Hooray for Holdren!

I saw this first on John Baez site. Its a good thing for the world as a whole that president Obama has appointed John Holden as scientific advisor and it will likely speed up the pace in US environmental initiatives and activities and thus push chances for global collective actions upwards.

Two years ago he held a video-taped one hour speech at the Belfer center on the state the planet and what activities can be done in terms mitigation, adaptation and suffering. The slides are also available  And also costs incurred for doing the neccessary actions to stabilize the the grenhouse gases at reasonable levels which are incurring costs in the range of 1 % of the worlds total global product (GWP), compared to the 2 % of GWP spent on defence today.

He also recommends that the developed countries must lead the way and take action immediately and take the up-front costs and compensate developing countries for eg minimizing deforestation. It is promising that the USA is acting with objective responsability and will certainly up the antes for a successful meeting in Copenhague at the end of the year. 

So who will do the next verification of Blacklight?

Image via Wikipedia

The company Blacklight Power has been around for a while and claims that they have a way to capture the energy from hydrogen as they move between energy levels without burning or nuclear processes. Even though there has been some independent verification it is still very early to draw any conclusions about the feasability of this.

And in the back of my head echoes the promised panacea of cold fusion which turned out to be a conundrum instead. Some years ago there was physicists both supporting and opposing the theory of the hydrino state. But for now I'll give them the benefit of doubt until there are further independent verification or refutation !

Encyclopedia of earth is a tremendous resource

Image by Aaron Escobar via Flickr

If You haven't already discovered the expert-based encyclopedia I urge You to pay a visit! There is an aim to under Creative Commons licensing be a:

"comprehensive resource for timely, objective, science-based information about the environment. It is a means for the global scientific community to come together to produce the first free, expert-driven, massively scaleable information resource on the environment, and to engage civil society in a public dialogue on the role of environmental issues in human affairs."

And also the encylopidia itself with articlas on anything You wanted to know. For example Albedo or Global warming. There are also sections on news, and also forums on a variety of topics. And if You cannot find You can always create You own!

Nano to the rescue for future energy storage?

Image via Wikipedia

ScienceDaily (2008-09-17) -- Engineers and scientists have achieved a breakthrough in the use of a one-atom thick structure called "graphene" as a new carbon-based material for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices, perhaps paving the way for the massive installation of renewable energies such as wind and solar power.

This will certainly have the potential to lower the barrier for renewable energy like wind and solar, but also batteries used in hybrid cars. It stems from research work done in the Nanoscience and Technology Lab at University of Texas in Austin.

Here is the abstract and and an image of chemically modified graphene for the main research report.

Art for combatting global warming

Robert Rohde - a PhD student at UC Berkeley - is running the site Global Warming Art and as he is also a contributing Wikipedian makes the content of his new site available under similar generous terms. Here is one recent interactive piece for exploring sea level rises (in the US).

Here is one interesting static image of oil usage per capita in the twenty largest countries. I really like this site and urge you to spend some time there!

Footprint trading

Image via Wikipedia

Here is another example of trading mechanisms in new companies. It is company with a recent web 2.0 service for reducing and trading carbon footprints (for a fee). The service is called Little carbon feet and is in beta right now. Once you have balanced out your newly added air or car travel footprint you can use that to share with people.

They use the Chicaco climate exchange , mentioned in an earlier posting on this blog, to purchase carbon emission offsets.

Revisiting shared climate prediction

OK I think it is time to get onto climateprediction.net (CP) again. I and the lab I headed at that time were avidly looking for "ET" from the inception of the SETI@HOME project and subsequently I also looked for large Mersenne primes in GIMPS. I personally found neither aliens nor any huge primes, but I have always loved the base idea of sharing reseurces in search of solutions for mankinds large problems. As a whole the GIMPS project holds the record for large Mersenne though

I had some problems with CP when I tried last year, but I'll figure it was mainly "baby stage" glitches. There, its a breeze to install and seems to be less problematic. CPView is a viewer i'll try as well.