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Is Earth’s Atmosphere an Import?

Soulskill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:55:00 +0000

garg0yle writes "One of the questions about the formation of our planet is: where did the atmosphere come from? One theory is that the oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases were part of the coalescing ball, and 'seeped out' during the final stages of the planet's formation. However, a new article at Wired says isotopic analysis of krypton and xenon indicates that they (and the rest of our atmosphere) may be of extraterrestrial origin, either arriving via comets or being swept up from gas clouds."

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Global Deforestation Demoed In Google Earth

kdawson — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:06:00 +0000

eldavojohn writes "On Google's official blog, they claim a 'new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth's forests.' Ars has more details on what Google unveiled at Copenhagen. If you have Google Earth installed, you can find a demonstration here. Many organizations and government agencies are on board with this initiative to put deforestation before the eyes of the public. If only satellite data of North America existed before the logging industry swept in!" It's interesting to contemplate the implications for intelligence gathering of Google's automated tools to compare satellite photos.

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US Patent Office Fast Tracks Green Patents

samzenpus — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:33:00 +0000

eldavojohn writes "A new initiative is being piloted where 'green' patents are given special priority over other patents in the backlogged system. David Kappos (Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO) said, 'Every day an important green tech innovation is hindered from coming to market is another day we harm our planet and another day lost in creating green businesses and green jobs. Applications in this pilot program will see a significant savings in pendency, which will help bring green innovations to market more quickly.' The details of how you qualify for a green patent (PDF) are available with patent blogs offering opinions on this initiative."

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Gigantic Spiral of Light Observed Over Norway; Rocket To Blame?

timothy — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:23:00 +0000

Ch_Omega writes "A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night (more pictures) has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing display to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor to a shock wave — although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its center — lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with telephone calls after the light storm — which astronomers have said did not appear to have been connected to the aurora, or Northern Lights, so common in that area of the world." The Bad Astronomer makes the case that a malfunctioning rocket spewing fuel is a parsimonious explanation, backed up by witnesses to similar events and a cool simulation (on video). An anonymous reader suggests that this Proton-M Carrier Rocket might be responsible for the display.

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Scientific Journal Nature Finds Nothing Notable In CRU Leak

Soulskill — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:18:00 +0000

eldavojohn writes with an update to the CRU email leak story we've been following for the past two weeks. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature has published an article saying the emails do not demonstrate any sort of "scientific conspiracy," and that the journal doesn't intend to investigate earlier papers from CRU researchers without "substantive reasons for concern." The article notes, "Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers." Reader lacaprup points out related news that a global warming skeptic plans to sue NASA under the Freedom of Information Act for failing to deliver climate data and correspondence of their own, which he thinks will be "highly damaging." Meanwhile, a United Nations panel will be conducting its own investigation of the CRU emails.

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Recycling Excess Heat From the Data Center

kdawson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:14:00 +0000

itwbennett writes "A new data center being built in Helsinki, scheduled to go live at the end of January, will generate energy and deliver hot water for the city. The data center is located in an old bomb shelter and is connected to the Helsinki public energy company's district heating system, which works by pumping boiling water through a system of pipes to households in Helsinki. The recycled heat from the data center could add about 1 percent to the total energy generated by the energy company's system in the summer." The article doesn't say what the overall efficiency of the heat recovery is. Researchers at MIT are working on a new energy-conversion technology based on quantum dots that they say has already demonstrated 40% of the Carnot efficiency limit — 4 times what is achieved by current commercial thermoelectric devices. The researchers believe they can reach 90% of the Carnot limit.

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Lifecycle Energy Costs of LED, CFL Bulbs Calculated

kdawson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:34:00 +0000

necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting on a new study from Osram, a German lighting manufacturer, which has calculated the total lifecycle energy costs of three lightbulb technologies and found that both LEDs and CFLs use approximately 20% of the energy of incandescents over their lifetimes. While it is well known that the newer lighting technologies use a fraction of the energy of incandescents to produce the same amount of light, it has not been proven whether higher manufacturing energy costs kept the new lighting from offering a net gain. The study found that the manufacturing and distribution energy costs of all lightbulb technologies are only about 2% of their total lifetime energy cost — a tiny fraction of the energy used to produce light." The study uses the assumption that LEDs last 2.5 times longer than CFLs, and 25 times longer than incandescents.

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Where the Global Warming Data Is

kdawson — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:04:00 +0000

Several readers noted the latest fallout from the Climate Research Unit's Climategate: the admission by the University of East Anglia that the raw data behind important climate research was discarded in the 1980s, "a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue" according to the Times (UK) article. The Telegraph quotes Phil Jones, beleagured head of the CRU: "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them." Some of the data behind these other results can likely be found in a new resource that jamie located up at the Real Climate site: a compilation of links to a wide variety of raw data about climate. From the former link: "In the aftermath of the CRU email hack, many people have come to believe that scientists are unfairly restricting access to the raw data relating to the global rise in temperature. ... We have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc."

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Modeling the Economy As a Physics Problem

kdawson — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:33:00 +0000

University of Utah physicist Tim Garrett has published a study that approaches the economy and its relation to global warming as a physics problem — and comes to some controversial conclusions: that rising carbon dioxide emissions cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day. The study was panned by economists and was rejected by several journals before its acceptance in the journal Climatic Change. "[Garrett discovered that] Throughout history, a simple physical constant... links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn't necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society's future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions. ... 'I'm not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem,' Garrett says. 'I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have.' Garrett treats civilization like a 'heat engine' that 'consumes energy and does "work" in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy,' he says. That constant is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, 'each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption,' Garrett says. ... Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett's theory is that conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use."

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Engaging With Climate Skeptics

kdawson — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:02:00 +0000

In the wake of the CRU "climategate" leak, reader Geoffrey.landis sends along a New York Times blog profile of Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech. "Curry — unlike many climate scientists — does not simply dismiss the arguments of 'climate skeptics,' but attempts to engage them in dialogue. She can, as well, be rather pointed in criticizing her colleagues, as in a post on the skeptic site climateaudit where she argues for greater transparency for climate data and calculations (mirrored here). In this post she makes a point that tribalism in science is the main culprit here —- that when scientists 'circle the wagons' to defend against what they perceive to be unfair (and unscientific) attacks, the result can be damaging to the actual science being defended. Is it still possible to conduct a dialogue, or is there no possible common ground?"

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