Climate Articles
Synthetic trees and algae can counter climate change, say engineers
Giant fly-swat shaped "synthetic trees" line the road into the office, where blooms of algae grow in tubes up the walls and the roof reflects heat back into the sky - all reducing the effects of global warming.
All this could be a familiar sight within the next two decades, under proposals devised by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers to alter the world's climate with new technology.
A day after John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Environment Secretary, warned that negotiations for a global deal to cut carbon emissions were in danger of collapsing, the institution is recommending a series of technical fixes to "buy time" to avert dangerous levels of climate change.
It says that the most promising solution is offered by artificial trees, devices that collect CO2 through their "leaves" and convert it to a form that can easily be collected and stored.Tim Fox, head of environment and climate change at the institution, said that the devices were thousands of times more effective at removing carbon from the atmosphere than real trees.
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Climate change could swamp Venice's flood defence
Rarely was a city so aptly named. By the end of the century, Venice - Italy's City of Water - could face daily floods, and according to a new study, the costly and controversial flood barriers now being built might not be able to protect it.
Laura Carbognin at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Venice and colleagues combined data on land subsidence in the city with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's forecasts of global sea level rise. They then calculated how this "personalised" sea-level forecast would change the city's daily tides.
When the tide rises above 110 centimetres, Venetians call it acqua alta ("high water"). This currently happens about four times a year, but Carbognin's team found that by the end of the century high water could swamp the city between 30 and 250 times a year. The impact on the local environment would be considerable - Carbognin calls it an "unsustainable aggression".
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A Convenient Remedy: Walkable Urban Neighborhoods
A Convenient Remedy: Walkable Urban Neighborhoods is a short movie from the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) that
demonstrates the difference that your choice of neighborhood can make in reducing your contributions to global warming --
and how it can help protect you from runaway gas prices.
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EPA Publishes New "Guide to Smart Growth and Active Aging"
As the demographic group of Americans over 55 and overall longevity increase, "(m)any of us have longed for the kind of age-friendly neighborhood that has different types of homes for people at different stages of life," along with walking paths, public transit, parks, shops and services close together, says the U.S. EPA in its newly published "Growing Smarter, Living Healthier: A Guide to Smart Growth and Active Aging," offering older adults advice and links to resources on how to stay or become active, connected and engaged in local affairs.
"Participating in community activities doesn't just benefit us," the guide observes. "It can be a rewarding opportunity to give back, to share our hard-won wisdom, to pass on our skills and experience."
With a focus on basic principles of neighborhood and town design, the guide seeks to expand the awareness of why design matters, how involvement in community decisions about growth can make a place better for growing old, and how to remake a neighborhood for easier access regardless of whether it's a city, suburb or small town.
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Climate tipping point defined for US crop yields
While news reports and disaster movies remind us about tipping points for Arctic melt and sea level rise, some things closer to home get less attention. Take food supply: new modelling studies show that there are climate tipping points here too, beyond which crop yields will collapse.
Wolfram Schlenker at Columbia University, New York, and Michael Roberts at North Carolina State University in Raleigh used a high-resolution dataset of weather patterns from 1950 to 2005 to discover how yields of three key US crops would respond to increasing temperatures.
"The single best predictor of a year's yield is the amount of time temperatures exceed about 29 oC and the extent to which they do so," they say.
"Below this, warmer temperatures are beneficial for yields, but the damaging effects above 29 oC are staggeringly large."
Overall, the results suggest that yields of maize, cotton and soybean drop by roughly 0.6 per cent for each "degree-day" spent above 29 oC.
A degree-day is a measure devised by the team to indicate by how much 29 oC is exceeded and the time spent above that threshold. At present, agricultural regions across the US spend an average of 57 degree-days above 29 oC during the growing season.
