Inspirational and good news.
Yes, it ‘s finally here! All Things Are Good Canadian readers need to make sure they vote today. If you don’t know where exactly to vote check out elections.ca. It’s not a difficult task to vote since you don’t even need to be registered.
Remember that the most important thing you do today (if not this year) is to vote for the environment.
Something that I’ve never thought about is happening in New Zealand and that’s using microwaves to store carbon in charcoal.
“The application of microwaves to charcoal making is new,” says Tim Flannery of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, an expert on climate change and not associated with Carbonscape. “If it increases efficiency in the charcoal-making process it could prove to be a real winner.”
The plant is months away from running at full capacity, and is currently being used to produce charcoal that can be used to fertilise soil and for academic research.
The use of charcoal as a fertiliser, or “biochar”, is well known. Nearly 500 years ago, tribes in the Amazon used to smoulder their domestic waste, and the resultant charcoal was mixed into the soil. In places in the Amazon, this terra preta, or black earth, is nearly half a metre thick.
Charcoal makes the soil more fertile by binding nutrients to itself and making them available for plants, and is extremely resistant to breakdown. “You do quite often get a very significant boost in soil fertility and water holding capacity,” says Michael Bird at the University of St Andrews, UK.
“The unknowns that remain are exactly how long [the charcoal] stays in the soil. In some circumstances it can be millions of years, or decades, depending on how it is made, and soil conditions.”
A researcher from the University of Calgary has create a machine that essentially scrubs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The Tech Herald explains:
The team now believes it is close to achieving that goal with the development of a relatively simple machine that can capture, or “scrub†the trace amount of CO2 present in the air at any place on the planet.
“The climate problem is too big to solve easily with the tools we have,†explained Keith, director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy’s (ISEEE) Energy and Environmental Systems Group and a professor of chemical and petroleum engineering.
“While it’s important to get started doing things we know how to do, like wind power nuclear power and ‘regular’ carbon capture and storage, it’s also vital to start thinking about radical new ideas and approaches to solving this problem.â€
Nasa and the JPL have created a climate time machine to quickly explain to policy makers the effects of climate change.
Because everybody is affected by the weather, it seems like everybody likes to improvise themselves a climate scientist. Amateur theories about global warming are a dime a dozen and, unfortunately, that can make it hard for the general public and policy makers to figure out what’s based on sound science and what has just been made up in 5 minutes by someone who doesn’t know anything about climate science.
That’s the problem that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is trying to help fix with Climate Time Machine. Read on for more details.
This is just freaking awesome: Ecuadorians believe that nature ought to be protected by their constitution.
While the the new constitution has many ramifications for how the country will now be governed, the pro-nature aspects of the constitution have their roots in Ecuador’s resentment toward international companies that have exploited the country’s natural resources and left pollution and poverty in their wake. Currently Ecuadorians are in one particularly nasty lawsuit with Chevron (formerly Texaco). The oil company polluted a huge area with oil waste and did not clean it up, causing extreme pollution to ecosystems and deadly health problems for numerous communities. It has been described as the “Amazon Chernobyl.â€