Open BioSphere

Join Azimuth

2010-12-02T13:58:00.000+01:00

I have decided to join Azimuth which was created recently and I will dedicate my efforts there mostly. So I'll post even less here . My motive for doing this is summarized in this post by John Baez (now doing research in Singapore). So if you fell like I do - that we humans are better off by combatting existental anxiety with collective pragmatic actions that we feel has a chance of getting to real and usable knowledge and results which can be applied for enhancing our lives - consider joining up !

If you want a shorter and funny version see this excellent show by stand-up comedian George Carlin ! Thanks John for the reference.

Plant Enzyme Converts Car Exhaust Into Fuel

2010-08-11T08:56:00.002+02:00

Image via Wikipedia

Plant Enzyme Converts Car Exhaust Into Fuel

Ecogeek has an article on t"he microbe Azotobacter vinelandii, found in the roots of many food plants including soy beans, creates the enzyme vanadium.which can convert CO which it converted to propane."

The enzyme could be modified to let cars could run partially off of their exhaust or carbon monoxide in the air around them, reducing pollution and cutting down on the oil we use.

Researchers say there's a more work to do and are working on ways to mass production.

Protovis for intuitive visualization

2010-06-07T11:21:00.003+02:00

Which uses the same declarative mechansims as Jquery and other semi- or completely functional programming languages for enabling simple and intuitive chainiing of fanctions. It has been developed by a research group at Stanford that focuses on visualization. Protovis. zippad "weighs" less than 1 Mb.

One interactive example targets interactive job categories and shows how the the male-female proportions has changed over the years . It also illustrates how to present help text and interactively change the vizualization on a query immediately.förändrats genom historien både för män och kvinnor.

I also partly agree with with Douglas Crockford that Javascript is now good language - at least as Douglas says in his book - as you use the "The good parts" there.

Here is a quote:

"The first is that you don't have a choice. The Web has become an important platform for application development, and JavaScript is the only language that is found in all browsers. It is unfortunate that Java failed in that environment; if it hadn't, there could be a choice for people desiring a strongly typed classical language. But Java did fail and JavaScript is flourishing, so there is evidence that JavaScript did something right.
The other answer is that, despite its deficiencies, JavaScript is really good. It is lightweight and expressive. And once you get the hang of it, functional programming is a lot of fun."

IfItWasMyHome.com - Visualizing the BP Oil Disaster

2010-06-04T12:30:00.009+02:00

Just to give some scale of this catastrophy for people living in Stockholm. IfItWasMyHome.com - Visualizing the BP Oil Disaster

Here is a static image for those who doesn't have the time to play with
the above:

Zooming in on Greenland

2010-05-30T11:29:00.001+02:00

Image via Wikipedia

From an article which came last fall here is a quote and a plot:

"We use monthly measurements of time-variable gravity from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite gravity mission to determine the ice mass-loss for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets during the period between April 2002 and February 2009. We find that during this time period the mass loss of the ice sheets is not a constant, but accelerating with time, i.e., that the GRACE observations are better represented by a quadratic trend than by a linear one, implying that the ice sheets contribution to sea level becomes larger with time."

This can be evidence that the melting is non-linear in nature and might be accelerating even more.

Message from the Global Biodiversity Outlook

2010-05-27T10:45:00.000+02:00

GloBio summarize the results as:

"Natural systems that support economies, lives and livelihoods across the planet are at risk of rapid degradation and collapse, unless there is swift, radical and creative action to conserve and sustainably use the variety of life on Earth. That is a principal conclusion of a major new assessment of the current state of biodiversity and the implications of its continued loss for human well-being." Here is an image of potential global tipping point areas:

This will be presented for the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2010.
The principal conclusions on biodiversity futures for the 21st century:

Projections of the impact of global change on biodiversity show continuing and often accelerating species extinctions, loss of natural habitat, and changes in the distribution and abundance of species, species groups and biomes over the 21st century.
There is a high risk of dramatic biodiversity loss and accompanying degradation of a broad range of ecosystem services if the Earth system is pushed beyond certain thresholds or tipping points.
Earlier assessments have underestimated the potential severity of biodiversity loss based on plausible scenarios, because the impacts of passing tipping points or thresholds of ecosystem change have not previously been taken into account.
There are greater opportunities than identified in earlier assessments to address the biodiversity crisis while contributing to other social objectives; for example, by reducing the scale of climate change without large-scale deployment of biofuels and accompanying loss of natural habitats.
Biodiversity and ecosystem changes could be prevented, significantly reduced or even reversed if strong action is applied urgently, comprehensively and appropriately, at international, national and local levels."

Here is the full report.

