posted by XtnYoda at 10:12 AM
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Industry caught in carbon ‘smokescreen’
By Fiona Harvey and Stephen Fidler in London
Published: April 25 2007 22:07 | Last updated: April 25 2007 22:07
Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.
A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.
Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.
The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.
The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.
The FT investigation found:
■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.
■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.
Francis Sullivan, environment adviser at HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank that went carbon-neutral in 2005, said he found “serious credibility concerns” in the offsetting market after evaluating it for several months...
Labels: culture of corruption, global warming
posted by XtnYoda at 11:07 PM
Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff
LiveScience.com Mon Apr 23, 12:25 PM ET
Scientists exploring a mine have uncovered a natural Sistine chapel showing not religious paintings, but incredibly well preserved images of sprawling tree trunks and fallen leaves that once breathed life into an ancient rainforest.
Replete with a diverse mix of extinct plants, the 300-million-year-old fossilized forest is revealing clues about the ecology of Earth’s first rainforests . The discovery and details of the forest are published in the May issue of the journal Geology.
“We’re looking at one instance in time over a large area. It’s literally a snapshot in time of a multiple square mile area,” said study team member Scott Elrick of the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS).
Forest find
Over millions of years as sediments and plant material pile up, layer upon layer, the resulting bands become time indicators with the newest, youngest layer on the top and the oldest layer at the bottom. Typically geologists peel away a vertical slice of rocky material to look at material, including fossils, over a period of time.
A coal mine offers a unique view of the past. Instead of a time sequence, illuminated in the layer upon layer of sediments, the roof of an underground mine reveals a large area within one of those sediment layers, or time periods.
Miners in Illinois are used to seeing a few plant fossils strewn along a mine’s ceiling, but as they burrowed farther into this one, the sheer density and area covered by such fossils struck them as phenomenal, Elrick said.
That’s when they called paleobotanist Howard Falcon-Lang from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and William DiMichele, a curator of fossil plants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
"It was an amazing experience. We drove down the mine in an armored vehicle, until we were a hundred meters below the surface,” Falcon-Lang said. “The fossil forest was rooted on top of the coal seam, so where the coal had been mined away the fossilized forest was visible in the ceiling of the mine.”
Here’s what the miners and other scientists saw underground: Relatively narrow passageways wind through the “cave,” marked off with stout 100-foot-wide pillars to ensure the roof doesn’t collapse.
“It’s like in some bizarre Roman temple with tons of Corinthian pillars that are 100 feet across and only six feet tall,” Elrick told LiveScience. “As you’re walking down these passageways you see these pillars of coal on either side of you and above you—imagine an artist’s canvas painted a flat grey and that is sort of what the grey shale above the coal looks like.”
The largest ever found, the fossil forest covers an area of about 40 square miles, or nearly the size of San Francisco. This ancient assemblage of flora is thought to be one of the first rainforests on Earth, emerging during the Upper Carboniferous, or Pennsylvanian, time period that extended from about 310 million to 290 million years ago.
A reconstruction of the ancient forest showed that like today’s rainforests, it had a layered structure with a mix of plants now extinct: Abundant club mosses stood more than 130-feet high, towering over a sub-canopy of tree ferns and an assortment of shrubs and tree-sized horsetails that looked like giant asparagus.
The scientists think a major earthquake about 300 million years ago caused the region to drop below sea level where it was buried in mud. They estimate that within a period of months the forest was buried, preserving it “forever.”
“Some of these tree stumps have been covered geologically speaking in a flash,” Elrick said.
Because the spatial layout of the forest has been maintained, the scientists can learn about entire plant communities, not just individual plants.
"This spectacular discovery allows us to track how the species make-up of the forest changed across the landscape, and how that species make-up is affected by subtle differences in the local environment," Falcon-Lang said.
The fossil forest extends along the ceiling of two adjacent mines, the Riola mine and the Vermillion Grove mine, which are located in Vermillion County, just south of Danville, Ill.
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posted by XtnYoda at 10:14 AM
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posted by XtnYoda at 1:13 AM
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Global warming could be heating Mars four times faster than Earth due to a mutually reinforcing interplay of wind-swept dust and changes in reflected heat from the Sun, according to a study released Wednesday.
Scientists have long observed a correlation on Mars between its fluctuating temperatures -- which range from -87 C to - 5 C (-125 F to 23 F) depending on the season and the location -- and the darkening or lightening of swathes of the planet's surface.
The explanation is in the dirt.
Glistening Martian dust lying on the ground reflects the Sun's light -- and its heat -- back into space, a phenomenon called albedo.
But when this reddish dust is churned up by violent winds, the storm-ravaged surface loses its reflective qualities and more of the Sun's heat is absorbed into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise.
The study, published on Thursday by the British journal Nature, shows for the first time that these variations not only result from the storms but help cause them too.
It also suggests that short-term climate change is currently occurring on Mars and at a much faster rate than on Earth.
Its authors, led by Lori Fenton, a planetary scientist at NASA, describe the phenomenon as a "positive feedback" system -- in other words, a vicious circle, in which changes in albedo strengthen the winds which in turn kicks up more dust, in turn adding to the warming...
posted by XtnYoda at 10:49 PM
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I hope a thought provoking read. One of my favorite lines is from the Princess Bride movie when the Dread Pirate Roberts is asked, "Who are you?" His response is the response I share with you, "No one of consequence."
