New scientist - 29/10/11

[M]

Some items on renewables and the planet this week.

Sceptics agree warming is real - A group of scientists known for their scepticism about climate change have found that the Earth is getting warmer. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, University of California, Berkeley told the US Congress that 20th century records may contain biases towards significant warming.

Capture Chokes - Global trend to abandon CCS as governments and industry cut back on costs and can't agree on who should pay. Five projects called of in the US and Europe in last year. CCS scheme at Longannet, UK (Europe's 3rd largest coal fired power station) abandoned by Ministers, neither they nor industry willing to foot the full bill.

Dust Bowl looms if drought plans fail - Texas facing droughts and possible 'dust bowl' as Southwest expected to get drier in coming decades. Denver water deciding on future strategy, as more than half of the water it supplies used for watering lawns and landscaping.

Shelter form the storm - 'Some places are ideal havens for species threatened by climate change. One is Britain, and it should throw open its doors.'

Operation clean-up - The Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, awarded the $1m prize to Elastec, for developing a better oil spill retrieval system that in competition tests achieved a recovery rate of approx 17,000 litres per min.

307GW - the maximum amount of energy the internet uses, approx 2% of global energy use.

Have fun.

Mart.

[smegal]

I used to read NS religiously up until recently. I got tired of how you would read a whole magazine and after sifting through the sensationalist nonsense only a few articles are left (like the ones below)

That said, your statistic on the internet is fascinating. I wonder if that is just servers and infrastructure, or all connected computers too.

[djh]

Shelter form the storm - 'Some places are ideal havens for species threatened by climate change. One is Britain, and it should throw open its doors.'

What, like Japanese knotweed, grey sqiggles, termites, Asian flu etc? I think we're already doing our bit.

[AlanM]

And as for the BEST report, there is quite a bit of disagreement over their announcements, in particular from Dr Judith Curry, a co-author who has disagreed with the best pronouncement, regarding the actual cooling trend of the last decade plus.