tagged w/ Carbon Dioxide
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Why do we need to know about CO2? Because the President-elect, several of his choices for environmental and energy agencies, the Supreme Court and much of the U.S. Congress has no idea what they are talking about and, worse, want to pass legislation and regulations that will further bankrupt the United States of America.Why do we need to know about CO2? Because the President-elect, several of his choices... more
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Melting icebergs, so long the iconic image of global warming, are triggering a natural process that could delay or even end climate change, British scientists have found.
A team working on board the Royal Navy’s HMS Endurance off the coast of Antarctica have discovered tiny particles of iron are released into the sea as the ice melts.
The iron feeds algae, which blooms and sucks up damaging carbon dioxide (CO2), then sinks, locking away the harmful greenhouse gas for hundreds of years.
The team think the process could hold the key to staving off globally rising temperatures.
Lead researcher Professor Rob Raiswell, from Leeds University, said: ‘The Earth itself seems to want to save us.’
As a result of the findings, a ground-breaking experiment will be held this month off the British island of South Georgia, 800 miles south east of the Falklands. It will see if the phenomenon could be harnessed to contain rising carbon emissions.
Researchers will use several tons of iron sulphate to create an artificial bloom of algae. The patch will be so large it will be visible from space.
Scientists already knew that releasing iron into the sea stimulates the growth of algae. But environmentalists had warned that to do so artificially might damage the planet’s fragile ecosystem.
Last year, the UN banned iron fertilisation in the Great Southern Ocean.
However, the new findings show the mechanism has actually been operating naturally for millions of years within the isolated southern waters. And it has led to the researchers being granted permission by the UN to move ahead with the experiment.
The scientist who will lead the next stage of the study, Professor Victor Smetacek, said: ‘The gas is sure to be out of the Earth’s atmosphere for several hundred years.’
The aim is to discover whether artificially fertilising the area will create more algae in the Great Southern Ocean. That ocean is an untapped resource for soaking up CO2 because it doesn’t have much iron, unlike other seas.
It covers 20million square miles, and scientists say that if this could all be treated with iron, the resulting algae would remove three-and-a-half gigatons of carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to one eighth of all emissions annually created by burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.
It would also be equal to removing all carbon dioxide emitted from every power plant, chimney and car exhaust in the rapidly expanding industries of India and Japan.Melting icebergs, so long the iconic image of global warming, are triggering a natural... more
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Cement, a vast source of planet-warming carbon dioxide, could be transformed into a means of stripping the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, thanks to an innovation from British engineers.
The new environmentally formulation means the cement industry could change from being a "significant emitter to a significant absorber of CO2," says Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, chief scientist at London-based Novacem, whose invention has garnered support and funding from industry and environmentalists.
The new cement, which uses a different raw material, certainly has a vast potential market. Making the 2bn tonnes of cement used globally every year pumps out 5% of the world's CO2 emissions - more than the entire aviation industry. And the long-term trends are upwards: a recent report by the French bank Credit Agricole estimated that, by 2020, demand for cement will increase by 50% compared to today.
Making traditional cement results in greenhouse gas emissions from two sources: it requires intense heat, and so a lot of energy to heat up the ovens that cook the raw material, such as limestone. That then releases further CO2 as it burns. But, until now, noone has found a large-scale way to tackle this fundamental problem.
Novacem's cement, based on magnesium silicates, not only requires much less heating, it also absorbs large amounts of CO2 as it hardens, making it carbon negative. Set up by Vlasopoulos and his colleagues at Imperial College London, Novacem has already attracted the attention of major construction companies such as Rio Tinto Minerals, WSP Group and Laing O'Rourke, and investors including the Carbon Trust.
According to Novacem, its product can absorb, over its lifecycle, around 0.6 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of cement. This compares to carbon emissions of about 0.4 tonnes per of standard cement. "From that point of view, it's attractive," said Rachael Nutter, head of business incubators at the Carbon Trust. "The real challenge is what is the supply chain, who do you need to partner with to take it to market? The million-dollar question is what are the applications of it? If it ends up as decorative applications such as floor tiles, it's quite interesting but not as much as if you get into load-bearing structural stuff."Cement, a vast source of planet-warming carbon dioxide, could be transformed into a... more
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Nasa's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) will pinpoint the key locations on the Earth's surface where CO2 is being emitted and absorbed.
CO2 from human activities is thought to be driving climate changes, but important facts about its movement through the atmosphere remain elusive.
