Science Daily October 28, 2019 The “hidden politics” of climate engineering were partially revealed earlier this year at the fourth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-4), when Switzerland proposed a resolution on geoengineering governance. According to a team of researchers in the US (UC Santa Cruz, American University) there are several areas of concern, including: Disagreement among countries about the current state and strength of SRM governance, The domination of research by North American and European scientists, The need to “decouple” governance of SRM and CDR and a significant split between the United States and the European Union over the “precautionary […]
Tag Archives: Climatology
A roadmap to make the land sector carbon neutral by 2040
Science Daily October 23, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Virginia, organizations, UC Berkeley, Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan) combines a review of modelled pathways and literature on mitigation strategies, and develop a land-sector roadmap of priority measures and regions that can help to achieve the 1.5 °C temperature goal set by the Paris agreement. Transforming the land sector and deploying measures in agriculture, forestry, wetlands and bioenergy could feasibly and sustainably contribute about 30%, or 15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, of the global mitigation needed in 2050 to deliver on the 1.5 […]
Liquid Air Could Store Renewable Energy and Reduce Emissions
IEEE Spectrum September 18, 2019 Refrigerated food warehouses and factories consume immense amounts of energy. A team of researchers and companies in Europe working under the CryoHub project sponsored by EU are now developing a cryogenic energy storage system that could reduce carbon emissions from the food sector while providing a convenient way to store wind and solar power. The system will use extra wind and solar electricity to freeze air to cryogenic temperatures, where it becomes liquid, and in the process shrinks by 700 times in volume. The liquid air is stored in insulated low-pressure tanks similar to the […]
1 in 5 Cities Is About to Have a Climate Unknown to Any Place on Earth
Science Alert July 11, 2019 Researchers in Switzerland analyzed city pairs for 520 major cities of the world and tested if their climate in 2050. They found that even under an optimistic climate scenario 77% of future cities are very likely to experience a climate that is closer to that of another existing city than to its own current climate. As a general trend, they found that all the cities tend to shift towards the sub-tropics, with cities from the Northern hemisphere shifting to warmer conditions, on average ~1000 km south and cities from the tropics shifting to drier conditions…read […]
Climate impact of aircraft contrails could treble by mid-century
Physics World July 1, 2019 Researchers in Germany used ECHAM5-CCMod, an atmospheric climate model, to investigate the climate impact of contrail cirrus for the year 2050. Contrails have the potential to linger and become artificial cirrus clouds which reflect infrared radiation coming up from the Earth’s surface far more than they reflect incoming solar radiation back into space. As a result, such clouds tend to trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere and have an overall warming effect on climate. According to the researchers instead of rerouting flights to mitigate the effects of contrails, a better course of action may be […]
More energy needed to cope with climate change
Science Daily June 24, 2019 Future energy demand is likely to increase due to climate change, but the magnitude depends on many interacting sources of uncertainty. An international team of researchers (Austria, USA – NCAR, Boston University, Italy) shows that, across 210 realizations of socioeconomic and climate scenarios, vigorous (moderate) warming increases global climate-exposed energy demand before adaptation around 2050 by 25–58% (11–27%), on top of a factor 1.7–2.8 increase above present-day due to socioeconomic developments and that energy demand rises by more than 25% in the tropics and southern regions of the USA, Europe and China. An important way […]
Scientists Are Scared a ‘Rogue’ Country Could Start a Geoengineering War
Science Alert June 14, 2019 A recent report by the United Nations’ PIPCC found that nations around the globe must implement “rapid and far-reaching” changes in energy sources, infrastructure, industry, and transportation to avoid catastrophic consequences of climate change. But some researchers are looking into geoengineering to address the dangerous warming. If a rogue nation were to start a geoengineering project without international oversight or buy-in, some experts worry the unintended consequences could lead to war. Geoengineering can take many forms, some of which exist already…read more.
New lidar instruments peer skyward for clues on weather and climate
Phys.org May 21, 2019 There is a critical need for vertical measurement profiles of humidity, aerosols, and temperature in the lower troposphere to provide needed coverage for improved weather and climate forecasting across the U.S. There has been a gap in the instrumentation to meet this vision for research and monitoring without relying on aircraft-based devices. A team of researchers in the US (Montana State University, NCAR) has developed diode-based micro-pulse DIAL (MPD) technology as an economical route to a profiler that could make accurate measurements and fulfill desired specifications for continuous, unattended operation and eye safety. The technology will […]
Counter-intuitive climate change solution
EurekAlert May 20, 2019 According to an international team of researchers (USA – Sanford University, Australia) some sources of methane emissions – from rice cultivation or cattle- may be very difficult or expensive to eliminate. An alternative is to offset these emissions via methane removal, so there is no net effect on warming the atmosphere. They argue that methane concentrations could be restored to pre-industrial levels by removing about 3.2 billion tons of the gas from the atmosphere and converting it into an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to a few months of global industrial emissions. They describe a potential […]
It’s Official: Atmospheric CO2 Just Exceeded 415 Ppm For The First Time in Human History
Science Alert May 13, 2019 Researchers at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography sensors in Hawaii recorded Earth’s atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide passing 415 parts per million for the first time since before the ancient dawn of humanity. As recently as 1910, atmospheric CO2 stood at 300 ppm – higher than it had been for some 800,000 years at least. It’s that ongoing fossil fuel use that’s the real problem here. According to the scientists we basically have no idea how bad things could get if we don’t stop adding to the problem at such an accelerated rate. There is […]