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Atrazine in US Drinking Water Found Widespread
A widely used pesticide known to impact wildlife development and, potentially, human health has contaminated watersheds
and drinking water throughout much of the United States, according to a new report released today by the Natural Resources
Defense Council (NRDC). Banned by the European Union, atrazine is the most commonly detected pesticide in U.S. waters and
is a known endocrine disruptor, which means that it affects human and animal hormones. It has been tied to poor sperm
quality in humans and hermaphroditic amphibians.
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Green Grades 2009: A Report Card on the Paper Practices of the Office Supply Sector
The third annual Green Grades report card looks at and grades the paper sourcing policies of 12 office retail, general retail and wholesale/distribution companies.
Since 2007, ForestEthics has teamed up with Dogwood Alliance have collaborated on the Green Grades office supply report card to inform American consumers and large purchasers of office supply products about which companies' paper practices safeguard the environment and the world's forests.
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Scientists Detect Greenhouse Gas Buildup Over Alaska
KODIAK ISLAND, Alaska, August 24, 2009 (ENS) - Billions of tons of carbon are buried in the frozen Arctic tundra, now heating up because of human-caused climate change. To measure which greenhouse gases are being released and in what quantities, government scientists are flying instrument-laden planes over the tundra from now through November.
They say recent observations indicate that the air above Alaska "may already hold the first signs of a regional increase in greenhouse gas emissions" that could contribute to global climate change.
"Recent observations could be isolated cases or part of a vast regional change in emissions that could accelerate climate warming to a more dangerous pace. We don't know yet," said Colm Sweeney, of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. "We're eager to find out."
Sweeney heads a NOAA aircraft project that samples greenhouse gases around the country. In addition, the lab monitors the gases from 60 sites worldwide.
"It's important to locate natural sources and measure how much methane and carbon dioxide are being released now so we can watch for signs of increasing emissions," said Sweeney. "Methane is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, though its lifetime in the atmosphere is significantly shorter. We're especially interested in those sources."
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Nitrous oxide fingered as monster ozone slayer
Most people know nitrous oxide as the laughing gas that dentists reserve for drill-phobic patients. But once it enters the atmosphere, N2O is no laughing matter. New calculations indicate that it has risen to become the leading threat to the future integrity of stratospheric ozone, Earth's protective shield against the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.
Currently, Freon and other chlorofluorocarbons - or CFCs - are the leading source of ozone thinning, especially in the hole that forms annually over Antarctica. The surprise is not that N2O is also ozone-toxic. That's been known for decades. What's new is a measure of how its ozone-destroying potency compares to CFCs, specifically to one known as CFC-11.
Calculations by a trio of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., now indicate that each molecule of N2O is almost one-fiftieth as effective at depleting ozone as is CFC-11.
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Analysis: States on road to being hotter, wetter
What will temperatures be like in your state in 100 years? If current trends continue, chances are they'll be much hotter than they are today - especially if you live in the American Midwest.
A new analysis of U.S. climate projections from The Nature Conservancy finds that temperatures in the worst-hit states could be up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than present-day levels by the year 2100.
Kansas, Nebraska and other Great Plains states would be the hardest-hit by climbing temperatures, according to the analysis. But temperatures everywhere could rise by 3 degrees Fahrenheit or more, meaning all of us would feel the heavy impacts of climate change:
* Hot summer temperatures could arrive three weeks earlier and last three weeks longer in the Northeast, with more days averaging above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
* In the Northwest, higher temperatures could contribute to earlier spring snowmelt, increasing the risk of forest fires and summer drought.
* Water could become more and more scarce in the Southwest as temperatures climb and spring snowmelt declines.
* Rising sea levels and increased storm surges could threaten low-lying coastal areas in the Southeast.
"If current trends continue, the weather and landscapes of the future will be nearly unrecognizable compared to what we are used to," says Jonathan Hoekstra, director of climate change for The Nature Conservancy.
The analysis, which used data from a 2007 report by the United Nations-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was produced using a new Climate Wizard Web tool made with the help of experts at the University of Washington and University of Southern Mississippi.
