most Likely Places for Alien Life in the Solar System
• Jupiter Quiz: Test Your Jovian Smarts
• Europa: Jupiter's Icy Moon and Its Underground Ocean | Video

Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Reuters file

A woman walks her dog in Minneapolis. Indoor energy demands in the chilly city are higher than cooling demands in Miami, according to a new study.

When it's hot outside, people crank up air conditioners that usually suck electricity from coal- and natural gas-fired power plants at the root of human-caused global warming. This seems like a recipe for disaster, but it's more sustainable than living in a cold climate and cranking up the heat, a new paper suggests.

"The traditional view that living in hot desert areas is not sustainable should be re-examined," Michael Sivak, a research professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, told NBC News. "Because my data suggest that from this point of view — mainly a climate control point of view — living in very cold areas is less sustainable than hot areas."

He compared the energy demands for indoor heating and cooling in Minneapolis, Minn., the coldest metropolitan area in the country, with those in Miami, Fla., the warmest big city. He found the demands are 3.5 times greater in Minnesota.

The biggest factor in his comparison is the number of heating or cooling days per year, which reflects the demand for energy needed to heat or cool a building. The measure is calculated by comparing the mean daily outdoor temperature with 18 degrees Celsius (64.4 degree Fahrenheit). So, for example, a 10 degree Celsius day corresponds to 8 heating degree days. A 25 degree Celsius day corresponds to 7 cooling degree days. In earlier research, Sivak found that Minneapolis has 4,376 heating degree days and Miami has 2,423 cooling degree days per year.

"The need for heating in Minneapolis is more energy demanding than cooling in Miami because the difference of the ambient temperature from the desired temperature is greater in Minneapolis than in Miami," Sivak explained.

His comparison also included:

• the efficiencies of heating and cooling appliances (a typical air conditioner is about four times more energy efficient than a typical furnace or boiler primarily because it takes more energy to heat up a room than it does to cool it); 
• and the efficiencies of power plants, which generate nearly all the electricity used in cooling and 7 percent for heating. ("In terms of power plant efficiencies, cooling is worse than heating," he noted). 

When all three parameters are taken into consideration, including cooling days in Minnesota and heating days in Miami, Sivak found that Minneapolis is 3.5 times as energy-demanding as Miami.

The study doesn't examine what happens as the planet warms, and thus fewer heating days are needed in places such as Minnesota, Buffalo, N.Y., and Portland, Ore., and more cooling days are required in Miami, Phoenix and Las Vegas, but the finding may be a silver lining of global warming.

"Proportionately, you would be shifting the needs," Sivak said. "You would be heating less and you would be cooling more."

In fact, he noted in a paper published Wednesday in Environmental Research Letters, the impact of warm-city living may be even more pronounced than suggested by his calculations since "people are generally more tolerant of heat than of cold."

In other words, people are more likely to turn on their heater when there's a nip in the air than they are their AC when the temperatures begin to rise.

While all of this sounds reasonable, "you run up against basic physical constraints in a hot place that you don't in a cold place," Austin Troy, director of the transportation research center at the University of Vermont, told NBC News. Troy is also the author of The Very Hungry City, a book that illustrates the energy demands of living in warm climates.

For example, in a cold place you can build an passive solar house that uses very little energy to heat it, but similar options are lacking for people living in hot climates. And as the climate warms, in the "sun belt there'll be significantly increased cooling demands for the summer," he added.

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, visit his website. 

NASA Earth Observatory

This map shows the 2011 Japan earthquake and its aftershocks..

By Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience

The devastating earthquake that struck Japan in 2011 may have unexpectedly released nearly all of the energy that had built up near the source of the resulting tsunami, new research suggests.

These findings, detailed in tomorrow's (Feb. 8) issue of the journal Science, may help lead to a better understanding of how earthquakes and fault zones work, "and with a better understanding, we may be able to anticipate extreme events or find out where super-large earthquakes might be possible in the world," researcher Fred Chester, a geophysicist at Texas A&M University, said.

The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki quake was the most powerful earthquake to hit Japan and the fifth-most powerful quake ever recorded, generating a tsunami that killed thousands and triggered a nuclear crisis. Research revealed the seafloor moved nearly 165 feet (50 meters) during the temblor.

Earthquakes are caused by stress that builds up on faults in the Earth's surface. Usually, earthquakes are thought to release only a portion of this stress on the fault, but the catastrophic level of activity seen with the 2011 temblor suggested that this quake may have relieved significantly more energy in that area — a boundary region where the tectonic plates that make up Earth's surface meet. [7 Craziest Ways Japan's Earthquake Affected Earth]

Drilling into the fault
To explore this possibility, researcher Weiren Lin at Japan's Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and colleagues set out aboard the scientific drilling vessel Chikyu to about 60 miles (93 kilometers) from the epicenter of the quake about a year after the disaster. The expedition analyzed rock as they drilled boreholes 2,790 feet (850 meters) into the seafloor about 22,600 feet (6,890 m) underwater.

