Ice albedo feedback interact

Ice albedo feedback interact

Join Azimuth

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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. 
4. 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. 
5. 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

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

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

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.

Summer reading - World Changing part one

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"

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

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

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