Group items tagged

Bacteria found at 8-15 km altitude could play a much bigger role in cloud formation and precipitation than previously thought... According to this study bacteria represent around 20 % of the total atmospheric aerosols in their size range! They say it could also have implications for the spread of diseases...

20% ????

I am certain that this is just the first in a series - highlighting the big dilemma of geo engineering: it's so cheap to do ....

Get cracking, ACT AI team ;) A new X prize designed to advance artificial intelligence has been announced at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference. The X Prize was set up to push the boundaries of technology to solve issues such as climate change. The winner, which will be announced at TED in 2020, will win $5m (£3.4m).

Using a sophisticated weather model, environmental engineers at Stanford have defined optimal placement of a grid of four wind farms off the U.S. East Coast. The model successfully balances production at times of peak demand and significantly reduces costly spikes and zero-power events.

Sometime in the last few billion years, disaster struck one of Earth's nearest neighbours. Planetary geologists think there is good evidence that Venus was the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect which turned the planet into the boiling hell we see today. A similar catastrophe is almost certain to strike Earth in about 2 billion years, as the Sun increases in luminosity.

the actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1593 just wondering if their conclusion that the long term solution is to change the orbit of Earth is really the ultimate wisdom ...

HIRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) images show flows lengthen and darken on rocky equator-facing slopes from late spring to early fall. The seasonality, latitude distribution and brightness changes suggest a volatile material is involved, but there is no direct detection of one.

The Global Warming Policy Foundations has warned policy makers that wind energy is an extraordinarily expensive and inefficient way of reducing CO2 emissions.

A wide scale 8 year experiment in China on combating desertification seems to have been successful. Instead of using cyanobacteria blooms in the sea, the tested method proposes to spray them on the boundaries of desert/farmland every few days, so that the carbon they capture stays on the ground. It is useful in fixing the organic material against wind erosion only complementary to planting hardy grasses. Very fast result, nevertheless. Could be classified as a geoengineering activity.

130 km2 as next step will be quite an area

Very comprehensive thanks to the narrator from EUMETSAT training office (plus aesthetically pleasing)

What he found was that wind turbines "could disrupt a hurricane enough to reduce peak wind speeds by up to 92 mph and decrease storm surge by up to 79%."

It seems the topic is getting more and more popular and is no longer considered fringe research, as this is a paper from nature climate change!

Problem solved.

Those would also work very well to keep the Kaiju's out..

Good point!

Indicators found in 3 billion year old rocks

Is this correct? The conclusions indicate that contrary to what felt extreme weather events are not increasing?? Where is the trick?

The secret is in the details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation#Funding_Sources

don't get fooled, this is the same strategy employed successfully by the tabac industry: installing doubt - all under the cover of science of course and using its methods; remember all these publications showing the overall beneficial effects of smoking, the "un-clear" link to lung cancer etc ... same here

CliSAP: Mr. Held, several hundred researchers worked for several years on preparing the recently published third part of the Assessment Report, without pay and on top of their normal duties. The result was a work over two thousand pages long. Was it worth it? An overview of the uncertainties when it comes to estimating investments in low carbon. Maybe there is room for computational management projects in there?

Open questions in geoscience. Food for thought

Lasers + diamonds --> simulate pressure of thousands of atmospheres on planetary cores!

As a side note, this is also being used as method to create a hypothetical substance called 'metallic hydrogen'. At such high pressures, hydrogen itself should become superconducting at room temperature and thus of tremendous interest...