CWL

To clarify, just in case you misunderstood me in thinking I was knocking solar energy, I wasn’t. I meant the other more destructive means of acquiring energy.

Admittedly I’m not that well versed when it comes to the diversity or lack of when it comes to emergent developing energies.That said, a good source of energy that I believe we can easily start implementing now while we continue to find better, safer, abundant sources of energy would be harnessing the power of the sun. In just the last 5 years there has been countless research and data expanding ways we can harness more efficiently and implement more readily this energy we downplay.

It’s cheap (hell, if we play it smart rather than greedy we can make solar energy so abundant and so easily attainable that it can be free for all with a small fee of simply installing the means to acquire and use it), it’s literally everywhere, it doesn’t compromise the safety our environment, the species that inhabit them and our way of life. With such efficiency, it would allow the time to slow (too late to stop) us from spiraling into the environmentally destructive path we’ve already set for ourselves as we find even better, safer, powerful energies and look for ways to revert some of the editable problems that we can change.

If we can manage to have our technologies mimic processes like photosynthesis (which we somewhat already can — so imagine with a bit more research, interest, lobbying and funding, say, as much as oil gets what can be done with this) rather than continue living and making technologies based on the energies we currently have (which time again have shown to be more harmful than they are useful when you stop thinking in short term) we can knock down a lot of the problems that plague us because of the oil industry and other harmful means of energy extraction and usage.

kqedscience:

“Tour Livermore High School with some students from the Green Engineering Academy and you’ll hear plenty of suggestions for energy efficiency upgrades at their school.

“What would be nice is if they had skylights,” says senior Natasha Moore. “So more natural lighting can come in.”

Senior Laila Hassen says the benefits go beyond cost savings.

“They’ve shown that when students are under hours of fluorescent lighting they can’t concentrate as well” she says. “It can actually hurt their eyes.”

Moore and Hassen are part of the Leadership in Energy Efficiency Program, or LEEP. The program is funded by Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. and administered by the Alameda County of Education. These students completed a district-wide energy audit with the help of an engineering firm, saving the school thousands of dollars.”

Learn more in KQED Science’s new radio report, “Who Gets the Cash for Energy Upgrades from Prop 39?”

NASA Finds 2011 is Ninth-Warmest Year on Record

(Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory, Robert Simmon)

While average global temperature will still fluctuate from year to year, scientists focus on the decadal trend.

Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since the year 2000, as the Earth has experienced sustained higher temperatures than in any decade during the 20th century. As greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, scientists expect the long-term temperature increase to continue as well.

don’t see why not

wespeakfortheearth:

Solar-powered boat sails around the world

“No sail, no fuel, no backup boats”

For the first time ever, a crew is trying to sail around the world using only solar energy to power the ship.

The project has been years in the making, and with just a few more months left to complete the journey, the vessel arrived in Doha.

scinerds:

Hyperwarming Climate Could Turn Earth’s Poles Green

An Era of ice that has gripped Earth’s poles for 35 million years could come to an end as extreme global warming really begins to bite. Previously unknown sources of positive feedback - including “hyperwarming” that was last seen on Earth half a billion years ago - may push global temperatures high enough to send Earth into a hothouse state with tropical forests growing close to the poles.

Climate scientists typically limit themselves to the 21st century when predicting how human activity will affect global temperatures. The latest predictions are bolder, though: the first systematic forecasts through to 2300 are beginning to arrive.

They follow four possible futures, including one in which we rapidly cut emissions and another in which we burn fossil fuels into the 22nd century (Climatic Change, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-011-0157-y).

Chris Jones of the UK Met Office in Exeter says that unpublished results suggest the “burn everything” scenario could see atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach 2000 parts per million - the figure today is 388 ppm. That pulse of CO2 could lead to a global temperature rise of 10 °C.

Temperatures this high were last seen in the Eocene, 34 million years ago, says Paul Pearson of Cardiff University in the UK. Conditions were so different back then that the Canadian High Arctic was populated by plants that are now found in the south-eastern US (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1704).

scinerds:

Sustainability Score Turns World Order Upside Down

Pictured Above: A map of how national development rankings rise or fall when their carbon footprint is factored into the score. Image: Chuluun Togtokh & Owen Gaffney

The United Nations Human Development Index is the world’s all-purpose national scorecard, a single number that represents a country’s success at providing a decent life for its people. But according to a Mongolian ecologist who feels his own country has been led astray, it’s time to update the HDI with a critically missing component: sustainability.

“My country is likely to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but the current HDI offers no encouragement for it to grow sustainably,” wrote Chuluun Togtokh of the National University of Mongolia in a Nov. 16 Nature essay.