Upstream technology rules and producer incentives

2010-04-07T17:17:00.003+02:00

Image via Wikipedia

I glansed in a book by Joseph Huber today and just noted a couple of observations he has made initially. Current approaches to technological innovation inside the environmental area are characteristically end of pipe solutions to solve downstream problems. It is more important to try to focus on the upstream technologies and environmental innovation (TEI), in order to prevent problems. It is also important to find incentives for the designers, producers or manufacturers that helps mobilize them

The book "New Technologies and Environmental Innovation" covers 11 technological clusters. Energy, natural resources, agriculture, chemistry and chemicals, materials processing, building settlement structures, vehicles and transport, utility goods, materials reprocessing (recycling, waste management), emissions control and finally environmental measuring and monitoring. His group has made a TEI database with over 500 TEI's.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: The Earthquake in Copenhagen: Reflections on CoP-15 and its Aftermath

2009-12-21T17:54:00.000+01:00

Worldchanging: Bright Green: The Earthquake in Copenhagen: Reflections on CoP-15 and its Aftermath

Hooray for Holdren!

2009-03-19T12:11:00.002+01:00

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?

2008-11-15T16:03:00.005+01:00

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

2008-11-09T14:49:00.002+01:00

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?

2008-09-17T11:01:00.002+02:00

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

2008-07-09T11:43:00.001+02:00

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

2008-06-18T14:21:00.002+02:00

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

2007-08-03T11:09:00.001+02:00

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.

Summer reading - World Changing part one

2007-07-19T12:15:00.001+02:00

Despite seeing the occasional negative review I decided to take on the book edition of "World Changing - A User's Guide for the 21st Century" and also post brief summaries and followups. When I bought the book the female cashier exclaimed "Oh what a beatiful book". My hope now is that it 's also beautiful on the inside.

The books editor Alex Steffen presents the bad and good news in the Introduction. The bad news starts with the unequal distribution of the ecological footprint (based on Wackernagel's ideas). If you are not familiar with the footprint framework it is good to learn about it because it is a way to actually measure and potentially price non-sustainable footprints. Then he continues with overpopulation "adding one city like Seattle every week" and ecological overshoot is adressed: "we are using the planet with such intensity that it is unable to restore itself". He conludes the bad news with a summary of energy resources, ie the environmental costs of producing non-renewable energy resources and that they are indeed running out and describes the tensions created by the current global economic unequality.

Finally Steffen adresses the good news and that the illusory tradeoff between "doing well and doing right" can be countered by small smart individual and collective steps of innovation. Sharing green innovation and inspire readers to innovate is the overall purpose with the book. He stresses that we should strive for individual actions with global impact. Start with the things you know and address some of the easier stuff and then incrementally and collectively adress the more complex issues. Making the "What will I do?" more maneagable and finding suitable societal networks for knowledge sharing.

I'll return to the questions and overall objective, when posting on each chapter. Stay tuned.

Personal Kyoto and "Real Costs"

2007-05-16T20:13:00.001+02:00

R&D for the public domain is what the lab part of Eyebeam does. Some of their projects are listed here. Eyebeam per se seems to have some of the flavour of an open site for art and technology, ie similar to MIT Media Lab. And indeed it turns out that several of the managers have a Media Lab background.

One project is personal Kyoto which is a way of checking and tracking electrical usage (for New York residents for now) and realigning the projected consumption with target levels in the Kyoto protocol. They also co-financed The Real Costs - a Firefox plugin to show CO2 costs when buying airfare tickets.

Cost-efficient sustainability

2007-04-11T19:00:00.001+02:00

Utilizing reverse auctions can be a complement to more large-scale market mechanisms like climate exhanges. There is also a host of open source auction implementations that support reverse auctions. TenderSystem, E-Z Auction and iLance are three that can be used for realization of your particular market.

There are many countries that are already using this for energy auctions and there are also emerging private companies in niche areas, like GoGreenSolar, for solar energy projects.

Using open source to track trees in the City

2007-03-15T22:12:00.001+01:00

OSGeo is creating many new and old open source tools for geospatial purposes. There are tools for both web-based and desktop mapping. Here is one project - Urban Forest - that has used several OSGeo tools:

"...the project team has created an Urban Forest Map, which digitally pinpoints the location of each tree, maintainstree data in a consistent database, and offers web access to the tree data – key for maintenance and planting efforts. The community can get involved by posting photos and stories about their own trees that they plant and map online. With the launch of this collaborative effort and the support of the Mayor's Office, a critical step has been taken to move San Francisco's urban greening efforts forward...

One of the OSGeo tools from Autodesk is called MapGuide Open Source

Extra, extra! Read all about it.

2007-03-02T16:48:00.000+01:00

This is a nifty thing to visualize (RSS and atom feeds). Here I use it on my own feed:

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IT investment getting greener

2007-02-01T14:58:00.001+01:00

At least in the US for the moment, where investment agencies are moving more towards clean environment technologies.The IT companies in Silicon Valley have started to employ people and are also leaning more towards juxtapositions of IT and green technology.

