Environment on Earth

The office is becoming a major driver of climate change.

Despite ongoing efforts to improve energy efficiency in the workplace, the world’s growing reliance on the Internet is leading to a rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

The energy required to power all the world’s computers, data storage, and communications networks is expected to double by 2020, according to a new McKinsey & Company analysis.

The rising emissions are due largely to greater Internet use in China and India, where coal-fired power plants generate the majority of the countries’ energy. China accounted for 23 percent of global emissions related to information technology (IT) last year. Worldwide, IT systems’ emissions were equivalent to the annual carbon dioxide emissions from more than a half-billion automobiles.

The predicted emission growth comes after years of increased energy demand from the world’s computer servers. The amount of electricity required for servers doubled between 2000 and 2005, according to aStanford University study. The world’s 30.3 million servers and other IT systems now account for about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the McKinsey report said.

North America’s office technology caused one-fourth of the world’s IT-related emissions in 2002. China has since passed the region to become the world leader in both overall greenhouse gas emissions and emissions attributed to IT.

China and the world’s emerging economies, including India, Brazil, and Indonesia, are expected to increase their IT emissions 9 percent annually in the years ahead. By 2020, McKinsey predicted IT would be the cause of 1.54 gigatons of greenhouse gases, or 3 percent of global emissions. If these calculations are accurate, the carbon footprint of IT would be comparable to that from aviation.

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               The word geothermal comes from the Greek words geo (earth) and thermal (heat). So, geothermal energy is heat from within the earth. We can use the steam and hot water produced inside the earth to heat buildings or generate electricity. Geothermal energy is a renewable energy source because the water is replenished by rainfall and the heat is continuously produced inside the earth.

This is mainly a concern with Enhanced Geothermal Systems, where water is injected into hot dry rock where no water was before. Dry steam and flash steam power plants also emit low levels of carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, and sulphur, although at roughly 5% of the levels emitted by fossil fuel power plants. However, geothermal plants can be built with emissions-controlling systems that can inject these substances back into the earth, thereby reducing carbon emissions to less than 0.1% of those from fossil fuel power plants. Hot water from geothermal sources will contain trace amounts of dangerous elements such as mercury, arsenic, antimony, etc. which if disposed of into rivers can render their water unsafe to drink.

Geothermal power plants use hydrothermal resources which have two common ingredients: water (hydro) and heat (thermal). Geothermal plants require high temperature (300 to 700 degrees Fahrenheit) hydrothermal resources that may come from either dry steam wells or hot water wells. We can use these resources by drilling wells into the earth and piping the steam or hot water to the surface. Geothermal wells are one to two miles deep. The United States generates more geothermal electricity than any other country but the amount of electricity it produces is less than one-half of a percent of electricity produced in United States. Only four states have geothermal power plants:

• California - has 33 geothermal power plants that produce almost 90 percent of the nation’s geothermal electricity.
• Nevada - has 14 geothermal power plants.
• Hawaii and Utah - each have one geothermal plant

There are three basic types of geothermal power plants:

• Dry steam plants - use steam piped directly from a geothermal reservoir to turn the generator turbines. The first geothermal power plant was built in 1904 in Tuscany, Italy at a place where natural steam was erupting from the earth.
• Flash steam plants - take high-pressure hot water from deep inside the earth and convert it to steam to drive the generator turbines. When the steam cools, it condenses to water and is injected back into the ground to be used over and over again. Most geothermal power plants are flash plants.
• Binary power plants - transfer the heat from geothermal hot water to another liquid. The heat causes the second liquid to turn to steam which is used to drive a generator turbine.

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Both Antarctica and the Arctic are getting less icy because of global warming, scientists said in a study that extends evidence of man-made climate change to every continent.

Detection of a human cause of warming at both ends of the earth also strengthens a need to understand ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland that would raise world sea levels by about 70 meters (230 ft) if they all melted, they said.

“We’re able for the first time to directly attribute warming in both the Arctic and the Antarctic to human influences,” said Nathan Gillett of England’s University of East Anglia of a study he led with colleagues in the United States, Britain and Japan.

