Global Warming or Climate Change

Extracting carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust and storing it underground may be the only hope to avoid a climate change catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels Like all big coal-fired power plants, the 1,600-mega-watt-capacity Schwarze Pumpe plant in Spremberg, Germany, is undeniably dirty. Yet a small addition to the facility—a tiny boiler that pipes 30 MW worth of steam to local industrial customers—represents a hope for salvation from the global climate-changing consequences of burning fossil fuels. To heat that boiler, the damp, crumbly brown coal known as lignite—which is even more polluting than the harder black anthracite variety—burns in the presence of pure oxygen, releasing as waste both water vapor and that more notorious greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). By condensing the water in a simple pipe, Vattenfall, the Swedish utility that owns the power plant, captures and isolates nearly 95 percent of the CO 2 in a 99.7 percent pure form. That CO 2 is then compres...

Inexpensive thin-film photovoltaic cells made from organic plastics may be one of the fastest ways to ramp up production of solar power —if only they could do a better job converting the sun's energy into electricity. One of the keys to unlocking organic thin-film's capabilities, according to a team of University of Washington in Seattle researchers headed up by chemist David Ginger , is to better understand how electrical charges move through solar cells by studying their structure at the nano level. Ginger says his team has been able to do this, directly measuring how much current is carried by each tiny bubble and channel formed during the making of the plastic in a solar cell, giving a better understanding of exactly how a solar cell converts light into electricity . This information could help engineers leap the hurdle of coaxing these carbon-based materials to reliably form the cheapest and most efficient structure for generating electric current and moving that current t...

A new study has shown strong evidence that as the oceans warm, clouds appear to scatter, indicating that changes in these clouds may increase global warming. The role of clouds in climate change has been a major question for decades. As the earth warms under increasing greenhouse gases, it is not known whether clouds will dissipate, letting in more of the sun's heat energy and making the earth warm even faster, or whether cloud cover will increase, blocking the Sun's rays and actually slowing down global warming. Now, a new study by researchers Amy Clement and Robert Burgman from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Joel Norris from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has begin to unravel this mystery. Using observational data collected over the last 50 years and complex climate models, the team has established that low-level stratiform clouds appear to dissipate as the ocean warms, indicating that changes in the...

New predictions indicate that the amount of sea level rise by the end of this century will be between 7- 82 cm – depending on the amount of warming that occurs. Placing limits on the amount of sea level rise over the next century is one of the most pressing challenges for climate scientists. Dr Mark Siddall from the University of Bristol, together with colleagues from Switzerland and the US, used fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements to reconstruct sea level fluctuations in response to changing climate for the past 22,000 years, a period that covers the transition from glacial maximum to the warm Holocene interglacial period. By considering how sea level has responded to temperature since the end of the last glacial period, Siddall and colleagues predict that the amount of sea level rise by the end of this century will be similar to that projected by the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). According to...

I feel like a doomsayer at times. You see, I work as a door-to-door campaigner for a local environmental organization, and sometimes I feel like the watchman who comes a-knocking, warning the village of raiders from the far east. "So I'm sure you've heard of the problems global warming has caused," I say to a poor, unsuspecting homeowner, as part of my usual rap. "The last week it's been rather cold, actually. I don't think global warming is happening," he responds. I smile, nod, then bid him goodbye. The environment is a slow, sleepy giant. It takes a lot to wake him up, but when he does wake up, he is awakened (just catch the previews for the "2012" movie). At the moment, he is just barely stirring, tossing around in his sleep. We haven't seen all he can do yet. We can draw the charts, cite the figures - the giant will do so and so when he awakes - but until people feel his breath down their necks, the giant of climate change is just ...

NEW DELHI : Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday admitted that India had for the first time agreed to join the effort to cap the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees from the pre-industrial level. But he strongly denied that it was a climbdown from its position not to accept binding emission cut targets. In a debate that for the first time saw climate change politics echo so deep in Parliament, Singh said the controversial Major Economic Forum declaration adopted at L’Aquila in Italy was “not a declaration of climate change policy by India”. Singh was speaking against the backdrop of suspicion in certain quarters that India’s agreeing to be part of the endeavour to adhere to the 2 degree threshold would lead to its acquiescence to pressure from the US-led developed bloc to take binding emission cut targets. He described such an interpretation as “misleading” and “one-sided.” The MEF is a US-backed initiative with 16 countries, including the G8 and emerging economies, to buil...