Groundbreaking News

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates – A major new report by the United Nations-supported Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) launched today underscores the incredible environmental and social advantages of a future powered by renewable energy over the next decades, WWF said. 

The 900-page Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation compares 164 scenarios on renewable energy and is the most comprehensive analysis ever of trends and perspectives for renewable energy.

“The IPCC and governments of the world signal loud and clear: fossil fuels and nuclear are no real alternatives to renewables,” said Dr Stephan Singer, Director for Global Energy Policy for WWF International.

“As oil and gas within easy reach is dwindling, the world needs to move to clean and sustainable sources of energy and avoid any investment into dirty alternatives.”

Although unique in its epic scope, the IPCC underestimates the potential of deploying renewable energy even faster, especially when combined with top level energy efficiency, WWF said. The organisation’s own analysis, called The Energy Report, shows a pathway to a 100% renewable energy future by 2050. This analysis is the first that also indicates the challenges and research needs to make sure this low carbon development respects development needs of up to 9 billion people.

“IPCC delivers a landmark report that shows the rapid growth, low-cost potential for renewable energy – but unfortunately does not endorse a 100% renewable energy pathway until 2050,” said Singer.

“WWF’s report adds that missing piece – a bold vision with a clear timeline. We need to be fast if we want to tackle pressing issues as varied as energy security and efficiency, and at the same time keep climate change well below the danger threshold of 2 degree global warming.

WWF strongly emphasizes that in addition to the climate benefits, the IPCC report documents the plethora of other advantages clean renewables provide including health and security of supply benefits, new job and technology opportunities for all countries and the potential to provide clean and affordable energy to the more than two billion people in parts of the developing world which either have no or only erratic access. 

Link Below:
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/climate_carbon_energy/climate_change/news/?uNewsID=200299

Animals Shrinking?

Humanity appears to be ushering in new age of minifauna, a kind of Lilliputian world full of runts and dwarves.

At about the size of a five-cent piece, Kugelann's green clock beetle would never be mistaken for a giant. But in the world of European ground beetles, Poecilus kugelanni is no runt. Indeed, some Belgian biologists recently classified the gaudy, green-winged creature as a 'big' beetle.

Big, however, hasn't proved better. Green clock beetle populations have crashed over the past century due to habitat destruction and other threats, and the insect is now endangered in many places. And it's not alone: dozens of Europe's other big-beetle species are also fading away, even as many of their smaller cousins seem to be holding on.

It's a pattern that researchers seem to be seeing everywhere. Around the planet, relatively large species are in big trouble — from lions and tigers and bears to cod, condors, and conifers. Even some heftier snails and salamanders are struggling.

"Size matters," says biologist Chris Darimont of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who notes that the assaults are coming from several angles. On one front, "a larger body size makes a species more vulnerable to all kinds of problems, from getting hunted by humans to habitat change".

One result: Nearly half of the world's large 'megafaunal' mammals — and more than half of the largest marine fish — are now considered vulnerable to imminent extinction.

Meanwhile, overfishing, overhunting, and pollution — and perhaps global warming — are fueling another downsizing trend. These pressures are causing some plants and animals to evolve with astounding rapidity, producing individuals that are on average shorter, thinner and lighter. In other words, they are literally shrinking.

It's a "vastly underappreciated problem," says Darimont, whose own work has shown that a wide range of hunted organisms now have body sizes that have shrunk on average by one-fifth. And human 'superpredators' are causing this shrinkage to occur incredibly rapidly, sometimes in just a few decades — or up to 300 per cent faster than in natural systems.

Together, the trends have some observers wondering whether we're on the verge of a new "age of the minifauna", a kind of Lilliputian world full of runts and dwarves?

It turns out that this is a very old story with a modern twist. More than 25,000 years ago, one megafaunal species — we humans — began to spread rapidly around the globe and in the process helped to wipe out about half of all land mammals weighing more than 44 kilograms.

Link Below:
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2011/05/09/3208858.htm

FLOATING INTO THE FUTURE!!!!!!!

The notion that airships represent the future of air cargo is being revived by a new generation of entrepreneurs some 75 years after a catastrophic fireball brought the industry to a screeching halt.

Far safer than the Hindenburg, whose tragic 1937 docking remains an icon of aerospace gone wrong, these modern airships are a hybrid of lighter-than-air and fixed-wing aircraft. They can loft enormous payloads without requiring the acres of tarmac or miles of roadway necessary for conventional air and truck transport. And they do so at a fraction of the fuel and cost of aircraft.

Airships "give you access and much larger payloads at much lower costs," said Peter DeRobertis, project leader for commercial hybrid air vehicles at Lockheed Martin's Aeronautics and Skunk Works division in Fort Worth, Texas. "It's also a green aircraft; you're not polluting."

