Group items tagged

Hoping to accelerate the adoption of solar energy by a wider audience, the city of San Jose, together with the Bay Area Climate Collaborative, recently launched a new program that will allow businesses and governments throughout the region to take advantage of similar "solar group buys."

In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers and scientists show that the gains that have been made in stabilizing CO2 emissions in developed or "rich" countries since the signing of the Kyoto agreement, have been neutralized by the increase in CO2 emissions from developing nations as they produce goods for trade, primarily to developed countries. Because of this disparity, many groups are calling for a change to the Kyoto agreement practice of only counting CO2 emissions that are produced in-country, rather than the CO2 footprint of those products that are consumed.

The threat to climate change posed by thawing permafrost, which could release stocks of stored carbon, is greater than estimated, a group of scientists said on Wednesday.

International climate negotiators were at odds Tuesday on how to raise billions of dollars to help poor countries cope with global warming. A major shipping group is willing to help, endorsing a proposal for a carbon tax on vessels carrying the world's trade.

UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller and others were looking at the so-called urban heat island effect - the notion that because more urban temperature stations are included in global temperature data sets than are rural ones, the global average temperature was being skewed upward because these sites tend to retain more heat. Hence, global warming trends are exaggerated. Using data from such urban heat islands as Tokyo, they hypothesized, could introduce "a severe warming bias in global averages using urban stations." In fact, the data trend was "opposite in sign to that expected if the urban heat island effect was adding anomalous warming to the record. The small size, and its negative sign, supports the key conclusion of prior groups that urban warming does not unduly bias estimates of recent global temperature change."

The diversity of the biological world is astounding. How do new species arise? In the traditional view, most speciation events occur under special circumstances, when a physical barrier arises and divides a population into groups that can no longer interbreed. The populations diverge genetically and eventually can't interbreed even if the barrier disappears.

Women have been left defenceless and at the mercy of militia groups in the aftermath of the Iraq war in 2003 according to research from the University of Birmingham.

The time may finally be right to sell Americans on eco-driving, according to a group of transportation experts from four University of California campuses as well as representatives from industry and government who attended an all-day conference on May 18.

Electric cars are an excellent choice for everyday use, in particular for daily trips in the city. This conclusion is the result of user analyses in two projects in which Siemens plays a decisive role: the internal 4-Sustainelectromobility (4-S) project involving 20 moveE cars and the external "Electromobility Model RegionMunich - Drive eCharged" project involving 40 BMW MINI E cars. The latter is a joint project with BMW Group and Stadtwerke München, Munich's municipal utility.

Marine researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups have created a map of the world's corals and their exposure to stress factors, including high temperatures, ultra-violet radiation, weather systems, sedimentation, as well as stress-reducing factors such as temperature variability and tidal dynamics.

The website titled "Visualizing Our Future Selves"[news21.com] attempts to answer the question how the dramatically aging demographics in the US will change over the next 40 years. It is an example of a 'personalized' visualization of sorts, in that users are asked to submit their personal demographic data, such as birth year, race, state, living situation and gender. The resulting diagrams then reveals country-wide statistical information in the context of one's own situation, divided into 4 different groups: Population, State, Health and Finances. Accordingly, the application shows an animated population pyramid, a population age density map of the US, a disease (e.g. cancer, heart disease, diabetes) prevalence forecast, and an income versus expenditure comparison filtered by several demographic variables.

Megacities offer the enticing prospect of employment and the benefits of an urban infrastructure - but they also expose their inhabitants to high levels of air pollution. Together with an Indian Partner Group of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Bhola Ram Gurjar is analyzing this pollution and how badly it is affecting the health of city dwellers.

The European Union's Working Party on Data Protection has issued five recommended requirements for the protection of personal privacy in a time of Smart Meters in the home (PDF). Below is what the group says needs to happen in order to gain the benefits of Smart Metering data while minimizing the risk and cost to personal privacy. 

The sign was a digital billboard, a new breed of outdoor advertising that is growing in both the region and the nation. The problem for Young, a Philadelphia architect, is that they're energy guzzlers, compared with other signage. In a recent report, he found that the largest of them can use 30 times what a typical household consumes. The report - funded by an independent grant but done under the auspices of an advocacy group that opposes the signs - concludes that as Philadelphia strives to become the nation's greenest city, a proliferation of digital signs might not be sending the right message.

South Korea's largest business group Samsung signed an initial deal Wednesday to invest $7.04 billion in a state project to build a green energy complex on reclaimed wetland.

What are the major technology challenges to future growth in the solar-cell industry? Where are the big-bang-for-the-buck R&D investment opportunities? These and other questions were put to a group of 72 internationally recognized experts in the field at a 2010 special workshop. Their conclusions are summarized in a new National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) publication on Photovoltaic Technologies for the 21st Century.

A group of Cornell-developed, fingernail-sized satellites may travel to Saturn within the next decade, and as they flutter down through its atmosphere, they will collect data about chemistry, radiation and particle impacts.