The Royal Society, Britain’s oldest scientific academy, has published a series of papers in its Philosophical Transactions outlining some of the options for intervening directly in the planet’s climate. Some of these are pretty scary.
Richard Branson, a British businessman, is already offering a prize of $25m for a workable way of removing a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year… Broadly, these ideas fall into two categories. One is to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The other is to compensate for the climate-warming greenhouse effect this carbon dioxide and other gases cause, by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the ground… One widely discussed idea… is to fertilise the oceans with iron… A second idea for scrubbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere… is to plant more [genetically modified] trees… Another possibility… is recycling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into fuel, by reacting it with hydrogen… generated in a way that produces no carbon dioxide… Perhaps the most intriguing idea… is to eject carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the Earth’s poles, using the planet’s magnetic field… To offset the rise in temperature expected by the middle of the century if things carry on as they are, the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface would have to be cut by just 1.1%… deliberately polluting the stratosphere with sulphate in order to reflect solar heat back into space… clouds might be made more reflective… [if you] spray them with seawater… Their answer is a fleet of specially designed ships. These would be wind-powered—not by sails but by Flettner rotors, which are giant, rotating cylinders that extract energy from the wind using the Magnus effect… The ships would drag turbines through the sea to provide electricity that would both drive the cylinders and power pumps that sprayed the atmosphere with seawater, suitably broken up into droplets… Such ships would weigh 300 tonnes. A fully operational system would require 1,500 of them…
It’s a seasonal attraction, but Stormpulse shows active hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic. And the graphics are better than TV because you can play around with them… You can turn on layers to show projected paths and historical tracks. The severity of the storm is color coded from Tropical Depression to Category 5 Hurricane. You can see all active hurricanes at once, drag the map around, or click on a specific storm. The site also offers satellite pictures and storm news.
People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN’s top climate scientist…
Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)… The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions… the biggest source globally of carbon dioxide from meat production is land clearance, particularly of tropical forest, which is set to continue as long as demand for meat rises… Transport, by contrast, accounts for just 13% of humankind’s greenhouse gas footprint…
Instead of using hydrogen as a fuel, as do conventional fuel cells, microbial fuel cells use naturally occurring microbes to generate power.
Bacteria live in the anode, where they eat glucose, sewage, or other waste water, and turn that into electrons and protons. The bacteria transfer electrons to the circuit, which provides small amounts of power… Such a fuel cell can run a cheap, efficient light-emitting diode (LED) for four to five hours per evening.