carbon dioxide

Transport Infrastructure Will Change
With the i-MIEV electric car being rolled out sooner than expected and electric vehicles like the G-Wiz and Vectrix becoming ever-more common sights on our streets, it’s a good time to start figuring out what the transport infrastructure of the future will look like. Dale Vince of Ecotricity fame, who is h...

Image: Kudzu weeds engulf a light pole by a47nn on Flickr
Weeds: are they troublesome invaders, ecological opportunists or key to tackling a potential global food crisis? According to research done by weed ecologists, our ambiguous relationship to these resilient plants could soon change in a world where carbon dioxide levels are rising – and where weeds could grow to oversized proportions (think 12-foot tall lambs-quarters, a common weed).

Of course, “weed” can be a rather subjective label, depending on your context – fa...

Photo courtesy elisfanclub on flickr

O.K. perhaps it's not news to you, and instead just a bit more evidence of man's effect on climate. Eons of air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice reveal how carbon dioxide ups and downs are in sync with rising and falling Earth temperatures, according to research presented in the journal Nature Geoscience - and hypothesizes how the recent surge of CO2 emissions has thrown that system, known as a feedback mechanism, out of whack.

Researcher Richard Zeebe measured CO2 in the air pockets in layers of Antarctic ice and found that amounts waxed and waned with known periods of cooling and warming on Earth. In the past C...

Last year, Radiohead bucked tradition by debuting their new album via web-only download, saving on paper and plastic. Last week, Thom Yorke and his Oxford band mates appeared on Conan's "green" show from home, saving as much CO2 as a car produces in a year, Yorke said. (But it's prob...

Scientists and businesses are increasingly turning to an innovative strategy to fight rising emissions: turning waste carbon dioxide into a commodity. Now researchers at Newcastle University have unveiled a new technology to capitalize on this trend; the team, led by organic chemistry professor Michael North, has developed a method of converting carbon dioxide into cyclic carbonates -- compounds wi...

(A Few Good Men: CLIMACT’s Pascal Vermeulen, Dimitri Mertens and Hugues de Meulemeester)

Those following the carbon offset market closely might be wondering about the differences in missions and motives between providers who are in it for profit, versus the ones who have gone the non-profit route.

Today Carbon Catalog, the resource that offers a directory and fair glance at the world’s offset providers selling online, interviews the for-profit Belgian-based provider CLIMA...

The announcement last month that ClimateCare had been bought by JP Morgan signaled the Wild-West climate offset business has reached a milestone - it's now a business big enough ($9.4 billion in offsets traded last year) for the traditional financial services industry to get involved. Another milestone: Kyoto CDM offset projects now number over 1,000 and have offset 135 million tonnes of CO2 (the picture is of a Cambodian cook stove efficiency project). It may be a while before t...

Red dots denote large-scaled CDM projects, orange are medium-sized, yellow small

The UN's Kyoto Protocol is sometimes considered a bust because it doesn't include the US, yet recent statistics from Det Norske Veritas, the certifying agency of Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects in the developing world, are heartening Earth Day news. Thus far 1,000 projects in 49 countries have "saved" carbon dioxide emissions of 135 million tons, and are expected to "save" a total of 1.2 billion tons of CO2 by the end of 2012, when Kyoto's first mandate period ends. For comparison, Norway...

It's generally accepted that increasingly acidified oceans could prove disastrous for most forms of marine life. We say most - coral reefs, certain phytoplankton species and larger organisms - because oceanographers are still hard at work studying the effects of higher carbon dioxide levels on individual species. Many, in fact, have now concluded that higher levels of dissolved carbon dioxide could help some species thrive over others. ...