Four men from the remote village of Licapa in Peru have decided to combat global warming by painting the Andes white.

In the last 35 years, rising temperatures have reduced the size of glaciers in the Peruvian Andes by 22%. The hope is that the whitewash will reflect heat away and stop the glaciers melting.

Peruvian Andes (by Martin St-Amant via Wikimedia)

As eccentric as it may seem, the whitewashing project was selected as one of the top proposals in the World Bank’s "100 Ideas to Save the Planet" competition held last year. As a result, Eduardo Gold, who proposed the scheme, secured £135,000 ($au 227,000) to carry it out. The funds are being used to paint about 70 hectares on three mountain peaks.

The team is using an environmentally friendly paint, based on an old Peruvian formula. It contains lime, egg whites and water.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

For years, we have been warned that low-lying coral island states will be drowned by rising sea levels. Now the first analysis of the data broadly suggests the opposite - most have remained stable, while some have even grown, despite rising sea levels, over the last 60 years.

Nanumea Atoll, Tuvalu (NASA image)

Paul Kench at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and Arthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji used historical aerial photos and high-resolution satellite images to study changes in the land surface of 27 Pacific islands over the last 60 years. Local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres during that time but just four of the islands have diminished in size.

Tuvalu, which stands just 4.5 metres out of the Pacific, has been widely predicted to be one of the first islands to drown in the rising seas. Yet Arthur Webb and Paul Kench found that seven islands in one of its nine atolls have spread by more than 3 per cent on average since the 1950s. One island, Funamanu, gained 0.44 hectares, or nearly 30 per cent of its previous area. In the neighbouring Republic of Kiribati, the three major urbanised islands - Betio, Bairiki and Nanikai - have increased by 30 per cent.

The reason is that low-lying Pacific islands are made of coral debris. This is eroded from the reefs that typically circle the islands and pushed up onto the islands by winds, waves and currents. Because the corals are alive, they provide a continuous supply of material. Structures linking islands can boost growth by trapping sediment that would otherwise get lost to the ocean. For example, when hurricane Bebe hit Tuvalu in 1972 it deposited 140 hectares of debris, increasing the area of the main island by 10 per cent.
Click here to read the rest of this entry.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Climate change is threatening some of our favourite cliches. These are some that we will need to update:

Images from Wikimedia Commons: "CO2-Temp" by Hanno, "Richmond Flood" by Iridescent, "Running Hare" by Marlene Thyssen, "Black Sea Oil Spill" by Marine Photobank, "Dead Zone" by Jkeiser and "Flowers of Prunus Tomentosa in May" by Pauk

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

A new study on the likely effect of climate change on tropical cyclones, published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States, predicts slightly fewer but much more destructive cyclones.

John McBride, principal research scientist for the Bureau of Meteorology says one of the most consistent findings is that the southern hemisphere is likely to see a drop in the number of cyclones each year. Australia is likely to  see nine cyclones every year instead of the current ten, which will not be very noticeable.

However, the intensify of the cyclones will increase by about 10 percent. In other words, there will be a 10 percent increase in the maximum wind speed. This will make a significant difference because the destructive power of a cyclone is exponentially proportional to its wind speed.

Darwin after Cyclone Tracy
(Image: Billbee via Wikimedia)

(From sources including the ABC)

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

An analysis by atmospheric scientists at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, has shown that, in the Arctic, aircraft vapour trails have caused 15–20% of surface warming.

Globally, commercial aircraft vapour trails have been responsible for 4–8% of surface warming since records began in 1850 - equivalent to a temperature increase of 0.03–0.06°C.

Previously, it had been assumed that the impact of aircraft emissions was the same everywhere. The new analysis, led by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, reveals that aircraft emissions increase the fraction of cirrus clouds where vapour trails are most abundant but, in other locations, the main effect is to decrease temperatures in the lower atmosphere, thereby reducing relative humidy and reducing the fraction of cirrus clouds.

Black carbon emission from aircraft also play an important role in determining whether cirrus cloud formation occurs. The researchers concluded that, If black-carbon emissions from aircraft could be reduced 20-fold, the warming resulting from vapour trails would be halted and a slight cooling would occur.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Closing the hole in the ozone is seen as the world’s greatest environmantal restoration achievement but there’s a hitch …

Under the Montreal Protocol, chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) were phased out and replaced with the less damaging hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) as an interim measure. HCFCs have now become the standard working coolant in refrigerators, air conditioners and aerosol cans.

