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:

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:

The International Energy Agency, which provides energy statistics and projections to 28 industrialised countries, has issued a report warning that every year of inaction in cutting carbon emissions will cost the world an additional $US500 billion.

The IEA estimates that in order to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees, non-fossil fuels will need to provide at least 32 percent of total energy and the share of new cars with internal combustion engines will have to fall to less than 40% by 2030.

The IEA says that to achieve this the world needs to spend a total of $US10,500 billion between 2010 and 2030 on energy efficiency and renewable energy. Each year of delay will increase that figure by $US500 billion.

The IEA estimates that world primary energy demand will rise by an average of 1.5 percent per year over the next two decades and that oil demand, excluding biofuels, will increase by 1 percent per annum to 105 million barrels per day by 2030 from 85 million barels per day in 2008.

While the IEA says that fossil fuel supplies are ample, the Guardian newspaper has quoted two "whistleblowers" who have questioned this claim.

One of the sources was quoted as saying "Many inside the organization believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90 million to 95 million barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further."

The paper quoted a second senior IEA source as saying that a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added.

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:

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist, Hashem Akbari, is poised to launch a campaign to paint the world white.

Inspired by the whitewashed villages around the Mediterranean, he argues that if we turn enough of the world’s dark urban landscape white, it would reflect sufficient sunlight to delay global warming and give us some precious breathing space in the global struggle to control carbon emissions.

Ola-Santorini Greece
(by Rambling Traveller via Wikimedia)

As well as reflecting more sunlight, buildings with white roofs stay cooler during the summer. The change also reduces the way heat accumulates in built-up areas - known as the urban heat island effect - and reduces the need for air-conditioning.

Click here to read the rest of this entry.

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

James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies have published a study showing that the rise in carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels can be kept below dangerous levels as long as emissions from coal are phased out globally within the next few decades.

Professor Hansen is head of the Goddard Institute and is well known for his research in climatology which raised awareness of the global warming issue in the 1980s.

Previously published research shows that a dangerous level of global warming will occur if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds a concentration of about 450 parts per million, beyond which point the disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and Arctic sea ice could set in motion feedbacks which lead to accelerated melting, further warming and extreme sea level rise.

In essence, the study found that, because of peak oil and relatively limited global reserves of gas, burning these two fuels without also burning coal would not result in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels above this point of no return. However, there are enormous global reserves of coal. Continuing to burn this in the current manner will take carbon dioxide levels above the critical 450 parts per million by about 2035.

To avoid this, developed countries need to begin reducing the amount of carbon they release from burning coal by 2013, with developing countries beginning to reduce their carbon emissions during the following decade. All emissions of carbon that reach the atmosphere from burning coal need to be phased out by 2050.

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

Australia’s "60 Minutes" has broadcast an item called "Crunch Time" which made much of the opinions of David Evans, a computer programmer with a PhD in electrical engineering who once worked on a mathematical modeling program for the Australian Greenhouse Office. Dr Evans put two arguments to support his view that global warming is not caused by carbon emissions. Dr Evans first point was that, although carbon emissions have continued to increase, global temperatures have not increased for the last eight years. Here is the graph of global temperatures from  the UK Met. Office’s Hadley Centre. It’s difficult to see Dr Evan’s evidence that temperatures have stopped going up.

Click here to read the rest of this entry.

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

There have been many claims that the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu is drowning because of rising seas resulting from climate change.

Tuvalu is a group of nine small islands with a total area of 26 square kilometres and a population of about 12,000. Its average height above sea level is just 3 metres. Tuvalu has no fresh water streams, no known mineral resources, poor soil, declining vegetation because of excessive clearing and almost no exports.

Tuvalu - Funafuti - Approach (by mrlins ex Flickr)

In 2000, the University of Hawaii conducted a study which concluded that over the previous 20 years sea levels at Tuvalu had risen by a total on only 1.4 centimetres. A subsequent study by the University of Tasmania suggested that the tidal gauge may have sunk slightly during the period and that abnormal El Nino conditions may have affected the results - making it possible that the sea had risen by as much as 2.4 centimetres over the 20 years.

Obviously, such a small rise is not the cause of Tuvalu’s problems.

What has happened is the islanders have taken beach sand to build brick houses - resulting in erosion of the beaches, especially during cyclones. There has been excessive clearing of forest undergrowth for fuel, resulting in further erosion. And reef damage by the crown of thorns starfish has causes even more beach erosion.

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

It is certainly true that sea levels are rising - they have been for the last 18,000 years. Since the peak of the last ice age 18.000 years ago, seas have risen by 130 metres. During the current interglacial period, sea levels were at their highest about 140,000 years ago when they were briefly 6 metres higher than now. They have been higher in the far distant past but changed landforms make comparisons meaningless.

For most of the last 3,000 years, seas have been rising at between 1 and 2 millimetres a decade. Since 1900, the rate of sea level rise has been about 1.7 centimetres a decade - ten times faster than before the industrial era. Since the mid-1990s, sea levels have been rising at about 3.1 centimetres per decade.

Click here to read the rest of this entry.

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