Guest blogger Lisa Moore, Ph.D., is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.
Last week, Bill summarized two new studies about carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and ocean. This week brought three very different topics: hurricanes (quite timely, since today is the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season!), global rainfall patterns and rainbow trout.
Yesterday, The New York Times published an editorial about coal-to-liquid technology. Their warning against so-called energy solutions that actually worsen climate change is right on target.
For more, check out a post I wrote last month, about why coal-to-liquid technology is a bad idea.
If you’re concerned about hurricanes and global warming and you’ve been reading the newspapers and magazines, you are probably confused.
Perhaps in an effort to be “balanced,” most stories in the media these days present a muddled picture. Cornelia Dean’s piece in the New York Times is a good case in point: a scientific paper is cited claiming a connection; another is cited claiming the opposite. The implication is that the science is inconclusive.
If you’re an avid follower of the news, you may have heard of a company called Planktos that’s trying to fight global warming and make a profit at the same time through a process called "ocean fertilization".
The concept is simple: phytoplankton (tiny one-celled algae) take up carbon dioxide (CO2) during photosynthesis. Fertilizing the ocean encourages growth of phytoplankton, and increases the rate at which CO2 is consumed – presumably leading to less CO2 in the atmosphere. Since ocean photosynthesis is often limited by lack of iron, the idea is to dump iron into the ocean and watch the phytoplankton bloom. Planktos sees this as an economic opportunity: Increase CO2 uptake in the ocean, and sell it as an offset to carbon emitters. (I talked more about how offsets work in a previous post on land-based offsets.)
Ocean fertilization may sound like a good idea, but it has some very serious problems. Here’s why.
In scanning the climate news each week, I come upon interesting items I’d like to share. This week I found some alarming new studies about carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere and ocean.
Yesterday, President Bush stated that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2006 declined 1.3 percent, "putting us well ahead of what is needed annually to meet my greenhouse gas intensity reduction goal of 18% by 2012." There are two problems with what he said:
