TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Is a Popular Carbon-Offset Method Just a Lot of Hot Air? A convenient way of cutting industrial gases that warm the planet was supposed to be the United Nation’s clean development mechanism (CDM). As a provision of the Kyoto Protocol, the CDM enables industrial nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in part by purchasing “carbon offsets” from poorer countries, where green projects are more affordable. The scheme, which issued its first credits in 2005, has already transferred the right to emit an extra 250 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), and that could swell to 2.9 billion tons by 2012. Offsets will “play a more significant role” as emissions targets become tighter, asserts Yvo de Boer of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.But criticism of the CDM has been mounting. Despite strenuous efforts by regulators, a significant fraction of the offset credits is fictitious “hot air” manufactured by accounting tricks, critics say. As a result, greenhouse gases are being emitted without compensating reductions elsewhere. [More] rss.sciam.com |
ExxonMobil Bets $600 Million on Algae Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. is making a major jump into renewable energy with a $600 million investment in algae-based biofuels. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Massachusetts pushes waste-based biofuels, holds off on corn, algae, and switchgrass In a decision that environmentalists are praising and biofuel producers are fuming about, Massachusetts has announced that waste-based biofuels are the only ones guaranteed to meet the state's renewable fuel standards. The ruling could potentially leave algae-, switchgrass-, and corn-based producers high and dry, although it's not quite the ban that some news outlets have called it, says Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources spokesperson Lisa Capone. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Novel Analysis Confirms Climate "Hockey Stick" Graph The “hockey stick” graph has been both a linchpin and target in the climate change debate. As a plot of average Northern Hemisphere temperature from two millennia ago to the present, it stays relatively flat until the 20th century, when it rises up sharply, like the blade of an upturned hockey stick. Warming skeptics have long decried how the temperatures were inferred, but a new reconstruction of the past 600 years, using an entirely different method, finds similar results and may help remove lingering doubts.The hockey stick came to life in 1998 thanks to the work of Michael Mann, now at Pennsylvania State University, and his colleagues (and many other climate scientists who subsequently refined the graph). Reconstructing historical temperatures is difficult: investigators must combine information from tree rings, coral drilling, pinecones, ice cores and other natural records and then convert them to temperatures at specific times and places in the past. Such proxies for temperature can be sparse or incomplete, both geographically and through time. Mann’s method used the overlap, where it exists, of recent proxy data and instrument data (such as from thermometers) to estimate relations between them. It calculates earlier temperatures using a mathematical extrapolation technique [see “ Behind the Hockey Stick ,” by David Appell, Insights; Scientific American, March 2005]. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Turning Trash to Fuel and Reducing Battlefield Risks In a bid to reduce the number of dangerous and expensive convoy missions trekking to remote base camps in Iraq and Afghanistan and to dispose of trash at those bases, the Army is backing an industry project aimed at turning solid waste into diesel . Covanta Energy Corp. is using the $1.5 million boost from the Army Corps of Engineers to develop technology for converting garbage into diesel that would be indistinguishable from crude oil-based diesel fuel and usable for military vehicles and generators. [More] rss.sciam.com |