Very interesting article.
“…global warming, at its core, is not a technology or policy problem. It is the greatest failure of thought in human history.
Attempts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will fail unless people first alter their thinking and behavior.
Earth is warming because humans, primarily in industrialized nations, suffer from systems blindness.”
Bob Doppelt’s book, The Power of Sustainable Thinking.
The move towards green roofs is picking up momentum, finding favor even in New York City.
…tiny absorbent leaves and modest but hardy roots of the sedum — typically found in desert climates — are at the center of a growing effort to reduce greenhouse gases, rainwater runoff and electricity demand in New York.
Fay, alternating between storm, depression and hurricane is raining itself out over the South, bringing drought relief to many areas, leaving in its wake record rainfalls and area-wide flooding in northern Florida. Now comes Gustav.
Hurricane Gustav intensified remarkably overnight, and is poised to deliver a heavy blow to Haiti early this afternoon as a Category 1 or 2 hurricane. Gustav intensified from a tropical depression at 11 am yesterday to a Category 1 hurricane last night in just 16 hours, tying Hurricane Humberto’s record–set just last year–for the fastest intensification from first advisory to a Category 1 hurricane.
As best it can be predicted now, Gustav will stay on a westerly course, moving eventually to the Cancun/Cozumel area of Mexico
There are some who think saving the world and ourselves can only happen by cutting back. The infinite manufacturing of useless goods destroys our natural resources and turns us into frantic pursuers of what will disappear as soon as it is captured.
Zeitgeist Films presents, “Manufactured Landscapes,”
a striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.
In the spirit of such environmentally enlightening sleeper-hits as AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and RIVERS AND TIDES, MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES powerfully shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it, without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions.
We’ve been watching Fay dodge back and forth over Florida and before that the Carribean islands, leaving flooding and a dozen or so deaths. The people of north eastern India should have it so lucky. Monsoon rains have upped the ante from “just usual flooding,” to a “catastrophe. Over one million are cut off from food supplies and from the other modes and mechanisms of daily life.
“It is not a normal flood, but a catastrophe,” said Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar after making an aerial survey of the ravaged districts.
Kumar said more than 1 million people were cut off from the rest of the country because the floods had washed away roads and made railway lines impassable.
India’s monsoon season, which lasts from June to September, brings rain vital for the country’s farmers but also massive destruction. Floods, mudslides, collapsing houses and lightning strikes kill hundreds of people every year.
This year’s monsoon has killed more than 330 people in India so far. In 2007, monsoon floods killed more than 2,200 people across South Asia and left 31 million others homeless, short of food or with other problems. The United Nations called last year’s floods the worst in living memory.”
Way out in the Pacific, a trillion gallons from nowhere, floats the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, [...roughly the size of Texas, containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash. Shoes, toys, bags, pacifers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles...]
A couple of intrepid souls have set sail towards it to try to stir up some interest. Junk is a craft, made up of junk, piloted by Marcus and Joel, which got underway from Long Beach on June 1.
Roz Savage, by her own small self, is rowing in the same direction, from San Francisco to Hawaii, by way of the Patch, and now about 83 days into rowing.
The two voyages crossed paths the other day, trading food and water and calloused hand shakes. What a freakin’ adventure!
Damn! If this can be done on a large scale, with renewable energy to power it, without CO2 emmissions, or other toxic side-effects, it would be phenomenol!
“Plastic water bottles. Plastic toys. Plastic clamshell food packages. Plastic bags. Plastic furniture. Plastic cassettes.
Right now, most of it goes into landfills, much of it on pace to degrade in, oh, 400 years or so.
PolyFlow has a different solution, one that gets around the hassle of recycling. Its patented technology breaks down all manner of plastics into their base chemicals, which can then be processed back into plastic.
A demonstration plant has been erected on a weedy section of asphalt on the site of the former Brown-Graves Lumber Co. mill in Akron. PolyFlow executives have been showing off the technology to plastics industry officials and venture capitalists.
The mobile processor sits atop a flat-bed trailer. At one end is a large vessel, sheathed in shiny silver insulation. Inside go all types of plastic, even carpet samples and shredded tires. The oxygen is removed and the burners turned on, initiating a process called pyrolysis.
