If you’ve heard that nuclear energy is the low-carbon way out of the global warming‘s slow motion (and not-so-slow motion) disaster, you may wonder if the solution is worse than the problem. But wait. Today’s designs aren’t your parents’ nuclear reactors. Not even uranium powered.
I hope that catches your attention. Check out this video for more.
The principal channel by which New York’s Hudson River empties into the Atlantic Ocean.
Global warming and climate change are baked (haha) into our future, but we shouldn’t make it worse. What we need – for the climate, for economic equality – is lots of clean, cheap energy.
Where fresh water rivers meet salty oceans there’s the potential to generate lots of electricity. A large percentage of us humans live in coastal areas, often where rivers create trade routes to the ocean, so generating power there would be handy.
Just pump positive ions from salt water across a membrane into fresh water, pop in electrodes, and bingo! You’ve got electricity. But creating the necessary membrane cell has been elusive. Whatever scientists tried has been too expensive… until now.
Researchers recently made a huge step forward. If the membrane is made of carbon nanotubes that are magnetically aligned, the ions willingly jump right through them, self-separating into the two needed solutions. Getting carbon nanotubes is easy, but aligning them is very hard. This team figured it out, making a 4X improvement on the previous state of the art. Brian Dunning writing about this discovery.
Semih Cetindag, a Ph.D. student in the lab of mechanical engineer Jerry Wei-Jen Shan at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, reported that their team has “cracked the code.” They use nanotubes. The trick was coaxing the tubes into magnetic alignment. That took a couple steps, and they need to make improvements, but… this could work.
Yee ha. I try not to get too worked up over lab studies, but this one’s hard to ignore. Let’s keep our fingers crossed (unless you’re working on this problem – then, get your tail into the lab!)
Tube worms – one of the larger deep ocean critters
Microbial mats
Set the table
With poisonous sulfides
For those that are able.
Beyond sandy shores,
More hitchhiking beasts
Find methane gas
A sumptuous feast.
How odd to discover
These gases are forming
In deep ocean cold
To drive global warming.
The dragon sleeps,
Its bubbling snores
Provide the incentive
To learn something more.
by Kate Rauner
Thanks to huffpost.com
Trees! Planting trees has been a good thing to do for ages, and maybe it’s more important that ever.
Data finally exist to show that if the right species of trees are planted in the right soil types across the planet, the emerging forests could capture 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide in the next 40 to 100 years. That’s two thirds of all the CO2 humans have generated since the industrial revolution. “Forest restoration is by far our most powerful planetary solution today.” scientificamerican.com
There are details, of course. Always details, like the species and soil conditions can make trees better or worse soldiers in the fight against global warming. But a recent study by Tom Crowther, professor of global ecosystem ecology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, produced the jaw-dropping numbers quoted above. And Crowther’s study didn’t assume agriculture would be wiped off the face of the planet – we humans can co-exist with all these new trees.
In America, there are many areas where forests are growing back.
The United States went through a period of intense deforestation between 1600 and 1900, but the size of its forest areas has been relatively stable for the last hundred years… between 1990 and 2010, the nation added 7,687,000 hectares (18,995,000 acres) of forested land. The trend in reforesting areas has been driven by organizations such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Arbor Day Foundation. education.seattlepi.com
I’ve also noticed in areas I’ve lived that slopes once cut for firewood are now blanketed in trees. And that’s better than a blanket of carbon dioxide.
