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Scientists discover new forest with undiscovered species on Google Earth – Telegraph
Conservationists have found a host of new species after discovering uncharted new territory on the internet map Google Earth.
GreenMonk news roundup 12/20/2008
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Oil Is Not the Climate Change Culprit — It’s All About Coal | Wired Science from Wired.com
New climate change scenarios quantify the idea that oil is only a small component of the total global warming problem — the real problem is coal.
If the world replaced all of its oil usage with carbon-neutral energy sources, ecologist Kenneth Caldeira of Stanford University calculated that it would only buy us about 10 years before coal emissions warmed the planet to what many scientists consider dangerous levels.
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Waterfootprint.org: Water footprint and virtual water
Launch of the Water Footprint Network: 16 December 2008!
Download press releasePeople use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc. The water footprint is an indicator of water use that looks at both direct and indirect water use of a consumer or producer. The water footprint of an individual, community or business is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business.
GreenMonk news roundup 12/19/2008
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Water efficiency organisation launched – Low Carbon Economy
A global organisation promoting resource efficiency of water has been launched with partners from civil society, academia, multilateral organisations and business.
The Water Footprint Network, which aims to encourage the transition to equitable and sustainable water use around the world, was launched earlier this week.
GreenMonk news roundup 12/17/2008
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Researchers eye clean energy possibilities along Portuguese coast
MIT researchers are working with Portuguese colleagues to design a pilot-scale device that will capture significantly more of the energy in ocean waves than existing systems, and use it to power an electricity-generating turbine.
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IBM and researchers from Harvard University are launching a new World Community Grid project to discover organic materials to create a more efficient and lower cost solar cell. The path-breaking effort will use idle computer power from volunteers to create large supplies of new clean energy.
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Wal-Mart recently announced the launch of Neu Direction, a line of Fair-Trade Certified wines from Argentina. Fair Trade Certification™ is administered by TransFair USA and “guarantees consumers that strict economic, social, and environmental criteria were met in the production and trade of an agricultural product.”
GreenMonk news roundup 12/16/2008
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Clean Break » Blog Archive » The grid and renewables: supersize me
Climate talks in Poznan, Poland, this week included a meeting to discuss the concept of a super-grid that would connect renewable-rich regions to energy-hungry regions via high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) cables. It’s an attractive idea. If Iceland has all the geothermal, North Africa has the solar, Scotland has the offshore wind and the coasts can tap wave power, why not build a grid that can carry that emission-free power to inland population centres that rely on fossil fuels and nuclear?
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BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Arctic ice thickness ‘plummets’
The thickness of Arctic sea ice “plummeted” last winter, thinning by as much as one-fifth in some regions, satellite data has revealed.
A study by UK researchers showed that the ice thickness had been fairly constant for the previous five winters.
The team from University College London added that the results provided the first definitive proof that the overall volume of Arctic ice was decreasing.
GreenMonk news roundup 12/15/2008
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BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Australia sets new climate target
Australia has said it will start a carbon trading scheme by the middle of 2010, despite appeals from the business community for a delay.
The plan will cover 75% of the country’s emissions.
It has also announced that it will cut greenhouse gas emissions by between 5% and 15% by 2020, from the 2000 levels.
Modest targets, well below international expectations.
GreenMonk news roundup 12/13/2008
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The Energy Roadmap – Ground breaking ‘Dry water’ method developed to store natural gas in a powder
Have you ever held natural gas in your hand?
“It (‘dry water’) looks like a powder, but if you wipe it on your skin, it smears and feels cold” says Andrew Cooper University of Liverpool, UK
What happened?
Chemists at the University of Liverpool have developed a reliable way of converting methane gas into a powder form in order to make it more transportable.The researchers use a white powder material made of a mixture of silica and water to soak up large quantities of methane molecules.
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East African geothermal tests ‘successful’ | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Geothermal energy generation in Africa could take a leap forward in 2009 after exploratory studies in Kenya exceeded all expectations, it was announced Tuesday.
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Calif. adopts major global warming plan – Climate Change- msnbc.com
California air regulators on Thursday approved a climate plan that would require the state’s utilities, refineries and large factories to transform their operations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The California Air Resources Board adopted what will be the nation’s most sweeping global warming plan, outlining for the first time how individuals and businesses will have to meet a landmark 2006 law that made the state a leader on curbing warming emissions.