But HCFCs are still damaging to the ozone layers and, in the longer term, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) were promoted as the best alternative. From January 1, 2010, the world’s developed nations must cut HCFC consumption and production by 75 percent. It will then become illegal to import, produce or sell HCFC-22 (Freon) and HCFC-142b, the ubiquitous refrigerants, for use in new equipment.

The problem is that, whereas HFCs do not destroy the ozone layer, they can be thousands of times more harmful to Earth’s climate than carbon dioxide.

The underlying problem is that the characteristics which make a good refrigerant are the ability to trap heat and durability - exactly the same characteristics that make a powerful greenhouse gas.

Ironically, the best solution may well be to use CO2 as a refrigerant. CO2 can remove heat from the air. The process starts when a refrigerator’s compressor condenses CO2 into a liquid, raising its pressure and temperature. The CO2 is then transferred to a  a radiator on the back or bottom of the fridge where the heat is released. The CO2 then travels through an expansion valve, reducing the pressure and causing it to rapidly expand into vapor. As the CO2 evaporates it absorbs heat, cooling the air inside the refrigerator compartment.

The difficulty with CO2 is that it must be used at a much higher pressure than HFC refrigerants, and therefore requires stronger piping.

Coca-Cola began testing the use of CO2 as a refrigerant in vending machines and other retail refrigerators in China during the Olympics and PepsiCo is now testing these vending machines in Washington, D.C.

(Based on sources including Scientific American)

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Update to "Where Have All the Anthems Gone?"

Do we finally have a worthy green anthem in the Time for Climate Justice campaign’s reworking of Midnignt Oil’s "Beds Are Burning"?

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Scientists at  a conference in London have concluded that global warming could result in increased volcanic activity, earthquakes and tsunamis.

The conference on Climate Forcing of Geological and Geomorphological Hazards suggests that climate change could tip the planet’s delicate balance and unleash a host of geological disasters - and that attempts to stall global warming by burying carbon dioxide could make matters worse.

Simon Day from Oxford University and Bill McGuire and Serge Guilla from University College, London, have shown that there is a link between the arrival of El Niño every few years and a greater frequency of underwater earthquakes in the Pacific. El Niño raises the local sea level by a few tens of centimetres and the scientists believe the extra water weight may increase the pressure of fluids in the pores of the rock beneath the seabed making it easier for geological faults to slip.

A team led by David Pyle from Oxford University and Ben Mason from Cambridge University has shown that volcanic activity varies with the seasons. The team found that there are around 20 per cent more eruptions worldwide during the northern hemisphere’s winter than the summer. The researchers believe that the reason may be that the global sea level drops slightly during the northern hemisphere’s winter. This happens because there is more land in the northern hemisphere and, so, more water is locked up as ice and snow on land than during the southern hemisphere’s winter.

A further indication that volcanic activity is linked to the oceans is the fact that the vast majority of active volcanoes are within a few tens of kilometres from the coast.

Click here to read the rest of this entry.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Scientists are encouraging people to hang out in cemeteries in a bid to fight climate change.

The idea is that by monitoring the effects of acid rain on marble headstones, researchers will be able to find out more about pollution levels.

Professor Peter Cawood, president of the Geological Society of Australia, says the EarthTrek project will be recording the changing environment for an ongoing period.

"The negative effects of climate change are creating stress and gravestones are recording that stress in a sense," Professor Cawood said. "The beauty of gravestones is we have a time when the clock starts in that we know when the gravestone was planted in the ground."

The international project, which started in the US earlier this year, has now been rolled out to the UK and Australia.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

According to scientists at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, attempting to tackle global warming by capturing carbon dioxide or switching to nuclear power will not work because a large part of the warming results from the heat produced by industrial processes rather than the greenhouse effect.

In a paper published in the International Journal of Global Warming, Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet  have calculated the total energy emissions from the start of large-scale industrialisation in the 1880s to the modern day  They point out that net heat emissions during that time account for almost three quarters of the global warming during that period - the greenhouse effect accounts for the remaining 26%.

The implication of their findings are  that those processes which produce heat, such as burning fossil fuels and using nuclear power, would continue to cause global warming even if all of the carbon dioxide which they emit is captured. On the other hand, those sources of energy which ultimately use the sun’s heat, including wind and marine power as well as solar, do not contribute to global warming.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know: