Clipmarks | wildcat's environment, planet, earth collection

Japan Creates Mega Solar City -Leads World

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:06:39 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

In an effort to create one of Japan's greenest urban areas and clean up its air by reducing CO2 emissions, Japan announced that two gigantic solar power generation plants will be installed in Sakai City.

The title of the project is quite a mouth full – the Sakai City Waterfront Mega Solar Power Generation Plan. Say that three times fast. I guess the title has to be fitting for the size of the project, however, because the two facilities will have a 28,000 kW combined maximum capacity and will help to reduce CO2 emissions by a whopping 10,000 tons annually. The city will work in conjunction with Sharp Japan and Kansai Electric Power, with Sharp planning on using thin-film silicon solar modules.

Japan is fast becoming the world's solar capital. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., leaders in the U.S. solar energy industry blasted the U.S. government on Monday for a freeze on applications for new solar projects on public land in six Western states.

Tags: solar power, japan, energy, co2

Pizza Loses Favor as Italians Turn to Pasta

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:39:42 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

The ongoing crisis in food prices has made a luxury of one of the world's most iconic foods even in its affluent homeland.

Italians are shirking pizza due to skyrocketing bills and turning increasingly to pasta, which remains comparatively cheap despite also seeing large increases in cost.

"When I was a student, it was a Saturday night classic: You went out with your friends and had a pizza," said Cristina Romanelli, a 34-year-old living in Rome. "Now you spend so much you can do it only once in a while."

In fact, the number of Italians who say their favorite food is pizza has dropped from 14.1 percent to 8.7 percent in the past two years, according to a survey from GPF Research Institute, a private opinion poll company.

Rising cereal costs, experts say, are pumping up the cost of the wheat flour used to make pizza dough. Wheat costs have grown 23.2 percent since April 2007, according to the national Institute of Services for Agricultural and Food Markets.

Tags: pizza, pasta, italians, cost of food

Hot future shock: Heat wave temperatures to soar

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:09:12 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

(AP) -- During the European heat wave of 2003 that killed tens of thousands, the temperature in parts of France hit 104 degrees. Nearly 15,000 people died in that country alone. During the Chicago heat wave of 1995, the mercury spiked at 106 and about 600 people died.

In a few decades, people will look back at those heat waves "and we will laugh," said Andreas Sterl, author of a new study. "We will find (those temperatures) lovely and cool."

Sterl's computer model shows that by the end of the century, high temperatures for once-in-a-generation heat waves will rise twice as fast as everyday average temperatures. Chicago, for example, would reach 115 degrees in such an event by 2100. Paris heat waves could near 109 with Lyon coming closer to 114.

Sterl, who is with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, projects temperatures for rare heat waves around the world in a study soon to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Tags: temperatures, heat waves, climate change

No Time for the Singularity

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:24:30 GMT

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Clip Source: www.worldchanging.com

Scientists like to low-ball their estimates. The now-famous IPCC scenarios for the effects of climate change are already known to be woefully, unrealistically conservative (Freeman Dyson's recent comments notwithstanding). Arctic changes expected 20 years from now are happening now, and in North America the beginning of spring has already been pushed back by two weeks, which is enough to play havoc with the fertility cycle of many migratory birds (among other consequences). The worst-case scenarios used in public debate ignore some extremely worrisome factors, such as the possible release of oceanic methane from clathrates. If we're going to deal with this problem, we have to do it now, as in, within the term of your next government.

The ultimate in technological optimism is the idea of the technological singularity, which posits that technological advance is exponential and, driven by progress in artificial intelligence, will soon hit the vertical slope of the curve.

Tags: singularity, scenarios

Penguin populations falling steeply

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:14:06 GMT

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Clip Source: www.world-science.net

Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, penguins are sounding the alarm for potentially catastrophic changes in the world’s oceans, a University of Washington biologist says.

The culprits are global warming, oil pollution, depletion of fisheries and rampant coastline development, which threaten breeding habitats for many penguin species, she argues.

These factors are behind rapid population declines among the birds, said the university’s Dee Boersma, an authority on penguins.

“Penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world,” she said. “The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins.”

there are 16 to 19 penguin species, and most penguins are at 43 sites, virtually all in the Southern Hemisphere.

Tags: penguins, life, biology, ecology

What We Can Learn From Buckminster Fuller

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:15:39 GMT

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Clip Source: www.wired.com

Sure, he's famous for giving us the geodesic dome — the super-lightweight building that gets stronger as it gets bigger — but Buckminster Fuller's legacy extends way beyond the soccer-ball structure. He was an avid futurist who tinkered in mathematics, engineering, environmental science, architecture, and art, all the while keeping notes in a mad-scientist-style filing system he called the Dymaxion Chronofile.

There was nothing mad, however, about Fuller's objectives: He just wanted to invent devices that would help humankind and protect the planet (which he dubbed, no kidding, "Spaceship Earth").

Tags: buckminster fuller, architecture, ecology

Would you eat Frankenmeat? Lab grown meat contest from PETA

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:12:31 GMT

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clipper's remarks: we can solve the hunger on the planet

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Tags: lab, meat

Spain to give apes rights

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:18:04 GMT

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Clip Source: blogs.nature.com

The Spanish parliament is to back legal rights for great apes, that’s gorillas, chimpanzees and orangs.

The parliament’s environmental committee has thrown its weight behind the Great Ape Project, which aims to provide apes with a “the right to life, the freedom from arbitrary deprivation of liberty, and protection from torture”. As the resolution passed by the committee on Wednesday has cross-party support it is expected to become law, says Reuters, and experiments on great apes will be outlawed.

Although there are not thought to be any such experiments taking place there is no law stopping them in Spain. Legislation will also outlaw their use in shows and circuses and the animals may only be kept in conservation centres. However the government has denied this amounts to ‘human rights for apes’ (El Pais).

Tags: apes, rights, spain

Ozone over Africa is destroyed faster

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 12:37:47 GMT

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Clip Source: www.cosmosmagazine.com

PARIS: A probe into levels of an important greenhouse gas above the tropical Atlantic has challenged assumptions about key sources of global warming, according to a British study.

Researchers found that natural chemicals in the atmosphere west of equatorial Africa destroyed 50 per cent more ozone in that region than expected. This process also reduced concentrations of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas.

It may well apply in oceans around the world and if so, it would pose major questions about how Earth's inventory of global warming gases is calculated, they said in a study published in the British journal Nature today.

Ozone, a naturally-occurring molecule composed of three oxygen atoms, can be beneficial or harmful to human life, depending on where it is.

In the stratosphere, 10 km to 50 km above Earth's surface, ozone protects living things by filtering out the Sun's damaging ultraviolet light.

Tags: ozone, africa

What’s Really Up With North Pole Sea Ice?

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:52:07 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com

The Drudgeosphere was all pumped up today about the “shock claim” in the (UK) Independent that the sea ice that normally persists year-round at the North Pole (I stood on it in March, 2003) will be replaced by open water later this summer.

Given the unpredictable short-term dynamics up there, which make the ice subject to vagaries of Siberian winds and a mix of currents, a lot of polar ice experts tell me it’s pretty much impossible to make such a prediction with high confidence. In fact, the Independent’s story — the opening sentences and headline at least — go way beyond what Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center tells the reporter. As early as May, ice experts were putting good odds on having open water at the North Pole. [UPDATE 11 p.m.: Gavin Schmidt of Realclimate.org muses on why the media hyperventilate over polar non-news developments.]

Tags: north pole, ice, melt, climate change

Thin Ice: The Arctic Meltdown Explained

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:17:02 GMT

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Clip Source: www.livescience.com

If the North Pole becomes ice-free this summer — the odds for that are 50-50, one scientist says — that doesn't mean that the whole Arctic region will become an open ocean.

Mark Serreze of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado told The Independent, a London-based newspaper, "I'd say it's even-odds whether the North Pole melts out."

