August 20, 2010 • 11:12 am 0
The United Nations projects that we’re on track to increase global population by about one-third by 2050. Most of that growth will happen in the poorest countries on Earth.Despite their poverty, those two billion people will add to the atmosphere at least three times the current greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S.
This fact alone has given the efforts to slow population growth new urgency…
Filed under: climate change, Scientific American, population
February 10, 2010 • 6:07 pm 0
Could methane-digesting bacteria and an Arctic cap of fresh water prevent a climate catastrophe?
Scientific American
Sometimes a researcher is willing to talk about their work even before it’s peer reviewed. This can be tricky: whatever you think of peer review, papers are almost always better after experts have read them and demanded that they be revised. In this case I think it turned out all right, because Elliott is an especially smart scientist, and also I managed to catch him right after he’d presented his work at a meeting to 30 of the most knowledgeable researchers in his field.
Filed under: climate change, Scientific American, climate models, LANL, Medea hypothesis, methane, Peter Ward, The Long Thaw
January 19, 2010 • 11:46 am 0
…Ironically, this eco-motivated change will undo one of our strongest, if accidental, defenses against climate change.
Popular Science
It’s weird that I had to be sitting in a conference room at NCAR to find this out. You would think it would be news! Just goes to show how little even the journalists who cover this beat really understand the consequences of increasing earth’s radiative forcing even just a little.
Filed under: climate change, green technology, Popular Science, aerosols, IMO, NCAR, radiative forcing
November 9, 2009 • 12:45 pm 0
Hurricane Forcing: Can Tropical Cyclones Be Stopped?
Scientific American
The oceanographers I interviewed for this piece were not kind to v1.0 of the Salter Sink as proposed in Salter’s first paper on the subject. They did want to see more research on it, however. I’m beginning to think that Intellectual Ventures’ policy of revealing its new inventions before papers on them have wound their way through peer review is a mistake.
Filed under: climate change, green technology, Scientific American, geoengineering, hurricanes, Intellectual Ventures, Myhrvold, ocean mixing, Salter
November 1, 2009 • 4:01 pm 0
image cc Paul Stevenson
You may have heard that, raised properly, grass-fed beef doesn’t hurt the climate. That’s a convenient lie: a recent lifecycle analysis of the carbon impact of grass-fed beef revealed that cows who are pastured for their entire lives emit 50% more greenhouse gasses than their less well treated colleagues trapped in Concentrated Animal Feed Operations.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: change.org, climate change
November 1, 2009 • 3:55 pm 0
image cc James Jordan
It turns out that removing CO2 from the smokestack of a coal fired power plant and then burying it under ground in a process called Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is the most costly, least efficient way to interdict carbon before it hits the atmosphere.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: change.org, climate change, green technology
October 30, 2009 • 3:30 pm 1
image cc Anne Norman
In the U.S., only a fifth of the aluminum we toss each year is recycled, according to the report Stop Trashing the Climate. (pdf) Paper isn’t much better – we’re only recycling about half of all our newspapers, boxes, magazines and paperboard.
If you’re a regular reader of Change.org, however, you’re probably already doing your best to recycle aluminum, paper and glass, all of which require large amount of energy – and therefore greenhouse gasses – to produce. (Together, the production of all three of these materials accounts for a third of annual U.S. CO2 emissions.)
But what you might not realize is that, like most households in America, every day you’re failing to recycle a kind of waste whose trip to the landfill is tremendously damaging to the climate: food.
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Filed under: change.org, climate change
October 22, 2009 • 10:22 am 0
Albedo Yachts and Marine Clouds: A Cure for Climate Change?
Scientific American
There has been a lot written about Marine Cloud Brightening, which in geoengineering circles is sort of like the Pepsi to the Coca Cola that is the attempt to cool the earth with what’s essentially an artificial volcanic eruption.
Here’s the thing that always got me: would the seemingly fantastical ships required to realize Marine Cloud Brightening even work? It seemed like the most interesting angle to pursue when my editor at Scientific American, Dave Biello, got interested in commissioning a piece on the scheme. So even though the headline at SciAm doesn’t indicate it, this is really a deep dive into the engineering side of this particular geoengineering scheme.
Filed under: climate change, green technology, Scientific American, geoengineering, marine cloud brightening
July 23, 2009 • 8:11 pm 0
SRM stands for Solar Radiation Management, and it includes all the geoengineering schemes that increase earth’s albedo in order to reflect more sunlight back into space, and in so doing reduce the net irradiance of the earth. These schemes include injection of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, artificially increasing ocean cloud albedo by seeding said clouds with sub-micron droplets of sea water, parking a fleet of space mirrors at an appropriate earth / sun Lagrangian point, etc.
(Moments ago I had to look up this acronym in Google and couldn’t find it. So I thought I’d do a little experiment in which I put up the correct definition of the term, in order to see if it starts showing up under a “define: SRM” search some weeks hence.)
Filed under: climate change, Uncategorized
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