"We know where most of the fossil fuel emissions are coming from; we also know where things like cement manufacturing are producing large CO2 emissions," explained Dr Crisp, who works at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"But there are other things such as biomass (forest) burning and clearing; and we don't have a good quantification of the CO2 released by those processes.
"If you take out the fossil fuels - for which we understand the CO2 source to within 10% - and look at the rest of the carbon dioxide that's introduced into the atmosphere by our activities, it's uncertain by 100%.Nasa's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) will pinpoint the key locations on the... more
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Tashi
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3 years ago
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The Hubble Space Telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside of the solar system, a significant step in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Though the planet is more similar to Jupiter than Earth and is too hot to harbor life, the ability to identify organic compounds on other planets is key to being able to find other habitable worlds, and potentially life.
"The carbon dioxide is kind of the main focus of the excitement, because that is a molecule that under the right circumstances could have a connection to biological activity as it does on Earth," astronomer Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a press release. "The very fact that we're able to detect it, and estimate its abundance, is significant for the long-term effort of characterizing planets both to find out what they're made of and to find out if they could be a possible host for life."The Hubble Space Telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet... more
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An ancient technique of plowing charred plants into the ground to revive soil may also trap greenhouse gases for thousands of years and forestall global warming, scientists said on Friday.
Heating plants such as farm waste or wood in airtight conditions produces a high-carbon substance called biochar, which can store the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and enhance nutrients in the soil.
Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. Subsequently storing that carbon in the soil removes the gas from the atmosphere.
"I feel confident that the (carbon storage) time of stable biochar is from high hundreds to a few thousand years," said Cornell University's Johannes Lehmann, at an event on the sidelines of U.N. climate talks in the Polish city of Poznan.
Lehmann estimated that under ambitious scenarios biochar could store 1 billion tons of carbon annually -- equivalent to more than 10 percent of global carbon emissions, which amounted to 8.5 billion tons in 2007.
Under a conservative scenario the technique could store 0.2 billion tons of carbon annually, he said. That would still require heating without oxygen -- called pyrolysis -- some 27 percent of global crop waste and plowing this into the soil.
Lehmann cited experiments on 10 farm crops suggesting biochar can also increase yields by up to three times, because the organic matter holds on to nutrients.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in November that global greenhouse gas emissions were so out of control that avoiding more dangerous levels of climate change depended on creating negative emissions later this century.
The energy adviser to 28 industrialized countries cited biochar as one way of achieving that.
The technique rings alarm bells among some environmentalists worried it could spur deforestation, but its chief problem may be that it is barely proven on a commercial scale.
"It will remain theoretical without making demonstration plants on the ground," Lehmann said.
Soils containing biochar made by Amazon people thousands of years ago still contain up to 70 times more black carbon than surrounding soils and are still higher in nutrients, said Debbie Reed, director of the International Biochar Initiative (IBI).
The IBI was in Poznan to lobby for research funding for biochar. In Poznan, 187 countries are meeting in ongoing talks to agree a new climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. They hope to finalize a deal next year.
Lehmann emphasized that the technique was not a substitute for fighting climate change by curbing man-made greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.An ancient technique of plowing charred plants into the ground to revive soil may also... more
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An environmental activist wants to sue world leaders to the tune of $1 Billion for not preventing Global Warming. This is either brilliant or crazy!An environmental activist wants to sue world leaders to the tune of $1 Billion for not... more
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Nov. 26, 2008 -- Among the complex mélange of molecules that create a wine's bouquet is another chemical signature: The amount of fossil-fuel-derived carbon dioxide in the air over the vineyard can be measured in the wine's alcohol.
Researchers propose using the technique to track attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in a given region, to see which carbon-management schemes work best, or to refine regional models of climate change.
"It's going to become more and more important to develop these techniques to measure carbon dioxide from fossil fuels in surface air so we can diagnose regional fossil fuel emission reductions," said Jim Randerson of the University of California, Irvine, who was not a part of the study. "This could be a really valuable component of a new network."Nov. 26, 2008 -- Among the complex mélange of molecules that create a... more
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Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may make Earth's oceans more acidic faster than previously thought—unbalancing ecosystems in the process, a new study says.
Since 2000, scientists have measured the acidity of seawater around Tatoosh Island off the coast of Washington state. The acidity increased ten times quicker than climate models predicted.
The research also revealed the corrosive effect of acidic oceans could trigger a dramatic shift in coastal species and jeopardize shellfish stocks.