Two interiews with Fritjof Capra on Transition Culture

2007-01-30T18:26:00.001+01:00

The first part is on Relocalisation and here Capra critizes the the original "sustainability" concept for focusing too much on individual moral persuasion mainly and leaving out the important issue of how to achieve sustainable development. Capras own simplest example is to mimic ecosystems which support life, recycle, uses solar energy and thus are adaptive and sustainable. This is a wonderful approach and it makes the issue more approachable for humans and also is a good incentive for how to go about with human communities. So I really think you should read this short interview in full. Aside on relocalisation theme : There is still an unclear picture on
costs and benefits. See for example the Dec 9 2006 issue of theThe Economist "Why ethical food harms the planet". (premium content). But maybe it is relevant to add an "may" to the title of the Econimist article!

Peak Oil and climate change is the second part of the interview and it recaps some things, but in the context of the opportunities served to mankind with the current climate change. If you need to get understand more on peak oil theory, check wikipedia, but the emphasis here is on "climate change", so don't get lost in debates about peak oil.

Need startup money?

2007-01-27T18:25:00.001+01:00

I was not aware of Ceres, until I read the Mindy Lubbers' excellent coverage of Davos on WorldChanging. Here is a quote from their investment part :

"Ceres works with investors worldwide to improve corporate and public policies on climate change and
other environmental, social, and corporate governance issues. As part of this mission, Ceres
launched and coordinates the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), an alliance of leading U.S.
institutional investors that collectively manage over $1.3 trillion in assets"

I will look closer at this and return later. They claim to be global in scope, but from the list of prominent "Ceres companies" there is mainly the large US corporate conglomerates that you'd expect. But there are also coalition members of interest.

See for yourself

2006-12-16T17:26:00.000+01:00

This is a extremely user-friendly climate simulation software that is available for download and it also comes with many predefined environmental scenarios:

"The EdGCM Project develops and distributes a research-quality global climate model (GCM) with a user-friendly interface that runs on desktop computers. Anyone can explore the subject of climate change using the same methods and tools that scientists employ. The design of the software allows students to learn and experience the full scientific process including: designing experiments, setting up and running computer simulations, post-processing output, using scientific visualization to display results, and creating scientific reports ready for publishing to the web..."

It has been developed by EdgCM cooperative project at Columbia University.

Zooming out in time to understand climate change

2006-11-21T11:20:00.000+01:00

I listened to this talk by the mathematical physicist John Baez last night and I must say his approach impressed me very much. The talk took place at the Long Now Foundation some weeks ago. From a summary of the talk by Stewart Brand (founder of Long Now):

"...The graphs we see these days, John Baez began, all look vertical --- carbon burning shooting up, CO₂ in the air shooting up, global temperature shooting up, and population still shooting up. How can we understand what really going on? "It's like trying to understand geology while you're hanging by your fingernails on a cliff, scared to death. You think all geology is vertical..."

After that John Baez starts to zoom out in time and sheds light on the implications of too speedy temperature change for Earth's species. His talk also has links to relevant material and can be used as a reference for global warming.

It would be great to see a followup of global warming and global dimming and what is known on how they interact. A good source for understanding global dimming is the aerosol postings on the excellent RealClimate blog. See especially this post by the researcher Beate Lipert.

Using semantic web to build environmental application

2006-10-17T19:58:00.000+02:00

Explore our planet is a nifty site. It is utilizing the RDF-based Geo-names which anyone can use (creative commons licence). Geo-names is a fabulous semantic web data-set and Explore our planet is one open way of exploring this to put attention on emerging environental issues by layering them on top of Google maps (for now).

It provides REST web access. It is good for developing web applications that require access to GIS data, geocode and similar functionality as ArcGIS.

What can we do - make wedges

2006-10-16T17:04:00.000+02:00

I browsed in the september 2006 issue of Scientific american and got my eyes on article called "a plan to keep carbon in check" by Solow and Pacalah. The present a pragmatic way of dealing with GHG and without choking economic global growth. they have developed a concept called "stabilisation wedge" which makes it more tractable to build emission reduction strategies and stabilize it by 2050.

The other interesting thing with their approach is the fact that it spreads the risk by having a broad spectrum portfolio which is important in order to achieve long-term sustainability (ie not betting everything on nuclear energy or carbon sequestration).

The group at Princeton Environment Institute, focus on Carbon Mitigation and the Wedge concept is described in detail on their site. They also give fifteen examples of wedges that can be used now. Their material is available in several forms, games, interactive presentations and so on. How would an emission reduction strategy look for your country ?

What can I do ?

