Green Options

It’s in the papers and on TV. It spreads across the Internet (including this very post), and it is finding its way into the classroom. Global climate change is nothing new. And it certainly isn’t going away. Not yet, anyway.

Antarctica has always been the last frontier for scientists on Earth. It even parallels to space exploration, considering just how inhospitable its lands are. Windy, cold, and for half the year a perpetual night time are not conditions that make for a comfy science exploration.But nevertheless, scientists are hell-bent on getting to know the southernmost continent.

So, in this spirit, for the first time West Antarctica (or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS)) is to be [...]

The hurricane seasons of 2005 and 2006 have posed a bit of a mystery to climatologists recently. After a whopping 15 hurricanes were forged out of the North Atlantic in 2005, including the devastating Katrina, only 5 hurricanes appeared a year later.

Most scientists will lay the blame for 2005’s record amount of hurricanes at the feet of a warming ocean. Heat from oceans increases the amount of hurricanes produced as well as [...]

From the beginning of the second paragraph onwards, my very opinionated voice will disappear from this article. I do not want to put any emphasis or spin on what I’m going to write. These are facts and their opinions, and they are what they are - incontrovertible in and of themselves.

In a world that has all but determined global warming is our fault, there are a few hold outs. A small group of US scientists are among them, who point [...]

You know, I really thought I was done with the ‘Arctic Ice’ stories. One would have thought that the entire world by now knew that it had not been a good year for the sea-ice up north. Record losses, the disappearance of the Northwest Passage for the first time in millennia; really not a good year at all!

But the Arctic is fighting back, even if it seems to be a losing [...]

Many of us have those geographical features that are, for all intents and purposes, our definition of home. For me personally, my ‘home’ is at the beach, and if I had the chance I’d be working down there in an instant. But it varies from person to person. My brother is more at home amongst hills and mountains than I’ve ever seen anyone, and my mum loves both mountains and ocean.

But unless I move to the center of Australia where Uluru sits, I live in a country that doesn’t necessarily have the bountiful plethora of geographical landmarks that some places do.

Take America, where I admit I would love to live. From the Grand Canyon to New England, the Rockies to California; it is a veritable geographical pleasure ground. And you ask most people who live there, or near similar landmarks worldwide, and these are the things that make home ‘home.’

All of this is just to bring your mind to the same place as mine and ask you, what would happen if those geographical features were at risk?

How do you prepare for “high impact-low probability” events? That’s a phrase that crops up regularly in global warming research and insurance industry talk. It’s also one that’s given me increasing pause, especially since I’ve begun reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.”

Taleb’s argument is this: that it’s the low-probability, high-impact, random and unpredictable events that have shaped human [...]

There is no doubt in many of your minds that I am a bit of a wind-power nut. I love to focus on it at any chance I get, but I’m sometimes held in check by a modicum of editorial power. Thankfully, when there is news like this, editorial power goes out the window in the face of a big story.

John Hutton, the British energy secretary, will this week announce plans [...]

Just as to ‘Save the Cheerleader’ was to ‘Save the World’, so we too must save the Amazon Rainforest, or risk letting our planet slide further in to a global warming epidemic. And I say ‘risk’ because the Amazon is simply too large and complex to rely fully on what research we have. But the question as always remains; do we do nothing, and risk everything? Or do we do something, and risk nothing?

A new report released by the World Wide Fund (WWF) For Nature based on several recent new studies, points towards the danger of letting the Amazon Rainforest die.

“The importance of the Amazon forest for the globe’s climate cannot be underplayed,” said Daniel Nepstad, author of the report. “It’s not only essential for cooling the world’s temperature, but also such a large source of fresh water that it may be enough to influence some of the great ocean currents, and on top of that, it’s a massive store of carbon.”

The Amazon Rainforest measures 1.6 million square miles (4 million square kilometers), and it crosses over 9 nations, including covering nearly 60% of Brazil. Though largely unexplored we do know that it contains one fifth of the world’s freshwater supply and about 30 percent of the world’s plant and animal species.

But, possibly more valuably, is the fact a forest the size of the Amazon is a terrific carbon sink.

The award winning UN Climate Panel that took home this year’s Nobel Peace Prize (along with Al Gore) hopes to look towards the mysteries of Greenland. After three successive overall reports, released in 1995, 2001 and 2007, the panel may look towards more specific research targets.

One of these is the effect a thaw of the Greenland ice-sheet could have upon the world.

Dutch scientist Bert Metz, a senior member

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The continuing quest for cleaner power has finally brought humanity to kneel before Mother Nature, pleading for some help. We have damaged her planet so effectively, and now we are asking for her good favor in return. We’ve turned to the sun, the waves and also the wind.

And it is winds that many believe will be our salvation.

A recent study by Cristina Archer and Mark Jacobson, published in the November issue [...]