Yes, do encourage millionaires to offset their high flying carbon
I was just reading a 2009 article that presented the offsetting of a private jet´s carbon emissions as greenwash. Continue reading
EPA Adds 12 Waste Sites to Superfund List
The Environmental Protection Agency added 12 hazardous waste sites to the list of the most-contaminated places in the United States on Friday, clearing the way for major cleanups to rid the sites of dangerous toxins.
Arsenic, lead and mercury were among a long list of toxins found at the sites-mostly former factories, chemical plants and contaminated water plumes. Investigators also found elements like benzene, copper and chromium, plus harmful chemicals associated with pesticides and industrial solvents.
All 12 sites post significant public health risks, the EPA said, leading to their designation as national priorities under Superfund, a federal program to identify and secure uncontrolled environmental hazards.
Read more…(MSN News)
Surviving Drought: Discovery May Help Protect Crops from Stressors
Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered a key genetic switch by which plants control their response to ethylene gas, a natural plant hormone best known for its ability to ripen fruit, but which, under stress conditions, can cause wilted leaves, premature aging and spoilage from over-ripening. The findings, published August 30 in Science magazine, may hold the key to manipulating plants’ ethylene on/off switch, allowing them to balance between drought resistance and growth and, therefore, decrease crop losses from drought conditions.‘In different stress conditions — flooding, drought, chilling, wounding or pathogen attack — ethylene tells plants to make adjustments to these adverse changes,’ says senior study author Joseph Ecker, a professor in Salk’s Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator. ‘Our study discovered a key step in how plants ‘smell’ ethylene gas, which may lead to better ways to control these processes in crop plants.’
Read more…(ScienceDaily)
Shading Earth: Delivering Solar Geoengineering Materials to Combat Global Warming May be Feasible and Affordable
A cost analysis of the technologies needed to transport materials into the stratosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting Earth and therefore reduce the effects of global climate change has shown that they are both feasible and affordable.
Published August 31, 2012, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, the study has shown that the basic technology currently exists and could be assembled and implemented in a number of different forms for less than USD $5 billion a year.
Put into context, the cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions is currently estimated to be between 0.2 and 2.5 per cent of GDP in the year 2030, which is equivalent to roughly USD $200 to $2000 billion.
Read more… (ScienceDaily)
Ocean-Friendly Substitutes
How do you enjoy seafood when many popular species have been overfished and populations are now depleted? By choosing ocean-friendly substitutes that are healthy, sustainable, and just as delicious as your current favorites.Here, chef and seafood expert Barton Seaver shares sustainable—and flavorful—substitutions for many overfished and depleted species.
Read more…(National Geographic)
Cleaner Fuel for Cruise Ships and Other Big Vessels From Ingredients in Detergents, Medicines
Scientists have described the development of a new fuel mixture to ease the major air pollution and cost problems facing cruise ships, oil tankers and container ships. These vessels tend to burn the cheapest and most highly polluting form of diesel fuel.
George H. Harakas, Ph.D., explained that large ships have slow-speed engines designed to burn inexpensive, thick ‘bunker fuels’ that literally are the bottom-of-the-barrel from the petroleum refining process. Bunker fuels are high in substances (such as sulfur) that produce air pollution, which creates a serious health and environmental problem when ships cruise along the shore or drop anchor in ports of heavily populated urban areas.
Read more…(ScienceDaily)
Effects of Global Warming
The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole, and everywhere in between. Globally, the mercury is already up more than 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius), and even more in sensitive polar regions. And the effects of rising temperatures aren’t waiting for some far-flung future. They’re happening right now. Signs are appearing all over, and some of them are surprising. The heat is not only melting glaciers and sea ice, it’s also shifting precipitation patterns and setting animals on the move.
Some impacts from increasing temperatures are already happening.
Read more…(National Geographic)
World’s Sea Life is ‘Facing Major Shock,’ Marine Scientists Warn
Life in the world’s oceans faces far greater change and risk of large-scale extinctions than at any previous time in human history, a team of the world’s leading marine scientists has warned.
The researchers from Australia, the US, Canada, Germany, Panama, Norway and the UK have compared events which drove massive extinctions of sea life in the past with what is observed to be taking place in the seas and oceans globally today.
Three of the five largest extinctions of the past 500 million years were associated with global warming and acidification of the oceans- trends which also apply today, the scientists say in a new article in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
Read more… (ScienceDaily)
Global Warming Causes More Extreme Shifts of the Southern Hemisphere’s Largest Rain Band, Study Suggests
The changes will result from the South Pacific rain band responding to greenhouse warming. The South Pacific rain band is largest and most persistent of the Southern Hemisphere spanning the Pacific from south of the Equator, south-eastward to French Polynesia.
Occasionally, the rain band moves northwards towards the Equator by 1000 kilometers, inducing extreme climate events.
The international study, led by CSIRO oceanographer Dr Wenju Cai, focuses on how the frequency of such movement may change the future. The study finds the frequency will almost double in the next 100 years, with a corresponding intensification of the rain band.
Dr Wenju and colleagues turned to the extensive archives of general circulation models submitted for the fourth and fifth IPCC Assessments and found that increases in greenhouse gases are projected to enhance equatorial Pacific warming. In turn, and in spite of disagreement about the future of El Nino events, this warming leads to the increased frequency of extreme excursions of the rain band.
Read more… (ScienceDaily)
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