2006-10-10T17:11:00.000+02:00

There is a new book coming out soon from Worldchanging.com which looks promising. It covers
the following things (list cited directly from their site):

"You (which presents introductory materials and covers basic approaches for changing our thinking and designing our lives to be more worldchanging);

Stuff (which covers topics like green design, biomimicry, sustainable food, clothing, trade and technology);

Shelter (covering topics like green building and landscaping, clean energy, water, disaster relief and humanitarian design);

Cities (topics like smart growth, sustainable communities, transportation, greening infrastructure, product-service systems, leapfrogging and megacity challenges);

Communities (topics like education, women's rights, public health, holistic approaches to community development, South-South science, social entrepreneurship and micro-lending, and philanthropy);

Business (topics like socially responsible investment, worldchanging start-ups, ecological economics, corporate social responsibility and green business);

Politics (topics like networked politics, new media, transparency, human rights, non-violent revolution and peacemaking);

Planet (the big picture -- everything from placing oneself in a bioregion to climate foresight to environmental history to green space exploration)."

I am actually looking forward to reading this. Fritiof Capra has been arguing for this for a long time and has actually done a lot of projects at his ecoliteracy center. I do not know if he is a contributor to this book though. If you haven't read anything by Capra you should (but feel free to skip "The Tao of Physics"). His actual message becomes more prevalent from "The Turning Point" and onwards.

Besides that I think books by Vaclav Smil are good and as a start you might consider "Energy" published by oneworld. It is consise and to the point and really lives up to being a beginners guide to Energy. After that you might tackle his more ambitious books. For a balanced but highly debated book there is "The Sceptical Environmentalist" by social scientist (and Greenpeace member) Björn Lomborg. The debate can be read in full at the previous link but mainly it has been scientists that has pointed out flaws in but his method and numbers.

Chicago Climate Exchange

2005-11-03T17:55:00.000+01:00

The worlds first greenhouse gas exchange - trading the major six gases:

Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX): "Our mission is to provide our members from the private and public sectors with cost-effective methods for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by building and operating a market-based emission reduction and trading program that is flexible, has low transaction costs, is environmentally rigorous and rewards environmental innovation."

They have also been very proactive in setting up a european counterpart and it runs as
some kind of sister project to CCX.

The Heartland Institute - Auctioning Pollution Rights - by Ted Gayer

2005-11-03T17:43:00.000+01:00

The Heartland Institute - Auctioning Pollution Rights - by Ted Gayer:

A brief explanation of applications of market mechanisms to pollution rights:

"In the past 15 years, cap-and trade programs have become the preferred means of regulating air pollutants. A cap-and-trade program establishes the annual number of allowable emission permits (the 'cap'), which is set below the existing emissions level. Each regulated entity must cash in one permit for each unit of air pollution it emits. The cost savings come from allowing firms to trade permits, so that a firm that finds it costly to reduce its marginal unit of pollution can instead purchase a permit from another firm that can reduce a unit of pollution for less cost. Because the overall cap is binding, the result is a reduction of pollution to the target level at costs much lower than the more rigid command-andcontrol regulations"

In practice there has been a full spectrum of implementations on national levels and I think many countries are still a far cry from achieving cost efficiency in the usage and bonafide effects concerning the goals of lowering pollution numbers. But it is anyhow the first econopolitical instrument that has potential to be useful in the long run.

There might be better incentives in other economical instruments, like traditional "stock or in natura" exhanges.

Atlas of the Biosphere

2005-11-03T17:16:00.000+01:00

Atlas of the Biosphere: the basic idea is to "gather as much information about the environment as possible, and deliver it to as many people as possible. We are dedicated to bringing environmental information to the widest possible audience."

It seems to give a broad survey of different important cycles like carbon, oxygen, and maps of land-use, human impact and more. I do not know right now if it still is maintained.

Taxing bads instead of goods?

2005-11-03T16:50:00.001+01:00

This is mentioned in Stieglitz book on the "Roaring Nineties" and is attributed to president Clinton who proposed "a brilliant new idea: Why not start taxing 'bads' - pollution - rather than 'goods' - hard work and savings".

This was indeed turned down by the US energy and automobile companies at the time, and converted into a tiny US gasoline tax increase of a couple of cents.

Concerns and ideas

2005-11-03T16:50:00.000+01:00

I have been reading several very good books on the "state of the planet and I think that sofar the best survey comes from Vaclav Smil and his MIT Press book "The Earth's BioSphere". He is very good at maintaing a holistic perspective without loosing details.

I think a popular and pedagogical version should be made mandatory during basic education. I willl maintain this blog for things related to problems concerning the biosphere and feasible solutions like self-government of (open) commons to achieve sustainable solutions (analyzed and researched by Elinor Ostrom).