Today's airships could conceivably be used to transport everything from ripe pineapples to heavy industrial equipment direct to the customer. Shippers, for example, could roll tractors, backhoes, and road graders onto a 50-ton hybrid vehicle at a factory and roll them off at the job site, easing logistics and cost.

A handful of companies have prototypes under development. Lockheed has an airship in the works dubbed SkyTug that should be commercially available by late 2013 with a range of 1,000 nautical miles and a 20-ton payload. The 50-ton Skyfreighter is expected to follow in late 2014.

The industry's future is initially aimed at leapfrogging the conventional cargo transport infrastructure, freighting goods where highways and airports don't exist - Canada's frozen north; China's western frontier; remote parts of Africa, Asia, and South America. No airships are commercially available for cargo transport there yet. But once established on the frontiers, experts say their versatility, cost and fuel advantages should allow airships to penetrate mature freight markets like the United States.

'Hard to justify any roads'

Optimistic entrepreneurs have made similar predictions before, however. Germany-based Cargolifter AG burned through some $500 million without building so much as a prototype before it went belly-up in 2002.

But today's technology is much improved from earlier, flawed approaches. And the potential market is vast.

In northern Canada, for instance, some 4 million square miles of real estate lie north of rail lines and all-weather highways, and warming winters are making seasonally-constructed ice roads less reliable. Historically, ice roads were open three months during the winter. Today, they barely see 30 days of operation per season. 

link HERE:

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2011/05/airships-as-climate-solution

Tough Choices

Though hindsight lets us peruse history with 20/20 vision, it's rare that we can predict -- or even imagine -- the future. This morning, the Army Corps of Engineers may have bucked that trend when that motley construction crew, best known for building the Panama Canal and channelling the Mississippi through concrete levees, blew up one of those very levees near Wyatt, MO.

Following weeks of record rainfall and tornadoes, the Mississippi river continues to swell, exceeding flow rates  last seen in 1927, and endangering downstream cities from Cairo, Il (which has already been evacuated) to Memphis, TN and other populated areas along Old Muddy.

It seems only natural that the Army Corps would blow up a levee to save millions of people downstream from rising waters -- but there's a cost, too: 130,000 acres of rich farmland, 100 homes and 2,800 now homeless in the areas surrounding the levee. That land, like the small island atolls in the Maldives, is ground zero for climate change.

A hotter planet means clouds hold more moisture -- and when those coulds dump, they flood rivers, farmland, houses and people's lives. The choices we can make now, to switch to renewable energy, and make buildings and transportation efficient, will not only help get us back to 350ppm of carbon in the atmosphere, but create jobs, wealth and security in America.

If we don't stop dumping carbon into our atmosphere, the choices we'll have to make in the future will look more like the morbid one that played out in Wyatt, Missouri today: flood millions in cities downstream, or ruin thousands of acres of land and ruin livelihoods upstream.

Knowing Carbon Footprint Bad For Environment?

Measuring a person’s ecological footprint or carbon footprint is a popular tool among environmentalists. Many see it as a way to educate people about the damage they inflict on the environment on an everyday basis — information that may prompt them to change their behavior.

But newly published research suggests that for many people — perhaps most — the receipt of such data may produce the opposite result.

In an experiment described in the journal Social Influence, “Only people who had invested their self-esteem in environmentalism — a strong form of commitment — reacted to negative environmental-footprint feedback by engaging in a pro-environment behavior,” writes Santa Clara University psychologist Amara Brook. “Others were less likely to engage in a pro-environmental behavior after negative feedback.”

Given that “for most people in developed countries, environmental-footprint feedback is very negative,” Brook’s study calls into question the wisdom of providing such information.

Two hundred and twelve students (median age 19) participated in the experiment, which was conducted over a two-week period. First, they answered a set of questions measuring their self-esteem level and the degree to which their self-worth was contingent upon a commitment to preserving the environment.

The following week, they completed a version of the standardenvironmental-footprint questionnaire, which was slightly adapted to apply to student life. (It covers such issues as the number of miles you drive per year and the amount of locally-grown food you consume.)

Link Below:

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/environmental-footprints-may-produce-backlash-30769/

Green Roofs

Rooftops covered with plants — logically dubbed “green roofs” — could help fight global warming, scientists now suggest.

Green roofs are growing more popular in cities, with the number of green roofs increasing by more than 35 percent from 2007 to 2008 in the United States, representing more than 3.1 million square feet installed last year. In Germany, widely considered the leader in greenroofing, some 12 percent of all flat roofs are green, with the German green roof industry growing 10 to 15 percent annually.

“In Stuttgart in Germany, 25 percent of all roofs there are green. It’s just normal. I think we can get to that level here,” said researcher Brad Rowe at Michigan State University, an environmental scientist in East Lansing. “It’s possible to choose plants where you don’t need to water them if you’re in a place like Arizona, if you have the right cactus species, for instance.”

