Author Archive for homer

Temperature Rising: With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

Published on October 3, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Justin Gillis from The New York Times

The trees spanning many of the mountainsides of western Montana glow an earthy red, like a broadleaf forest at the beginning of autumn.

But these trees are not supposed to turn red. They are evergreens, falling victim to beetles that used to be controlled in part by bitterly cold winters. As the climate warms, scientists say, that control is no longer happening.

Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.

From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.

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New Battery could be just what the Grid Ordered

Published on September 28, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

from the article

By Prachi Patel from Technology Review:

Utilities need cheap, long-lasting ways to store the excess energy produced by power plants, especially as intermittent power from solar and wind farms is added to the mix. Unfortunately, the batteries available for grid-level storage are either too expensive or don’t last for the thousands of cycles needed to make them cost-effective.

A new battery developed by Aquion Energy in Pittsburgh uses simple chemistry—a water-based electrolyte and abundant materials such as sodium and manganese—and is expected to cost $300 for a kilowatt-hour of storage capacity, less than a third of what it would cost to use lithium-ion batteries. Third-party tests have shown that Aquion’s battery can last for over 5,000 charge-discharge cycles and has an efficiency of over 85 percent.

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It’s Not Easy Flying Green

Published on May 11, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Graphic: Patrick Gillooly

From Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office:

A new analysis emphasizes the large variability in greenhouse gas emissions from alternative fuels.

There’s a race afoot to give biofuel wings in the aviation industry, part of an effort to combat soaring fuel prices and cut greenhouse gas emissions. In 2008, Virgin Atlantic became the first commercial airline to fly a plane on a blend of biofuel and petroleum. Since then, Air New Zealand, Qatar Airways and Continental Airlines, among others, have flown biofuel test flights, and Lufthansa is racing to be the first carrier to run daily flights on a biofuel blend.

As we see increasingly, the “green” label is not always to be trusted. Air transport – of luxury goods and of their consumers – continues to have significant environmental impact.

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Will future cities be friendly? Urbanisation is not just about infrastructure but also social cohesion

Published on February 2, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Mihir Bholey in Down to Earth: Science and Environment Online:

It is rather naive to delink urbanisation from the rising lifestyle aspirations and the imperatives of economic development. Opportunities, power and prestige are some of the irresistible attributes of the growing urban centres which attract migrants on a large scale. In India economic liberalisation and urbanisation have become complimentary to each other. Although the wave of urbanisation is sweeping the entire Asian subcontinent and giving it the kind of preeminence that Europe and North America enjoyed due to their industrial socio-economic set up, it is India and China which are drawing attention. It is estimated that by 2025 around 2.5 billion Asians will turn city dwellers which will be nearly 54 per cent of the world’s urban population.

Between 1950 and 2005 India urbanised at the rate of 29 per cent, which was way behind China’s 41 per cent. According to a report by McKinsey Global Institute, by 2025 India will add 215 million people to its cities, whose population will account for 38 per cent of the country’s population. Urbanisation of this magnitude will not only impact world economy but also the environment, with its ever growing need for energy, fuel and consumer goods.

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Why a Flooded Australia Will Probably Boost Soaring Energy and Food Prices

Published on January 13, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 2 Comments

From Joel Kirkland, Lauren Morello, Dina Fine Maron of ClimateWire:

With each new incident of record monsoon floods, fires and earthquakes, more tremors shake the global economy.

The latest disaster is unfolding in Australia, where the northeastern state of Queensland has been inundated after a month of rain, and is proving every bit the catalyst for rising commodity prices as the 2010 floods in Pakistan and the wildfires in Russia were. Flooding in Australia has roiled Asia-Pacific markets for coal, cotton, wheat and sugar.

If weather events are increasingly disastrous in the world’s bread baskets, global warming could result in a familiar and worsening pattern: periodic collisions between Asia’s seemingly limitless demand for goods and the world’s supply of basic agricultural and energy commodities. That could send average commodity prices significantly higher, limiting economic growth and, perhaps, affecting the appetite for burning coal.

IHS Global Insight predicted yesterday that the floods would trim at least two-tenths of a percent off of Australia’s projected 2011 gross domestic product. Queensland is the largest exporter of coal for making steel. Nearly all of the mines are closed, and seaborne coal prices are approaching record highs.

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The Efficiency Dilemma: If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?