"The increase in acidity we saw during our study was about the same magnitude as we expect over the course of the next century," said study co-author Timothy Wootton, a marine biologist from the University of Chicago.
"This raises a warning flag that the oceans may be changing faster than people think," he said.
Increased carbon dioxide emissions from human activities have led to a 30 percent rise in ocean acidity in the past 200 years.Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may make Earth's oceans... more
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Japan is the world's 5th largest producer of carbon dioxide, and it's emissions increased 2.3% last year to hit record highs in March... a staggering 1.371 billion metric tons.
Unlike the European Union, Japan has hesitated to implement mandatory caps or carbon taxes on companies, stating that such a move would negatively affect their competition with the rest of the world.
Japan now faces humiliating failure to meet its Kyoto target in the next 4 years.
The news comes in the midst of what appears to be a global economic recession, which may divert attention from climate change and the money it requires.Japan is the world's 5th largest producer of carbon dioxide, and it's... more
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islek
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3 years ago
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"(PhysOrg.com) -- If climate disasters are to be averted, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) must be reduced below the levels that already exist today, according to a study published in Open Atmospheric Science Journal by a group of 10 scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom and France."
This information is pretty consistent with the goals and ideas of the 350 campaign, which I think is covered in another story here: http://current.com/items/89166052_the_350_animation_the_importance_of_a_number_in_a_global_language"(PhysOrg.com) -- If climate disasters are to be averted, atmospheric carbon... more
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"A rock found mostly in Oman can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at a rate that could help slow global warming, scientists say.
When carbon dioxide comes in contact with the rock, peridotite, the gas is converted into solid minerals such as calcite.
Geologist Peter Kelemen and geochemist Juerg Matter said the naturally occurring process can be supercharged 1 million times to grow underground minerals that can permanently store 2 billion or more of the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity every year.
Their study will appear in the November 11 edition of the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.
Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth's mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. It also appears on the surface, particularly in Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that produces substantial amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of fossil fuels.
"To be near all that oil and gas infrastructure is not a bad thing," Matter said in an interview.
They also calculated the costs of mining the rock and bringing it directly to greenhouse gas emitting power plants, but determined it was too expensive.
The scientists, who are both at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, say they have kick-started peridotite's carbon storage process by boring down and injecting it with heated water containing pressurized carbon dioxide. They have a preliminary patent filing for the technique.
They say 4 billion to 5 billion tons a year of the gas could be stored near Oman by using peridotite in parallel with another emerging technique developed by Columbia's Klaus Lackner that uses synthetic "trees" which suck carbon dioxide out of the air.
More research needs to be done before either technology could be used on a commercial scale.
Peridotite also occurs in the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea and Caledonia, and along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and in smaller amounts in California.
Big greenhouse gas emitters like the United States, China and India, where abundant surface supplies of the rock are not found, would have to come up with other ways of storing or cutting emissions.
Rock storage would be safer and cheaper than other schemes, Matter said.
Many companies are hoping to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by siphoning off large amounts of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and storing it underground.
That method could require thousands of miles of pipelines and nobody is sure whether the potentially dangerous gas would leak back out into the atmosphere in the future.""A rock found mostly in Oman can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas... more
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The leader for climate change in China, Gao Guangsheng declared Tuesday that China wants rich countries to commit 1 percent of their economic worth to help poor nations fight global warming.
He said the financial turmoil rattling the global economy should not deter a big increase in funds and technology to poor nations.
A partnership between the United Nations and China to address the issue of technology transfer will kick off with a meeting next Friday, November 7 in the Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square.The leader for climate change in China, Gao Guangsheng declared Tuesday that China... more
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reefs including the Great Barrier Reef off Australia could begin to break up within a few decades, research suggests. (Photograph: Cathie
A new global deal on climate change will come too late to save most of the world's coral reefs, according to a US study that suggests major ecological damage to the oceans is now inevitable.
Emissions of carbon dioxide are making seawater so acidic that reefs including the Great Barrier Reef off Australia could begin to break up within a few decades, research by the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California suggests. Even ambitious targets to stabilise greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, as championed by Britain and Europe to stave off dangerous climate change, still place more than 90% of coral reefs in jeopardy.
Oceanographers Long Cao and Ken Caldeira looked at how carbon dioxide dissolves in the sea as human emissions increase. About a third of carbon pollution is soaked up in this way, where it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid. Experts say human activity over the last two centuries has produced enough acid to lower the average pH of global ocean surface waters by about 0.1 units.