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NYPIRG - Human Countdown - Sunday, 9/20 - "A Climate Wake Up Call"
On September 20th, New Yorkers from all walks of life will gather in Central Park for an interactive public demonstration to call for world leaders to agree upon a global climate change deal.
As officials prepare to meet at the United Nations to discuss the urgent issue of climate change, thousands will gather in Central Park to create a Human Countdown. Renowned choreographer Christopher Caines will direct participants to form a giant earth moving though a human-made hourglass. This international media photo opportunity will demonstrate that the time to act is running out.
Climate change is happening right now. In December 2009, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen to set global climate policy; it is imperative that they agree on a global climate change agreement that is fair, ambitious and binding.
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Clash in Alabama Over Tennessee Coal Ash
UNIONTOWN, Ala. - Almost every day, a train pulls into a rail yard in rural Alabama, hauling 8,500 tons of a disaster that occurred 350 miles away to a final resting place, the Arrowhead Landfill here in Perry County, which is very poor and almost 70 percent black.
To county leaders, the train's loads, which will total three million cubic yards of coal ash from a massive spill at a power plant in east Tennessee last December, are a tremendous financial windfall. A per-ton "host fee" that the landfill operators pay the county will add more than $3 million to the county's budget of about $4.5 million.
The ash has created more than 30 jobs for local residents in a county where the unemployment rate is 17 percent and a third of all households are below the poverty line. A sign on the door of the landfill's scale house says job applications are no longer being accepted - 1,000 were more than enough.
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Nuclear waste now stored outside reactor
Kewaunee plant has run out of interior storage
After decades of national debate over what to do with spent nuclear fuel, and with no resolution in sight, the Kewaunee nuclear power plant in northeastern Wisconsin finally ran out of storage space inside the plant.
So over the past week, Kewaunee workers have begun storing radioactive waste in casks on the grounds of the reactor, a short distance from the shores of Lake Michigan.
After a practice run a few weeks ago, workers moved spent fuel into the first of the 25-ton, 16-foot-long casks and then transferred the cask into a concrete vault outside the building Aug. 22, said Mark Kanz, spokesman for the Kewaunee Power Station. A second cask was transferred Thursday.
An expert on nuclear waste from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's regional office in Chicago was on hand for the first procedure, said Viktoria Mitlyng, an agency spokeswoman. The process went smoothly, she said.
The casks were designed to be temporary storage for nuclear waste. This year, however, the Obama administration announced it was not going to move forward with plans to develop a permanent storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he would appoint a commission to investigate a variety of alternatives for long-term nuclear waste disposal. In the meantime, Chu told Congress this year, the NRC has said storing the spent fuel at reactor sites is safe.
"The NRC has said that it can be done safely. That buys us time to formulate a comprehensive plan in how we deal with the nuclear waste," he said.
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Climate Trouble May Be Bubbling up in Far North
Only a squawk from a sandhill crane broke the Arctic silence - and a low gurgle of bubbles, a watery whisper of trouble repeated in countless spots around the polar world.
"On a calm day, you can see 20 or more `seeps' out across this lake," said Canadian researcher Rob Bowen, sidling his small rubber boat up beside one of them. A tossed match would have set it ablaze.
"It's essentially pure methane."
Pure methane, gas bubbling up from underwater vents, escaping into northern skies, adds to the global-warming gases accumulating in the atmosphere. And pure methane escaping in the massive amounts known to be locked in the Arctic permafrost and seabed would spell a climate catastrophe.
Is such an unlocking under way?
Researchers say air temperatures here in northwest Canada, in Siberia and elsewhere in the Arctic have risen more than 2.5 C (4.5 F) since 1970 - much faster than the global average. The summer thaw is reaching deeper into frozen soil, at a rate of 4 centimeters (1.5 inches) a year, and a further 7 C (13 F) temperature rise is possible this century, says the authoritative, U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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