Currently viewing the tag: "climate"
Whitening clouds by spraying them with seawater , proposed as a “technical fix” for climate change, could do more harm than good, according to research. Whiter clouds reflect more solar energy back into space, cooling the Earth. But a study presented at the European Geosciences Union meeting found that using water droplets of the wrong size would lead to warming, not cooling. Doh! As science advisor John Holdren resasserted in 2009 of strategies such as space mirrors or aerosol injection, “ The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects. “ Two major problems for most of the ‘hard’ geoengineering strategies — aka solar radiation management aka smoke and mirrors — are that they still require aggressive mitigation, and they must meet a very strong test of science. If you don’t do aggressive greenhouse mitigation starting now, you pretty much take geo-engineering off the table as a very limited (but still dubious) add-on strategy — as even geo-engineering experts like climatologist Ken Caldeira have made clear (see Caldeira calls Lomborg’s vision “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story” ). Also, the nation and the world are not going to pursue an expensive and potentially risky strategy unless they have much higher confidence in climate science than many people seem to have today. You’d have to know with near certainty that doing nothing would make things much worse. Nobody undergoes chemotherapy unless the alternative is pretty darn grim and certain. But if the entire U.S.
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April 9 Science News: Key ‘geoengineering’ strategy may yield warming, not cooling
Saudi Arabia is best known for their significant oil reserves and subsequent wealth from oil exports. However, recent criticisms declared that the country is not as oil-rich today as Saudi Arabia has let on.
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Saudi Arabia To Decrease Dependence On Oil And Increase Renewables
Whoever said we can’t adapt to climate change? There used to be two kinds of homeowners in this scorching city, those with dazzling green lawns irrigated by sprinklers and those with more natural backyard expanses of rocks, cactuses and desert flora, which required no watering at all. Now, though, the grass may be greener next door simply because of a fresh coast of paint. This idea is almost up there with the plans of Versace, “ to create the world’s first refrigerated beach. “ The NY Times front-page (!) story , Spraying to Make Yards Green … but With Paint, Not Water,” continues: Homeowners’ associations in this arid region typically have rules requiring residents to maintain either desert landscaping or green grass, with brown lawns not an option….
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Lawn Order: As Southwest dries up, some homeowners ‘green’ their lawns with paint!
Today, as the UN climate talks came to a close in Bangkok, Ambassador Pablo Solon of
In 2007, a team of scientists led by Wieslaw Maslowski predicted that sea ice in the Arctic would be nonexistent in the summer months come the year 2013. Many scientists disagreed with this conclusion, with a large number of scientists predicting the more likely date for the scenario would be in the decade of 2040. Now using more advanced computer models, the team of scientists once again estimated the timeframe. Using the new climate modeling, one the scientists believe is similar to that used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientists again came up with a prediction found to be controversial According to the new climate models, Maslowski’s team has determined that the Arctic will likely be without sea ice in the summer by the year 2016. However, the margin of error is plus or minus three years. In other words, the earliest the Arctic would be without ice in the summer according to the new models would be 2013- the same conclusion as in 2007.
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Scientists Predict Arctic Will Be Ice Free By 2016