The Environment / Global Warming

• Ocean Acidification – The Other Carbon Problem

  Humankind's assault on the oceans continues apace. A short time ago, we considered the loss of 40% of the phytoplankton in the oceans since 1950. In my post How We Wrecked The Oceans, marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson explains why he believes the sea will be devoid of fish and other large marine organisms sometime in the 2040s. And now comes the "other" carbon problem—acidification of the oceans. As we burn fossil fuels, carbon dioxide (CO2) is released into the atmosphere. Everyone knows that part, but what they often don't know is that the oceans act as a enormous carbon "sink"…

• Dwindling Hopes for Climate Accord

  Heat waves and deadly floods notwithstanding, an effective global climate change treaty is not on the horizon. Delegates from 190 countries gathered in Bonn last week for the UN Climate Change Confererence in preparation for the sixth meeting of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which will take place in Cancun, Mexico this November. In Cancun, world leaders are expected to craft a follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2012. Yet already four months prior to the Cancun Summit, hopes for reaching a binding global climate accord are dwindling rapidly among…

• Climate Change: The Danger of Complacency

  As US climate policy stumbles, runaway climate change scenarios highlight the dangers of complacency. A choice topic to spoil dinner parties and a long-standing, legitimate source of concern among scientists and well-informed policymakers, abrupt climate change - climate events that unfold faster than the pace at which humans can adapt to them - was the focus of a December 2008 report released by the US Climate Change Science Program, a collaborative project of relevant US government agencies scrutinizing the four most pressing scenarios. A relatively high degree of indeterminacy characterizes each scenario. Nevertheless, the potential downsides make for sober reading.…

• Climate Concerns May Soon be a Thing of the Past as Scientists Work on Splitting CO2

  A team of scientists at George Washington University and Howard University have devised a theoretical means of splitting CO2, turning the demon gas into either solid carbon or into carbon monoxide, CO. The CO could be used to generate hydrocarbon fuels with the aid of hydrogen -- a by-product of their theoretical process "STEP" (Solar Thermal Electrochemical Photo). By using the sun's visible light and heat to power an electrolysis cell that captures and converts carbon dioxide from the air, a new technique could impressively clean the atmosphere and produce fuel feedstock at the same time. The key advantage of…

• Europe Forced to Recalculate Climate Change Policies

  Last week, the European Union’s energy ministers swiftly stepped in to finally put an end to growing calls to unilaterally increase the block’s emission-cutting target to 30%, as economic concerns are overshadowing concerns about climate change. The debate over whether to increase the current target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 20% from 1990 levels by 2020 dates back to late 2008 when EU leaders first endorsed the idea and intensified with the proximity of Copenhagen’s climate change late last year. But the failed negotiation appeared to rule out any unilateral move from Europe, which officially conditions any additional reductions to…

• Volcanic Eruptions: Is Nature Set to Crush Global Warming?

  The global warming enthusiasts are convinced that as humans inject more and more carbon dioxide into the air we will warm the atmosphere beyond recognition. But nature may be set to crush all of that talk. A blast of arctic cold may soon encase the earth. On March 20th a volcano began erupting on the island of Iceland. The ash cloud from this volcano has forced airlines to cancel thousands of flights with some estimates putting the airlines’ losses at moe than $200 million dollars per day due to cancelled flights. A volcano erupting in Iceland is not an uncommon…

• Climate Change: Money, Politics & Scandals

  “With all the hysteria, all the fear, all the phony science, could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? I believe it is.” – US Senator James M Inhofe (Republican – Oklahoma), 28 July 2003. Such is the rallying cry of the climate change denial movement. Since Senator Inhofe made this statement seven years ago, the drive to discredit climate change and the science that underpins it has enjoyed considerable success, even as awareness about climate change and the threat it poses to humanity has gone mainstream. The US, widely seen…

• Carbon Sequestration - Is burying Carbon Dioxide underground a realistic option?

  Climate Change is having a great impact on global perspectives, which is leading Governments and Businesses to take a serious look at Carbon Sequestration (CCS.) This means that instead of drilling gases out of the bottom of the planet, there is now a push to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from the gases discarded by industry and transporting and injecting it into underground geological formations. On November 4, 2009, European Union Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs and US Secretary for Energy Steven Chu launched a new EU-US Energy Council in Washington, DC to “continue and deepen” cooperation in energy and environmental subjects…

• Climate Change: Clean Coal, Nuclear Energy or Simply Energy Savings?

  On November 6, 2009 The World Coal Institute released its new report "Securing the Future - Financing CCS in a Post-2012 World." One revealing sentence on the website says “significant investments are needed in Carbon Capture and Geological Storage (CCS) to allow the technology to play its critical role in global efforts to address climate change” further stressing that governments have a central role to play, notably to finance this new technology that cannot be borne alone by the private sector. The report comes out at a time where the “clean coal” concept is the latest trend, like saving the…

• Speakable and Unspeakable About The Copenhagen Climate Meeting

  An informative essay by Ferdinand E. Banks on the Copenhagen Climate meeting, Energy Economics, the Nuclear revival and why Global Warming should be uniting us / not dividing as a new energy economy needs to be put into place- and fast! Several years ago I gave a number of energy economics lectures which included an insistence that the Kyoto conference on the environment was badly flawed. My reasoning turned on the neglect of nuclear energy, as well as the decision taken at that meeting to promote cap-and-trade (or emissions trading) as the main device for offsetting a too rapid accumulation…