The Arctic has warmed sharply in recent years and sea ice shrank in 2007 to a record low. But Antarctic trends have been confusing — some winter sea ice has expanded in recent decades, leaving doubts for some about whether warming was global.

The U.N. Climate Panel, which draws on work by 2,500 experts, said last year that the human fingerprint on climate “has been detected in every continent except Antarctica,” which has insufficient observational coverage to make an assessment.

The scientists, writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, said the new findings filled that gap.

The study, comparing temperature records and four computer climate models, found a warming in both polar regions that could be best explained by a buildup of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, rather than natural shifts.

FEW THERMOMETERS

The link with human activities had been elusive in the polar regions because there are fewer than 100 temperature stations in the Arctic and just 20 in Antarctica, they said.

The scientists said temperatures had risen about 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) in the past 40 years in the Arctic.

Temperatures in Antarctica, an icy deep freeze bigger than the United States, had gained by a few tenths of a degree. The Arctic is warming fast because darker water and ground soak up ever more heat than ice and snow that reflect the sun’s rays.

The study also formally linked greenhouse gas emissions

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Levels of a powerful greenhouse gas are four times as high as previously thought, according to new measurements released.New analytical techniques show that about 5,400 metric tons of nitrogen trifluoride are in the atmosphere, with amounts increasing by about 11 percent per year.

Ray Weiss of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and colleagues said it had not been possible to accurately measure this gas before.

They said nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than an equal mass of carbon dioxide, although it does not yet contribute much to global warming.

Previous estimates had put levels of the gas at less than 1,200 metric tons in 2006.

Nitrogen trifluoride, a colorless, odorless, nonflammable gas, is used to etch silicon wafers and in some lasers.

Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, Weiss and colleagues said they analyzed air samples gathered over the past 30 years under the NASA-funded Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment.

Weiss said nitrogen trifluoride needs to be regulated, as carbon dioxide is.

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The Eiffel Tower is cutting down on its display of sparkling lights to set an example of energy saving, its management said.

The Eiffel Tower has twinkled for 10 minutes every hour on the hour during the evening since January 2000.

Now, to reinforce the message that energy must be saved for environmental reasons, the tower will sparkle for just five minutes every hour.

The tower’s managers said the measure was mostly symbolic, as the 20,000 flashing light bulbs that produce the twinkling effect consume relatively little energy.

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Researchers were astounded when, in the fall of 2007, they discovered that the year-round ice pack in the Arctic Ocean had lost some 20 percent of its mass in just two years, setting a new record low since satellite imagery began documenting the terrain in 1978. Without action to stave off climate change, some scientists believe that, at that rate, all of the year-round ice in the Arctic could be gone by as early as 2030.

This massive reduction has allowed an ice-free shipping lane to open through the fabled Northwest Passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland. While the shipping industry—which now has easy northern access between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans—may be cheering this “natural” development, scientists worry about the impact of the resulting rise in sea levels around the world.

The Impact of Rising Sea Levels
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of leading climate scientists, sea levels have risen some 3.1 millimeters per year since 1993. And the United Nations Environment Program predicts that, by 2010, some 80 percent of people will live within 62 miles of the coast, with about 40 percent living within 37 miles of a coastline.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reports that low-lying island nations, especially in equatorial regions, have been hardest hit by this phenomenon, and some are threatened with total disappearance. Rising seas have already swallowed up two uninhabited islands in the Central Pacific. On Samoa, thousands of residents have moved to higher ground as shorelines have retreated by as much as 160 feet. And islanders on Tuvalu are scrambling to find new homes as salt water intrusion has made their groundwater undrinkable while increasingly strong hurricanes and ocean swells have devastated shoreline structures.

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Higher levels of pollution in Asia may affect the formation of clouds high in the Himalayas, perhaps disrupting monsoons and speeding a thaw of glaciers, according to a study.

The report, by scientists in France and Italy, found microscopic particles in the air that can be seeds for water droplets at a Nepalese mountain observatory, the highest in the world at 5,079 meters (16,660 ft) above sea level.

It was the first time scientists had observed such particles forming so high, far above those seen in previous studies from Europe and Japan.

