SCIENCE

Image from D G Brown

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes the case that 208-250 billion tons of carbon dioxide -- roughly equivalent to a century's worth of future emissions (122-147 years, to be exact) -- could be safely stored under the Juan de Fuca plate, reports The Guardian's Alok Jha.

The tectonic plate, which ari...

Image from hdptcar

Time for another round of good news, bad news. First, the good: According to a weighty new UN report (it's 6,300 pages long and includes submissions from 2,500 experts) uncovered by The Independent, the world stands poised to enter a new era of peace, prosperity and empowerment. Increased democratization, economic and technological advances and medical breakthroughs have the potential to bring millions out of povert...

Electric Cars: You Want 'Em? We've Got 'Em!
Over the past 3 years, we've written about many electric cars here on
TreeHugger. We think it's time to look in the rearview mirror, so here's an overview. If you see anything you like, just follow the links to see the original articles.

Electric Roadster by Tesla Motors
The electric car that made a lot of people do a double-take (in a good way). Yes, it's expensive, and yes, it's only a two-seater, but it can make people want it like few other green cars, and someone has to pay the early-adopter 'tax'. Our first post abou...

Former Intel CEO Andry Grove recently wrote an interesting piece on energy. His angle is not totally green, but it's worth reading. Here's a good quote:

"New technology often shows up in this manner: it is not completely satisfactory in the beginning, but good enough to get going. The first personal computers, for example, were little more than toys. They fascinated cognoscenti and hobbyists, but compared to the mainframe computers that were the workhorses of that time, they were limited. PCs quickly grew in capability and eventually reached parity with mainframes and then surpassed them in efficiency and computing power. Such approaches, of starting low and moving up, have been nam...

Image from Greenpeace

It's bad enough fish already have to deal with the consequences of overfishing; now, according to a new study authored by a team of UBC fisheries scientists, dozens will be faced with the prospect of extinction by 2050. Even slight fluctuations in temperature could cause many cold water species to perish as they attempt to seek out new, more am...

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Scientists may be getting closer to unraveling the secrets of photosynthesis, reports New Scientist Tech's Colin Barras. In a new study published in the journal ChemPhysChem, a team of Chinese scientists from the Hebei Normal University of Science and Technolog...

Image from Reuters/Marcos Brindicci

Cow flatulence and its link to climate change has been a favorite topic for us to cover at TreeHugger. So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that we'd jump on a Reuters story describing the climatic implications of cow burps.

Researchers in Argentina have been "collecting" cow burps by strapping big, red plastic tanks to their backs. Just as cow farts are a significant source of methane emissions, so ar...

With all the talk about expanding the world's existing wind capacity, there is still surprisingly little attention being paid to the tremendous potential offered by ocean winds -- save for the occasional offshore wind park. Enter NASA: It turns out scientists have been using its QuikSCAT satellite for years to create maps of areas with strong wind activity.

Paul Dimotakis, NASA's chief technologist at Pasadena's Jet P...

Image from little byte of luck

It's not exactly what you might think. While adding water will speed up the mountains' growth, it's not because the rocks themselves are growing -- rather, it's because extreme rain events help buoy the mountains upwards. As Discovery's Larry O'Hanlon reports, a team of researchers, led by Potsdam University's Andrés Mora, has published a new study examining the impact of rain on Colombia's Eastern Cordillera mountains. ...

Full Illustration of Article, complete with lame hockey rink analogy

A new Canadian study looks at the risks of engineered nanomaterials, and raises serious concerns. According to Martin Mittelstaedt in the Globe and Mail, the Council of Canadian Academies was asked by Health Canada to "study the state of knowledge about these novel substances and the regulatory changes needed to oversee their use. They concluded that "there are inadequate data to inform quantitative risk assessments on current and emerging nanomaterials." Their small size, the report says, may allow them "to usur...

Water-Powered Car Saga
Last month, we wrote about the Genepax 'Water Car' and were surprised by how many people were ready to believe that it truly worked with water as the only fuel without special explanation or evidence from those who make the claim. Right now the post has 124 comments, which is higher than average for TreeHugger, and a significant portion of those talk about rewriting the laws of physics and such.

A Q...

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Though it may be a bit premature to heap too much praise upon duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza) -- after all, relatively little is still known about its properties -- the early signs, at least according to a team of Rutgers scientists, seem very promising. A team of plant biologists from Rutgers' Waksman Institute of Microbiology have convinced the DOE to focus resources on the genomic sequencing of the diminutive aquatic plant, claiming it holds immeasurable potential for f...

Copper Nanorods Reduce Energy Needed by an Order of Magnitude
After super-efficient solar panels that are "hairy" on the nanoscale, here come "hairy" pots & pans, as well as computer chip heatsinks and other heat-transferring devices. Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute made the "unexpected" discovery: "by adding an invisible layer of the nanomaterials to the bottom of a metal vessel, an order of magnitude increase in efficiency is achieved in bringing water to boil. [...] The potential applications for this discovery are vast and exci...