When the carbon footprint is added, the Human Development Index is thrown into disarray. Australia, the United States and Canada all drop from the top 10. The United Arab Emirates, Brunei, Qatar and Bahrain — all countries that score high on the standard HDI — also fall. Rising are Hong Kong, Sweden and Switzerland, while Norway stays on top. “Anyone who has visited the Nordic countries will recognize that moderation need not compromise a high standard of living,” wrote Togtokh.

Citation: “Time to stop celebrating the polluters.” By Chuluun Togtokh. Nature, Vol. 479, No. 7373, Nov. 16, 2011

Full Article

scinerds:

Fukushima Radiation Spread: Wide Dispersion and Localized Hot Spots

Yesterday’s issue of PNAS contains two papers that are first steps in tracking the radiation released by the meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Both contain bits of good news: a substantial amount of the radiation went out over the Pacific, and most of the remainder is concentrated immediately northwest of the crippled reactors. However, they also indicate that some isotopes released by the damaged reactors were spread fairly widely across the country, raising the prospect of localized hot spots.

The two papers take somewhat different approaches to understanding where the radiation went. One of them actually involves environmental sampling of the radiation emitted by five different isotopes that were released from Fukushima. The second builds an atmospheric model of the isotopes’ spread, and calibrates the model against real-world data.

Both studies indicate that the dominant factor that determined when and where contamination occurred was rain, which brought radioisotopes released into the atmosphere to earth. That interacted with the specific timing of different events—the explosions that destroyed the reactor buildings and the venting of radioactive steam—to create complex patterns of radioactive contamination. So, for example, a large release on March 15 ended up primarily contained in the prefecture of Fukushima itself. In contrast, a release on March 21 was able to travel further, and resulted in contamination of a number of neighboring prefectures (Japan has 47 prefectures overall).

scinerd:

Urban Beehive

The Urban Beehive was developed as part of Philips’ new Microbial Home project, a self-sufficient closed-loop home concept that also features items like a methane digester and a plant-based effluent (read: toilet) filtration system. It’s a design concept, so it’s not exactly coming to a Home Depot near you. But it could, and maybe it should.

The Urban Beehive has two parts that attach to your apartment window: A white frontispiece with a flower pot and a small hole for bee entry, and an orange-hued glass inverted teardrop mounted inside your house. This way you can see the bees at work, and access their honey via a small spigot.

The glass teardrop has an array of honeycomb frames for bees to build their wax cells, like existing honeybee colony kits do. The shell is orange to help the bees navigate, and there’s a small hole for the urban beekeeper to release smoke inside, should the hive ever need to be opened (smoke chills out the bees). The city benefits from the bees’ pollination work, and your apartment benefits from fresh honey and the pleasing effect of watching bees, Philips says.

Article: Sleek Urban Hive Lets You Keep Bees in the Comfort of Your Apartment

DARPA Wants to Recycle Space Junk Into New Satellites

An intuitive way of getting rid of our space junk

The United States Department of Defense is looking for ways to repurpose space junk thousands of miles above Earth back into valuable satellite parts, or even completely new spacecraft.

The military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has started a program called Phoenix, which seeks to recycle still-functioning pieces of defunct satellites and incorporate them into new space systems on the cheap.

The Phoenix program aims to use a robot mechanic-like vehicle to snag still-working antennas from the many retired and dead satellites in geosynchronous orbit — about 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) above Earth — and attach them to smaller “satlets,” or nanosatellites, launched from Earth.

scinerd:

Sea Levels Will Continue to Rise for 500 Years

Perhaps it’s time we start to A.) Shift to more ecologically friendly sources of energy B.) Seriously start looking into those nicely designed high sea level metropolis

Rising sea levels in the coming centuries is perhaps one of the most catastrophic consequences of rising temperatures. Massive economic costs, social consequences and forced migrations could result from global warming. But how frightening of times are we facing? Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute are part of a team that has calculated the long-term outlook for rising sea levels in relation to the emission of greenhouse gases and pollution of the atmosphere using climate models.

The results have been published in the scientific journal Global and Planetary Change. “Based on the current situation we have projected changes in sea level 500 years into the future. We are not looking at what is happening with the climate, but are focusing exclusively on sea levels,” explains Aslak Grinsted, a researcher at the Centre for Ice and Climate, the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Model based on actual measurements

He has developed a model in collaboration with researchers from England and China that is based on what happens with the emission of greenhouse gases and aerosols and the pollution of the atmosphere. Their model has been adjusted backwards to the actual measurements and was then used to predict the outlook for rising sea levels.

The research group has made calculations for four scenarios: A pessimistic one, where the emissions continue to increase. This will mean that sea levels will rise 1.1 meters by the year 2100 and will have risen 5.5 meters by the year 2500.

What We Recycle

In conclusion: We really need to work on that ratio..