GreenMonk news roundup 12/12/2008
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Super-Concrete to Store Solar Power in Works : TreeHugger
Researchers at the University of Arkansas are working to develop a new way of storing thermal energy in concrete. They were given an award from the U.S. Department of Energy in the sum of $770, 000 dollars as part of the federal government‘s program to create inexpensive solar energy storage
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Fake Christmas Trees Not So Green | LiveScience
Still debating on whether to go real or artificial for this year’s Christmas tree? According to Newswise, the winner is that old-fashioned, living, breathing, carbon-sequestering noble fir (or any living Christmas tree, for that matter).
GreenMonk news roundup 12/11/2008
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maribo: Is climate science strong enough for the courts?
Myles Allen, a physicist at Oxford University, said a breakthrough that allows scientists to judge the role man-made climate change played in extreme weather events could see a rush to the courts over the next decade. He said: “We are starting to get to the point that when an adverse weather event occurs we can quantify how much more likely it was made by human activity. And people adversely affected by climate change today are in a position to document and quantify their losses. This is going to be hugely important.”
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The cream of the UK climate science community sat in stunned silence as Kevin Anderson pointed out that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out, he said, that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and “dangerously misguided” at worst.
In the jargon used to count the steady accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s thin layer of atmosphere, he said it was “improbable” that levels could now be restricted to 650 parts per million (ppm).
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Global Temperature Increase on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
This time series shows the combined global land and marine surface temperature record from 1850 to 2008.
Taken from the UK’s Climate Research Unit (see www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/).
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For the foreseeable future, the global financial-services sector will be wrestling with the grim realities of credit losses, deleveraging, and challenges to traditional business models. With dramatic industry restructuring already underway and a clear need for players to concentrate on the here and now, it would be easy to lose sight of a nascent but significant long-term opportunity: facilitating carbon trading.
GreenMonk news roundup 12/10/2008
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The hidden cost of our growing taste for meat | Environment | The Observer
As the west’s appetite for meat increases, so too does the demand for soya – used as animal feed by farmers. But the planting of huge tracts of land is causing deforestation and destroying eco-systems in developing countries.
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Ever since last week’s announcement of a deal to roll out Project Better Place’s model for recharging electric cars in Hawaii, I’ve been curious about how it would work out, if the supplies of new renewable electricity needed to wean the Islands’ million or so cars and light trucks off of oil were not forthcoming, or at least didn’t materialize as quickly as the company and state hope. If I’ve done my sums right this morning, it appears that electrifying Hawaii’s passenger cars would still save large quantities of oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly, even if every kilowatt-hour (kWh) to run them was generated from the state’s oil-fired power plants.
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America’s Addiction Fuels Desire For Coffee Ground Biodiesel : Gas 2.0
Researchers are reporting they have successfully made a high quality biodiesel from spent coffee grounds. They estimate that the coffee ground biodiesel industry could generate as much as $8,000,000 in profits annually using waste from US Starbucks stores alone.
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Arctic will have first ice-free summer in 2015: Researcher
The ice that has covered the Arctic basin for a million years will be gone in little more than six years because of global warming, a University of Manitoba geoscientist said.
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Climate change: Sci-fi solutions no longer in the margins
With political efforts to tackle global warming advancing slower than a Greenland glacier, schemes for saving Earth’s climate system that once were dismissed as crazy or dangerous are gaining in status.
Negotiating a multilateral treaty on curbing greenhouse gases is being so outstripped by the scale of the problem that those promoting a deus ex-machina — a technical fix that would at least gain time — are getting a serious hearing.To the outsider, these ideas to manipulate the climate may look as if they are inspired by science fiction.
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Research on nuclear fusion continues apace…
MIT researchers are keeping hope alive in the long quest for fusion energy. Researchers have advanced our ability to harnesses one of the most complicated forms of energy science in the universe, but add a word of caution that real scalable reactors could still be ‘decades away’ as all eyes now focus on the ITER in France.
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Defense Tech Briefs – Silicon Nanowires for Anodes of Rechargeable Li Power Cells
Battery technologies are improving every day!
Charge capacities could be increased substantially over those of carbon-based anodes.
Silicon nanowires have been investigated as alternatives to the graphite heretofore widely used as an anode material in rechargeable lithium-ion power cells. The theoretical specific charge capacity of graphite, corresponding to the maximum Li content (at a composition of LiC6) is 372 mA•hr/g. In contrast, the theoretical specific charge capacity of Si corresponding to the maximum Li content (at a composition of Li4.4Si) is much greater — 4.2 A•hr/g.
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IEEE Spectrum: The Price Is Wrong for Oil Shale and Tar Sand Tech
Looks like oil isn’t going to go away any time soon without a fight!
The huge run-up in oil prices over the last several years, reaching a peak of close to US $150 per barrel this past summer, has given energy companies a big incentive to find new ways of harvesting unconventional oil, especially in North America.