Image from Wikimedia

There really is no respite for our battered coral reefs. As much as I'd like to say that there has been some good news on this front, the latest headlines have been growing bleaker by the week. Now a new report released by NOAA, hardly your alarmist types, has revealed that close to half of all U.S. coral reefs are in "poor" or "fair" condition -- a direct result of anthropogenic activities such as coastal development and overfishing and climate-influenced ef...

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The conclusions of a new report written by Australia's top climate scientists are grim: Heatwaves are expected to increase 10-fold while droughts will almost double in number and become more widespread -- possibly impacting an area twice as large as now. Rainfall is also projected to continue its long decline throughout the country.

The report's release prompted agriculture minister Tony Burke to compare the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO's (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) findings to "a disaster novel," according to <...

The more than 16,000 species currently listed by the IUCN as seriously endangered may be gone much sooner than we think. In a new study published in Nature, the University of Colorado's Brett Melbourne and UC Davis' Alan Hastings estimate that endangered species may become extinct 100 times faster than originally expected, blaming earlier predictions on erroneous, outdated models, reports The Guardian's Ian Sample.

It wouldn't be the first time that a previously well-established model has fallen by the wayside in light of stark new evidence (...

Image from ESA

There is still no light at the end of the tunnel for fire-besieged Northern California. According to some reports, there are still over 1,000 wildfires burning in the region with little hope for improvement in the near future. Over 1,400 square kilometers of land have already been burnt, and there are more than 19,000 firefighters on hand, many from around the country, helping to put out the blazes.

The image was captured by the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite on June 2...

Image from jpctalbot

At the risk of gross oversimplification, let me start by revealing the Climate Change Risk report's two main takeaways: Avoid living in most parts of Africa if you're especially risk averse (75 percent of the world's 20 most vulnerable countries are found there) and move to Canada to best hedge your bets.

The Comoros Islands: most at risk
The riskiest location by far, as

Good Computer, Bad Computer
The Global eSustainability Initiative has released a report showing that while information and communications technologies (ICT) use a lot of energy and have an impact on global warming, that impact might not be negative. It is true that electronic equipment worldwide is about on par with aviation for CO2 emissions with 830 million tonnes (or 2% of total), but the other side of the coin is that these technology could help avoid 7.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2020, or 500% more than what they caused.

How Computers Make us Greener
The most obvious way that electronic equipment c...

Wave Power Technology
Most wave power devices so far, like those from Ocean Power Delivery, are made of metal and contain many hydraulic rams, hinges and articulated joints. This makes them expensive, and the more things there are to break, the higher maintenance costs will be.

Introducing the Anaconda
Francis Farley, an experimental physicist, and Rod Rainey of Atkins Oil and Gas, have invented a new device that could help bring the cost of wave power down. They call it the 'Anaconda' after the species of aquatic boas (and a cheesy movie). It's bas...

Image from Jesse Bikman

Can you imagine a future in which current record high temperatures will be considered "lovely and cool"? If not, you might want to get used to the idea, says Andreas Sterl, a climate modeler with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the author of an upcoming study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

As the AP's Seth Borenstein reports, Sterl's model predicts heat wave temperatures will rise twice as fast as regular average global temperatures by 2100....

The idea behind waste gasification is an attractive one: Take trash and subject it to extreme heat under anoxic conditions to produce syngas, a blend of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source. Despite its promise, its high operating costs and relative inefficiency had heretofore limited its applicability in most countries.

Yet, as reported by Technology Review's Peter Fairley, that is all set to change with the approval of North America's first gasification plant ...

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In 1999, California passed the landmark Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) which directed the state to create and manage the state's first network of marine protected areas (MPA) along the coastline. The move was seen as a necessary countermeasure to widespread coastal loss and degradation, which had already resulted in over 90 percent of the state's wetlands being lost and in la...

From what i can learn from the press we are living in food mayhem: yesterday morning a nutritionist was complaining on French tv that because the country had turned its back on the usual bread and jam breakfast in favour of American-style fat and sugar-loaded cereals, the population was at risk of fattening. In the afternoon, i was reading in La Repubblica that the soaring costs of pasta, bread, fruit and vegetables are making Mediterranean diet harder to afford. Italians are eating more cheap processed foods high in fat, sugar and salt (via WSJ.) The whole continent is complaining about the food crisis.

Image courtesy of Richard Simmon/NASA

To put it succinctly: not a chance. Just because I know there are those who will gleefully point to this study as proof that global warming is all a big hoax (*cough* Senator James Inhofe *cough*), let me start off this post by quoting one of the study's authors, Noel Keenlyside: "We want to make very...