The plastic is essentially vaporized, after which it passes through a pipe to a condenser that converts it into a liquid the color of brown mustard. The noncondensable gas is flared off, but eventually will be used to fuel the plant.
The liquid can then be distilled into its raw components - chemicals like tolulene, benzene and styrene, the building blocks of plastics that would normally come from a barrel of crude oil. ”
“Researchers are developing a solar collector to turn roads and parking lots into cheap sources of electricity and hot water. “Asphalt has a lot of advantages as a solar collector,” says Rajib Mallick of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “For one, blacktop stays hot and could continue to generate energy after the sun goes down, unlike traditional solar-electric cells.
Plus there’s already gynormous acreage of installed roads and parking lots. They’re resurfaced every 10 to 12 years. The solar retrofit could be built into that cycle. No need to transform other landscapes into solar farms. Or maybe not as many.
Furthermore, extracting heat from asphalt would cool the urban heat-island effect, cooling the planet a wee bit. Finally, solar collectors in roads and parking lots would be invisible, unlike those on roofs. Cuz we all know how attractive roads are.”
“- A maroon-striped marauder with venomous spikes is rapidly multiplying in the Caribbean’s warm waters, swallowing native species, stinging divers and generally wreaking havoc on an ecologically delicate region.
The red lionfish, a tropical native of the Indian and Pacific oceans that probably escaped from a Florida fish tank, is showing up everywhere — from the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola to Little Cayman’s pristine Bloody Bay Wall, one of the region’s prime destinations for divers.
Wherever it appears, the adaptable predator corners fish and crustaceans up to half its size with its billowy fins and sucks them down in one violent gulp.
Research teams observed one lionfish eating 20 small fish in less than 30 minutes.
Lionfish
“Many coastal areas of the world’s oceans are being starved of oxygen at an alarming rate, with vast stretches along the seafloor depleted of it to the point that they can barely sustain marine life, researchers are reporting.
The main culprit, scientists say, is nitrogen-rich nutrients from crop fertilizers that spill into coastal waters by way of rivers and streams.”
If global warming is the number one danger, where is this? 2? 3, behind water? What to do about it is fairly obvious: stop with the frickin’ nitrogen fertilizers. How much would food production diminish? What other, less dangerous, technologies could increase food production? What percent of food is wasted and how much could that be reduced?
Not the usual fare here, but as a digital dependent media we have an obligation to help keep the net clear. From the SF Chronicle Tech Chronicles.
Latest spam e-mails pose as CNN alerts
Google, which tracks spam as part of its program to offer businesses e-mail security, has seen a 600 percent increase in unwanted e-mails since July 20, many disguised as personalized CNN newsletters, marketing manager Sundar Raghavan said Monday.
The company is warning users not to click on these e-mails, which are cleverly written and contain some valid links.
The spammers don’t appear interested in stealing data, Raghavan said. Rather, anyone who clicks on the e-mails downloads code that turns his or her machine into a spam-spewing bot.
Google advises recipients not to click on links or attachments in e-mails from people they don’t know. If you’re curious about a CNN alert, search for the story on CNN’s Web page.
Google figures that 93 percent of all inbound e-mail is now spam and that the average corporate employee has received around 26,000 messages so far this year, up from around 18,000 in all of 2007. On a peak day for this attack, July 24, Google saw 10 million messages pass through its servers, Raghavan said.
- Deborah Gage
“Pacific Ocean shellfish - the mussels and snails, the clams and cockles - are heading for a mass invasion into the North Atlantic that could alter the entire ecology of both oceans as sea ice vanishes from the warming high Arctic, two California scientists predict.”
But the headline implies too much. Adds, in the first paragraph, to the drumbeat of fear we all feel, in prognosis more benign.
“Studying the fossils of marine organisms from 3.5 million years ago, the two California paleontologists saw that water from the Pacific Ocean must have been flowing north through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean where the ice had cleared and food was abundant. From there, hundreds of Pacific marine species moved into the warm North Atlantic to “colonize and enrich” the sea there, Vermeij and Roopnarine concluded.
“But a million years later the ice age returned in the far north and put an end to all of that,” Roopnarine said. “The Arctic Ocean, covered densely with ice again, became virtually a desert.”
