Category — Pollution

Microsoft has been touting Vista’s new power saving features, saying that upgrading to Vista could easily save consumers and corporations $50 to $75 per computer per year in energy costs.

The question, though, is what marvelous new code makes this miracle possible. The answer? They fixed three stupid mistakes that have cost the world billions of dollars and millions of tons of CO2 in the past five years.
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Two weeks of international talks aimed at avoiding dangerous human influence on the earth’s climate have ended in Nairobi without setting a firm timetable for one of the principal objectives of the talks: establishing long-term targets for reductions in heat-trapping gases that are linked to rising global temperatures.

Except for the United States and Australia, all major industrialized countries are bound by a climate accord known as the Kyoto Protocol that requires them to reduce their combined emissions by 2012 to levels lower than those measured in 1990.

But that commitment has always been seen by climate experts as a baby step that would have to be followed by ever-tightening emissions restrictions, if a dangerous rise in concentrations of the long-lived gases, particularly carbon dioxide, is to be avoided in this century.

Participants and observers from outside the United States expressed growing frustration with American opposition to binding restrictions on the gases, saying that without clear signals from the world’s largest current source of such pollution, it was harder for the rest of the world to move forward.

If the sun warms the Earth too dangerously, the time may come to draw the shade. The “shade” would be a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere to help cool the planet.

This over-the-top idea comes from prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate. The reaction here at the U.N. conference on climate change is a mix of caution, curiosity and some resignation to such “massive and drastic” operations, as the chief U.N. climatologist describes them.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself “not enthusiastic about it.”

“It was meant to startle the policy makers,” said Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. “If they don’t take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this.”

Serious people are taking Crutzen’s idea seriously. This weekend, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., hosts a closed-door, high-level workshop on the global haze proposal and other “geoengineering” ideas for fending off climate change.

In Nairobi, meanwhile, hundreds of delegates were wrapping up a two-week conference expected to only slowly advance efforts to rein in greenhouse gases blamed for much of the 1-degree rise in global temperatures in the past century.

Heads-up to Peter Adams of Windgrove

BBC News reports arsenic-contaminated water can be made drinkable cheaply and simply using tiny crystals related to rust.

Scientists at Rice University in Texas say that particles of iron oxide can bind themselves to large amounts of arsenic in water. When mixed into contaminated water, the tiny crystals became coated with the poison and began behaving like iron filings.

When a strong magnet is placed above the particles, they clump together and are simple to remove.

If confirmed it could help nearly 60 million people in Bangladesh who drink water with dangerous arsenic levels.

The researchers from Rice University’s Centre for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology report their work in the journal Science.

In only four states is George Bush getting a majority of voters giving him a higher approval rating than disapproval rating. In the rest it is markedly the other way … down to a low of 23 per cent in Rhode Island [where his disapproval rating is 75 percent!

That tub of fruit yoghurt on the supermarket shelf has been advertised as healthy, fresh – and probably organic into the bargain.

But it also probably represents as much as 9000 kilometres of road and air transport to get it to the shelf. The yoghurt base, the fruit, the jar or tub, the lid, the label and even the bulk carton it came in have all come from widely scattered places. Germans consume 3 billion serves of processed yoghurt every year. [Read more →]

A fascinating scenario by Bob Holmes in New Scientist.

He writes:

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet’s land for our cities, farmland and pastures.

By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we’re leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change.

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Making cement is one of the most energy-intensive industries, producing vast quantities of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

The relentless flood of concrete drowns more and more C02-absorbing vegetation all over the world, giving yet another boost to the cycle of global warming.

Eco-Cement, developed by Tec-Eco of Tasmania, Australia, is designed to save fossil fuels – and to absorb CO2. Based on reactive magnesium oxide, it needs CO2 to harden and set.

Better still, it can be combined with wastes such as fly ash from power stations and many types of slag which are too chemically reactive to be used with conventional cement to make concrete.

ABC News is reporting that California today sued six of the world’s largest automakers over global warming on Wednesday, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have caused billions of dollars in damages. The lawsuit is the first of its kind to seek to hold manufacturers liable for the damages caused by their vehicles’ emissions, state Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. [Read more →]

*Or why we should all worship the ground we walk on

Tamsyn Jones has written an evocative cover story for the latest issue of E/The Environmental Magazin which succinctly argues that our future depends on our looking after it. [The photograph is an outtake from the cover photoshoot by Jon Moe.]

“It’s one of nature’s most perfect contradictions”, says Tamsyn, “a substance that is ubiquitous but unseen; humble but essential; surprisingly strong but profoundly fragile. It nurtures life and death; undergirds cities, forests and oceans; and feeds all terrestrial life on Earth.” [Read more →]