"The expedition was incredibly challenging — we were really pushing the depth limits and our equipment at this site," Chester said. "Another challenge was the 'rapid response' nature of this expedition — most scientific drilling operations like this in the deep ocean take years of planning, and we only had 13 months. We were delayed a lot by weather and by key equipment failures, but with perseverance and highly capable drilling engineers, we were able to succeed."

To measure the amount of stress in the rock, the investigators analyzed how resistant rock in the borehole was to the flow of electric current. The more stressed rock is, the more fractures result when drills bore into it, and the more fractured rock is, the lower its electrical resistivity (meaning the current flows more easily through it). By continuously measuring how electrically resistant the rock was as the borehole was drilled, the scientists could deduce the magnitude and even direction of the stress in the rock.

The researchers found the present amount of stress on the fault is nearly zero, revealing the earthquake released nearly all the stress there.

Surprisingly little stress
"It is very surprising that this can occur," Chester said. "Studies over the past 30 or 40 years have shown that it's very hard to slide rock against rock due to the amount of friction involved, and studies have shown that in conventional earthquakes and smaller faults, only 10 percent or some other small fraction of the stress is released when these blocks of rock slip past each other."

"However, increasingly, it's becoming clear that these plate boundary faults are weak," Chester added. "It's as if there's much lower friction than one would expect, and they can release a substantial amount of their total stress."

Analysis of rock samples gathered from one borehole and scientific instruments placed within another will glean further insights into the huge quake.

"We're measuring the temperature across the fault zone after the earthquake," Chester said. "The higher the stress in an area, the more frictional heat is generated, so measuring temperature is another way at getting at the question of how much stress was relieved and the strength of the fault during the rupture."

Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on  Facebook  and  Google+.

• Image Gallery: This Millennium's Destructive Earthquakes
• 7 Ways the Earth Changes in the Blink of an Eye
• In Pictures: Japan Earthquake & Tsunami

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Camilla Zenz/Zuma Press

In this file photo, wind turbines generate power in San Gorgonio near Palm Spring California.

Government incentives pushed newly-installed wind-generating capacity to a new high in 2012, but the outlook for 2013 is grim, according to an industry analyst.

"The year-end numbers are the ones that make the headlines, so last year was a record year," Amy Grace, a wind analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told NBC News. 

"But for the manufacturers … for the last quarter they’ve basically been doing nothing except laying people off."

The U.S. wind industry installed 13.2 gigawatts of generating capacity in 2012 as it rushed to meet an expiring production tax credit as well as a cash incentive that was part of the stimulus package passed in the wake of the financial crisis.

Congress extended the tax credit in the bill it passed earlier this month to avert the so-called fiscal cliff. It will give projects that start construction in 2013 a tax credit of 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour generated. 

Typically, the credit is given to projects that are completed by a certain date. The difference in language was requested by industry since it can take up to 24 months to plan, finance, and build a new project. According to Grace, only one project is currently on the books.

"It is a huge question mark over what happens this year," she said. Her forecast is for just 3 gigawatts of installed capacity, though more projects will likely get started, meaning 2014 could be better.

Boom bust
The wind industry has ridden this boom-bust cycle for more than a decade, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), due to annual uncertainty over the future of the production tax credit.

The tax credit is needed, the association argues, to keep the price of wind energy competitive. Without it, utilities are likely to focus their development efforts on less expensive alternatives such as natural gas.

The loss of the incentive, according to AWEA, would translate to the loss of 37,000 jobs in the wind industry, particularly at factories that build parts such as turbines.

To avert the uncertainty, AWEA has proposed a gradual phase-out of the tax credit between now and 2018, a time when wind should be competitive with other forms of energy.

"With the policy certainty that accompanies a stable extension," reads an AWEA letter on the proposal sent to congressional leaders, "the industry believes it can achieve the greater economies of scale and technology improvements that it needs to become cost-competitive without the PTC."

Grace, the industry analyst, said the phase-out, as proposed, is unlikely to gain traction in Congress, but it could serve as a starting point for negotiations.

If it happens, she added, it might actually backfire for the wind industry because utilities will lose the sense of urgency to build new projects.

Gassy future
Looking out to 2015 and beyond, Grace expects wind to become competitive with natural gas, which today is relatively inexpensive thanks to the boom in production driven by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, technology. 

Today’s low prices for natural gas — between $2 and $3 per million British thermal units, or BTU — are commonly seen as disastrous for wind, she noted, but in the medium term it is "very good for wind."

That’s because gas-fired electricity generation plants, unlike coal-fired ones, are relatively easy to turn on and off in response to fluctuating demand. 

Given low natural gas prices, utilities are building more gas plants and transitioning from coal to gas in existing plants. When gas prices rise, as they are expected to in a few years as the demand rises, wind will benefit, Grace said.

"If you have a very gassy system, as they say with a lot of gas generation, you are not worried about incorporating more wind onto your books because you have a lot of gas that you can turn on and turn off when the wind dies or the wind speeds up," she explained.

While she doesn’t expect the record set in 2012 to be shattered anytime soon, the market could hit stable growth of between 3 and 6 gigawatts per year.

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, check out his website.