Such acidification spells problems for coral reefs, which rely on calcium minerals called aragonite to build and maintain their exoskeletons.
"We can't say for sure that [the reefs] will disappear but ... the likelihood they will be able to persist is pretty small," said Caldeira.
The new study was prompted by questions by a US congressional committee on how possible carbon stabilisation targets would affect coral loss.
reefs including the Great Barrier Reef off Australia could begin to break up within... more
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Climate experts are warning that if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions aren't reduced, most of B.C's glaciers will be melted within 150 years.Climate experts are warning that if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions aren't... more
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The Bay of Naples is renowned for its breathtaking beauty and glittering clear waters. For centuries, tourists have flocked to the region to experience its glories.
But beneath the waves, scientists have uncovered an alarming secret. They have found streams of gas bubbling up from the seabed around the island of Ischia. 'The waters are like a Jacuzzi - there is so much carbon dioxide fizzing up from the seabed,' said Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, of Plymouth University. 'Millions of litres of gas bubble up every day.'
The gas streams have turned Ischia's waters into acid, and this has had a major impact on sea life and aquatic plants. Now marine biologists fear that the world's seas could follow suit.
'Every day the oceans absorb more than 25m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,' said Hall-Spencer. 'If it were not for the oceans, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be far higher than they are today and the impact of climate change would be far worse. However, there is a downside: it is called ocean acidification.'
Scientists calculate that the seas are absorbing so much carbon dioxide that they are 30 per cent more acidic than they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution. The change is three times greater and has happened 100 times faster than at any other time during the past 20 million years.
Tomorrow hundreds of scientists will gather in Monaco for the 'Second International Symposium on the Ocean in a High CO2 World'. One focus of debate is likely to be the Plymouth study. The seas off Ischia - which are affected by carbon dioxide from volcanic activity - offer a first-class opportunity to investigate what might happen in the next few decades.
Scientists found that in Ischia's highly acidic water:
• Biodiversity of plants and fish has dropped by 30 per cent
• Algae vital for binding coral reefs have been wiped out
• Invasive 'alien' species, such as sea-grasses, are thriving
• Coral and sea urchins have been destroyed, while mussels and clams are failing to grow shells.
The conference will also tackle the dangers posed to fish larvae, which are sensitive to high levels of acid, as well as the threat to commercial fish stocks.
'Many developing countries have seafood as their prime source of food,' said Dr Carol Turley, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory. 'If they lose that, the result could be famine.'The Bay of Naples is renowned for its breathtaking beauty and glittering clear waters.... more
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To better understand how emissions might change in the future, Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York considered a wide range of fossil fuel consumption scenarios, which shows that the rise in carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels can be kept below harmful levels as long as emissions from coal are phased out globally within the next few decades.
Global warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist says.
"We've already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," according to James Hansen. "But there are ways to solve the problem" of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which Hansen said has reached the "tipping point" of 385 parts per million.
Hansen calls for phasing out all coal-fired plants by 2030, taxing their emissions until then, and banning the building of new plants unless they are designed to trap and segregate the carbon dioxide they emit.
The major obstacle to saving the planet from its inhabitants is not technology, insisted Hansen, named one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2006 by Time magazine.
"The problem is that 90 percent of energy is fossil fuels. And that is such a huge business, it has permeated our government," he maintained. "What's become clear to me in the past several years is that both the executive branch and the legislative branch are strongly influenced by special fossil fuel interests," he said, referring to the providers of coal, oil and natural gas and the energy industry that burns them.
"You need a new Kyoto protocol with all the major emitters committed to it. Then you are cooking with gas."
To better understand how emissions might change in the future, Pushker Kharecha and... more
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by Andy Jacobson, postdoctoral research staff member in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program at Princeton University.by Andy Jacobson, postdoctoral research staff member in the Atmospheric and Oceanic... more
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The EPA has issued its "Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.6; Analyses of Effects of Global Climate Change on Welfare and Human Systems"
which anticipates a wide range of negative impacts on human health over the coming decades, including "increased mortality"
This excerpt, which I found on page 94, states the following:
"there is no guarantee that future changes in climate will not present a threshold that poses technological or physical limits to which adaptation is not possible."
The Bush administration has rejected proposals to cap C02 or impose carbon taxes to limit global warming.
The EPA has issued its "Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.6; Analyses of Effects... more
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This is a fascinating and dynamic article concerning the state of global warming and the number everyone must know and encourage: 350This is a fascinating and dynamic article concerning the state of global warming and... more
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