Now that the northern seas are warming and a new mass migration of marine species is in the offing, “there’s a fair likelihood the invasion might generate new fisheries,” Roopnarine said. “Extinctions are unlikely, and there might be a cascading increase in abundance, perhaps, but that’s not easy to predict.”
Vermeij agreed. “Invasions like this can increase the genetic diversity of many species,” he said, “and in the long run we’ll see a lot of new hybrids.” “
A little lead on Earthweek holds out the hope that a species of grass could suck lots of CO2 out of the atmosphere and, at the same time, leave prime corn growing land available for corn
New research in the United States may have found a way to use the majority of traditional grain crops for food rather than diverting nearly a quarter of them for biofuel production.
A team from the University of Illinois says the giant perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus can produce far more biofuels per acre than current sources, such as corn.
To achieve the current White House goal of offsetting 20 percent of gasoline use with ethanol would take about a quarter of all U.S. cropland out of food production, the researchers say.
Writing in the journal Global Change Biology, crop sciences professor Stephen P. Long said that Miscanthus can be grown on land unsuitable for growing corn or other grains, meaning that acreage used for those crops could be once again allocated exclusively for food production.
A few problems spring to mind: 1) pricing. If a farmer can get more for growing the grass than for growing corn, then grass it will be — corn land or not. 2) “Exotic species” syndrome. We’ve seen a lot of this lately, in which a species — of plant, shellfish, bird– is introduced into a niche it didn’t evolve in. In some cases the introduced species will not survive. In others, not only does it survive but it thrives, and gobbles up the land, food, water needed by existing species, driving them to extinction. Even under well meaning proposals this is a threat which needs to be fully understood before rising for the standing ovation.
In a related piece, Steve Lawrence of AP writes of the re-introduction of tules and cattails into the Sacramento delta. The driving idea is that the islands in the delta which have been farmed and have been submerging into the river bottom for over 100 years need to be built back up. Tule and cattails are what created them if the first place, so why not return some to their original state and let nature take its course. As an added benefit, the two reeds are excellent CO2 captors.
“All that soil out there are plants that grew 6,000 years ago and didn’t decompose completely,” said Robin Miller, a biogeochemist with the Geological Survey. “That’s what peat is. So we’re just making the same thing happen that happened here for millennia.”
About 2 1/2 years ago, scientists noticed that their “big garden,” as Miller calls it, was removing carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
“We were capturing a lot of (carbon dioxide) at levels much greater than other systems — marshes and forests, grasslands,” said Roger Fujii, the project’s director and the bay-delta program chief for the Geological Survey’s California Water Science Center.
That revelation persuaded state and federal officials to expand the project. They are now trying to determine whether the tules and cattails could be used to combat global warming through what they call “carbon-capture” farming.
Under that scenario, companies could meet state greenhouse gas limits by paying delta farmers to plant tules and cattails rather than row crops.
“They can just sit back and watch the tules grow, and they should be making money,” Fujii said. “That’s what the vision is. It’s not to do it just on Twitchell Island. It’s to see if we can do it throughout the delta on subsided land.”
There are problems, however, that need investigating. How much methane is produced? Nitrous oxide?
The predictions that global climate change would bring rain in faster, denser fall is being borne out in New Hampshire. The Southwestern quadrant of the state, which was hit hard in 1999 and 2005, and along with the entire state in the spring of 2006, is underwater over large areas today. A reported 11 inches falling in some places. The average rainfall for Keene, New Hampshire, in August, one of the places hit yesterday, is 3.9 inches.
Satellite observation and number crunching have shown that rising temperatures, indeed, lead to more extreme downpours — and fewer light rains. More extreme downpours in turn, lead to flash flooding, property damage and loss of life. The poorer the area is, the worse the problem.
The observed rise in the heaviest tropical rains is about twice that produced by computer simulations used to assess how human-caused global warming could change rainfall, said the researchers. …
But this analysis, using satellite measurements, is the first to find a strong statistical link between warmth and extreme tropical downpours, the researchers said.
Like Las Vegas, Nevada yesterday for example
Alan Dugan, 1961
Whelped from blackness by a pressure of rocks,
black water rose like breath from the lungs
and bust in speech. It poured its glitter,
trouble, on the sand, and babbled on about
its quick exploits in shape above the plain.
This speaking taught the desert thirst: once
sucked at by that thirster, sand, the water spread
its cool hair over fever: sand was changed:
what was almost sand in sand, the waiting sand,
a hidden seed, leaped up and burst in palms!
