Nepal has made significant efforts towards low-emission development, using government tools to encourage finance flows towards climate action. However, achieving its ambitions will be difficult given current
Studies show that soil fertilized with organic materials, such as compost, could increase the amount of stored carbon and potentially help slow down greenhouse emissions. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore (25 February, 2008)
New solar technology greatly improves performance A new coating for solar panels could lead to more efficient solar collection. The energy from sunlight falling on only 9 percent of California's Mojave Desert could power all of the United States' electricity needs if the energy could be efficiently harvested, according to some estimates. Unfortunately, current-generation solar cell technologies are too expensive and inefficient for wide-scale commercial applications. A team of Northwestern University researchers has developed a new anode coating strategy that significantly enhances the efficiency of solar energy power conversion. A paper about the work, which focuses on "engineering'
EVERY silver lining has its cloud. At the moment, the world's oceans absorb a million tonnes of carbon dioxide an hour. Admittedly that is only a third of the rate at which humanity dumps the stuff into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, but it certainly helps to slow down global warming. However, what is a blessing for the atmosphere turns out to be a curse for the oceans.
If two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct, people will still be driving gasoline-powered cars 50 years from now, churning out heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
The waters around Sri Lanka are among the most heavily damaged and polluted ocean regions in the world, a study has revealed. The research by a team of American, British and Canadian researchers was published in yesterday's edition of Science. Activities like water and air pollution, overfishing, commercial shipping or greenhouse gas emission are continually damaging the planet and there is no sign that they will ever stop. Apparently, the most affected areas are "the North and Norwegian seas, South and East China seas, Eastern Caribbean, North American eastern seaboard, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Bering Sea, and the waters around Sri Lanka, the study said. The survey, analysing all 17 activities through which humans impact the oceans, and their conclusion was that every square mile of the ocean has been damaged in some way. The researchers have designed a map that emphasizes and explains the results of their study. The map was released at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston and published in yesteday's edition of the journal Science, the Associated Press reported. "Our results show that when these and other individual impacts are summed up, the big picture looks much worse than I imagine most people expected. It was certainly a surprise to me,' said lead author Ben Halpern, an assistant research scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, according to the Associated Press. The oceans around the polar areas are the least impacted, but scientists predict they will be damaged more and more in the following years, as long as the global warming continues. "There were two things we didn't anticipate,' Halpern added in the telephone interview. "Every single spot in the oceans was affected by at least one human activity ... we figured there'd be places people just hadn't gotten to yet.' Some good news is that, in the Congress yesterday, the House voted the approval of $454 million for ocean exploration programmes and studies over the next seven years, at the National Geographic and Atmospheric Administration. Ben Halpern still has hope that things can be improved. "There are some areas in fairly good condition. They are small and scattered, but have fairly low impact. That suggests that with effort from all of us, we can try to protect these patches and use them as a guideline for what we'd like the rest of the ocean to start looking like,' he stated. e-News
Clouds have always given climate modelers fits. The clouds in their models are crude at best, and in the real world, researchers struggle to understand how clouds are responding to-and perhaps magnifying-greenhouse warming; But two new studies now show that much of the worry about clouds' role in the warming has been misdirected.
The caretaker government plans to ban two-stroke vehicles in all the district headquarters and metropolitan cities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to hazardous global warming. "Government is thinking about making cities and district towns clean by getting rid of two-stroke engine as it causes massive air pollution,' Raja Devasish Roy, special assistant to chief adviser on Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) and Forest Affairs, told UNB. He said the government will take steps to create awareness among the people against the use of two-stroke engines.
The Environment Ministry is considering requiring measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for large-scale projects such as building shopping centers in suburban areas that lead to a sharp increase in road traffic, ministry sources said Sunday. Aimed especially at reducing the rising emissions in the transportation sector, the ministry wants to include the provision in a bill it plans to submit during the ongoing Diet session to revise the law on promoting measures to deal with global warming, the sources said.