These roofs can reduce heating and air conditioning costs, with Department of Energy simulations projecting they can lead to a roughly 10 percent reduction in natural gas consumption and a 2 percent drop in electricity use for a typical building. Moreover, green roofs last two to three times longer than standard roofs because they are protected from ultraviolet radiation and the extreme fluctuations in temperature that cause roof membranes to deteriorate. They also retain and detain storm water, which could otherwise exacerbate flooding and erosion.

Link Below:

http://www.livescience.com/9714-green-roofs-curb-global-warming-study-finds.html

Solar Panels Catching On

Upon noticing that solar-panel installations in California showed a pattern of clustering, researchers at Stanford University set out to determine why some neighborhoods were rife with photovoltaic panels while others had none.

What they found is a positive example of the human tendency to conform to social norms: We do what our neighbors do. People are encouraged by their neighbors’ ability to pay for and understand new technologies, and local contractors become more adept at installing and maintaining them. Others simply want to keep up with the Joneses. The Stanford study found that for every 1% increase in the number of solar installations within a given ZIP code, the time that passed between subsequent installations decreases by 1%.

So if you want to make your neighborhood greener, lead by example: Install a few solar panels, show your neighbors how they work, make them envious of your shrinking energy bill. Then watch them follow suit.

--Zoë J. Sheldon

link Below:

http://sierraclub.typepad.com/greenlife/2011/04/leading-by-example-californias-solar-panel-contagion.html?sf1375534=1

Killer Grizzly

If you think global warming is some distant threat, come visit Yellowstone, our most beloved national park. Acres of trees are dying, trout runs are disappearing, and starving bears are attacking campers. It’s an ecosystem in collapse, and things are only getting worse.

by Paul Solotaroff // photographs by Christopher LaMarca

Before that heartbreaking night at the end of July, she was a ghost bear tramping the backwoods shade, a scared specter at her wit’s end. She and her three cubs, all woefully thin and eking out a diet from grass and shoots, were so unwell that they wore their winter coats through the full, high heat of summer. In a lean year for grizzlies, they stood last in line, going without a solid meal of deer or elk or the staple of Yellowstone’s bears, whitebark pine seeds. Those seeds, rich and fleshy, had grown for centuries on the crowns of the staunchest trees in North America: gnarled, obdurate pines that survived 50-below winters and laughed off killing winds on western peaks. Nothing could slay those trees, neither fire nor ice, until the region started warming around 1980. Now 80 percent of the Rockies’ whitebark pine groves stand dead or dying in ghost-gray swaths, and the bears who ate their fruit and kept out of harm’s way have bumbled down the hills in search of food. Among their number was the sow with three cubs and teats running dry of milk. With winter two months off, she had to somehow bulk up fast or watch her yearlings starve.

To her credit, she hadn’t become a “problem bear,” the park officials’ term for hundreds of hungry grizzlies who venture into town prowling for food. Though Yellowstone’s 600 bears aren’t confined to the park itself — they’re given free run of the greater ecosystem, an area that stretches from central Wyoming to the forests of northern Montana — there simply wasn’t enough alternative food to see all of them through the summer. And while full-grown males have the brawn and bravado to venture off the range in search of meat, a mother grizzly rarely leaves the safety of her turf, lest a wolf pack or another bear kill her cubs. Timidity had its virtues: She wasn’t one of the 80 or so bears shot last year while picking apples off a tree or nosing through trash in someone’s backyard, or given a lethal injection by U.S. Fish and Wildlife vets for grazing on the bluegrass near a school.

Six weeks before, the first shoe dropped. On June 17, an adult male bear (or boar, as they’re called by biologists) killed a veteran hiker who had the wretched luck to cross his path. Erwin Evert, a botanist and and retired science teacher, had spent most of his career studying Yellowstone’s flora and had just brought out his life’s masterwork, the first comprehensive catalog of plants in the area in more than a hundred years. On his daily hike near Wyoming’s Kitty Creek, the easternmost of the park’s gateways, he wandered into a copse where a team of federal researchers had trapped and sedated a bear. Alas, they hadn’t posted warning signs or waited until the boar was sufficiently roused to pad back into the brush. Dazed and in pain (he’d been darted three times with a chemical cognate of PCP, then had blood, teeth, and hair pulled for study reasons), the bear bit Evert through the skull and skittered off; he was shot two days later by marksmen in a chopper who tracked his radio signal. There hadn’t been a bear-caused fatality in the park in 24 years, though given the grim developments of the prior decade — a 10-year run of extreme drought and heat, and a glut of famished grizzlies — the screw was bound to turn. On July 28, it turned again, and this time it wasn’t about human error or the caprices of nature’s law. This time, it was a taste of things to come.