Published on December 25, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 2 Comments

From David Owen in the New Yorker:

Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century was the world’s leading military, industrial, and mercantile power. In 1865, a twenty-nine-year-old Englishman named William Stanley Jevons published a book, “The Coal Question,” in which he argued that the bonanza couldn’t last. Britain’s affluence and global hegemony, he wrote, depended on its endowment of coal, which the country was rapidly depleting. He added that such an outcome could not be delayed through increased “economy” in the use of coal—what we refer to today as energy efficiency. He concluded, in italics,“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” Jevons might be little discussed today, except by historians of economics, if it weren’t for the scholarship of another English economist, Len Brookes. During the nineteen-seventies oil crisis, Brookes argued that devising ways to produce goods with less oil—an obvious response to higher prices—would merely accommodate the new prices, causing energy consumption to be higher than it would have been if no effort to increase efficiency had been made; only later did he discover that Jevons had anticipated him by more than a century. Nowadays, this effect is usually referred to as “rebound”—or, in cases where increased consumption more than cancels out any energy savings, as “backfire.”

For more (subscription required): http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_owen#ixzz198hPJeJU

Does the Cancún agreement show climate leadership?

Published on December 13, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

From John Vidal in The Guardian:

In the last hours before the final session of the Cancún climate changesummit, the world’s poorest countries tried to remind the rich what was at stake. Bruno Sekoli, chair of the 54 nations in the least developed block, spoke for them all:

“The objective of these talks [has been] to mitigate climate change and help developing countries adapt [to climate impacts]. The situation is extremely disappointing. Concentrations of greenhouse gases have risen at alarming rates and it’s worrying to think of the situation in just 10 years’ time. Most of us are already fighting for survival I appeal to developed countries to do what is right. They have shown economic, even military leadership. They must now show climate leadership.”

Well, they didn’t. They kept the wheels on the bus by reaching an agreement on Saturday, but it is still careering towards the precipice.

The promise of vast new flows of aid money is still a chimera; the ambition to keep temperatures to 2C is nowhere near enough to prevent disaster across Africa, Latin America and Asia. In the overriding desire to get a deal – any deal – gaping loopholes and ambiguities were left in, dates were left out and major issues about the final legal form and the emission cuts all countries will need to make were pushed back another year. In effect, the world is in limbo.

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An end to gridlock?

Published on December 2, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From an editorial in Nature:

Europe says it is embarking on an unprecedented overhaul of its electricity system. But it must do more to convince the private sector that it is serious.

Europe says it is embarking on an unprecedented overhaul of its electricity system. But it must do more to convince the private sector that it is serious.

Such an offshore grid would be a world first and would bring many benefits. These would include far greater integration, and hence price competition, between the electricity markets in northern Europe, wider access to extensive short-term hydropower storage in Norway, and crucial links to bring to land the energy generated by offshore wind, wave and tidal power. The grid is just one of half-a-dozen energy-infrastructure priorities for Europe that the European Commission announced last month. Together, they will require euro200 billion (US$264 billion) of investment over the next decade according to the commission, half of it from public sources. The quoted price for the North Sea grid is about euro20 billion.

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Published on November 30, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

From John Vidal in The Guardian:

David Cameron has refused to attend the UN climate talks in Cancún, despite a direct appeal by the Mexican chair of the conference.

The talks, which began today, have been accompanied by little of the razzamatazz that followed the host of celebrities and world leaders that attended last year’s event in Copenhagen. The US, UK and EU have all played down the chances of a deal and the Mexican authorities expect about 22,000 people, including 9,000 official delegates and journalists – fewer than half the number that attended the at-times chaotic conference in the Danish capital.

Despite low expectations, at least 20 world leaders are expected to be present, the majority from Latin America. The small island states of Vanuatu, Samoa, Kiribati and Nauru are also planning to send their leaders. And although the US has little to offer, because of the failure of domestic climate legislation in the Senate earlier this year, the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, warned today that the US risks falling far behind advances made by China and other countries in the global race for clean energy, something he he referred to as a “Sputnik moment” – the US response to the Soviet Union’s early lead in the space race. “We face a choice today,” he said. “Are we going to continue America’s innovation leadership or are we going to fall behind?”

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Fifth of vertebrates face extinction-study

Published on October 27, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

species-lossFrom David Fogarty, Reuters:

About a fifth of the world’s vertebrates are threatened with extinction, a major review has found, highlighting the plight of nature that is the focus of global environment talks underway in Japan.

The study by more than 170 scientists across the globe used data for 25,000 species from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of threatened species and examined the status of the world’s mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fishes.

The authors found, on average, 50 species of mammals, birds and amphibians move closer to extinction each year because of expansion of farms and plantations, logging and over-hunting. Another factor was competition from other species, particularly those introduced from other areas.

But the study, published in the journal Science, also found that conservation efforts had curbed the overall rate of loss.

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