“We think it’s because there’s a lot of pollution in the valleys which rises and meets clean air masses higher up. This creates new particles,” Karine Sellegri at the Universite Blaise Pascal in France, one of the authors, told Reuters.

The study, in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the particles might come from smoke from people burning wood in Himalayan valleys. Or some might have a natural origin, from vegetation.

Still, the scientists pointed to wider risks of the cloud-forming mechanism.

“Rising air pollution levels in South Asia will have worldwide environmental consequences,” they wrote.

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A wind farm is a group of wind turbines in the same location used for production of electric power. Individual turbines are interconnected with a medium voltage (usually 34.5 kV) power collection system and communications network. At a substation, this medium-voltage electrical current is increased in voltage with a transformer for connection to the high voltage transmission system. A large wind farm may consist of a few dozen to about 100 individual wind turbines, and cover an extended area of hundreds of square miles (square kilometers), but the land between the turbines may be used for agricultural or other purposes. A wind farm may be located off-shore to take advantage of strong winds blowing over the surface of an ocean or lake.

A proposed solution for wind energy and other intermittent power sources is to create a supergrid of interconnected wind farms across western Europe. This large-scale array of dispersed wind farms would be located in different wind regimes.

 Wind speed

As a general rule, wind generators are practical where the average wind speed is 10 mph (16 km/h or 4.5 m/s) or greater. An ‘ideal’ location would have a near constant flow of non-turbulent wind throughout the year with a minimum likelihood of sudden powerful bursts of wind. A vitally important factor of turbine siting is also access to local demand or transmission capacity.

Usually sites are preselected on basis of a wind atlas, and validated with wind measurements. Meteorological wind data alone is usually not sufficient for accurate siting of a large wind power project. Collection of site specific data for wind speed and direction is crucial to determining site potential. Local winds are often monitored for a year or more, and detailed wind maps constructed before wind generators are installed.

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France will support research on low-carbon emission cars with 400 million euros ($547 million) in funding over four years, President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a speech at the Paris auto show.Sarkozy also said he would seek changes to EU rules on state aid to allow member countries to support carmakers in their efforts to produce more eco-friendly vehicles, arguing the U.S. government was offering state aid to its automakers.

“The U.S. Treasury is preparing to grant 25 million dollars in long-term loans at unbeatable rates to U.S. carmakers for them to renovate their plants that are more than 20 years old,” Sarkozy said.

“I don’t want us (Europeans) to be living in a framework that doesn’t allow us to help our own carmakers undertake a major technological shift,” he said.

“That is why I will propose to the European Commission and to our European partners a revision of the common framework on state aid … so that it can be harmonized with the goals we are pursuing in the context of the climate-energy package.”

Sarkozy said France would launch a plan to support research and development on vehicles with low carbon emissions. He said massive investments were required to make such vehicles widely available and to improve their performance.

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Climate taxes, not cap and trade markets alone, will lead to the vast technological changes the world’s energy system needs to fight global warming, a top U.S. economist said.Cap and trade has emerged as the dominant attempt to slow global warming. Global deals in permits to emit greenhouse gas emissions have hit nearly $65 billion a year. The European Union, under the Kyoto Protocol, has embraced cap and trade since 2005 and voluntary markets have developed in the United States, the developed world’s top carbon polluter.

But a straight carbon tax on energy production — at an oil wellhead or refinery for instance — would be simpler and cheaper than putting a cap on tens of thousands of polluters, Jeffrey Sachs, a special advisor to the U.N. secretary general and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University told a panel.

As the world prepares to form a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol by the end of next year, focus is sharpening on how well cap and trade markets are fighting emissions.

Carbon taxes would quickly cut emissions across all sectors of the economy, including vehicles and manufacturing, said Sachs. It could also be more efficient than spreading the trade of permits across the financial system.

“Having a lot of people engineer financial instruments for carbon when there are much more direct ways to do this strikes me as not really a great investment,” Sachs said.

“I’m also not so keen on sending our best and brightest off to do more financial engineering,” he said. “I think the kind of (financial) meltdown we have right is a little bit of an example of how we’ve taken a generation of young people and put them in tasks that don’t really solve social problems.”

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