The water argued greenery to sand: now sand
is passionate with fruit! Ticking with bugs,
bustling with flowers and death, the garden is
a place and fireworks, a green wild on the calm.
Oh its mirages offer water, figs, and shade
to windrift birds for songs and wings of praise.
Clock-lost nomads, lost in the running sands,
will have to choose, when madness lights
advertisements of water to their soaking need,
if they will drop to the truth of desert, dry
to sand, to run to where the fanfare of quick
water winds their clocks, give place to love,
and lets them drink their living from its deaths.
From the University of New Mexico comes an intriguing idea for desalinization. By placing two 30 foot tall cylinders near each other, one with salt water the other with fresh water, and a connecting pipe at the top, a small amount of heat applied to the salt water side will create enough of a vacuum at the top for vaporization to take place below the boiling point. The fresh condensate moves to the fresh water side replacing that drawn out at the bottom for irrigation, washing etc.
While clever, there are several problems. Keeping the water columns at the necessary height with shut off valves and intake valves can presumably be done automatically. The automation will have to be rugged and simple. 30 feet however, is fairly high, and likely not suitable except in rural areas. The amount of water, however, is not so insignificant. A 30 foot column with a 4 foot diameter can hold about 3,000 gallons of water. As I understand the scheme, the fresh water side has to be primed almost to the top, meaning the primer water has to be found or transported to the spot before the device works, perhaps not easy in water stricken areas. The article does not mention the evaporation rate possible, thus the gallons per hour transformed and the return on investment. Finally, there is the matter of the brine left on the saline side. How often does it have to be drained, and how? Where does the brackish water go — and at what cost to the environment? It will be interesting to see where UNM takes the idea.
The heat requirements are said to be so low that small solar, or even the exhaust from other household or industrial appliances, such as air conditioners, may be enough to create the vacuum.
Then for another approach to desalinization and energy usage there is the PX Pressure Exchanger which recaptures energy in the waste product, brine, of reverse osmosis.
State-of-the-art desalination plants suck in seawater and then use electricity-driven pumps to put it under pressure. This salty stream is then slammed against filters designed to let the fresh water bleed through while sequestering the high-pressure brine - a process called reverse osmosis.
“It takes a lot of pressure to get the pure water to go away from the salt, and it takes a lot of energy to pressurize the water,” Stover said.
That’s where Energy Recovery comes into play. The company designed its pump to capture the pressure trapped in that left-behind brine and recycle its energy into repressurizing the next batch of virgin seawater destined to be slammed against those reverse-osmotic filters.
An eccentric inventor in the parched plains of Australia has come up with this idea for a water windmill. Based on the behavior of an African beetle which extracts water vapor in the desert from the wind moving through its carapace this is beyond ingenious. Would it really work to provide any substantial amounts of water? Tests will tell. But check it out.
If that weren’t enough Max Whisson, the inventor, has another idea to water the deserts. He calls it a Water Road: Seawater brought inland in black covered surface pipes, allowing the sun to heat the water and at certain points near delivery going to full vapor condensation, leaving the salt behind and being collected to water crops and gullets.
Source: CleanTechBlog
More about Whisson, here.
This could be very promising indeed.
In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.
Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.
Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases.[which can be stored] Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.
Scientists Say Area That Cannot Support Some Marine Life Is Near Record Size
The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area on the seabed with too little oxygen to support fish, shrimp, crabs and other forms of marine life, is nearly the largest on record this year, about 8,000 square miles, researchers said this week.
Only the churning effects of Hurricane Dolly last week, they said, prevented the dead zone from being the largest ever.
The problem of hypoxia, very low levels of dissolved oxygen, is a downstream effect of fertilizers used for agriculture in the Mississippi River watershed. Nitrogen is the major culprit, flowing into the Gulf and spurring the growth of algae. Animals called zooplankton eat the algae, excreting pellets that sink to the bottom like tiny stones. This organic matter decays in a process that depletes the water of oxygen.
Researchers expected the dead zone to set a record — even more than the 8,500 square miles observed in 2002 — after the Mississippi, swollen with floodwaters, carried an extraordinary amount of nitrates into the Gulf, about 37 percent more than last year and the most since these factors began being measured in 1970.