The article, posted on the newspaper's Web site Friday, generated some confusion as to what would actually happen at the North Pole, and in the Arctic Ocean as a whole, as the summer melt season gears up in the next few weeks.

melt-out at the North Pole wouldn't mean that all Arctic ice would melt. Rather, the thin, newly-formed ice around 90 degrees latitude could melt away for a few days

Such an event would be significant, he said, because any holes that have appeared in the ice at the North Pole up until now have been a result of winds pushing the sea ice around and creating cracks

Tags: arctic, melt-down, science, north pole, climate change

How a Man-Made Tornado Could Power the Future

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:27:30 GMT

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Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Coiled up in a tornado is as much energy as an entire power plant. So a Canadian engineer has a plan to spin up his own twister and extract energy from its tethered tail.

It all depends on heating the air near the surface so that it is much warmer than the air above.

"You can generate energy whenever you have a temperature gradient," said Louis Michaud. "The source of the energy here is the natural movement of warm and cold air currents."

These so-called convective air currents are only useful if they can be channeled in some way. That is why Michaud proposes using a tornado as a kind of drinking straw between the warm ground below and the cold sky above. Wind turbines placed at the bottom could generate electricity from the sucked-up air.

Whirlwind tour

Tornadoes and hurricanes form when sun-heated air near the surface rises and displaces cooler air above. As outside air rushes in to replace the rising air, the whole mass begins to rotate.

Tags: energy, man made, tornado

Warming threatens Calif. flora

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:05:18 GMT

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Clip Source: www.azcentral.com

LOS ANGELES - Two-thirds of California's unique plants, about 2,300 species that grow nowhere else in the world, could be wiped out across much of their current geographic ranges by the end of the century because of rising temperatures and changing rainfall, a new study says.

The species that cannot migrate fast enough to higher altitudes or cooler coastal areas could face extinction because of greenhouse-gas emissions that are heating the planet, researchers say.

California's flora face a potential "collapse," said David Ackerly, an ecologist at the University of California-Berkeley, who was the senior author of the paper.

Half of the plant species that are unique to the continental United States grow only in the Golden State, from towering redwoods to slender fire poppies. And under likely climate scenarios, many would have to shift 100 miles or more from their current range.

Tags: calif., flora, climate change

The Water Shortage Myth

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:33:22 GMT

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clipper's remarks: "No, there is plenty of water. The problem is that the vast majority of Earth's water is contained in the oceans as saltwater, and must be desalinated before it can be used for drinking or farming.

Large-scale desalination can be done, but it is expensive. "

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

The two main environmental news stories of the past year or so have been the twin impending disasters of global warming and water shortages. There is a scientific consensus that global warming is occurring, and many governments (including, belatedly, the Bush Administration) have taken steps to address the problem.

But the more pressing issue is water; people can live with global warming (and have been for some time), but people cannot live without water.

While drinking water is the most obvious need, everything around us takes water to produce, from food to telephones to tires. Not only is agriculture dependent on water [the U.S. Geological Survey estimates it takes about 1,300 gallons of water to grow a hamburger] but so is virtually every industry. Even energy production needs water, in hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactor cooling towers.

Demand soars

The barrage of news reports warn of a dire water shortage, and provide sobering statistics:

Tags: water, desalination

Cheap vs Obsolete

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:32:13 GMT

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Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Cheap vs Obsolete: Is the ‘Oil Drilling Debate’ Masking the Real Issue?

Several media sites have recently wrote scathing reviews of Bush’s plan to open up protected areas to drilling, while other media agencies wrote glowing reviews. Is it a political move void of all reason and common sense, or an enlightened plan to help Americans? President George W. Bush recently urged Congress to overturn a 26-year ban on offshore oil drilling in the U.S. and also open a part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to petroleum exploration. The arguments for and against were polarized, but for the most part, they all made some fair points, which begs the questions: Is it a good idea or not? Will it really make gas cheaper or not?

But the real underlying question being skirted around is this: Should we be focusing on making oil cheap or should we focus on making it obsolete?

Of course in an ideal world, gas would be cheap and increasingly obsolete

We don’t live in an ideal world.

Tags: oil drill, gas, debate