Carbon dioxide emissions make the big headlines in climate change news, and with good reason--we've now seen the impact of carbon dioxide on global temperature. But carbon dioxide has a far more potent cousin lingering in her shadow. Methane comes in second to carbon dioxide in the amounts produced by human activity, and the amount of time it spends in the atmosphere, but compared to CO2, each molecule packs a much bigger punch. When compared pound for pound, the EPA found that methane's impact on climate change is 20 times greater than CO2. The gas' potency, combined with the fact that methane emissions are on the rise makes methane of great interest to scientists studying climate change.
In the next few years, the stale, thick heat produced by the London underground will no longer drift uselessly into the atmosphere. Instead, some of it will warm 1,400 nearby homes, cutting heating bills by about 10 percent. Recycling heat is quite common in Europe. Denmark gets roughly half of its electricity from recycled heat, followed by Finland at 39 percent, and Russia at 31 percent. In the U.S., it’s just 12 per cent.
Yesterday, Amazon announced the new MatchBook service, which offers a deeply discounted Kindle version of a book when you buy a new copy of the physical version. It's something people have been calling for for a while; why not toss in a digital version, which is essentially free to create and distribute? And it's not just new books - if you've ever bought a qualifying book from Amazon, even all the way back in 1995, when the site launched, you can get a digital edition for somewhere between $3 and free.
Virgin Galactic proudly touts the fact that each of the passengers who will fly into sub-orbital space on its SpaceShip2 will emit less carbon dioxide than a typical air passenger on a flight from New York to London. But some scientists say carbon dioxide emissions are irrelevant to measuring the greenhouse gas footprint of the nascent space tourism industry. The big threat from the scaling-up of space travel, they say, comes from something called black carbon-a type of particulate matter that, when hurled into the stratosphere, builds up for years, absorbing visible light from the sun. According to one study, black carbon emitted into the stratosphere by rockets would absorb 100,000 times as much energy as the CO2 emitted by those rockets.
Dear Mr. President, I was hoping to get a jump on this Earth Day letter during the weekend, but I fell behind because of water in my basement. Torrential rains the past few days soaked the ground so much, the water had nowhere else to go. Of course, April showers are not unusual where I live in the Midwest; the problem is that right now, I don't have enough trees and bushes to absorb them. And that's the unusual thing. Those plants died, weak and thirsty, during an epic drought last summer - the hottest year on record. Now their absence is taking a toll.
If cleaning carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was easy, we'd already be doing it. But carbon capture has proven to be a tough technology to feasibly roll out on a grand scale, and that means all the things we do that produce carbon dioxide emissions - which seems to be just about everything these days - are still roughly as bad for the planet as they were several years ago. That's a problem in a warming world, and one that a team of researchers may have just found a solution for via an inexpensive polymeric material.