Link Below:

http://www.mensjournal.com/the-ghost-park

The solar investments from Google just keep on comin’, and this time, it’s a biggie. On Monday afternoon, the search giant announced its largest investment in renewable energy to date: $168 million into one of the first utility-scale solar projects being built by startup BrightSource Energy in California’s Mojave Desert.

Even for the clean power fans at Google, the size of the funding is impressive. To date, Google’s investments in solar and wind farms have been considerably smaller, including announcing last week that it would put €3.5 million ($5 million USD) into a solar photovoltaic farm in Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, which is near Berlin. In May 2010, Google announced it planned to invest $38.8 million into 169.5 megawatts worth of wind projects developed by NextEra Energy Resources in North Dakota. And Google has made a variety of smaller equity investments into greentech startups over the past few years.

LINK HERE

Shift in Northern Forests Could Increase Global Warming

Boreal forests across the Northern hemisphere are undergoing rapid, transformative shifts as a result of a warming climate that, in some cases, is triggering feedback loops producing even more regional warming, according to several new studies.

Russia's boreal forest - the largest continuous expanse of forest in the world - has seen a transformation in recent years from larch to conifer trees, according to new research by University of Virginia researchers.

In Alaska, where the larch were largely devastated by a disease outbreak in the late '90s, vast swathes of forest are becoming inhospitable to the dominant white and black spruce.

"The climate has shifted. It's done, it's clear, and the climate has become unsuitable for the growth of the boreal forest across most of the area that it currently occupies," said Glenn Juday, a forestry professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Link Here

Nuclear Energy That Bad?

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

Link Here

Coastal Erosion In The UK

Millions living near the coast are likely to be hit by rising sea levels, erosion and storm surges, warns a new study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

On Benbecula, they know all too well that rising tides threaten the UK's coastline. For the 1,200 inhabitants of the small, low-lying island in the Outer Hebrides, the sea's encroachment is becoming a serious problem, especially on its western shores.

Impacts of Climate Change on Disadvantaged UK Coastal Communities, a report to be published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, an influential thinktank, records how local people have seen the coastline retreat before their eyes in just a few years.

The threat posed by erosion has been exacerbated by the fact that the sea has taken material from the island's beaches that is normally used for constructing roads and buildings. But Benbecula is not alone: the report claims that rising sea levels are likely to have a "severe impact" on much of the UK's coastline by 2080.

link below:

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/800640/climate_change_will_wreak_havoc_on_britains_coastline_by_2050.html

Global Warming Quick Fix? Nuclear War

U.S. government computer models have predicted that a regional nuclear war could reverse global warming for at least ten years, reports National Geographic. Scientists built a model taking into account bombs with Hiroshima-level impact, which would—after destruction—slowly set global cooling in motion.

The global warming fix would also create “widespread famine and disease,” “years without summer,” and—for a time—a “colder, hungrier planet.” But, after that, experts say the earth would cool by a couple degrees and precipitation would reduce for a few years.

Luke Oman, a physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said, ”The main message from our work would be that even a regional nuclear conflict would have global consequences.”

Despite their main message, we’re not really sure why experts are looking into this possibility at all. In the meantime, let’s hope for a better, less horrifying solution to global warming. Like kittens, perhaps.

Link Below:

http://www.ecorazzi.com/2011/02/28/the-cure-for-global-warming-a-small-nuclear-war/

Sea Level Is Rising

 The shifting sands and ever-changing shape of North Carolina’s coast may be most evident along the area’s barrier islands, where beach towns are the front line in the conflict between human development and the natural processes that can threaten the homes and property built there.

One response to maintain beaches and fight erosion is projects that pump sand onto the shoreline.

On Topsail Island, Surf City and North Topsail Beach continue to pursue a federal beach nourishment project for the southern end of North Topsail Beach and the northern end of the Town of Surf City.

Along Bogue Banks, a decade of various post-Hurricane Floyd beach nourishment projects is complete, and the Carteret County Beach Commission and towns along the island are now working together on a comprehensive plan for beach nourishment along the island for the next 50 years.

Link Below

http://www.jdnews.com/news/rising-88071-changing-sands.html

Freezing US Set For Dramatic Temperature Rise

The US was in the grip of a cold snap on Thursday and Friday, with snow on the ground in 49 out of 50 states, including Hawaii.
The only state without snow was Florida. Oklahoma had experienced its snowiest month in 100 years.
However, a dramatic increase in temperature is forecast for this weekend; the mercury set to rise by as much as a 100 degrees (farenheit) in some places.
So what is responsible for this dramatic change?
The jet stream, a fast-moving ribbon of air high up in the atmosphere that marks the boundary between cold and warm air, has been further south than usual, with cold air to its north and warm air to its south.
The jet stream is moving northwards this weekend, allowing southern and central states to warm up.