Green Options

Oceans regulate our climate. They play a key role in keeping the world’s “homeostasis” in tact. However, their ability to absorb carbon & keep the climate in balance is dwindling, a new report shows.

In a year-by-year study from 1765 to 2008, researchers found that the oceans are struggling to meet increasing emissions demands. They cannot take in as much carbon as they used to.

The study, published in the November 19 issue of the journal Nature, found that the percentage of fossil fuel emissions the ocean has been taking in since 2000 has decreased by as much as 10%.

This is the first study of its kind or breadth. One previous study had attempted to measure the oceans’ industrial carbon absorption for one year — 1994. This does so for a period of 200+ years.

Somebody this little kid’s age could actually see the beginning of the end of sweet corn in their lifetime. If you love corn and all the cheap sugars it creates to make candy you better stock up now, because climate change could cut crop yields by up to 82%.

If you are like me and like to drizzle soy sauce on your sweet corn instead of butter, you’re really out of luck. Soy crops also could drop by as much.  And forget wearing that cute orange cotton tee shirt to soak up the mess from this treat. Cotton is the third crop that scientists now estimate could drop as radically if climate change keeps going at this rate unchecked.

In a rather startling paper published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, North Carolina State University agriculture and resource economist Dr. Michael Roberts and Dr. Wolfram Schlenker, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, found that U.S. crop yields could decrease by up to 82 percent under the most rapid warming scenario (A1FI).

The worst case scenario assumes that we did very little to slow climate change in the 21st century. You might think that we could not be that stupid. We’ll see.

Many scientists cite 350 parts per million of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as the magic number where we escape the effects of global warming. We’re currently at over 380 parts per million and that number is going up all the time. So how can we get back below the tipping point? One Columbia University scientist thinks he has a solution: gigantic fake trees that absorb CO2 right out of the air!

[Creative Commons photo by Bill Ward]

Klaus Lackner, Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, got his idea for the design from his daughter’s eighth grade science project. Six years later, he’s working on a full-sized model that has the potential to remove tons of CO2 from the air. So how does this work?

Scientists at Columbia University have discovered that a rock found in the Middle East can be used to soak up carbon dioxide at a rate high enough to significantly slow global warming.

The team found that when the rock, known as Peridotite, comes into contact with carbon dioxide it converts the gas into harmless minerals such as calcite. They have also worked out a way to ’supercharge’ the naturally occurring process to a million times its normal speed to grow enough of the mineral to permanently store 2 billion or more tons of carbon dioxide annually. This equates to an astonishing 7 per cent of the total global carbon emissions from human activity each year.

According to researchers at Columbia University, peridotite rocks could be harnessed to capture carbon dioxide in large quantities, potentially offsetting billions of tons of CO2 emissions each year. The rocks, found in Oman, California, New Guinea and elsewhere, produce calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate rock (both solids) upon contact with CO2.